Lessons

Just last week, during prayers at bedtime, my youngest son thanked God that piano lessons were over for the summer. I’m not sure when it became law for upright pianos to be stationed in every household, to break the backs of the fathers who move them there and to break the minds of children who, coming home daily from school, find not freedom but piano lessons, but it’s a law I resent even as I continue to abide by it. In one corner we, too, have a breaking-down piano like a hulking mushroom.

I took piano lessons from third to sixth grade—until I broke my arm, thank God—and honestly never played one song that had life or actual music in it. For me, the piano was a parallel art: it was an art that ran parallel to my life and never once broke into my own playing. One night, after I tearfully struggled through my lesson, going through the motions, I got out our old typewriter and began happily copying encyclopedia entries. First, I did “Temperate Forest” followed by “Desert.” Climate descriptions, animal lists, whatever. I plunked them out and felt every one of the clicks and thunks, felt the energy transferred from my fingers to the simple levers of the keys that punished the paper with staccato precision, marking it with elegant letter after elegant letter. That rhythmic mechanical process clicked off something in my brain. I loved it.

Dad was a musician, or rather a musician turned farmer, with short muscular fingers at least a key-and-a-half wide from milking cows for forty years. The night of the plunking typewriter, he scolded me sharply for my miserable attempt at the piano while I could type out meaningless stuff easily enough. He was right. There was certainly no music to the words, nothing like he could do on the old upright. He’d modeled what music might sound like, playing from memory an old ditty in which his hands jumped from the keys with life and verve, his thick torso swaying back and forth, a conduit of emotion and energy even if he didn’t hit all the right notes. In a man of his size, it was something to behold.

As I sit this morning and wonder what it is I’m doing at this keyboard, I can’t conjure as much emotion as he did for those little ditties. It wouldn’t be safe. Or sustainable. And yet it’s exactly what I want in a way—to grasp and hold lightning for a minute like he did, for meaning to flow through the conduit of my body and out these ten tangled fingers.

So I get up morning after morning, sit before the keyboard, and bend myself to the lessons, waiting for lightning to strike.

The Fortune of First Impressions

The simple answer to the question is: I’ve read enough great books to just know. But this isn’t about that answer. It’s too simple anyway—and carelessly arrogant—however satisfactory it is. Instead this is about the question I found myself contemplating after reading the opening salvo of Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet and knowing this would be the best book I’ve ever read.

The whole restless mob of us spread on blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living.

I immediately read this passage aloud. Twice. Interrupted and read it to my wife. I have quoted it at length to people since then. Here, in one instant intake of words, was the story, the voice, the language that would entwine all the experiences in this book. And I just knew that this sentence (and many, many, countless others in this book) was sublime, exquisite, everything. Never has an opening to a novel forged such an indelible first impression.

To me this has always been an antiquated notion: that wonderful opening line to the novel as an edifice on which an entire story rests. Opening lines are great, but a novel is a marathon; how you get out of the blocks doesn’t really effect the race. So I’ve come to disavow any initial first impression of a book. I want to believe that I’m better off reading into it fifty to a hundred pages before I make any judgement. But this single sentence in Cloudstreet stripped that practice away like decaying plaster. I was given over to something instinctual. And I couldn’t ignore it. Couldn’t talk any doubt into myself. Why? Why did I trust this first impression? And why was it so very right some four hundred pages later when I read the last line and flipped back to this opening sentence?

I went back to Malcolm Gladwell’s compelling read Blink. At length Gladwell talks about snap judgements, those based on the merest of slices of information. We are, he writes, “innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition” and that ours is a world “that assumes that the quality of a [judgement] is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.” Gladwell concedes there is a fallibility in making snap judgements. However, there is just as much, if not more, good here as well. That these rapid assertions can be educated and controlled. We can trust our instincts. Blink is a long argument about how and why we should cultivate first impressions.

This brings me to the gospel story of Peter and Andrew. Upon hearing Jesus’s words, they made a snap decision to drop everything they were doing and could ever do. And what did Jesus say? “Come. Follow me. I will show you how to fish for people!” I think of them, there, in the dreamy briny sunshine in the middle of their living. This first encounter with Christ. How was it they had cultivated themselves, their spirits, for this moment? Did they know in an instant that trusting this sliver of a saying, this presence there on the hillside chiaking about going fishing for people, would be so significant?

Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes this in The Sabbath, “The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information [a thing], but to face sacred moments…A moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time…It is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to a thing.”

So think of that initial pulse from a person, a work of art, a book, a song, a place. The feeling that transported you. Did you trust it? Should you have?

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.

Mad Men: Unfamiliar Gestures - Part 2

Read Part I here

“It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.” —Frank O’Hara

What effect are these new gestures having on Don Draper?  Does he feel more like himself again? Would that be a good thing? Or are the gestures leading to something better, something blended of the Dick Whitman he was and the Don Draper he had become? On his trip west, after giving his car away to the young man who reminded him a lot of himself, Draper sits alone at a bus stop. He looks like a drifter, except for the bag of money in his lap. He ends up at the Bonneville Salt Flats and puts his money and mechanical talents behind two guys trying to break the land speed record. These last episodes are filled with generous gestures, so different from the selfish gestures that had been the pathway to creating Don Draper. They show him not in command, but helping others take command. He looks up Stephanie, to find a way to help her, because he feels like he has a responsibility toward her, for Anna’s sake.

Stephanie drags Don to a retreat on the coast. She leaves suddenly without him after an emotional confrontation with a woman about the child she gave up. Stranded at the retreat, he feels the full weight of the misery that propelled him on his quest and now includes sorrow over Betty’s pending death. Her words were sounding in his ears, “I want to keep things as normal as possible. And you not being here is part of that.” Don calls Peggy and agonizes, “I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am.” When she asks him, “What did you ever do that was so bad?” his answer reveals the depths he’s been searching, “Broke all my vows, scandalized my child, took another man’s name and made nothing of it.”

An attendee comes up to Don as he sits on the ground by the phone. He looks so distraught she thinks he is on a bad trip. She invites him to a session she is late for, on the pretense of not wanting to walk in alone.

During the session, Don listens closely to a man named Leonard who describes how his office job and his family leave him feeling invisible. He tells about a dream he had that describes how even though his family is kind and happy, they don’t seem to include him, they leave him sitting on the refrigerator shelf and close the door, making the light go out. At that point, the man starts to cry. At first, you think maybe he’s laughing over the refrigerator dream. But then you realize he’s weeping. As the man’s easy going facade crumbles, Don gets to his feet and walks over to him. Some have said that Don Draper never changes. But here is a gesture unlike any he has ever made. He gets down on one knee before Leonard, who no doubt would have been his subordinate in an office setting, he wraps his arms around him, but not just to comfort him. Don puts his head on Leonard’s shoulder and sobs with him. It was a gesture another Whitman expressed this way, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” Don Draper relates to this invisible man because his own identity has been so elusive.

The next morning, Don stands watching the ocean on the edge of a cliff. Did you think for a second he might throw himself off? He breathes the sea air, watches the sun come up. Was he ever so clear eyed and unhungover first thing in the morning? Later, sitting cross-legged in a group meditation, while concentrating on his mantra, the idea for the Coke ad comes to him, he smiles.

Did Don Draper go back east and pick up where he left off, to work his way into a partnership at McCann Erickson? Don Draper changed, that fact is revealed in his expansive gestures. This kind of transformation results in lifestyle changes. Rather than going back east, it’s more likely that he bought a house on the beach and became an advertising consultant. California was always the better coast for Don. It’s where he visited Anna, proposed to Megan, and got away from his New York problems. Like Joan who celebrated the good and bad of her climb to independence by calling her production company Holloway-Harris (“you need two names to make it sound real” she told Peggy), Don might call his company Whitman-Draper, reconciling the two parts of who he has become, and as a nod to this other poet he would relate to. Maybe it was this Whitman Matthew Weiner had in mind all along who said, “A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibilities of their own souls.”

Didn’t we know, out of all the possibilities, that he’d land on his feet? There he was every week at the end of the fall sequence, comfortably settled on the sofa, white collar and cuffs, cigarette in hand.

(Don’t miss Don Draper reading Frank O’Hara’s poem.)

Mad Men: Unfamiliar Gestures - Part 1

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again...”    —Frank O’Hara

We wondered if he’d make it, after years of watching the silhouetted man in the title sequence tumble past the images on the skyscraper. It was the confluence of verb and adjective, he was falling and fallen in every episode. We read it in his gestures.

We became familiar with these gestures, lighting a cigarette, pouring a drink, catching a woman. The straight posture, the raised eyebrows, the shrug. Many of his gestures spoke the language of a commanding presence, a successful partner, the iconic possessor of the American Dream.

In a way, the gestures were both the building and the unraveling of the man. He fed off them and they undid him, each in their turn. There were gestures that gave us a view into his murky depths. There was his assault of Bobbie Barrett in the ladies’ room when she attempted to bribe him. There was the moment he returned home with the cake for Sally’s birthday party only to pass the house, drive late into the night to brood. Maybe he was thinking about “having it all” as a party guest gloated, or maybe about Rachel Menken and being trapped in a marriage in the suburbs. There were the gestures inherent in two failed marriages, and many hookups and infidelities—at least 19 women in his life over a 10-year period.

There were some bright gestures blended with the dark. He was devoted to Anna Draper, the real Don Draper’s wife. He promised he would take care of her, gave her money for a porch, painted her living room. He sent her a book of Frank O’Hara’s poems that deeply moved him (the Beatnik at the bar couldn't see past the suit.). Anna once told him, “I know everything about you and I still love you." When he later heard about her death, he sobbed and told Peggy that Anna was “the only person in the world who really knew him.”  

Gradually the degrading, selfish, and hurtful gestures transitioned to something more hopeful. What did it mean for him to show his children the brothel where he grew up, after carefully creating a polished father image to impress them? Seeing Don in front of the derelict house appearing a little mystified, and the children looking both stunned and awed, one critic writes, “Sally immediately recognizes the enormity of the gesture.”  

After he made his fortune, reclaimed himself from alcoholism, and fell through almost every relationship he had, he began to look both out of place and at home in his new gestures. For once his presence in the room wasn’t commanding. In the McCann Erickson boardroom he seemed bewildered by the box lunch that replaced the full bar, and within minutes of the presentation, his expression seemed almost whimsical as he looked out the window and watched an airplane float past the Empire State Building. Weren’t we waiting for his usual rhythms to kick in? For him to stand up and say something creatively insightful that would put him back in his rightful place at the head of the conference table? Instead, he stood up and wandered out the door.

He went to spend time with his children, but they had become accustomed to his absence. Sally got a ride back to boarding school rather than wait for him to take her, and the boys were doing traditionally father-son activities, scouts and baseball, without him. He finds Betty in the kitchen reading her psychology book. He rubs her shoulders when he sees she is sore and she explains it was from carrying all her textbooks at registration. In a tender moment, she confides that she always wanted to study psychology, and Don smiles and encourages her, “Knock ‘em dead, Birdie.”

He builds bridges to Sally, keeping in touch with her while she’s at school, giving her advice and extra money for things like sport’s equipment. He gave Megan a million dollars because he felt bad about derailing her life. He pursued a waitress, not for his usual reasons, but because “she seemed lost.” It’s as if, seeing the collapse of his life in (and out of) the gray suit, he needed someone to rescue. He heads west, feeling a kinship to Jack Kerouac as he and a daydream Cooper quote from his book, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” He helps a kid who tried to swindle him, with the grand gesture of giving him his car, to help him “choose a different route,” as one critic put it. Different from the road that Dick Whitman had so far paved with elaborate lies.

Read Part 2 here

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.

You Must Change Your Life

Naomi Shihab Nye describes poetry as “a conversation with the world, a conversation with those words on the page allowing them to speak back to you—a conversation with yourself.”A few weeks ago, at AWP, I heard Nye speak on a poetry-activism panel with Luis Rodriguez and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Griffiths’ photography and poetry gives voice to the grief and rage she feels at the police brutality in America. Rodriguez, the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, has seen poetry unite his diverse, complicated city. All three poets spoke with a beautiful urgency, reminding us of the power in our art.  

This seemed to be the theme of AWP. Claudia Rankine was the keynote speaker. Her book, Citizen, is the perfect example of revolution-inciting poetry.

In fact, every session and panel seemed to be built on this same idea. Throughout the conference, I kept thinking of the last line of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” After contemplating the beauty and power of the statue, the speaker feels an edict: “You must change your life.”  

The Monday after the conference, I drove to work in a bit of a funk. I missed the urgency and energy and buzz of the conference. Then the story of Dagmar and Wali came on NPR and reminded me that returning to regular life was the whole point.  

The story concerns a very odd couple: Dagmar Nordberg is a 60-year-old Swedish museum director. Wali Hafiz is a 23-year-old Afghani engineer and refugee. Wali was brutally beaten and left for dead by the Taliban after he refused to support their efforts. He was forced to leave his wife and young daughter and flee to Sweden. This excerpt from the NPR transcript describes Wali and Dagmar’s first encounter:

They met on a train platform in a nearby village on a freezing cold day last November.

"He was standing there in a T-shirt, with his jeans and his cotton shoes," Nordberg recalls. "And I thought he was just one of these boys playing computer games all day long. And I've come to that age where I can say things, so I just passed him by and I said, 'It's winter!' "

Hafiz says he had so many problems he couldn't think about the weather. And besides, he didn't own a jacket. Nordberg remembers he was so stressed that he was sweating, but he replied politely.

"He said, 'I know, ma'am,'" she says. "That was the first time I heard Wali's voice."

Nordberg says she understood then that he was a lost refugee and she could either go on with her life or help him. "I just knew I had this choice here and now, and whatever I do will have consequences," she says.

So she took him in, taught him English, and secured him an apprenticeship. If you play the story to the end, you’ll hear them laughing together at her kitchen table…two unlikely kindred spirits.

I’m sure Dagmar, as a museum director, would have liked what Nye, Rodriguez, Griffiths and Rankin had to say at AWP, if she’d been able to hear it. I’m sure that when she curates the art in her museum, she looks for works that challenge and inspire change.

What amazes me is the way she altered her life in one moment, because of one encounter. Her story reminds me that it isn’t enough to listen to great speakers or to feel moved by great art. We must also be willing to take action.

I can’t get over that line she called out over the train platform— “It’s winter.”

Those words did what Nye says all poems should do. They connected strangers and moved them from hostility to understanding. They began a conversation. And ultimately, they transformed.

Printed out on a page, separated from their story, they might not look like much. 

It’s Winter.

Still, that’s the best poem I’ve heard in years. 

Christ in a Corset at Comic Con

N.B.: Follow links at your own discretion; some content may be unsuitable for work or children.

My boys were enthralled with playing Super Smash Bros. on an old Nintendo 64, so they didn’t notice the black-bearded man in the long, bleach-blond wig, white halter, cape, and white g-string pulled up over his basketball shorts (imagine a dude in this). It was my third Comic Con, so I knew to expect a range of costumes and costume quality, but this was the first where I noticed the cross-dressing cosplay they call “crossplay.”

If you go to Comic Con, you’re going to see some stuff, and it will teach you something about how you see—especially as a male. Imagine if every fifth woman you saw was squeezed into Harley Quinn spandex or Catwoman leather or some suit that projected her bared chest out for the world to admire. One needs to watch one’s thoughts.

There were impressive male costumes, too, like Captain America, Mr. Freeze, or Cardinals Iron Man. And there were playful, elaborate costumes like the Charizard with extendable wings or the 8-foot-tall, Ewok-piloted AT-ST with articulating legs, or even the girl in the BB-8 dress on white and orange roller skates—not to mention any number of winged, intubated, or grotesque characters I didn’t know.

I’m ambivalent about taking my young boys—four and seven—into these situations. Most of the time they don’t seem to notice the more unusual or “adult” costumes since they are distracted with the Pokémon and Storm Troopers. When I asked, afterward, if they’d seen anything they didn’t understand or if they had any questions, they shrugged and kept eating their graham crackers.

What would I say, anyway? I don’t quite understand a lot of cosplay, much less crossplay, despite my penchant for choosing female video-game avatars or my fondness for Spider-Woman and Wonder Woman.

Frankly, a lot of cosplay seems garish and in poor taste to me—and I’m not a big fan of camp. It doesn’t ruin my time or offend me; it’s just not what I would choose to look at, certainly not to do myself.

I get that it’s about transformation. It’s like Halloween in HD. For a brief time you get to participate in the existence of another persona, you get to alter your habitual way of being in the world, even if you don’t look great doing it.

But it really started to click for me when we passed a group of four very large women corseted up in gothic leather with plenty of ties and laces. Their hair and makeup was blue and black, their skin pale, their breasts almost obscenely bulging out of their tops, and there they were, sitting in a circle on the floor with their hot dogs and their plastic bags full of toys and comics like it was a normal thing to do.

If you clicked through any of the links above, maybe you felt that mixture of contempt for “the nerds” and envy at their dedication to their passion. It’s easy to feel superior at Comic Con, but if you are at Comic Con, then you’re the nerd in someone else’s eyes.

But I didn’t see nerds in that circle of busty, hot-dogging Goth girls. I saw regular people searching for the story that would make their reality match their inner sense of their universal significance.

That’s not vanity, that’s the imago Dei in them. Aren’t we all destined for something greater than earning a paycheck and consuming entertainment media? Whatever their errors, the “nerds” understood the importance of belonging to something greater than themselves.

Maybe heaven will look a little like Comic Con: a mass of society’s oddballs glorified in unexpected ways by grace. The challenge of being a good artist—or human—I think, means trying to see that shimmer of Heaven through the cleavages in the present.

How to Know

"Knowing is the responsible human struggle to rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality." —Esther Lightcap Meek, Longing To Know

We were in the car going somewhere. Our children, Joseph and Jonathan were in the back seat with Bev and me up front. It was nearly Christmas and Joseph was challenging the veracity of our assertions about Santa Claus. It's you guys, right? Bev and I weren't ready to abet our seven-year-old's descent into the murky realm of fact versus fantasy. It's a yes or a no, he insisted. Stunned by his need for this knowledge, the best I could do was offer a pathetic, Um, well... yes and no.

I still struggle with this. I would love to be certain, but I know that real truth resists the either/or of certainty. And though I'm a big fan of both/and quantum outcomes, this seems equally unsatisfying. Besides, there are no Hallmark moments reading quantum mechanics to your kid at bedtime.

I am not alone. The struggle is historic. Duality is expressed in the Age of Enlightenment from the 18th century still evidenced in the sacred/secular divide. It's in ancient Greek philosophy, in Raphael's School of Athens showing Plato's upward pointing finger and Aristotle's downward palm as essence and existence at odds. We even see its beginnings in the torrents of creation: the cold and the heat, high and low pressures, tectonic forces, the things we're made of. It seems the world's dynamics—its mechanisms for change—depend on apparent opposites cast irreducibly together. Yet, can such a maelstrom be the unity we intuit?

Duality inheres a two-ness that begs for a reconciliation that is beyond our present choices. We sense it should be there on the insistence of our desire alone—a belief that persists in a search for justification that is fleeting. So the choice seems between an endless struggle and the sidelines—between living in the tension-filled room where money, power and influence too often win, or being alienated by skepticism that leads to desperation.

Poet William Bronk offers an example of the latter position. Michael Heller remarks in the New York Times Book Review, “The natural world, Bronk would insist, is a world we can never know.” Bronk’s work suggests a basic estrangement between man and nature, promoting a bleak human situation we persist unsuccessfully in belonging to. Consider his poem On Being Together:

I watch how beautifully two trees stand together; one against one. Not touching. Not awareness. But we would try these. We are always wrong.

But consider the struggle again. In the Four Corners region of New Mexico, in Chaco Canyon, are the ruins of an ancient pueblo village of the Anasazi Indians. For years archaeologists puzzled over its disparate buildings, spiral petroglyphs and stone slab arrangements. Finally in 1979, a team oriented parts of its layout on the sun and suddenly, the pueblos became a watchport on the seasons. Their strange architecture was a finely tuned eye on the relationship of the earth with the stars. Here is human endeavor, book-ended in time, following human longing for harmony, clarity and insight. The patterns are there.

How we know is captured in a context somewhere between the rules and the world where our selves are subject to both, and certain of neither. But in this proximate humiliation our beliefs can flourish in the apprehension of patterns—our coming to know by glimpses on the hope that our home is secure in the stars.

Joseph is twenty-seven, now. I don't think he has reached a conclusion on the matter of Santa Claus. I think he is beginning to rest in the dialectical tension of life. He still wants concrete answers on metaphysical realities, but all I can do is give him two trees—not Bronk's—but rather one on the earth pointing to the sky that is also a similitude of the one that gives hope. In the mean time he has become one of the best Santas I know.

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.

The Soul’s Tempo in Four Quartets - Part II

Read Part I 

“The Dry Salvages,” the third poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets, thinks about time from the wilderness of rivers and oceans, drawing parallels to the cycles of life and to eternity. Rhythmically, this poem feels like water lapping at the shore: “Where is an end of it, the soundless wailing”; “where is there an end to the drifting wreckage”; “where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing”; “there is no end, but addition.”

“The Dry Salvages”  (1941) evokes Heraclitus’ most famous observation: “One cannot step twice into the same river.” Similarly, in time’s currents, humans are no longer the same travelers they were the moment before; nor will they be the same the next moment.  We are ever changing, but this signals our aging as well. Implicit in wilderness is the idea of an older time,  before clocks: “The tolling bell / Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried / Ground swell, a time / Older than the time of chronometers.” This is nature’s movement, something quite larger than ourselves, something we cannot control.

In nature, time is both destroyer and preserver, signified by “the river with its cargo of Dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops.” Here, Eliot wants us to know that agony is timeless; when we are in it, it seems eternal: “People change, and smile: but the agony abides.” Also, “time is no healer”; instead, time always kills the patient. The speaker seeks refuge from agony in prayer, and finally turns away from ancient remedies of magic and sorcery. He concludes that the only way to live timelessly is through prayer and through the saints. “Little Gidding" (1942), the most overtly religious quartet, moves the speaker from the human experience of time to the threshold of timelessness. Little Gidding is a chapel Eliot made pilgrimage to in 1936, when England was nearing war’s threshold. So too, readers enter the poem at a transitory time, “midwinter spring,” “suspended in time,” where “the brief sun flames the ice.” As in Heraclitus, this flash of light compares to insight. Yet this light is also a “pentecostal fire / In the dark time of the year.” We should approach this moment of light prayerfully, Eliot tells us, ready to see our folly and be restored by “that refining fire.” In prayer, a person prepares to cross the threshold and be “transfigured in another pattern,” experiencing visionary detachment that goes beyond desire to love. While history is “a pattern / of timeless moments,” to be transformed people must “arrive where we started from / And know the place for the first time,” “through the unknown remembered gate” (l. 246), to a place and experience humans have only glimpsed on the cave walls.  

My afternoon at the Menil that long-ago September, experiencing Mineko Grimmer’s Remembering Plato, the ice melting, the pebbles dropping and producing a watery music, the projected patterns on the walls constantly changing, I think I felt myself approaching a gate that wasn’t yet open to me. I still carry a vivid memory of that day when the experience touched me so deeply. In Four Quartets, Eliot works his way through ideas of memory and its patterns, and suspended time, toward glimpses of eternal forms, and finally, to the gate of timelessness, or eternity. Following the soul’s tempo, the speaker will gain “complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything) / And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.”

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 Sea Wall

                    so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world and spirit wed. - Howard Nemerov

When I was young, our family friends had access to a deserted strip of beach. Over the summer, my mom would pile us five kids and two of our friends’ kids into our station wagon and let the waves and sun exhaust our energies. There was a sea wall with a makeshift ladder that we climbed to get from the car to the sand below. I remember going up and down that ladder as a six year old. It was positioned straight up against a wall of creosoted beams. That meant, for a small child, getting up the ladder was a combination of pulling up on one rung while pushing off on another, the simple physics of overcoming gravity by force. The physics was simple, but the effort was not.

Decades later, I realize that as artists – creators – the sea wall is a metaphor for two aspects of our vocation. First, it’s where we put in the effort to call things into being. In “Choruses from The Rock,” T.S. Eliot writes, “After much striving, after many obstacles;/For the work of creation is never without travail.” At the sea wall we prevail over obstacles that come between our attempts to take our vision of waves, sky, and sandwiches on the beach into the every day world of roads, framed views, and meals at the table. Part of the effort comes in working against the paradox of noisy backgrounds – where we live – those places that both hinder our art and are its wellspring. The sea wall is also the meeting point between the finite nature of our abilities and where we are (hopefully) set ablaze by Caedmon’s sudden angel.

Nemerov’s lines show us another aspect of the sea wall in the artist’s life. We begin to shape the language of our vision on the sea side of the wall. It’s where we take in the world by reading fiction and poetry, nonfiction, the lines on people’s faces. Where we listen to the wind, and music, and sounds of longing in the babel. And we watch movies, sun and shadow, postures in conversation. It’s when we attempt to translate the vision with “pen’s point or brush’s tip” that something inexplicable happens, “world and spirit wed.” Because humankind struggles to see by believing, we long to bring something of the invisible world to the visible. Maybe it’s partly through artists’ creations that God answers the prayer, “I believe, help my unbelief.” This is the artists’ call, to carry the stone jars up the ladder, and watch the water turn to wine.

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.

Rilke and Foolishness

Sometimes, when I’m burnt out, I look to Rilke. Not his Letters to a Young Poet, or his masterpiece, Duino Elegies, but to his very first collection, Wegwarten. It was self-published, and he handed it out on street corners. One version of the story even claims he did this while “dressed in the black habit of an abbé with long curly hair.”

I really hate feeling foolish. I think, perhaps, it’s my deepest fear. I know, I know….my deepest fear ought to be something more lofty or noble, but honestly, embarrassment terrifies me.

I teach junior highers, so basically, I spend my days with 130 walking manifestations of this fear. They are never still—always tucking, brushing, fixing, sweating, lip-glossing, whispering, watching. They are little machines of anxious, self-protective energy.

When I think back on my own junior high years, I remember how intensely I wanting to blend in—to disappear, be it through diets, trends, or the right hedge of friends who would shield me from the blinding glare of individuality.

Even as a writer, even all grown up, I struggle with this. I obsess over how to write what I think editors want to read. How to snuggle into a writing community in which my voice will be welcomed and lauded. I skip certain contests and journal submissions, just to avoid the embarrassment of unrealistic expectations.

Of course I also fear writing forgettable poems, yet my pride steers me away from topics that would fuel really memorable poetry—family dysfunction, social justice, feminism, sex. Topics with the potential for embarrassingly spectacular failure.

In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury writes,

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

As I write this, I am a few days away from working  The AWP Conference & Bookfair, and I know my first instinct will be to try to blend in with the crowd. But I’m going to try to shake off that fear. I’m making it my goal to embarrass myself early and often, for the sake of celebrating writing. To strike up a conversation with the writers I really admire, or share poems with fellow attendees, or hit up an open mic. Knowing me, it probably won’t go 100% smoothly. I’ll probably suffer at least a slight scrape to my pride.

After the sting fades, I’ll remember Rilke handing out his poetry on the street. Wegwarten was universally panned. In that moment, Rilke looked pretty foolish. But you know what? It worked out okay for him.

The Soul’s Tempo in Four Quartets - Part 1

On a Friday one long-ago September, after I’d toured several galleries at the Menil Collection with some fellow writers, I was anxious to get outside and enjoy a rare, cool afternoon. However, the guide had one more exhibit to show us, a room-sized sculpture, Mineko Grimmer’s Remembering Plato.

As soon as I entered this simple, beautiful space, I forgot my urge to rush outdoors, astounded by the sculpture: At either end of the room, a shallow, rectangular pool rested on the hardwood floor. Stretched across the middle of each basin were two wires. Over each pool, an ice pendulum encrusted with pebbles hung. Spotlights projected the water’s light and shadows onto the walls. The ice was melting; pebbles were dropping onto the wires and into the basins, producing single, musical notes and watery sounds. Simultaneously, the projections on the walls changed, as pebbles falling faster over time disturbed the water. The effect, as Menil director Ned Rifkin aptly explained, is to animate “the internal mechanism of a clock we do not ordinarily see or use, one that corresponds to the soul’s tempo. ”

The patterns on the walls figure largely too in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where Eliot examines the distance between the ideal form and a person’s changing perceptions of it over time. The quartets, “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding,” also show us that human limitations can become a means of transcendence. If we accept the limits, exercising a measure of humility, then we may be transformed and freed of time. The quartets can be read, too, for their political context and imagery of war, but it is its narrative reflecting the poet’s conversion to Christianity that I find particularly interesting.

While the elements of Four Quartets are wide ranging, and each reader will take something different from the poems, the speaker enacts what it is like to grapple with the sublime. What I love about the quartets is Eliot’s musing on how we may glimpse eternity, where the soul experiences timelessness, and how we may seek God. I think my astonishment upon seeing Mineko Grimmer’s Remembering Plato was an exalted moment for me: I was taken out of time for a few moments and had a glimpse of something greater than myself.

In the first quartet, “Burnt Norton” (1936), the speaker’s perplexity concerning time is at once apparent: “If all time is eternally present, / All time is unredeemable.” The speaker moves toward the memory of a manor and gardens and considers the disjunction between ideal forms and reality in a positive way, namely, that the saving grace of memory is its distance from actual events. For in memory, the speaker can reconsider life and make new patterns of it.

Yet Eliot’s speaker is also bewildered, knowing that humans cannot remove themselves from time. Even when he calls on memory, he must do so in real time. There are glorious moments that humans sometimes perceive, and in those moments, movement is suspended: “The pool was filled with water out of sunlight, / And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, / The surface glittered out of heart of light. ” Like my experience of Mineko Grimmer’s sculpture, such moments are the still point, just as the earth’s axis is its still point. Throughout “Burnt Norton,” the speaker tries to apprehend the still point where the soul can rest, while “desire itself is movement.” One reading of this quartet is the speaker’s striving for love beyond desire, a divine love, a salvation.

Eliot’s second quartet, “East Coker” (1940), moves through the seasons, which in turn give way to years, and years to ancestry and history. There is also motion toward acceptance of human limitations as well as geographic movement away from civilization toward wilderness. The movement of our time in this life is cyclical, and the speaker ponders how he might be released from it. “In my beginning is my end,” he says, recognizing that time is comprised of endless, cyclical occurrences. These are purposeless unless he—and we—begin to view them in timeless contexts.

Eliot also wants to remind us that movement through the seasons points to human frailty: though Plato’s cave-dwellers dance around the bonfire, the dance ends with the dancers. We humans fear the loss implicit in giving ourselves over to someone or something we may lose; fear of “belonging to another, or to others, or to God.” In order to acquire “the wisdom of humility,” we need to face our fears. And to gain abiding faith, hope, and love, apart from cyclical time, we must wade into the darkness. In doing this, the speaker indicates, it is possible to gain the insight of a refining fire.

Read Part II

Spoken Word

The documents are in folders, carefully taken out and laid upon my desk. Others have been folded and refolded; the creases have become a part of the paper. They are birth and marriage and death certificates, transcripts and diplomas. I scan the documents and send the file to one of my translators. After a few hours or days, the translated words in English are sent back. I look through, edit and check. The documents are filled with words like certify, signature, official, issued, expire; it’s pretty straightforward stuff.

Many clients are fluent in English and could translate their own documents if not for the need of an official stamp. A few come with little English and have a friend or family member along. Some are in a hurry with a deadline to meet, often students with transcripts due the next day, but many are relaxed; they’re used to things taking a long time.

Every once in a while, a client hands me a personal document—a statement or letter. These contain painful stories, usually against a backdrop of political turmoil, and they are usually handwritten. As I scan to proofread the English, I am an intruder, as are all the other people—the secretaries and lawyers and judges—who will be privy to the pages of story. Some of these documents are for immigration purposes, and they are the most difficult.

Recently I sat with a man from a war-torn country, for whom we had translated multiple documents over several weeks. On this day, with this last letter, the most important document, the man asked me to read the finished text aloud in English.

I didn’t want to but couldn’t refuse. So I put on my best reading voice, stopping to improve phrasing or make a better word choice as I read words that are common to these kinds of documents—words such as whips and gangs, militia and refugee camp. The man, standing next to my wood desk, listened intently, occasionally asked me to reread a sentence here and there, to be sure it sounded right. I had read the words before—it’s my job to do the final proofread—but by reading aloud, I felt the full force of my intrusion into a story that wasn’t mine. The words shook me up; they became a part of me.

When I finished, the man nodded, satisfied with the translation. He could hear how the words sounded just right in my American accent. I printed the words, the pronounced and perfected words, and pressed my organization’s seal over them. The man thanked me, and I wished him well, God’s blessings on his family, maybe in French, maybe English, I don’t remember now, and he returned the blessing, because that’s what you do.

And as the translated words have moved from office to office—accomplishing, I hope, the work they were meant to do—they have stayed with me, linking me somehow, to this story of a foreigner’s family hoping for refuge and safe haven.