Ideas

I love how ideas come. Sometimes scattered, sometimes tipping off one another. Setting off memories. Reminding you of a person, or another time, or another thought you've had. Shimmering like insects (butterflies? more menacing, like iridescent beetles?) beating against you.

Reading the newspaper, watching a film, having a conversation.

Today I was catching up on the NYT, and already I set aside an obituary for a friend I may not send; a friend who loves reading obituaries. This one about Alice E. Kober, who apparently nearly deciphered Linear B, just before Michael Ventris did. A brilliant woman, a classicist, who died at the age of 43. But she is forgotten and Ventris takes the honors, although he built on all she did.

Or reading a Modern Love column: "'Maybe you can tell her that you're a man, you're my husband, and your wife wants to cook for you?' I sighed. Everything Dawn said was true, but did I really have to say it to my mother?" Damn. Another woman sacrificed on the altar of the Sacred Mother In Law. Been there. How do people balance their desires, make choices seem so weak? Why is filial love so poisonous some times?

Or the OpEd piece about hurting children by helping them: "The study, led by the sociologist Laura T Hamilton of the University of California, Merced, finds that the more money parents spend on a their child's college education, the worse grades the child earns." Hold on! My parents spent a fortune and I did quite well. But I had inner drive. They didn't do my work for me; it was all on my own recognizance, all based on my own wanting to succeed. I agree that if you do the work for children, if you don't let them rise and fall on their own, they're screwed. Helicopter parenting protects in the short term while inflicting long-term damage.

Which makes me think of how they don't enforce proper spelling in our school, and papers come home with free-form composition that gives me hives. I don't sit back and say, "Oh, that's lovely!" I can appreciate the sentiments and ideas therein, while also becoming a Tiger Mother and make my sons spell things five times correctly. I explain patiently about how writing is about presenting yourself to the world. It truly is. And no child of mine is going to self-present as a poor speller, at least not now. They need to learn to spell and then become e.e. cummings. When they're in their 20's, they can invent their own styles. Not. Yet. Precision in language matters; it matters enormously.

Anyway, back to ideas. I was revisiting the filmed version of The English Patient, and was struck by some of Almasy's lines related to communication-by-cypher: "Maddox knows, I think. He keeps talking about Anna Karenina. I think it's his idea of a man-to-man chat. [sighs] Well, it's my idea of a man-to-man chat." Okay, a little cliché, I grant you that.

I am nonetheless fascinated by what is touched upon and understood but left unsaid; the subtlety of exchanges, especially in British contexts. The codes of shared meaning and experiences. Rebukes; numbness; disappointment; love?

How does one access the ineffable? Can one cast off the leaden shoes of the literal and make the leap? Understand the heart of the person who says, "I love you" but is culturally bound otherwise not to open up?