Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
The greening of the trees? Really the greening of everything else as well. Whether you look up or down, the sheer saturation and brightness of every plant is the cheeriest sight imaginable. Verdant renewal.
I’ll take it all, as well.
The weeds in my garden, alas, are growing faster than everything else, and so I will make it short here today, so I can go out there and tackle them, ruthlessly.
Three recommendations for things to watch (and I might have recommended one already, if so, blame the repetition on an aging brain.
A Canadian series on Amazon Prime or Hulu, Coroner, (not The Coroner), is a police procedural from Toronto, tackling relevant contemporary themes, from racism, houselessness, queerness, military PTSD, tribal issues to the lure of cults, with a surprising amount of candor and criticism. It centers around the family story of said coroner, her father battling dementia, her gay son, and a mother who abandoned her as a child. Every time it threatens to veer into soap opera territory it rescues itself, and the cast is the most diverse cast I have seen on TV in a long time. The only downer were the last episodes of the last season, which didn’t know how to rap up, featured some deus-ex-machina concoction and a somewhat pathetic ending in the true meaning of the word pathos. Overall intelligent entertainment.
And speaking of racism, here is an astounding film capturing its essence. Black Girl is not for the faint of heart, it is enraging and very sad, but a masterpiece, created by Ousmane Sembène in 1966 to expose French Colonialism. For anyone keen on classic art films, do not miss it.
My last suggestion might be the one mentioned before: the eternally long and equally important documentary that partially explains America today as written up in this Atlantic essay. The link provided by the Atlantic does not work. Here is one I found that shows the full running time of The Sorrow and the Pity. Yes, 4 hours of your life, but none better spent. Marcel Ophuls made this film about the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. He uses interviews with a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand. They comment on the nature of and reasons for collaboration, including antisemitism, Anglophobia, fear of Bolsheviks and Soviet invasion, and the desire for power.
Yes, deep into the weeds of politics. I, on the other hand, will be deep into the weeds of my garden, momentarily.
For today I feel like traditional Senegalese music, in honor of the Black Girl.
