mizchalmers

The Fault in Our Stars is written by someone my age about teenagers dying of cancer. The teenagers are adorably articulate and wry, which is what happens when they are written by clever fortysomethings – see also Juno and The Gilmore Girls. But I cried and cried for Wendy, who was just that funny anyway at fourteen, and for Jen, who at forty-three knew exactly what she was leaving behind. Glioblastoma, leukaemia.

The Still Point of the Turning World is written by Emily Rapp, who lost her son Ronan in February. He was three. Tay-Sachs. I’ve become violently allergic to the notion of meritocracy because of its implication that there are people who are without merit. Jen never made much money. Wendy never finished high school. Ronan never learned to speak. What does that make them? Emily Rapp says:

If you love but the love is never known by the other person as the love you bear for them, is that love wasted? I eventually realized that this way of thinking was more about ego than anything else, and that no love is ever wasted; in fact, the most precious love is often the kind that isn’t returned, and that is given freely.

I’ve realized it is my most deeply held political conviction that all are created equal. A person’s performance as an economic agent under late capitalism is about as relevant as their performance in chess or dressage or sport aerobics to what they are actually worth. Every person is a planet with a diamond core, a Tardis, bigger on the inside. We can’t possibly love anyone enough, but we can try.

Rumpus: What did Ronan smell like?

Rapp: Rice and shampoo. Sleep.

Rumpus: I know what it felt like for me to hold Ronan. What did it feel like for you?

Rapp: It felt like holding the world.

Mirrored from Yatima.

There are only two in the USA: the other is in Tennessee. This one was founded by Pat Derby, an Englishwoman descended from Shelley who found herself in Hollywood training cats, bears and elephants for shows like Lassie and Daktari. She hated the violence and cruelty of the industry and exposed it in a pretty wonderful, if bleak, book cowritten by Peter S. Beagle, who also wrote The Last Unicorn. She died in February.

The sanctuary is only open twice a year and you have to buy tickets in advance. It’s up in the Sierra foothills and it was a scorchingly hot day. Six hundred people came. I grumbled about the heat and having to wait in line for a shuttle, and then the shuttle came and we were taken to a picnic area where there were two Asian elephants to the left of us and three African elephants to the right. Gypsy, Wanda, Mara, Maggie and Lulu.

There are massive steel fences around their enclosure but the enclosures are vast – acres upon acres. That they wanted to visit with us at all is astounding to me. We were kept at a safe distance, about twenty feet, but we were in the presence of elephants, and this is an ungainsayable thing. I’ve seen elephants before but I don’t think I’ve ever seen happy elephants before. We were there for their entertainment as much as the reverse. They made eye contact.

I believe of them now, as I believe of whales and octopus, that they are sentient. How they must suffer when they are caged or in chains.

Maggie, one of the African elephants, lived in an Alaskan zoo with only an Asian elephant for company. The two have different vocalizations, but Maggie speaks both languages. Gypsy and Wanda came to the sanctuary at different times from different places but are now inseparable. Archival footage of circuses revealed that they had been friends before and had remembered one another for decades. Lulu, rescued from the San Francisco zoo, was the most reticent of the females. She wanted to be near Maggie and Mara but she didn’t particularly care for us. Up on Bull Mountain we saw Nicholas and Prince; Prince also prefers to keep away from humans.

But Nicholas swam for us, and dug a log up from the bottom of his lake. Another animal again in water, his bony head like a hippo’s, the water pouring off his gleaming skin. Graceful and at peace.

It was everything I love most passionately about California: the dry hills, the circling raptors, the ridiculous mule deer, and the people who pour out their lives trying to fight injustice and make safe spaces and be kind.

Mirrored from Yatima.

I rode Jackson today. I’m trying to stay out of his face during warmup, so I trotted him in both directions on the buckle, reins looping down. I worked on my position instead of his: elbows in, shoulders back, hip angle open. Trying to make a square corner under the trees, I flexed my right ankle and sank into my seat.

Jacks lifted his back under me and came soft and round.

Not surprisingly, when we jumped I was tall in the saddle and he was forward and electric into my hand.

Mirrored from Yatima.

Kirsty is a force of nature. I’ve been meaning to go up to Edinburgh since Alex and Ioanna moved there from Ireland years ago, but the details eluded me. When I mentioned it in passing to Kirsty the whole thing was organized in what seemed like sixty seconds. I flew in early for the London conference I come to every April, and Kirsty and I caught the train to Edinburgh.

The journey was gorgeous and fascinating. “Green and pleasant land,” I tweeted as we left London, then “dark Satanic Mills!” as we crossed the midlands and I saw four huge power stations (Eggborough and friends maybe?) belching steam into an otherwise cloudless sky. As we sped to Scotland we saw Durham Cathedral, the Angel of the North (which I have loved since first seeing pictures of it and which came as a completely unexpected treat), beautiful steampunk Newcastle, Lindisfarne like something from a Miyazaki film or happy dream, the sun sparkling on the mouth of the Tweed at Berwick, and the looming bulk of the Torness Nuclear Plant.

Motion sickness got to me after a while. (The hangover from the night before probably didn’t help. That was Grant’s fault.) I thought I was going to hurl all over Waverley Station. I took my first steps in Scotland trying not to puke and telling myself “Don’t mention their accents don’t mention their accents,” so of course when I called Alex I blurted out “you sound very Irish.” I guess at least I didn’t vomit?

When I had recovered myself somewhat Kirsty and I had fun storming Edinburgh castle, and when we finally did make it to Alex’s house the awkwardness of nine years’ separation did not survive its first encounter with a pretty decent Sangiovese I’d brought out from California. Alex made osso buco. It was delicious. Ioanna is delightful and their daughter Lena is so best. We figured out how to fix capitalism but I didn’t write it down, so that’s a pity.

Mirrored from Yatima.

Untitled, a photo by yatima on Flickr.

The Asian Art is always fantastic but this exhibit just blew me away. You should go.

Mirrored from Yatima.