Perfect weekend

Such a perfect weekend just passed. Temperatures in the 70’s. Sunshine and stillness. I planted in my little garden, and filled my windowbox, and cleaned the house, and in between all that I read papers and prepped for my 101 class (It’s a new prep, and I’m on step ahead of my students. I wanted to get a little ahead. No such luck).

On Saturday afternoon I sat in my chair and looked at the neatly swept patio, at the little table and chair set and the flowerpot on the table with its blue and yellow pansies spilling over the edge. The trees along the fence line a few feet away are beginning to bud. Tulips on the verge of opening nodded in the barely perceptible breeze. Happy. Yes. And I reminded myself that I have felt this way before and will again, and in between will be different feelings, and everything is all OK.

Earlier that day, a friend had sent me one of those “Getting to know you” emails, with questions about work and life and TV shows and so on. “What are four places you’ve worked?” “Four places you’ve visited?” “What are four movies you’ll watch over and over again?”

The absence of a question about favorite books struck me. A question about TV shows, and one about movies, yes. But nothing about books. Fewer people read these days. The questionnaire supported the image of a society in which the written word is losing favor. It was sent by an older friend of mine, who didn’t note the absence of a question about reading. When I forwarded it, I said I didn’t watch TV, and added favorite books instead. It felt like a loss, having to configure the questionnaire for me, so much out of the mainstream (for most people except, I suspect, for the readers of this blog, perhaps!)

The last question I also couldn’t answer, but my silence in the face of it struck me as a positive one. “What four things are you looking forward to this year?” Last year I would have said, “Visiting the Azores,” but would have been stuck after that single answer. This year, without a highly unusual trip on my agenda, I had nothing to say. But lest you all worry that my life is without joy, rest assured. My silence settled in me with a sigh of gladness. I don’t need to look forward. This moment is enough. I could say I’m looking forward to the break of the summer (I teach, yes, but fewer classes, and there is no committee work involved). I could say I’m looking forward to everything associated with longer days and more light. But really I see no point in looking forward. I’ve given up on living outside the moment, and when I succeed, I like it. Which is to say that sometimes I slip back into the habit of imagining myself elsewhere, which fuels discontent. In the winter, the dead of winter, when walking the dogs is a frozen chore that even they dread, I find myself imagining a time I might have a fenced yard where they can relieve themselves and chase the birds. But then I remember that in winter I like sitting in my chair and watching the birds eat; I love the pale filtered light and the starkness of the bare branches. I love the the sense of living protected in a small space, while outside the hills stretch away to the sky, and all is austere and silent. And so I remember there is no need to look forward, because right now is enough.

Esperanca’s book

“Here,” Nada told my sister, Ruth May, on Christmas Day. “Did you see what Adah gave Esperanca for Christmas?” He held out the book I wrote for his daughter and had published at Lulu.com. It looked like a real book, a trade paperback with a glossy bright cover and numbered pages. Ruth May turned away, pretending busy-ness, and didn’t even look. Her boyfriend didn’t look either. Nada put the book on the coffee table and we went on with our Christmas, but all I could think about was Nada’s family, how when Esperanca opened the present at his house on Christmas Eve, they erupted with joy. They passed the book around reverently, opening it with careful, loving fingers. They traced the picture of Esperanca on the cover. “Wow,” they said. “You wrote this? For Esperanca? That’s beautiful.” His brother told me, afterwards, “I don’t generally read books, but I’m going to read this one.” His aunt and mother asked where they could buy their own copies. They called his sister and his other brother to tell them.

I was surprised, totally surprised, at their reaction. I didn’t expect too much response, except perhaps from Esperanca, who set to reading immediately. And now I’m embarrassed, afraid it won’t be good enough. I knew my family wouldn’t be interested. They never have been. Ruth May has never read the book I wrote with my mother about having breast cancer together. The others show little interest in my writing, my life, except for Leah who has a kind and generous spirit, although she is troubled. Over the years, she is the one I find myself most empathetic towards.

I didn’t expect Nada’s family to be so welcoming of Esperanca’s book, to thank me so eagerly for such a great present. I love them. I cannot get over people who accept me so readily and warmly. I expect them, every day, to lose interest. Their continued love and support amazes me.

How odd the past month or so has been. I look through my window at the patio upon which birds fight, at the winter-bare tree branches and the massed clouds behind the hills on the horizon, at the narrow slant of yellow sun that lies across the dead grasses on the walkway. It is all cold and still; even the birds stop in mid-peck and look up, as though awaiting something.

I have been working a little on the book I wrote with my mother, imagining I can publish it on Lulu for those who might be interested it, family friends, though not family members. I begin it with Obadiah, because Obadiah is the thread that links the story through the years.

And now I remember Mum didn’t want us to withdraw from one another, didn’t want us to turn our backs because we see things differently. Ruth May’s disinterest in anything I do is simply who she is, absorbed in little Liam’s first months, lacking curiosity. She has always been thus. She is still my sister. Obadiah holds us together, not a book for someone she’s never met.

Jack Kerouac’s Advice

“He just stopped coming one day,” R.C. said. “He said, ‘I gotta go on the road.’ And he did.”

The college reading group was in the middle of discussing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This morning, before the meeting, I Googled the Beat writer, brushing up on his life in preparation for the discussion. Wikipedia noted his 30 steps to better writing. I paste them below.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

I don’t want to be good any more. I want to write without editing, without censoring. I’m afraid of words in ways I never used to be. Locked myself away from the freedom of them, wrapped in rules, in advice, in teaching “how to.” I used to just write. Goddamit I want to write like that again. But there’s ice there in the place where the words reside. I want to be warm. I’m tired of winter. It all pulls, this way, that way this way that way this way this way this way no way. No way.

Too much comfort. One paper left to grade, and grades to post, and then the break, and a workshop to get ready for, and two new class preps, and ice in my throat, melting from too much comfort.

“Here,” he said in my ear, softly. “Right now.” Years ago, a dark stairwell, his hand, light filtering from behind a grill that blocked our way. The warehouse mall behind us, around a corner shoppers and security guards. The dark our blanket, but for that one glimmer ahead of us. I remember. I am in the center of remembering when the Old Guard speaks.

“I’ll take your recommendation any day,” he says, this crusty man who grumbles about everyone’s choices . He’s taught where I teach for more than four decades. He sat in on a class on Irish writers I taught when I first started there. “Those books in your class, they were excellent. I’ll go with your recommendation.”

I’m surprised. They’re all longing for Kerouac’s wildness to bring them back to freedom, to the illusion they can live in that melancholy wild desperation till they die, and that it will be romantic and beautiful even as their livers explode from cirrhosis. I think, There will be angels. I love that title: Desolation Angel. The only kind. But now they turn and look at me, the good girl, and I have the power to decide for the group. I don’t know what to say. Someone prompts me. “You’re the expert,” he says. “That’s why I thought we could do a Barry book.” The expert.

I know the author, went to dinner with him, interviewed him, wrote an article that was published in the Irish Literary Supplement. He called it a humdinger of an article. I love that he’s a mystic about his writing. I love the way he is “submissive to everything, open, listening,” the way he is a “crazy dumbsaint of the mind.”

Expert. I laugh. It’s not true. I haven’t read his most recent novels, not for lack of desire, but for lack of time and energy and the compass that points me. But still. “Yes,” I say, and suggest, and they accept my suggestion.

I am obtuse. I know it. If you want more, you can explore. The clues are there. But none of that matters. I just want to write, to not be good, to confess.

To confess.

Quiet

These days I’m calm, not pushed to blog. I admit I write in part for comments, for the sense of community evoked by reading comments on one’s words. When the comments disappear, part of my desire to make my writing public disappears too. I find myself taking joy in writing into the eternal dust, words that whirl away, unread, unremarked, simply because I like to write them. When I blog, a cautious demon sits on my shoulder whispering tsk tsk, and I backspace and erase. In my journal, I just write. The words flow out, and I don’t revise, review, worry. There’s freedom in it, and I’ve been glorifying in that freedom.

I’ve also been reading. I’m enjoying The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite, which describes and explains the Celtic Tiger’s impact on the Ireland I no longer know. I’ve been reading about Teresa of Avila, my patron saint, and also reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. I read several books at a time, for some reason, depending on my mood. Do I want to know more about Ireland or Iran? About literature or mysticism? About economics or fanatics? I dip into, then set aside, whatever I’m reading, but always return to it. In the end, I always finish.

There’s summer work, a stack of papers to be finished by Monday’s 101 class. There’s my sister’s house to get ready for her baby, due in a month, breech. There’s my father’s deck. I’m his official deck gardener now, and my mother’s beloved roses are flourishing after their bout with blackspot. If only my sister and my father didn’t live three hours away. Visiting three out of four weekends a month drains the bank account and the energy. But taking the time, honoring family, feels right.

Zeke too demands time and attention. If I take stock from a year ago, I realize how far we both have come, our ability to live in the same space in harmony and contentment. Not that we don’t occasionally argue, as any 14-year-old argues with her mother. But we always come to an understanding. She is happy as long as she can be with me, have her friends around, be free to sleep in and follow her own schedule. We go hiking or swimming, go to the occasional movie, and I spend countless hours ferrying kids from place to place. In return, she shares with me her music, tells me her life, and draws me into her world. She includes me in her conversation with her friends, turns to me for advice, and assumes (knows), that I respect and love her. After the challenges of a year ago, I know how right I was to sell my horse and focus on her, to show her that I loved her enough to give up what she perceived I loved more than her.

I feel as though I’m summing something up in preparation for moving on, but I’m not really. It’s not that I don’t plan to blog any more, just that my life is cycling into a reading space right now, and I like it. It’s where I want to be. I’ll update when the mood strikes me. Maybe I’ll get back into daily writing one day soon. In the meantime, I just want to touch base with anyone who might still be reading, if anyone has hung on after all this time. If you have, thank you for your persistence.

Juxtaposition: World churches

Just one big soul:

My college has committed to assigning a college-wide text, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, next year. I’ve signed on, so I’m reading it here in Louisville, Kentucky, between reading scores of papers on Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. It’s been a good 20 years since I last read Steinbeck’s classic, but I’m enjoying the experience, as I did the first time, and I keep thinking of the chapter where Tom Joad meets the Reverend Jim Casy again and Casy tells him about the doubts that have led him to give up preaching, and the epiphany he had about God:

“I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit–the human spiret–the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of. Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a sudden–I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

And I love what he knows, and the deep down conviction of it, and the truth in it: Buddha nature, Christ in everyone, the kingdom of heaven is in you, all that.

Cathedral of the Assumption, Louisville, Kentucky:

(Sunday evening): After today’s reading, I found myself unexpectedly hungry for Mass. One of the RCIA leaders told us once that his favorite thing to do when traveling is to attend Mass at the local church, and I understood this afternoon as I left the reading room. I wanted to find a church and enter it, to partake of the Eucharist, that moment of grace, and to feel the lightness and clarity that comes with it.

The guidebook pointed me to the Cathedral of the Assumption, only a few blocks from my hotel, so I walked there, wondering if it would be possible for me to slip in quietly and sit in the back, as Mass was well underway by that time. I entered a side door and climbed stairs to the sound of joyous singing. Before I got to the top of the stairs the door opened and a man beckoned me in, then pointed to a chair. It was just moments before the Eucharist, and so I was able to partake and then to kneel and feel the stillness flow through me, still surprised by it. A different church, unfamiliar people, and yet the same liturgy, the same quiet ritual, the same icons, and an overwhelming sense of being home.

Afterwards I looked around at the beauty of the architecture in this 1852 church, and at the light flowing through the stained glass over the altar, a light that was echoed minutes later outside, as it streamed in long silvery rays from behind gold-tinted clouds.

Reverend Casy again:

“Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing.”

All part of the wonder and the joy and the silence and the mystery. Every moment. Being Catholic and loving Buddhism, having a childhood dog named Shiva, and a Kuan Yin statue on my shelf. All part of the beauty. Inscape.

**Images taken from the website for the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville, KY.

Circling words

My developmental students and I talked about the importance of vocabulary today. They laugh at me sometimes because I love words so much, but they also recognize the importance of building their vocabulary. One of them asked, “Do you ever read a book where you don’t know the words?” And I told them, “Wait a minute!” and ran to my office to grab my copy of Banville’s The Sea. Revenant and finical and declivities and canthus and groynes and horrent and cinereal. Five of the words in the previous sentence aren’t even recognized as words by the spellchecker on WordPresss. They are beautiful things, those words, so particular, so surprising. Diana and I had an email exchange about Banville and his words a day or two ago. “People criticize him for showing off,” she said. I told her I think windowpane writing — writing so clear and unadorned that the story beneath unfurls like a movie in one’s head without drawing attention to the words — is fine. But so is writing that slows one down, that asks to be savored. If Banville and his ilke didn’t use such rich but almost-forgotten words, who would? They’d disappear eventually, I suppose, and that would be a pity.

I showed my students the circled words in my book, then waved a small notebook aloft. “In here,” I said. “See, I list them. Then I have to figure out a way to use them in a sentence, or I’ll forget them.”

“I feel better,” one of my students said. “I’m not the only one circling words in books.”

“It’s an ongoing project,” I tell them. “I hope you’ll be circling words when you’re 100. I hope I will be. I hope I never stop learning.”

Reading Gilead

I’m reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson for the book club at my college. It started a little slowly, written as it is in the meandering voice of a 76-year-old dying minister as he recalls his life in an extended letter to his young son. At first the story was confusing. The ancestral line of ministers predating the writer of the letter befuddled me. Was the narrator talking about his father or his grandfather? How did he fit in the scene? Was it in the past just a wee bit, or a generation or more, recalled by his father or his mother? But slowly the narration unfurled, and I was drawn in by the sheer beauty of the writing, the sure voice of the speaker — even in its most unsure moments. The story too intrigues me. John Ames’ best friend, Boughton — the name itself provocative. Boughton’s son, Jack Ames, the profligate namesake of the narrator. The narrator’s young wife and pre-pubescent son who seem drawn to Jack Ames in ways evocative and dangerous. And always the narrator’s yearning voice, describing each scene, explaining it, forecasting it, deconstructing it, glossing it. Always the circling back to the Bible, and outwards again to secular life.

I’ll write more when I’m finished it, or perhaps even as I’m reading. I have a stack of papers to start reading, and this afternoon am heading to my dad’s house to help him get his container gardens under control. He has finally (after more than three years!) decided I might be able to help with them without killing my mother’s beloved roses and sweetpeas.

So I’ll leave you with this:

“My advice is this — don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp” (179).

Finn: Cannibalism, I know it

OK, it’s not the Third Day. It’s not even close to the Third Day. But I’ve finally finished Finn and am ready to write about it.

Let’s start with R.C., my colleague, who pushed the book into my hands about two months ago and said, “What do you think?” He was referring to the advance reviewers’ copy, which had showed up in his mail box at work a day or two earlier, and specifically to the first page or two, a conversation between Finn and Bliss, the perennially inebriated blind distiller from whom the hero of the story got most of his poison. “I just hate this guy’s style,” R.C. muttered, “even if the premise is interesting.”

I hated the style too. Overblown sentences, wheeling off into diversions and redundancies, a constant sense of breathlessness. I wanted Jon Clinch to just STOP, sometimes. Just let a sentence be. But despite my discomfort with his style, like R.C. I got pulled into the story, which wove its way through scenes from Mark Twain’s original novel, and then digressed off to create a life and reason for Huck’s no-good daddy, Pap, reinvented as Clinch’s Finn.

In Clinch’s rambling tale, in which chapters revealing the grown Finn are interspersed with chapters flashing back to his youth as son of the hard-headed and brutally racist Judge, Pap’s backstory comes clear. Rather than a disreputable and abusive drunk, he can be seen as the victim of circumstances beyond his control. Always rebellious in the tightly controlled household run by the Judge, he runs afoul of his father over and over again, until he commits the ultimate crime, according to the racist elder Finn, and falls for a black girl.

****Caution, Spoiler follows****
Perhaps the most controversial premise of the novel is the suggestion that Huck was the daughter of the girl Finn brings home, a black runaway slave whom he rescues from slavery and seems for a time to genuinely love. Some of the gentlest and kindest writing in the book flows from the scenes in which Clinch describes Finn loving Mary, and later on in which he describes him taking the toddler Huck fishing. There, for a time,  young Finn seems to brim with promise, perhaps not the studious and obedient son whom his father desired to forge in a kiln of disapproval and cruelty, but still a human being with potential for kindness and grace. The moment at which he decides to protect the name of his young son is the turning point in the book. When Finn attacks Huck’s detractor and is sent to jail, something in him changes irrevocably. He returns brooding, and brutal. From then on, his life is marked by increasing alcoholism, violence and isolation.

For my taste, the transformation from the young Finn, who was potentially capable of finding salvation, to the brute devil who dies at the end of the novel happened too rapidly, and not quite seamlessly. The humanity Finn exhibits before his incarceration is too quickly erased. This, along with an affected tic from which almost all the characters seem to suffer, a propensity to say, “I know it” in confirmation of whatever needs confirming, keeps the book from my fully enthusiastic endorsement. The cannibalism too strikes me as a little too risque, too forced. Finn is a brute, true, but would he really skin a woman and serve her skin campfire-fried to an old blind man called Bliss? (Ignorance is….what a play on words).

The one regret I have about having read Finn now is that I haven’t read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in more than two decades, perhaps closer to three. I can’t remember enough about the book to know how closely Clinch’s scenes cohere with the original. I know his early chapters recreate some Huck Finn scenes from a different perspectives, Pap showing up in Huck’s room looking for the money, for example. And I know that he has painstakingly told the story of the house that Huck and Jim found floating down the river, including all the items within it: the milky white room with its walls covered in charcoal drawings of brute scenes, the gunshot body, the wooden leg, the women’s clothing. But I don’t know all the details well enough to feel confident in comparing the two.

R.C. is thinking of teaching both novels next fall. Perhaps I should sit in on the class, see what his students make of the classic alongside the contemporary novel. I just don’t know if I can take rereading those breathlessly redundant sentences again, or having to hear “I know it” echo in my head yet again.

Has anyone else read Finn? If so, I look forward to anything you might want to share about your experience of it.

Finn: Cannabilism, I know it

OK, it’s not the Third Day. It’s not even close to the Third Day. But I’ve finally finished Finn and am ready to write about it.

Let’s start with R.C., my colleague, who pushed the book into my hands about two months ago and said, “What do you think?” He was referring to the advance reviewers’ copy, which had showed up in his mail box at work a day or two earlier, and specifically to the first page or two, a conversation between Finn and Bliss, the perennially inebriated blind distiller from whom the hero of the story got most of his poison. “I just hate this guy’s style,” R.C. muttered, “even if the premise is interesting.”

I hated the style too. Overblown sentences, wheeling off into diversions and redundancies, a constant sense of breathlessness. I wanted Jon Clinch to just STOP, sometimes. Just let a sentence be. But despite my discomfort with his style, like R.C. I got pulled into the story, which wove its way through scenes from Mark Twain’s original novel, and then digressed off to create a life and reason for Huck’s no-good daddy, Pap, reinvented as Clinch’s Finn.

In Clinch’s rambling tale, in which chapters revealing the grown Finn are interspersed with chapters flashing back to his youth as son of the hard-headed and brutally racist Judge, Pap’s backstory comes clear. Rather than a disreputable and abusive drunk, he can be seen as the victim of circumstances beyond his control. Always rebellious in the tightly controlled household run by the Judge, he runs afoul of his father over and over again, until he commits the ultimate crime, according to the racist elder Finn, and falls for a black girl.

****Caution, Spoiler follows****
Perhaps the most controversial premise of the novel is the suggestion that Huck was the daughter of the girl Finn brings home, a black runaway slave whom he rescues from slavery and seems for a time to genuinely love. Some of the gentlest and kindest writing in the book flows from the scenes in which Clinch describes Finn loving Mary, and later on in which he describes him taking the toddler Huck fishing. There, for a time, young Finn seems to brim with promise, perhaps not the studious and obedient son whom his father desired to forge in a kiln of disapproval and cruelty, but still a human being with potential for kindness and grace. The moment at which he decides to protect the name of his young son is the turning point in the book. When Finn attacks Huck’s detractor and is sent to jail, something in him changes irrevocably. He returns brooding, and brutal. From then on, his life is marked by increasing alcoholism, violence and isolation.

For my taste, the transformation from the young Finn, who was potentially capable of finding salvation, to the brute devil who dies at the end of the novel happened too rapidly, and not quite seamlessly. The humanity Finn exhibits before his incarceration is too quickly erased. This, along with an affected tic from which almost all the characters seem to suffer, a propensity to say, “I know it” in confirmation of whatever needs confirming, keeps the book from my fully enthusiastic endorsement. The cannibalism too strikes me as a little too risque, too forced. Finn is a brute, true, but would he really skin a woman and serve her skin campfire-fried to an old blind man called Bliss? (Ignorance is….what a play on words).

The one regret I have about having read Finn now is that I haven’t read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in more than two decades, perhaps closer to three. I can’t remember enough about the book to know how closely Clinch’s scenes cohere with the original. I know his early chapters recreate some Huck Finn scenes from a different perspectives, Pap showing up in Huck’s room looking for the money, for example. And I know that he has painstakingly told the story of the house that Huck and Jim found floating down the river, including all the items within it: the milky white room with its walls covered in charcoal drawings of brute scenes, the gunshot body, the wooden leg, the women’s clothing. But I don’t know all the details well enough to feel confident in comparing the two.

R.C. is thinking of teaching both novels next fall. Perhaps I should sit in on the class, see what his students make of the classic alongside the contemporary novel. I just don’t know if I can take rereading those breathlessly redundant sentences again, or having to hear “I know it” echo in my head yet again.

Has anyone else read Finn? If so, I look forward to anything you might want to share about your experience of it.