Driving with discourse
All clambered into a car on the way to the snowfields, a tangential discussion about the nature of God and whatnot (you know, the trivial questions of life) reminded me of the song In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel.
The song concludes with the lyrics "can't believe / how strange it is to be anything at all" that I've found to be a starkly frank statement of the singular abstruse absurdity that I find completely unfathomable irrespective of the effort I invest in the problem.
I fail to understand how some gloss over this truth so lightly.
Now, how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through your mouth
To make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
And now we keep where we don't know
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago
Now he don't even know his name
The image of Anne Frank's Father Otto Frank placing his fingers into his daughter's mouth on publishing her famed diary account of her experience hiding from a Nazi occupied Netherlands is a stirring one. Equally well, one can imagine the reader bringing Anne's voice to life as they flip through the pages of her diary. The symbol of Anne stands for many: including my Grandmother fleeing Latvia, her home, from the Soviet 'sphere of influence' to the relative refuge yet lifelong displacement of the immigration camps.
What a curious life
We have found here tonight
There is music that sounds from the street
There are lights in the clouds
Anna's ghost all around
Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees
From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.
When I looked outside right into the depth of nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.
As the Anne Frank tree ails with disease, The Anne Frank Center's plan to distribute saplings across the United States seems only fitting as it mirrors how my Grandmother's family was cast across the globe like thistledown in the wind.
