What the Body Loves

I've been fascinated by geese since I moved to Ohio in 1987 and first saw Canada Geese.  I liked their regal bearing, their large size.  I've since run across the goose as an archetype or symbol in a lot of literature.  The goose that laid the golden egg is a story element that originated with the cosmic or world egg, which separated to become the earth, sun, and moon. 

The image of the goose is primordial to me; it is symbolic to me of the deepest aspect of the imagination. When I touch that place, I feel a sense of completeness.  

This poem by Mary Oliver describes how I often feel when I write.  It is a returning to my "animal self," that part of me that's wild, elemental.  Oliver says that to have a divine moment "You do not have to walk on your knees...repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves."

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting----
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

When you write, let your body love what it loves, and write that.

Fire in the Earth

Work/werk/n:  an oppor-

tunity for discovering

and shaping;

the place

where the

self meets

the world

--From David Whyte's book Crossing the Unknown Sea:  Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.

The quote above, as well as the following poem, written by Pablo Neruda, describe what writing means to me and what it feels like when the writing is going well.  The poem is translated by David Whyte and is in his book of poems, Fire In The Earth.  Earth is a metaphor for our bodies; the fire is the soul, the center, the self.  It is where our creativity and imagination originate.

LA POESIA

...And something ignited in my soul,

fever or unremembered wings,

and I went my own way,

deciphering

that burning fire

and I wrote the first bare line,

bare, without substance, pure

foolishness,

pure wisdom

of one who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open.

To me, this is what the early stages of writing feel like.  That initial spark of something we know or remember, the impetus to get it down, the first effort which is without form, foolish even.  But pushing through that first stage, you reach a moment of transcendence, of connection.  A moment when the heavens open and we feel connected to something greater than ourselves.

Strangers

"The stranger functions as an unexpected messenger who can embody or mirror what is extraordinary within us, what is possible but yet unlived." 

--Mark Nepo

"We ought to concentrate on how the encounter [with the stranger] ... can be as much a catalyst for creativity as it is a potential trigger for anxiety."

--Elaine A. Jahner

"When people await a cat, the stranger manifests himself as a lion."

--Nouk Bassomb

Stranger, from the Old French, Estrange, meaning "extraordinary."

These journals (or blogs) admit strangers into sometimes intimate territory.  So I've been thinking about the stranger, who happens to be an archetypal character in literature.  The stranger has potential to destroy, but also the potential to build and transform.  Who will we let into our lives, and what difference will the stranger make? 

William Stafford once wrote in the poem, "Ask Me" --

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether

what I have done is my life.  Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt:  ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

Helen Dooling Draper also addresses this notion of the archetypal stranger in her essay, "In the Doorway."  She writes of the stranger poised in the doorway of our life, each of us with the choice of whether or not to let the stranger in:

"In this moment between heartbeats, the door is neither fully open nor closed; the choice between fearful rejection or whole-hearted welcome has yet to be made."

Draper also asks:  "When we encounter a stranger, we wonder:  Is this a friend or foe?  Is it safe to believe the words of someone unknown?  Shall we throw the gates open and welcome--or slam them shut in dismissal?"

She says, "Perhaps the true role of the stranger is to call us to a meeting at the border--the place between ourselves and ... the place where we might discover a kind of knowing that relates not only to place but also to time." 

Together, Draper says, "we listen to others who guide our steps--scholars, seers, poets, teachers--and we gain insights through myth, story, and traditional wisdom."

It seems to me that is what the Internet has opened up for us all.

 

 

The Other Thing

 

 

 

"Right.  Money isn't everything--what's the other thing again?"

A simple way of looking at story writing:  You are trying to remind your readers about "the other thing."

Cartoon credit:  The New Yorker, Sept. 27, 2004

April Fool

This is a drawing I did in a sketchbook on 1 April 1981.  At the time I was an undergraduate, in my mid-twenties, and had not yet discovered writing as my ultimate source of expression.  I was double-majoring in Art and English.

The drawing, a self-portrait, is called "April Fool."  I felt like a fool and made myself look like one because I had no idea where I was going.  I was married with two children, and I was coming to an awareness that I would never be the artist I had hoped to be.  I just wasn't good enough.  I loved my literature classes, but what could I do with that to make a living?

The hands definitely express the idea that I was feeling trapped, pressed down by expectations (real and some possibly imagined). 

White on White

This poem by Elizabeth Spires is from this week's New Yorker.  I am greatly taken with it. 

The first time I read it, I didn't even realize it is the "nightgown" that is speaking--the speaker felt so utterly human.  The second reading, when I realized the speaker is literally a nightgown, deepened the meaning, and I was in awe of how the personification of a simple piece of clothing yielded such a profound statement about ambivalence. 

The nightgown, which has no head or heart, sees a moment of transcendence so many of us seek (a release from the eternal struggle between head and heart)--a moment that surpasses a need for words, a "white world written on with white writing."

 

NIGHTGOWN

by Elizabeth Spires

To be inhabited.

To float from room

to room raving, waving my arms.

To be tossed by unfamiliar dreams,

and then to lie limp and slack on the bed.

To be folded, without a thought,

and put away in a dark drawer.

Or to hang in a closet, shapeless as a sack,

knowing the terror of form dissolving into formlessness.

         

          Someone is inside me.

          Someone is continually dreaming

          dreams not my own

          so that I am pulled this way and that!

 

I have always been attracted to the moon.

To a place where I shiver but do not freeze.

And although I, unlike you, must make do

without a head or heart, I can imagine a future

you cannot:  where, filled with a wild winter-emptiness,

I fly over a streaming patchwork countryside

to see what has so far eluded me:

the white world written on with white writing!

Family

This is a photograph I keep on the wall of my writing studio.  It is, I believe, the only photograph in existence of the entire family I grew up with.  Grandmother, Father, Mother, and two Brothers.  I'm the baby in the photograph.

It comes as a shock to me each time to realize that only two of the people in the photograph are still alive.  

I keep this photograph in plain sight because it causes me to reflect on life and loss, which is usually my favorite thing to think about while writing, because I think loss is what describes life best. 

I look at the people in the picture who seem to be having fun on a sunny day.  I wonder what each person was thinking about.  I wonder what their dreams were.  I wonder what kept them working, striving, and getting up again when they failed. 

I'll never know the answers, but the questions are good ones.