Imagination

I teach a course at BGSU called "Imaginative Writing."  But what is the imagination?  I don't think there's one agreed upon definition.  But clearly, long ago humans developed an ability to recognize special, magical moments in life.  They developed the ability to describe their exterior world, and to participate in self-knowledge.  They learned to describe their inner world.  

Somewhere along the line, some designated themselves as transmitters of this magic, of this wisdom.  They were the shamans and the artists.  Those of us who try to follow in their footsteps benefit from their wisdom. 

I've written in earlier entries about how--when my writing is going very well--I feel like I'm traveling into my center, into my true self.  And that this center seems connected to something divine, though I don't really understand the essence of that divinity. 

This I do know:  The return to that experience of mystery is one of the things that keeps me coming back to the writing act.

I'm not alone in the experience of the divine.  William Blake, my inexhaustible source of inspiration, wrote:

I rest not from my great task!

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination

Colridge also felt the imagination is the "organ of the divine." 

Colridge thought that the imagination is "the highest faculty that synthesizes experience into imagery.  It perceives shape or form and order, using different, even opposite, elements of feeling, vision, and thought to achieve a unified whole.  In other words, it fuses and assimilates the daily experiences into a larger unity."  (I. M. Oderberg)

I like that thought, that it is the artist's task to FUSE AND ASSIMILATE DAILY EXPERIENCES INTO A LARGER UNITY.  This is also why it is so important to read the work of other writers, and to read widely.  The work of other writers will become part of your own consciousness.  You will have a deep well to draw from when it's time to do your own work.

Shelley thought that the imagination helped us to access the "real" world. 

(Oh!  How I love this:  Shelley's notion of what the "real" world is!)...

He thought we only experience the "real" world during moments when we feel illuminated, when we become aware of "the heart of things."  In other words, when we sense the presence of the eternal.  (Think about this the next time you hear someone snidely suggest:  "Get real!"--thinking of Shelley will give you a wonderful, secret thrill!)

Blake thought humans were fallen souls from heaven that needed to get back to their original state as spiritual beings.  He thought it was the job of the artist to help humans get back to that state of existence. 

Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.  For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Blake thought the imagination to be the creative soul of the universe, life itself "a ceaseless crossing of thresholds, an endless being through becoming...endless...endless time...no beginning, no end..."

I think the imagination is also our way to recognize possibility.  This "ceaseless crossing of thresholds" causes a change, a growth.  It's like the idea of the Tibetan Buddhist who sees in the heart the "jewel in the lotus."  As we cross the thresholds, the jewel becomes more and more polished until our full inner potentiality is reached.

I think when I write, I'm polishing the jewel.  It is a never ending process. So it's the journey wherein we glimpse the eternal.  On the whole, we will often feel ragged and unfinished.  But, oh, we will also have those moments when we see through the narrow chinks of our cavern.  We live for those.  We live for those! 

I think the artist's task is to try to portray that journey, and when we portray it, we take the participants of our art along with us; or, better, set them out on their own journey.  To me, the poem by Dag Hammarskjold describes the creative act perfectly.  We leave the mediocre, "everyday" world and enter the unknown land of the imagination.  We don't know what we will discover; we often don't even know what our goal is.  But we vaguely know what we seek--that clear, pure note of "truth":

Thus It Was

by Dag Hammarskjold

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper,

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

 

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

To get there, I believe we have to work hard on making ourselves the kind of indivividuals who can perceive this "truth."  We can't perceive it unless it exists within ourselves.  That, for me, is where writing and the spiritual life merge:

You cannot see beauty outside unless you have beauty within you. You cannot understand beauty unless you yourself are beautiful inside. You cannot understand harmony unless you yourself in your inner parts are harmony. All things of value are within yourself, and the outside world merely offers you the stimulus, the stimulation, of and to the exercise of the understanding faculty within you. -- G. de Purucker

Change

 

Wesley Mcnair

I'm still formulating my entry about the imagination and the creative life.  In the meanwhile, I was quite taken by this poem that came to me from NPR's Writer's Almanac.  My first impression of the poem was that it must have felt very good to write.  Secondly, it felt very good to read, because more and more lately I have entertained thoughts (fantasies?!) of bringing about a great change in my life. I've been on a job search the last year; last year I interviewed for a teaching position in creative writing at Fairbanks, Alaska.  Someone else got the position, but if the committee had chosen me, I would have been there.  I would have left family (children--the husband goes where I go!), home, cats, and almost all of my possessions.   

A college lecturer, I certainly identify with the lines about the "sadness of rooms" where family slept while I graded mounds of papers.  And about not fitting in, not wanting to fit in, at some of the colleges where I taught (I won't name those colleges).  I identify with the speaker's feelings about missed opportunities, a lost life.  Perhaps that, the feeling of loss, is what my need for change is all about.

Poem: "Goodbye to the Old Life" by Wesley McNair, from Fire. 

Goodbye to the Old Life

Goodbye to the old life,
to the sadness of rooms
where my family slept as I sat

late at night on my island
of light among papers.
Goodbye to the papers

and to the school for the rich
where I drove them, dressed up
in a tie to declare who I was.

Goodbye to all the ties
and to the life I lost
by declaring, and a fond goodbye

to the two junk cars that lurched
and banged through the campus
making sure I would never fit in.

Goodbye to the finest campus
money could buy, and one
final goodbye to the paycheck

that was always gone
before  it got home.
Farewell to the home,

and a heartfelt goodbye
to all the tenants who rented
the upstairs apartment,

particularly Mrs. Doucette,
whose washer overflowed
down the walls of our bathroom

every other week, and Mr. Green,
determined in spite of the evidence
to learn the electric guitar.

And to you there, the young man
on the roof turning the antenna
and trying not to look down

on how far love has taken you,
and to the faithful wife
in the downstairs window

shouting, "That's as good
as we're going to get it,"
and to the four hopeful children

staying with the whole program
despite the rolling picture
and the snow - goodbye,

wealth and joy to us all
in the new life, goodbye!

Still the Question

"The Path" painting by Reginal Machell *******************************************************

Thus It Was

by Dag Hammarskjold

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper,

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

 

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

******************************************************

You cannot see beauty outside unless you have beauty within you. You cannot understand beauty unless you yourself are beautiful inside. You cannot understand harmony unless you yourself in your inner parts are harmony. All things of value are within yourself, and the outside world merely offers you the stimulus, the stimulation, of and to the exercise of the understanding faculty within you. -- G. de Purucker

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I want to write in my next entry about the imagination and the creative life.  These two quotes are but a prelude to that discussion...

The Sage

 Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

Cynthia, this entry is for you!  It's based on your entry, "Father Christmas" by ELP.  This is the trek of the Idealist.

The Sage

by Greg Lake

(sung by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer)

I carry the dust of a journey
that cannot be shaken away
It lives deep within me
for I breathed it every day

You and I are yesterday's answers
the earth of the past come to flesh
Eroded by time's rivers
to the shapes we now possess

Come share of my breath and my substance
and mingle our streams and our times
In bright infinite moments
our reasons are lost in our eyes

Alone

Galway Kinnell

This poem was sent by the Writer's Almanac on Christmas Day. 

I first discovered Galway Kinnell's work in 1987 when I came to Ohio for the MFA program in fiction writing.  I found a copy of his Book of Nightmares in the campus bookstore.  His work was unlike any other poetry I had read, and I find that book still haunts my mind.  The poems have strong, archetypal images throughout.

I like the following poem and think it an exceptional choice for Christmas Day, as holidays are about communion with the sacred aspect of ourselves and we have a deeply engrained need to share this experience with others. 

This poem causes me to think deeply about what aloneness feels like, and the longing that accompanies it.

There is a boundary line between solitude and loneliness--sometimes it's hard to understand which side of the line we are on.  This boundary is a theme I return to again and again in my own work.

Poem: "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" by Galway Kinnell, from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Praise the Day

A good poem to read on this snowy day--

Poem by Denise Levertov

...

Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
          the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney’s shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, which stays
our hand,
our murderous hand,
                    and gives us
still,
in the shadow of death,
          our daily life,
          and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.

Capturing the Eternal

From The Writer's Almanac: 

It's the birthday of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, (books by this author) born in Head Tide, Maine (1869). One of the most popular poets of his lifetime, he is remembered for a few short poems, which he said were "pickled in anthological brine," including "Richard Cory," "Miniver Cheevy," and "Mr. Flood's Party."

His father was an extremely practical business man who managed to retire when he was fifty-one years old. He encouraged each of his sons to follow a different career path: medicine, business, and science, but Edwin Arlington Robinson, who was the youngest boy in the family, said, "[As a young man] I realized...that I was doomed, or elected, or sentenced for life, to the writing of poetry."

Unlike many poets, who have to work all manner odd jobs in order to support themselves, Robinson rarely did anything in his life other than write poetry. Before he made a name for himself as a poet, he was known in his hometown as an idler and a failure. The only job he ever kept for more than a few months was a job at a customs house given to him by Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his poetry, and he wasn't required to do any work. Even after he began to support himself with his poetry, he didn't get married, he didn't travel, he didn't teach or give public readings.

Robinson said, "The man who fixes on something definite in life that he must do, at the expense of everything else...has got something that should be recognized as the Inner Fire. For him, that is the Gleam, the Vision and the Word! He'd better follow it. The greatest adventure he'll ever have on this side is following where it leads."

--------------------------------------------------------------

I still have my copy of Robinson's Selected Poems from my days as an undergraduate at East Carolina University.  My favorite poem of Robinson's is "Isaac and Archibald," and I think of the poem often, saying to myself:  You really MUST read that poem again; it's such a great poem!    Seeing the write-up in the Almanac has finally made me do so.

The poem's speaker is a man looking back on his childhood experience of visiting with two old men named Isaac and Archibald.  The poem begins:

 

Isaac and Archibald were two old men.

I knew them, and I may have laughed at them

A little; but I must have honored them

For they were old, and they were good to me.

 

I do not think of either of them now,

Without remembering, infallibly,

A journey that I made one afternoon

With Isaac to find out what Archibald

Was doing with his oats.  It was high time

Those oats were cut, said Isaac; and he feared

That Archibald--well, he could never feel

Quite sure of Archibald.  Accordingly

The good old man invited me--that is,

Permitted me--to go along with him;

And I, with a small boy's adhesiveness

To competent old age, got up and went.

 

 Later in the poem, Isaac tries to teach the boy something about death and memory: 

 

                     "...Look at me, my boy

And when the time shall come for you to see

That I must follow after [Archibald], try then

To think of me, to bring me back again,

Just as I was to-day.  Think of the place

Where we are sitting now, and think of me--

Think of old Isaac as you knew him then,

When you set out with him in August once

To see old Archibald."

 

The most memorable section of the poem, the one I think about the most when my mind stretches out toward Robinson again, is the following one.  I now see I marked the section.  And I remember doing it.  I remember marking this section in class as the teacher lectured.  I marked it with an arrow and put the word "ominous" beside the arrow.  

The section includes a metaphorical allusion to death thatRobinson deftly weaves into the narrative poem.  The two old men andthe boy had gone down into Archibald's cellar to fetch a cup of cider:

 

Down we went,

Out of the fiery sunshine to the gloom,

Grateful and half sepulchral, where we found

the barrels, like eight potent sentinels,

Close ranged along the wall.  From one of them

A bright pine spile stuck out alluringly,

 ...

There was a fluted antique water-glass

Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest,

There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort

That feeds on darkness.  Isaac turned him out,

And touched him with his thumb to make him jump...

 

Since reading this poem, I have never looked at cellars or darkness or crickets  the same way. 

More than twenty years ago, as a younger student of life, I thought of this reference to death as "ominous."  However, looking at the poem now, I have a different impression.

 Now I see something strangely comforting in the way the old man touches the brown cricket to make it jump.  It is almost as though his touch is the touch of God, stimulating the insect back to life.   This section of the poem doesn't seem ominous to me now, but eternal.

 

In Celebration: Winter Solstice

From The Writer's Almanac

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It's officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfire to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

In ancient Egypt and Syria, people celebrated the winter solstice as the sun's birthday. In Ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even war were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

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One of my favorite poems:

Winter Poem

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

Written by Nikki Giovanni

Winter

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
  --  Albert Camus (1913-1960)

Calming the Monster

Material: polychromed terracotta
Museo Gregoriano Etrusco 
Date: Early 5th century B.C.

Part of Beth's response to the previous entry about the "cave" is:  "The funny thing is...my truth is often unkind, repugnant and hurtful, a kind of monster.   Hah!  sound familiar?  But when I let monster out, and I pet it, and tame it, I find a kind of forgiveness, of myself and others."

After reading Beth's comment above about the "monster" hiding in our "cave," I couldn't help but think of the following poem by Louise Bogan, "The Dream":

Oh God, in the dream the terrible horse began

To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.

Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,

And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through

     his nose.

 

Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground

When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the

     rein.

Another woman, as I lay half in a swound,

Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

 

Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.

Throw him,she said, some poor thing you alone claim.

No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,

And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.

 

But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove

Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,

The terrible beast, that no one may understand,

Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

Duality of Caves

Linda Hogan, author of Dwellings

I had separate conversations recently with two women.  Both women used "cave" as a metaphor for their situation.  One had something to tell me; something terrible that had happened in her past.  She felt she needed to get it out into the open, that she wanted me to know about this thing before she "shoved it back" into her "cave."  Here, the cave is a fearsome place, the place that is the repository of our awful memories and thoughts.  In mythology, this is the cave that the dragon sits in, or the cyclops, murderous, thieving monsters.  I think, too, of Star Wars, which is deeply mythological, of Luke going into the cave to battle with that he most fears.

The other woman was Beth, who came to the Tim O'Brien presentation and sat with me, my husband, and one of my students, a bright and talented young man named Michael.  After the presentation, which was spiritually uplifting and thought-provoking, Beth took a long, deep breath and said, "Now I just want to go home and be in my cave."  Since that day, she has used the metaphor several times.  She can't wait, she says, to be in her cave. 

I know what she means.  In "Caves," an essay by Linda Hogan in her book Dwellings, Hogan speaks of caves as the "land's quiet temples."  She writes of visiting a cave that is a "sacred place," where there is a "constant warm dripping of water" and warm-water pools where people bathe. 

Hogan writes:  "Barefoot, naked, I go down the stone pathway and lower myself into the hot water.  Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief."

She then evokes the womb/tomb imagery of the earth (the same imagery suggested in the Persephone myth), saying:  "Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone?  I do.  I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves."

Hogan calls caves "a feminine world, a womb of earth, a germinal place of brooding."  She points out that many creation stories involve caves.  Many recreation stories do, too.  Hogan tells of an old Japanese woman who, after America dropped the Atomic bomb and she found her home and family ravenged, journeyed into the hills and retreated for a year into a cave. 

Hogan writes, "She remained in a cave, alone, for over a year before she entered again the world of people.  She returned bony and wise.  From her eyes shone a light.  She was the first woman to become a Shinto priest.  What she knew she had learned from the cave, heard spoken by it, she had seen in the darkness."

As with the gods and goddesses, who represent dual concepts, the cave represents dual concepts:  the darkness can be fearsome or it can be nurturing.  It can be the respository of "monsters" that seek to devour us, robbing us of our journey toward individuation, of our ability to regenerate ourselves, to transform into "something new."

Or it can be a womb in which we can hear the "murmuring heartbeat" of the Earth.

When I write, I also must retreat in "my cave."  In many instances, I experience the cave in both its meanings.  While writing, I often must confront what I fear.  But I also find the act of writing to be nurturing and regenerative. 

Retellings

"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."  --Willa Cather

This entry is dedicated to oceanmrc, who is afraid there are no stories left to tell.

May she tell her stories fiercely.

WILLA SIBERT CATHER was born December 7, 1873, near Winchester, Virginia. When she was nine years old, her family moved to the town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, later the setting for a number of her novels. She attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. After college she spent the next few years doing newspaper work and teaching high school in Pittsburgh. She moved to New York City and worked for six years on the editorial staff of McClure's Magazine. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for One of Ours. She died on April 24, 1947.

Symbolic Withdrawal

The drawing is by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98).  You'll really need to click on "view larger" to see this fine pencil drawing.  Hades emerges from the Underworld through a chasm in a four-horse chariot.  Winged figures bear Persephone away from her friends who tear their hair in grief.  Note the many-headed snake also emerging from the cleft!

 

 

 

 

 

Recently in Cynthia's Journal, Sorting the Pieces, she wrote of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone is relevant to her life.

Since reading her entry, I've wanted to write more about Persephone. I mentioned Persephone briefly in an earlier entry called "Underworld Seed."

Her first name was Kore, or "Maiden."  In one account of the story, Demeter hides Kore, her first-born daughter away from the Gods in a primordial cave. 

I want someday to do an entry on the symbolism of the cave. 

Here, I think the cave is a reference to womb. Demeter places her maiden child into the cave in order to protect her from the dangers of the world.  This is an action we can all relate to.

But we can never completely protect our children, not from life's horrors, life's ugliness, life's many abductions, and certainly not from death. 

Persephone's time in the underworld is a symbolic withdrawal. The meaning of her withdrawal to the underworld can be found in the stories of other holy ones who had to "die" to the mortal world in order to be reborn, transformed. 

Persephone is in a continual state of death and rebirth.  She is the goddess of both life and death. (Many gods and goddesses are a juxtaposition of opposites:  Demeter rules over both plenty and famine; Apollo over plague and purity; Dionysus over ecstatic genius and drunken, wild rage, and so on.)

Of all the goddesses, Persephone is probably the one I most identify with (along with her other incarnations, such as Inanna and Isis). 

As we mature, we all must eat the seeds of the pomegranate*, knowing that something will have to die in us, something will have to change.  Sometimes we are tricked into eating the seeds; sometimes we eat them willingly. 

As the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone represents the human condition, which is the journey from "womb" to "tomb." I look to her to understand the nature of my mortality. 

Persephone's journey is the journey our physical body takes, even as it sheds cells and renews them, and finally when our physical body dies.  Her journey symbolizes the journey of our psyche as we move toward individuation. 

*I found the following observation on a strange website called Dissecting Hannibal.  Earlier in this entry, I mentioned the dual domains over which the gods and goddesses ruled.  Note that the Pomegranate's symbolism is also dual:

Pomegranate is an important symbol in Old Testament. It has dual symbolic meaning as fruit of condemnation and forgiveness. Pomegranate can be compared with the apple (pomme) eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The price of knowledge of good and evil is death, Adam and Eve became mortal. In the whole Bible price of knowledge is death. On the other hand from the early Renaissance pomegranate appeared in paintings of Mary and Holy Child (one of Botticelli's or his school paintings presents Jesus with pomegranate in his left hand, Giovanni Bellini also painted Holy Child holding this fruit and sometimes as in Joos van Cleve painting bitten pomegranate is placed on a plate near apples).

Jewish tradition says that human body includes 613 nerves and pomegranate fruit 613 seeds as Torah includes 613 commandments. To eat a pomegranate is to eat human flesh...

 

Sacred Heart

Vicky asked me about the meaning of this image, which I used in my previous entry based on the quote by Frederick Boecher. 

I'm not certain about the exact origins of this image, I'm sorry to say.  It looks to me like a book with pages in the shape of a heart.  I may be thinking this, though, because for our first wedding anniversary, my husband gave me such a handmade book, a book of his heart-thoughts.  That is probably what drew me to this image in the first place.

I found the image in an article called "A Medieval Cordial" by Christopher Bamford.  The article is subtitled "Intoxication of the Heart" and it is about women mystics and the point in history that thoroughly recognized the divine feminine, such as Sophia and the Blessed Virgin.  The women mystics were inspired by the writings of St. Bernard, among others, who wrote that the secrets of Jesus' Heart "lie[ ] visible through the clefts of his body; visible too the great mystery of his love, and the bowels of his mercy."

It is actually quite a fascinating time in history, the 12th and 13th Century, when Christian religious thought was being influenced by Ismaili, Manichaean, and Sufi teachings, as well as the Troubadours, who were responsible for spreading the concept of romantic love.  Thus Christianity got all wound up in the erotic, which created some gorgeous poetry.

Women mystics had visions about Christ's love, and the heart was central in these visions.  For instance, Mechthild of Hackeborn saw the Lord opening the wound of his "sweet" heart and said:  "Behold the greatness of my love."  Then the Lord united his sweet Heart with her soul's heart, giving her the "graces of contemplation."

Beatrice of Nazareth heard the Lord say to her, "Can a person and his or her heart be separated from each other?"

And Gertrude of Helfta, on her deathbed, saw Jesus' divine Heart "in which every kind of good is hidden."  Jesus' heart "opened itself to her as a paradise of joy and bliss."

I use the idea and the image to convey that writing comes from the heart of the writer and that the heart needs to be listened to.  

I'm also very drawn to the religious mystics because writing feels like a spiritual act to me, even if I'm writing about ugly or disturbing things*.  When I write, it feels like I'm accessing my soul, my center, that which is connected to something beyond. 

I won't go so far, as the mystics did, to call this "something" God, but there is something cosmic about it; that's the way it feels to me, anyway. 

This is a subject I will come back to again and again, because I'm trying to understand it myself. 

Gertrude of Helfta once wrote, "I have never found a human friend to whom I would dare tell all I know; the human  heart is too small to bear it." 

Isn't this powerful? 

In my writing, I want to push the envelope on what I think the human heart can bear.  If I break the heart of the reader, through this breaking and subsequent mending, the reader becomes "something new."  I want to force my reader through a door of transformation.  This is where my writing goals are at the moment.

*The malevolent energies and destructive forces which have been abroad in our time tell us how strong is the evil that lies mixed with the good in humanity's heart.

*There are swift elusive moments which every real artist knows, and every deep lover experiences, when the faculty of concentration unites with the emotion of joy and creates an indescribable sense of balanced being.  Such moments are of a mystical character. 

* When you first face the mystery which is at the heart's core and in the mind's essence, you know nothing about it other than that it is the source of your being and that it possesses a power and intelligence utterly transcending your own.  Yet you feel that it draws your love and, in your best moments, inspires your character.

*You feel the Presence of something higher than yourself, wise, noble, beautiful, and worthy of all reverence.  Yet it is really yourself--the best part come at last into unfoldment and expression.

*Because it comes from within, it comes with its own authority.  When it is "the real thing," you will not have to question, examine or verify its authenticity, will not have to run to others for their appraisal of its worth or its rejection as a pseudo-intuition.  You will know overwhelmingly what it is in the same way that you know who you are.

*Each glimpse brings a grace.  It may be a message or an awakening, a revelation or a warning, a reconciliation or a confirmation, a strengthening or a mellowing.

*The truth is there plainly before you and deeply sensed within you.

*Each glipse is not just a repeat performance; it is a fresh new experience.

*When you retreat to your center, you have retreated to the point where the Glimpse of the truth may be had.

 

--From the notebooks of Paul Brunton

The Wright Stuff

It's the birthday of poet James (Arlington) Wright, (books by this author) born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio (1927). Wright's whole youth was aimed at leaving his small hometown. His father worked at the same glass factory for fifty years, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry. Neither went to school past the eighth grade. He was the middle of three sons.

He started writing poetry when he was eleven, when a friend tried to teach him Latin and also gave him a copy of the collected works of Lord Byron.

The Writer's Almanac for today reveals that it's the birthday of James Wright.  I want to say something about Wright.  I did not know Wright's work until I came to Ohio in 1987 to study fiction writing in the MFA program at Bowling Green State University, where I now teach. 

Our MFA program has 10 fiction writers and 10 poets.  It's a two year program, and the participants are staggered:  that is, in any year, you have new workshoppers mixing with the old.  One of the new poets (at the same time that I was a second-year fiction writer),Denver Butson, wrote a poem about James Wright that I found to be so powerful that I asked Denver for a copy of it.  "Sign it, please," I said, and he did sign and date his poem for me. Denver has since published many poems.

Denver's poem made me want to read Wright's poems.  At some point, I bought Wright's complete poems, Above the River.  After I graduated from the MFA program, I lost my way as a writer for a time.  It was Wright's poetry that helped me to find my way back to writing again. 

The advice I would give people who want to write is so simple:  read.  Find writers who speak to you and read their work.  Find the time to read it.  Even if it's just a few minutes a  day, say when you first get up in the morning.  Let the writer's words stay with you through the day.

Explore what the writers you love loved to read themselves.  And read what they loved.

Wright was an extraordinary writer, but he never felt his work was extraordinary.  When his first book of poems won a Pulitzer Prize, he said he didn't think he deserved the recognition. He said:  "It'll fade, and I'll be a footnote in some high-school anthology." He also said, "I didn't believe it; I thought I didn't deserve it. I still don't think I deserve it." 

Oh but how his words did speak to me when I needed them most.

I include here an excerpt from his poem, "On the Skeleton of a Hound":

                                                I alone

Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground,

And while the moon rises beyond me, throw

The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.

For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull

And toss it over the maples like a ball.

Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep

That flamed over the ground a year ago.

I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,

The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,

The honest bees built honey in the head;

The earth knows how to handle the great dead

Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,

Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

Where Need And Hunger Meet

 

 

Vocation: The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

– Frederick Boecher

 

 

 

Something for writers to think about: 

What if what you need to say is what a reader needs to hear?

 

 

Frederick Boecher, from his book, Wishful Thinking:

 Vocation "comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a person is called to by God. There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you've missed requirement (b), on the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren't helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do.

Thinking In Metaphors

What we learn from fairytales, myths, icons, and parables is that we need metaphors to make the unknown knowable.  Here, little Thumbelina floats on her lily pad, pulled along by the butterfly, a symbol of transformation.  Later, she will go underground, just as Persephone did, in order to confront death and longing.  Still later, she will become something new.

In the Faulkner speech that Beth sent me and which I included in an earlier journal entry, Faulkner addressed the importance of enduring.  Indeed, that is the message at the rich heart of The Sound and The Fury. 

I ran across the following poem this week.  I think it illustrates something that Cynthia and Vicky have discussed in their journals recently, the idea of confronting the same problems, issues, pains, again and again.  Where do we get the strength to face these difficulties?  How do we endure?  The poem:

THE STONE CRAB:  A LOVE POEM

by Robert Phillips

Delicacy of warm Florida waters,

his body is undesirable.  One giant claw

is his claim to fame, and we claim it,

 

more than once.  Meat sweeter than lobster,

less dear than his life, when grown that claw

is lifted, broken off at the joint.

 

Mutilated, the crustacean is thrown back

into the waters, back upon his own resources.

One of nature's rarities, he replaces

 

an entire appendage as you or I

grow a nail.  (No one asks how

he survives that crabby sea with just one

 

claw; two-fisted menaces real as night

-mares, ten-tentacled nights cold

as fright.)  In time he grows another--

 

meaty, magnificent as the first.  And,

one astonished day, Snap!  It too

is twigged off, the cripple dropped

back into treachery.  Unlike a twig,

it sprouts again.  How many losses

can he endure? ... Well,

 

his shell is hard, the sea is wide.

Something vital broken off, he doesn't

nurse the wound:  develops something new. 

Through the losses of the stone crab, we recognize our own. We see that, like the crab, we must do more than "nurse the wound"; we must be strong enough to develop "something new."  We must transform if we are to endure. How perfect is the stone crab for illustrating this growth!

When we tell our own stories, we must find the right metaphor to make the experience real for readers.  The old adage, "show don't tell," is mostly true.  (Although this adage kept me for too long from giving my stories the necessary exposition--sometimes "telling" is not only necessary; it's best.) 

To tell vivid stories, we need to learn to "see" the world metaphorically, think metaphorically.  Even Hemingway, who is known for his terse, no-nonsense prose, was deeply metaphorical in his writing.

"The Stone Crab:  A Love Poem" by Robert Phillips first appeared in The Hudson Review.  Reprinted in The Pushcart Prize IV:  Best Of The Small Presses.

Addendum:  Vicky adds in a comment:  Sometimes it feels like the shell is soft and we are in a tidepool, going round and round, but it doesn't have to last long.  A moment or two of self-indulgent breast-beating can give way to a channel to the ocean and there we are again, swimming free. growing again. Myth is helpful, but so is the example of everyday folk, people who get up again and keep on going.

See how beautifully she picks up on the metaphor!  And her comment about "every day folk, people who get up again and keep on going" is so apt.  That is why I enjoy reading the journals (blogs).  There is something so heroic in many of them.  And it's refreshing for me to read the words of people writing out of joy and out of frustration and out of need.  Thanks to you all!  What you're doing is truly in the spirit of Faulkner's idea of endurance.

 

 

Haven't Tried That!

I got curious about Trumbo and the bathtub, so I did a quick internet search and found this anecdote:

"He worked at night, often in the bathtub, the typewriter in front of him on a tray, a cigarette in his mouth (he smoked six packs a day). On his shoulder perched a parrot I had given him, pecking Dalton's ear while Dalton pecked at the keys." (Kirk Douglas in The Ragman's Son, 1988)

A parrot!  I haven't tried that.  I've had several cats perched on the ledge of my tub, though.

Something In Common

It's the birthday of the screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo, (books by this author)born in Montrose, Colorado (1905). He is best known for the novel Johnny Got His Gun (1939), and for writing the screenplay for the movie version of that book, and for being blacklisted from Hollywood for belonging to a Communist organization. Trumbo attended the University of Colorado, but transferred to the University of Southern California when his family moved to Los Angeles in 1923. He dropped out of college and worked in a bakery for six years because he wanted to teach himself to write. Trumbo estimated that he wrote eighty short stories and six novels during that time, all rejected by publishers.

I read the Writer's Almanac for today with great interest.  Dalton Trumbo is among my early influences.  I read Johnny Got His Gun around the same time I read Agee's A Death In the Family. 

I loved Trumbo's novel, not only because it's good writing, but because there was a war going on, and my brother was there.  Johnny Got His Gun, became, for me, an eye opening experience, and, although the novel is set during WWI, I would always think of it as an "anti-Vietnam" war novel. 

The Writer's Almanac also reveals about Trumbo that he did a great deal of his writing in the bathtub.  This is something I have in common with him.  In fact, I wrote several of the stories in my latest collection in the tub. 

I can't tell you how many books and journal pages I have dropped into my bathtub waters.  In Chicago for the AWP Writer's Conference this past March, I bought a book of poetry by Matthea Harvey called Pity The Bathtub Its Forced Embrace Of The Human Form.  It ended up, guess where, churning in the waters of my warm tub, and before I ever left Chicago.

While writing one of the stories in my latest collection, I dropped my journal into the water, and the ink started bleeding.  I rushed to get on a robe and get to my computer  to type in the story before it disappeared completely.  I wonder if this ever happened to Dalton Trumbo?

The Human Spirit

I know that my dear friend, Beth (with whom I took creative writing classes back in the eighties), will not mind that I share her recent e-mail to me regarding William Faulkner and how meaningful she found the following speech of Faulkner's:

Dear Theresa,

For some reason, I have been “into” Faulkner lately.  It came to me that I should re-read “Barn Burning.”  So I took out a Faulkner audio from the library, and on the CD was Faulkner, giving this speech.  It struck me to the bone, went to the core of me, I hurt when I heard it.

I am collecting some quotes and such that aid me at my desk and I wanted the entire text of this short speech.  I thought you might enjoy it, if you have not heard or read it.  Love, Beth

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech

Stockholm, December 10, 1950

 

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty isto write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I have underlined what is most meaningful to me.  "The human heart in conflict with itself" is what I try to write about.  It is what interests me most, beyond artifice, beyond plot, beyond technique.  Just the crisp, clear ringing of the heart. 

Faulkner believed people had ceased to ask questions about the problems of the human spirit.  I have found myself thinking about this idea ceaselessly since I have read it because it is a belief I also have entertained. 

It is the writer's work to keep asking those questions, the ones about the problems of the human spirit, the ones that really matter.

Thanks, Beth.

Dream

Dream by The Hungarian-born artist Ralph Fabri (1894-1975)

I don't usually tell many people about my dreams.  I have a vivid, rich dreamlife, full of imagery and hidden meanings.  But generally dreams make sense only to the dreamer.  And everyone else bores of the dreamer's ruminations--quickly.  Have you ever been held captive of someone telling you his or her dream? And it goes on and on?

But here I go.  I will preface the dream with one shared by Mircea Eliade in his journal, No Souvenirs: 

Last night's dream.  Two old men who are dying, alone, each in his own way.  Disappearing forever with them, without witnesses and without leaving a trace, was an admirable story (which I knew).  Terrible sadness.  Despair.  I withdrew to a room on the side, and I prayed.  I said to myself, If God does not exist, all is finished, all is absurd.

I awoke with the taste of ashes.

I love the sensory nature of this dream, especially the last impression, the taste of ashes. 

I include Eliade's dream as a crutch, as a way of saying it's okay for me to tell you my dream.  It's a way of saying, please don't be bored.  Read on.  It may not be as bad as you think!  

But I also include Eliade's dream because he says something so important about writing our stories, about getting them down.  We cannot let our "admirable" stories perish with us.

Sometimes our personal mythology merges with the universal in intriguing ways.

I told Vicky (Vicky is a perceptive woman I've recently met online--we  found each other not through this journal but as a result of a common experience we had, one I had expressed in a recent short story) about this dream a few days ago.  At the time I didn't understand its meaning.  She hinted I should look at my own journal for the answers.  (Vicky is so patient and never tells me my dreams bore her).  The dream: 

I was standing in the kitchen with my boys, who were small, around ten or under.  They are all men now, the youngest 20, almost 21. I opened the refrigerator and said, "We're going to color Easter eggs today."  They all gasped, happily, and said,"Really?"  It was the kind of joy children express when you've truly surprised them in a good way.

I said, "Yes, really!"  I opened the refrigerator and took out a huge carton of eggs.  More than two dozen, more than three dozen, perhaps.  The eggs in the top rows of the carton were whole, but in the bottom rows of the carton, they were merely shells.  The eggs had been cracked, used, and the discarded shells placed back into the carton.

The used eggs had white shells; the unused eggs had brown shells.  "Oh no!" I said to the children.  "Brown eggs!  We can't color brown eggs!"

I felt tremendously let down.  I felt I had let my children down.  That is all of the dream. 

My interpretation: 

I had recently done an entry in my journal on the cosmic egg.  In the entry I had typed out the story of Eurynome, who changed herself into a bird and laid the cosmic egg, which became the world and the sky, the egg from which came all life.  Not long after the entry, I did a presentation at the Northwest Ohio Writers Forum.  I talked about mythology, symbols, and icons.  I read the Eurynome myth in conjunction with an excerpt from my own novel in which the mother is not strong like Eurynome, but dependent on her abusive husband.  I talked to my audience about how I changed the imageof the powerful woman who dances on the waters to a weak, frightened woman who says what she needs to quietly, speaking into the drain of the sink.  (In contrast to Eurynome, who drives the male out of her presence after buising his head with her heel!)

I think doing the journal entry and then doing the public speaking, which always makes me nervous, drove the cosmic egg idea home, and triggered some memory--or memories--deep in my unconscious, and it had to come out in dream form.  I was forced to think about my own life and how the egg myth relates to my life. 

I think the white shells represented my spent years and the lost potential of those years.  I could no longer color these eggs.  I think these eggs represented not only my artistic life, but my life as a mother.  I think I was mourning all the lost opportunities in my creative life (my art), and lost opportunities with my children.  In a sense, both are my "children."  That is why I was brokenhearted when I saw the white eggs were spent. 

The remaining eggs were brown, and these represented my middle-years.  These years are not the bright canvas that the early years were.  Anyway, how do you color a brown egg?  It isn't the same in terms of brightness, of beauty.  There aren't as many possibilities with a brown egg, or so I thought.

I believe I'm meant to take from the dream that I should not give up the idea of coloring the eggs altogether.  I must find a way to color the eggs, to make my art, to do what I can for my children.  Despite the lost opportunities, there are still ways to connect with my children.  There are still ways of showing my love.  I can't magically make them happy, like I could when they were children.  Their needs, and my own needs, seem more complicated now.  It is more difficult to get the desired result now.  My art is a slightly different situation; something about the doing of it seems easier than it did when I was younger, but it also seems harder because I no longer have the innocent belief that "success" will happen simply because I am somehow "special," and it is destined to happen to me. 

Vicky told me I should also consider the Spinoza quote, which I had written in my AOL journal earlier:  "I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."  I think Vicky was right; the Spinoza quote is relevant.  The  brown eggs were only substandard because my imagination considered them so.  I had not yet found a way to envision the brown eggs as beautiful and useful in my life.

 

 

Whose Dreams Are Perished

Argos recognises Odysseus
17th century etching
Theodor van Thulden (1606 - 1669)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Once again I've been inspired by one of Robert Brimm's poems.  In his entry for December 1, he includes a poem about a dog named Houdini, along with a beautiful photograph of the shadow of a tree stretched upon the ground.  Robert's poem is called "Old Dog Asleep."

Below is part of my post to Robert's journal entry.  To read Robert's poem, go here.

In my response to "Old Dog Asleep," I included the following excerpt from The Odyssey:

There the dog Argos lay in the dung, all covered with dog ticks.
Now, as he perceived that Odysseus had come close to him,
he wagged his tail, and laid both ears back; only
he now no longer had the strength to move any closer
to his master, who, watching him from a distance, without Eumaios
noticing, secretly wiped a tear away, and said to him:

"Eumaios, this is amazing, this dog that lies on the dunghill.
The shape of him is splendid, and yet I cannot be certain
whether he had the running speed to go with this beauty,
or is just one of the kind of table dog that gentlemen
keep, and it is only for show that their masters care for them."

Then, O swineherd Eumaios, you said to him in answer:
"This, it is too true, is the dog of a man who perished
far away..."

And this was my comment on the excerpt from the Odyssey (and by extension, Robert's poem):

How those last words ring true for most of us.  Are we not sometimes human beings whose dreams are perished; are we not so often looking again for our true selves?  

I'm very interested in how our pets come to represent hidden aspects of ourselves.  The story of Odysseus and Argos brings me close to tears every time.  Robert's poem is powerful, as well.

Odysseus and Argos
Engraving and etching on paper
John Flaxman
1805

I have quoted the following excerpt from the journal of Mircea Eliade before, his journal entry from 1 January 1960.  I have repeated it here because it relates so well to Robert's poem (Odysseus and Ulysses are the same):

Every  exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca.  Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey.  The path toward Ithaca, toward the center.  I had known all that for a long time.  What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies).  But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center).  That means:  seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods in everyday life.

My point is that it is ever so easy to see ourselves inside the work of others.  Robert's life is like the life of Homer's hero.  So is mine.  So is yours. 

 

Road to the Interior

Painting by Sesshu

Weather-beaten bones,

I'll leave your heart exposed

to cold, piercing winds

 

After ten autumns,

it is strange to say Edo

speaking of my home

--Basho

This entry was inspired by Robert Brimm's poetry and art Journal, Chosen Words.  Robert,the author of Chance of Rain, a poet twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, writes Haiku and reading his excellent work made me want to read Basho again.  So I picked up my copy of Narrow Road to the Interior, translated by Sam Hammill.

Narrow Road to the Interior is a collection of prose and poetry travelogues written by Basho (1644-1694).  Basho undertook several contemplative travels during the last ten years of his life.  The title is a wonderful metaphor for the journey each writer must make within.

The following excerpt from "The Knapsack Notebook" speaks eloquently of the writer's spirit, which Basho calls "Windblown": 

Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown.  Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away and blown off by the least breeze.  It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life.  True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity.  From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another.  This windblown spirit considered the security of court life at one point; at another, it considered risking a display of its ignorance by becoming a scholar.  But its passion for poetry would not permit either.  Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously.

Saigyo in poetry, Sogi in linked verse, Sesshu in painting, Rikyu in the tea ceremony--the spirit that moves them is one spirit.  Achieving artistic excellence, each holds one attribute in common:  each remains attuned to nature throughout the four seasons.  Whatever is seen by such a heart and mind is a flower, whatever is dreamed is a moon.  Only a barbarian mind could fail to see the flower; only an animal mind could fail to dream a moon.  The first task for each artist is to overcome the barbarian or animal heart and mind, to become one with nature.

Truly, Basho's "home" became his art:  That is where I want to live, my art. 

Heaven On Earth

If there ever has been a person who has had the experience of heaven while living on this earth it would have to be William Blake.  Just thinking about him, just letting his name run through my mind (let alone reading one of his poems or looking at one of his drawings or paintings!) makes my pulse gallop.  I believe there is so much mystery about the man and his works.  If he were all we devoted ourselves to, we would never reach the bottom of the experience.

According to the Writer's Almanac, his birthday was Sunday, the 28th:

It's the birthday of poet and artist William Blake, (books by this author) born in London (1757). When he was 25, he married an illiterate girl named Catherine Boucher, who was a devoted wife, although she once remarked, "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise." A friend once dropped by to find them sitting in their garden, naked, reciting passages from Paradise Lost. "Come in!" cried Blake. "It's only Adam and Eve, you know!" Blake and his wife printed and bound his books, including Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Being A Writer: In Perspective

The following information comes from the Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of writer James Agee, (books by this author) born in Knoxville, Kentucky (1909). He was 16 when his father was killed in a car accident, and as an adult he worked for nearly two decades, on and off, on a manuscript that tried to recreate, as he put it, "my childhood and my father, exactly as I can remember and represent them." He never finished it; but after he died it was published as the novel A Death in the Family, and won the Pulitzer Prize (1957). He's also the author of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), generally considered to be a masterpiece. He was an obsessive person, an insatiable talker, addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, and Benzedrine. He died of a heart attack in a New York cab in 1955, with no will, no insurance, and $450 in the bank. 

I had to put this in my journal because James Agee's A Death In The Family is one of the first books that made a big impression on me.  I still have the copy I bought from the Scholastic Book Club back when I was in the 7th grade.  It's a paperback with pages that are now brown and brittle.  I'm not sure how much of the book I understood at age 13, enough that I remembered the haunted feeling it had given me, the realization of the temporariness of life.  The beauty of Agee's prose is something I would discover many years later.  

The common manner of Agee's death reminds me of another situation involving a writer I admire:  Dorothy Allison.  I participated in the Southern Festival of Books in 2002 by doing a presentation of my novel, and Allison was also at the festival that year.  I went to her presentation (I was a lowly first novelist; to me she has "rock star" status), and the presentation was very powerful.  I learned a lot by watching her that day about the power one's voice should have during a reading, about how to act out one's story (I had not thought of a reading as a "performance" before I saw Allison). And then I practically ran to the signing collonade so I wouldn't have to wait in a long line to have her sign my books.  When I got there, my heart fell because a long line already snaked from the table.  But then I realized the line was for Garrison Keillor, and no one was in Dorothy Allison's line.  Indeed, only two of us had books signed by Allison that day.  I couldn't believe it! 

What the death of Agee and the Dorothy Allison signing show me is that "being" a writer has got to be enough. There can't, there shouldn't, be an expectation of reward greater than that.  

From A Death In The Family:

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.  It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on their side of that.  The houses corresponded:  middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the nate nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches.  These were softwooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods.  There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn't doing very well.  ...

But it is of these evenings, I speak.

Supper was at six and wasover by half past.  There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the father and the children came out. ...

It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them:  that of the fathers and families, each in his space of lawn, his shirt fishlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous, hosing their lawns.  The hoses were attached at spiggots that stood out of the brick foundations of the houses.  The nozzles were variously set but usually so there was a long sweet stream of spray, the forearm and the peeled-back cuff, and the water shishing out a long loose and low-curved cone, and so gentle a sound. ...

...By some chance, here they [my family] all are, all on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night.  May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed.  Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:  and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:  but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.