...and all my poor husband is laboring with is a horrific migraine headache. So what do I do to keep from worrying about him? (We once had to go to the emergency room with one of these things, but I know that right now he wouldn't permit such an expensive jaunt, especially with a costly hernia surgery appearing to loom on the horizon for our five-year-old.) What do I do when I'm not checking his temperature and pulse? I sit outside and draw a tree, something I haven't done in years. It was going pretty well until the five-year-old came out and asked me to draw the dog just beyond the fence, also in the scene. My artist's eye is far too rusty to make much of a dog on paper, but I tried. Drawing was soothing and a flashback to my younger days...as was my follow-up activity to the sketching: I came inside and watched An American in Paris.
Funny what watching a musical from the early 50's does to someone like me. I felt so achingly nostalgic for the simplicity of it: for the days when the label "avante garde" could be carried by something like the musical ballet sequence in this movie rather than requiring a further reach say toward a jar of urine and a crucifix. I ache for the way the dance sequence impressed the innocence of my childhood when I watched this movie with my parents, themselves avid fans of the golden age of the Hollywood musical. But at the same time, I see with new eyes--eyes a little misty from a tear or two--how well the dance that Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron do in the fountain on Concorde Square (I think that is the fountain it is to represent) portrays intimate love between a man and a woman...something my child-eyes did not see as I sat on my parents living room floor and imagined myself as the dancer.
I ache in a way that seems to disconnect me from the world of today even as it reminds me that the world I "feel" at that moment is, after all, the one that is forever gone. It is something I wrote about once before, after driving through a little town that appeared still locked in an earlier time. I said seeing such a town was a trigger that opened a doorway to a mystical place. Today such a trigger took me again, the door opened through this movie as it followed that visit to my own quieter past days: days of sitting and drawing as I stare at a tree.
I've been thinking about this doorway and I've found that it does not appear to you until you have lived through a few life-eras. First, there is the one of being sure that the generation older than you have all the secrets to "what is cool." Next comes the era of presuming you and your own generation have all the secrets to genuine coolness (later known as pretension), you have this coolness (--or to avoid making my own point, should I say phat-ness, or is that passe now too?) In any case, you are sure you have these pretensions formed with more original flare than any other generation ever has had or will have. Finally, you are on the verge of the doorway when you make the shocking discovery that the next generation is of the same opinion about themselves that you were about yourself. This is a thing you never considered possible! You were sure the generation following yours would automatically respect the wonder of your ultimate pretension. And now, because they don't feel this way at all, their pretension looks utterly stupid to you. The thing is, they don't care. In fact, your "stuffy" attitude in disrespecting their originality only supports that "new cool" self-perception they have of themselves; so finally you sigh and rub an aching place...any aching place will do...and say, like Old King Solomon: "So, all is vanity under the sun. I get it now."
But then you look to the generation before yours and see them wink at you as if you have made some new rite of passage. It is as if they are congratulating you for coming to see that you live that ancient wisdom: you are part of a human progression that has gone along this very route for generations. At the moment of that wink, you recapture something a little higher than what you've been feeling, which would be pride after its fall from lofty heights, now squashed flat into a steamy heap of depression on the sidewalk but not quite dead, an occasional flutter of self-pity and melodrama can be found at the pulse points--until that wink; then all that is left that needs to die does die, and you find your sheepish humility regarding your own pertinence. The benefit of all this is that you regain some hope for the next generation, knowing someday you'll be able to give them a similar winking lift back into genuine pertinence.
...It is then that you can go to this magical timeless place...timeless because its existence doesn't depend on reality, only on your perceptive memory. And magical, well magical for the same reasons. You know it as the place where you still believe, stil hope all the things the young ones still blindly believe and hope about themselves, but now you believe these things without pride and disunity toward other generations, rather you believe in oneness with them.
But now, my love, you come stumbling out from your state of feverish sleep to a state of feverish waking, so I'll come back to reality and be with you. The one drawback of the magical world: you can't do anyone there any good, the most you can do to honor all those there is to bring their magic that swells your spirit into the world of the real and the do something good for someone.
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