The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.
(Schopenhauer.)
I’ve been mourning the loss of a very close childhood friend. She was very literally the first friend I ever had. Because we moved quite far apart, in the last several years, our contact has been social networking and phone calls on each other’s birthdays (my lucky number, 22, is owing to her birthday of February 22nd). I do have to give her a wry thumbs-up because it was very clever to die of breast cancer in October so that we’d all remember every year to donate and walk and light candles and the like, but I can’t say I have been much of a fan of the actual passing.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight….
Not people die but worlds die in them.
(Yevgeny Yevtushenko, People.)
My friend had time to say goodbye to her sons, her husband, her sister and her parents, and to all of the rest of us who loved her. But what I have been struggling with is the loss of that world inside her: a world whose first gasps I was lucky enough to share with her, a world whose confident, feet-found orbit was still only just beginning. I feel so bitter and helpless about it. I didn’t realize how badly I’d been repressing it until I went to her funeral at our old church several hours away (alone, which was a terrible mistake). I didn’t weep or make a spectacle, but I didn’t stop crying. It was like I couldn’t.
Afterward, a very nice, very short woman came up and began gently asking me about my friend, and I explained that we’d known each other since we were very, very young, and had even gone to school together off and on. Turns out the woman was one of my kindergarten teachers. The nice one. Still nice, after all these years. I’ll explain that another day.
The point is — horrible. Bitterness. Anger. Grief. But not so much anger that I wish to assuage it by some sort of strike back; that would not at all comfort me, because I’m not down to facts just yet. I’m not ready to slap on a pink-ribboned tank top and run any marathons to make things better for others, because I don’t give a shit about all that yet. That is for sure.
I feel like a lost and selfish monster, surrounded by all this breast cancer awareness promotional material and not even up to the point of resentment of the disease; ergo, mystified by the idea of embracing that activism to trump my grief. I don’t like to feel that way. And I like to do all kinds of charity malarkey. I really do. I’ve donated this month already in the name of another friend’s mother, who beat it two years ago.
But this new thing — I am just not ready to even think of my friend’s death in terms of what killed her. That seems objective to the point of frightening. But I should strive for it? Right? How do you get to there?
It’s been forever since we had a Hot Man Bein’ Hot of the Day. Shame on me! Some lady fan service. Depending on your viewpoint.
Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986; adapted from the Stephen King novella “The Body”). This is the first of what I hope will be a series of Corey Feldman entries. He’s totally an O.G. hottie. Did You Know?
Okay, so before you castigate me as a freak and a pedophile, let me explain.
Understand that I’m coming at the “hot” aspect with the eyes of the little ’80’s girl who saw him in this and Gremlins, Goonies, Lost Boys*, et al and conceived a giant, throbbing, lifelong crush on Corey Feldman. My feelings when I see him with wet hair and his dorky glasses are timeless because of this. I am not generally turned on by pictures of 15-year-old boys.
Yes, he was 15. He was just playing a 12-year-old. Moderately better, yes? So please all around don’t look too askance at this entry. Appreciate with me that Terry Duchamp is all kinds of pimp in this movie! A total Unlikely G. That’s hot at any age, in the general-heat way, not the get-it-on heat way.
Totally pimp!, but I’m still feeling hinky. Gonna end this one early. Look for more Corey Feldman, hopefully with greater legality of age, in the near future.
*Don’t even act like I’m not in The Lost Boys because I totally am. I’m on the carousel in the boardwalk footage. Never Forget.
I hope your mom has a good Mother’s Day. Sick burn! Except actually a fond wish …
Alanis Morissette — “The Heart of the House”
Shirley MacLaine and daughter Sachi.
You are the original template.
You are the original exemplary.
How seen were you, actually?
How revered were you, honestly, at the time?
Mirrormask.
Why pleased with your low maintenance?
Where was your ally,
your partner in feminine crime?
But, oh, mother, who’s your buddy?
Oh, mother, who’s got your back?
Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher on Debbie’s birthday.
The heart of the house,
The heart of the house.
All hail the goddess.
Joanie and Christina.
You were “good-ol'”
You were “count on her ’til four a.m.”
You saw me run from the house
In the snow melodramatically.
Marvelous Jessica Walter as Lucille on Arrested Development. It is comforting to know there are many worse winkers in the world than me. (But I wager not a great many.)
But, oh, mother, who’s your sister?
Oh, mother, who’s your friend?
The heart of the house.
The heart of the house.
All hail the goddess.
Shirley and Sachi again, by Leo Fuchs. I adore pictures of the two of them together.
We left the men and we went for a walk in the gatineaus
And talked like women,
Like women to women would.
“‘Women to women would’ — where did you get that from?
Must’ve been your father, your dad.”
Audrey Hepburn and her mother before the Occupation.
I got it from you, I got it from you.
Do you see yourself in my gypsy garage sale ways?
In my fits of laughter?
In my tinkerbell tendencies?
In my lack of color coordination?
Probably like the fifth time I’ve used this picture. Bebe Buell and Liv Tyler, beautiful women and loving mothers both.
All my best wishes to the maternal among us of any age or gender. I don’t believe God intends any of us to be orphans. In the absence of a literal physical “mother,” I hope we are able to open our hearts to others in our lives that wish to help fill that role. And if you have still your original mom, won’t you call her or something? It’s a horrible and complex thing and that’s why none of us mothers are perfect, because it’s the first time you realize that you have to be this role first, and a person second, and though high-handed so-called instruction books abound, your own children arrive essentially manual-less. Cut mom a break and shoot her a thank you, maybe? As Panda says, file that under “just sayin’.” SeaQuest out!
Updates might be spotty the next few days: the Cappy is about to be in town in, like, an hour on that aforementioned leave and I will be trying to spend as much time as possible with my brother from another mother before the Army steals him away again.
This is an outtake from a shoot for a poster that came free with an X-Files comic book that the Cappy and I both had in high school. HMS Dorkytimes, ahoy!
For a four-eyed loner who spent most of my childhood in the back of moving vans with headphones and a comic, and my school days trying to stay under the radar, I am ridiculously lucky to have such great, great friends as an adult. The past few weeks have made me more aware of that than ever.
I’ll try to squeeze in or schedule my Daily Batmans and some fun stuff in the next few days, but I plan to be mainly absent. Catch you on the flip!
As an Army “brat” (her father is Maj. Paul James Tate), she spent a great deal of her childhood packing and moving from one military base to another.
Before Sharon was 15, she had lived in Tacoma, Houston, El Paso and San Francisco — just to name a few cities. When Maj. Tate was shipped overseas in 1959, he took his wife and Sharon with him. As a result, Sharon boasts a fluency in Italian and a diploma from a Vicenza, Italy, high school.
(“Sharon Tate is on a crash program to get to the top.” New York Daily News, December 18, 1966.)
I believe that childhood upheaval, while it does give you an interesting background, is part of why she reports having been so painfully shy. I moved around a lot as a kid and felt the same. In interviews, though, she cites her background as having made her a “people watcher,” and a person who is open to new experiences and travel. I appreciate that, true to form, she gleaned the positive from what could have been a negative experience, and I think the above picture beautifully exemplifies that attitude of attenuation to detail and desire to marvel at the world around you.
William Blake Month ends today (unless I change my mind), and I’d promised that America: A Prophecy would be continued, so here are excerpts from the rising action and “Finis.”
The terror like a comet,
or more like the planet red
That once inclos’d the terrible wandering
comets in its sphere.
Then Mars thou wast our center,
& the planets three flew round
Thy crimson disk; so e’er the Sun
was rent from thy red sphere;
The Spectre glowd his horrid length
staining the temple long
With beams of blood; &
thus a voice came forth, and shook the temple
That stony law I stamp to dust:
and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book,
& none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desert sands,
& consume in bottomless deeps;
To make the deserts blossom,
& the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy,
and burst the stony roof.
That pale religious lechery,
seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot,
and in coarse-clad honesty
The undefil’d tho’ ravish’d
in her cradle night and morn:
For every thing that lives is holy,
life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight
can never be defil’d.
Fires inwrap the earthly globe,
yet man is not consumd;
“Laura” by Ryan McGinley, 2010.
Sound! sound! my loud war-trumpets
& alarm my Thirteen Angels!
Loud howls the eternal Wolf!
the eternal Lion lashes his tail!
America is darkned;
and my punishing Demons terrified
Crouch howling before their caverns
deep like skins dry’d in the wind.
They cannot smite the wheat,
nor quench the fatness of the earth.
They cannot smite with sorrows,
nor subdue the plow and spade.
They cannot wall the city,
nor moat round the castle of princes.
They cannot bring the stubbed oak
to overgrow the hills.
Who commanded this?
what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen’rous from experience
till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers
of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade,
and generosity a science,
That men get rich by,
& the sandy desert is giv’n to the strong
What God is he, writes laws of peace,
& clothes him in a tempest
What pitying Angel lusts for tears,
and fans himself with sighs
What crawling villain preaches abstinence
& wraps himself
In fat of lambs? no more I follow,
no more obedience pay.
“Blood falls” by Ryan McGinley.
And the flame folded roaring fierce
within the pitchy night
Before the Demon red,
who burnt towards America,
In black smoke thunders
& loud winds rejoicing in its terror
Breaking in smoky wreaths from the wild deep,
& gath’ring thick
In flames as of a furnace
on the land from North to South
I think this is the Tacoma Narrows.*
His plagues obedient to his voice
flew forth out of their clouds
Falling upon America,
as a storm to cut them off
Dark is the heaven above, & cold
& hard the earth beneath;
And as a plague wind fill’d with insects
cuts off man & beast;
And as a sea o’erwhelms a land
in the day of an earthquake;
“Extranas formas aerodinamica” by profundorosso on the flickr.
Fury! rage! madness! in a wind
swept through America
And the red flames of Orc
that folded roaring fierce around
The angry shores,
and the fierce rushing of th’inhabitants together:
The citizens of New-York
close their books & lock their chests;
The mariners of Boston
drop their anchors and unlade;
The scribe of Pensylvania
casts his pen upon the earth;
The builder of Virginia
throws his hammer down in fear.
Then had America been lost,
o’erwhelm’d by the Atlantic,
And Earth had lost another portion
of the infinite,
But all rush together in the night
in wrath and raging fire
The red fires rag’d! the plagues recoil’d!
then rolld they back with fury.
(William Blake, excerpts from America: A Prophecy.)
*Along with the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was still a gruesomely hot topic in the overheard adult conversations of my early childhood in the Sound. I didn’t fully understand what happened in either case but my morbid imagination obsessed over the half-described tragic events and I was terrified of taking the car over the spans from island to island. I used to fold my little hands over my eyes as I sat on the couch in our trailer waiting for my dad to come home and pray he would take his car up on the ferry instead of driving over the bridge, and any loud noises from trucks going over the shabbily paved nearby highway were certainly the rumblings of another volcanic eruption which would bury us all in ash. I guess what I’m saying is I’ve always had an acute overawareness and fear of cataclysmic death. I have no idea why.
I hope your mom has a good Mother’s Day. Sick burn! Except actually a fond wish …
Alanis Morissette — “The Heart of the House”
Shirley MacLaine and daughter Sachi.
You are the original template.
You are the original exemplary.
How seen were you, actually?
How revered were you, honestly, at the time?
Mirrormask.
Why pleased with your low maintenance?
Where was your ally,
your partner in feminine crime?
But, oh, mother, who’s your buddy?
Oh, mother, who’s got your back?
Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher on Debbie’s birthday.
The heart of the house,
The heart of the house.
All hail the goddess.
Joanie and Christina.
You were “good-ol'”
You were “count on her ’til four a.m.”
You saw me run from the house
In the snow melodramatically.
Marvelous Jessica Walter as Lucille on Arrested Development. It is comforting to know there are many worse winkers in the world than me. (But I wager not a great many.)
But, oh, mother, who’s your sister?
Oh, mother, who’s your friend?
The heart of the house.
The heart of the house.
All hail the goddess.
Shirley and Sachi again, by Leo Fuchs. I adore pictures of the two of them together.
We left the men and we went for a walk in the gatineaus
And talked like women,
Like women to women would.
“‘Women to women would’ — where did you get that from?
Must’ve been your father, your dad.”
Audrey Hepburn and her mother before the Occupation.
I got it from you, I got it from you.
Do you see yourself in my gypsy garage sale ways?
In my fits of laughter?
In my tinkerbell tendencies?
In my lack of color coordination?
Probably like the fifth time I’ve used this picture. Bebe Buell and Liv Tyler, beautiful women and loving mothers both.
All my best wishes to the maternal among us of any age or gender. I don’t believe God intends any of us to be orphans. In the absence of a literal physical “mother,” I hope we are able to open our hearts to others in our lives that wish to help fill that role. And if you have still your original mom, won’t you call her or something? It’s a horrible and complex thing and that’s why none of us mothers are perfect, because it’s the first time you realize that you have to be this role first, and a person second, and though high-handed so-called instruction books abound, your own children arrive essentially manual-less. Cut mom a break and shoot her a thank you, maybe? As Panda says, file that under “just sayin’.” SeaQuest out!
Girls Like A Boy Who Reads … comics! Thought it was time for some rare female fan service up in this piece — wink-wink. You’re welcome. Photo via iheartbatman on the tumblr, very cool bloggy-blog.
“The things which the child loves remain in the domain of the heart until old age. The most beautiful thing in life is that our souls remain over the places where we once enjoyed ourselves.” — Kahlil Gibran.
All of the artwork in this post was done by Audrey Hepburn during World War II.
Audrey at the beach in 1937, 8 years old, before the war.
Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it all in at once.
In 1939, Audrey Hepburn’s mother Ella moved Audrey and her two half-brothers from Belgium to their grandfather’s home in Arnhem, in the Netherlands. She believed they would be safe there. On May 10, 1940, six days after Audrey’s eleventh birthday, the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, having already come through Luxembourg and Belgium. The Germans called their campaign of invasion of the Low Countries “Fall Gelb;” in Dutch, the Nederlanders refer to it as “Slag om Nederland,” or, “Battle for the Netherlands.”
Audrey passed much of her time outside of school during the occupation drawing.
Completely hemmed in and outmanned by the German army, the Dutch main force in the Netherlands nonetheless held out for five days in mid-May, 1940 — a small contingent near Zealand held off the Wehrmacht through the 17th, but finally surrendered after grave loss of life. Almost exactly five years later, the final Dutch province was liberated.
During the five-year occupation of Arnhem, besides spending her time drawing and performing openly in plays with her mother and friends, Audrey attended school under the name “Edda van Heemstra,” a pseudonym invented by her mother Ella that she hoped would not betray Audrey’s English roots.
Audrey in costume for one of the plays in which she and Ella performed to raise spirits in the town during the occupation.
Audrey trained in ballet and secretly performed for small, sympathetic groups to raise money for the Dutch Resistance.
“The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performances.”
1939 — age 10.
I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when war broke out and 15 when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it, but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn’t know what I was going to read. I’ve never been the same again, it affected me so deeply.
During the Dutch famine over the winter of 1944, the Germans confiscated the Dutch people’s limited food and fuel supply for themselves. Without heat in their homes or food to eat, people in the Netherlands starved and froze to death in the streets. Hepburn and many other Dutch people had to resort to using flour made from tulip bulbs to bake cakes and cookies.
Arnhem was devastated during allied bombing raids that were part of Operation Market Garden. Audrey’s older brother Ian was sent to a labor camp, and her uncle and cousin were shot in front of her for being part of the Resistance.
Audrey and her brothers Anthony and Ian playing in 1938.
We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they’d close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read the diary [of Anne Frank], I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today’. That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.
In Belgium in 1934, five years before the war broke out.
I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child.
When the tanks came in and the country was liberated, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration trucks followed. Hepburn said in an interview that she ate an entire can of condensed milk and then got sick from one of her first relief meals because she put too much sugar in her oatmeal. This experience is what led her to become involved in UNICEF late in life. (source)
My own life has been much more than a fairy tale. I’ve had my share of difficult moments, but whatever difficulties I’ve gone through, I’ve always gotten a prize at the end.
Donate to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, online via PayPal, by phone at 310.393.5331, or through the mail to The Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, 710 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 600, Santa Monica, CA 90401.
Update 1/27/2012: Contact info for the AHCF update:
Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund
65 S. Grand Avenue – First Floor – Pasadena – CA 91105
phone 1.626.304.1380
fax. 1.626.304.1386
email ahcf@audreyhepburn.com
The Thought Experiment 