Ups and Downs

On some days, for no discernible reason, I am oppressed with grief, constantly aware that we have lost a vital and exciting presence in our family, a delightful, annoying, exciting, frustrating, loving, belligerent, generous, impulsive, sensitive person, and on other days I feel rather normal, though the underlying sadness never goes away.
Fortunately, I manage to be enthusiastic about some of the things I do. I'm reading Vikram Seth's monster novel, A Suitable Boy, 1,400 pages about India in the early 1950s, and I'm fully involved in the lives of his brilliantly conceived characters. For some time now I hadn't been able to enjoy fiction, one of the mainstays of my life as long as I can remember myself, so A Suitable Boy is a welcome intrusion into my life.
Part of the reason for my aversion to fiction is connected to our loss - either it seems shallow, or else it is painfully connected to what we're feeling - and part of it may be connected to my age and experience. I've already read a great many novels, and the new ones that I read don't surprise or edify me all that much. But for me reading a book (or series of books) has always been a kind of project, and finishing a book has always given me a feeling of accomplishment, so not being involved in a reading project was another emptiness in my life, an echo of the big emptiness.
Music still involves me, as does my new passion: pottery.
I'm finally bringing some finished pieces home, including one clumsy, misshapen, heavy little cup with a poorly formed, poorly proportioned handle, and I've begun drinking from it, with great love for it.
I also can get involved in movies, which is fortunate, because the Jerusalem Film Festival just opened last night. Earlier in the week, Judith and I saw a DVD of Lust, Caution, the Ang Lee thriller set in Japanese occupied Shanghai during World War II - nearly three hours of slow-moving drama, punctuated by scenes of intense lust, which I found difficult to watch, because they fascinated me, aroused me, and repelled me.
The sexual partners are a sadistic police minister, a convincingly evil man, a collaborator with the Japanese, and the young woman who has infiltrated his life in order to arrange his assassination. Her sexual enslavement to him is as real as her political and moral enmity. His sexual bondage to her, which began with an ugly, brutal rape but turned into an obsession, also functions in an area of his life separate from the rest of it, deeply contradictory to it in some ways.
The next morning I looked for reviews of the film on the web and saw that US reviewers hated it, but British reviewers liked it, and I went with the Brits.
For me the lesson of the film is partly the way the pieces of our lives - emotional, political, intellectual - can be separate from one another. People are or can be inconsistent and illogical: two or more contradictory positions can be true at the same time in our psyches.
The movie I went to see on the opening night of the film festival was a perfect exemplar of the movie-festival genre: a Swedish movie - set in a freezing landscape - about an overweight adolescent whose only interest in life is ping pong. Who would go to see such a film except during a film festival?
On my way home, as I started walking up a steep street, I heard the motor of a car running around the corner, and I saw headlights. I moved to the side of the street, to keep out of the way, and as I turned the corner, I saw a tall young man with long hair get into the passenger seat of a non-descript, oldish white car, and it drove off, coming uncomfortably close to me.
Five steps later I saw what the two young men had been up to: the window of an old Renault Cleo had been smashed. By the time I realized that I'd happened on a getaway, the white car was well out of sight, and I had no chance of seeing its license number. I called the police on my cell phone to report the crime, and the woman on duty asked me to stay there until a patrol car came, which I did.
It wasn't until I was home, after the police came and called out the owner of the car, that I realized how lucky I had been. If I had come up the street half a minute earlier, I would have caught the young men in the act, and who knows that they would have done to me? I might have been run over, knifed, shot, or beaten up and robbed.
The one thought that keeps going through my mind, about Asher, is how his accidental death was an example of terribly bad luck. So many things could have prevented it. The fortunate timing that saved me from possible violence could have saved Asher from the fall that ended his life.