Calligraffiti

My Bark is Bigger than My Bite

2011-03-14T09:07:00.012-07:00

A piece written by my nephew Aaron, a gifted, up-and-coming poet…

Chicken of the sea, shiny silver scales hailing: “We need to evolve tonight”

Left fin extended, saluting civil upheaval via southern bend

That’s the reflection from the blurry shimmering in the murky waters

My soul swims in pollution with no HAZMAT mask on

Huckleberry Finn thumbing is dumbfounding,

Posing by the obvious usage of goblin hobnobbing

I’m all stumbling summersaults and awkward umbrage mistaken for

High stakes hatred

Who’s raking the leaves on my lawn?

Leave me alone, I’m some kind of dumb and fumbling all thumbs via

Scummy mentality

Trying to scrape together leverage so I can muster a “hello” to the

Barista as she creates my coffee

Who can afford more lumbar support or stomach average lunches so

They can squish between cleavage and beaver within skinny slivers of

Fantastic orgasms?

Spin a better lattice so my yellowish teeth grit fits knitted with indented intonation

Perfectly interwoven with worn out welcomes of worrisome shivers shouting-out so

Starstruck, thumb-sucking dumb fucks

Against my luck I snuck under the radar to find celibacy sanctuary

Statutory of limitations has expired

I’m hidden in a crooked rubber nook caroming

So slow-mo fancy HD

Am I gonna come out clean and finally stand on my own two feet?

I guess I’ll wait to see

The excitement is so palpable in a kaleidoscopic plethora of avenues

Philanthropic hope if only I’d win the lotto, so in the cards and you know it

I’ll be like the handout homie Great Gatsby

Life of the party intermixing gist with drinking but missing not for the lazy but

Because of social anxiety

Showcase my poetry in the Smithsonian only in a social state of dystopia

Let’s bask backwards for the marijuana brownie bake caked on my consciousness,

Complex logistics getting fragile helicopter moms pissed

Just get stuck in the most muggy of things stinging rigid that have no relevance

Cuz I’m busy crying about Forsberg retiring

Happy VD everybody!

~Aaron Daniel Purcell

2/14/2011

Look at Me

2011-02-19T14:21:00.010-07:00

She stood near the music

both to hear and to see—

after all, Orpheus speaks

to ear and eye.

Harlem River rushed

along the ground beneath

her tapping feet.

Suddenly she turned

and heard, saw

a gravity of souls,

the familiar magnetic pull

of blue-green iris

to blue-green iris—

melding like Monet’s blossoms.

The reunion was pleasantly

shocking, surreal.

She ran her fingers

across the beauty that

was this coming together—

this parting—

then sent it soaring

with a black kiss.

It sailed above the crowd

and exploded into

blues and confetti.

Perhaps in the end

all that remains is the
music.

~Susan Adams Kauffman

"Dark Night Chills" by Glenn Beckmann

2010-11-18T21:16:00.003-07:00

The following story was penned by my good friend Glenn, a writer, artist and all-around outdoorsman who lives in Alaska.

I hear a call sometimes at night after you're asleep. I need to feel this night's air. Tonight it's cold and dark, as my boots crush the frozen snow beneath. Each step fills the peace. I try to find the spot that feels right; it's quiet, and then I'm still.

I hold my breath to let this night's calling filter in. First a cold chill touches me, as I'm focusing the shadows. The wind is soft and steady. It's my first call this night as I hear branches whisper, as they comb the breeze They almost hide the voices of this night.

Tonight this breeze cuts. I shiver, but continue to listen. A distant wash of an ocean's heartbeat pounds the beach. It's clear to me now, it's constant. But that's not all that's calling me; I'm still being pulled.

I look up to this nights sky, and this opens me to a deeper chill. My body shakes with a heavy shiver. I need to cross my arms to keep it still. It subsides.

This night's blackened sky is filled with life, and it's calling me. Like the stretched trees around me, we both are pulled upwards. Stories are being told in patterns of pinhole lights, each twinkle a song that fills me with wonder. I'm lost in its peace, and for a moment time stands still--until a blade of shocking cold cuts me. I awaken to this earth that keeps me. I want to listen to the this nights sky, but my body is chilled; it tells me no.

I make my way back to bed. I shiver one last time as I slip my bare feet into the bed beside you.

Dragonflies in Defiance

2010-10-03T20:40:00.008-07:00

I strolled down to the creek today to watch the dragonflies. Because it is so late in the season, they are huge, big as fingers (such as this one who sat still and let me photograph her). Because we are entering fall, they are also mating. It is wondrous the way they make love in mid-air. What would that be like: to feel no physical boundaries nor forms against which to thrust, to unite bodies? Mere air would require more tandem effort in order to produce the glorious friction of intimate contact. Yet floating weightless, ungrounded, with a lover would also feel musical. Song, after all, rises above the tug of gravity and fills the air waves with pure sensation. Today the dragonflies swirled and swooped, their bodies joined in a duet of delight. Soon these lovers will die. The females will lay their eggs and lie down. Perhaps we humans could learn a thing or two from these magnificent creatures. We live, we love, we expire; why not float with abandon now and then and defy that which leads to a variety of deaths: gravity, disconnection, silence? Winter quickly follows autumn.

Outside the Stupa

2010-09-28T22:21:00.010-07:00

Save the ashes
For reminders
Stony things remain

Tooth and bone
unimpressive
I have left these things

Because fire is bright
Fire is clean
efficient and divine

Tooth and bone
Charms and dolls
I am free tonight

~From "I Burn" by Toadies

I'm sitting on the ground--something I haven't done in far too long--watching ants wind their way through a maze of cow, or perhaps horse--?, bones. I just picked up a femur and marveled at the swirled curve of a socket. It is perfectly articulated. I once would have traded everything in order to know its designer. But now I don't want to know him/her/it. I doubt that I would understand this entity, anyway. Besides, there would be a sort of diminishment of the designer if we did connect. My eros is too hungry, too groping. I'd want to somehow internalize the creator, perhaps even worship it. Instead, I'll simply gaze from a distance and "be" in this creation, this moment, with these insects and leg bones, these skulls.

I'm at the Shambhala Center outside of Fort Collins, Colorado, a Buddhist retreat nestled in the mountains. My friends and I drove here this afternoon. It's lovely. I hear the wind rustling the aspen leaves. I see silver flecks as they flutter. We entered the stupa a few minutes ago, and while I found the gilded Buddha statue impressive, and the colorful designs and mosaics enchanting, I couldn't sit there on a meditation cushion for long. Doing so felt claustrophobic here in this idyllic wooded setting. I also couldn't remain in the stupa because it was uninspiring. I've outgrown religion in all of its forms. It's not that I feel superior to believers; rather, religion has become too confining for me. In my eyes, it can't possibly contain the Source; in fact, the earth itself can't contain it. And I don't think a man-made temple can begin to adequately address or express this Ground of Being.

Nonetheless, I made the decision while sitting on the floor of the stupa to ignore the religious aspects of what surrounded me and instead bask in the sensual experience. Perhaps if I had to name my religion, it would be sensuality. Or art, the expression of sensuality. I'm much too erotic of heart for any religion constructed by humans. So I'll sit here on the dry, grassy ground among these bones and simply "enjoy" without seeking understanding or a connection to the transcendent. This transcends.

NOTE: I did return to the stupa later in the day, where I found the following words in a poem someone left as an offering:

In the garden of gentle sanity
May you be bombarded
with coconuts
and wakefulness.

How?

2010-02-04T02:01:00.008-07:00

How does one grieve

when there has been

no absolute severance,

no death? I wilt, I break,

but I cannot die

to this. Thus, the dying

proceeds for another day.

And another. Another.

The knife blade is serrated,

the cut jagged and

disconsolate.

I weep over the loss

but cannot figure out how

to lose, nor to stanch

the steady drip of

blood, of heart.

--Susan Adams Kauffman

WAITING

2009-11-11T08:29:00.007-07:00

Winter,

for those of us,

brings its cold,

its muted air,

and its slumbering

loam

that awaits.

I am a handful

of seed—

lavender, perhaps—

oblivious yet

abiding,

listening in my sleep

for the faint,

thawed breath

of longing.

-Susan Adams Kauffman

A Found (and Kept) Poem

2009-05-31T18:06:00.011-07:00

Rilke 1, 17 from Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth—
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of the evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.

Nearly fifteen years ago I came across this poem that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his early twenties. The first time I read it, my heart confiscated it. I latched onto it because something deep inside me knew that it was meant for me. Its every phrase, every image, felt familiar--as if Rilke had envisioned me, who would be born nearly forty years after his death, as its muse and recipient. I know this sounds absolutely presumptuous, but I don't care. Poems are meant to be stolen--swallowed, even. Every poet knows that their craft demands generosity; once their words are received by a hearer or reader, they can never be reclaimed. That is one of poetry's gifts. I resonated with Hours 1, 17, fifteen years ago, and I resonate with it now. I am also struck by its simple yet haunting language. It reminds me of something Rilke himself came to understand: "you" is not the god of religion but the human soul. No wonder it continues to feel so familiar.

Michael Cunningham

2006-03-15T15:16:00.001-07:00

Quiet as plucked wires...

The above is one many quotes I scrawled on my program during Michael Cunningham’s recent presentation at the Denver Post-Rocky Mountain News Pen and Podium series. On Monday evening, February 20th, the Pulitzer- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author spoke at the University of Denver's Newman Center for the Performing Arts on a variety of topics including genre, the writing life, and his current novel, Specimen Days (from which he read the glistening "plucked wires" simile).

Now, one thing I should clarify before proceeding is that I am not an author groupie. I've attended dozens of writer's conferences, readings and book signings and have always conducted myself with the utmost propriety. Michael Cunningham, however, is no run-of-the-mill prize-winning novelist. Nope. He’s the best: the crème de le crème, the Albert Einstein of writers, my idol, God. I told him as much on Monday night. Well, I left out the dairy, physicist and divinity references, but I did inform him that he is my favorite living writer. And okay, since you insist, I’ll jump ahead to the book-signing portion of the session during which Cunningham and I spoke personally...

After standing in a long line conversing with two engaing gentlemen who happened to be not only fellow writers but admitted gays "in crush" with Cunningham, I approached the signing table. I handed him four books: two copies of The Hours (my all-time favorite novel), one copy of Specimen Days and a copy of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (on which The Hours is based). While he signed the books, I introduced myself, telling him that I was a writer and had just completed my master's degree. "Michael," I said (we were now on a first-name basis), "I know this may sound trite—and I'm sure you hear it all the time—but I need to say it: You are my favorite contemporary fiction writer. Ask anyone who knows me well, and they will tell you that I've been saying that for years. Of everyone writing today, it is you I most want to emulate." (Hey, for those of you now cringing: at least I didn't gush a la Misery, "I'm your number one fan!") He said he was honored. He also asked about my graduate program and said that he thought it was "great" that I was quitting my full-time job in order to pursue my writing dreams. Beaming, I asked him if he was acquainted with the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke. "Are you kidding?" he said. "I bow down to the guy. Letters to a Young Poet is one of my very favorite books." I almost erupted at that point. "See!" I wanted to say. "I knew it! We're kindred spirits!" Alas, determined to exude restraint—and because I knew for a fact that he was likewise aware of our deep kinship—I simply nodded knowingly. When he opened my personal copy of The Hours, I said, "May I ask you a personal question?" He said sure. "You disclosed in tonight's Q and A session that [Hours character] Mrs. Brown is based almost exclusively on your mother." He nodded. "Does this imply that Mrs. Brown's son, Richard, is based on you?" He said no, that Richard was based on poet Theodore Roethke. Then I asked if he would pose with me for the above picture. He graciously obliged. Finally, I hugged my books securely to me (you never know whom you can trust, after all) and thanked him. Cunningham said, "It was nice to meet you, Susan. Again, I can't believe you just quit your job in order to write. That is so great!" I said good-bye and dashed around a corner where I immediately flipped open my copy of The Hours. On the title page he had written, "To Susan: With blessings on your own future books. Michael Cunningham."

Cunningham is a genuinely nice guy. I'm sure he writes similar inscriptions in other groupies'—er, I mean aspiring writers'—books; however, I can assure you that none is as treasured as mine.

The following is a random sampling of quotes from Cunningham's presentation...

I'm a promiscuous reader.
I try to listen to the big, hungry impulse of the world.
[When asked about how he approaches the delicate issue of basing a character or scene on an actual person or event...] A gift from a novelist is like a gift from a cat.
[On the writing craft...] Never, never give up.
[On being a writer...] I'm a farmer at heart. I'm a creature of habit. I do my best work during consistent, measured intervals—like someone plowing a field.
If I know too well where a novel is going, the most it's going to do is get there.
I always want to end up with a book that is a little smarter than I am.
[On why he often employs multiple genres in his novels:] We live in a bigger world than ever before. One story doesn't always cut it anymore.
[When asked about his perceived audience:] I write for my companion, Ken, and about half a dozen others; otherwise, it's too abstract.

While discussing Specimen Days, which consists of three novellas tied together by a common thread of allusions to Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass, Cunningham explained that he employed the genres of horror, thriller and science fiction, respectively. He then read excerpts from three stories that informed his own: Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a title by Raymond Chandler that now escapes me (sorry), and Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains." Writers," he said, "borrow from one another all the time. I will be the first to admit that Specimen Days was influenced by these three authors—as well as many, many others." He continued: "Authors who protect their work as if it were a baby or a sacred text need to lighten up. It's just a book, after all." Asked if it bothered him that David Hare, screenwriter of the motion picture version of The Hours, had altered the story for his adaptation, Cunningham responded with a resounding, "No!" It was, he revealed, quite the contrary. "I saw it as an expansion. The Hours is now two stories. I love it when things evolve; it helps them endure."

No doubt Cunningham's art will endure. I hope to someday crawl in the dirt tread of his footsteps.

Note to Self

2006-03-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Note to self after quitting full-time job in order to follow writing dreams: As you struggle once again with risk and change—and the fear that accompanies them—revisit the following wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke:

"You should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it. This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country.People have, with the help of conventions, oriented all their solutions toward the easiest side of easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it." (Letters to a Young Poet, 53)

If You Know...

2005-12-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

"If you know much about
your work—why you work,
how you work, your aims—
you are probably not a poet."

—Mary Webb

Blue

2005-11-13T11:05:00.008-07:00

We never met, my brother and I.

Charles Patrick, my dad’s namesake and only son, died nearly twenty years before I was born. As is true of any family who has lost a child, a relentless grief, like a halo of bees, hovers when we say his name. He was a stunning child, as photographs attest, with cornsilk hair, ruddy cheeks, plump lips and blue, mercurial eyes—like our father’s. From an eight-by-ten that hangs in my mom’s living room, Patrick’s gaze haunts me. Brimming, as they seem to be, with ocean water, his eyes are fringed with long, black lashes and framed by brows so dark and angular they make him appear thoughtful, or peevish. But he is only three; the stern slant of his eyebrows is more likely due to pain than to precocity or ill-will.

Only months after the photograph was taken, Patrick died from a stomach tumor. In the Forties, doctors understood little about the insidious, mutational nature of cancer cells. Surgeons at Louisville Children’s Hospital slit his tiny belly open for exploration, only to quickly, with fumbling fingers, stitch it closed. There was nothing they could do, they said; they were sorry. Patrick had weeks, perhaps months, to live. They handed him back to my parents, who returned home to Dunham, Kentucky. Mom and Daddy were mute, spent, yet determined to make their little boy’s final days as comfortable as possible.

In families of dead children, there is also a tendency to rationalize the youngster’s passing, to claw some seed of meaning out of arid ground. In our case, a few have surmised that Patrick’s untimely death protected him from the horrors of war. Had he lived to see adulthood, he would have been an ideal candidate for Vietnam. But I don’t buy it. Since when is a soldier’s suffering more unthinkable than a child’s?

Even more troubling is the presumption that God used Patrick’s death at age three to save Daddy’s soul. After my parents brought him home from the hospital, my brother’s health rapidly deteriorated. Daddy took time off work at the mines to help Mom care for him. Afternoons, he would rock Patrick on the front porch swing and watch the coal train pass. Patrick would lift his head from Daddy’s shoulder long enough to grin and wave at the conductor who, in turn, would remove his denim cap and flap it like a flag. Daddy smiled, too, for Patrick’s sake—but inside he was disconsolate.

Weeks passed and the tumor swelled, draining Patrick’s strength. On his last day, he lay in Daddy’s arms listening for the train. Unable to raise his head, he twitched a finger in the conductor’s direction He did not smile nor speak. Daddy responded to Patrick’s death by challenging God’s supposed goodness and by despising himself for surviving his own child. Grief threatened to swallow him. He drank.

I never witnessed this version of Daddy. By the time I came along, he was fifty and a born-again Christian full of faith, not questions. His heart had been bleached—sterilized—by the power of The Blood. He no longer drank, smoked, chewed, cussed, gambled, danced, lied, fibbed, nor anything else that resembled the remotest notion of worldliness.

However, immediately following Patrick’s death, my unsanctified father sought salvation in jugs of corn liquor and whiskey. Worried by his behavior, Mom begged him to accompany her to a revival meeting at her church, Burdine Freewill Baptist. They sat through the fire-and-brimstone sermon; then, as Daddy told me years later, the Holy Ghost plunged a fist through the church ceiling and yanked him up by the collar. Daddy made his way down the aisle, thinking about hell and how, as the angry evangelist testified, bad people went there. He was bad, he knew, because he was weak and wild and human as Adam. Daddy also thought about Patrick. Above all else, he wanted to see his son again. He knelt at the altar, pleading for deliverance—and the guarantee of Heaven.

“If Patrick hadn’t died,” Daddy declared before his own death in 1990, “I might not have seen what a sinner I was. Jesus used Pat’s death to draw me to Himself.”

For years I tacitly accepted this reasoning. After all, Daddy’s conversion story was rife with drama and good intentions. But my brother was not an image frozen by a photograph, nor a theater prop, nor a recruitment tool used by a soul-saving God. He was no white, unblemished Passover lamb.

I look again. I see the electricity in his eyes. I observe the blue: passion’s hue. My own irises crackle with this heat. I notice, too, the contrasts: fierceness of brow, the pillowy roundness of lip and cheek. Patrick was a little boy who once lived in a family. He loved to sit on his father’s lap. He smiled at the passing train. And he clung to the world—to Daddy’s shirt. I wish I had known him—and the very human father whose fears drove him to the blindness of certitude.

Benet Pines 10/3-10/7

2005-10-13T19:53:00.002-07:00

Days 1 and 2
I’ve been here for more than 24 hours now. I came to the Benet Pines Retreat Center—a contemplative getaway in Colorado Springs run by Benedictine nuns—for a week in order to think and write. I’m trying to make headway on my Master’s thesis. So far, my work has been productive. I spent much of yesterday evening and all day today writing. Around 4pm both days I’ve gone for long walks. I really like the solitude. I have no TV, no phone, no radio, no CDs to listen to… I could listen here on my laptop, but I left Abbey Road and Evolve (Ani DiFranco) out in the car. I made myself promise not to bring them here into my cabin. The only noise I want around me is outside my open window: wind worrying the pines and magpies fussing at black squirrels.

Let me tell you about yesterday first. I arrived early in the afternoon and checked in with Sister Josie at the main office. Then I drove down the dirt road to my designated cabin, Jesu Rama. [Please, could one of you language experts clue me in to the meaning of “Rama?”] I laughed when I pulled up. The cabin is the size of a Tuff Shed. I’m not lying. I unlocked the door and went inside where, to my delight, I found a cozy, charming writer’s nest. There is a kitchenette with a small refrigerator and microwave oven. There is a rocking chair with a corduroy cushion and crocheted afghan slung over its back. There is also a desk with a lamp and bookshelf containing an assortment of paperbacks. I had to call Mechelle on my cell phone at that point to report that the first book that caught my eye was Jung’s Man and His Symbols. “You won’t believe it!” I squealed into her answering machine, “They have Jung! I’m going to like it here!” Above the desk there is also a crucifix hung on a single nail. Its stainless steel Jesus has a sad, feminine face and long, spaghettilike legs that look like guitar strings needing to be plucked. I have a comfortable twin bed with flowered sheets and a clean, white bathroom that smells faintly of Pine Sol. The place is perfect.

Minutes after I arrived and unpacked, Sister Phyllis tapped on the door. She handed me a fistful of coffee filters “in case you run out.” She also told me she’s recently seen a doe and two fawns hanging out on the property. I said I hoped they dropped by for a visit.

After the sister left, I slipped my tennis shoes on and went for a walk. I crossed the road and headed up a trail—fringed with barren wild strawberry plants and kinikinik—toward the labyrinth. The labyrinth consists of a circular pathway outlined in hundreds of stones. I wound around to the center (Sue Monk Kidd and other "dissident daughters" would have been proud) and sat for a while on a stone bench. At my feet I noticed a small pit in which fires had been lit. I wondered what kinds of ceremonies had occurred here. Most retreatants are women, so I imagined the circle had facilitated everything from Catholic mass to goddess worship. Tired from my drive, I walked a bit further up the trail and lay down on a bed of pine needles. The ground was warm from the sun. I squinted, peering up into the lace of swaying branches. Then I fell asleep. When I woke twenty or thirty minutes later, I was a pincushion. Needles snagged in my clothes and hair. I didn’t care in the least. I returned to Jesu Rama, wrote some more, then curled up in bed and read Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, Specimen Days. It’s a sumptuous read—almost as good as The Hours. Cunningham is my idol; I hope I can someday be a fraction of the masterful writer he is.

Day 3
Today I woke around 8am and wrote until 2. Then I ate lunch and went for another hike. This time I took a trail that wound past an 8’ wooden cross—which struck me as displaced out here in the wild—and up to a small statue of St. Scholastica. Was there really such a woman? I don’t know, but the pleasure (bookish contentment?) on her white face made me smile. [Mechelle informed me later that St. Scholastic did, indeed, exist.] Finally the path led to a grotto up on a rocky incline. In the grotto was the figure of Mary. Surrounding her were stones and pine cones hand-placed in geometrical patterns and rows. Beneath one of the rocks—smooth and oval, an egg— someone had pressed an aspen leaf. Beneath another was the faded photograph of a baby boy. Under four others were slips of paper containing writing. I probably committed some kind blasphemy by doing what compelled me next, but I couldn’t resist: I gingerly pulled each slip from beneath its rock and read it. (Is it possible to spy on God?) They were mostly prayers. One asked Mary to heal a man by the name of Arthur. Another said she was trusting in the pope’s intercession for a loved one with ALS. Another bore a heart and read simply, “I love you.” The last, held in place by a jagged crystal, thanked “My most blessed goddess” for teaching her faith and endurance. It closed with, “I will to will your will.”

Looking at all of these offerings, I thought to myself, “People need repositories.” We do. We need them for our loves, our hopes, our sadnesses, our triumphs. We need to entrust them to someone or some thing. Perhaps, I wondered, God originated in the lackluster, pre-creation void. He or she was the color white, the absence of all color. Then, as we filled God up with all the things we need to give away—the spectrum of threads, rocks, scraps, flecks, memories, thumbprints, wishes—we stained him or her black: the convergence of all color, the suggestion of presence. I don’t know if I’m making any sense. It’s just what came to mind there on the mountain, at the grotto, sitting on a moss-covered boulder, watching my silhouette ripple down the embankment like a dark river.

Day 4
Last night I drove up to Denver to attend the Nine Inch Nails show with Mechelle. (On my way out I told the sisters I was off to go fellowship with a stadiumful of heathens and devil-worshippers. They flung a sponge soaked in holy water at my head. Such kidders, Josie and Phyllis. Of course I'm only joking :-).) Mechelle and I had a blast. My friend Steve was perceptive a while back when he called my fondness for rock concerts “Dionysian.” That’s usually how it is. Mechelle and I sipped beer, danced and played air tambourine like whirling—and slightly tipsy—dervishes. It was more than that, though. There were times when I stood completely motionless, simply drinking in the words, listening for the delicate pulse of this angry but sensitive musician whose thoughts are more consumed with God than most of the rest of us put together. It made me think about how a love/hate relationship with God is probably the truest kind.

Day 5
This is it: time to return to civilization. I’m going to miss this place, this little Tuff Shed out in the middle of nowhere. I accomplished a lot on my thesis while here—and was reminded how impossibly difficult fiction writing is. Will I ever get past this lazy thinking, these clichés? Sigh… Back to reality. Then again, I could always take the vows and stick around. Hmmm...very tempting. I think I'll go talk to the sisters...

Benet Pines: http://benethillmonastery.org/about-us/benet-pines-retreat-center.htm

Cornered

2005-10-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

“Forced into a corner, I’ll choose truth over hope any day.”
Marjorie Williams

“Neither a romance nor a melodrama; just the truth. Truth was, to the end, the thing she handled best.” So wrote Washington Post staff writer David Von Drehle in the newspaper’s January 17, 2005, obituary for Marjorie Williams. Williams, a Post columnist and contributor to other publications such as Slate and Vanity Fair, died of liver cancer this past January 16th. She was 47 years old.

In its most recent issue, Vanity Fair (October, 2005) runs an excerpt from Williams’ memoir, “A Matter of Life and Death,” which she penned (but never finished) over the course of her three-year illness. Not only does the article treat us to one last helping of sharp, inspired writing; it also reinforces Von Drehle’s characterization of Williams as a staunch—what I like to call blood-letting—truth-teller. Unlike another certain “someone” profiled in this month’s VF—whose claim to fame is her Hilton name and whose pretty cerebral chandelier is, well, lacking a few bulbs—Williams’s writing displays an unmistakable combination of intelligence, wit, grace and translucence. A translucence so glaring you want to squint yet so subtle it lingers like extinguished candle.

I read it two weeks ago, and it still haunts me.

Williams, to again quote Von Drehle, “faced her death open-eyed.” While I find this extremely admirable—and reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s elegant audacity (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” or “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me”)—I also find Williams' penetrating gaze jarring. She found out at age 43, as the mother of an 8-year-old and 5-year-old, that she had inoperable cancer. It was, she writes, “stage IV(b). There is no V, and there is no (c).” It’s the worst news I can imagine receiving in the prime of one’s life. She was told that she had three to six months to live. Because her tumors had already metastasized, she was not a candidate for surgery. Her only treatment option was chemotherapy, which, fortunately, kept her alive for years rather than months. Throughout her ordeal, Williams recorded her thoughts in a journal. Reading them makes you feel a bit like a voyeur—as if you’re peering through the slit of someone’s curtain, watching them shower. You know you shouldn’t look, but you can’t avert your eyes. The difference, though, is that Williams wrote her memoirs for an audience; she invites us into her inner sanctum—and undresses in front of us. “Don’t look away,” she says. “Now is not the time for politeness. Look. Look.”

So here it is: An intimate account of what it feels like to observe—and live—one’s own dying. Look if you dare…

We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live…What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, I felt weirdly like an actor in a melodrama.

I live at least two different lives. In the background, usually, is the knowledge that, for all my good fortune so far, I will still die of this disease. This is where I wage the physical fight, which is, to say the least, a deeply unpleasant process. And beyond the concrete challenges of needles and mouth sores and barf basins and barium, it has thrown me on a roller coaster that sometimes clatters up a hill, giving me a more hopeful, more distant view than I’d expected, and at other times plunges faster and farther than I think I can endure. Even when you know the plunge is coming—it’s in the nature of a roller coaster, after all, and you know that you disembark at the bottom and not the top—even then, it comes with some element of fresh despair….I’ve hated roller coasters all my life.

But in the foreground is regular existence: love the kids, buy them new shoes, enjoy their burgeoning wit, get some writing done, plan vacations with [my husband], have coffee with my friends…What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal life as possible, only with more pancakes.

Sometimes I just feel immortal: whatever happens to me now, I’ve earned the knowledge some people never gain, that my span is finite, and I still have the chance to rise, and rise, to life’s generosity. But at other times I feel trapped, cursed by my specific awareness of the guillotine blade poised above my neck. At those times, I resent you—or the seven other people at dinner with me, or my husband, deep in sleep beside me—for the fact that you may never even catch sight of the blade assigned to you.

Sometimes I simply feel horror, that most elementary thing. The irreducible fear, for me, is the fantasy that I will by some mistake be imprisoned in my body after dying. As a child I never enjoyed a minute of any campfire stories of the buried-alive genre. And even without that unwelcome and vivid fear in my mind, I can’t find any way around the horror of being left alone down there in the dark, picked apart by processes about which I’m a little squeamish even when they’re just fertilizing my daylilies. Intellectually, I know it won’t matter to me in the slightest. But my most primal fear is that somehow my consciousness will be carelessly left behind among my remains….But, of course, I am already being killed, by one of nature’s most common blunders. And these blunt fears are easily deconstructed as a form of denial: if I’m stuck alive in my coffin, well, that will in some sense override the final fact of my death, no? I can see these dread-filled fantasies as the wishes they are: that I really can stay in this body I love; that my consciousness really will run on past my death; that I won’t just…die.

Sometimes, early on, death was a great dark lozenge that sat bittersweet on my tongue for hours at a time, and I savored the things I’d avoid forever. I’ll never have to pay taxes, I thought, or go to the Department of Motor Vehicles. I won’t have to see my children through the worst parts of adolescence. I won’t have to be human, in fact, with all the error and loss and love and inadequacy that come with the job…I won’t have to get old…It says a lot about the power of denial that I could so automatically seek (and find!) the silver lining that might come with dying of cancer in my 40s. For good or ill, I no longer think that way. The passage of time has brought me the unlikely ability to work, simultaneously, at facing my death and loving my life. Often it is lonely work.

For me, time is the only currency that truly counts anymore…Choose, choose, choose…These forced choices make up one of the biggest losses of sickness. But on the other side of this coin is a gift. I think cancer brings to most people a new freedom to act on the understanding that their time is important…The knowledge that time’s expenditure is important, that it is up to you, is one of the headiest freedoms you will ever feel.

It made me furious anytime someone tried to cheer me up by reciting some unhappy tale of a sister-in-law’s cousin who had liver cancer but now he’s 80 and hasn’t had been troubled by it in 40 years. I wanted to scream, “Don’t you realize how sick I am?” I knew how narcissistic and self-dramatizing this sounded. Still, it enraged me when anyone said, “Aaanh, what do doctors know? They don’t know everything.” I was working so hard to accept my death: I felt abandoned, evaded, when someone insisted that I would live.

[I also felt irritated] at the people who had memorably inappropriate reactions. I can’t count the times I’ve been asked what psychological affliction made me invite this cancer. My favorite New Yorker cartoon, now taped above my desk, shows two ducks talking in a pond. One of them is telling the other: “Maybe you should ask yourself why you’re inviting all this duck hunting into your life right now.”…One woman sent me a card to “congratulate” me on my “cancer journey” and quoted Joseph Campbell to the effect that in order to achieve the life you deserved you had to give up the life you had planned. Screw you, I thought. You give up the life you had planned.

[I have always been drawn to] the dark side, sniffing under every rock…[My personality and upbringing] married me for life to the inconvenient argument, the longing to know what was real….Hence, even when my prospects for recovery or remission have looked best, there has always been one face of my being that was turned toward the likelihood of death—keeping in touch with it, convinced that denying it any entry would weaken me in ways I couldn’t afford. Forced into a corner, I’ll choose truth over hope any day.

But it turns out that hope is a more supple blessing than I had imagined. From the start, even as my brain was wrestling with death, my body enacted some innate hope that I have learned is simply part of my being. Chemotherapy would knock me into a passive misery for days. And then—depending on which formula I was taking at the time—a day would come when I would wake up feeling energetic and happy and very much like a normal person. Whether the bad time I had just had lasted five days or five weeks, some inner voice eventually said—and still says—“Never mind. Today is a ravishing day, and I will put on a short skirt and high heels and see how much of the future I can inhale.”

To read a Slate piece on Williams entitled, "Washington's Most Dangerous Profiler," go to http://slate.msn.com/id/2112356/.

The Simple Mind

2005-09-26T21:59:00.001-07:00

In the article, "The Inescapable Paris," featured in the October, 2005, issue of Vanity Fair, the concept of "intelligence" is tossed around as glibly as a frisbee. Paris Hilton, the beautiful heiress whose topless, vacant-eyed image graces the magazine's cover, is described as canny, transfixing, and smart. Says Chris Applebaum, director of Hilton's "hot" Carl's, Jr., commercial, "She can sometimes be a little bit of a space cadet, but I have to say, when she focuses she can be incredibly intelligent." Fingering her 24-karat yellow diamond engagement ring during the interview, Hilton demonstrates her obvious brilliance by sniffling, "I like it, but it's yellow, and I'm like, I didn't want yellow for my engagement ring. I just needed something to wear until I get [one I like]." Another outside, very credible source, a paparazzo named Ron Galello, also attests to Hilton's mental acuity. "Paris Hilton is a phenomenon," he says. "She's sexy, smart, gracious and kind..." Which explains, I'm sure, why later in the piece, when her fiance discusses his Greek surname, Kasidokostas, she chimes in: "I can't even pronounce that shit." Then, to ice the cake, the blond Mensa opens her mouth about her infamous sex video: "I used to think it was so bad, but it's like, everyone has sex. I'm sure everyone has filmed a tape..."

I'm sure everyone has, Paris, honey. Now go eat another Godiva. And give one to Tinkerbell.

To be fair, Vanity Fair does strive for some balance. The magazine consults feminists likeThe Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf, who compares Hilton to "Muzak"and sees her popularity as a sign of our times. "We're in the most aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-literate, anti-middle class discourse," says Wolf. "It's all right. What's the big deal? Doesn't matter if people are killing people in your name. Just go to the mall." The article makes me want to write a terse letter to the editor. But then (like, hello! finally!) Vanity Fair faithfully redeems itself. In the same issue it runs "A Matter of Life and Death," a powerful, poignant, genuinely intelligent piece by the late journalist Marjorie Williams. In fact, you know what? I want to talk about Williams' memoir at length, but to do so here, in this Paris Hilton entry (next to this ridiculous photo of her posh pooch) would profane it. Thus, I'll close here and dedicate a separate, deservedly respectful, post to Williams.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with one final tidbit... In the Hilton article, Thomas Tadayon--manufacturer of the Hollywood Prescription, a $29.99 lip-plumping product for which Hilton is spokesperson--observes philosophically: "[Paris] makes a lot of money, and the system doesn't pay out that kind of money to airheads. You don't make millions of dollars as an idiot."Ah, but lest you forget, Mr. Tadayon, this is America.

Unutterably

2005-09-25T11:00:00.001-07:00

Yes, I'm alone--but then again I always was. (Trent Reznor)

There is a place on the road where the solitary nature of the human journey becomes clearly seen. (Gwynneve in Confessions of a Pagan Nun)

The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. (Rilke)

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and we were talking about traveling. He asked me what place I'd like to visit. Immediately what came to mind was Rorogne, Switzerland, where Rainer Maria Rilke is buried. If I could purchase a plane ticket right now and fly to Switzerland, here's what I'd do: I'd rent a car and drive to the tiny town of Rorogne in Canton Valais. Then I'd pack a backpack and hike up to the old Rorogne church. Then I'd find Rilke's grave and unroll my sleeping bag--directly on top of the grave, to be exact. I'd camp out there six feet above his bones, under the alpine sky, with my head pillowed near his epitaph. That's it. That's where I'd go this very minute if I could.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not like the early, rather morbid, Christians who venerated the remains of fellow believers. (Julian Augustus nicknamed their churches "charnel houses.") Reliquaries, in fact, sort of give me the creeps. No, what I want to do is get as physically close to Rilke as possible. I just feel the need to rest my body against his final resting place. To rub against both the traces of his presence and the cold, earthy reality of his absence.

For a while now I've been trying to come to terms with a lot of personal sadness. I find my eyes welling up at unexpected moments, though I wouldn't really characterize the experience as crying. More accurately, it's as if my body can no longer contain my interior; therefore, it brims over my edges. Perhaps, like Gwynneve, the protagonist of Kate Horsley's Confessions of a Pagan Nun, "I [am learning] the loneliness of incarnation." The more I try to live toward life rather than resist it (to, as Robinson Jeffers puts it, "feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly"), the more I am drawn downward--toward soil, roots, underground caverns, underworlds, and what Jungian analyst Sandra Lee Dennis calls "the embrace of the daimon." Down here, "at bottom--in the deepest and most important things" we are "unutterably alone" (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Norton trans., p. 23). It's an existential loneliness; no matter how connected we long to be with another body or soul, there is no such thing as perfect union. This truth is the wormwood nectar that drips from Eros' lips: "Yearn but do not consummate." The tragedy of this--when one really allows him- or herself to look it in the eye--is devastating.

Still......

In Letters Rilke goes on to say, "We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them" (p. 69). [For an expanded version of this section to the book, click on http://mythosandlogos.com/Rilke.html.]

I want to curl myself atop Rilke's grave because it's not merely his presence I want. I want to feel the circumference of solitude as well. Seemingly dissimiliar, I know: the presence of absence, the warm breath of death, the substance of intangible hoped-fors. But these are the very things that make sense to me. They are the songs of Orpheus, the logic of the mythopoetic. And they reverberate not only audibly; they river familiarly from some inner spring. Because of them, I can somehow cope with--possibly even own--my aloneness.

The self-authored inscription on Rilke's headstone reads:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire
to be no one's sleep under so many lids.

Someday I'll run my fingers--lips--over the hard, etched granite.

2 Views on Loving the World

2005-09-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

I John 2:15:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

Richard Wilbur:
Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
Keeping their difficult balance."

September 4th

2005-09-04T11:18:00.000-07:00

Last night I woke up around 3:30 a.m. after having dreamed--or at least I think it was a dream--the following:

I'm alone, sitting in a dark, bare room. A voice speaks to me, though it is not an audible voice--nor is it inside my head. I'm aware of this: that it's both something intuitive and something transcendent. It's telling me that after we die, we are not asked whether we believed a certain creed (thus earning a crown and hearing "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!") or whether our names are written in the Lamb's Registry. Rather, we're asked why we settled for seeking connection with the (divine?) through religion. Organized religion, the voice seems to be saying, is a limitation. Don't settle for it. There is so much more.

It was weird. It didn't feel like the mythological god or heavenly beings I typically envision. The experience felt more like some kind of appointment with an unnamable, all-encompassing energy that wasn't quite "other." That sounds so New-Agey. I don't mean it to. I just don't know how else to describe it.

Perhaps poetry is the articulation of dreams. To me, it comes closest to voicing intuition and naming transcendence. Emily Dickinson spoke the language of dreams well. "Truth," she said, "is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it." Gaston Bachelard, in his astonishing Water and Dreams, put it this way: "When forms, mere perishable forms and vain images--perpetual change of surfaces--are put aside, these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They have weight; they constitute a heart." Julian Augustus wrote, "I am not much drawn to any form which has lost its meaning."

What is the "more?" Like most truth, it is ironic. The "more" isn't the transcendence of forms nor the mastery of forms but the reception of forms into the human imagination. [Receptivity is an "anima" attribute, by the way. I just watched The Vagina Monologues and was reminded that openness is archetypally feminine.]

Okay, what am I saying? I don't know. I really need to start writing poetry again. I spent an hour at a marsh near our house yesterday watching dragonflies flit across the water's surface. There were 3" royal blue dragonflies with striped wings, smaller red ones and ones that were smaller still--silver streaks of electricity. I watched these exquisite creatures--those born in the earth's muck--chase each other through the air like helicopters then perch on the corduroy heads of willows like gemstones. I could have sat there all day. Dragonflies are mystery in flight. They are winged desire. They begin life as mud-colored larvae crawling like beetles along the silt floor. They develop in dark, primal water. Again, to quote Bachelard, "In the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; black flowers bloom in matter's darkness. They already possess a velvety touch, a formula for perfume." The brown larvae mature into brilliant insects that iridate the sky. These blooms graced me yesterday with perfume. I let the scent fill my nostrils. It entered my imagination. Just like truth found in poems and dreams.

Why I Like Trent Reznor

2005-08-31T08:02:00.004-07:00

Reznor on religion:
"There are just some things that don't seem very fair in the world, like this fucking hypocrisy of organized religion. I just don't understand how people can blindly believe a bunch of the shit they're fed, to believe it so that they don't think too hard about other issues. 'Be a good boy and you'll go to heaven.' If it works for you, fine, but it doesn't work for me and that pisses me off because I kind of wish it did."

Reznor on music:
"It's like beating your head open and unzipping your chest cavity saying 'here are my guts - everything I've felt, including a lot of stuff I'm not proud of'. It's hard. It uses you up. I walk off stage sometimes and feel like I've just slept with everybody in the audience."

"To a large extent, my music is about me coming to terms with who I am...Sometimes that's a shocking thing because when you peel back the skin, sometimes you find that what you see is not always the person you originally hoped or thought you were."

"Today, musicians are complimented much more on their business plan than their talent. When I see an idiot like Fred Durst [of Limp Bizkit] spouting off about, 'I'm in it for the money, buy my record, buy two copies of it, I'm going to be the best business man, I'm just doing this till I get into movies' -- [he should] sell dish-washing liquid or something. It's damaged music. I don't mean him personally, but this climate has created a very unhealthy situation to spawn new creative acts."

Reznor on love:
"I do actually believe in love. I can't say that I'm 100 percent successful in that department, but I think it's one of the few worthwhile human experiences. It's cooler than anything I can think of..."

Reznor on George W. Bush's reelection:
"One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion." (See related article on what Bush had to do with Nine Inch Nails pulling out of this year's MTV movie awards:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8010244/.)

Reznor on the John/Paul/George/Ringo:

In response to a question posed in Rolling Stone (RS 1127) about who Reznor considers a genius: "It's so obvious, but the Beatles. When I was growing up, the people who liked the Beatles I didn't like, so I didn't pay attention to them. Around The Downward Spiral I really started digging White Album-era Beatles, and it expanded outward from there. They were so far ahead of the game, it's just not fair."

Other reasons...
He's good friends with Tori Amos and Maynard James Keenan. He's close to his grandparents. He's not afraid to admit, "I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am." And he writes lyrics like If I could start again/a million miles away/I would keep myself/I would find a way and cries every time he hears Johnny Cash cover them.

(Dis) Connection

2005-08-28T21:54:00.000-07:00

Feeling a bittersweet pull tonight, a sort of loneliness. I think it's because I went down to the basement to look for a baby picture Sam needed for a school project. While downstairs, I came across an old photo album. In it was a snapshot of a friend I took when we were both nineteen. He's sitting on the ground behind my house in the mountains holding my nephew, Aaron, on his knee. Aaron was three at the time; now he's twenty-five. I can't believe it was that long ago: a lifetime ago. My friend's handsome, tanned face was so youthful, not quite yet a man's. His light brown hair was silky--like a baby's--and slightly disheveled. And his eyes were bright and clear as the mountain sky.

"Defined elementally, eros is the desire for connection," writes James Hollis in The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other.

I guess my feelings tonight are erotic--but in the elemental (Platonic) sense, not the sexual. My friend and I are still in touch; we reestablished contact almost four years ago. In fact, we're much closer now than we were at age nineteen. Which, I'm sure, is why I feel this tug of sadness. We haven't talked in a while, and I miss him. Miss the companionship, the connection. The mysterious, substratal connection only we older versions of those sun-kissed college kids could possibly understand--or endure.

"Once again," sings the ancient poet Sappho, "limb-loosening Eros shakes me, a helpless crawling thing, sweet-bitter."

Molly Peacock on Desire

2005-08-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

Not long ago here on my blog I wrote that I wouldn't make a good Buddhist because I love desire too much. Part of me wrote that with regret because I envy the serenity and emotional/mental clarity many Buddhists seem to possess. And I felt a bit like a misfit: unlike some people, my interior life is kind of messy, cluttered, unsettled. Perhaps the clinical term for this is neurosis? Probably. After all, what's so hard about detachment, objectivity, sleeping with a Monarch butterfly or hungering without taking a bite?

For me, just about everything. I fall more into the categories of "she [who] couldn't marry well hurt and love and beautiful things" (Erica Check) or "she who [struggles to] reconcile the ill-matched threads of her life" (Rilke).

This morning, though, I discovered that I am not the only one who finds the so-called virtues of objectivity and orderliness both unattainable and, well, un-desirable. I found a fellow neurotic/artist in poet Molly Peacock. The following is from her latest collection, Cornucopia...

Why I Am Not a Buddhist
I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I've sought
--you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold--and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

On Stale Air

2005-08-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ars Poetica

2005-08-22T20:47:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday night in my literature class we began our unit on poetry. I forewarned my students that poetry is my first love, and I think about ten minutes into my lecture--after I'd chained the door shut and threatened with a Taser anyone who tried to leave--they had no doubts. We started by discussing their feelings about reading poems. Most said that they saw them as difficult, irrelevant, inaccessible--and thus rarely spent much time bothering with them.

But then something kind of wonderful happened. I passed out a poem that bore neither a title nor a byline. We spent a lot of time talking about it; my students seemed to be deeply affected by the word choices and imagery. They kept asking me what it was called and who wrote it, but I insisted that they'd have to wait and see. Then we watched two video interpretations of the poem, which, as they soon discovered, was really the lyrics to a song: Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." We watched Trent Reznor's interpretation, which showed him in his early twenties lamenting not only his own drug use but the universal capacity for "hurtfulness" inherent in human nature. The video ends on a positive note; however. It shows the decay process of a fox--in reverse. So the corpse transforms from a pile of dust, bone and fur into a fully intact, bushy-tailed fox. The redemption/resurrection symbolism is undeniably Christlike--a detail of which I'm sure Reznor was acutely aware.

After the Nine Inch Nails video, we watched Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt." He filmed it not long before he died, as an aged, ailing man. His take is much more personal, filled with references to his career, family and religious faith.

See, I told the class, poetry is all around us. It touches us in our everyday lives. Most of today's songs contains lyrics, which are nothing more than poems set to music. So, sadly enough, are advertising jingles and television theme songs. Poetry informs our experience of the world much more than most of us realize.

Students began talking about how they've both hurt others in their lives and been hurt themselves. I had an agenda that included ten more poems, but the discussion became so engrossing that we only got to three. One student spoke about how he has spent most of his life hurting himself. He's a perfectionist, he explained, and he's always viewed himself as never good enough. When he was younger, for example, he exercised obsessively. He was driven not simply by a desire for physical fitness but by a need to be "the perfect athlete." I mentioned that I could relate personally to his story. Just that week, I said, I'd been perusing old journals from high school and college. I said I was amazed--and saddened--by how preoccupied I used to be with pleasing an impossibly hard-to-please God. My perfectionism was almost pathological, especially when it reared its head in the form of anorexia. Another student interrupted me and asked, "So how did you make such a dramatic turnaround? You don't seem at all like that now." I told him that it had been a long, slow, uphill process. I'd finally learned, I said, that God--if he or she exists in any comprehensible form--was big enough to handle all of my shortcomings, my doubts, my humanity. And I stopped projecting onto God all of the impossible expectations I'd internalized from my parents, siblings, church, Bible and self. "I also have a really good support system," I added. "I have the best friends in the universe." Others chimed in with their own reflections. I was surprised by our transparency, though maybe I shouldn't have been. Poetry tends to orchestrate these things. It dunks us below the surface, mines us down to our elemental layers, joins us at the spiritual hip.

We also listened to Bruce Cockburn's "Maybe the Poet." (I know, I know, my students don't stand a chance now that I've exposed them to Mr. Cockburn. Poor suckers.) The chorus of the song asserts, Male, female, slave or free / Peaceful or disorderly / Maybe you and he will not agree / But you need him to show you new ways to see / Pay attention to the poet / You need him and you know it.

Poetry is a human necessity--even if we deny its presence in our lives. If only we'd keep our ears open. As Cockburn puts it, Maybe the voice of the spirit / In which case you'd better hear it.

Letter From a Friend

2005-08-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

I am so fortunate. I have a few really good friends who know me well and love me anyway. Here's a note Mechelle sent me the other day. I cherish it---and her. It's a response to an email I'd sent her containing a "contract" I'd drawn up in order to help me deal with some personal stuff. I thought it would help me commit on a rational level to some goals. And I wanted her to help keep me rationally accountable. But alas, she knows me better than I know myself...

Susan,

(Re:) the contract. I know you said today you don't think you can follow through. It's OK. The contract sounded like it would be hard to uphold. Reminded me of the letters you used to write to yourself about being a better wife, Christain, etc. I wish you could go easier on yourself, including not making contracts that are really hard. Love yourself, Susan, even love your longing. I love you and your longing. Love the stuff that hurts in you...

Mechelle

I think it's time to reread Letters to a Young Poet. I need to be reminded how to do the above and how to, as Rilke says, "always be beginning." I keep forgetting these things.

Post Script

2005-08-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

The nice thing about blogs is that they allow you to spout as much ignorance and incongruence as you like without having your credibility challenged. At least blogs like mine---which no one reads anyway :) After thinking more about what I wrote the other day re: "leaps and descents," I need to reconsider--or at least acknowledge--a few things...

Kierkegaard would have been the first to declare that few things in life are unambiguous. His "leap of faith" was complicated, intricate. He said that people may not find "ultimate meaning" in this life but that they could find something they valued and commit themselves to it. In his case, it was Christianity. His "leap" into such a commitment was not blind; it was taken after a lot of premeditation---as much as one can premeditate matters of faith. Which, as he understood well, is a paradox.
My descent into the abyss also requires a large measure of faith. Who knows what they are getting into when they choose to descend? In the end, we all die anyway. Perhaps the real point is that we have a say in how we journey. This freedom of choice is, to me, what infuses life with meaning.
Julian the Apostate was just as committed to his pagan gods as his Christian counterparts were to "The Galilean." So he, too, was caught up in magical thinking. However, he was not evangelical; he was a polytheist who was tolerant of most practices save intolerance. He inspires me because he was a free spirit who loved knowledge and delighted in being alive. I just bought Gore Vidal's novel, Julian. I can't wait to read it, to learn more about this ancient "man of the open hand."
Trent Reznor may not have resorted to The Leap, but he's resorted to plenty of other abyss-avoiding mechanisms including drugs and S & M. Even so, I admire his honesty and ability to turn pain and terror into something art-worthy.
Stephen Crane captures the essence of faith's complexity in the poem, "The Wayfarer:"
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”

Jackson Browne

2005-08-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

Jeff and I saw Jackson Browne in concert the other night. He performed at Boulder's Fox Theatre, an intimate hole-in-the-wall that holds no more than a couple hundred people. We were ten feet from the stage as Leo Kottke and Mike Gordon (former Phish bassist) warmed up and Browne sang a two-hour set. It was wunderbar. There were many highlights, including a moving rendition of "Lives in the Balance," songs during which bluegrass band Nickel Creek came out and joined Browne onstage—and an extended acoustic version of "The Pretender." My favorite moment of the evening, however, was hearing the song, "Sky Blue and Black." It actually made me cry. I don't know why, but the older I get, the more I catch myself pausing in the middle of experiences and shooting mental freeze frames. I think to myself, "This hour here in this room with these people, this collective body heat, these rhythms, these lyrics and these sensations—like individual snowflakes—will never, ever occur exactly like this again. " Which is why I wanted to savor every word of "Sky Blue and Black"—along with certain memories and yearnings it conjures...

Sky Blue and Black

In the calling out to one another
Of the lovers up and down the strand
In the sound of the waves and the cries
Of the seagulls circling the sand
In the fragments of the songs
Carried down the wind from some radio
In the murmuring of the city in the distance
Ominous and low
I hear the sound of the world where we played
And the far too simple beauty
Of the promises we made

If you ever need holding
Call my name, I’ll be there
If you ever need holding
And no holding back, I’ll see you through
Sky blue and black

Where the touch of the lover ends
And the soul of the friend begins
There’s a need to be separate and a need to be one
And a struggle neither wins
Where you gave me the world I was in
And a place I could make a stand
I could never see how you doubted me
When I’d let go of your hand
Yeah, and I was much younger then
And I must have thought that I would know
If things were going to end
And the heavens were rolling
Like a wheel on a track
And our sky was unfolding
And it’ll never fold back
Sky blue and black

And I’d have fought the world for you
If I thought that you wanted me to
Or put aside what was true or untrue
If I’d known that’s what you needed
What you needed me to do
But the moment has passed by me now
To have put away my pride
And just come through for you somehow

If you ever need holding
Call my name, I’ll be there
If you ever need holding
And no holding back, I’ll see you through
You’re the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
You’re the whispering and the sighing
Of my tires in the rain
You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue
That’s the way love is

That’s the way love is
That’s the way love is
Sky blue and black

Leaps and Descents

2005-08-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Spiraling,
spiraling,
down,
down....

I’m thinking about the song, “Cold Water” by Damien Rice.

Cold, cold water surrounds me now
And all I've got is your hand
Lord, can you hear me now?
Lord, can you hear me now?
Lord, can you hear me now?
Or am I lost?

It aptly expresses my own current feelings. Sometimes I miss God so much—the God who, in my former, simpler faith, was so tangible to me. The God of the Bible, the Christian God, my Heavenly Father whose love was so accessible I could feel his spirit in my marrow.

Now, however, that god is the god of The Leap. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. I’m no longer willing nor capable of making such leaps. In the above song, Rice laments his profound sense of isolation and disconnectedness. His anguish is palpable. He pulls me in with word and melody; I am there in the water, floating, treading, slipping under. But then the monks enter the atmosphere with their haunting, monotonic chant, bearing a message from God: “Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I’m here. I love you.” And there it is: the Leap.

I have a saying I often tell my kids, a twist on the Golden Rule: “Treat others the way you wish they treated you, not the way they necessarily do treat you.” In other words, model the ideal behavior rather than imitate the base. In a way, I think this is what we do when it comes to God: Envision the ideal and live as if it were real rather than face the real-ity of what is. This is probably a bad analogy; I guess my point is that the concept of God has become to me little more than a preferable illusion. Rather than drown alone in the icy water of what is, we imagine a fatherly figure reaching out to hold our hand. We are children, terrified of this immense, unpredictable, hostile world, and we long for arms, a hand, a lap, the enfolding of another around us. I completely understand this. Many days I’d rather return to the womb than face my life.

Yet…"How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" (John 3:4 KJV). How can we go back? In my opinion, we can’t. At least I can’t. I refuse to revert back to childish ways, to magical thinking. Even if I wanted to (which I often do, to be honest), I would not be able to. For how can a man (person)...?

In my literature class this week we’re reading Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and discussing Existentialism. Kierkegaard was an existentialistic theologian who somehow managed to retain his belief in the Judeo-Christian God. From the little I know about him, he was brilliant. Still, he opted for hopeful imagination rather than reason when he confronted the abyss. I had a waking dream a number of years ago in which this Middle-Eastern-looking guy in a skull-cap and colorful burlap robe appeared to me on a grassy plateau. We walked together, then started skipping and laughing giddily. Then we came to a crevasse deep and wide as Colorado’s Royal Gorge. I couldn’t see to the bottom of it; it was pitch black. My companion sprang across the chasm like a gazelle and stood on the other side, smiling. “Come on!” he yelled. “Just jump!” I had the sense that I probably could have if I really wanted to; after all, my friend did it. Yet I knew I shouldn’t. “No,” I yelled back, “I’ve got to go through the abyss.” He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I wait at the edge of you.” Then I started down, down into the dark unknown.

I suppose I’m down here right now writing this. Often I want to reach for a hand, but there is no hand. Is the consequent despair worth it? I don’t know. I could probably imagine a hand and convince myself that it’s real and even begin to feel it on my skin. But would that make it real?

The God we’ve managed to envisage down through the centuries and record in sacred texts has given us both “a hand” and a crippled leg. More people have been killed in the name of this Hope Personified/Deified than for any other reason. And on those who haven’t been able to suspend reason and tacitly put their faith in this God, cruelty has been inflicted in countless ways. I think of Julian, the Roman emperor (and nephew of Constantine) whom the Christians nicknamed “Julian the Apostate.” He was an incredible man with a superb intellect who knew more about Christianity than most of his contemporaries yet couldn’t put his faith in it. He couldn’t take the Leap. Instead, he loved the pagan myths, the wisdom of philosophers and the ancient poems. Thus, he was demonized by the Church not only during his lifetime but by later generations.

It’s lonely down here. However, I take comfort in the fact that others like Julian have passed this way before me. And I’m convinced that I’m doing what is right for me: descending and climbing rather than vaulting across the here and now toward some illusory wished-for.

[Just thought of another song that has to do, like the Rice song, with loneliness. In this song, though, Trent Reznor--like a true, angst-riddled existentialist (and fatalist?)--does not resort to The Leap. I'm not sure who the "you" he's addressing is. Could it be God? I don't know.]

"All The Love In The World"

Watching all the insects march along
Seem to know right where they belong
Smears of face reflecting in the chrome
Hiding in the crowd I'm all alone

No one's heard a single word I've said
They don't sound as good outside my head
It looks as if the past is here to stay
I've become a million miles away

Why do you get all the love in the world?

All the jagged edges dissapear
Colors all look brighter when you're near
The stars are all afire in the sky
Sometimes I get so lonely I could die

Why do you get all the love in the world?

--Nine Inch Nails

Book recommendation: Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. I don't agree with him on every point--he's blunt and outspoken--but his arguments are extremely compelling (and well-documented). He effectively exposes the insidiousness of fundamentalist religion, especially modern-day Islam. Here's a quote: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death" (p. 123). A frightening reality. To read an interview with Harris, go to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/542154/002-5665840-8513608.

"Art" by Herman Melville

2005-08-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.

Landslide

2005-08-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to Stevie Nick's rich, gauzy voice singing "Landslide." I was reminded that a few years ago I started thinking about the "you" in line 11 as both Jesus and my extended family. It is hard to grow up (spiritually, anyway) when so many of those around you (and within you) beg you to remain a child. Part of you feels apologetic, as if you've somehow wronged them in the shedding of your old skin. Did Adam and Eve feel it? From the Genesis account, it sure seems so. Suddenly, in their fallen (a.k.a. enlightened, independent) state, they understood that they were naked--and they felt ashamed. They tried to hide from God. But maybe they presumed wrongly about God's reaction. Maybe Moses or whoever jotted the account down got it wrong. God sent them on their way from Eden (childhood?) clothed in animal skins he tailored for them. This sounds to me as if he was interested in equipping them against the elements, not punishing them for growing up.

Last night Sam asked me why I didn't resort to tactics like guilt or fear on him and his siblings in order to motivate them to do chores.

"Why would I want to do that?" I asked him.
"Well, I've seen Aunt Nancy do it with Evan and Lexie..."

Sam had just spent several days at my sister's house. My sister is very good at housekeeping and organizing. Sam loves structure; he thrives in such environments. Yet, earlier yesterday he'd said, "I don't think Evan and Lexie obey their parents out of love but out of fear. Their parents have taught them that disobeying your parents is the same as disobeying God. So they're always afraid of getting punished." (He'd also asked several questions about hell, so I assume he'd heard about that delightful concept while at his cousins,' too.)

I explained to Sam that, while I had been well-acquainted with guilt and fear as a child, I refused, "to lay those trips on you guys. I want you to do your chores because you love me, not because you fear punishment."

Of course, fear often gets you more efficient results than lovingkindness--especially for laid-back types like me who value revery over housecleaning.

But I don't care. In my opinion, efficiency and results are overrated. After Adam and Eve vacated the garden, God stationed an angel bearing a flaming sword at the entrance. He didn't want anyone else to enter. Not only did he want to make sure that no one ate of the Tree of Life, but I like to imagine that he also had decided to let the garden grow wild. They say that Eden is located somewhere in modern-day Iraq. No one has found it, though, because it's overgrown with weeds, wildflowers and, perhaps, derelict fruit trees. Now it's just an unremarkable patch of terrain.

When people change, landscapes change. There is alteration--sometimes even upheaval, overturned earth. But there is also renewal and growth and creation. Maybe God is in the unpredictable movement, the quake and the shiver and the wind rustling through leaves--not in the greenhouse.

Landslide (1975)
I took my love, I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
'Till the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life
Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too
Oh, take my love, take it down
Climb a mountain and turn around
If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well the landslide will bring it down
If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well the landslide will bring it down.

Messages? Meanings?

2005-07-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream in which I was looking through a little book. It was old and illustrated with woodcut drawings. On the page I read there was a picture of a fox, followed by this sentence: “When we sleep, it’s to rest, not to outwit metananda (or metanda?).” I woke up and immediately wrote it down, excited that I’d been given some kind of written message in my dream. I knew that a fox can symbolize the archetypical trickster. But I was confused. What was metananda/metanda? I knew that meta means “change,” as in “metamorphosis." But I didn't know the defininition (or if there even was one) of metananda. When I got to work, I looked it up. All I could find was a Harvard-educated Buddhist Monk whose last name is Metananda. So what does it all mean? In the middle of my dream (I’d been dreaming that I was at some kind of camp and was participating in a group game. We were building a train made up of both our bodies and real train cars. I was acting as a connector between two cars.), I somehow ended up with this little book. Its message seemed to be telling me that, even though I’m asleep, I can’t avoid some kind of change/transformation that is taking place. Am I trying to “outwit” (like a fox?) whatever it is? I don't know. Very strange. Fascinating. I wonder what Jung would say.

On my way to work today I heard a song on the radio that stirs me every time I hear it: Toadies’ “Possum Lake.” I find it compelling on several levels. First of all, Todd Lewis’ voice is so sexy; I’m not quite sure how to describe it, but it’s extremely passionate—almost pained. And the lyrics…Ah, the lyrics. It’s about a boy and girl at a lake who go behind a building where he tries to seduce her. “I’m not gonna lie,” he tells her, “I’ll not be a gentleman/Behind the boathouse/I'll show you my dark secret.” And the fact that he weaves in references to Jesus only adds to the seductiveness. Lewis grew up in the Bible Belt, the son of a fundamentalist minister, so his Jesus-laden pleas sizzle with irony. Reminds me of when I was in 5th grade and attending Temple Christian School in Dayton, Ohio. There was a boy in the grade above me who caught my eye. His name was Eddie Markley, and unlike many of the other boys I’d known since infancy, Eddie hadn’t grown up in the church. Instead, his wealthy aunt was paying for him to attend private school. I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn’t quite “one of the crowd.” This made him, in my eyes, the cutest, most interesting boy in school. Eddie noticed me, too. We often stared at each other on the playground or in the lunchroom. Eventually we met because my nephew, who was also in 6th grade at the school, blabbed to Eddie that I liked him. But instead of putting him off or turning him bashful, the revelation emboldened Eddie. He started writing me notes and hanging out with me on the playground. Soon we were meeting behind the church building to kiss. He even kissed me once in front of everyone at a birthday party. I acted shy about our rendezvous and the birthday kiss, but to be honest, I was intoxicated by Eddie and our youthful displays of affection. I was, for the most part, a “good girl;” I wanted to follow the rules. Still, I also wanted to taste the allure of taboo. Perhaps this is why Todd Lewis and his songs appeal to me: He’s like the clean-cut Baptist boys who walk around filled with desires. If you look carefully enough, you can glimpse a carnal amber flicker in their eyes. Growing up, I found these boys irresistible. I guess I’ve always been attracted to slightly blemished sheep—to those who aren't afraid to be ungentlemanly now and then.

On a totally different note (I think)…After the Toadies song, the next song that came on was Tori Amos’ “Sleeps With Butterflies,” another song that has special meaning to me. Here are the lyrics:

Airplanes
Take you away again
Are you flying
Above where we live
Then I look up a glare in my eyes
Are you having regrets about last night
I'm not but I like rivers that rush in
So then I dove in
Is there trouble ahead
For you the acrobat
I won't push you unless you have a net
You say the word
You know I will find you
Or if you need some time
I don't mind
I don't hold on
To the tail of your kite
I'm not like the girls that you've known
But I believe I'm worth coming home to
Kiss away night
This girl only sleeps with butterflies
With butterflies
So go on and fly then boy

Balloons
Look good from on the ground
I fear with pins and needles around
We may fall then stumble
Upon a carousel
It could take us anywhere
I'm not like the girls that you've known
But I believe I'm worth coming home to
Kiss away night
This girl only sleeps with butterflies
With butterflies
With butterflies
So go on and fly boy

Sadly, this song makes me aware of the fact that, while I do like rivers that rush in, I also tend to be an "attacher."I wouldn't be a good Buddhist because I tend to fasten myself to things—people and ideals. I wish I were better at setting things free, keeping my hands/heart off kite strings. I wish I were better at agape. Agape loves no matter what. And it doesn't lead to death--unlike another kind of love. Sigh...I want to learn to do the selfless thing: sleep with a butterfly.

Three messages received in the first hour of my day...Hmmm...Maybe these little meanings flit into our lives to remind us that we're alive rather than dead, that we're here, walking this earth, living this life. This (is) life.

July 16th

2005-07-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm officially a college professor now, albeit a very green one. I taught my first lit class two nights ago, and my first English comp preparation class this morning. Both went well. Who knows? Maybe teaching will prove to be a good fit for me.

Reading:
Almost finished with Kirsch's God Against the Gods. It's fascinating--about the history of monotheism vs. polytheism. So much of Western history, I'm reminded, was determined by Constantine's decision (for political reasons, mostly) to embrace Christianity. The book's also been making me think about God as a father figure. If we would stop casting God in that role, perhaps we'd stop living with the fantastic notion that we are going to be tended to. Yesterday on the [extremely-annoying-yet-appealing-to-masochistic-ex-fundies-like-me] radio show, The Bible Answer Man, the host, Hank Hanegraaff, told a woman who was upset about the tragedy in Chechnya (it was a rebroadcast) that God allows horrific suffering because he is a good father. Okay: A.) Since when do fathers refuse to protect their children? B.) What kind of father places a gazillion conditions on his love for his children? and C.) Who the hell appointed the creator of the universe a.k.a. The Ground of Being to be our FATHER in the first place? [Well, okay, so the writers of the Old Testament started the trend. Moses told Pharoah that God referred to Israel as "My firstborn son." And okay, Jesus called God, "Abba" (daddy). Nonetheless...] I think Freud was right: most of us remain retarded and fixated on parental figures our entire lives. "Suck, suck, suck," goes little Maggie Simpson.

I also started reading the Robert Boswell novel, The Geography of Desire. And I'm still nibbling away at Bataille's Erotism: Death and Sensuality. It's amazing.

Listening to:
My husband Jeff and I saw Robert Plant in concert this week. He's one of my favorite pop/rock vocalists; very bluesy and soulful--and moving toward a more "world" sound these days. Highlights for me were his cover of the Youngblood's "Darkness, Darkness" and Led Zep's "Gallows Pole." He still has it. Also listening to Damien Rice's B-Sides. The CD is a mixed bag (mostly demos and live recordings), but Damien's beautiful voice--along with his segue into French in the first song--make it worth the ten bucks I plunked down.

Watching:
My family saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this weekend. I disliked 80% of it. (10% of the dislike I'd have to attribute to running into Johnny, a guy in my office, at the theater. But that's another story for another day.) Although I love the Roald Dahl book--and the script does maintain most of the book's integrity--I hated Tim Burton's dark interpretation of the story. I also found Willy Wonka downright creepy. (Which is a shame because Johnny Depp is usually swell in my book.) My kids hated the film, too. Sam said it was the worst movie he's ever seen--which makes it pretty bad, considering Sam has seen The Pokeman Movie two or three times.

Feeling:
Excited about life but also rather lost--like a little girl wandering aroud a department store after being separated from her mother. In fact, I've had two dreams in a row in which my mom is accompanying me somewhere, helping me do something. I rarely ever dream about her, so I'm wondering if it has to do with my current sense of displacement. I know it does. The Summer of My Displacement: perhaps a good title for a cheesy novel.

Good Parenting

2005-07-03T09:01:00.004-07:00

Yesterday morning my husband Jeff and I were at, of all places, a Grease Monkey shop getting our oil changed. While waiting in the lobby, I overheard the following conversation between a woman and her 7-ish-year-old son:

Boy: "So am I a pagan, too?"
Mom: "Honey, you can be whatever you want to be. I'm pagan, but your dad is Christian. Remember how you were baptized as a baby in an Episcopal church? We respect both religions in our family. When you're older, you'll be able to choose for yourself how God best makes sense to you."

Immediately, I said to the woman, "You're a good parent." She looked at me, not quite sure I was talking to her. "Sorry," I said, "I was eavesdropping." She smiled and turned back to her son. Later, her husband came in, and then they left together. Before they walked out the door, though, she turned around and caught my eye. "Take care," she said and smiled again.

I didn't really think any more about the incident until last night. My 13-year-old son, Sam, and I were driving home from his friend's house. He asked me about a process through which his friend was currently going at his church: confirmation. I explained the process as best as I could, concluding with the summary, "Confirmation is, basically, a time when people who 'come of age' confirm their adherence to church doctrine."

"So," Sam replied, "they're confirming what they've been taught, not necessarily what they've thought critically about." (Not to brag, but how did I end up with such smart kids? All three constantly challenge and amaze me.) I said he was right in a lot of ways, although most people of faith sincerely believe in what they're confirming. "But they're ignorant," Sam shot back. I reminded him that ignorant does not necessarily mean stupid. You can be intelligent yet ignorant. "I know," he said. "But how can anyone believe that they have THE TRUTH when they don't know about anything but their own beliefs?" He was right. I told him about the conversation I overheard at Grease Monkey and how I told the woman she was a good parent. I told him my all-time favorite Bruce Cockburn lyric, "Everything is bullshit but the open hand." We talked about the Bible, about the value of mythology, about the meaning of religion (literally, it means, "re-union") and how it's basically, as Plato imagined it, the soul's search for the missing connection (to God, to Truth, to Beauty) it knew before it was born. We discussed the usefulness of religion--how it helps people cope with the terror of the unknown, with their feelings of meaninglessness, with their mortality. I said religion can be both terrible and wonderful but either way it makes life utterly interesting. We talked about paganism and the terrorists and fundamentalists/literalists, and about the evangelical mindset. Sam said he didn't want to be a person who did things out of guilt ("like win souls," he said) but rather out of a love of life. "So maybe by loving life you'd be loving God?" I asked. "Yep," he said. "I'd let life teach me."

If you knew me well, you'd know that both of these conversations (with the woman at Grease Monkey, with Sam) are radically different from ones I would have had even a decade ago. I grew up a fundamentalist Christian. Our church motto was, "Old-fashioned, independent, fundamental, Bible-believing Baptists and proud of it." Jerry Falwell regularly filled our pulpit as a guest speaker. I was taught to judge anyone who did not believe as I; of course, this judgment was cloaked in "love" (pity?) and a deep desire to win their hell-bound souls to Christ. I had certainty, eternal security and a special place in a male, triune God's heart. I had everything--everything except humanity. I was fearful of what I didn't understand, hated mystery, had no compassion for 99.9% of the rest of the world's population and was amazingly arrogant, self-righteous and...drum roll, please...ignorant. (Here's a link to my childhood church's web site, just in case you don't believe me: http://www.cbtministries.org/index.htm)

My friend Steve put it succinctly not long ago by saying that the betrayal of one's religion is really the betrayal of one's family. Religion and family are, in most cases, intimately entangled. Steve is right. In my own experience, my extended family feels as if I have turned my back on *them,* just as much--if not more than--the Judeo-Christian God. Heck, they've recently informed me that I was never really "born again" in the first place--since I've been able to get up and so seemingly easily walk away. This is their rationalization, anyway. It allows them to maintain their "rightness."

Whatever...

All I know is that I love my family, I love the mystery I sometimes call God, and I love the pagan woman at Grease Monkey. I could tell she'd probably gotten her share of scorn for her beliefs. When she first looked at me, she seemed defensive. But when she saw that I was sincere, she smiled. All of us are in the same boat. We're all scared. All of us want to be special in someone's eyes--namely, the someone who went to the trouble of creating this majestic universe. All of us want to feel that our lives have purpose. None of us wants to die. But it's what each of us does with these desires that differentiates us. I want the open hand. I don't want my life to be a closed fist. Being less ignorant now has humbled me greatly; I've had to give up a lot of preconceived, warm-fuzzy notions. I understand why they say, when something hurts, that it "smarts." Gaining wisdom is often a painful endeavor. And costly. I'm no longer close to my extended family the way we once were. I've committed--according to them--the unpardonable sin. I'm a blasphemer who loves story more than dogma. And I have few--if any--answers.

But then I look at my son Sam and know that with wisdom also comes great joy. Hopefully he and my other kids will grow up to be people who are kind and compassionate, who wake up and say, "Okay, life, what do you have to teach me today?" If they do, I will be what the psalmist called "exceedingly glad." Not that their lives will be easy and pain-free; quite the contrary. But they will be wise. I told Sam as we pulled into the driveway last night that it all boils down to, as my favorite poet Rilke puts it, loving the questions. "Never stop loving them," I said, "and everything will be okay. It'll be just as it should be."

The Greatest Sin

2005-06-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

Perhaps shame is the greatest sin, worse than any other.
--Gwynneve, Confessions of a Pagan Nun

On many levels I agree with the above statement; however, I think I'd alter it to read, "Perhaps to inflict shame is the greatest sin." This morning I finished Kate Horsley's, Confessions of a Pagan Nun. It's one of the best books I've read all year. The story affected me the way great poetry or music affects me: I feel both diminished and enlarged; I have both nothing to say in response and much too much to say. I suppose you could argue that the main theme of the novel is the paradox of saying but not saying--the elusive yet reconciliatory embrace of mystery.

Confessions is about Gwynneve, a medeival Irish nun who was raised by pagans. Though she loves Christ, she is also--much to St. John's and her contemporaries' consternation--a lover of "the world and the things in the world" (see I John 2:15). She's somehow able to harmonize the many dualities she encounters during this transitional period of history by means of two things: imagination and words. Both are incredibly powerful--able to instigate bloodshed and able to course like familiar blood in veins. It's in both that she puts her faith.

Ultimately, Gwynneve muses, "The truth may be too brilliant a light, too vast for words or other mental geometries." To revere the light while refusing to be ashamed or afraid of what lurks in the dark is, according to the novel, to be free. "I am dangerous," writes Gwynneve, "only when I am urged to be what I am not."

I have much more to say (about the love story between Gwynneve and the druid Giannon, her "soul's twin," about her vibrant, earthy mother, Murrynn, and about the lyricism of Horsley's writing), but at the same time, I'm rendered mute (!). I'll let the book speak (or not speak?) for itself. By all means, read it. Receive its shadows and secrets, its emerald-and-moss-covered luminosity. As John Lennon said, "It's all about God anyway."

Shards from Louise Gluck's Vita Nova

2005-06-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

From "Lute Song:"

I made a harp of disaster
to perpetuate the beauty of my last love.
Yet my anguish, such as it is,
remains the struggle for form

and my dreams, if I speak openly,
less the wish to be remembered
than the wish to survive...

From "Lament:"

A terrible thing is happening--my love
is dying again, my love who has died already:
died and been mourned. And music continues,
music of separation: the trees
become instruments.

How cruel the earth...

...He is dying again,
and the world also. Dying the rest of my life...

From "Relic:"

I think sometimes
our consolations are the costliest thing.

From "Orfeo:"

...there is no music like this
without real grief.

Louise Gluck, Vita Nova, 1999. From SF

June 23rd

2005-06-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

Erotism is assenting to life even in death.
--Georges Bataille

Currently reading:
Confessions of a Pagan Nun by Kate Horsley
Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Bataille
Poems of Yeats
Soul Mates by Thomas Moore

Currently feeling:
Sad. Full of grief. Always the vague, lingering grief. The stone in the throat.

Currently writing:
I'm off tomorrow, so I'm going to set up my new laptop, load my new writing software (Storyweaver) and work on my novel. I'm thinking about changing the working title from Full Immersion Water Baptism to The Patience of Beauty. I also plan on reading a picture book on dragonflies--for research. Will probably listen to Bach while writing. He touches me.

The Collector

2005-06-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

I am so angry. (I’m actually writing this a day after my first entry—but I did something wrong yesterday and it didn’t publish correctly.) I’m angry because of a novel I just finished, John Fowles’ The Collector. He paints his two characters so well that I found myself loving one and loathing—having murderous feelings toward—the other. Without giving too much away...The Collector is the story of a Londoner named Frederick who has no interiority. He’s hollow and artless and narcissistic. (Even Bartleby had more substance.) His only interest is butterfly collecting. He’s just going about his mundane life as a clerk (an unmarried, asexual, still-living-at-home-with-his-aunt clerk, to be exact) when he notices a beautiful young coed named Miranda who lives near his office. He begins to stalk her. Then he comes into some money after winning the lottery, and this emboldens him. He decides he wants to “take” Miranda for himself, so he kidnaps her and keeps her locked in a room in his cellar. (His aunt’s on holiday in Australia, so he’s living alone by this time.) For the first half of the book, we see events through Frederick’s eyes. While I did sympathize a bit with his dreary existence, I mostly despised him for being weak and spiritually vacant. “I could *so* kick his ass,” I thought to myself. His indifference and ineffectuality and utter selfishness are more despicable to me than stupidity or ignorance or hostility. At least there is a spark of something in the misguided and bitter. Frederick, on the other hand, is nothing but ash.

Then there’s Miranda, whom we hear from in the second half of the book. She’s keeping a diary. She’s everything that Frederick is not. She’s smart and perceptive, with a voracious appetite for life. An art student, she appreciates all forms of creativity and says she most hates “those who don’t make anything.” She also figures Frederick out very quickly; she knows she’s nothing more to him than a butterfly in a killing glass. She calls the other specimens in his collection her “fellow abductees.” Frederick can’t love anyone or anything, so he imprisons Miranda in order to indulge his admiration for her outer beauty. He knows nothing about her person. Fortunately, Fowles does allow the reader that pleasure. I fell in love with Miranda. I wish she were a real person. She’d be a close friend—or a sister. Here are my favorite lines from their conversations and her diary:

· “Ugly ornaments don’t deserve to exist…He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.”
· “I’m thinking of all the butterflies that would have come from these if you’d let them live. I’m thinking of all the living beauty you’ve ended…You’re like a miser, you hoard up all the beauty in these drawers.”
· “Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?…Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?”
· “The essences. Not the things themselves.”
· “Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”
· “It’s feeling that matters. Can’t you see?”
· [Thinking about a man named George, whom she loves...] “The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.”
· “Uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.”

What makes me so angry is the way Frederick—and people like him—snuff out life by trying to “capture” it. You can’t possess another living thing. Not its essence, anyway. Why do we have to get our hands on life? Grab, grab, grab. Greed, greed, greed. Like the Japanese tourists you see at the Grand Canyon who never really look at the landscape; they’re too busy capturing a still shot for their scrap book. I wrote author Thomas Moore a few weeks ago. I titled the subject of my email, “Eros and other difficulties.” (I was struggling with some of my own "longing" issues.) When he wrote back he’d changed the title to “Winged desire.” I like that. To look at a thing—even desire itself—without touching it. “To have,” writes poet Louise Gluck, “honored hunger.” Is there a way to honor hunger while neither feeding nor supressing it?

In the Beginning...Beauty

2005-06-22T07:48:00.001-07:00

I only have a minute. I'm at work and am heading out the door. First, though, I want to jot down some thoughts in honor of beginnings...and beauty. I've been thinking a lot about the latter concept and am beginning to imagine that it is vital to my search for understanding. I have so much to learn, but what I do know now--today, this very minute--is that beauty is not the same as attractiveness or loveliness. Rather, it's the fragile splendor of the breakdown (Frou Frou), the residue of immense patience (Witter Byner), the beginning of terror (Rainer Maria Rilke), the blood-indigo hue of pain (Trent Reznor), and the "Other" that Plato, Jung, Woolf, Faulkner, Tillich, Gluck and other seekers said is the sole object of soulful desire. More so even than truth, which Keats insisted is synonymous with beauty. I also like what Robinson Jeffers called it: "the sole business of poetry." Everything else, he said, is a reason but not the reason. I want to catch a holy glimpse before I die of this paradoxical ideal the Greeks referred to as kallos--from which we get the English calli. Calli + graphy = beauty-filled writing. Since beauty encompasses much more than what is aesthetically appealing, however, I think it's only fitting to name my web log Calli + graffito (Italian for colloquial, often vulgar and defacing, inscriptions). So welcome to my quest for beauty. Welcome to Calligraffiti.