Blue Nights

I read this in one day because I couldn't help myself. I have always been seduced by Didion's style. I wanted to be under the spell of her hypnotic use of repetitive phrases as she described the loss of her daughter at age 39.  I imagine I am not alone in this sad sorority of mothers who have experienced the death of a child in being eager to read the latest report from the front lines,especially coming from such a fine writer as Joan Didion. Her memoir about the death of her husband said so many things so well about the rather common event of widowhood that I was hoping for something extraordinary when it came time to describe that unnatural event of surviving your child. How much is left unsaid in this book!  We receive snippets of things Quintana Roo did and said when she was five, and fourteen, and how she prepared for her wedding when she was thirty seven.   I was hoping for more, a portrait of a beloved daughter, but it is all mixed up with the heartache of the bereaved. When it comes to those eerie feelings upon discovering all of the items saved for her child (now who will inherit this?!.) though she is quite splendid.

Five years had passed since she picked up her pen to write about it.  Is it that we have so much in common that I read her account?  My daughter also died five years ago.  No, her details are so different from my solidly middle class life. Didion exists in a class I never belonged to.  As a writer, she has lived with her husband as a significant player with all the accoutrements that go with that status. Her tone is not snobby, though.
Even though I read the book hungrily, in one or two big bites, the repetitions began to wear on me.  The mention of the exclusive make of China and linens, the names of the hotels in Paris and Honolulu-- these were not gratuitously given, but still, it is a bit much.  One can grow tired of a sad book in which all the places and people and things come with such an extremely high pedigree.

In the end, though what is saddest is the sound of Didion  losing her vitality, her willingness to go on, and who can blame her?  Her obituary will be full of accomplishments.  She doesn't need to do one more blessed thing to prove herself, and she has lost the two people most dear to her. />
Still, I wish she would return to her reporting of things other than herself.  She is capable of a great expose on medicine as it is practiced in hospitals, or the politics of the Republican Party. No matter how world weary Didion sounds, she is still very much among us.

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue.  This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of the daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live.  You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming –yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise.  You pass a window, you walk to Central  Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.  The French call this time of the day, “l’heure bleue.”  To the English it was the “gloaming.”  The very word “gloaming” reverberates,  echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.  During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come.  As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone. 

--from the opening page of Blue Nights

 

Nick Alciati on December 2

In New Paltz last Friday my nephew, Nick Alciati, exhibited ten photographs for his senior thesis show at SUNY New Paltz. Nick has been studying photography and education, and his work was beautifully mounted and hung in the museum on campus.  The "light and shadow" images were perfectly lit, an homage to male flesh, partial nudes, no faces, only  bodies.  The portraits on his website capture delicate and heavy faces,  an exquisite jaw line, a fulsome head of hair. 

The  art show included work by 16 other seniors.  There were crystals grown on human hair and small stick figures made from sticks by Melodia Molina.  Mitchell Saler paints natural landscapes -- Lake Placid seen from the air, a barn in New Hope, NY, a rainstorm over the water, a sunset.  His triptych shows three spiraling bodies of air mass-- a hurricane's eye, a whirlpool, and galaxies, all taking the same  forms, linked together in a mystical way.  I was taken with these meditations on nature.

The jewelry and digital designs and sculptures all lived in the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art side by side.  It was clear that a lot of discussion had to take place to fit so many works in such a finite space.  The more I looked at Nick's photographs, and the farther I got from them, the better I liked them, especially the nudes.  Congratulations to him for preparing such a thoughtful thesis statement, and for mastering the techniques of light and shadow, and portraits, with a narrative that was very personal.

It was poignant to see the photograph of Nick holding the small dinosaur from Lizzy's collection, which he had put on the table near the postcards and comments notebook.  The title was "Remembering Lizzy."  She loved photography and would have been proud of Nick's work.  The show took place on the fifth anniversary of her death at age eighteen.