Puppilustenfloogen

Only German possesses the word to capture it with precision.  The English translation is mildly obscene, loosely – "a flood of lustful feelings towards a puppy."  You probably know it but haven't let yourself name it.  It would sound so vulgar, even to think it.  The nose (yours, not puppy's) starts to twitch with desire to sniff.  The lips begin to quiver with longing to kiss.  The fingers flex for a fistful of that plush puppy toosh.   An electrical storm of longing overwhelms conscious thought, productive work (math assignments, blog writing, moving global capital, etc.) is waylaid by two furry creatures curled around each other on a dog bed.  Perhaps one of them yawns just so, or does that sleepy stretch where the two front legs reach straight, ears bunching up on shoulders.  God help you if he rests his head on her back, or she tucks her face under her own paw.  AHHHH!  Puppilustenfloogen!

As you would expect, German has words for the various shades of puppilustenfloogen.  For example, you know you have it real bad when you fall on your face, right then and there; this they call "swoonenpuppilustenfloogen."  Or when you take the puppies for a run, a proper public workout, and you find yourself unable to resist a squeeze of the bunchy butt drawn side-to-side by the wagging tail.  This they call "roonenpuppilustenfloogen."  As you have already imagined, when you are besieged by fall-on-your-face longing while running, you have swoonenroonenpuppilustenfloogen.  This can be very dangerous – to the puppy, your face, and your reputation.

A cozy variation tends to come on in early morning to people only half-arrived from sleep; the sight of a sleeping puppy elicits a mammalian urge to return to the primordial warmth and floaty softness of the womb.  The satisfaction of "morgenpupplilustenfloogen" is best achieved by pressing closed eyes into the soft neck fur under puppy's ears and tucking hand under puppy's belly.

A kinky variation comes about when more than one family member is overwhelmed by pupplilustenfloogen at the same time, in which case it's convenient (for the sake of not going to jail) to have at least two puppies.  This the Germans call "grupenpuppilustenfloogen."  It tends to come on late at night, such as when two puppies curl up alluringly on either end of the living room couch, attracting boys to them.  The bigger the boys, the harder grupenpuppilustenfloogen can be to identify, as the puppies can be rendered entirely invisible under the boys' backsides.   In this case, one must listen for human murmurs and sighs as evidence of grupenpuppilustenfloogen going on.  The Germans have a word for this too – "puppiloovenwhisperschplecken."

Transit

Our isolation and the continuing good health of our parents have insulated us from the direct losses.  Aunt Randi has recovered.  We've been learning to live in this moment.  The silver linings have been so luminous they've distracted me from the darkness of the clouds. 

Then on Wednesday I woke up to read that John Prine had died.  I didn't know his music well, but he sang me a good ways cross-country last summer ("Clay Pigeons").  The forever silencing of his gentle, sympathetic voice made my heart hurt in an unexpectedly personal way.  Later on Wednesday I learned my writing partner and former student Khaleel has lost two relatives in New York.  It's becoming clear how economic disparities, race, health care access – injustice in its many forms are intensifying the differential infection rates and outcomes.  Khaleel's family's losses confirmed what the news began reporting this week, that Black Americans are many times more vulnerable.  Anger complicates the grief.  I want to blame Trump for it all, but I know I can't.  People were always going to die.  Our failures created Trump, not the other way around.  We learn nothing if we let him take our inglory too. (I know that's not a word but it should be.)

I forgot how heavy grief is in the body.  I crawled under my covers and read all day.  I was late to prepare the Passover dinner.  I was feeling the unraveling of the old, the permanence of the losses, without consolations.  The graduations that can't be retrieved.  The seasons of spring sports kids won't play.  The indie films that won't have their festival premieres.  The music lost.  The family members lost.  The burial rites delayed or unperformed.  The futility of human efforts against the currents of history and nature.  I don't mean to be overly tragic or grandiose.  I know my own losses are trivial compared to others, but even this thought couldn't stop the free fall that had begun in my core.  I surrender, I found myself thinking.  Let me lay down now.

Earlier this week the kids asked to watch Earth: The Making of the Planet on National Geographic, a documentary that left a big impact on Duncan and Reeve in fifth grade.  From a cosmic explosion of light and energy settling into star dust to the origins of life through the Cambian explosion of life forms to now, we watched the history of everything on the projector, puppies on laps, pulsing images filling the living room over our own little primordial fire.  We are but a flashing instance of life continuous.

The kids wanted to do a Passover seder just us on Night One.  Despite my procrastination on the cooking and cleaning front, it turned out to be among our most meaningful and fun yet.  The boys prepared an epic re-enactment of Moses's life and the ten plagues with Reeve a most despotic Pharaoh (the vacuum cleaner brush as beard a powerful costume choice), Tucker an appropriately ambivalent but increasingly forceful Moses (move over Charlton Heston), and Duncan a convincingly quixotic God (accolades for the angry chicken Halloween costume repurposed as burning bush).  The wild beasts performed their part well in their first Passover play, resting from the excitement afterwards on the couch.  Second night we invited extended family to a seder by Zoom in which Mom and Ken, Nana and Papa, Dad and Helen, the Lehmanns, Nancy, the Hulses from Virginia, the Donahue Melgars from San Francisco, the Luckys from South Lake Tahoe, and Richard and Kat from DC joined in ritual and conversation particularly ripe for our moment.  Later we played family trivia with many of the same characters, adding Pulsifers from North Carolina, all from our dining room table.  It all feels strangely b'shereit.

Yesterday the sun gave respite from the gloominess of the week.  Jordy and Reeve took a morning bike ride; I took the dogs on a trail run.  We joined Marah, Sally, Mahmoud and Omar in Mohameddia, Morocco via Zoom, comparing our lives, cooking to occupy the mind and eating to give pleasure and variety to the days, curfew at 6pm, the kids shared the books they are reading (Wizard of Oz in French for Sally, The Beyonders for Tucker, Ishmael for Reeve), stuffed animals and real ones, the excitement of going to the pharmacy after three weeks in an apartment, the unreliability of information, the uncertainty of how we get out of this.  Yet another new adventure in our interstellar vehicle, aka the dining room table.

The afternoon brought heavy lifting and digging, prepping space for the chickens, cleaning out the tree house Dad built for the boys, moving the pieces of the jungle gym.  Trampoline time.  Napping.  As the sun sank, Facebook notified me Rabbi Finley's morning services had been live.  Jordy and I listened as I did yoga in the front hall, puppies getting into the flow before conking out directly under my downward facing dog.  By way of introducing the practice of counting the Omer, Finley challenged the omniscient and omnipotent notion of God we've inherited (from Aristotle, he claimed, interestingly).  The Kabbalistic understanding of God by contrast is not static but dynamic, not about eternal "being" but about eternal "becoming" – and broken.  To name the infinite is to contain it; theology can actually obstruct our souls' work.  It's not until our hearts break on our theologies that the divine can find a way in.  As he closed with the Misha Berech, the prayer for the sick or dying,  I found myself face up in shivasana (corpse pose) under a pile of puppies.  I could feel Jordy's body respond to Finley's prayer that those facing the end of life may feel held in the human community, may meet death with dignity, may be free from pain and fear.  Turned upward, my eyes rested on the white clouds tumbling against the blue sky, warm in the reflected light of the setting sun.

Ten Years' Change in a Week

"Ten years' change in a week," the NY Times headline reads this morning about how doctoring went to telemedicine in an instant.  Apply to our whole way of life times three weeks equals 20 or 30 years of change.  That feels about right.

All the switches flipped in an instant, like an infant taking first violent suck of oxygen from lungs.  Ebbs flowing and flows ebbing.  Households emptied by the daily drag of work, school, appointments now full of human energy.  Streets and office hives of activity now empty.  Video conferencing compresses social distance while a physical distance of three feet at Plainfield Store is uncomfortable.  A record low unemployment flips to record high.  Zoom conquers even the generation who hoped to cruise out of here without bothering, defining the new aesthetics and etiquette of culture.

This week our experimental "live" theater on Facebook Live with Parish Players friends migrated to Zoom with The Spoon River Anthology.  The production went next-level, with lighting, costumes and finessed transitions.  The audience was "in the (Zoom) room" with the performers; conversation afterwards was rich.  A perfect Saturday night gathering for 90 minutes, no driving, no stumbling on the ice in the dark.  The performers looked me in the eye in close-up.  I forgot the medium and was genuinely moved.  The creative wheels are spinning for what we can do next.

More on creativity unleashed... I've been working this week on finding a new role for WRIF (White River Indie Films).  The festival isn't happening, but we see a chance to serve as a virtual gathering place for film viewing and making. I'm composing weekly newsletters with links to the myriad of new ways to watch new release films online.  (I'm writing this down so we will remember how it was "before" when festivals fought for premieres, filmmakers and distributors guarded streaming rights, and audiences felt some urgency to move their bodies in order to see what's new.)  New still matters, but less? And geography suddenly doesn't.  Plus, Old is relevant again because shelf space is unlimited and at the moment nothing new is being made.  Curation is the name of the game.  

This was happening already, a consequence of on-demand and a.i.-drive viewing and listening?  Current to the boys are '80s music and movies, '90s and '00s TV series (The Office!).  Novelty still matters, but quality and zeitgeist matter more.  There's time for circularity.  Watch parties are a thing now via Netflix, etc.  We haven't surrendered the social aspect of viewing; we've just distanced it, which was always kind of true about movie-watching anyway: From the Nickelodeon and peep show to the megaplex, the dark theater aimed to eliminate the outside world for a more perfect suspension of reality and transportation to the imaginary.  Honestly, we've always been ambivalent about other audience members anyway – good if friends or someone you want to sneak an arm around or when their reactions amplify our own; bad when they text or talk or smell bad.  Movie theaters were dying before all this.  

And do I care?  Last summer (i.e. a lifetime ago) I came back from LA in a crisis of faith about it all anyway.  I wanted to make movies to help us love the broken world more; meanwhile, the over-cranking content machine seemed to feed escapism and an ever darkening view of reality.  I get it.  Our dystopian fixations reflect the crushing anxiety of climate change, social-media aggravated social isolation, a broken politics, abandoned by God, consolation in sharing hopelessness.  It's centuries in the making.  (I am teaching 1984 at the moment.  Good timing.)  It's just not the story I'm made to tell, and if my stories aren't fit for our times, I have other work to do for now.  Something to do with getting unstuck, moving beyond consumption of anesthetizing entertainment, toward connecting with others again, growing in consciousness, finding our way out of this mess together.  Conversing with all the prophets, from Jeremiah to John Lennon.

In this light, WRIF glowed with new purpose. The movies are the means; community is the goal.  The festival's plus factor would be the human interaction, conversations sparked by shared viewing, new filmmaking made possible by bonds forged.  And now this... It should be a defeat, but it doesn't feel so.  I'm thrilled. I feel the synapses of caring people here and everywhere sparking with activity. Where and how we will gather (physically) again is TBD, but the collective reach for good storytelling – whatever the access–to save us heartens me.  And when we do gather, we'll appreciate it all the more.  My favorite idea so far is to hold a spring screening at the Fairlee Drive-In!  Alone together.  (Personal poetry in this, having fond memories of Saturday Night Fever and other '70s classics in their first run at the old White River Drive-In.)   

Leaping forward and back.  We ordered our chickens.  People are playing board games.  Home cooking is back.  People are baking bread and sharing strategies for making their own sourdough starter when yeast isn't available.  People are taking walks just because.  Families are making music videos and performing plays in their living rooms.  The boys invented a baking contest this week.  Duncan applied learning from his woodworking class to fix a cutting board. Reeve has a new routine of morning bike rides, returning yesterday to report on the "most beautiful ride of (his) life," noting the morning sun breaking through mist on Blow-Me-Down creek and a duck with an orange headpiece.  Jordy and Tucker are making up for all the chess games and bedtimes lost these past seven years of weekly separations.  Boredom opens the negative space.  A new relationship to time.  

As the weeks pass and work carries on in the new way, it's tempting to impose structure on time, grab the old goals and ambitions.  It's helpful.  We're marking it on the kitchen wall in pencil and are shocked to see how much has already passed.  Grateful for Shabbat as an axis for the wheels of weeks to spin on, holding onto the "week" as a thing to keep us in synch with each other and the outside world.  We remember what was always true and Einstein proved – that time is relative, and we play a part in constructing it.  Freedom brings terror.  Even as we hold on to routines (=activity/[time]x[space]) created in the old physical order for comfort, I don't want fear to narrow the possibilities for re-imagining everything.

One telling place where the new time doesn't work is live music.  Zoom delays and lagginess frustrate synchronized play.  Recordings and solos work fine but remind us of what's lost in asynchrony.  Networks will get faster, delays imperceptible.  Soon thunder will move as fast as lightning. Sound at light speed. Is it too much to ask for both/and?  I want to feel the vibrations of live music in my skin again, and I want to be able to play from afar in something like "real time." 

My mind sifts what I want back, what I never want back. All seven billion minds alive on earth right now are sifting the same.  I missed so much before because it was all passing in such a blur.  The exquisite cardinal before me as I type strutting his red stuff for the ladies.  Trees on the trails I never took the time to meet.  Fields within sight I literally never noticed.  Being with the boys throughout the day.  Things I never want back – hours upon hours of driving for color-coded activities overlapping in a Google calendar, habitual exhaustion a sacrifice to the ego gratification of "productivity."  Learning shackled to school days serving parents' work schedules rather than children's physiology and social needs.  Work schedules shackled to quarterly shareholder earnings rather than parents' physiology and social needs.  Frivolous travel made fast and frequent by carbon we dare not even account for.  Impulse-purchases of plastic items in the check-out line, destined to live for eternity in a landfill.  Drive-through lines of lonely people in atomic automobiles feeding hunger for shared company with fast food that's killing them.  The substitution of consumption for presence.  

I want to sustain this connection with all living beings.  I never want to forget  our ability to act together in concert for the greater good.  I want to translate this to a new sustainable way of life on earth.  I want the equality with which this disease strikes to renew our faith in the best of our old ideas, the truths we once held self-evident, so we can see them to fruition.

We may have leapt twenty, thirty years in a few weeks, but it won't all stick however much we want or don't want it to.  Normalcy will return in some form, the parts I miss – meeting friends at cafes, performing together, voting, farmers markets without face masks, kids' sports games, museum and concert going – and the parts I don't.  Fears of change for the worse are swirling – sustained economic depression, Native American communities at risk of being wiped out by Covid19,  the election derailed, authoritarianism, the end of democracy.  While we were imagining the worst in broad strokes, we failed to anticipate the specifics.  (As one of my students said on a conference call this week, "It behooves the prophet to speak in generalities.")  Yet in a simple, specific strand of DNA has been revealed all that we've neglected.  May our creativity save us. 

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Hannah Senesh's "Eli, Eli" came to mind this morning as I wrote:

O Lord, my God, I pray that these things never end:
The sand and the sea

The rush of the water

The crash of the heavens
The prayer of the heart.