the point of making love

[from Far Afield © 1990 by Susanna Kaysen, p313-14:]

---"Jonathan?" Her tone was tentative.
---"Yeah." He braced himself for a new accusation.
---"It wasn't really right, what I said."
---"Oh?" He turned around.
---"It's that I felt alone." She paused. "As if you didn't want me in particular."
---"Well, whose fault is that?" He was tired. "You made such a fuss about no future and just this visit. What do you expect me to do?"
---"You could be with me. Then you'd have more to remember."
---"That's just a fancy way of saying more to lose."
---"Maybe losses are wealth," said Daniela.
---Jonathan stared out to sea. Was he the sum of his losses, soon to be increased a hundredfold when this landscape no longer met his eyes? He turned back to look into her eyes and was surprised to see the glaze of desire on them. He moved a step closer, and she stood up. For a moment she was standing in his arms, then they were falling onto the cool cushion of grass, their green, cloud-canopied bed.

[I do so enjoy women writing men characters—they're some of the only men i can actually stand! I only wish Susanna Kaysen would write some more stories, but i guess that it's up to us writers to carry on the torch as best we can. Or maybe i could look her up somewhere, meet her, and get her to share some ideas about writing.

I guess this morning i was looking for something to illuminate love and loss, endings, and the ways people find to go on with their lives.

Hold on to what is good, peeps. Farewell.]

Does The World Have Meaning?

[from Living By Fiction © 1982 by Annie Dillard, p185:]

---Which shall it be?  Do art's complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature?  Is nature whole, like a completed thought?  Is history purposeful?  Is the universe of matter significant?  I am sorry; I do not know.

[Here's to the asking of questions, big and little.  Good job, Annie.

Be well, gentle reader; don't let the bastards get you down.]

"when you don't know where you're going"

[from No one belongs here more than you. 'Making Love In 2003' © 2007 by Miranda July, p110-111:]

---It doesn't really feel like driving when you don't know where you're going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination. I felt like I was fooling the other drivers and I just wanted to come clean. But the more I drove, the more I felt like I had somewhere to go. I was making difficult left turns that no one would ever do unless they had to. Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new. It wasn't like a square dance, where you miraculously end up with your original partner, laughing and feeling giddily relieved to find him after dancing with everyone else in the world. Instead, they swung around and kept on going, some people were at work by now, or halfway to the airport. In fact, driving might be the most opposite of dancing. I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself, now that I had finished my book . . . .

[The stories in No one belongs here more than you. are some of the best ever.  Miranda July is a goddess.  Even though i really don't like even driving in automobiles (much less driving them myself), the driving metaphor is brilliant here; and i really like the idea of having 'no destination' (in life).  Heh, i just wish i had finished another book.

Enjoy yourselves, peeps. Ciao!]

Feeling Hornery?

[from http://FaithbookbyBabaran.blogspot.com/ © Baba Ran / Barbara Gilbert, 2010:]

 

Friends

in the game of love and loss
there is no Monica, there is no Ross

in the game of show and tell
there is no heaven, there is no hell

in the game of hit the ball
there is no coach for one and all

in the game of hide and seek
there is no lion, there is no meek

in the game of truth or dare
all is love, all is fair

if you're feeling hornery
better think about the bee

if you're feeling bluish
better think . . . am I Jewish?

if you answer "I'm a Jew!"
be happy, friends,

'cause I'm one, too!!!!!

[Good morning, gentle reader.  Here's a piece that hits close to home for me; thought you all might get a smile out of it.  Me, i need a smile to get my mind off a death in the family.  Good-bye, Angel.

Don't give up.]

nah, forget it — no hope

OK, this may have to be the post for tomorrow, because i don't think i'll feel like writing a damned thing more tomorrow.  I'm a wreck.  All i've got left is my false sense of cheer and the knowledge that life will just drag on for a while, and it'll most likely drag me along with it forever.  And i've got arbitrary punctuation and capitalization variations left, too, i suppose.  Just shoot me, gentle reader; just shoot me.  (And new readers, i apologize (because i really like apologizing) for the lack of coherent content just now; just give me some time.)

I Don't Want To Dance

Eddy Grant's 'I Don't Wanna Dance' is playing on my stereo right now, on infinite repeat. Whether it should be playing 'I Can't Dance' by Genesis instead is a matter for another post. Even though i actually can't (that is, don't know how), i also don't really want to. And not just dance, but maybe the whole damned romance thing.

---Maybe i've finally had enough. Maybe i don't think it's worth it anymore. Maybe i'm too tired of hurting to want any more.

---Sometimes my life seems like a farcical series of romantic misadventures. Perhaps other people's lives seem like that to them, and i have lots of sympathy for them; but me, i want to cancel my series and film no more episodes. It was a good run — twenty-one seasons! — but maybe it's enough. Now the cast can get back to their regular lives.

---Or maybe i can't stop. Maybe i'll meet someone again, eventually; and maybe i'll think that person is worth coming out of retirement to film another season. Gods help me; gods help us all. Please!

[I've turned off infinite repeat, and the music proceeds to 'Gimme Hope Jo'Anna'.  Hope.]

Why Do I Write?

[from Writing Down the Bones © 1986, 2005 by Natalie Goldberg, p122, 123:]

---"Why do I write?" It's a good question. Ask it of yourself every once in a while. No answer will make you stop writing, and over time you will find that you have given every response.

…

---Writing has tremendous energy. If you find a reason for it, any reason, it seems that rather than negate the act of writing, it makes you burn deeper and glow clearer on the page. Ask yourself, "Why do I write?" or "Why do I want to write?," but don't think about it. Take pen and paper and answer it with clear, assertive statements. Every statement doesn't have to be 100 percent true and each line can contradict the others. Even lie if you need to, to get going. If you don't know why you write, answer it as though you do know why.


[The first time i thought anything much about writing as a career, it was during some study session in "The Cocktail Lounge" in Uris Library at Cornell, my freshman year.  (But it's a memory with the quality of a dream, like something recalled from my time in the womb.) Really, i was just daydreaming, probably procrastinating a physics problem set or something. I was so naïve; i thought idly that it would be easy, making stuff up (because i was thinking about writing fiction, which i was reading a lot of instead of studying). But it's not easy, as i was to find out.  And i do recommend Writing Down the Bones for anyone thinking about writing; it's work, but it helps with the discipline.

Take care, gentle reader; enjoy the rain if it's raining or the sun if it's shining.]

Not "People Of The Book"

[from Opening the Lotus © 1997 by Sandy Boucher, p9-10:]

---Many prominent religious traditions rely strongly on a single text. Christians take their truth from the Bible; Jews, from the Torah. Followers of Islam believe that the teachings of the Koran are literally the word of god, not to be interpreted or analyzed but followed precisely.
---Buddhism offers a different model. While there is a Buddhist canon, a set of books officially recognized as containing the basic teachings (including the sutras, which are supposed to be the historical Buddha's words), Buddhists in the various traditions may use any of the thousands of Buddhist texts in the canon as a guide. Zen Buddhists may study the Japanese author Dogen; Theravada Buddhists may read the sutras; Tibetan Buddhists may refer to the wisdom teachings of Padmasambhava, the Indian teacher who brought Buddhism to Tibet, and so on. These books are respected, studied, and consulted by Buddhist practitioners, but they are seen as guides only. The pursuit of Buddhism lives in the intention and energies of the individual. It is our own efforts, whether sitting in meditation or trying to act out the tenets of Buddhism in the world, that will lead us to a deeper view of existence.

[Yay, Buddhism! Think for yourselves, readers; find truths where YOU will, not where some arbitrary hierarchy tells you to find them. Remember your intentions and energies! (And the impact these have on others.)  And maybe look into texts about an Indian spiritual master, Meher Baba, for a somewhat different point of view.

Be well, rest up, and keep talking to each other.]

Four Sisters

[from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Modern Library Paperback p10:]

---As young readers like to know "how people look," we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within.  It was a comfortable old room, though the carpet was faded and the furniture very plain, for a good picture or two hung on the walls, books filled the recesses, chrysanthemums and Christmas roses bloomed in the windows, and a pleasant atmosphere of home-peace pervaded it.
---Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands,  of which she was rather vain.  Fifteen-year old Jo was very tall, thin and brown, and reminded one of a colt; for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way.  She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful.  Her long, thick hair was her one beauty; but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way.  Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a fly-away look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman, and didn't like it.  Elizabeth—or Beth, as every one called her,—was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression, which was seldom disturbed.  Her father called her "Little Tranquillity," and the name suited her excellently; for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved.  Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least.  A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders; pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners.  What the character of the four sisters were, we will leave to be found out.

[Right now i can handle a new beginning, but just barely.  People reduced to words on paper—characters—are a lot less threatening to me than the flesh and blood kind right now.  Give me a little time, and i'll be back to my old self.

Which sister do you fancy yourself to be?  Or do you prefer seeing aspects of each in yourself?

Shine on, peeps.]

The Closet

[from Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx © 1997, p53-54:]

---The closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room.  In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he remembered.  At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with suspension from a nail, hung a shirt.  He lifted it of the nail.  Jacks's old shirt from Brokeback days.  The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis's nose hard with his knee.  He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn't held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.
---The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack's sleeves.  It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.  He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

[Aside from this being a highly evocative description, what interests me is how Annie Proulx (a woman) imagines a man mourning, remembering, and missing another man; and i think she captures it just right.  How do you recall those you love who aren't currently with you?

I suggest reading Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain (which is very short) and also her The Shipping News (which won the Pulitzer Prize) if you ever get a chance; good musings on love.

Good day, Gentle Reader . . . .]

Multiple Relationships

[from DRINKING - A Love Story © 1996 by Caroline Knapp, p137:]

---I am consistently amazed to hear women talk about their multiple relationships with addictions, the way they combine two or three, the way they shift from one to another, so naturally and gracefully you might think they were changing partners in a dance.  Addictions segue into one another with such ease:  a bout of compulsive overeating fills you with shame and sexual inferiority, which fills you with self-loathing and doubt, which leads you to drink, which temporarily counters the self-hatred and fills you with chemical confidence, which leads you to sleep with a man you don't love, which leads you circling back to shame, and voilá:  the dance can begin again.  The dance will begin again, for the music is always there in women's minds, laced with undertones of fear and anger, urging us on into the same sad circles of restraint and abandon, courtship and flight. 

[DRINKING is another book on my reading list; but i merely opened pages at semi-random somewhere beyond halfway through the book today, and this passage popped out at me.  I'm certainly no expert at this kind of thing, but i imagine that some similar dynamic exists for men and addictions too.

Do your best to feel good about yourself, and enjoy the sun.]

cause and effect, attitudes, and "I-ness"

[from Daybook © Anne Truitt, 1982, p47-48:]

The lives we lead appear, on logical examination, to result from the inexorable operation of cause and effect.  The point at which we seem able to bring our modicum of will is on our own attitudes, which then manifest themselves in the way we handle events.  By our means we can try to tailor our ends.  In the interval between event and responsive action, attitude acts like the chemicals in the nerve synapse, mediating the quality of the response.  I try to work on my attitude toward what happens.  In order to do this I find I must attempt to keep a distance, a position from which to examine my experience.  For me, the key to this distance is the memory of how I was when I was very young.  From this pure feeling of "I-ness," my life appears in retrospect to have been structured by a process of acquisition.  I learned and retained and organized a set of facades appropriate to various occasions.  When I encountered Gurdjieff's definition of personality as a compendium of many "I's", as distinct from the pure feeling of "I" with which we are born, which he calls "essence," I recognized its validity in my own experience.

[As people who know me will agree, i enjoy writers with an introspective bent—and especially with an interest in the philosophy of "I-ness" and such!  But i'm also glad that the self-analytical habit drops away most of the time and i'm free to actually live.

(And a side note:  I've decided to post only on weekdays; weekends are my days off.  Thank you for understanding.)

Enjoy the rain, peeps in the U.S. northeast; celebrate that we get a break from the dreary August doldrums.]

OK, so i didn't write anything today . . .

Do writers have to write every day?  Mostly.  Sometimes.  Usually.  "Normally."  (I like this last one.)  If they feel like it.

Why do i write?  Because sometimes it feels like i have to.  (Or else i'll go (further) insane.)  For me, it's some the same reason why i read -- because i feel like it!

---

More time spent with my true love.  And so comfortable, that time spent together now; we're so lucky.  Some of the best times of life:  just being together, safe and loving.

Beautiful trees and grass visible out my window — hello, nature.  (Even if a bit tamed.  Plus i have the AC on, because i'm still warm from bicycling.)  Bits of dappled sunlight getting through the obstacle course of leaves.  No roommates home right now; the whole house to myself, and i'm still content in my room.  In my imagination, a little light snow has begun to fall; the backyard slowly turns white, and the trees are surprised by August frozen precipitation.  A few little leaves flutter down from the trees, breaking the illusion.  Maybe i should turn down the AC.

---

How will we know when we've done enough in this life?  I don't know.  Maybe when we stop asking.  Maybe when we stop caring whether we're done or not, if we've "done enough" or not, or some other odd notion.  Maybe when we reach a final acceptance that we have to die and demonstrate that acceptance by actually dying.

Enjoy living, dear Reader.

"that floating, receptive state of the recently asleep"

[from To Touch A Wild Dolphin © 2001 by Rachel Smolker, p1-2:]
A loud, percussive pfhooo awakens me from the shallow half-sleep one has on board.  I lay still for a moment, wide-eyed, listening.  No doubt a dolphin breathing and, again, surprisingly close.  After pulling back the salt-damp covers, I clamber out onto the deck of  Nortrek, our forty foot catamaran.  A persistent cool breeze blows out of the southeast, and the stars are blinking fiercely, a broad and brilliant arch overhead.  The moon is trailed by a strip of shimmering water, but otherwise the water is dark and calm.  The flow of an incoming tide tugs gently on Nortrek's moorings and slips back along her twin hulls.  There in the moonlight I see the silvery shape of a dolphin's back rolling at the surface as it breathes and submerges in one fluid motion.  Then a burst of glittering phosphorescence shoots forward like a comet and dissipates in a sparkling splash as the dolphin lunges after a fish, then breaks through the surface to breathe again.
---I can just barely make out the dorsal fin, squat with nicks along the top edge; it is Nicky.  She moves past the line of moonshine, and her silver-smooth skin glows as she rolls back under the surface and is transformed into another comet of phosphorescence.  I know by her breathing and the way she is moving that she is hunting.
---My mind still in that floating, receptive state of the recently asleep, I settle down on the deck to admire the spectacle:  the phosphorescent comets below and the Milky Way above.  The magnificence of the scenery pulls me far above and beyond myself.  Shark Bay is a tremendous, wide-open expanse, jutting out into the Indian Ocean.  Distant from any city lights, it is a place where the night skies offer up a slowly rotating banquet of constellations, pulsating multicolor planets, bright clouds of star clusters, and dark, eerie nebulae.  The occasional passing satellite and shooting star are the only objects that disrupt an otherwise constant and by now familiar geometry.  Right now Orion is low on the horizon, so it must be about three A.M.

[I used to be such a dolphin fanatic; if possible, i would have become a dolphin when i grew up.  If this book had come out when i was younger, i probably would have gone into marine zoology & aquatic mammal behavior studies (or something).

I hope that everyone out there, humans and dolphins alike, takes the time to enjoy the grandeur of the world around us.  Especially the oceans.

And happy Friday the 13th to all!]

leaving the old baggage behind

[from Bitter Ice © 1999 by Barbara Kent Lawrence, p335-336:]

One bright fall morning, just after I had moved from my house to the apartment over the office, I walked across the main street of the village over to the post office.  I picked up my mail, which included two letters from friends asking how I was doing, and I realized I was doing surprisingly well.  I felt richer than I had ever in my life, rich in friends and family, rich in loving and being loved.  And I looked up at the blue sky over the village street and I saw an image of myself in the clouds, borne aloft by people, each a brightly colored helium-filled balloon—purple, aqua, orange, blue, green, and yellow—to an endless horizon.
---I have been so fortunate.  Now I can look back and see that I dragged heavy bags around with me for most of my life, bags packed with old hurts and lies, with masks and uniforms, all the trappings I thought necessary to disguise myself.  I have been taking a long trip around my world as I thought I knew it.  Now I am coming home, home to a house I built myself to share with people who love me and whom I love, to fill with the things I have gathered on my journey.  ….  This time, as I come home, I will leave my old bags at the airport carousel to turn and turn until someone throws them away for me.  I am going to buy new clothes and pack a new bag with only the things I really want.  And I will travel lighter.

[This book, though painful for me to get through, was very much worth the reading.  The description "a memoir of love, food, and obsession" captures the essence of it.  Walk over to the bookstore (or library), pull if off the shelf, and dig into it (armed with a series of big cups of coffee).  Enjoy the world as best you can.]

Salad First!

Am listening to a Béla Fleck album, 'Tales From The Acoustic Planet,' and wondering what to post to my blog (since i didn't post anything this morning).  The funky, jazzy banjo reminds me of first listening to Monsieur Fleck (anyone with an accent aigu in their name deserves the 'Monsieur'):  my second girlfriend had several of his CDs.  And later, another friend would laugh when i'd confuse his name with 'Ben Afleck' in attempting to reference either a movie or a piece of music.

I was tempted to put up a quote from Bitter Ice today, but i think i'll save it for tomorrow.  Spent a whole wonderful day with my true love, and i'm in no mood for copying out a couple of someone else's paragraphs at the moment.  Instead i'm relaxing away passion's welcome fatigue:  the AC's on, the music sighs & plucks low, and a yummy salad awaits my attention in the near future (after i stop typing this and prepare it).

Today i feel sure of my happiness—it's not going anywhere (without me, that is).  I feel ready for whatever twists & turns of fate that may come.  And i feel safe in this world for once, not precarious or unstable; secure.  I have time to listen to banjo music or to take a nap if i choose.  (But salad first!)

Good day to you all!

Learning to Love

[from Reading Lolita in Tehran ©2003 by Afar Nafisi, p303-304:] 

---By the time I had chopped the cucumbers and the herbs, adding them to the yogurt, I had come to a conclusion:  our culture shunned sex because it was too involved with it.  It had to suppress sex violently, for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key.  We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun.  What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality.  These girls, my girls, knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discuss Joyce and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about their own bodies, about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation.
---How do you tell someone she has to learn to love herself and her own body before she can be loved or love?  By the time I added the salt and pepper to my dish, I had come up with an answer to this question.  I went to the next session armed with a copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand and Our Bodies, Ourselves—the only book I had available on sexuality—in the other.

[Reading Lolita in Tehran was such a moving glimpse for me into the cultural life in Iran that it made me appreciate anew the freedoms we take for granted here.

Enjoy (and exercise!) your freedoms, Patient Reader.]

Life, and what to do with it . . .

[from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath:]

46.  What is my life for and what am I going to do with it?  I don't know and I'm afraid.  I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.  I can never train myself in all the skills I want.  And why do I want?  I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.  And I am horribly limited.  [p. 43]
…

62.  …  I am at odds.  I dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man.  [p. 54]
…

63.  …  I desire the things which will destroy me in the end … .  [p. 55]

[I was really drawn to Sylvia Plath (and to Anne Sexton) in my post-suicidal days; i was also ashamed that i hadn't kept journals or really done any writing worth mentioning before my own suicide attempt.  I thank the gods that suicide doesn't hold the same fascination for me it once did:  the reading and writing eventually helped me work through it, i guess.

It's time now for a renewed search for what else to do with my own life.  Any suggestions?

Be well, Patient Reader.]

morning sunshine, companionship, & unanimity

[Daybook—the journal of an artist © Anne Truitt, 1982, p165-166:]

7 May

Yesterday I moved the houseplants outside to the terrace in the sun, the fish bowl in their dappled shade, and danced the hose sprinkler over them all.  The oak leaves are slightly larger than squirrels' ears—just past corn-planting time in Virginia.  A revel in my garden—wind, sun, dandelions, buttercups, and violets.
---It was on just such days as these that I first began to know my father, during a bright spring when, apparently considered in some way ailing, I was made to lie in the sun a lot.  My father would wrap me, still in a babyish one-piece cambric undergarment, in a steamer rug, round and round like a cocoon, and place me on a long chair on our brick terrace under the grapevine trellis.  He would then settle himself next to me in the morning sunshine and keep me company.  I don't remember that he read to me—though this was the Peter Rabbit era, and I adored hearing stories and seeing pictures; I just remember silence.  A kind of meditative companionship that has always been most dear to me:  profound unanimity.

[Not so sunny here this morning, except above the clouds; but i always try to feel some sunshine in my heart, whatever the weather on the ground.  Enjoy the day, peeps.

And until we meet again, may whatever gods you believe in hold you in the palms of their hands.]

Once you were a tree . . .

[Hannah Tillich, From Time To Time © 1973, p110]

THE TREE POEM

Once you were a tree
Your loving twig-hands,
raised in fatherly fashion,
tender sounding
in noontime wind.

I flew through your branches,
sang in morning light,
and built my nest
in your heart.

When the weather was angry
we swayed together.
I, secure at your side,
trembled whenever you did.

But in the summer rain,
deeply, trustingly hugged
by your sheltering leaves,
I gazed sleepily
into pearls of water
falling in silver chains
round my impervious house.

[I read From Time To Time more than ten years ago, and i often don't even notice its slim silhouette on my bookshelf.  Maybe it's time to read it again!

May the rains fall soft upon your fields.]

The River Beneath The River

[from Women Who Run With the Wolves © 1992 by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., p298-299:]

Creativity is a shapechanger.  One moment it takes this form, the next that.  It is like a dazzling spirit who appears to us all, yet is hard to describe for no one agrees on what they saw in that brilliant flash.  Are the wielding of pigments and canvas, or paint chips and wallpaper, evidence of its existence?  How about pen and paper, flower borders on the garden path, building a university?  Yes, yes.  Ironing a collar well, cooking up a revolution?  Yes.  Touching with love the leaves of a plant, pulling down "the big deal," tying off the loom, finding one's voice, loving someone well?  Yes.  Catching the hot body of the newborn, raising a child to adulthood, helping raise a nation from its knees?  Yes.  Tending to a marriage like the orchard it is, digging for psychic gold, finding the shapely word, sewing a blue curtain?  All are of the creative life.  All these things are from the Wild Woman, the Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river, which flows and flows into our lives.
---Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing.  It seems in most instances to be in a simple being.  It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself.  It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all can be done with the overflow is to create.  It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must.

[I admit that long ago i found this book and put it on my shelf because the title captivated me, being in my feminist mode; but i've never read it.  This quote from the beginning of Chapter 10 convinces me to read more.

May the sun shine warm upon your face.]

Who can resist an opening?

[from Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interupted © 1993, p5:]

People ask, How did you get in there?  What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well.  I can't answer the real question.  All I can tell them is, It's easy.
---And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe.  There are so many of them:  worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, and perhaps of the dead as well.  These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
. . . most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists.  And who can resist an opening?

[Girl, Interrupted was one of those vital, essential books that got me through the 90s alive and gave me permission to talk about my own issues with life and society.  Susanna Kaysen rocks!  I've been delighted to read her other books, and I would gladly nominate her for beatification.

May the wind be always at your back.]

Wrestling With Inner And Outer Voices

[from Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington, p131-132:]

Some writers, wrestling with the inner and outer voices that urge them to stay silent, become defiant:  we have a right to our truths, they say to themselves or to anyone who wants to debate the question with them.  And indeed they do.  However, writers who have plenty to say about their rights to free speech are sometimes less anxious to think about the responsibilities that go along with those rights.  ....
---We must each come to our own decisions about the writer's responsibility to those whose lives are entwined with our own, and whose stories inevitably overlap with ours.  You might be writing about a failed relationship.  Perhaps your memoir involves your closeted gay brother, your teenage daughter's first period, or a close friend's mental breakdown.  Each of us must balance the reasons for writing a story or for using real names, against that might be done to someone else.  Sometimes the choice is not difficult to make:  you believe that your story will be crucial to many readers, and that any harm to others will be slight.  But often it is harder to know what matters most:  someone's livelihood or your need to tell the story; the importance of your story to many readers or one person's fear of public humiliation.

[This passage popped out at me when i was glancing through the book; it reminds me of the learning process that writing has usually involved for me — if i want to explore, analyze, and perhaps therapeutically work through parts of my life, memoir writing is the way to go.  But it's work, no question about it; keep at it.

May the road rise to meet you.  ...]

Something Good To Read . . .

[Margaret Atwood, Negotiating With The Dead, p155-156:]

When I was a young person reading whatever I could get my hands on, I came across some old books of my father's, in a series called Everyman's Library.  The endpapers of that date were a sort of William Morris design, with leaves and flowers and a lady in graceful medieval draperies carrying a scroll and a branch with three apples or other spherical fruit on it.  Interwoven among the shrubbery there was a motto:  "Everyman I will go with thee and be thy gude, In thy most need to go by thy side."  This was very reassuring to me.  The books were declaring that they were my pals; they promised to accompany me on my travels; and they would not only offer me some helpful hints, they'd be right there by my side whenever I really needed them.  It's always nice to have someone you can depend on.
---Imagine my consternation when — some years later, and enrolled in a university class that required me to fill my gaps, Middle English among them — I discovered the source of this cuddly quotation.  It was a medieval play called Everyman, in which Everyman is not on some pleasant country stroll but on his way to the grave.  All Everyman's friends have deserted him, including Fellowship, who wanders off in search of a stiff drink as soon as he hears the proposed destination.  The only loyal one is Good Deeds, who isn't up to the job of saving Everyman from the consequences of himself, being too feeble.  However, Good Deeds has a sister called Knowledge, and it is Knowledge who offers to be the helpful guide on Everyman's ramble to the tomb, and who speaks the words I have just quoted.
---The relationship between me and these books, then, was not as cosy as I'd once thought.  In the light of their newly discovered context, the three round fruits toted by the Pre-Raphaelite lady looked positively sinister:  I was acquainted by then with Robert Graves's book The White Goddess, and I felt I could recognize the food of the dead.
---I remain rather amazed at the long-ago editors of this series, and their choice of design and epigraph.  What possible help did they think Pride and Prejudice and Mopsa the Fairy were going to be to me on my leisurely hike to the crematorium? — though when you come to think of it, I suppose we're all on the same train trip, and it's a one-way ticket, so you might as well have something good to read on the way.  And some lunch too — that must be where the fruit comes in.

[I'd forgotten this piece until i looked at the last chapter of Negotiating With The Dead again last evening.  Then i had to smile.  May you always have something good to read on your way to the tomb; and enjoy it!]

Relationship Swapping

[From Diane Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind, p129-130:]

---Immune systems carry a grudge.  When special immune system cells find bacteria, fungi, viruses, or other invaders, they collect them and take them to one of the thousands of lymph nodes scattered around the body.  There T-helper cells receive the cargo and order B cells to manufacture antibodies, proteins that stick to the invaders and kill them.  Other immune cells save pieces of the invaders as memory aids.  They keep mumbling about the invader, and the next time it appears, the mumbling surges to an all-out war cry.  . . .
---Yet as immunologist Gerald N. Callahan observes in Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion, we safely trade bits of self with loved ones all the time.  Couples pick up some of each other's mannerisms, accents, habits, ideas.  But we also absorb people in more visceral ways.  When we pass along a flu or a cold sore, for instance, viruses pack some of our proteins and lipids in the viral envelope and release them inside another person, who will store some in his or her lymph nodes.  Retroviruses—such as AIDS, for instance—can install pieces of someone else's DNA in one's chromosomes.  But we're probably swapping gene fragments with people all the time, imperceptibly, through infection and lovemaking because "over the course of an intimate relationship, we collect a lot o pieces of someone else . . . . Until one day what remains is truly and thoroughly a mosaic, a chimera—part man, part woman, part someone, part someone else."  Little by little, as bits of DNA make it to our chromosomes, intimate relationships help shape the immune system's cameo of us, and modify the brain, altering the self whose continuity we cherish.  We don't just get under each other's skin, we absorb people.  Everyone we've ever loved remains with us, and we're invisibly changed for having known them.  That will make some people feel queasy, I suppose, but it warms me.

[Good morning, readers.  A bit more clinical entry this morning, eh?  But still a little warm and fuzzy nonetheless.  I have loved Diane Ackerman's books—every single one i've come across, starting with A Natural History of the Senses, which was used as a supplementary text to a rigorous Perception class i took as an undergraduate:  i thought it was fantastic!

Find joy in whatever you read, write, or speak.  So, until tomorrow . . . .]

Accidental Destination

[Mary Karr, The Liar's Club, p177:]

We moved to Colorado wholly by accident.  We were crossing the state, headed for the Seattle World's Fair, when Mother, who'd been staring blankly out the Impala's window, cried out for Daddy to stop with such a screech that I figured she was carsick.  They were both carsick a lot on that trip, plagued as they were by Smirnoff flu.  We eased over.  The road sloped down into a broad valley all embroidered with columbine flowers and pink buttercups and white Queen Anne's lace.  Beyond that stood Pikes Peak, which, for a kid reared in the swamp, looked unreal.  In my chorus book was a similar mountain on the page facing "America the Beautiful," a purple peak with a long wisp of cloud dragging across it and a snowcap.  Stepping out of the car air-conditioning that day was like entering that picture.  How weird, I thought, the air's so cool, for in Leechfield [Texas] blue sky meant suffocating heat.  Also, the smell of evergreen was dislocating, for it conjured the turpentine in Mother's studio.

[This memoir of Mary Karr's has been a real wake-up for me again; it's so stark and unromanticized compared to my own memories that it makes me rethink, and that's always good. 

Enjoy the day, peeps.]