I discovered yesterday, to my delight and chagrin, that I like the Ken Ken puzzles that appear next to the crossword puzzle in the New York Times: in a Ken Ken puzzle, you have a four or six frame grid which, when filled in, have the numbers 1-4, or 1-6 in each horizontal and vertical row; the grid itself is broken up into smaller sections, and in each section you are to enter the number that will yield a given number after performing the indicated mathematical function - adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying. Thus if you have a three panel section on a six frame grid that carries the notation "20x" it means that the section should be filled out with the numbers 1, 4, and 5 but that to figure out where to put them, you have to see how the numbers work in the horizontal and vertical arrays.
Get it? If not, no worries; you will not have to stress out about the hours that will be sucked up by this particular past time, though I'm told that such logic games stave off dementia in the long haul. This is just a way of introducing the fact that rather than pick up today's paper with a whole fresh set of puzzles that would delete an hour or so from other productive forms of activity, I contented myself with reading yesterday's news, which in the Times includes the weekly science section. Nicholas Wade's article on genetic variation (and the lack thereof) in grapes contains the great lines: "The purpose of sex, though this is perhaps not widely appreciated, is recombination,...the new combinations of genes provide variation for evolution to work on, and in particular they let slow-growing things like plants and animals keep one step ahead of the microbes that prey upon them."
While one might argue that we should in fact be seeing microbes as co-conspirators in the ongoing acts of creation, this kind of insight is well worth the two bucks that a New York Times will set you back if you pick it up in your local Acme in suburban Philadelphia, but the article that is staying with me is one by Ben Daitz, a doctor reporting on the ways in which health care workers affiliated with the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital open up conversations with Navajo families about end-of-life directives, a tricky negotiation in a cultural context in which it is understood that to speak of death is to invite it.
The staff ended up composing a poem:
"When that time comes, when my last breath leaves me, I choose to die in peace to meet Shi-dy-in."
Here, I'm thinking of the wisdom of these folks in understanding that some things have to be approached in lyric time; keeping this in mind in the wake of a year in which I was repeatedly reminded of all the different ways in which our expected narratives of our lives get interrupted and transformed and thinking of the poets -- Lucille Clifton, John Rybicki, Joy Harjo, Barbara Ras -- who helped to show the way through.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Just Kids
I have to admit that when I started Patti Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir, I wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was about; her recollections of her childhood in a working-to-middle class neighborhood outside of Philly straightforwardly conveys her camaraderie with her siblings, the specter of childhood diseases that confined her to bed for weeks on end, the horror of the social stigma of getting pregnant at 19 while working her way through Glassboro State College for a teaching certificate, falling from grace in her neighbors' eyes from the smart eldest daughter who was going to make something of herself to something lower than everyday trash.
Knowing something of the kind of life-changing effect her work has had on friends just a half-generation older than my own, I was thinking that this was clearly a situation in which the good folks who were on the award committee were themselves so smitten with Ms. Smith that whatever she made of her coming of age as an artist alongside Robert Mapplethorpe was going to be taken as holy writ from on high. As someone who probably heard her first as that other singer on Bruce Springsteen's "Because the night" and who first listened to Horses in its entirety within the last year (the kind of admission of pop cultural ignorance that, in my household, leads to someone standing at the dinner table, pointing to the kitchen door, and saying with 90% humorous intent "Out! Get OUT!") I could completely understand that I'm basically so behind the curve on her entire career that all that she has done that has been revolutionary, I've gotten via other artists in their various takes on and homages to her work, so when I finally get to the source I can't fully appreciate what she was doing in bridging beat poetry and rock n' roll.
So while my Bronx-born and Ardmore-reared kin cut their wisdom teeth on Smith's music, I was steeping in the music of Lynryd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet, thanks to the programming selections of radio stations in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the era that Patti Smith was galvanizing audiences in New York City and in other places where folks were willing to lend an ear to the heresy that "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" -- which Smith breaks down as an assertion of her decision as an artist to take responsibility for her actions, in a radical Christ-like way.
The point at which the memoir really began to draw me in is as Smith narrates her early days with Mapplethorpe, whom she first encounters while trying to crash with friends from home who have enrolled at Pratt, next as a customer at Brentano's who purchases -- at the astronomical price of $18.00, a Persian necklace that functions as a talisman for Smith, and then in Washington Square Park where Smith is trying to duck out of a date that is taking a turn she doesn't want to follow. As they scrape together a household - trashpicking a mattress and religious icons for their $80/month apartment, debating over whether to spend the extra dime for the chocolate milk Robert craves from the automat -- they spend free days riding the F train out to Coney Island or taking in the scene in Washington Square Park. Smith writes that one day "We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us...'Oh take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'"
Of course, the joke that we're all in on is that they are just kids - doing things like shoplifting copies of Rimbaud from second hand bookstores because they don't have the 99 cents to buy the copy, only being able to buy one hot dog on their trips out to Coney Island, with Robert eating the lion's share of the sausage while Patti eats most of the saurkraut - but they are also going to become Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. From Smith's point of view, what we see as inevitable is shown to be a sort of miracle -- the only way she is able to cover the bus fare to New York is because she finds a pocketbook with $18.00; when she returns from a trip to Paris she finds Robert in the grip of a potentially life-threatening illness, in an apartment where a murder takes place on the front steps her first night back - only the advice of a transvestite junkie at the fleabag motel to which they have fled convinces Patti to take Robert to the Chelsea Hotel, where she talks their way into a room by brandishing their portfolios (which, of course, would in fact now be worth far more than their weight in gold) and spinning tales of getting an advance from her job (which she is in fact able to do); in pursuing an interview with a drummer who has introduced himself to her as Slim, she ends up in a relationship with Sam Shepard in which she begins to make a name for herself as a poet, and starts to find her home in rock 'n roll.
There are also moment at which her straightforward prose gives way to the kind of lyricism that animates her songs: in writing of her friendship with the musician Matthew Reich, she notes that "I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe." When I read lines like that, I begin to get her shamanistic way with words and understand how she's worked her magic on so many lives.
Knowing something of the kind of life-changing effect her work has had on friends just a half-generation older than my own, I was thinking that this was clearly a situation in which the good folks who were on the award committee were themselves so smitten with Ms. Smith that whatever she made of her coming of age as an artist alongside Robert Mapplethorpe was going to be taken as holy writ from on high. As someone who probably heard her first as that other singer on Bruce Springsteen's "Because the night" and who first listened to Horses in its entirety within the last year (the kind of admission of pop cultural ignorance that, in my household, leads to someone standing at the dinner table, pointing to the kitchen door, and saying with 90% humorous intent "Out! Get OUT!") I could completely understand that I'm basically so behind the curve on her entire career that all that she has done that has been revolutionary, I've gotten via other artists in their various takes on and homages to her work, so when I finally get to the source I can't fully appreciate what she was doing in bridging beat poetry and rock n' roll.
So while my Bronx-born and Ardmore-reared kin cut their wisdom teeth on Smith's music, I was steeping in the music of Lynryd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet, thanks to the programming selections of radio stations in Southwestern Pennsylvania in the era that Patti Smith was galvanizing audiences in New York City and in other places where folks were willing to lend an ear to the heresy that "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" -- which Smith breaks down as an assertion of her decision as an artist to take responsibility for her actions, in a radical Christ-like way.
The point at which the memoir really began to draw me in is as Smith narrates her early days with Mapplethorpe, whom she first encounters while trying to crash with friends from home who have enrolled at Pratt, next as a customer at Brentano's who purchases -- at the astronomical price of $18.00, a Persian necklace that functions as a talisman for Smith, and then in Washington Square Park where Smith is trying to duck out of a date that is taking a turn she doesn't want to follow. As they scrape together a household - trashpicking a mattress and religious icons for their $80/month apartment, debating over whether to spend the extra dime for the chocolate milk Robert craves from the automat -- they spend free days riding the F train out to Coney Island or taking in the scene in Washington Square Park. Smith writes that one day "We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us...'Oh take their picture,' said the woman to her bemused husband, 'I think they're artists.' 'Oh go on,' he shrugged. 'They're just kids.'"
Of course, the joke that we're all in on is that they are just kids - doing things like shoplifting copies of Rimbaud from second hand bookstores because they don't have the 99 cents to buy the copy, only being able to buy one hot dog on their trips out to Coney Island, with Robert eating the lion's share of the sausage while Patti eats most of the saurkraut - but they are also going to become Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. From Smith's point of view, what we see as inevitable is shown to be a sort of miracle -- the only way she is able to cover the bus fare to New York is because she finds a pocketbook with $18.00; when she returns from a trip to Paris she finds Robert in the grip of a potentially life-threatening illness, in an apartment where a murder takes place on the front steps her first night back - only the advice of a transvestite junkie at the fleabag motel to which they have fled convinces Patti to take Robert to the Chelsea Hotel, where she talks their way into a room by brandishing their portfolios (which, of course, would in fact now be worth far more than their weight in gold) and spinning tales of getting an advance from her job (which she is in fact able to do); in pursuing an interview with a drummer who has introduced himself to her as Slim, she ends up in a relationship with Sam Shepard in which she begins to make a name for herself as a poet, and starts to find her home in rock 'n roll.
There are also moment at which her straightforward prose gives way to the kind of lyricism that animates her songs: in writing of her friendship with the musician Matthew Reich, she notes that "I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe." When I read lines like that, I begin to get her shamanistic way with words and understand how she's worked her magic on so many lives.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Haunted houses and Night Bookmobiles
Shirley Jackson's taut 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House opens with the words "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The collective dream visions of the four figures who commit themselves to spending a part of a summer at the titular manse range from fireside banter about their imagined lives as a courtesan or a bullfighter to an image of a blood-drenched bedroom; the reader spends most of her time at the elbow of Eleanor Vance who has spent most of her adult life "caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking."
Eleanor's adolescent experience with a poltergeist who had showered her family's house with stones for three days puts her on the radar of the anthropologist who seeks to scientifically document supernatural presences in the house; at Hill House she finds that she has the ability to make up an entirely new life for herself by weaving together stray images and overheard bits of conversation -- a glimpse of two lions standing guard outside a house she passes in the car she has surreptitiously taken, a mother's explanation to a disinterested waitress about her daughter's demand for a cup full of stars -- and finds herself strangely at home in a place where she finds herself literally as well as figuratively in the grip of unseen and restless forces.
One way to read The Haunting of Hill House is as an allegory for the pleasures and perils of wholly giving one's self over to one's imagination: Eleanor Vance could be an eccentric aunt of Alexandra, the central figure in Audrey Niffenegger's graphic narrative The Night Bookmobile who comes across a Winnebago on a deserted Chicago street in the wee hours of the morning as she walks off her anger following a lovers' spat; Alexandra discovers that the RV is a bookmobile that contains everything that she has ever read from Pat the Bunny and Charlotte's Web to cereal boxes and Gravity's Rainbow (which has text only on the first 57 pages, since that is as far as Alexandra was able to get through Pynchon's novel). At dawn, closing time for The Night Bookmobile, the Librarian ushers Alexandra out of the Winnebago and she returns to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, finding him skeptical about her story of The Night Bookmobile, she asks the reader:
"Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -- trying to read -- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love...It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly."
Alexandra's second encounter with The Night Bookmobile kindles a desire to be a Librarian; told that no positions are available at The Library but that she could become a regular librarian, she goes to library school and rises through the stacks of the Chicago public library system and is eventually named the director of one of its branches on the day of her third encounter with The Night Bookmobile; her desire to spend all her time in that realm leads her to suicide, after which she wakes to discover herself in her favorite dress and in her most comfortable shoes in The Central Reading Room of The Library, where her own Librarian congratulates her on having been hired and where she is handed a copy of Goodnight Moon, the inaugural book in the library of her own patron. Alexandra's initial elation is deflated a bit when she discovers that her own library has been deaccessioned, since "only living people can be Readers."
Alexandra's ambivalence over her new position is counterbalanced by the final frame of the book that shows her leaning comfortably against the doorway frame of the Airstream trailer that houses her patron's collection; in The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor's determination to stay in Hill House's realm despite her compatriots' decision to send her back to her drear domestic life sends her careening down the driveway of the house on a straight shot to a large tree that marks the crash site of the house's first mistress who died before ever reaching the front the door. Jackson delivers the reader from the grip of the narrative into a moment of lyric time with the line "In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?" Both stories seem to suggest that in wholly giving one's self over to the imaginative realm, one loses one's traction in one's waking world that, paradoxically, the very ground of one's dreams, yet The Haunting of Hill House suggests that Eleanor's real downfall comes when she began to believe that her imagination could shift the terms of her everyday world, a prospect that frightens her companions more than the elusive beasts and invisible intruders of the house itself, and which compel them to cast her out of their small circle. As the others go back to the comforts and disappointments of their public and private lives, Eleanor's sharp insights and fully realized sensory experiences continue to haunt even when the book is placed securely back on the shelf -- the kind of afterlife that might in fact be actively sought by most Readers.
Eleanor's adolescent experience with a poltergeist who had showered her family's house with stones for three days puts her on the radar of the anthropologist who seeks to scientifically document supernatural presences in the house; at Hill House she finds that she has the ability to make up an entirely new life for herself by weaving together stray images and overheard bits of conversation -- a glimpse of two lions standing guard outside a house she passes in the car she has surreptitiously taken, a mother's explanation to a disinterested waitress about her daughter's demand for a cup full of stars -- and finds herself strangely at home in a place where she finds herself literally as well as figuratively in the grip of unseen and restless forces.
One way to read The Haunting of Hill House is as an allegory for the pleasures and perils of wholly giving one's self over to one's imagination: Eleanor Vance could be an eccentric aunt of Alexandra, the central figure in Audrey Niffenegger's graphic narrative The Night Bookmobile who comes across a Winnebago on a deserted Chicago street in the wee hours of the morning as she walks off her anger following a lovers' spat; Alexandra discovers that the RV is a bookmobile that contains everything that she has ever read from Pat the Bunny and Charlotte's Web to cereal boxes and Gravity's Rainbow (which has text only on the first 57 pages, since that is as far as Alexandra was able to get through Pynchon's novel). At dawn, closing time for The Night Bookmobile, the Librarian ushers Alexandra out of the Winnebago and she returns to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, finding him skeptical about her story of The Night Bookmobile, she asks the reader:
"Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -- trying to read -- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love...It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly."
Alexandra's second encounter with The Night Bookmobile kindles a desire to be a Librarian; told that no positions are available at The Library but that she could become a regular librarian, she goes to library school and rises through the stacks of the Chicago public library system and is eventually named the director of one of its branches on the day of her third encounter with The Night Bookmobile; her desire to spend all her time in that realm leads her to suicide, after which she wakes to discover herself in her favorite dress and in her most comfortable shoes in The Central Reading Room of The Library, where her own Librarian congratulates her on having been hired and where she is handed a copy of Goodnight Moon, the inaugural book in the library of her own patron. Alexandra's initial elation is deflated a bit when she discovers that her own library has been deaccessioned, since "only living people can be Readers."
Alexandra's ambivalence over her new position is counterbalanced by the final frame of the book that shows her leaning comfortably against the doorway frame of the Airstream trailer that houses her patron's collection; in The Haunting of Hill House, Eleanor's determination to stay in Hill House's realm despite her compatriots' decision to send her back to her drear domestic life sends her careening down the driveway of the house on a straight shot to a large tree that marks the crash site of the house's first mistress who died before ever reaching the front the door. Jackson delivers the reader from the grip of the narrative into a moment of lyric time with the line "In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don't they stop me?" Both stories seem to suggest that in wholly giving one's self over to the imaginative realm, one loses one's traction in one's waking world that, paradoxically, the very ground of one's dreams, yet The Haunting of Hill House suggests that Eleanor's real downfall comes when she began to believe that her imagination could shift the terms of her everyday world, a prospect that frightens her companions more than the elusive beasts and invisible intruders of the house itself, and which compel them to cast her out of their small circle. As the others go back to the comforts and disappointments of their public and private lives, Eleanor's sharp insights and fully realized sensory experiences continue to haunt even when the book is placed securely back on the shelf -- the kind of afterlife that might in fact be actively sought by most Readers.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
From Batman to Atropos
In "Night on Earth," a 2003 issue of Planetary, an occasional serial written by Warren Ellis for DC Comics and (most often) illustrated by John Cassaday, the series' three main characters who function as a kind of archeological team go to Gotham City to track down John Black, a young man suspected of perpetrating some very gruesome deaths in the city. The organizing conceit of this issue is that in this particular universe, Batman doesn't exist, but the man the Planetary team is tracking has been subjected to insidious experiments that have left him with the power, and pain of cycling through alternate universes, so when the team finds Black he has something akin to an epileptic seizure and cycles everyone into a parallel reality, one in which the caped crusader does in fact exist.
When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume; Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.
As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy." Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe; and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain. I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production. Tune in next week....
When a muscle-bound, ninja-style fighting Batman shows up on the scene, the trio are at a loss as to what to make of this guy in the fetish costume; Jakita, the character most likely to be played by Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of the comic book, takes on this interloper while her compatriots try to catch Black as he stumbles down an alley. When they catch up with Black, he seizes again, and Jakita finds herself in a candy-colored universe with a slightly portly guy in a slightly baggy leotard who looks a lot like Adam West, who played Batman in the television series that ran from 1966-1968.
As Jakita tries to recover from a blast of "Bat Female-Villain Repellent" the Drummer, one of her team members, sees "some kind of transvestite hooker running down the alleyway at us" while it dawns on Elijah Snow, the other member of the Planetary triumverate, that they're encountering different iterations of this mysterious "cape guy." Elijah has the bad fortune to come face to face with a Frank Miller-esque, Dark Knight version of the character as Black cycles into yet another universe; and the team members find themselves having to renegotiate the terms of Black's capture and custody with figures whose solutions to the problem at hand range from long-term treatment at Arkham Asylum to an immediate bullet to the brain. I'm thinking about the ways in which comics offer an example of how to consider the radically different iterations one can have of one character, one life in thinking through some editorial and ethical issues in cutting footage to fit a key moment in a documentary in which how we choose to frame a few seconds of video can have the effect of casting a kid's life as a downward spiral of violence or as a wellspring of creative production. Tune in next week....
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Circles
This past weekend, I was in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina for an Advent retreat organized by four women -- Elaine, Joyce, Kate, and Lydia -- whom I have the privilege and pleasure to know through a community called Word and World, a group of activists who are variously and manifoldly artists, musicians, pastors, teachers, dancers, cooks, care-givers, fundraisers, singers, masseuses, students, weavers, farmers, organizers, poets, and travelers who cast their work from a faith-based perspective.
This is the kind of community in which you find yourself being the recipient of the grace of a total stranger who has offered to give you a ride from the Asheville Airport to the heights of Bryson City (thank you, Amy!), then find yourself, three days later, being shepherded down the mountains by other total strangers (thank you, Rachel, Jim, Mark, and Michael!) who have given up their Sunday to put chains on the 14 cars driven by your comadres to provide traction for the icy roads that skirt the coves, hollers, and gaps that feature near-vertical crops of several hundred feet.
As part of the weekend, Kate invited me to lead a writing workshop in light of the retreat's themes of lamentation and celebration, and in reflection of the Magnificat, which, as Kate noted, is one of those points at which the Bible becomes a bit like a musical insofar that folks are moved to burst out in song. I was using the framework of Lynda Barry's writing workshop that she shares in What It Is; to help folks settle down to do the actual work of moving the pen across the page, she has folks engage in a relaxation exercise at the end of which she reads a poem by Rumi, then offers the prompt that will start the next session of writing. I didn't have Rumi on me, but I did have Joy Harjo's How We Became Human and read her "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,
to one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
that you can't see, can't hear
can't know, except in moments
steadily growing and in languages
that aren't always sound but other circles of motion.
Like Eagle that Sunday morning
over Salt River. Circles in blue sky, in wind
swept our hearts clean.
with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
that we must take the utmost care
and kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
all this, and breathe, knowing
we are truly blessed because we
were born, and die soon, within a
true circle of motion,
like Eagle rounding out the moment
inside us.
We pray that it will be done
in beauty.
In beauty.
The writers in the workshop engendered amazing pieces in the space of seven and nine minute writing sessions. I was so grateful for the gift of those words that I decided to leave How We Became Human in retreat center's library, knowing that we would be carrying Joy Harjo's words with us in our various travels back to California, Connecticut, Ontario, Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia, and North Carolina, and hoping that some future visitor would discover the collection and have the opportunity to spend some time with Harjo's words.
When I got home, I found a message from a local friend, Kaye, in my email inbox, with the message that she had found a poem that struck her with its power and beauty, and wanted to share it with me. The poem in question was Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," so I very much felt that while I had left the physical book back on the shelves of Sabbath House, the poem had indeed accompanied me home.
This is the kind of community in which you find yourself being the recipient of the grace of a total stranger who has offered to give you a ride from the Asheville Airport to the heights of Bryson City (thank you, Amy!), then find yourself, three days later, being shepherded down the mountains by other total strangers (thank you, Rachel, Jim, Mark, and Michael!) who have given up their Sunday to put chains on the 14 cars driven by your comadres to provide traction for the icy roads that skirt the coves, hollers, and gaps that feature near-vertical crops of several hundred feet.
As part of the weekend, Kate invited me to lead a writing workshop in light of the retreat's themes of lamentation and celebration, and in reflection of the Magnificat, which, as Kate noted, is one of those points at which the Bible becomes a bit like a musical insofar that folks are moved to burst out in song. I was using the framework of Lynda Barry's writing workshop that she shares in What It Is; to help folks settle down to do the actual work of moving the pen across the page, she has folks engage in a relaxation exercise at the end of which she reads a poem by Rumi, then offers the prompt that will start the next session of writing. I didn't have Rumi on me, but I did have Joy Harjo's How We Became Human and read her "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon,
to one whole voice that is you.
And know that there is more
that you can't see, can't hear
can't know, except in moments
steadily growing and in languages
that aren't always sound but other circles of motion.
Like Eagle that Sunday morning
over Salt River. Circles in blue sky, in wind
swept our hearts clean.
with sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
that we must take the utmost care
and kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
all this, and breathe, knowing
we are truly blessed because we
were born, and die soon, within a
true circle of motion,
like Eagle rounding out the moment
inside us.
We pray that it will be done
in beauty.
In beauty.
The writers in the workshop engendered amazing pieces in the space of seven and nine minute writing sessions. I was so grateful for the gift of those words that I decided to leave How We Became Human in retreat center's library, knowing that we would be carrying Joy Harjo's words with us in our various travels back to California, Connecticut, Ontario, Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia, and North Carolina, and hoping that some future visitor would discover the collection and have the opportunity to spend some time with Harjo's words.
When I got home, I found a message from a local friend, Kaye, in my email inbox, with the message that she had found a poem that struck her with its power and beauty, and wanted to share it with me. The poem in question was Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," so I very much felt that while I had left the physical book back on the shelves of Sabbath House, the poem had indeed accompanied me home.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Hints from Eloise's first cousin, Peg Bracken
I just read a great piece by the painter and memoirist Beth Castiglione that speaks openly of her starch fetish:
http://www.interrobangzine.com/essays/performance-piece-housewife/
which led me to think about the ways in which we work to save future generations from certain things -- i.e. starching and ironing handkerchiefs -- which may in and of themselves be what actually saves them; my own intimacies with the iron these days have been along the lines of rediscovering the joys of iron-on appliques -- something about the transformative properties of heat....and of rhinestone-studded skulls and crossbones have been bringing me a lot of pleasure, which makes me feel that I can now out myself for being completely in a Peg Bracken groove right now.
Much has been made of the recent publication of the 50th anniversary edition of her I Hate to Cook Cookbook, but my own personal favorite title from her oeuvre is The I Hate to Housekeep Book, subtitled "When and how to keep house without losing your mind." The edition I have is from 1962 and has the most fabulous Hilary Knight illustrations; every now and then, you see an image of a figure who could be Eloise's first cousin, or even perhaps her long-absent mother.
The book is chock-full of straightforward bits of housekeeping advice: did you know that toothpaste could be used to shine silver? That one way to hammer in a nail without banging your thumb is to position it between the teeth of a comb? That you can cut up old rubber gloves when you're in need of rubber bands? But she also speaks directly to issues that anticipate The Feminine Mystique, which Betty Friedan published the year after some crafty housewife first picked up my copy of Bracken's survival guide; as Bracken notes in a chapter entitled "How to be Happy When You're Miserable":
"...sometimes you stumble over a day of doing nothing -- or a series of them -- which you can ill afford. For if you continue to stand immobile among deeds undone and resoutions vain, you'll find that you can't even do the things you want to do, and presently you may lose your mind. Every girl owes it to herself to hang onto her mind as long as she can.
The reason for these occasional periods of standing and staring while the work piles up is usually malaise of the spirit. It can stem from any one of three or four thousand deep-seated causes which there isn't room to tackle here, much as I'd like to have a try.
Still, we might consider some random antidotes which random housewives have found helpful..."
Of Bracken's helpful hints, my favorite is the following:
How to Comfort Yourself When You Have Acted like a Jackass
Everyone does this occasionally, and you shouldn't feel too upset about it unless it happens quite often, such as three times a day, in which case you must simply get used to it. Remember, other people like you as well or better for it, because it makes them feel superior; so you've at least spread a little sunshine. And at the very least, you've served as a bad example.
http://www.interrobangzine.com/essays/performance-piece-housewife/
which led me to think about the ways in which we work to save future generations from certain things -- i.e. starching and ironing handkerchiefs -- which may in and of themselves be what actually saves them; my own intimacies with the iron these days have been along the lines of rediscovering the joys of iron-on appliques -- something about the transformative properties of heat....and of rhinestone-studded skulls and crossbones have been bringing me a lot of pleasure, which makes me feel that I can now out myself for being completely in a Peg Bracken groove right now.
The book is chock-full of straightforward bits of housekeeping advice: did you know that toothpaste could be used to shine silver? That one way to hammer in a nail without banging your thumb is to position it between the teeth of a comb? That you can cut up old rubber gloves when you're in need of rubber bands? But she also speaks directly to issues that anticipate The Feminine Mystique, which Betty Friedan published the year after some crafty housewife first picked up my copy of Bracken's survival guide; as Bracken notes in a chapter entitled "How to be Happy When You're Miserable":
"...sometimes you stumble over a day of doing nothing -- or a series of them -- which you can ill afford. For if you continue to stand immobile among deeds undone and resoutions vain, you'll find that you can't even do the things you want to do, and presently you may lose your mind. Every girl owes it to herself to hang onto her mind as long as she can.
The reason for these occasional periods of standing and staring while the work piles up is usually malaise of the spirit. It can stem from any one of three or four thousand deep-seated causes which there isn't room to tackle here, much as I'd like to have a try.
Still, we might consider some random antidotes which random housewives have found helpful..."
Of Bracken's helpful hints, my favorite is the following:
How to Comfort Yourself When You Have Acted like a Jackass
Everyone does this occasionally, and you shouldn't feel too upset about it unless it happens quite often, such as three times a day, in which case you must simply get used to it. Remember, other people like you as well or better for it, because it makes them feel superior; so you've at least spread a little sunshine. And at the very least, you've served as a bad example.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Prayer flags and Walking Words
I went to Swarthmore's campus yesterday to catch the last day of the installation of Pato Hebert's work; I realized in the morning that the exhibit was closing, and was kicking myself for not making it down earlier in the month since I wanted to revisit an Arboretum installation that was scheduled to come down at the beginning of the month. At the end of Pato's official lecture as the Cooper Artist-in-Residence back in September, members of the audience were given Sharpies and those little flags that usually denote that some herbicide has been recently applied and is now sinking down to the water table.
On the red flags, folks were invited to respond to the prompt "I struggle when...." and on the yellow flags their their responses to the cue "I am at my best when...."; at moments like these, I am reminded of just how much I am asking of students when I do these kinds of in-class assignments since I myself usually like to present pre-polished statements to the world. As we walked over the library for the reception, we planted our little flags in a triangular bit of groomed lawn in front of the building; as I was walking up from the van stop, I was happy to see the small field covered with what looked like fluttering prayer flags - many more than we had first planted, which means that passers-by have been inspired to add their own thoughts.
Solipsist that I am, I went looking for my own words but didn't find them; rather than brood over whether they had been washed away in a recent rainstorm or mowed down by an inattentive spectator, I found myself caught up in the words that others had shared: "I am at my best when I am with my daughter"; "I struggle with finding an alternative to self-righteousness and self-hatred"; "I am my best every day because I know I am a child of God." It's amazing to me how the weight of one's own struggles feels so much lighter when one is aware of the burdens others are carrying; being attuned to others' struggles and taking full account of others' joys can have the effect of lightening one's own load.
My physical burdens actually multiplied when I entered McCabe to see Pato's photo exhibit and window installations; in the middle of the space which was hung with photos capturing images of Pato's breath on a wintry L.A. evening was a booksale conducted by Friends of the Library - trade paperbacks for $2.00, and mass market editions for a buck. Collections of writings by Howard Thurman and Martin Buber! A Moon guide to Pennsylvania! Benedetto Croce's Aesthetics! And a new (to me, anyway) work by Eduardo Galeano entitled Walking Words, with woodcuts by José Francisco Borges. Galeano intersperses his retellings of folk tales and urban legends with aphorisms, tabloid headlines, and random observations: in a short section entitled "Windows on Walls" he shares the following:
In Lima: We don't want to survive. We want to live.
In Havana: You can dance to anything.
In Rio de Janeiro: He who is afraid of living is never born.
On the red flags, folks were invited to respond to the prompt "I struggle when...." and on the yellow flags their their responses to the cue "I am at my best when...."; at moments like these, I am reminded of just how much I am asking of students when I do these kinds of in-class assignments since I myself usually like to present pre-polished statements to the world. As we walked over the library for the reception, we planted our little flags in a triangular bit of groomed lawn in front of the building; as I was walking up from the van stop, I was happy to see the small field covered with what looked like fluttering prayer flags - many more than we had first planted, which means that passers-by have been inspired to add their own thoughts.
Solipsist that I am, I went looking for my own words but didn't find them; rather than brood over whether they had been washed away in a recent rainstorm or mowed down by an inattentive spectator, I found myself caught up in the words that others had shared: "I am at my best when I am with my daughter"; "I struggle with finding an alternative to self-righteousness and self-hatred"; "I am my best every day because I know I am a child of God." It's amazing to me how the weight of one's own struggles feels so much lighter when one is aware of the burdens others are carrying; being attuned to others' struggles and taking full account of others' joys can have the effect of lightening one's own load.
My physical burdens actually multiplied when I entered McCabe to see Pato's photo exhibit and window installations; in the middle of the space which was hung with photos capturing images of Pato's breath on a wintry L.A. evening was a booksale conducted by Friends of the Library - trade paperbacks for $2.00, and mass market editions for a buck. Collections of writings by Howard Thurman and Martin Buber! A Moon guide to Pennsylvania! Benedetto Croce's Aesthetics! And a new (to me, anyway) work by Eduardo Galeano entitled Walking Words, with woodcuts by José Francisco Borges. Galeano intersperses his retellings of folk tales and urban legends with aphorisms, tabloid headlines, and random observations: in a short section entitled "Windows on Walls" he shares the following:
In Lima: We don't want to survive. We want to live.
In Havana: You can dance to anything.
In Rio de Janeiro: He who is afraid of living is never born.
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