Winter Solstice, 2025

Winter Solstice, 2025. Shortest day of the year up here in the northern hemisphere. Where I am now, in Kolkata, cooler a bit, choking air, but the wobble makes not much difference about when it gets dark. Around 6 or so. Here a dull white sky sometimes allows a yellow disk to penetrate it; the AQI seems to be far worse than a year ago, and a check confirms:

In turn I am hacking, my nose runs, and the people here say “you’ll get used to it.” I don’t think I will; I’ll just shave a few more months off my life.

Three months ago I was in NYC, seeing some friends, some surely for a last time, as I’d done in Chicago, Boston and elsewhere. I don’t intend to return to the USA again, so for some a swan song so-long. In late September flew from NYC to Dublin, train/bus up to Derry where I was greeted by Marcella and Uma, who clearly recalled me, and ran to slobber me with kisses. She knows a good sucker when she’s trained him: he’ll throw balls for me!! He’ll tug my toys with me and toss them!! Play play play!!!!!

So went to Marcella’s lovely place, which she got back in the interim after some repairs sent her to another place earlier. She’s settled into her new job with Repair Cafe, where she’s in a kind of administrative/developmental post. I stayed a month, and we all had a good time – went a few places, took long, slow (because of me) walks in the nearby park, and I got some editing done on Weyauwega film and some other things. It rains a lot this time of year so lots was indoors, good for writing or editing and things. Took it easy for the most part, partly because my banged up 82 year old body was feeling the wages of my travels – walking slow, legs not getting enough circulation (despite the drug I’m taking for it – Cilostazol), and partly because after a near-6 months of pretty constant travel, needed a little break. Because coming up was another month of more.

Left Derry and flew to London where I had a quick 3 days stay, now in another place, with Roland Denning in Camden, as my usual refuge was now occupied by grandchildren ! Stayed in Camden, and managed to squeeze in seeing a few friends, while I tried to sort out my India visa which was becoming, again, a hassle. Then took Eurostar to Paris after having to change – meant to go to Brussels and see people there, but then one of them instead was in Paris, so…. So I saw Mark Rappaport and then, as happened, friend Jane from NYC was there and we shared hotel a few days and had some fun, and I had a breakfast with Vivianne who then invited Jane for a dinner. All so fast.

And then flew on to Split, in Croatia where Tanja Vrvilo had organized a spread out partial retrospective of my films – 12 features and a handful of short works, showing in Split, Zagreb and Rijeka, and tossed in was a week in Tirana, staying in Enver Hoxha’s villa in the center of town – it has been turned into an artist residency thing. So for three weeks I shuttled to one place and the next, showed films, saw new places, and made new friends, saw some older ones. Was a good time, made a little much appreciated coin and had travels covered. And finally resorted to iVisa to get my Indian one, as I’d done last time around as the government on-line service just does not work. I got a 5 year visa this time as the hassle and cost is just…

So flew back to London for a quick 3 day stay, managing to see Hilary and Stuart, and meet with Dahci Ma, a Korean friend from 15 years ago. A bit hectic, but fun. And then flew on to Kolkata, where I arrived 2 weeks ago.

The air here is horrendous, and finds me red-eyed, sniffling and hacking. No fun. On the other hand on getting back I gave myself a day of rest and then went with Aopala to visit. They were all very happy to see me back, telling that my nickname is “White Grandfather!” I told them given my age perhaps it should be great-grandfather, since they start so young. They all wanted their photos taken (more) and were so enthusiastic and welcoming that I asked Aopala if maybe we should go ahead and ask bluntly about being in a film. She was hesitant and then agreed and asked. I was hoping to get 3 to 5, but instantly we had ten. A woman volunteered to sing a Bengali song. The young girl I’d wanted and had been so shy said yes. And others. So I am ready to dig in and try to figure out what can be done, and how. In the next 4 months or so – I hope to go to the mountains in April-May when it will be hot hot hot here. Aopala and Abhirup, her boyfriend, have agreed to come along.

As things are forming up hope to get some kind of film – fiction narrative mixed with portrait of the place? And for sure an on-line photobook of D-Block and its people. Something to keep my hands busy and out of trouble!! Seem to have raised a handful of Facebook friends to donate some old digital cameras to give to the kids there, to let them go shoot their own world and if turns out good and interesting, another part of book on D-Block.

Through all this I’ve been riding the being-old roller-coaster. My lower back/legs shrieking at times, almost to the point of saying, “sorry Jon, you don’t get to get out of bed today.” It says, but never gets its way. Got a prescription for steroids and seems to be helping a lot. However my walking is limited, calves tighten up now in 1/3rd of a mile. Will consider angioplasty after I have doctor examine and ponder. I do, though, manage the morning’s stretchersizes, 30 squats and 50 pushups. Ain’t dead yet.

Out in the wider world, the USA sprints to a chaotic collapse, with the Trump Gangsta.Guv going nuts and like to be gone in a quick year. Replace by what, who knows. Collapses are always messes. He was the predictable conclusion to “The American Century,” imperial hubris compounded with ultimate corruption. Same thing happening around the world as global warming warms up, volatile weather, warmer air carrying more moisture. Boil a pan of water and watch how it happens.

My coming months will be here, hopefully busy with D-Block and a few other self-appointed things I hope to get done while here.

That’s my seasonal news. If inclined please drop me a note about your life.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

…

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Taking Stock : 82

Marking time, the conclusion of my 82nd orbit of our nearby star, without which we would not exist (along with myriad other factors – distance from, timing, nuclear cycles, all remote from our hands.) Depending on the culture you live in and how much one complies with its views, we’re here by some divine appointment, or, in my view, by a near impossible roll of the dice, though however infinitely small the chances of simply being here, as we are, is, infinity seems big enough to allow 9 billion of us at the moment, never mind those who preceded us, and all the other millions of billions of other equally amazing creatures which are “life.”

_{My family 1946 or so, Hinsdale Illinois}

My own little trajectory, commenced in Chicago, May 16, 1943, has been, so others tell me, lucky/adventurous/amazing, which is all from some perspectives, true. A sperm met an egg, and bio-logic happened, and I arrived. Later my mother told me, in utter innocence and naïveté, that I hadn’t been planned/wanted, and had abortions been as available then, as when she told me this – sometime when I was in mid-thirties – I wouldn’t be here. She had not given a thought at all about what this could do psychologically, and fortunately, as I had long before withdrawn from my erstwhile family, the impact was more one of amused detachment, wondering how a mother could so casually tell her child such a thing.

When I was born, as had been the case with my brother, I had pyloric stenosis, to say a blockage at the bottom of my stomach, at the valve which keeps food from passing on to the intestines for digestion. In my brother’s case, apparently nothing was done, or perhaps they did not know, or a procedure for “fixing” didn’t exist. He was not the brightest bulb in the world, though not “retarded” at all; I think he likely suffered from infantile malnutrition and his brain development was hampered. He apparently cried and puked to the wall his first year, surely not exactly endearing himself to his way too young parents of 18 and 19 years of age. I think this in turn ended in psychological damage as an infant and young child. He escaped the house as early as he could, lying about his age to join the military.

In my case, my birth-defect was detected, and I had an operation in a day or so, removing the blockage. It left a tiny scar, which as I grew older, grew bigger with me – about an inch and a half vertical incision above my navel, to the right hand side. Busy with that, they did not do the, at that time, ordinary matter of circumcising me, leaving me a minority among my peers, with a foreskin. Sometime – not really sure just when I was told this story, it occurred to me that my life was all owing to accidentally borrowed time. In hindsight I think this in a way liberated me from complying with all the conventions that define a culture and its society. Early on, I was an outsider.

From this perspective, one which many friends who in the last years have ended their trip in this world and did not enjoy, mine has been a normal journey: it is speckled with long ordinary days, ho-hum biding-time days; and then the occasional tragedy – a deeply loved daughter, Clara, whom I’d raised for 3 and a half years, almost alone, then kidnapped by her mother, sequestered and brain-washed (common in these cases) and blocked from access to me, ending utterly alienated from her father, mired in a life of lies, now 24 years later. A long ago “friend” committing a betrayal of a vicious and palpable kind; another thought-to-be friend doing something similar. And auto injuries caused by other people, imposing life-long consequences. And on the other side, times of transcendent joy – whether triggered by some deep creative impulses; the brief glance of a landscape; or a quivering heart snared in “love” (whatever that is) – evanescent as life itself, in which the past and future are ever linked, with an instantaneous now, ever fleeting. This, and all the mundane things, “of the world,” (as noted in an early short film, 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life _{Pswd FRAGS}) which in passing seem dull and boring, when added up and called “a life,” become in our minds intensely important.

_{From 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life, 1968}

Entering solar orbit number 83, my obit coming up, my life spreads out behind me, like the wake of a ship, a fractal matter of repetitions, looping eddies, the cycles of days and years diminishing in the distance, lost on the horizon. Ahead is the dead certainty of erasure.

I’d meant to write something else today, but sitting to think and type, whatever it was evaporated and out came this. I thank myself that here at the edge of my life, I’m not a cranky old man, despite the physical and psychic bruises and pains life has issued, but instead seem to contain an inward contentment, calming and happy. Whatever I have done – the catalogue of films made, paintings, poems, silly C&W warbles – are all nothing to me. I did what I did because there was and is no choice. We all do exactly what we do, and we can do no other. It is our fate to be who we are. And similarly here at the closure of my life, my only wish is for those few whom I have come to know, that in whatever small and modest way possible, I can help them be as inwardly as happy as they can be.

Philosophically these days I am a mixture of a Pogoist, and a Pessoaist:

Whatever the ideology, religion, philosophy, all of our “problems” are rooted in the same reality, and that is the problem: humans act like humans, and the honest and clear-eyed truth is that we are the problem.

“I am nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I couldn’t want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

_{Photo by Joseph Podlesnik}

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.