Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin’

“Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now."     —Bob Dylan

My brother began listening to Dylan when he was 17. That means I heard iconic lyrics like: “Well, they’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to be so good/They’ll stone you just like they said they would” and “Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?” drift through the house when I was 14. The guitar and harmonica, Dylan’s sometimes smooth, sometimes raspy voice wove their way through my mind and for years resided in the grooves of fond memory. I was immersed in “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “Tamborine Man,” “Lay Lady Lay,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” as they spun their familiar sounds from the turntable. Recently, feeling homesick for those songs, I listened to them again. I was surprised to find that the Dylan I knew opened to new and deeper levels.

It wasn’t just that I was older. During this same time I went back to listen to other music I inhabited as a teenager. Returning to Carole King and Carly Simon, for instance, felt just the same as it did in the past. But Dylan’s music now spoke in ways I never heard before. How is it that even his old songs can still be fresh today? Italian author Italo Calvino offers a simple point about what makes a literary classic: “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.” Dylan’s work is new over time because it is deeply meaningful.

It continues to have something to say because Dylan has always been open to change, not holding himself to a constraint others wanted to impose. He got a lot of grief for it. He was constantly moving artistically, from writing topical songs like Woody Guthrie’s, to protest songs, to flashing image songs, and he famously switched from acoustic to electric guitar. He probably would never consider himself brilliant, but there is brilliance in his lyrics, music, and knowing not to hold onto categories, but to allow himself the freedom to chase change and ambiguity.

Dylan’s style could change because he is true to his inspirations. Among the many are Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud (“When I read [Rimbaud’s] words the bells went off.”), and Paul Verlaine.

After passing through the familiarity of nostalgia, I found in Dylan so much of the poetic soul of the Beats. When he was 18, someone gave Dylan a copy of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Dylan said the book blew his mind. When poet and friend Allen Ginsberg asked him why, Dylan told him, "It was the first poetry that spoke to me in my own language." Ginsberg continues to explain Kerouac’s influence on Dylan: “So those chains of flashing images you get in Dylan, like ‘the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen and her silver studded phantom lover,’ they're influenced by Kerouac's chains of flashing images and spontaneous writing.” In Dylan’s “Desolation Row” (1965) he blends these images and more: beauty parlor, circus, Bette Davis, Romeo, Hunchback of Notre Dame, iron vest, Noah’s rainbow, Einstein, a monk, pennywhistles, and mermaids. The Beatles were taken with Dylan’s lyricism and style. George Harrison says of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album, "We just played it, just wore it out. The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude—it was incredibly original and wonderful."

As his audience attempted to confine him, Dylan resisted with all his creativity. In a 1966 Playboy interview, Dylan is asked, “Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-'n'-roll route?” Dylan responds with an explanation that was more like an improvisational riff. He spun a tale of images that included a card game, crap game, pool hall, Mexican lady, Charles Atlas. It flows in a pastiche of people and plots and scenes. When he’s finished, the interviewer says, “And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?” Dylan replies, “No, that's how I got tuberculosis.” Dylan talks in imaginative circles and was often considered “contrary” by journalists because he knew that many people were not willing to listen to, and probably would not understand, his views on the artistic process.

In the same 1966 interview, Playboy reminds Dylan that he told someone he had done everything he ever wanted to do. “If that's true,” the interviewer asks, “what do you have to look forward to?” Dylan replied, “Salvation. Just plain salvation.” Dylan’s work, as it continues to speak, does offer a kind of salvation. As one author puts it, “it is in the nature of beauty to suggest the divine and the eternal.” I’m so glad I followed nostalgia’s pull to Dylan and found more of the place where beauty saves the world.

Not Just for Dark and Stormy Nights

It happened in the closing days of an expansive week and a half in Scotland seeing the awe inspiring ruins, breathing the thick Celtic air, rambling on the highlands and feasting on their startlingly fresh strawberries and unbeatable spuds. Settling into my early morning flight to London, I saw a ghastly image that has never quite left me: a spiny, mustard-yellow man whose grizzled body displayed with such shocking translucence the clawing effects of a life-sucking illness that the look at his decaying body arrested me with a terror so sudden and thorough that all human compassion was replaced with a gripping horror. I sat debilitated, crushingly ashamed and utterly terrified.

Searching the caches of memories filed under “comfort,” I inwardly regenerated the likeness of Great Great Grandmother from George MacDonald’s Princess stories. Reassured by the gentle crooning that all worthy rockers make under the noble weight of maternal figures, I pictured Great-Great Grandmother sitting in her attic spinning: the splendour of her luxurious silver hair softening the sharper angles of her shoulders, her rich sparkling eyes evidencing shimmering wells of compassion and strength. At that moment, as I stood in the doorway to Great Great Grandmother’s attic, I knew she would welcome me to her side, despite, perhaps even because, of the weight of my shame and fear. She, MacDonald’s illustrious depiction of the feminine side of God, would call me to her warmth and envelop me with strength and courage.

The Princess stories were my introduction to MacDonald, and the image of Great Great Grandmother has been significant in my spiritual development. My head and heart have had a thorough plunging into the world of George MacDonald of recent. MacDonald's letters, unspoken sermons, essays, fiction, poems and biographies are in the process of burrowing into my heart and soul, much like a tick into the damp fleshy parts of a mammal.

This absorption evidences itself in several ways, I sometimes catch myself three bumpy lines into a sentence, hoping against hope to smooth out the rough waters of miss mashed consonants and commas, semi-colons and symbols all fighting for prominence. When this happens, my groan is swiftly followed with an optimistic sigh; I am pleased that MacDonald’s influence is consciously and unconsciously making its way into my inner workings. Although I don’t necessarily agree with the entirety of his world view, now that I know more about it, he has illustrated a more compassionate, gracious and loving approach to life. And, as such, philosophy, theology, personality and penmanship, when I see bits of it eeking out in my own work? Well, I couldn’t be more thrilled.

The Folded Lie

The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.

These words were written by a gay man—a man who had recently met the love of his life, a man who did not feel safe to speak openly about this love, a man under threat of incarceration and violence because of this love. These words were written by a man facing news of tragedy—a horror caused by politicians’ greed and stupidity and inability to live in peace, a horror which he’d been through before, a horror which seemed to be repeating itself in a nightmarish, unstoppable cycle.

These words are W.H. Auden’s. They are from his poem “September 1, 1939,” written on the eve of World War II.

America loves this poem. We turn to it in moments of national mourning. It was ubiquitous after the 9/11 attacks. Politicians quoted it. Newspapers reprinted it. I myself have shared it with students and on social media during each of the recent mass shootings.

When we reach for the comfort of this poem, we don’t usually leave time to discuss Auden’s sexuality. We don’t pause to decode the poem’s references to the struggle of being queer in the 1930s. In fact, in some versions reprinted after September 11th, 2001, all sections that hinted at this were snipped out.

These references are obscure, so they probably just seemed confusing and off-topic. (Remember Auden, as a British citizen, lived under threat of criminal prosecution for sodomy—references to his homosexuality had to be coded. This was more than a stylistic choice.)

Nothing hateful was meant by the shortening of the poem, right? It just seems pointless to bring up Auden’s queer identity, right? Pointless to acknowledge that the first line, “I sit in one of the dives /on Fifty-second Street” is most likely a reference to a gay bar. What good would it do, bringing that up? After 9/11, it probably seemed like an irrelevant detail. In the wake of the Orlando shooting at Pulse nightclub, it seems less so.

You can posit that an author’s sexual orientation is nobody’s business, or claim we shouldn’t bring biography into art. But we live in a society where straight is default, so to say nothing is to imply heterosexuality.

So with a writer like Auden (or Whitman or Dickinson or Shakespeare or Woolf or Cather or Bowie or St. Vincent Millay or Oliver or Cohen or Ocean or Jónsi), to say nothing is to be complicit in a lie of omission.

This lie is convenient, as most lies tend to be. It lets readers absorb all the beauty and comfort and strength of a poem without ever even knowing that they’ve been identifying—on a personal, emotional level—with a queer writer. Many Americans who drew strength from Auden’s poem in 2001 never had the opportunity to grapple with the fact that its author was queer, simply because they didn’t know.

When we read, we are in someone else’s head for a minute. Through this mind-boggling miracle that is literature, we learn to listen to voices other than our own. We develop empathy.

Some might say, oh, let me just enjoy the beauty of this art without worrying about its context. Nope. You don’t get that luxury. Our country has an empathy deficiency. Does that sound dramatic? Consider the conservative churches who wondered “how to respond” to the mass murder at Pulse, or worse, responded with hate. Consider that threats toward the Muslim community in Orlando have already begun.

Queer voices are already included on required reading lists in nearly every high school. These could be a powerful weapon against hate and ignorance, but we can’t activate that power unless we acknowledge the sexuality of the authors we teach. (And of course, we need to drastically increase the diversity of those reading lists, too.)

If you’re familiar with “September 1, 1939,” you’ve probably heard that Auden later disowned his poem. The line he hated most was “we must love one another or die” because, he said, “we die anyway.”

Here’s the stanza in its original form:

All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

I can see why Auden would write off that last line. After the war, it must have seemed so naïve. And the famous image in the poem’s final stanza—lights dotting a dark horizon—can feel a little pat in the face of so much tragedy.

The poem has value, though. Maybe not so much to comfort, but to challenge. When I read the line “all I have is a voice / to undo the folded lie,” I think of the many “folded lies” we face today: the NRA’s bizarre grip on our legislation, bigotry thinly disguised as patriotism, religion being twisted to justify both hate crimes and hateful responses. And the folded lie of heteronormativity that continues to be told through the censorship and casual omission of queer voices, both in literature and in life.

So many lies, folded up so tightly. It is overwhelming. That’s probably why Auden wrote (and why most of us still like) that comforting-if-slightly-illogical line about love.

We can’t undo all the lies at once. But we can honor Auden’s voice. Re-read “September 1, 1939,”—all of it—and remember it was written in a gay bar; read it in remembrance of the 50 beautiful lives cut horrifically short on a Sunday morning in a gay bar. And when you finish the poem, spend some time reading the stories of the victims. Find yourself in these stories, even if—especially if—they are different from your own. Mourn for each lost voice. Mourn for all of us.

Degrees of Separation

“Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.” — Bruce Feiler

I’m leaving soon, leaving the Houston metropolis and all of my artistic and creative friends, to say nothing of my adult children and their families, my church family, and my students. Finally. I love them all. I love the life that I’ve made here, but I am moving to my small cabin in the country. I’ve been planning this change for several years.

Sounds crazy, yes? Yet I won’t be so far away that I am unreachable. In another time and place, moving away usually meant a permanent good-bye to the life one knew. Maybe I am a little world-weary, though this move is more about being able to live a good life in a small community.

Still, world-weariness, or weltschmerz, has been on my mind for a while. A month ago, I read Casey Walker’s debut novel, Last Days in Shanghai, about a young Congressional staffer Luke Slade who truly exemplifies what it is to be world-weary. The novel demonstrates why some people decide to pause, reexamine their old lives, and begin anew.

Luke Slade accompanies his boss, “Lyin’ Leo” Fillmore, on a weeklong trip to China to check on a joint real estate venture. Leo is, of course, so corrupt that Luke almost can’t help but become involved in corruption by accepting bribes on Leo’s behalf.  This leads Luke to question his motives and the work he has chosen to do. Is he really willing to promote himself and his career at any cost? The central characters in this novel are compelled to consider the moral and ethical dimensions of their lives, and Walker manages to let the characters do that without seeming “moralistic.”

Midpoint in the novel, Li-Li, a young Chinese woman and Slade’s counterpart, tells Luke her dreams to leave the corrupt business life. Then we see hints of Luke’s own awakening in his response to Li-Li: “Go build yourself a hut on the most beautiful mountainside. Contemplate the stream water and the fog and light as morning wanes to afternoon and never for any reason let a person talk you back down to this world.”

Yes, he is also talking about himself. Some pages later, he declares, “A thousand years ago, a holy man, the wild Bodhidharma, who must have felt overwhelmed by the circumstances of his world as I now did mine, climbed up Mount Song and sat in a cave for nine years meditating. What puzzles me is that he eventually got up and left—that after nine years of contemplation, something became clear enough that he could get to his feet and venture back outside.”

Luke will have to leave his job—that becomes clear. He’ll need to withdraw from his corrupt business life long enough to find a new direction. That, I think, is one beauties of the novel. Having taken part in corruption, several characters have the courage to pause or retreat, and to redirect their moral and spiritual lives.

In our own lives, there are degrees of separation, aren’t there, and for differing reasons—but often those separations are in order to reevaluate and redefine ourselves and the lives we want to live. Less extreme, we opt for a retreat or a quiet hour in a church service.

There’s a church in Houston called Ecclesia. I got curious about its name recently, so I looked it up. I learned that it means not merely “assembly”; it also means “called out” or “called apart.” It strikes me that when we go into a place to worship or meditate, we are setting aside time to be separate and apart, to remember how we want to live and why. These small offices are a tonic against world-weariness.

A Powerful Medicine

I think of it like fingerprinting—fingerprinting for someone’s being-in-the-world.

Anybody can do it. Perhaps the best place to start is with those closest to us. I have three sisters:  one with laser intellect able to bless or zero you through her eyes; another with a Phoenix-like power, able to sacrifice her body and make it rise again; and a third with a charisma spoken right from the heart, which effects everyone it touches like pixie-dust.

Then again, it’s a practiced art. Think of the teachers who first name it for us, who watch hundreds of students parade through their classrooms, but who turn to us and name it, the thing in us that we grasp onto and say, “I am __________.”  

The “thing in us” that I’m talking about is something akin to the Native American term “medicine,” though that concept is larger and more powerful still, a concept about which I’m not qualified to speak. Humbly, though, I’d still like to borrow this term “medicine,” a term that speaks to one’s powerful effect on the world, an outworking of an individual’s internal qualities.

To name someone else’s medicine takes intimate knowledge or just careful observation plus language, which is why it is so often the domain of teachers or writers. Language undoubtedly plays a role in understanding these things, in “unlocking” them, to tie into the language of self-help, which for my money flattens the concept. In naming a person’s medicine, we cause those qualities to be, we bring them forward from the chaos of personality and give them being that they might be wielded in the world.   

In writing terms, to name someone’s medicine is creative nonfiction’s version of characterization, except it’s naming what’s already there. Actually, then, it’s more like simple exposition: naming the power that inheres in a person that is their driving force in the world. Naming someone’s medicine, and knitting various people with their various medicines together, surely transforms the world into a place of possibility.

It’s a skill we could stand to cultivate. Another easy place to start is with the famous. Muhammad Ali’s self-characterization, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” only captures one aspect of his powerful medicine, one that both continues to ripple in the world and of which we now feel the loss. Currently, I’m spellbound by the wood elf mischief of the basketball player Steph Curry:  elusive, playful, masterful.

But mostly, I think, we should look at the people right around us, to name the medicine in the lady we otherwise might look past, in the fellow who has no beauty that we should desire him. There might even be prophetic insight or balm for the world in the act. How much medicine is lost on the world because there is no one to name it?  

Vitreous Humor

What they don't tell you is that getting older comes on you like a pie in the face: suddenly, unjustly, and funny to onlookers. And not funny to you. It comes like a slow-motion pratfall. It feels like a prank show genius has studied your increasing night-time eliminations and booby-trapped the route with a banana peel, a toy truck and a hoe in perfect succession. Aging comes blindly, symptom by symptom, each with its own joke.

For instance, my glaucoma came first as night visions. The ones like shadow people. Presences by your bed at three in the morning that wait for you to wake up enough to give you a heart attack. They'll tell you later it's just the vitreous humor in your one eye increasing pressure on your last nerve, or something like that. But until they do the shadow people will get their nightly kicks at the price of your terror. And then once you know, it's as if the eye doctor and the soul-stealing succubi are in on it together. They aren't of course, but you'll swear you can hear the laugh track.

And here's the truly absurd part: I am giving you an account of what it's like to get older, but until you're there these stories will be about someone else and not you. And though you'll have been warned you still won't see it coming.

When Jesus was transfigured, even after forty days of enjoying his post-crucifixion presence, the disciples despaired for their imagined messiah: the one of a conquering hero who would restore Israel to glory. But instead he is one in a world of darkness as gradually dawning light.

If you're as lucky as me you'll survive the indignity of aging to discover the benefits of professional advice and new habits. I'm getting better sleep now. The shadow people are dissolved into a fuller reality. The same is happening with my wife. She was fitted with a continuous positive airway pressure device. You know the term CPAP. It's one of those things no one wants to have. An alien on your face and Wife of Darth jokes. You wear facial indentations to work every morning and swear people are thinking, Weren't you in Mad Max? or, Hey, Bane! But for years my wife was beset with irregular heart beats, palpitations that made her feel her chest would explode. And now she's better. We're better.

The face of love changes. You won't see it coming.

Kicking off the Tarp

The year I was going to be a senior in high school, my youth group went on a mission trip to Tijuana, Mexico to build houses for people who didn’t have them.

The homes we built were simple: four walls, a foundation, and a ceiling. I remember my youth group director, Bill, showed me how to fold thick, black paper into fourths, then prick the nail through it before hammering it into the wood. He told me to tap the nail to stabilize it, then with two or three whacks the nail would slide into the wood, securing the wall. It was repetitive, satisfying work.

One of the houses we built sat on an edge of a cliff. The man we built it for was currently living underneath a blue tarp held up by sticks. On breaks, we climbed down from the cliff, sat around for a few minutes, drinking pop. Somebody figured out that you could jump from the road, fly through the air and land on the dirt without getting hurt. It was like a sand dune.

We jumped from the road and into the bright blue sky for a few minutes every afternoon. I practiced my toe touches, having ample time to fly in the air, lift my legs and reach my arms towards my toes. I sailed in the air for about three seconds, gracefully let myself out of the pose, then tumbled down the mountain, laughing and spinning. I remember my brother, Geoff, did cannon balls with the same skill. Sometimes, we jumped together and even then there was plenty of time to jump and fly and fall.

I remember on our last workday in Tijuana, Bill handed the hammer to the man who would live in the house to pound in the last nail. The man sobbed while he hammered and I worried he’d hurt his fingers. I remember wanting to kick the blue tarp off those sticks, and hoping the wind that rarely blows in Tijuana would pick it up and sail it off the cliff.

*                *                *

We went to San Diego at the end of our work trips because I think that was Bill’s hometown, and he had a connection to a church so we could stay there for a few days and unwind. I remember we went to a Dodgers game, Bill’s favorite team. I remember walking up what felt like a mountain to the ballpark. “This isn’t Wrigley Field,” I complained.

The night before we left, I called my parents from a pay phone across the street from the church to say hello and check on my flight. My mom and I chatted for a few minutes, confirmed what time I’d land in O’Hare, and then her voice changed when she told me that several days ago there was an accident. She told me that Tim Lutz, a boy I had known since I was six and who lived down the street from me, got hit in the head, lost consciousness, and died.

“He was playing basketball with his friends,” she told me. Tim got hit in the side of the head with a basketball. He was knocked unconscious and never woke up.

All of this, including the funeral, happened while I was in Tijuana, twenty-three years ago this June.

Tim had brown eyes with long, thick eyelashes. He had freckles on his nose and cheeks that I swear danced when he laughed, and he laughed a lot. To say he was a baseball fan is an understatement. He and my brother were on several baseball teams together, and growing up, summer meant watching them run the bases and slide into home plate whether they needed to or not.

I think a lot about the details of Tim’s death, especially when June arrives, and what I was doing while it happened. It seems morbid, maybe even perverse to admit that. Was I hammering nails into wood when he got hit in the head? Was I jumping off that cliff when he was rushed to the hospital? At night, while Bill led devotions, and we sang songs under stars so bright I believed if I stood on my tiptoes I would at the least feel their heat on my fingertips, was Tim taking his last breath?

I could ask my friends. Decades later, I know at least twenty people who would tell me the details, go over dates and times and days. It would take three texts, twenty-five minutes on Facebook, a google search with key words: Tim Lutz, June 1993. But I don’t do any of this. Every June I think about it, and every year I do nothing.

*                *                *

I once saw Tim catch a baseball in the middle of Gunderson, the street he and I lived on. He was in mid-air when he caught it, and I was driving away in my car towards who knows where. His friend John, who lived across the street, threw the ball at him and Tim ran into the street, caught it, then threw it back to John. I saw it all in my rearview mirror.

I consider asking about the details of Tim’s last week on earth, and end up here, on Gunderson, with Tim playing catch with his buddy as the streetlights flickered on and the fireflies showed up. I’m not even sure how accurate my memory is, but I don’t care. Maybe it is like the blue tarp I didn’t kick off in Tijuana years ago. Maybe I thought I was protecting something for this man. Maybe I was afraid I was being disrespectful. Maybe it is easier to think about a memory I cannot create.

Unsafe Zone

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am. —Sylvia Plath

I sit on a worn chair in the waiting room of the local government-funded mental health center—our county’s Medicaid destination. Will comfort be found in such a place? The lone potted plant languishes, badly in need of water. A wall poster of a fierce-looking young woman with tattooed biceps admonishes victims of abuse to find a Safe Zone. Patients check in and quietly sit and leave the room as therapists summon them. They seem overly careful of every step, as if falling down is a contingency they are not prepared to handle. Most wear broken-down shoes and odd clothes. No-money-for-luxuries shoes and clothes. I glance into the streaming eyes of a young man with a red, oddly twisted face. My eye contact seems to wound him. Someone else implores his caseworker to understand how really fast he used to be able to run. An old man clutches multiple zip-lock bags of medications in his lap while a nurse asks personal questions within sight and sound of the entire room. The man’s face twitches at every juncture of orifice and skin. His mouth kneads his tongue as though trying to coax moisture from it—the incessant thirst of the medicated. I need more Lexapro, I can hardly function right now, he says. I lose interest in my book. I pray for the patients—for blessing, stability, something. What would Jesus do?

The tasteful outfit of one of the caseworkers catches my attention as she stands at the counter. She returns my look, a bit too long. A swell of panic hits my throat: She thinks I’m one of the patients. I look down. My Mary Jane flats are old and scuffed, my outfit mismatched. I got up too late to pay attention. Broken-down shoes, like the man with the zip-lock bags wears. My note pads and books are spread across three seats. Wads of paper, a caved-in water bottle—my morning life splayed out. Clearly, a patient without boundaries, the caseworker is thinking. I resist going to her and saying, I’m here because I drove a friend. I’m waiting for her. I was in the driver’s seat. I drive them and pray for them and feel bad for them. But don’t make me identify with them, kissing and mingling my healthy juices with their sick ones. Don’t think I’m a mess myself. God forbid I be a mess—lowly, disturbed, poor. One of those last and least who might one day be first and most.

Making a Harp - Part 1

On the second day of our impromptu beach vacation, Dennis decides to buy an electric planer at a local hardware store. “The oak panels need to be thinner, so they will resonate more once the harp is complete.”

“Uh, what,” I ask. “I thought that was the reason for sanding the pieces before we left.”

“Yes, but thinner wood will make the sound so much better.”  

A parade of images flashes through my mind. Sawdust filling every crack and crevice of the beach condo. Neighbors beating down our door because sawdust has drifted to their condo. Various kinds of bodily harm due to malfunctioning equipment.

I love my husband. We have been married for five years. He is building me a harp because I once played years ago, and it delights him to make things with his hands. As he builds, as the tools and sharp objects pile up, my nerves feel frayed. I have trouble with disorder. My own chaos is fine, but pairing it with my husband’s is an uncomfortable challenge. The older I get, the more I see my own hypocrisy, but this awareness doesn’t prevent it from sprouting like a rogue chin hair.

I sit on the couch and write but mostly stare out the window to the ocean. Dennis is on the balcony operating a planer that sounds like the world’s loudest dentist drill. I try not to watch. Focus on your writing. He pauses and pokes his head in, his curly hair coated in fine dust. “Too loud,” he asks softly, and then,“It won’t take very long.” Instead of saying, Yes, it’s too loud, and this feels crazy, I say, “No problem.” This is what you say when your spouse is building you a harp.

My parents have been married for over forty years, an impressive feat given they were both previously married. They taught me much. I seemed to have missed the lesson about how your spouse’s delight can also drive you mad at times. Not only is it pure joy for Dennis to work on the harp, it is an offering in celebration of my talents. No one told me something so gracious could make me irritable and petty. Our premarital counselor, Stephen, never mentioned this possibility. Stephen was on point when he ended our final session with, “One of you will need to decide who is in charge of opening the mail.” At the time, I thought he was making a joke. At the time, I didn’t realize the full consequences of marrying someone with virtually the same personality preferences.  

This means many things. It means we are drawn to spontaneity and living in the moment. Once, while driving from Arkansas to Washington, we ran out of gas two days in a row. We were caught up in telling stories, and the needle slid past my notice. The inconvenience turned into an adventure, and we loved it. It also means we are reluctant to open the mail, and I usually reward myself with a good cry after tending to home finance. Our similar personalities mean we both love creativity, and we often make messes in the process. Sometimes our creativity coexists peacefully as we write or read. Sometimes Dennis’s creativity is loud when mine is quiet.

I wake in the morning to find Dennis organizing his tools between the dining room and the balcony. “Where will you work this morning,” I ask. “I’d like to write.”

“I feel like I’m running you off,” he says.

“No, just tell me where you’re going to work, so I know where I can write.”

The back bedroom with a closed door and shuttered window turns out to be the best place to write. I’m not tempted to stare out the window to the waves crashing. I will not become an expert in sea gulls. Dennis lends me his high tech headphones to cover my ears entirely, and I begin typing.

Read Part 2

'But I Can Do It Afraid'

I was 27 years old when my daughter, my only child, Ellie, was born. It took years to conceive her, and then suddenly, on a pre-dawn Saturday morning, my water broke like the rainstorm that always arrives on days a meteorologist has confidently assured you, “Enjoy, folks. Today will be a sunny 70 degrees.” There were no signs Ellie would be a full three weeks early.

There was no packed bag. There was no gas in the car. I was down to two public-presentable maternity outfits. And the cute one was dirty. I was stunned to be so irrevocably out of time. I thought there would be weeks yet to locate the inner courage to properly and calmly  and bravely bear a human life. Instead, I pulled wrinkled maternity jeans from the hamper and ran them through the dryer. My husband and I scraped toward the hospital on a quarter of a tank of gas and even less courage.

Labor contractions are big bullies. There is often no warning when they will hit you hardest, and once they begin in earnest, you are at their mercy. But that sort of unstoppable force can also be a kind of relief. There’s no thinking. There’s no planning. There’s just bearing. During birth,  life leaks then shatters its way into the world, and you are the conduit through which it will pass. And it’s beautiful and joyful and terrifyingly unstoppable.

The next day, groggy and elated, I remember my husband telling me how brave I was during labor. I also remember looking at him like he had turned purple. This was not bravery, I thought. This was a matter of going on. A child ready to be born must be born. Bravery was something noble and solid that filled up a person from head to toe, that gleamed within like a warm, steady light. I was not brave. I was scared and tired and an absolute shaky mess of hormones and relief. I had even opted for the epidural.

*                *                *

When Ellie turned three, I was rain-storm shocked again. This time, I found myself “single mom-ing” my life with her. Each day, I went to work, paid the bills, made the dinner, read the bed-time stories, drank too much coffee, and lay awake at night convinced at how royally I was screwing things up. Because I was always scared, I also believed that I was not really brave but simply acting, as I did in that delivery room, at the behest of life and doing my best to keep up and remember to breathe. Somehow, I had forgotten that bravery does not exist apart from the very fear that requires it to form, solidifying like a rock we sling against the darkness.

A few weeks ago and at eight years old, Ellie begged to have her ears pierced. At this, I caught my breath. I vividly remembered from my own childhood experience that ear piercing involves pain. My writer’s sense of imagery brought visions of needles. Sharp objects would make a space for themselves in her skin. I also knew she would be terrified once she sat in the chair, and the process began. So, I told her that maybe she should wait, that it was okay to take more time to gather up her courage if she wasn’t feeling brave enough right now.

But Ellie stepped into her own story like the heroine I want to be. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, Mommy, and I am really scared. But I can do it afraid.”

Already in the car from school pick-up, we rushed to the mall. I held Ellie’s hand, and quiet little tears fell down her cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her right hand shook in her lap while courage bloomed as two dainty studs in Ellie’s pink earlobes and caught slivers of the ceiling’s fluorescent light. Ellie smiled at her image in a mirror. I sucked in a gallon of air.

Ellie did it afraid.

What I have forgotten about courage, Ellie has reminded me. Courage is at its finest in the company of fear. Courage is at its most beautiful in the hands and heart of the underdog, of the grieving, of the single mom or dad, or in the brimming, tight-shut eyes and terrifically shaking hands of an eight year old kid. In his Narnia books, C.S. Lewis describes bravery in a passage I’ve often read and always forget to apply to my own life, “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.” Thank God we don’t have to feel brave to be brave.

In a few weeks, Ellie can change out her first pair of earrings for another. I will take her to the shop where her ears were pierced. I will let her choose two shiny new pairs of earrings. I will help her slip them into the healed spaces opened up by both her fear and her courage, and I will watch her smile at the gleam she gives off in the mirror. Maybe, “doing it afraid” is the only kind of brave that matters.

Imagination, Intellect, and Good Works

“For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart”    —Matthew 12.34

Suppose at a very young age, you could read and write at an advanced level, and almost without effort. Imagine having a desire for knowledge that seems to take charge of you. You read everything you can get your hands on—sometimes your reading is directed and purposeful; other times it is rangy and anxious. What if you could turn on your imagination with hardly a conscious effort and turn words into fine imagery and figurative language?

This is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651 – 1695), a child prodigy, who as a young adult, garnered the attention and support of Mexico’s leaders and courtly society. In her life, she became widely known throughout Mexico and in Europe as the Tenth Muse. Yet she lived in an era when women’s roles were tightly circumscribed and society was highly regimented. An unlikely celebrity, she was born an “illegitimate” child and raised by her mother, though she enjoyed the refuge of her grandfather’s hacienda during her childhood. In her grandfather’s library, she read hungrily. By several accounts, she was also a religiously devoted child. As she matured, she began to speak of her intellect and imagination as God’s gift.

At age 12, when her grandfather died, the girl was sent to serve in the viceroy’s court in Mexico City. She had expressed to her mother the wish to attend university disguised as a male, but she was forbidden from doing so. In the royal court, though, the viceroy’s wife helped her continue her education and writing. By all accounts, Juana Ines grew into a stunning beauty, catching the attention of several suitors. Yet she defied all expectations when she refused more than one marriage proposal and entered the convent in 1669. She did so, she said, so that her studies and writing might continue.

In the convent, Sor Juana enjoyed her own apartment and the protection not only of the Church, but also the viceroy’s court—for a time. When her most ardent supporters left “New Spain” for Spain, the Archbishop of Mexico and other church officials sought to forbid her from reading or writing anything that was not religious. Ultimately, Sor Juana bowed to the Archbishop’s pressure. However, her body of work, which includes drama, poetry, rhetoric, religious texts, and carols, is still the inspiration for many writers today.

Sor Juana came to my attention, during my days as an editor, when I was asked to copy-edit Willis Barnstone’s Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet. This volume introduced me not only to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, but also Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jose Luis Borges, and others. The world of poetry opened up to me when I read these translations. The only woman among these masters is Sor Juana. I took note of that.

It is a wonder that she is recognized at all. That she persisted in her writing for so long is because she was determined to use the talents that God gave her. She once wrote, “What garland can human wisdom expect when it sees what divine wisdom received?” Jesus, she reminds, brought divine wisdom to people, and yet the people executed him. Sor Juana knew that her studies and writing lay outside society’s role for women. She was prepared to face the consequences of her work. In that way, she serves as an inspiration to many, including myself. She did the good works she believed she was meant to do.

The Gates of Dawn

“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”   ― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

You know the feeling. You've just finished a big show, cleaned up the messes, returned the equipment, the wrap party is over, and now what? For weeks life had singular purpose. For the last several days you've been riding that wave. What exhilaration! And as soon as the morning after, you're on the shore looking out at the horizon on a dead calm.

In the seventh chapter of Wind in the Willows, Rat and Mole set off down the river on an adventure to save their friend, Portly. Along the way they hear and follow a haunting song with great anticipation. As they enter Wild Wood they are confronted with a mystical appearance of Pan playing the song against a rising sun and are overcome with a desire to worship. When they lift their heads, Portly is sitting there, no worse for the wear. But, they can't remember what happened and they can't recall the song. It seems an oddly melancholy moment.

The title of the chapter is “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”― and youth group called their recent musical based on it “The Gates of Dawn." In just seventy days we wrote the script and songs, designed and constructed the set, learned our parts, and did two shows. At church some days later I noticed bits of the froth like patches of suds on the faces of the kids. No one mentioned it. It was as if we'd forgotten, but not.

In two weeks from this writing the Church will celebrate Pentecost. We'll have ridden the ebb of Lent through the highs of Eastertide for nearly one hundred days. And in a rain of fiery tongues we'll celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit in power. The following week will be Trinity Sunday and the Sunday after that begins the long stretch of calm seas called Ordinary Time. It will dawn as a kind of inevitable denouement that allows us to gather the threads of our lives―in my case, the lawn, some work, the rest that I'd foregone―and let memory return in time with the understanding that abides the common, the quiet, and the quotidian.

Mad Faith

Why all this talk of the Beloved, Music and dancing, And Liquid ruby-light we can lift in a cup?

Because it is low tide, A very low tide in this age And around most hearts. We are exquisite coral reefs, Dying when exposed to strange Elements. God is the wine-ocean we crave— We miss; Flowing in and out of our Pores.    —Hafiz

The tide is low around our hearts—deadly low. Things haven’t changed much from the fourteenth century when the Persian poet Hafiz penned his poem, “Why All This Talk?” The craftiest thieves of our souls are safety and mediocrity, spiriting away the cup of ruby-light that is our birthright before we’ve had a chance to take a sip. Yet how to access the high tide that buoys us into the arms of the Beloved, that wine-ocean we crave? Tides can kill. They purge and roar and threaten to drown. Sort of like God. So we live the spiritual equivalent of children of five or six who still wear helmets to ride their scooters down the sidewalk. Dang we’re good at getting through life without sustaining a single head injury.

Not so the Celtic saints, who from all accounts operated on one speed and that was high. Christ himself said that the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force (Matthew 11:12). Those Celts seemed to actually believe that, wrestling out their sanctification in ways that astonish today. They built their churches and beehive cells as close to the roaring coastal waters of the Hebrides Islands as possible in order to feel closer to God’s power and, dare we say it, his danger. Their prayer caves were so proximal to the surf that during bad storms the sea sometimes pushed its fury into these caverns where men and women of mad faith were praying as though their souls and the spiritual future of the British Isles depended on it. Yes, the Celtic monastics chose to be cornered by God, and they loved it.

A fellow monk once observed the saintly prior Cuthbert standing all night in the sea with the water up to his neck. When asked why, Cuthbert is said to have replied, “If I’m not facing death when I pray, I’m not really praying.” The applications to our own scant spiritual pursuits won’t be lost on most of us. Why we don’t get out there in the deep water is anyone’s guess. After all, Aslan isn’t particularly safe, but he is good.

Shedding My Skin

I found the skin of a snake in my backyard last summer while I was crawling on my hands and knees pulling weeds. Sandwiched between stalks of crocosmia was an entire body case, white and transparent, stamped with tiny squares, like thin patterned tissue paper. Resting there whole, without the snake itself, I thought of the disciples finding Jesus’ grave clothes in the empty tomb. Where had he gone?

I’d seen the snake before, both of us startled the first time I rustled my way through plantings, serrated yellow trowel in hand, digging up the long roped roots of bindweed. I’ve never liked snakes. In addition to the bad rap from Genesis, a baby rattler bit my dog in our Santa Cruz Mountains backyard years ago and I spent thousands of dollars on antivenin to save him.

I knew this snake, a garter, wasn’t poisonous, and so I chose to greet it with friendly respect as I would a feral cat, remembering the words of the herpetologist I paid a thousand dollars to inspect our mountain property for more rattlesnakes: snakes are a sign of healthy ecosystem.

Snakes are also, as the mystics in my life tell me, a sign of transformation. So it seemed right and fitting—since I left California for Washington’s Puget Sound and discarded my former identities for new ones just forming—to welcome this skin skin and the snake, as signs of my own resurrection into a new life. I wonder if the snake felt the loss of its former self as I do, or if it’s simply a relief to shed a skin too tight to allow for growth and becoming. I know I felt cramped, fighting to fit inside the container I spent years constructing. Like the snake, my slip into new life wasn’t seamless. It was nothing compared to Jesus’ journey, his relinquishment of his very life to an existence beyond our imagination, but it required twisting and thrashing. You have to be a contortionist to escape yourself, to surrender your old identity and leave it behind.

There are moments when transformation feels like loss—I panic like the disciples wondering how I can go on. But I wonder if the past is ever really gone, or if we don’t gather up our old selves like the snake’s spent skins and stitch them together hoping for something familiar to clothe the new self, to keep us warm through winter and sane through old age. What we lack in craftsmanship we make up for in desire, so we parade in our patchwork flesh, hoping those threads will connect us to the Divine.

I wish I’d seen the snake that day, iridescent and incandescent, stretching boldly into its new skin. And oh, how I’d love to walk down the street dazzled by the sight of all-new Easter people walking tall, chests open, shining bright while our pasts are scattered like forgotten love notes, our shed skins and grave clothes fluttering high into the wind.

Hagar Shipley Helps Me See

“Do you ever get used to such a place?’ She laughs then, a short bitter laugh I recognize and comprehend at once. "Do you get used to life?" she says.     —Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel

Last summer a friend and I pooled together some resources to cross half an ocean and take an elderly friend of the family on a day long excursion to a tourist attraction (we did other stuff when we were there too, so don’t esteem my altruism too highly). Not adept at planning, we took great care in organizing transportation, meals, operation hours, admission costs/requirements, mobility aids etc. On the way home from our pleasant outing, my friend asked the dozing but cognitively sharp octogenarian what was one of the most important things to living a worthwhile life.

The response? “Don’t ever go into debt. Save all your money.”

That’s it.

That was her advice.

In the months that have ensued I have been thinking a lot about the expectations we place on others, particularly the elderly. When I find myself frustrated with the ones in front of me, I often reach for the ones from literature for guidance. For me, one of these fictive individuals is Hagar Shipley from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel.

Canadian author and literary critic George Woodcock recounts that the staying power of great literature in general, and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel in particular, is related to its ability to depict universality as well as uniqueness. In Hagar Shipley, the increasingly dependent 90 year old protagonist, he says, we recognize enough aspects of our own grandmother that we have a certain sense of familiarity. Too much familiarity though, he warns, is tedious so all good authors also establish a degree of uniqueness which draws us in.

I’m not sure I see either of my grandmothers in Hagar, nor would I particularly want to. She treats others with harsh judgement, spite, resentment and a startling lack of insight. She assumes the worst intentions and is not easily entreatable. She is in fact, as her son refers to her, “a holy terror.”

So just what is it about Hagar that I find myself being drawn to again and again? What is in the recollection of this terrifying woman that revitalizes my patience and maybe even kindness when I find myself in the extended company of the aged? Perhaps it is my sympathy to Hagar’s dogged determination to the North American ideal of freedom (which, according to Margaret Atwood and others, defines her struggle). Or maybe, as Woodcock suggests, it is the loud grumblings and rumblings humanity makes along the path of mere survival. How can this story's startling reminder of mortality, human frailty, and tendency to egoism possibly encourage gentleness?

I think, for me, it is this: Laurence has entrusted something to the embittered and feisty Hagar that I sometimes forget to concede to people labeled “other”: humanity. Laurence has created a character with foibles and flaws and a striking sense of individuality. Hagar Shipley busts through the stereotypes we often place on the elderly: she is neither sweet nor kind nor senile nor particularly sagacious in a way we recognize.

And she, just as we, when asked “does one get used to life?” must shrug. She has not gotten used to life. Life, after all, is not a pizza or a bedspread. Life is not conquerable; it is not predictable; it is usually not even understandable. It just is.

Hagar’s tale is not necessarily a cautionary one, though she does eventually recognize that she has carried the backbreaking chains of pride throughout her life which has tragically “shackled all she touched.” I’m not sure Laurence means for me to pity Hagar, just as she does not entice me to emulate her. What Laurence does do is help me see: help me see the humanity in others and the humanity in me. And, while I am looking through that view, my capacity for compassion is enlarged.

The Shape Among the Figures

Poems move us through space of one kind or another. Since so many words began their lives in some action or image (the Latin source of “redundant,” for example, contains the image of overflowing waves), even abstract poetry creates a sense of navigation. In poetry filled with overtly concrete imagery, of course, this movement’s easier to feel, and the shapes described in the movement through the space can be revealing.

Consider these two poems, one by the late Seamus Heaney, an Irishman who taught in America, the other by the late Galway Kinnell, the American son of an Irish immigrant. A dozen years separated their births, and a decade divided the writing of these poems: Heaney’s “Digging” appeared in 1966; Kinnell’s “St. Francis and the Sow” in 1976. In both poems, the shape the speaker’s attention makes—determined by the sequence of imagery in space—describes a figure central to the meaning of the poem.

Heaney’s poem “Digging” begins as an elegy for the life he cannot lead—the farmer’s way of his father and his father’s father—then becomes the very means of uncovering a sense of kinship between that way and his own, a knowledge that gives his life meaning and purpose. As he makes this discovery, his attention drops and rises, dips and returns. It falls from his window to the ground, where it unearths the sustenance he needs: a precisely felt awareness of his place, his people, his history. The fruit of his attention he carries back up to his room, where the gripped pen readies to fall again and again to the work at hand. Digging.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests. I’ll dig with it.

“St. Francis and The Sow” is a song sung in praise of the flesh, especially that which might be called filthy, ugly, broken, stained, beneath the notice of the upright. St. Francis loved each creature equally. He found the imprint of God’s love within every made thing. And so it is no surprise to find the figure of the cross embedded in the description of the animal at the end of the poem, when the speaker leads us in a litany of imagery, from the snout to the tail, then from “the hard spininess spiked out from the spine” down to the “fourteen teats” that nourish the animal’s young. Unmixed attention is prayer, Simone Weil once wrote. Here, our attention to the least among us traces a cross inherent in living flesh, even as our attention’s direction describes the action of a blessing.

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Driving

It’s hard writing about the salty Gulf Coast without the taste of fried biscuits in Mendenhall, Mississippi, or the hypnotic curves of rice paddies in southeast Arkansas, the lonely cotton gins and weathered Baptist churches that survive calamitous storms year after year. Before we can throw our bodies into the roiling sea, there’s a rite of passage we must traverse. It takes nine-and-a-half hours to drive from Little Rock to Orange Beach. Nine-and-a-half hours of poverty and the whims of commodity crop economics. It used to be cotton and rice. Now it’s GMO corn and soy. “You can’t even eat that corn,” my mom would say. A black cloud of starlings shoots past us. “I know, it all goes to the cows outside Denver,” I would reply. Dollar General replaced the mom-and-pop small town shops, and now even those soul-starved places are empty, only to be filled by storefront churches promising salvation by the highway. One sign reads Just Church. Fast food wrappers skitter along asphalt and half-smashed snakes. Upturned armadillos try to hold up the sky with their stubby legs. Meanwhile, kudzu swallows up longleaf pines and the lives that depend on them, and the forest turns into a tomb, encased by this foreign, medicinal vine only Agent Orange could knock out. The roadside greenbelt looks more like a freak show displaying storybook monsters frozen in time – their movements, their joys, their battles all swallowed up by this relentless vine. I don’t care how medicinal it is and what the rumors are for curing cancer. That vine is killing the forests.

We drive and drive through one small southern hamlet after another. We look for the places where the good bathrooms are. Lake Providence. Hattiesburg. We pass the HoJo where my parents stayed on their way to New Orleans for their honeymoon. I casually mention that I’ve never tried boiled peanuts. My husband shakes his head and exclaims, “You’ve never     tried   boiled    peanuts!” We stop at the first roadside sign—just a piece of cardboard and the words, Boiled Peanuts, written in black marker. A round man in overalls scoops them out of a steaming metal barrel next to his pickup truck. I hold the heavy brown paper bag between my legs and feel the warmth radiate through my thighs. The slippery peanuts taste like what they actually are, legumes, and this feels right. I can’t finish the whole bag. I can’t write about the ocean without covering the ground leading there. Those peanuts and disenfranchised farming dreams. We cross five hundred hardscrabble miles for the promise of beach paradise at the end of the road. Yes, there is beach litter – cigarette butts, Styrofoam scraps, tampon applicators, and the odd flipper. Tar balls have decreased since the 2010 oil spill. Pelicans, osprey, and gulls act like nothing happened. Some say not to eat the oysters and shrimp, but I can’t resist the flavors holding my childhood together. I walk to the water and dive into a small wave. A school of fish shoots past me, and I know my ashes will be scattered here someday. I know I will return and become part of a swirling gyre of manmade debris and God’s holy mysteries, and that will be fine.

Stubborn Patience in Paradise Lost

Last night I dreamt that I got lost again. It’s a frequent dream for me: I can’t find my car or my way home. While that type of dream may have metaphorical meaning for some people, I think it is most likely pretty literal for me. When I was a kid, sometimes I had to ask my friends at sleepovers to remind me where their bathroom was because I couldn’t quite remember their house layout and I was scared of opening the wrong door. Before smart phones and GPSs, using public transit was a complete nightmare. In addition to having the tendency of getting lost, I am also pretty good at remaining unseen. It was not that uncommon for me to be the last one sitting on the bus patiently awaiting my destination when the driver would turn around, and, with a start say, “I had no idea there was still a passenger on here!” Sometimes, I had gotten on the right bus, but on the wrong side of the street and so ended up at the other side of the city.

Often, in an attempt to make me feel better, people will tell me that they are not very good with directions either. They mean well, but it doesn’t really help; it makes me feel like they think they understand, but they don’t. It can be somewhat isolating. So, when I meet someone who has a similar challenge it can be really quite bonding.

The petite elderly professor who taught me Paradise Lost was like that. One of her colleagues once told our class that said professor was so perpetually lost that it was sometimes an accomplishment for her to find her way home from a neighbour’s. True or not, the impression stuck and she became among my favorite instructors. When she spoke of Milton’s Satan, Adam, and Eve, I paid attention and was quite nearly riveted. Without power point, whiteboard, props or even a dramatic voice, the passages she pointed to were gripping. I still read it from time to time. The story fascinates me. I know the ending, how can I possibly be so transfixed, I sometimes wonder. I’m beginning to think I might have an inkling of what particularly fascinates me about the story: Satan.

Perhaps of all the lines in Paradise Lost, the description of Satan’s “stubborn patience as with triple steel” is among the most chilling for me. The Fallen Angel’s designs to deceive and destroy God’s freshly created Eve and Adam stuns me with its icy resolution. It strikes me because of its dissimilarity with the nature of evil that I often see portrayed in culture and literature: hot, passionate, sensual desire with searing results. Milton, however, shows us a Satan who is not sexy, only stubborn.

Like Francis Underwood of House of Cards, Satan’s plans are strategic, stealthy and unwearied: his will is enduring and his resilience indestructible. Perhaps this image is so striking for me because of the composed calmness the line suggests he possesses. There is little hustle and bustle going on at this moment; instead, there is cold calculation. Rather than the perpetrator of forbidden fun like the devil (who can forget Al Pacino in this role) in Devil’s Advocate, Milton’s antagonist embodies the nature of evil Charles Williams explores in Descent into Hell: deliberate, incremental and isolating steps that go deeper and deeper into the non-spectacular: the anti-spectacular, in fact, for it is oblivion.

The Pageant of Specificity

This fall, I plan to take my twelve-year old pheasant hunting for the first time, as my father took me. Last fall, when he was eleven, I took Micah out to shoot in a gravel pit outside of town, after which time I had one question:

What was my dad thinking?  

A shotgun in the hands of a twelve year old is an unnatural thing. Even my simple single shot 20 gauge doesn’t fit his body, overbalancing it and conjuring young David in Saul’s armor at best and Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” at worst. Though several of his friends already went hunting this year, meaning the peer pressure’s on, after seeing him shoot I contemplate putting him off another year—until his body grows into it, I tell myself.

Enter Hunter Safety training. In order to legally carry even the metal tube plus firing pin that is the shotgun I own, Micah has to complete twelve hours of online course material that will take him through things like a short history of the gun, the various moving parts of various types of guns, and situational hunting ethics, and he’ll have to be able to show that he can handle a .22 safely under the watchful eye of an instructor at a scheduled “field day.”   

Observing the online course over his shoulder, I’m reminded of why guns and hunting are so bewitching: particularity.

Consider the action types:  break action (think the double-barrel shotgun of every old coot in every old film you’ve seen), bolt action, lever (think every western), pump (think onomatopoeia: “snick-cluck,” in one Faulkner story, “chuh-chuh” in ominous adolescent boy parlance), and semi-automatic. Going through action types feels like insider information, and I can feel Micah’s interest grow.

In a later chapter, a man literally up to his eyes in camo disappears against the backdrop of a tree; his decoys set carefully in the field in front of him, he squeaks out a perfect turkey cluck with what looks like a stick and cross section of limb but is really a slate call. Micah asks, “Can we go turkey hunting?”  

My question exactly.

Once, during my MFA program, the fiction writers heard a craft lecture on the topic of guns. If you’re going to talk about something like a gun in your writing, the idea went, you’d better talk about them specifically and well. They came out bright-eyed, thinking about their work and the world more closely.

This is what details and paying attention and writing do:  focus us in on the world.

Micah passes the field day tests. Seeing how conscientious he is in handling the .22, I feel somewhat better. At the end of the day, the students are given a chance to shoot clay pigeons, first with a 20 gauge and then a 12 gauge. I convince Micah to try it, though he’s nervous. He’s never shot either, and he’s worried about the kick they will give, and whether he’ll miss. Knowing the situation, he’s probably equally embarrassed to not shoot, a more dangerous motivation, conjuring in a small way The Things They Carried.

But we’re among friends here. One of Micah’s instructors was also the instructor at my field day almost thirty years ago, a man who once told me how disappointed he gets when the novels he reads don’t get the guns right. When it’s Micah’s turn, he readies the black 20 gauge pump and once again looks the part of David. The gun’s unwieldy; he looks as if he could tip over. As the first pigeon wheels outward, a bright orange disk against the warm background of gravel piles, Micah fires but misses, the disk breaking against the ground. He carefully snick-clucks the second shell into place. When the second target spins through the air, Micah finds it at the end of his bead and fractures it with his shot. He’s satisfied, even pleased, but also ready to leave. He doesn’t feel the need to shoot a bigger gun.

I look forward to the fall pheasant hunt:  father and son in blaze orange amidst the shades of fall on a crisp October day; walking some rare, grassy corner of the plains; startling a bird skyward, a bird so painted it can only be exotic; maybe knocking it down with lead shot, opening the break action to smell the quick bitter smoke of the powder; toting the bird home to clean it, including heart, liver, and gizzard so Micah’s Grandma can cook it; eating it, as part of our particular practice, as laab gai, ground up with herbs and accompanied by a salty soup.

In reality, it might not work this way—the weather will be too cold, too hot, too windy; more likely than not, I’ll miss, hopefully Micah won’t; maybe we won’t see any birds and we’ll need to use frozen chicken for the laab. No matter, because the pageant of pheasant hunting, gun safety, eating laab gai, all of it is a way to turn us to the things of the world, the ongoing pageant of the specific.

The Quickening of Ink

One morning in her thirty-ninth year, in her father’s house where she lived as a near-invalid from a respiratory ailment that had plagued her since childhood, Elizabeth Barrett received a fan letter from a struggling poet six years her junior. "I love your poems," the missive began.

Over the next twenty months, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett exchanged 574 letters, culminating in a telegram from Robert: “I love your poems—and I love you.” The lovers had yet to meet in the flesh.

When they did, two months later, they eloped, sailing to Italy, where Barrett’s health bloomed and where they welcomed the birth of a son, whom they nicknamed Pen.

Three years into their marriage, Barrett presented Browning with a ribbon-bound packet. It was made of forty-four love poems, many written when the two had known each other through words alone.

Robert urged Elizabeth to share the poems with the world. "I dared not reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's," he later wrote.

Barrett finally agreed to publish the intensely private works, but only under the guise that she’d discovered them in a foreign tongue and rendered them into the one that she and her husband held in common.

The poems appeared in her next book, in 1850: “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

Sonnet XXIII

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands which loose the string
And let them drop down on my knee to-night.
This said,—he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it!—this, . . . the paper’s light . . .
Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God’s future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this . . . O Love, thy words have ill availed
If, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

Words long for flesh. The textured pages Browning impressed with his pen were folded by his hands, carried, hand by hand, to the reaching hand of his beloved. His words lived with her before he could. They lay in her lap, in her hands, against her breast. They burned and paled. Every curve of Browning’s ink was as distinctive as the shape of breath that whispered it to life.

Am I speaking from mere nostalgia when I ask what the lovers of our age will have to hold? Will a touchable screen of scrollable text suffice? Will words composed of pixels that must recombine into the next desired object, words displayed in a uniform face that may be swapped for another at will, each indistinguishable from the face of some other utterance—a slogan, say—none of them able to be traced by hand in hopes of discerning the character of the heart that wrote them, none of them able to be worn by touch: will this give an apt accounting of the love? Perhaps this is, in part, why Barrett did not want her sonnets set into type. What is lost when words cannot bear the alterations made by the passion of their use? What will love consist of when the words that compose its expression are diffused into ether?

Fifteen years after her love was made flesh by the quickening of ink, Elizabeth Barrett died, in her husband’s arms.