Like a cat caught chasing her own tail
I ought to shake you off. After all
these years the betrayals seem less wrong
than part of who I am. We both know
we knew and still know now, though we haven’t
spoken for years and probably never
will. Our life remembered roams this place,
troubled heart sleeping in doorways on
streets that look empty to those who lack
empathy. They don’t know what it’s like
to endure sadness for sadness’ sake.
How did I wake up here? The simplest
answer is not enough. It cuts to
the soul, a death-wishing admission
that I was and will always be less
than I wanted to be—for you, for
me, and any who comes after. The
hard penance is to forgive yourself.
New York and Orlando April 2015
Notes and Credits
I took this painting from the Wikimedia Commons. In Russian, its name looks like this: Исповедь. Бернардинский собор во Львове (Церковь Святого Андрея УГКЦ). Google translates it as “Russian : Confession . Bernardine Cathedral in Lviv ( Church of St. Andrew Church).” I can’t find a painter’s name or year in all my trying on the Net. Yet of all the things I encountered when using search terms like “confession,” “penance,” and “forgiveness,” this is the most sinteresting and haunting thing I found. Mere commons photographs of confessionals would not do. The pain and loneliness of confession and absolution are captured here, and that is what I sought. The poem itself is my own journey. Not sure how far along I am in my own forgiveness, but with hope I will get there one day. It’s the only way I can begin to return the love I have, so I need to work on it.
I ran to love but hid from its embrace.
I looked at it instead through windows,
where love so deep took its place besides things
out of grasp, too expensive, too precious
too good. To want but never have was
perfection, to hold yet be restless, bet
nothing while everything rested in dreams
that replaced what we did with a stream of
desire till life crashed in. Glass spilled the day
I broke your heart, but the heart I crushed was
my own. It lives now behind glass with things
that never took place while the Furies’ buzz
kills forgiveness and fans faint embers of
loss. All I have is there, too precious,
too good, too gone, and I can’t remember
why or how. In a weak moment I
imagine a word that might bring us back
when a voice cries “No! Love is not selfish.”
Love claims and love lets go, one easy as
the other, remorseless, beyond joy or
pain with no thought to please—but only to
be. Behind the glass is nothing now but
empty space. No door, no window, no vent,
no way through or round but to feel the rain
of a thousand shards fall to the ground. I
try not to howl or jump when I am cut,
for cuts heal. And love lives like this: patching
over scars and new skin, sometimes clear and
others deformed but always relentless.
You cannot hide from love; love tells me this.
For love always tries again, not to get
it right, but just to love, again.
—New York, April 5, 2015
Notes and Credits
The opening photograph is taken from the NY Daily News piece, “Tilda Swinton sleeps in a glass box for surprise performance piece at Museum of Modern Art,” by Margaret Eby, March 23, 2013. No photographer was attributed. The piece is a strange play on celebrity that makes me thing of Goop. But it still seems a good photo for the poem, which puts the experience of love into museum boxes in order to dissociate from the pain while keeping the experience alive with false hopes. Writing the poem made me consider that love is not so sentimental as automatic. We bring sentiment to love that isn’t there and needn’t be there. Love will never be more than what it is. Never build a life around love, but around what you bring to love. And as for love itself, let it be what it is. My first love post was one of the early TRS posts; looking at it now it feels like life has changed so much. And love is here, again.
You smile when your heart is broken,
life wringing joy from bitter
darkness in this lowest hour.
The honest baring of teeth
against desire, mocking hope,
a face skids on the ice
looking down, looking in, cut off
cracking, cracking, crackling.
Beneath the brittle surface
oxygen is scarce, sounds weighted down.
Senses grow numb, your body cold,
yet it will last not seasons nor the
passing of time, melting slowly
to the bone, where truth is spun.
There was, there is, and there will be love.
The Scene
Across the church, I saw her big, toothy grin. It made her face expand and inflate. She was chasing after her son, a puffy toddler loose in the church, racing to the altar steps with all the abandon of a baby bull in a sacred store. She grabbed him and brought him in with one swooping motion that parents know how to do without trying. I remembered the Wednesday service, when she cried in the pews. The Reverend Mother sat with her quietly, holding her and this child whose father now lived halfway across the world. Her mother told me what happened and how it happened and wished her daughter could let the anger go. And today, chasing the boy down, she couldn’t help smiling when she picked him up, just like she can’t help the anger. I know that feeling. There’s nothing you can do about it but trust it and hope that the boy, and the smile and the joy, are bigger than the heartbreak. There was, there is, and there will be love.
Notes
The story is true. The smile was huge and beautiful. The photograph was taken by the author at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, in 2010 during a snow storm. Only the birds cross the ice on Lake Prospect.
Why do you need a miracle?
Miracles don’t pay your rent,
Pulse your nerves, light the dark,
Still the Earth, or make you well.
Miracles do nothing on their own.
Miracles don’t feed your heart.
This only blood can do, be it
Yours or mine, flesh to flesh
Dried in place. Stained like rust,
Blood never lets you go.
Miracles live on air
Because they are nothing
New or old under the sun.
Borrowed or blue, nothing at all
But dreams too afraid
To cross that line and cut your skin.
Miracles are cheap excuses for love
Deferred, leaving hope for dead.
They are God-machines grinding down
Your sharp edges until you are dull.
I am no miracle, but I am more
Than you deserve. Now as then,
Your treadmill grace beats your brow.
Too humiliated to save face,
You struggle for something else to save.
You wear this miracle like a shield
Of dreams. Proud behind it, you have no fear.
That wish protects, but at a price
You know so well, and so do I,
Every time we go to sleep alone.
I dreamt that we were around each other, but not really together. Our recent split was a wound still open, and I was trying to follow you, to get back to you, to make you see me again as yours. I knew that I had pushed you away in the first place and then raised the stakes for a reunion. I never claimed to be the complete master of my emotions. And you, being your locked-down self, said the same thing over and over, which in this case was like saying nothing at all, since I didn’t believe you wanted it to end.
All this was in the air around us when I saw the child, a young girl maybe two or three, walking around, uncertain perhaps where she was. She was small, dressed in a pink Hello Kitty onesy, carrying a stuffed animal. She bore a vague resemblance to you. It looked as if she would begin to cry at any moment.
I didn’t know whose child she was, and there were no other adults around. For reasons I don’t really understand or remember, I thought the child was with you, or that you knew where the parents were. I pursued you with the child, and I told you that we need to find the parents.
I don’t remember that you said anything, but you took the child from me.
Then we got into a car and you told me to drive. The car wasn’t yours, but I couldn’t figure out if it was stolen or rented. On the way there—a “there” that only became clear as we got closer, since I didn’t know where we were going and was only following your periodic directions—the air between us was frosty. Not much was said. You held on to the child.
We pulled into the parking lot of a drug store, one of those chain stores that all look and feel the same, regardless of the name on the sign out front. It was very white—the aisles, the light, the coats that people were wearing. You took the child back behind the pharmacy counter and began speaking to someone amid shelves of pills and ointments and jars. I couldn’t hear what you said, but you did something to divert me, something involving the car, and I left.
When I got back to the pharmacy, you were gone. I shouted into empty space, “We have to return the car! Whose is it?” Then I saw you running away.
I followed you into a massive, dark parking lot, the kind of multi-story affair you see next to stadiums, shopping malls, and airports. By the time I reached the spot, the car was gone and so were you. I thought: I must call you.
I awoke shaking and covered in sweat. I reached to the nightstand for the telephone, and that’s when I realized where I was.
Notes and Credits
This posting is fiction, but the dream was real.
Photography credit to Lara Wechsler, who let me use this photo for this posting. Lara’s work can be found on flickr, and on her own website. Her work is on exhibit with other local artists at 440 Gallery in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her work is street photography, which mainly involves photos of street scenes and, in Lara’s case, photographs of people. The photograph I used in this posting is the rare one in her collection not of people (or even one person). In this case, it’s a shot that evokes a persona, the perfect image for this dream that made me think, over and over again, what do I want?
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. —Anton Chekhov
Glass can reveal you and other things in the world. Glass can challenge you.
Glass can cut you. Glass is a magical substance. Glass reflects things as truly as it distorts them.
Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again. —Alice, Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
Stained in small pieces, it can create images and stories that tell us how God lived and died, saints turning sunlight and suffering into colored mists of other-worldly atmosphere here on earth.
You could be known as the most beautiful women who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal. —Bob Dylan, “Sweetheart Like You”
Broken, glass becomes a metaphor for struggle laced with pain and suffering, love destroyed, the end of things that once were.
My whole life has crashed, won’t you pick the pieces up
’cause it feels just like I’m walking on broken glass —Annie Lennox, “Walking on Broken Glass”
Yet broken glass is more than this. Sometimes, what is broken becomes better than it was before.
“Now it’s just like the other horses . . . ” says Laura in Tennesee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, when Jim knocks her glass unicorn to the floor, breaking its horn.
Breaking the glass at the conclusion of a Jewish wedding reminds of the fragility of human relationships, which need the greatest care. The broken glass is the world the couple came from, forever and irreparably changed by their union. New joy must live alongside the pain and suffering of the world.
Something fell from Nellie’s hand and knocked on the floor. She started, jumped up, and opened her eyes wide. One looking-glass she saw lying at her feet. The other was standing as before on the table. —Anton Checkov, “The Looking-glass”
The mirror reveals only what it is shown, and what it means to the looker can be something different altogether. The looking-glass is only one more opportunity to warp the matter of the world into shapes that suit deception, plotting, and retellings of post-hoc truths that matter now more than the time to which they refer.
Looking through the bent backed tulips
To see how the other half lives
Looking through a glass onion —John Lennon, “Glass Onion”
All that ends must be followed by something else. So it is with broken glass. The broken vase pictured at the opening of this essay was bought by a lover to whom I had sent roses after some transgression that I have long forgotten. She, too, is gone, though the vase remained with me after she left. It’s been filled by the flowers of other lovers who have come and gone, each one leaving a mark on my heart, life by a thousand cuts, as it were.
Then one day last year, my cat jumped up to the window sill in the middle of the night and the vase came crashing to the floor. The sound woke me and I went to look, shaking my head as I plodded back to bed, thinking that in the glint of that broken vase there was a story to be told. I will miss her.
I met Gondim in Rio de Janeiro in 1987. He brought me to Morro dos Prazeres, a favela whose name translates into English as “Hill of Pleasures.” We took the streetcar from downtown up to the neighborhood of Santa Teresa, climbing a couple thousand feet along the way. It was (and still is) Rio’s last streetcar line, and the trip is a step back in time. At the end of the line, you arrive in Santa Teresa’s walled streets and tight alleys, a Bohemian retreat high above the Rio’s noise and splatter. It’s a nice place, and the mountain air is cool.
One turn and a hundred feet down another street, Santa Teresa gives way to small houses climbing up the hillside in seemingly ramshackle fashion, stacked one atop the other to the sky. Children play on rooftops, their kites hanging in the ocean breeze. The two neighborhoods cling to each other on the steep hillsides of Rio de Janeiro in an uneasy relationship marked by occasional hostility, outbreaks of violence, and cheap domestic help. The views are breathtaking across the Guanabara Bay. Back in 1987, Gondim introduced me to Walter, the “professor,” a fan of Fidel Castro’s and leader of the neighborhood association in Morro dos Prazeres. I spent time there talking to people, hanging out, following Walter around.
At that time, Gondim lived in Santa Teresa, among artists and musicians and dancers. It was love and revolution all night long over cachaça, weed, and samba. At night, and sometimes during the day, I played music anywhere I could, with Rogerio or for the girls on Avenida Atlântica between tricks, the ocean crashing across the road beneath the moon and the Southern Cross.
1992
Five years passed and I wasn’t a very good correspondent. Neither was Gondim or Rogerio or anyone in Rio. In 1992, I found Rogerio in Flamengo, the neighborhood down on the beach below Santa Teresa. He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was on my way to Belém. Belém!, he screamed—there are only crooks and thieves and whores there!Madness to go there! he told me. My people, I thought, and then he gave me his sister’s phone number and said I should look up her up when I get there. Next I went to Gondim’s offices at the magazine, but the editor told me he had moved. Where to? I asked. Belém, she said, and she gave me a phone number.
In Belém, it was sweaty nights on the street in Cidade Velha with Gondim and his friends, among them Petit, a Catalan who had married a Belemense girl and become a professor at the university. We drank beer, ate chicken and rice, and sang songs about everything. With Marga (see the Tamba-Tajá stories) I took in the arrival of Iemanjá on the beach at Mosqueiro in 1992. Márcia took me to her neighborhood, Bom Futuro, which like Morro dos Prazeres had a meaning that seemed at odds with its circumstance, “Good Future” in Portuguese. We had great parties at her house and a photograph of all the women in her family, four generations, hangs in my office next to my desk, not far from a photograph of my own mother.
Bom Futuro was an invasão—they didn’t call them favelas in Belém—in a swampy area amid the mega-invasão of Área Cabanagem(pop 200,000) named after Oscar Neimeyer’s nearby monument to the slave and Afro-Native rebellion that occurred in Belém in the 1830s. Chiquinho took me to his invasão in Aurá, a suburb about an hour or 90 minutes from central Belém by bus. I spent years with him and his comrades as they struggled to pave the streets and keep the lights on. I cherished these friends dearly, as I also loved M-J, who became my accomplice in dreams for a few years.
Then things changed.
The details are unimportant. What matters is that things changed because I made decisions that I don’t understand today. The right thing to do now seems so obvious, though it was so obviously the wrong thing to do at the time. My mistake was not so much in doing right or wrong, but in doing either only half way. I forgot my passion at some point, and my calling went to rest beneath a rock of responsibility or reason that did not suit me very well. Maluco Beleza was the song I loved, and it became the life I lived a little by accident and not nearly enough by design.
2008
Years later, when I picked up The Savage Detectives in Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore, I felt like I found something I had lost.
My lives with Greene and Cortázar were there on Bolaño’s pages, in the stories of Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima and their band of poets—the visceral realists—by way of hundreds of small depositions from everyone who had crossed paths with them over four continents and twenty years, chronicling their lovers and affairs, their triumphs and tragedies and madness. About half way through, the literary and historical sweep of the novel becomes staggering, Cortázar resurrected in the granularity of Bolaño’s storytelling and an entire generation of Latin American literature (including at least two Nobel prizes) left in the dust. This was my world.
I laughed out loud on the subway to read Amadeo Salvatierra reminiscing on his hero during the years just after the Mexican Revolution (p. 396),
… I emerged from the swamp of mi general Diego Carvajal’s death or the boiling soup of his memory, an indelible, mysterious soup that’s poised above our fates, it seems to me, like Damocles’ sword or an advertisement for tequila …
And also at the exchange between Belano and Lima and Salvatierra over the one published poem by Cesárea Tinajero, the original visceral realist in the 1920s (p. 421),
Belano or Lima: So why do you say it’s a poem?
Salvatierra: Well, because Cesárea said so … That’s the only reason why, because I had Cesárea’s word for it. If that woman had told me that a piece of her shit wrapped in a shopping bag was a poem I would have believed it …
Belano: How modern.
I felt my heart tug when Joaquín Font spoke about his release from the mental hospital where he’d spent the last several years (p. 400) …
Freedom is like a prime number.
… and when Edith Oster, a heart-broken, ill, displaced Mexican in Barcelona, told of how she went to find a payphone to call her parents in Mexico City (p. 436),
In those days, Arturo and his friends didn’t pay for the international calls they made … They would find some telephone and hook up a few wires and that was it, they had a connection … The rigged telephones were easy to tell by the lines that formed around them, especially at night. The best and worst of Latin America came together in those lines, the old revolutionaries and the rapists, the former political prisoners and the hawkers of junk jewelry.
She had broken Belano’s heart, too, but the image brought me back to Vargas Llosa’s revolutionaries in Historia de Mayta, who sat around debating the finer points of Marxist theory in their garage, perched atop stacks of their party’s newspaper that had no readers and never saw the light of day, much less of a dim bulb or candle for covert reading in a dormitory, prison, or monastery.
Bolaño himself was at one time or another an old revolutionary, a former political prisoner, and a hawker of junk jewelry. Adding rapists to the mix only put down the rose-colored glasses of our generation’s passions and all those fights between Garcia Marquéz and Vargas Llosa as if to say “enough, already.” Yet being Bolaño, it would have been more like a visceral scream from the front row during a book reading at a polite salon or book store.
The Savage Detectives is a fractured narrative told in the shards of pottery and broken mirrors laying about the floors of the places where Bolaño slept. I read Bolaño and I saw what had become my life.
Notes and Credits
The photo of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives was taken by the author on his nightstand. This is the normal appearance of my end table. I picked up the leather Brazilian street scenes in Salvador, Bahia, in 1993.
Bolaño’s biography is well-noted and I won’t go over it here, except to say that the last 10 years of his tragic life (cut short by terminal illness) was one of those artistic outpourings that will live in legend. In a brief period of time, Bolaño the cast-off cast-away reshaped Latin America an became its voice (for now, at least).
The photo of Santa Teresa and Morro dos Prazeres comes from the Wikimedia Commons and a photographer named “chensiyuan.” The photo of Belém from the Amazon River was taken by the author in 2000, arriving in Belém on a boat trip that began in Manaus about 10 days earlier. The photograph of Bom Futuro was taken in 1995 on a visit to Márcia’s house. I’ve chosen for now to leave out my photos of Márcia, her family, and the parties we had.
The picture of the Bolaño graffiti was taken from gsz’s photostream on Flickr. The photo of the author and Gondim was taken on the beach at Mosqueiro in 1995. Mosqueiro is the old resort area of Belém, still within the city limits but on a remote island, where the elite used to have weekend vilas and houses.
Earlier this year, torrential rains caused flooding in Rio that resulted in a huge landslide in Morro dos Prazeres and other areas. As a result, the mayor of the city developed a plan to remove the neighborhoods, on the pretext that the danger of flooding is no longer tolerable. The problem with this logic, however, is that Rio’s favelas have always had this problem in the annual rainy season. To many, it seems the floods are just an excuse to to solve some of Rio’s other problems with crime and drugs (really a police problem) by blaming the poor and tearing down their neighborhoods.
This is the same issue that drew Janice Perlman to the favelas in the 1960s and me there, later, in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the problem of drugs and organized crime is all too real. In 1987, when I was there, the police routinely went into Morro dos Prazeres and rounded up young men for summary executions – this as a warning to others and a means of controlling the population. Twenty years later, the film Trope de Elite(Elite Squad) chronicled the same story, Morro dos Prazeres still there at the center.
The Memorial da Cabanagem is a landmark in Belém. It was built by Governor Jader Barbalho after he became one of 9 resistance candidates to win election to governorships against the military regime in 1984. The pretext is that Barbalho’s victory signaled a rebellion of Cabanagem-like proportions, the people rising up against the elite. After humble beginnings, Barbalho himself has been governor twice and held seats in both the national congress and the senate, where he was that body’s leader for a short while until he was impeached while rumors and allegations of corruption mounted. Barbalho is one of the richest men in Pará. As with Fernando Collor, time conquers all, and Barbalho is back in the national congress representing Pará. Jeferson Assis’s Flickr photostream has many images of the Cabanagem monument, as does Jeso Carneiro.
Bolaño’s rigged payphones reminds me of stories my friends told about the payphones in Washington Heights in the 1980s. The Latin American drug traffickers (or so my friends said) would rig them to make free international calls, and everyone in the neighborhood used them.
When all is said and done, I wish peace to my friend Gondim and pray that I will see him again.
Both can shine brilliantly, sparkling in the light to dazzle your eyes, making young couples blush with happiness and pride. Like the truth, diamonds aren’t nearly as rare as their market value would indicate. Both can be found with ease when you know where to look. Every once in a while, someone stumbles on a massive diamond in the plain light of day, just one more rock in the landscape until a chance encounter sets it apart. No small amount of truth is discovered in the same way. What sets these discoverers apart from the rest of us is as often as not luck.
The truth and diamonds leave two trails, one of bliss and hope, the other of blood and cruelty. More banal than ironic, this is the way of the universe. The same truth that turns a God of peace into a God of war also turns simple assumptions about fairness into human rights.
What happens when beauty and ugliness form a bond so tight that they become inseparable? The trouble with the truth and diamonds is that they can lead you anywhere. What really matters is where you want to go.
Notes and Credits
The opening photograph of the Hope Diamond is by Chip Clark, who passed away on June 12, 2010, away after 35 years as a photographer for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Mr. Clark’s beautiful photographs of gems, animals, birds, and other things can be found all over the web.
The Hope Diamond is surrounded by legend. It seems that most who have possessed it have come to tragic ends. It is currently owned by the United States of America and is on display at the Smithsonian.
The playing cards were photographed by the author, from a miniature travel deck for Patience (Solitaire) given to me in 1992 by Professor Raymond Grew, a mentor of mine in graduate school at the University of Michigan.
It should be noted that the truth also grows more precious with time, the simple truths of youth seeming to appear ever more complex and enduring as time goes along, much like the songs of Neil Diamond and just about everything touched by Johnny Cash.
“… let no mournful yesterdays
disturb thy peaceful heart.”
Ellen M. Huntington Gates, “Sleep Sweet”
“Of the making of many books there is no end,
and in much study there is weariness for the flesh.”
Ecclesiastes 12:12
When the glass is empty the writer searches, at times desperately, for some truth or experience to put on the page. The writer writes to make life real. It is an alchemy that turns nothing into something. Without writing, the writer is hollow, small, almost nothing.
When the glass is full the writer becomes like a god, though not so much a god of creation as one who reorders worlds that already exist. The writer recreates what he or she has known in order to say something about it. At the end of the day, it is a gratifying act.
Reverie
In 1967, Gloria Steinem interviewed Truman Capote for an article that was published in McCall’s. It was a candid interview. She asked him how he would like to be described as a writer and as a person—adding “without false modesty,” just in case. Capote replied with grace and clarity.
“As a writer, that I’m a good artist, a serious craftsman; that my writing gives pleasure in itself, regardless of what I’m writing about. I spend a great deal of time with that object in mind. Because to me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”
Early in his career, Capote was praised for the beauty of his sentences. His prose was impeccable and his writing almost alone brought him into social circumstances the likes of which he never could have dreamed as the model for Dill in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a lonely child of divorce in a small Alabama town.
But Capote flew too close to sun. In a terrific irony—the exception that proves the rule, it seems—Capote’s downfall came when he tried to write what he (thought he) knew. The serialized chapters of his long-awaited novel, Answered Prayers, hewed too closely to the real lives of his New York socialite crowd. Scandalized, Capote’s supposed friends abandoned him and he learned how far, indeed, Monroeville, Alabama, was from New York’s Upper East Side.
Capote had abandoned the “inner music” of his words for a cloying attempt that was less writing what he knew than writing what he both coveted and hated. Such is vanity.
Vanity
To write is to be like a god, one of those fundamental acts of hubris that always results in a fall, whether in the Garden of Eden or Greek mythology. The “inner music” of Capotean reverie was to Franz Kafka a siren call to vanity and self-worship through the admiration of others. To his close friend and ally, Max Brod, Kafka wrote in 1922—
“Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but a reward for what? Last night it was as clear to me as the catechism learned in childhood that it is a reward for devil worship. This descent to the powers of darkness, the dubious embraces, and all the other things that doubtless occur down below and which we know nothing about up here when we write our stories in the sunshine. Perhaps there are other kinds of writing, this is only one I know…”
The writer was oblivious to this affliction, mindlessly scribbling away beneath a penumbra of vanity that surrounded the sun itself. Like sex, writing was at once a sensual and gratifying pact with the devil that was utterly essential to living experience—and at the same time, an act that obscured and defamed the very essence of love itself.
“It is the vanity and the hedonism, which flutter around and around either one’s own or another’s form in a ceaseless search for pleasure until in the end, by this constant repetition, a whole planetary system of vanity is created.”
Kafka’s life was filled with deep and vital relationships, with both women and men. His Madonna-whore complex notwithstanding, he knew how to connect with others, recoiling only from those women he thought of marrying. Writing was Kafka’s only salvation, the only thing that made him seem real to himself.
As a writer, however, Kafka was a failure in his own estimation. His work remains for us mainly because his close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, famously chose to ignore to Kafka’s request to destroy all the remaining manuscripts, which included his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
Prayer, a writerly cup
The photo of the cup of tea at the beginning of this post was given to me by a friend, Maghan Lusk. She is from South Carolina. In 2008-09, she wrote a blog called “[a creative writer’s] life, uncensored.” On the blog, she wrote about writing, managing seamlessly to intersperse her own experiences with topical matter. Her writing and point of view suggested a very thoughtful person who took the time to understand why people were doing what they did, rather than judging them and tossing off opinions.
In 2009, she shut down her blog to work on her first novel, which she has now completed. Of her desk and cup she wrote—
“When I sit down to write, I make a pot of Ceylon orange pekoe (2 tbsp of loose tea, 1 tbsp of lemon curd, 1 tbsp of honey). And I warm the pot before I add the boiling water – it’s a highly methodical process. I like the color, so I always drink from a glass tea cup. The pot in the back belonged to my mom before she married my dad (27 years ago).”
Before Maghan turned the pot to the support of her writer’s craft, her mother used it to warm the water she soaked her feet with. Behind the pot, on the edge of the chest-of-drawers, is a framed poem, “Sleep Sweet,” by Ellen M. Huntington Gates.
The desk itself is piled high with the artifacts of Maghan’s life and work. In the stack of books are admired pieces, atop which sits Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the much-celebrated novel set in Iowa, in which the Rev. John Ames writes out a family history for his young son. The Reverend’s wife calculated that all the sermons he had written across his life of preaching would come to 67,500 pages of prose, or 225 books by the Rev.’s own calculation, “which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity.” In Robinson’s prose, Rev. Ames takes us to a place in writing so much finer and wonderful than Kafka’s, less self-involved than Capote’s, more human and more in touch with the real reasons we write—to reach out to someone else.
“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel that I am with you now, whatever that can mean …”
Feeding the Wolves
There is a famous Cherokee fable that goes like this.
An elder Cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”
The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
Capote fed both wolves, with his life and with his words. He was as destroyed by writing as he was acclaimed for it. The same thing happened to Hemingway. Kafka—and possibly Faulkner—fed the wolves with words alone, leaving their lives to become shambles of unrequited desire.
Sylvia Plath fed both wolves. She fed them with her words and her flesh. She married a man, Ted Hughes, who believed that a writer had the duty to live beyond all morality, to use his or her own life to build the experiences that would come to life in words.
To be an artist is a dangerous thing. It is a special role, a special calling that cannot be resisted. From the beginning of time—Lascaux to the Bible to Pynchon and Picasso and Joe Strummer—artists have helped us know who we are and how we live. Some of them handle the role better than others.
Notes and Credits
I owe thanks to Maghan Lusk for sharing her photos and story for this posting, as well as for insightful correspondence over issues of writing, spirituality, and living in the Deep South over the last year or so.
Capote’s interview was by Gloria Steinem, “‘Go Right Ahead and Ask Me Anything.’ (And So She Did) An Interview with Truman Capote.” McCall’s 95 (November 1967), 76-77, 148-52, 154.
Kafka from: Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922, in Franz Kafka, I Am a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings, ed. N Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 223. An interesting source for Kafka information (though not the only one I used, of course) and condominiums in Miami can be found here.
Gilead quotation: p. 19 of the Picador, 2004, edition.
The Cherokee fable of the two wolves is widely known. The version posted here was taken from a website called “First People, The Legends.” The story is the much the same in its various posting around the Web.
The photographs of books were taken by the author, on his own desk. Disclosure: I have not read Gilead, but I will do so shortly. I have not read In Cold Blood, but I saw the movie with Robert Blake a long time ago on late-night tv. I have not seen the movies of Capote’s life, neither Toby Jones’s nor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s. The copy of In Cold Blood in the photograph was found on the sidewalk in Park Slope one day. I have read much of Kafka’s writing—novels, stories, and letters, and I saw the movie.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
These, I, singing in spring, collect for lovers
Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world—but soon I pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side—now wading in a little, fearing not the wet …
Everything here is yellow and green
the ground, that winter nightmare,
has cured its sores and burst
with green birds and vitamins
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
I took a broken root to fling
Where the proud, wayward squirrel went,
Taking delight that he could spring
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
Notes and Credits
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 1-4
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, #38, These, I, Singing in Spring, ll. 1, 4-5
Anne Sexton, It is a Spring Afternoon, ll. 1, 30-32
Sylvia Plath, Wintering, l. 50
W. B. Yeats, An Appointment, ll. 2-4
Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring, ll. 1, 13-14
All the photos were taken by the writer in Prospect Park, Brooklyn – except for the white roses, which bloom every year in Tom and Laura’s backyard in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The squirrel is the most recent, taken as he chopped up and dropped leaves and twigs and flowers on all of us baseball parents while our children were at practice last week.
For the W. B. Yeats poem, I credit Jim Tolstrup, who posted on this poem and squirrels and anarchy a couple months ago.
truth and rocket science 