(Billy) Pilgrim

DVD /film based on the novel.  My students read the novel and viewed clips of the film.

Today in my imaginative writing class (which meets at 9:30 in the morning--much too early for a night owl like me), we discussed Slaughterhouse-Five.    We've been studying myths and the students have read two works that discuss mythological heroes, works by Joseph Campbell and David Leeming.  The students have a paper due on Tuesday which will focus on Vonnegut's hero, Billy Pilgrim.   

I wanted the students to deal with a couple of issues:  I wanted them to think about how Billy Pilgrim compares and contrasts with the mythological heroes Campbell and Lemming talk about.  And I wanted them to think about the heroes they will create in order to tell their own stories.  In what ways will their heroes be like or unlike mythological heroes.  At the heart of the matter is change.  To what extent do the old stories work and how do we need to adjust stories (and heroes) to speak to our generation.  

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes,  

People aren't supposed to look back.  I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now.  The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. 

It begins like this:  

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this: Poo-tee weet?  

The thing that impresses me the most about his passage is Vonnegut's narrator's modesty.  Like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Slaughterhouse-Five is about an author trying to make sense of the utter senselessness of war.  That we cannot capture our experience in the lofty way we envision it is inevitable.   

Billy Pilgrim is a modern hero in the sense that he undergoes the existential dilemma so many of us face:  what is the meaning of my existence?  What is the meaning of life?  In the face of the world's horror, how do I find peace.  Can I ever be happy? 

Vonnegut writes of Pilgrim and a character named Rosewater:  "They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war." Slaughterhouse-Five is a story about the fire-bombing of Dresden during WWII.   Pilgrim's solution is to re-invent himself. 

In class, we talked about the writer's job, which to re-invent myths and stories for readers today.  Vonnegut writes that Rosewater felt that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov.  

But Rosewater now believes "that isn't enough any more."  In other words, Dostoevsky wrote for his place and time.  His work contains eternal truths, yes, but can never speak to the present generation in the same way it spoke to readers in the time it was written.    So the pilgrimage of the writer is this:  to go out in search of the words, the thoughts, the deeds, the problems, the truth that makes sense in this time, in this place.   

Poo-tee-weet?

Pilgrims

Reuben Gold Thwaites

Back in December, my husband and I hatched out an improbable plan.  We've slept on it, talked about it, researched what would go into it, and now it looks like we're actually going to do it.

This summer, Allen, Buddha (our new Boston Terrier), and I are going to do something many would find odd.  We are going to float the entire length of the Ohio River from Pennsylvania to Illinois.  We will leave a couple of weeks after I've gotten out of classes, around mid-May; Allen has already arranged leave from his part-time job.

While we're floating, I won't have access to the Internet.

I haven't mentioned this plan to anyone but Beth until now because I wasn't sure it was really going to happen.  Any number of things might have turned us back from this strange quest, but so far nothing has.  We've been able to work most things out.  What hasn't worked out, we've let go and said we're going anyway.

Our son is going to live in our house, take care of our cats, pay our bills, and for 6-8 weeks, we are going to live aboard a small boat (small enough that most people consider it unlivable for more than a weekend jaunt) and see what it takes to live without many of the comforts we've become accustomed to. 

I plan to take my laptop and several paper journals, as well as a small selection of books.  I hope to write about the experience, to produce a series of essays or stories about what I learned.  I've never written non-fiction before; I've never produced works without my "mask."  I'm not even sure I can.  If I can't, well, I'll just turn the experiences into fiction, I suppose. 

For inspiration the last few months I've reread Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, and Annie Dillard's wonderful Pilgrim At Tinker Creek.  I've also read Afloat On The Ohio by Reuben Gold Thwaites, a man who floated the Ohio with his wife and two  other companions  at the end of the 19th Century.

I don't know what I will discover about myself during this trip, but I look forward to the voyage and whatever it may bring. 

 

Touching the Divine

Painting by Caravaggio

So there is something about touching the wounded that shows us the very face of the divine. --Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

Once, I remember a pious woman frowning and pronouncing someone a "Doubting Thomas."  I don't think she was talking about me, though I can remember how her accusation flew like a dart into my chest, and I cringed at the thought that anyone would think so terribly of me as to cast me as a "Doubting Thomas."  I also remember a sermon about "Doubting Thomas" (at a fundamentalist church I once attended) and the message was the same:  Thomas  lacked faith; you don't want to be like him.  

As with most things, as you grow, hopefully, you learn to look at life in a more complex way -- a teaching story like the one about Thomas, who wanted to touch Christ's wounds,  can have more than one meaning.

At a lecture I attended last night, the speaker showed Caravaggio's painting of Thomas, and I was reminded of my own epiphany concerning Thomas, a realization I had about him when I was an art student in the 70's.  I was at that time struck by Caravaggio's painting, at Thomas's willingness -- eagerness -- to touch that which most humans would find repugnant. 

In some ways, I'm now reminded of loving caregivers, some people in the medical field, and of saintly human beings like Mother Teresa. 

As my ideas about my writing have continued to be shaped,  I have come to the realization that the stories I enjoy reading most are those of anguish and pain, of psychological wounds, which may or may not be symbolized by actual physical wounds.  The stories I write are the same. 

I don't have the physical or mental stamina of a medical caregiver or the moral courage of Mother Teresa .  Still, I have a need to "touch" humanity's wounds -- I've discovered this  is my way of touching the divine.  

I am Thomas. 

 

 

Keep On Keeping On

I told myself when I started this blog that I wouldn't use it to talk about movies--a writer should talk about writing, I reasoned, and I still believe this; however I find I must make an exception for I Heart Huckabees.  I watched it twice today, once through and then again while listening to the director's (David O. Russell's)commentary.

I was particularly struck by how the movie touches on what I've been reading and thinking about lately--the meaning of life.  Even as I write this--the meaning of life--I realize how trite and self-absorbed it sounds.  Because I believe as Joseph Campbell does, that there is no "meaning" to life--there's just life.  As Campbell says, if you hold up a flower, you don't ask, "What's the meaning of a flower?"  And in considering the flea, you don't ask, "Or of a flea?"  What art gives us is not the "meaning" of life but the "experience of being alive."

What I love about Huckabees is that it deals with the "meaning of life" dilemma in a truly humorous way and at the same time touches on the hard truth about our existence.  Life isn't fair; it's brutal and often nasty--and, perhaps even more to the point, temporary--and we can't change that.  But in the face of that knowledge, we can be heroic by doing the best we can. 

This idea of being heroic in the face of our mortality is essentially the thesis of Ernest Becker in his excellent book Denial of Death.  Becker says that we must accept our "creatureliness," which is the fact that our body, just like that of all animals, will decay and die. Joseph Campbell, too, makes this assertion.  He talks of how "terrible" life is, given the fact that we must live it by killing and by eating, eating, eating.  Until we face up to this fact, Becker  says, we aren't really living.

I was intrigued to hear Russell mention Joseph Campbell during his commentary, repeating Campbell's thoughts on life, suffering, and Christ.  Christ's acceptance of his brutal fate should act as a prototype, Russell pointed out, for our own acceptance.  Once we accept the world for what it is, we can learn to function within it without becoming paralyzed by our insecurities.

Russell also mentions that an early influence for him was J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.  (I did my Master's thesis on Salinger).  My point is that as I was watching I Heart Huckabees, I felt a deep affinity with the writer-director.  I felt we were looking at life through the same lens.  Listening to the commentary just confirmed it.

The way this entry connects to our art is that the creative life requires intense concentration and a huge leap into the unknown, a leap of faith that what we are doing is somehow worthwhile.  Does the world really need one more story?  Does it need another novel?  Or painting? 

If we give in completely to the "meaningless of life" belief, we lose the impetus to create.  If, on the other hand, we give ourselves completely to the "art as immortality" argument, we run the risk of giving in to our human ego, an idea illustrated so well in the movie when the "poet" plants photographs of himself inside a store and dreams of recognition and maybe a little Bob-Dylan-fame.

I love this movie because it reminds me not to take myself--or my art--too seriously.  It also reinforces that there is a reason and a way to keep on keeping on.
 

 

e. e.'s spring

painting by e.e. cummings

Now, this poem makes me laugh.  For Some reason, it reminds me a bit of Vogon poetry from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Sorry, e.e.

"Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes!"

Happy Spring.

 

e. e. cummings

spring omnipotent goddess Thou
dost stuff parks
with overgrown pimply
chevaliers and gumchewing giggly


damosels Thou dost
persuade to serenade
his lady the musical tom-cat
Thou dost inveigle


into crossing sidewalks the
unwary june-bug and the frivolous
angleworm
Thou dost hang canary birds in parlour windows


Spring slattern of seasons
you have soggy legs
and a muddy petticoat
drowsy


is your hair your
eyes are sticky with
dream and you have a sloppy body from


being brought to bed of crocuses
when you sing in your whisky voice
the grass rises on the head of the earth
and all the trees are put on edge


spring
of the excellent jostle of
thy hips
and the superior

Does Anybody Remember Laughter?

Looking over my entries, I see there's not much in terms of humor, a shame. 

And shame on me.

I love the religious stories and myths that make me laugh, stories of poor old Coyote in Native American myth, like the story in which he falls asleep and then his anus eats his dinner.  "I'll show you," Coyote says, and takes a burning stick to his anus (which is why that part of the body looks like that).  But the story says more, says so much about the way we "cut off our nose to spite our face."  The way we hurt ourselves through our vindictiveness, through our personal (and collective) stupidity.

I like the laughing Jesus because the Christian myths are so devoid of humor, and humor is such an excellent tool for understanding.

Last night, I met with a group of writers at a local coffee shop to talk about writing.  There were five of us, four women, one man.  All of us teachers, except one.  We delved into some pretty serious topics, such as empathy and the writer's responsibility.  But we also laughed.

It was revivifying.

D. H. Lawrence wrote:

Let us talk, let us laugh, let us tell

all kinds of things to one another;

men and women, let us be

gay and amusing together, and free

from airs and from false modesty.

Afraid of the Light

I fell a little behind in my Writer's Almanac readings.  So today when I was going through them, I found this gem, a quote by Henrik Ibsen.  His play, A Doll's House, was startling and life-transforming for me when I read it as a freshman in college in the mid-seventies.   

For those of you who haven't read or seen the play, its importance is in its feminist message that a woman's role (Nora) is not confined to the moral authority of her husband (Torvald), nor is her purpose confined to being a "good" mother to her children.  It was written in the 1880s.  There are several versions of the play on video and DVD; I think my favorite version is the one in which Anthony Hopkins plays Torvald.  

Out of respect for Ibsen's work, I named the protagonist of several interconnected short stories Nora.

Henrik Ibsen wrote,  "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light."

The quote makes me painfully aware that I need to do a mental housecleaning, a cerebral ghostbusting of sorts.  It makes me wonder how many memories or beliefs I am holding onto have no "vitality." 

I think it's true what he says, that we are "afraid of the light."  

But when we write, we can't be afraid of it.   The light is the only way to drive the lifeless ghosts away.

Exile III

artist, unknown

A theme I keep coming back to in this journal is exile. 

Exile is a recurring theme in myth.  The Garden of Eden is one such example.  (At the end of this entry I include an excerpt from Father Andrew Greeley's Myths of Religion as an explanation for why I refer to Christian stories as "myths").  The Garden has been interpreted as the womb, our birth our first expulsion from paradise. 

I try to impress on my students how important it is to train themselves to think in mythological terms, because, as Father Greeley says, "Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words."  A myth, he says, "is a symbolic story which demonstrates...the inner meaning of the universe and of human life."  As Father Greeley, in justifying his use of "myth" in reference to Christian stories, explains:  "To say that Jesus is a myth is not to say that he is a legend but that his life and message are an attempt to demonstrate the inner meaning of the universe and of human life."

Our visiting writer this semester at the university where I teach, Amy Newman, wrote and published a book of poems called Fall, in which she explores the various meanings of the word, "fall."  My friend Beth and I had the opportunity not long ago to hear Amy read her work.  It was one of the finest readings we've been to. 

In one poem, Amy Newman likens our fall from grace at the Garden of Eden to her own birth.  It is a poem about exile.  She begins the poem with the definition:

--fall among.  To come by chance into the company of.

 

At my birth, I broke the surface of the water;

then I heard the end of the garden, and

felt the sadness of the exile.  I pushed,or was pushed,

and found the new world's skin, the gate, her private entrance,

my new world, then I became, was introduced

to all that would delight and annoy me,

 

leaned into the way out, felt light-headed,

the stirring of all that wet, the blood, the shame,

her being burst open.  I fell among the family.

And backward from the paradise:

the sounds of lambs, a bleating in rhythm.

Trees, marginal, and emarginate leaves,

 

cloudless partial sky like a tide.  All lost to me,

the urge of the reckless afternoons, insistent

in their distances, that gone astray

of what I dropped, so far behind me.

This poem should run backward:

My coming into being.

 

the heart beating in my conception,

the absence of my possibility, and then,

that fruit and its constant scent, its holy,

impossible gesture.  That flesh trouble,

made of seed, of want, and underneath,

the hidden, small, fineprinting.

 

*From Myths of Religion, by Father Andrew Greeley:

Many Christians have objected to my use of [myth] even when I define it specifically.  They are terrified by a word which may even have a slight suggestion of fantasy.  However, my usage is the one that is common among historians of religion, literary critics, and social scientists.  It is a valuable and helpful usage; there is no other word thich conveys what these scholarly traditions mean when they refer to myth.  The Christian would be well advised to get over his fear of the word and appreciate how important a tool it can be for understanding the content of his faith.

Ecstasy

At one time, when I thought of the word "ecstasy," I pictured flailing arms, the body and the mind all out of control.  I pictured people drunk on the spirit of God or on drugs. 

What I did not picture was quiet exuberence.  That is how I've come to think of ecstasy in my own life, as a kind of quiet quickening that happens deep within.  In reading through an article on James Wright tonight, I ran across the word "ecstasy."  Kevin Stein, the author of the article, points out that the origin of the word "ecstasy is from the Greek, meaning "to displace."

Thus, to experience ecstasy is to be somewhere beyond yourself, "to inhabit, if only briefly, an alternate reality."  As for my own taste in reading, I cannot pronounce it "good" unless at some point in the reading, the author takes me, if only briefly, to some place beyond myself. 

It is an odd feeling, a simultaneous feeling of detachment and union.  Sometimes that feeling only lasts a split second--I get an electric jolt or a feeling of effervescence in my blood,  And, suddenly, I have entered the author's consciousness, the author's dream. 

I experienced this feeling most recently after reading a story written by a student in my fiction workshop, a story about a young girl growing into maturity, recognizing the world's corruptibility.  The tension created by the imagery in the story rent my spirit from my body and suddenly, I was somewhere "out there."  It was not a "perfect" story, but it woke me up.  Although it took me "out there," it also brought me back to myself.  (I had been feeling detached, numb, sad lately.)  That is what I mean about being displaced ("out there") but at the same time connected, unified with a greater whole, thus being brought back "to myself."

This kind of tension in one's writing, to me, is worth ten thousand times more than any plot.

Wright is one of my favorite poets.  I've done an entry on him before.  ("The Wright Stuff" 12/13/04)

He lived on the Ohio River and knew a lot about corruptibility.  The article quotes copiously from Wright; I've chosen the stanzas that speak to me in the way of tension.  The kind of tension that creates ecstasy within me:

In the following lines, we see the tension between sunlight and shadow and how the speaker's shadow is unified with that of the horse:

The white house is silent.

My friends can't hear me yet.

The flicker who lives in the bare tree at the field's edge

Pecks once and is still for a long time.

I stand still in the late afternoon.

My face is turned away from the sun.

A horse grazes in my long shadow.

The author of the article says that in such mystical accounts of Wright's, "animals serve as ambasssadors of an alternate reality."  The following lines are among my favorite of Wright's:

We paused among the dark cattails and prayed....

We ate the fish.

There must be something very beautiful in my body.

I am so happy.

To me, the poet is describing a feeling of quiet exhiliration, of ecstasy. 

Reading the lines, I feel it, too.

Exactly As It Is

Wislawa Szymborska

In my previous entry I raised the specter of numbness, that feeling of being stuck, unable to move forward with our art.  I'm not finished with the topic by a long shot, but I won't be discussing it in this entry.  I also want to address the temperament of the artist later, too, as I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately about that--views of Becker, Rank, Jung and Freud.

I ran across a poem today as I was cleaning off my desk here at home, and the poem really spoke to me.  A few months ago, I went through stacks of New Yorker magazines and cut out poems, stories, and cartoons that I liked.  This is one of the poems I cut out, "First Love" by Nobel Prize winner (1996) Wislawa Szymborska:

They say

the first love's most important.

That's very romantic,

but not my experience.

 

Something was and wasn't there between us,

something went on and went away.

 

My hands never tremble

when I stumble on silly keepsakes

and a sheaf of letters tied with string--

not even ribbon.

 

Our only meeting after years:

the conversation of two chairs

at a silly table.

 

Other loves

still breathe deep inside me.

This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

 

Yet, just exactly as it is,

it does what the others still can't manage:

unremembered,

not even seen in dreams,

it introduces me to death.

 

Of course I have no idea what the author's intent was, but, as I'm prone to do, I relate the poem to the writing process, especially storytelling.   I've found more than anything that students get tangled up in their notions of plot, what it is, what it's for, and in their fears that they can't create sufficient plots for their stories.  Interestingly, the definition of plot is: 

Main Entry: [1]plot
Pronunciation: 'plät
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English
Date: before 12th century
1 a : a small area of planted ground <a vegetable plot> b : a small piece of land in a cemetery c : a measured piece of land : LOT
2 : GROUND PLAN, PLAT
3 : the plan or main story of a literary work
4 : a secret plan for accomplishing a usually evil or unlawful end : INTRIGUE
5 : a graphic representation (as a chart)
 

So really all a plot is, is a plan.  But plans change all the time, don't they?

Do our lives ever happen as planned?  Of course not.  So why should our stories, then?

I'm not the kind of writer, or reader, that's much interested in heavily plotted pieces--detective stories, who-done-its, mysteries, thrillers, action pieces.  My idea of plot is simple:  it follows John Gardner's notion that it only exists as a way to show off your characters.  The character is all.

Rather than creating zingy, complicated plots, I like  to do a close analysis of the interior lives of my characters.  That's why, surprisingly, the first definition of "plot" really works for me:  "a small area of planted ground," or "a small piece of land in a cemetery," or "a measured piece of land."  I like to think of my stories as, metaphorically, a small area, a postage-stamp of land, as Faulkner once said, where something happens to somebody.  Where a character steps through a metaphorical door, crosses a threshold, and is now in a new room, a new awareness. 

I think that's why I'm really drawn to poems like Szymborska's.  To me, what she is describing is a new awareness that the speaker has come to: what her first love taught her--that loving another is a form of death because you become absorbed into each other.  Submerging yourself in another is a form of death; it is a transformation of experience.  It is at once wonderful, a grand feeling of transcendence, and it is terrifying, because change is always unknown territory. 

I love her poem for its truth and its simplicity.   Because it blows to smithereens a common stereotype:  that first love is best love.  It lays that old dog to rest.  I love the poem for its vague eroticism:  "Other loves / still breathe deep inside me."

The poem is not static; it breathes and moves.  (To me, a plot should also breathe and move; the epiphany should happen not by plan but it should be discovered.  The plot should be, in a sense, organic, growing out of memory, intent, and present experience.)  It takes the speaker and the reader to a moment of realization.  It shows us life, strange as it may sound, exactly as it is.

Comfortably (or Uncomfortably) Numb

Pearl Buck

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this:  A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive.  To them a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create--so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off. ... They must create, must pour out creation.  By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.  Pearl Buck

I don't know how many people who are artists--or who desire to be artists--relate to Buck's statement.  I certainly do.  At first glance, this desire to create would seem like a burden.  And this is an idea I hope to discuss further in a future entry.  But if being of an artistic sensibility is a burden, then the very real and very wonderful fact is that the artist has an outlet for her or his hypersensitivity.  As the poet and essayist Diane Ackerman has stated, "Art offers a refuge from the burden of individuality."

One of the worst feelings one can have is feeling (knowing) that one is meant to create but  not being able to find the way to express that need.  It is like being lost.  I once experienced it as feeling as though I was lost in a hall of mirrors; everywhere I looked, I saw a distorted image of myself, but I was helpless to find the real me. 

There came a day of reckoning for me when I had to admit that despite all my reading and all my college degrees, I had no clue about how to proceed.  I was empty.  I had nothing to write about.  I didn't even know how to write.  From there it was a matter of taking a series of baby steps back to myself, back to the part of me that wanted to write.  It's a bit like that wonderful music film, Pink Floyd's The Wall.  Pink, an artist, is in a state of severe depression.  In finding his way back to his art again, he recalls his "little black book with the poems in it."  In other words, he goes back to when the experience of writing was new.  He has to remember that.  For him, it is a matter of being "born again" (the image is of being baptized with water from the commode; how powerful and how telling is that?)

As we go through life, the edge wears off that initial excitement we first had when we practiced our art.  This is perhaps inevitable because our brains need novelty to ignite our senses.  If we stop doing our art in order to do other necessities, our ability to do art becomes compromised.  Moreover, if we start "going through the motions" in life then what we "know" becomes dull, the truth of what we know becomes blunted.  As Hegel once said, "the known, just because it is known, is the unknown."  We begin to live as though our lives were not mysterious anymore.   Losing our contact with the mystery of life, we also lose the sense of being alive.  We sink into a state of brain rest.  Flatline.  We feel "Comfortably Numb," to borrow from Pink Floyd's famous song--or, worse, terrifyingly numb.  Is it possible to feel numb and terrified at the same time?  Yes it is.  Can you feel numb and a sense of panic at the same time?  Yes you can.  I have been there on both counts.

In a later post I would like to come back to this topic of numbness and how to get over it.  Meanwhile, I'd like to hear from others about this topic.  If you have advice, I'd love to know about it!

1

COMFORTABLY NUMB

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?

Come on, now.
I hear you’re feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain,
Get you on your feet again.

Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts:
Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re sayin’.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I can’t explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb. ...

 
 

 

The 10 Things

Dorothy Allison

10 Things I Have Done...

1.  Had my hand kissed by Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina.

2.  Been shot at by the irate owner of a barn, which my husband and I were scouring for dirty antiques, trinkets, mostly, thinking the barn was long-abandoned by humans and by time.  I was four months pregnant at the time.

3.  Baked a birthday cake for one of my sons, using the last of everything I had in my cupboards (we were very poor then) and having the cake turn out tasting like it was a million years old, like it had been found in a mummy case.  I cried all day and all night because none of us could bear to eat it, hungry as we were, as much as we wanted to.  For we had needed that cake.

4.  Saw a young boy fill a paper sack with water, into which he put a live fish he had just caught.  He carried the fish in the sack so gingerly and with a big smile on his face.  It said so much to me about faith.  I have always wanted to put this image in a story.

5.  Changed places with my husband in a Chevette (with a stick shift) upon seeing police lights behind us beckoning us to pull over.  My husband, who was driving, did not have a drivers license (long story).  We slid across simultaneously.  If the cop noticed, he never said anything.  He was pulling us over because the bumper was missing from our car.

6.  Had a highway patrolman drive me to my then teaching job at Heidelberg College 25 miles away because he pulled me over for a broken headlight and discovered my drivers license was expired by one day.  He said I wouldn't be allowed to move the car.  He said if a call came in on his radio, I would have to exit the car, no matter where we were.  He asked me what I taught, and when I said, "English," he said, "In school I hated English."  Later, I had a professor drive me to my car and he showed me how to travel back roads to gethome.  I traveled those same back roads for about three weeks with my expired license because I was working so much that I didn't have time to renew my license.  It was an 80 mile round-trip between Heidelberg and home.

7.  Slept in the back of a Ryder Truck somewhere in Tennessee.  My husband and I had loaded the bed last; we backed the truck up into some trees at a State Park.  We were moving to Ohio so I could study  writing.  The breeze was cool, it was a clear, beautiful night, and pine cones hit the truck all night, keeping me awake.  It is amazing the dangers you imagine in the dark, in the back of a Ryder truck, in a strange place.  We held each other; we made love.  The next morning we bathed in the lake.

PS--What was not in the Ryder: all the paintings I did as an art student, because they were all quite large and we had no room for them where we were going.  What was in the Ryder:  my memory of how my paintings looked in the big dumpster, how I thought of all the hours I had spent painting them, how it was better this way.

8.  Was in the front row of people, just five feet or so away from President Clinton when he came through Bowling Green on the Presidential train, and I waited excitedly as my son, Brian went into the train to talk to the President.  Brian had won a poster contest and the prize was to meet Clinton.

9.  Had my lifejacket accidently fastened to a sailboat I was on.  So when I was told to change sides, I couldn't, and the boat capsized, and the person I was with saved my life.

10.  For some reason, early in our marriage, bet my husband I could eat 10 Taco Bell tacos.  I lost.  I could only eat 7. 

 

Urgent--Let me own my own time

Entry Word: urgent
Function: adjective
Text:
Synonyms: PRESSING, burning, clamant, clamorous, crying, exigent, imperative, importunate, insistent, instant
Related Words: driving, impelling; demanding

A lot of people recently have been doing lists in their journals.  The most recent list is the 10 things the writer has done that the reader (probably) has not.  I've entertained the notion of doing such a list; it would be good for my imagination, but I am finding it difficult.  I think I need to consult with my husband and ask him to help me to remember some of my "finer" moments.  I seem to have settled into a form of complacency lately, and I wouldn't mind some kind of a lightning bolt to strike me and wake me up.  A list of my feats might do the trick.  Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I recently read articles about two poets, Kenneth Koch and Jack Gilbert.  What struck me about both men is that they seemed to understand the meaning of the word "urgent."  We see the word "urgent" in so many bland contexts that it's easy to forget the extent of its meaning.  We see it in e-mails and on our snail mail--"urgent you reply."  Our colleagues, bosses, students often leave messages on our phones:  "Urgent I speak with you."

Koch kept his work and correspondence in folders, on which he would write things like:  "Occasional poems," "Letters from before to respond to now," "Do this."  I understand from the article that his favorite label was "Urgent."  He wrote "urgent" on the front of countless folders.  URGENT!  Most of these folders remained untouched for years.  Meanwhile, he wrote beautiful poems, taught his classes quietly, competently, with humor, wrote a novel, short stories, vacationed with his wife. 

In one poem, he invokes the Greek gods as a way of illustrating the poet's role:

The exigent poet has his

   satisfactions...

But that is not the only  kind of poet

   you can be.  There is a pleasure in

   being Venus,

In sending love to everyone, in being

   Zeus,

In sending thunder to everyone, in

   being Apollo,

And every day sending out light.

Jack Gilbert experienced fame as a poet in the sixties, traveled, taught, but mostly disappeared from public view.  He felt no need to keep publishing, although he contined to write--he felt that publishing robbed the writer of savoring his own work, of letting it deepen and become richer through time.  I understand that he has published a mere fraction of what he has written--and this only at the behest of writer-friends.

What I liked most about Gilbert was that he said:

"When I was a boy, I used to pray when I went to sleep at night.  Among my prayers was:  Let me own my own time."

That--it seems to me--is worth being urgent about.

The Great Fires

by Jack Gilbert
 

  Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigsthat kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.