Spring, I find again, is hard, beautiful, and distressingly full. We went to a Seder last night, Hanauta and I. Traveling by train north along the Hudson River’s eastern bank, we were absorbed by the fog’s low tabernacles, gently pitched and sustained in all stillness on the luminous leaden plane of water. Is there a word, I wonder, for the irregular patches of river, where the surface flow is finer-grained and catches more light? Hanauta skirts the question of lexicon and says: “Maybe there are sandbars there.” I am fastened by my gaze to broken basalt at the water’s edge, the wet of red leaves among oak trunks, ruddy stubs of reed in silted inlets.
The story of the going out from Egypt, I find again, is good, beautiful and invitingly full. For many years I have been the child who does not know to ask. I find many things to ask now, of myself at least, but I don’t know if they are good ones or right ones. I ask myself, back home and dismayed by the accumulated weight of tasks and obligations (the burden I leaven for reasons I cannot understand, let alone control), I ask myself how happy should I be? Shall I rejoice in my freedom or reflect on the features of my enduring slavery?
We have a week away from the classroom. I miss the rituals of care-taking that prop me up, the little burdens that are manageable, the timely execution of which reassure me of my competence. Surely the Israelites, before their flight, considered that they might, among their other losses, regret the end of their servitude. The loss of an identity that, while limited and painful, not to be cherished, cannot easily or readily be replaced.
Here are four self portraits. Mine, above, with a sudsy sponge, cleaning off a table for the 200th time. Below is Rita full of contentment. She rolled this drawing up and tucked it in her cubby then came back to make a second drawing, announcing it would be “scary,” though she later described it to me, simply, as “a mail box.”
And here are Aisha’s two drawings. The first she worked on deliberately, head on. Even with just two eyes it reads accurately as her: intense and lively. She abandoned it, though, for the second.
This she laid out quickly, at an angle, thinking about her hair, her ornaments, her whole self and its periphery. She was happy with the result.
Can I go out from myself, inhabit the edges, enjoy the periphery, the seam of the seasons, the river in flight between its basalt banks?
