DECEMBER 2021

 December 1, 2021

Dec 5  

so much has happened I've written nothing so far.  Piano concert at Silver at night, Trafton and Elizabeth joined us.  Adam and Ze Mayon wowed everyone with their playing.  Ken wrote a delightful review.  

Pepe died Dec 1 or Nov 30 in his sleep.  Everyone gathered at Chezet this weekend for the funeral.  He celebrated his 95th this summer??

Lots of holiday movies.  Sending Jim's book to all and sundry.  My special needs saints are squabbling in the next room, each claiming they would be the one I choose as my patron saint, my personal patron of patron saints.  Best solution most likely to guarantee each one their own month.  

Mantel cleared.  Decorating next.  Market Basket has the oysters that will do.  Dave will teach himself to shuck them!!  

On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 2:41 PM Roy Stephenson <respidear@gmail.com> wrote:
Very interesting! It was of course the name of our grandfather who died so long ago.  And yes of course our family is very far down the autism spectrum in addition to general intelligence, indeed the two are more entangled than we can understand.  The women got some common sense to balance out but the boys were all weird, considering that I am the most nearly normal.  This will be a good subject to talk together next year.

On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 8:58 AM Virginia Garlitz <virginiamgz@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Roy,
Can you tell me more about the Algernon gene?  Iwonder if it could be part of an unfolding pieee I have started on my brother Rick  in which I posit that all of our family )like all of human beings??)maybe are on the autism spectrum.  And this applies to only those who have supreme intelligence and are very good looking, of course.
Hope you are doing well, are healthy and happy.  We look forward to seeing you in ABQ.
much love,
PUSS

Va seems to be waking up to her own autism elements.  I'm waking up too.  Live long enough for layers to peel off the onion we never knew we had.  we are fatter onions than we'd thought.  Cosmic onions in miniature.  "You then calculate the degree of aberration . . ."  531 Musil

Dec 7   Whole Foods trek, clear highways, sunny skies after rains and wind last night.  

nice note from André—-and I take special note of his line about running away from himself—maybe that is what grad school is for.  

"Oh, this sounds like one of those everlasting "They're everywhere, these Jews." It might be true, as easily as it might not be.  But what do I know. I was a grad student in the early 70's totally ensconced in Cambridge, Mass. Hiding from everything, myself included.

Stay well.  One of these days ... that drink."
Agreed!  I am embarrassed that I sent it out with insufficient thought.  

You've read my mind or we're in sync because hiding from everything, myself included has been very much the motif of my inner reflections for a few months, maybe years.  The older we get are we more willing and able to peel off layers?

Thanks too for keeping us imagining that that drink can happen.    Come see us in New Mexico!  we bought a small house there, 2 guest bedrooms.  We'll be there Jan-mid June.  Back here in NH next summer and fall.  

Take care.  

Now I'm already imagining how I might manage to get to NYC next summer or fall just to see what that drink would be like.  And in the original I misspelled embarassed!!  like that—-
Phil parsing the page I sent him from Musil—-And the only two excerpts seem to show the different viewpoints of males and females.  The male is aware that no one really understands why things are happening, and the woman just wants things that she thinks should happen.

André this afternoon:   "I've spent the whole morning writing about screens--the things we screen from view.  Most, it turns out, are in ourselves. The question is: when we're done peeling ourselves, will we be surprised by what we find, or have we known it all along but didn't want to?"
now how to reply ?   Wouldn't it be usually both and?  If we most often have known it all along and we created or found a screen to hide it until we were ready to finally view what we thought we didn't want to see, once we do we can take the surprises.  Surprise of being ready to remove the screen and finding as well much we had no way of expecting.  weren't the screens protecting our fears?  when they fall away, we can want to know what we thought we didn't want to know.  we can want the unknowing in the surprise.  spiral dialectic, hidden, revealed, lost, found, protected from, scarred/scared by, surprise as both scab revealing new skin.
This drink.  That drink.  How could it ever happen?  Can you get up to Albany or Greenwich, CT?  If I found a way to get to NYC what would we say?  within a two hour drink?  A waste of expectation and anxiety without adequate surprise!! or continuation.  

Wouldn't it be usually both and?  If we most often have known it all along and we created or found a screen to hide it until we were ready to view what we thought we didn't want to see, once we do we can take the knowing and whatever surprises every facing always brings.
Elizabeth's car trouble this morning.  I drove them and they had a good swim.  I made the first half of Mamacita Knott's enchilada recipe.  Young butcher at Hanaway cut me two pounds of pork cubes.  I think it is easily eight cups as the recipe requests but I didn't measure the whole lot.  

"The word, in its arrogance, gives an arbitrary and impoverished form to the invisible movements of our inner being." MWQ 549
"Like all heightened states of emotion, love brings out a certain madness about the supposed connectedness of things so that any words uttered tended to light up with richly ramifying significance, which manifested itself like a veiled deity before it dissolved in silence. . . . . she was brimming over with uncontrollable feeling, with something godlike inside her that moved as if on skates, and more than once she felt that she was about to crash down in a dead faint."  550
"the real truth between two people cannot be put into words; every effort of that kind only creates a further obstacle between them."  551

blood draw this morning.  Dave asked me to order gold chain for Cécile and after worrying about driving all over finally went to Amazon and boom got something he approved.  Tesla parked next to me at Mid-State.  Had too much green tea yesterday.  Final purchase round at Whole Foods, every holiday delicacy known to man.  
Love the blurbs on the back of the Musil Intimate Ties volume.  "Musil is such a consummate stylist that after him Kafka may seem immature, Mann chatty, Brecht arch, Rilke precious, and Walter Benjamin hermetic.  translator Wortsman captures this author's unique combination of quizzical authority and austere hedonism."  Anthony Heilbut  
And Coetzee says unlike D H Lawrence Musil seeks to "eroticize the intellect."  
we saw season one of The Empress, German, Czech production.  Have never? heard a drama all in German.  Nicely done.  season 2 to go.  
Waiting now.  Decorations up more or less.  Cookies to munch on.  Fingers crossed kids don't get sick and make it onto the plane.   
Phil is reading over his diaries.  He read Musil's first volume in 1988 but remembers nothing.   Gray morning again here.  
Snow tonight.  
"But every year there came a time around winter solstice when she felt closer than usual to these most tenuous borders of self."  33 Intimate Ties


Sunday  19 Dec   Short visit earlier with Davey as he was walking.  Knocking on wood and crossing fingers and toes that their covid tests on Tuesday will be negative and they can fly!!!  Holding our breath now for two more days.
Big snow overnight.  Beautiful this morning.  Now noon.   
Surprise visit with cookies from Tobi Pfenninger.  
Great essay by Genese Grill on Musil and Proust in Numéro Cinq 2014/02/06

hooorayyyyy  Kids are negative tested and are Flying Here!!!!!  Preps in high mode.  Off to get pies first thing this morning.  
25th  Superfine Christmas.  Best Christmas ever.  Perfect Christmas day and eve.  Put on the pajamas and read the Night Before in the books for Eliot and Emma.  They woke about 6 and were very good at waiting and waiting and waiting until after huevos a la plata, Milner style, with cinnamon rolls and bacon.  Thrilled with all that Santa brought them, especially the disguise beards and mustache sets.  Eliot got his suit and two bow ties.  Emma picked up a sports jacket (at Ladders) so they can match.  They play legos/duplos endlessly on the floor under the piano.  A hospital village it looks like.  Dark now, they went out at dusk to play in the new snow.  Snow most of the day even though it seemed very close to rain, back and forth, but the fine white veil over everything.  Dave cooked his sage crusted turkey breast and made mashed sweet potatoes and green beans sauted with pecans.  Three pies, pecan too sweet, pumpkin perfect and mine pie to die for, from Mouton Farm.  Three hard sauces with brandy, Hogans from Ireland took the prize.  Great soft cheeses and a very popular cranberry orange sorbet by Pabob.  

boxing day  Janice came over to speak French.  Kids started a snow fort, an igloo, at Aaron's house.  Ladies had their nails done in Franklin for big bucks.  
"the gap, the chasm between the clash of two actions, in which you shrink back from a feeling of self, sinking somewhere into the silence between two words that could just as well be the silence between the words of a completely different person."  Intimate Ties 93  
oh yes I would have written like this!!  if only Musil had stayed in this mode.  These two he wrote after Törless.  MWQ expands endlessly from this.