Heather King's Blog, page 24

JOIN ME AT KYLEMORE ABBEY!

kylemore-with-scan

PEOPLE!! Here’s your big chance to visit the gorgeous West Coast of Ireland, ask the big questions, eat yogurt, ice cream, eggs and cheese from the grass-fed sheep, cattle, goats, and chickens (wait, do chickens eat grass?) of the Irish countryside, attend Mass at the splendid, castle-like Kylemore Abbey, and hang out with ME.

Last two weekends of September, select the one of your choice. The summer tourists will have gone and I, for one, cannot even imagine the beauty.

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LYING FLAT IS JUSTICE

I’m always on the lookout for creative types who lead or led an “alternative lifestyle.”

Recently, for example, I came across a woman named Hope Bourne (1920-2010), who lived for decades on the moors at Exmoor, Great Britain, in a broken-down “caravan” (basically, trailer), on virtually no money. She wrote, tramped the fields and woods, painted, drew, thought, grew her own vegetables, shot her own rabbits, and walked into the village every week or so to collect her mail and buy a loaf of bread and if she was flush, a bar or two of chocolate.

She considered herself wealthy in every way that matters. She was not a recluse, she emphasized: simply a solitary, with a wide circle of friends. You can view (fairly low-quality) YouTubes where she describes her life and philosophy. And I’m dying to read one or two of her books, which include Wild Harvest, Living on Exmoor, and Hope Bourne’s Exmoor Village.

Paul Erdős (Hungarian: 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) “was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.” [wiki]

He apparently spent almost his whole working life traveling about and simply descending upon the home of whoever would have him, with no advance warning and no end date.

“Described by his biographer, Paul Hoffman, as ‘probably the most eccentric mathematician in the world,’ Erdős spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase. Except for some years in the 1950s, when he was not allowed to enter the United States based on the accusation that he was a Communist sympathizer, his life was a continuous series of going from one meeting or seminar to another. During his visits, Erdős expected his hosts to lodge him, feed him, and do his laundry, along with anything else he needed, as well as arrange for him to get to his next destination.”

Another point in his favor: he was a total caffeine addict. He once tried to wean himself from the Ritalin and  Benzedrine he’d started taking after the death of his mother and managed to last thirty days. “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict,” he afterward told the friend who’d bet him $500. “But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.”

He spent virtually every waking hour on his beloved mathematics and died with his boots on, of a heart attack, at a mathematics conference in Warsaw.

BUDAPEST, 1992
BREW ME UP A POT OF DARK ROAST!

Finally, we have a movement called Tang ping that really took off “in April, 2021, with a post by Luo Huazhong (username “Kind-Hearted Traveler”) on the internet forum Baidu Tieba, in which he discussed his reasons for living a low-key, minimalist lifestyle.

In 2016, 26-year-old Luo quit his factory job because it made him feel empty. He then cycled 1,300 miles from Sichuan to Tibet, and now back in his home town Jiande in eastern Zhejiang Province, spends his time reading philosophy, and gets by doing a few odd jobs and taking US$60 a month from his savings.He only eats two meals a day.

Luo’s post, entitled with “Lying Flat is Justice”, illustrates:

‘I can just sleep in my barrel enjoying a sunbath like Diogenes, or live in a cave-like Heraclitus and think about ‘Logos‘. Since there has never really been a trend of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land, I can create it for myself. Lying flat is my wise movement, only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.’”

Happy 4th of July, and I hope everyone gets some rest today. It’ll be 109 degrees today here in Tucson.

WRITING YOUR LIFE

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

“Those who give up everything for God have always been the most powerful proof for the truth of Christ as a personal presence. But there is also a corollary to this. In a time when Christianity does not attract so strongly, must it be that souls giving their lives sacrificially to God are far fewer in number or perhaps simply more isolated, less visible, less able to influence? It is love alone in generous self-giving that consistently draws others to the truth of Jesus Christ.”

— Father Donald Haggerty, priest of the Archdiocese of New York, from “Conversion: Spiritual Insights into an Essential Encounter with God.”

That could be the credo for today’s Catholic artist.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

“We have become a crowd of exhibitionists. The internet gives us startling resources to publicise our private sphere. each of us can, with the simple means of a mobile phone and a mirror, upload seductive photographs of ourselves, film ourselves feeding the dog, or pontificate on the state of the world and the church.

The worldwide web feeds the agreeable illusion that there is before us an immense audience waiting with bated breath for our oracles, our communications…This tendency coexists with conscious obfuscation. Because we are so exposed to one another, we expend much energy in hiding aspects of our lives we don’t want others to know about.”

–from Coram Fratibus post dated June 25, 2023. The site is maintained by Erik Varden, Catholic spiritual writer, Trappist monk, and Bishop-prelate of the Territorial Prelature of Trondheim, Norway. The Notes section has lots of wonderful reflections on theology, music, film, books… 

“The Church is ‘not a system, an idea, an ideology, a structure, a society, but the tremendous living establishment, which has existed since the apostles until today, fulfilling her history from century to century, growing, unfolding, struggling, ailing, recovering, living out her destiny and maturing toward the return of the Lord.’”

–Ida Friederike Görres, from a eulogy by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger

A beautiful poem by Andrea Cohen about families, fathers, strangers, tragedy, that starts:

Roosevelt Dargon, how often I have thought of you
and your leg. 

“Will you go to the funeral?”

“I will, of course.”

“Was she a friend of yours?”

Well, I knew her, like, but I couldn’t say we were friends.”

“I was certain that this was Mike Menahan’s relationship to most of the people in Corofin. He knew everyone in the village but was friendless. But everyone in the village went to everyone else’s funeral , whether friendship was involved or not. It was simply something they did, like going to a parade. They went to remind themselves of their own mortality and to feel relieved that it wasn’t them.”

–Rosemary Mahoney, from Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women (1993), a memoir of her time in Ireland–she stayed in a crumbling castle and spent hours hanging out in local bars, listening to people talk, observing how they interacted., and also interviewing mover-and-shaker women…An all-around wonderful book, as are all of Mahoney’s.

DETROIT

Wow. Detroit is a city in Michigan as you may know; in fact the largest city in the state.

I’m staying with friends in a downtown-adjacent area called Core City. They bought a house that was in a state of disrepair (though structurally sound) and several years later have created a magical series of spaces that includes not only living quarters and a guest suite but a General Store, Museum, and extensive vegetable, flower and fruit gardens, vine-entwined sitting areas, outdoor sculptural features, Colonial twig trellises, and a pond-in-progress.

PIET OUDOLF GARDEN, BELLE ISLE, DETROIT

We toured the Piet Oudolf Garden on Belle Isle, walked along a couple of waterfronts, and picked sour cherries in a friend of my friends’ backyard. I have visited the Motown Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts (highlights were James Barnor: Accra/London and Rembrandt’s “Christ.” I have walked around the neighborhood, attended Mass at St. Aloysius, helped weed, made an appearance at an outdoor electronic music (!) event called Soundhenge, and attended a strawberry fest.

REMBRANDT, CHRIST, c. between 1648 and 1650

But mostly I’ve observed. I’ll return home Tuesday, and begin to prepare for Ireland.

“Before You, all multiplicity becomes one; in You, all that has been scattered is reunited; in Your Love all that has been merey external is made again true and genuine. In Your Love all the diffusion of the day’s chores coems home again to the evening of Your unity, which is eternal life.

This love, which can allow my daily routine to remain routine and still transform it into a home-coming to You, this love only You can give. So what should I say to You now, as I come to lay my everyday routine before You? There is only one thing I can beg for, and that is Your most ordinary and most exalted gift, the grace of Your Love.

Touch my heart with this grace O Lord. When I reach out in joy or in sorrow for the things of this world, grant that through them I may know and love You, their Maker and final home. You who are Love itself, give me the grace of love, give me Yourself, so that all my days may finally empty into the one day of Your eternal Life.”

–Karl Rahner, Encounters with Silence

FILM NOIR L.A.

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

“Each of us is in some way or another, and in succession, a criminal and a saint.“
— Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)

My tastes range wide in movies, but top place goes to film noir, described by the Oxford Languages Dictionary as “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”

“The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.”

In “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir” (Running Press Adult, $20.99), San Francisco-based Eddie Muller (the “Czar of noir”) explores several tropes of the genre: Vixenville (the femme fatale), the City Desk (newspaper grift), the Psych Ward, Thieves’ Highway (crime on the road), The Big House (prison movies).

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

TO WHOM ELSE SHALL WE GO?

Last Friday was the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These special days devoted to Our Lord, I’m like a proud mother, or wife, or child. As always with a notable liturgical feast, I was thus hyper-vigilant, excited, and fearful lest I lacked the strength and fortitude to make it to Mass.

So I woke at 3 am and, exhausted, went to the 9 am at St. Ambrose here in Tucson. Wept. “To whom else would we go, Lord?” I have no-one but Christ.

Oh, it is interesting: aging! Ever more invisible, ever more useless in the eyes of the world. Ever more do I live in the Sermon on the Mount. Ever more am I like Chesterton’s figure in Christian art: hollow-eyed, in exile, staring with a frantic intentness outward.

Which is fine and as it should be: as Flannery O’Connor said, “We are all blessed in our deprivations if we let ourselves be. I am really most “myself” (whatever that means) sitting in a pew by myself at Mass and crying. Most myself; most sure of what I believe and live and move and have my being for and in.

This time of year in the desert you have to get up and out the door super early as the temp can climb to the 90s by about 8. So on my walk this morning I was thinking about how maybe the worst thing about COVID was that it set us at each other’s throats.

I don’t want to be at anyone else’s throat and I pray no-one else is at mine. So I’m pondering, as I often am, how to further purify my heart. If I make any progress, I’ll let you know!

Meanwhile I am off Tuesday for a week in Detroit, a city that will be new to me. Rested up and excited.

THE GARDENS AT ALCATRAZ

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Everyone’s heard of The Rock: the infamous maximum-security prison that operated from 1934 to1963 on a tiny, harsh, rugged island in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.

The Rock has spawned movies, books and folk heroes: Escape from Alcatraz; the Bird Man of Alcatraz. Al Capone was incarcerated here, as were such notorious criminals as George “Machine Gun” Kelly, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, Roy Gardner, and Frank Lee Morris.

But the rich and varied history of Alcatraz extends far beyond its site as a penitentiary. It was used in the 1850s as a military fort. Its lighthouse, still in operation today, was the first on the West Coast. In 1969 Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz for 19 months. They hung a portrait of Geronimo over the fireplace mantel in the old Penitentiary Warden’s mansion and held tribal meetings around the hearth.

Today it’s known as an important bird-nesting locale as well as for the historic Alcatraz Gardens.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

CELEBRATING THE REAL SISTERS OF L.A.

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

In a saga that has been well documented in recent weeks, the Los Angeles Dodgers recently issued an invitation, retracted it, then, under mob pressure, issued a groveling apology and implored a group of “drag nuns” who call themselves, all in good fun, of course, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, to participate in an upcoming Pride Night celebration at Dodger Stadium.

The good fun includes, but is far from limited to, an annual Easter event called the Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary contest, pole-dancing, and simulated sodomy around a “camp” reenactment of the crucifixion, a pregnant “Free Choice” Mary, and a Condom Savior Mass.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

AND MY MOUTH SHALL PROCLAIM THY PRAISE: A PLUNGE INTO MEXICAN DENTISTRY

I have been reduced to driving to Mexico for dental care.

That’s right. Things have come to that.

I won’t bore you with the ongoing cross of my beloved, brave teeth which, over the course of my life, have undergone extractions, adult orthodontics, resorption (a supposedly incredibly rare occurence that has happened twice or maybe thrice, I’ve lost count, in my own mouth), bonded bridges, more root canals and crowns than I can possibly remember or count, scaling, periodontal surgery, and two implants (one of which, after about 20 visits, failed, and had to be unscrewed, at which point I learned that implants go in way easier than they come out).

Perhaps this is the place to say that I brush and floss (Dr. Tung’s) religiously, with Phillips Sonicare and a Water-Pik, have my teeth cleaned ever four months, etc etc and have for years.

Anyway, my recent experience was typical. I went in for what was to be a routine cleaning and after a second and third opinion definitively learned that I need to have an entire bridge removed in the upper right part of my mouth, possibly an extraction, and a new bridge made, to the tune of $5000.

When I mentioned this turn of an events to a friend in Tucson, he said, “Oh you have to come down to Mexico and I’ll turn you on to Dr. Pincero (I’ll call him). My wife and I are driving down next week and we’ll walk you through.”

The Mexican border is but 62 miles or so south of Tucson: a straight shot, it’s true, down the 19. Still.

There’s a Nogales, AZ and a Nogales, Mexico, right across the border, notoriously lousy with cartels and, according to a recent news article, “quickly becoming a hotbed of fentanyl smuggling.” There’s the whole getting across–and back across–which I imagined taking hours. There’s the dental accreditation question, malpractice insurance, the language barrier, etc.

“The border’s a breeze,” said my friend. “You park on the Arizona side and just walk over. The guy speaks perfect English. Lives in and educated in the U.S.” (This latter wasn’t true as I saw from the diploma mounted on the office wall, but whatever).

Anyway, the mouth situation has been hanging over me and I’m leaving for a lengthy stay in Ireland in a little over a month. So somewhat against my better judgment I went down a week ago Friday with my friend and his wife, and it really was a lot easier than I thought.

For one thing–who knew–they simply let anyone into Mexico! No ID, no passport. There’s a sign about fruits and vegetables but apparently, say, drugs, a criminal record, iffy citizenship status and I don’t know what all else are perfectly acceptable. You put your purse on a rudimentary conveyer like at the carwash and out it comes two seconds later and you’re in.

Mexico’s main products, in this neck of the woods, would appear to be prescription drugs (every other store front reads “Farmacia”); plastic bottles of vanilla extract, which are set out on tables in pyramids on the main plaza; brightly painted tin garden ornaments (I guess) of cacti, flowers, and birds; and colorful, teeth-rotting snacks.

We walked the three blocks to the office and my friend, his wife and I were buzzed in. They both had a checkup and a cleaning, which took about 10 minutes each (this is what a visit to the dentist consists of for normal people), and then Dr. Pincero called me in, shoved me down in the chair, and said “Open.” After poking briefly between the offending teeth, as if chipping ice with a pickaxe, he cried, “Poor execution! Kindergarten work!”

I’m used to having my teeth insulted by dentists so the words no longer sting (much). The last guy had taken X-rays, studied them in silence, then asked, “May I ask if you have a plan for your mouth?” A plan!? Not to be bankrupted? To continue to be able to eat?

Maybe the work was kindergarten–whoever had done it was lost in the mists of time—but guaranteed it was work that had required innumerable uncomfortable, angst-ridden, dread-saturated, nerves-stretched-to-the-breaking point visits to the dentist–just like this one; not to mention untold thousands of dollars scraped and scrimped and saved from my salary as a freelance writer which not to put too fine a point on it is subject not only to income tax but an additional 15.3% (on net) self-employment tax.

Visits during which my abiding prayer had been, Please let this thing last until I die, Lord, which will no doubt be prematurely from dental trauma.

“The whole bridge needs to come out,” the doctor was continuing. “We’ll take impressions for the temporary today and then you’ll come back and we’ll just CRACK THAT THING RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE!”

Weakened from fear and fatigue, and realizing I could procrastinate no longer, I found myself signing a check for $1071–what was to be the first of three installments–and making an appointment for 9 am the following week. “Two more visits only,” said the doctor, at which I inwardly howled with laughter (as I did at the estimate). Right.

Welp I made my way down the following Tuesday, and thanks be to God, the drive, parking lot and getting across the border proceeded smoothly and quickly.

I arrived on time. The assistant ushered me in. The doctor gave me a couple of giant shots of Novacaine or whatever they use, the second one directly into the roof of my mouth. Then the assistant snapped into place a kind of rubber balloon, evoking padded rooms and asphyxiation, the purpose of which was apparently to catch the giant chunks of tooth which were about to be blasted off.

After that the doctor started up a machine that sounded like a combination leaf blower/buzzsaw and started grinding away at my bridge. This went on, as I had fully anticipated, way way longer than either he or I had hoped. After about fifteen minutes, I heard above the roar, “This is hard bridge!” Stick around, Sonny, I thought.

Finally the bridge came off and then came the next step: the step when the damage is surveyed and inevitably turns out to constitute the absolutely worst case, most expensive possible, scenario–plus a little fillip for fun.

Sure enough, right off the bat: “That back tooth needs a root canal.” Why of course it does! Luckily, for me a root canal is nothing; the equivalent to someone else of an X-ray. Down here it would only run me 400 extra bucks (his buddy down the hall would do it) plus of course another visit. Ok, what else?

Dr. Pincero doesn’t say much. He determines upon a course of action, I grasped quickly, then follows through at once. Back went the balloon mouth guard. Out came a “block” of the kind shoved between the jaws of mental patients in 40s movies like The Snake Pit before the patient receives electroshock therapy.

Bite down, the doctor ordered so I bit down for what seemed like a truly unbelievable amount of time as he and the assistant engaged in some esoteric process that involved endless grinding, sucking, blowing, and the application of an evil-smelling liquid during the whole of which the two of them jabbered away saying God knows what to each other–probably joking, I imagined–in Spanish.

After a while my entire body, nerves screaming, went into rigor mortis mode, and my lower lip began trembling with the combined effort of biting down on the block and the pain shooting through my clenched jaw.

Around Minute 40, again I again heard a word from the dentist: “This VERY HARD for ME!”

I have an unfortunate tendency to try to bond with every random person I meet: the CVS cashier, the woman bending over the smell a flower, the guy I’d just seen selling peanuts on the corner: “Hola! Buenas!” No-one will disabuse a person of this habit quicker than a dentist–who clearly views the person in the chair not as a human being but pretty much as Michelangelo, chisel in hand, viewed a block of granite.

Finally, finally, the doctor was done. The second the assistant took the block out I shot up from my seat shouting, “My God, that hurts!! My jaw is killing me!”

Utterly unmoved–not once during the ordeal had either of them asked whether I was okay–the two of them gazed impassively out the window waiting for my histrionics to subside. Then Dr. Pincero jerked my seat upright and more or less forced me to look up at the ceiling-mounted screen.

You would have thought he was showing me the image of a Fabergé egg instead of an object that looked as if it should have been in a jar of formaldehyde in the Mütter Museum.

“I built up your tooth!” he crowed, waving off the quantities of dark liquid pooling around what looked like a sawed-off elephant tusk with an airy, “Just blood.”

“Good work!” he congratulated himself. “Another dentist would have pulled but you have no bone” (this is another phrase that runs thematically through my dental history–You have no bone–meaning an implant wouldn’t “take” and making me feel, while I’m already at my most vulnerable and exposed, that there is something defective about my very skeleton).

Here’s another fun thing about Mexico: they employ none of the pesky FDA rules that hamper our own distribution of helpful anaesthetics. Just in case the raw nerve that was now exposed gave me trouble the assitant gave me a little box containing four pills: 30 mg Mavidol, which I googled the second I got back to my car and learned is not narcotic and not habit-forming but does require a prescription in the U.S. and is I gather like a nice strong Alleve.

My mouth was fine and I had hardly any pain even though Dr. Pincero had to drill under the gum as he’d mentioned several times, an event I chose not to picture. I drove home listening to Glenn Gould and, once back in Tucson, filled up the car with gas, stopped at Babylon Market for feta cheese, olives and red lentils, and even went to the gym.

Later I took a Vespers walk, said Evening Prayer, played a Haydn sonata on the piano, and read some more of Hemingway’s Boat.

I woke in the middle of the night with a start to voice a question that had apparently been roiling around in my subconscious for hours: “Why do I have no bone, Lord? Did you just forget?” The two of us laughed our heads off. And then He helped me go back to sleep.

CODA: I returned to Mexico two days later for a root canal (“Oh!” the guy said when I opened my mouth), followed by two more hours in Dr. Pincero’s chair filling cavities and neatening up (utterances here included “Nothing is easy with you!” and “If you could see your teeth right now, you would cry”). Turns out I may need a second root canal and if I really want the bridge to last, should get an extra crown, teh all around upshot adding close to $2000 more dollars and what I’m certain will end up being three or four more visits to this particular little dental interlude. I actually like the guy a lot and might think he’s trying to rip me off if not for decades of similar such experiences.

So that will be the month of June. Good news: the drive to Nogales and back is kind of spectacularly beautiful. I’ve discovered, at long last, podcasts. And it could be a lot worse. Troublesome teeth aren’t tumors, for example, or ALS disease, or any of the zillions of other things that can go wrong in a human body. So thank you!

And a Blessesd Solemnity of the Holy Trinity to all.