Somewhere in time...

Looking at a calendar doesn't change the feeling. I have trouble fitting myself into the fact that the 1970s are, simply, gone.

Steve Earle and Kris Kristofferson were on Austin City Limits Thursday night. Our non-cable existence fills with more than we can possibly watch from Netflix and the choices arrayed like a trick card deck by a video game console. Simple joy in the form of public television folk music is a throw-back pleasure.

I don't know when the Earle-Kristofferson program was taped; the mood was pure 70s. In my transported state, I yearned to be young enough or cool enough to wear a bandana tied on my wrist like Earle and have it be an authentic statement, not the act of a mimicking wanna-be. I wanted a do-over, and the talent to support it, as a solo act, there with my wrist bandana and guitar.

No doubt there is a scientific term for the rooted stance my brain has taken, freezing a portion of it somewhere between the ages of 27 and 34. I seem to have staked a claim there and will not be budged. I can't explain why. It is not delusional, though of this I have only circumstantial proof, for I do know my age, the year and that it seems to be a very altered world than that of more than 30 years ago.

Assuming I am not the only one with a portion of self that resides elsewhere in time, I wonder is this a trait we all share, a way of holding onto a more youthful outlook, a more flexible and energetic way of thinking? Does this keep us from becoming stodgy? Do we ever outgrow entirely our earlier passions or will I be singing along with, heaven help me, the Kingston Trio or, less dated, Dylan into my dotage the way my still-youngish grandfather sang his World War I songs in the 1950s, the way, at her request, New Orleans jazz was played at my mother's memorial service? We love what we loved.

Not that I can claim true innocence at those ages, but I certainly was considerably less time-worn and scuffed than I am now. So many sobering events waited around the corner of those intervening years. Bob Seger wrote, "...wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then..." Is it about reaching a mental peak at a specific age and being allowed to perch there, as though we have achieved some goal and will not yield the ground to reason or time?

Having lived with this - is it a phenomenon? - for a few decades I see it as a niche. Once a pocket of what feels a match for our combined heart, spirit and mind is identified, unconsciously, we are allowed to remain, at least that part of us which does not age or evolve or deteriorate. We are permitted to be of both then and now, never unclear that we inhabit bodies of a certain age, yet still influenced by the preferences of an earlier version.

It casts the whole matter of "good old days" in a very different light, doesn't it? It may be argued that this is simply nostalgia, longing for what we think has been lost. I return, again, to one of my wild-eyed, hair-on-fire theories that we are still all the moments we have lived; some of them just seem to welcome our lingering more than others.

I am most grateful that all of this goes on without having to dress the part, at least in the real world. That wrist bandana will not turn up at the high school reunion or any public venue. I can't promise, though, that I won't see how it looks with my tee shirt and house pants, or that I won't browse on-line to see if there is something in a multi-color floral pattern that would still qualify as a bandana. It is all castles in the air, anyway. Why not have them draped with what we find suits us best?

A story in three words

It doesn't take a paragraph for you to see the sorry road ahead. You can point to the moment when illusion triumphed over the clear knowledge of throwing it all away and seemed like a reasonable option. "Took up with..." guarantees folly. If one has a first step on the road to hell, these words are surely etched there. There is little chance that taking up with will end well. Once we hear that James Taylor's Millworker "...took up with a no-good millworking man from Massachusette..." we know not to hold our breath for triumph.

A snippet from Google: Interesting Facts about World Writers ... Catholic mother's death, James Joyce took up with a chambermaid, Nora Barnacle. ...


It may be that we only take up with someone during a fugue episode or a failure of self-esteem or a reckless lack of caring about the future, even as close as tomorrow. The whole noir genre is fueled by bad ideas which often involve being dazzled, seduced, misled, fast-talked or come-hithered into dangerous liaisons with persons of the opposite, though not exclusively, gender.

But I suspect - though it could be, by loose definition, a bewitching - some of us have been sent into the world with key mechanisms in less than good working order. There is no difference between having arrived on earth that way or having been substantially, almost fatally, altered by circumstances of abuse, neglect, trauma or loss. Bad experiences turn some of us cautious and others of us indifferent.

When I thought of the phrase as one which has not been replaced, let alone improved upon over possibly a few centuries, give or take, I wanted to throw my arms around it as a model of verbal shorthand. If I sat and pondered, and my pondering skills right now seem at low ebb, I could possibly list other examples as succinct as these three words, but possibly not.

We will leave it that it is not only as a student of fiction that I know the nuances of "took up with." Short term, longer term, being the taker or the, very seldom, one hopes, takee, this is life as an object lesson. When your parents, who played a significant part in the origins of such heedless behavior, point you out to younger siblings as the creature they do NOT want to grow up to be, the cycle of defeat is nearly concluded.

But what surprises life holds, what redemptive nets somehow appear beneath our most dizzying falls. That some of us survive our worst ideas, or complete absence of ideas, is surely miraculous. I am ever drawn to tales of rebirth and transformation, of what was lost being found, the missing restored, what was broken repaired. Whether I escaped through luck or providence, I know how close I came to being trapped by all those words foretell. When I read or hear them, I know to cross my fingers and wish for good sense or rescue to arrive in time.

The world is so full of a number of things...

Acting on the hope that it is not bad blogging manners to post two links without first asking permission, I wanted to share visuals found at Denise's blog.

The first is her Tumblr site, a place to stop and allow the bright pretties to sweep you along.

From there I found Mr. Finch, via this work. If you link to him, please do look at the "Beasts." I am still reeling with what is possible from human hearts and hands.

My thanks, unbeknownst to them, to Denise and Mr. Finch for allowing me to share their art and inspiration.

Travelogue

When I logged onto our computer earlier this week, the above illustration had become my son's desktop wallpaper. This is a cropped version of it, a scene of the underwater city of Rapture from Irrational Games' BioShock, a video game. I was startled, then ensnared by the detail and what I could imagine as the backstory for this group of swells, looking out upon, or possibly too involved to notice, their underwater world. I noticed.

With infinite detail luring me in (I cannot resist an underwater world), I thought of fantasy realms, make-believe destinations and real places that seem so remote or unattainable they might as well be fictional. In the way that words or subjects have of arriving in clumps, I let my mind roam and thought of my artist mother, who was determined to visit Spain and see the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

She not only endured but transcended a divorce after 28 years of marriage, began a cottage business with ceramics and those ceramics sent her first to Greece and the Greek islands, then later to Spain and her dream tour of the Gaudi sites. His Casa Batllo in Barcelona may illustrate why video game alternate reality could have called him and my mother's realized dream to mind.

Two days later, in the closet plunge, I found an envelope containing photocopies of all the local obituary notices of my father's passing, sent by my step-mother. In rereading them, I was reminded of his ties to the South Pacific, where he had served during World War II. His biography gave greater detail than I remembered about his assignments. But I always knew he wanted, above everything, to see the Fiji Islands again.

Places unknown give our expectations an aura of magic; places experienced call to us with the imperfection of memory. We expand and romanticize them, assign them virtues which perhaps stretch the truth, hope to return in the quest for intangibles we fear may have been lost forever. My father did return to Fiji, with my step-mother, on their honeymoon. He never spoke to me of that trip, nor did he write of it in any of his papers I've found. Perhaps even for a man of words, his reclaiming of that place, of those life and world-changing times, was beyond explanation.

While writing this, Leon Russell was singing in the background.


My journeys have become interior. I will never miss a chance to watch Venice or Paris on screen, still allow myself temporary residence when following Donald Sutherland and the red coat he pursues or riding in the 1950s-vintage Citroen of a French noir classic. Should the means and opportunity ever materialize, I would not say no to such an adventure. Yet I have gained more than I could have hoped by exploring the inner landscape.

When I stopped being resentful of circumstances which dictated a quiet, contemplative existence, I understood that I had been delivered to my true destination. One can, I'm sure, ponder as well at distant sites as at home, but my assignment seems to be about finding my own heart and translating that into a wider knowledge.

The shores are generally sunny, each day delivers its own, varied treks. Morning reveals new paths, provides new encounters. The food doesn't vary much, but I hold the cook responsible for that. Attire is casual and surprises never fail to appear. It is a crossroads at which home and away intersect. Boredom is never an issue and I get to sleep in my own bed. I may want to design some postcards, local highlights, but I suppose, in a way, I already have. You are reading of them now. No need to say, wish you were here.

What shall we call you?

In some arcane volume, marbled endpapers, pages thin and crackling as onionskin, I wonder if there exists a list of rules for writer's etiquette, protocol. It would, ideally, specify the requirements for calling ones' self a writer, setting fire to the uncertainty of whether or not one has the goods.

Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, translated into a movie which I love with adolescent excess, includes a scene at a writers' conference in which "Q," played by Rip Torn, addresses the academic audience with a speech that begins, "I (beat beat beat) am (beat beat beat) a (beat beat beat) writer." Hoots, shrieks, applause (possibly fainting, which would occur off-screen) result, and among the movie watchers, especially those with "writer" tattooed on the secret, hidden side of their hearts, explosive laughter.

On some mornings, showing up at the keyboard has a Little Engine That Could aspect of, "I think I can, I think I can." The best days are the ones that feel like being dropped off by a Sikorsky S-76 for the next leg of the journey to find Coronado's cities of gold. You don't want to take time for breakfast, you've made notes on anything at hand before getting out of bed, you worry that the words will leave you if you move too slowly.

In order to claim the word genius, I think it is necessary to be so designated by an outside party. The rules for a writer title are less clear. I have read that one needs to be declared a poet and ought not to self-bestow the name. Poet is specific, creating the expectation of one having composed poetry. A writer could, in theory, be someone who sends letters to the editor.

There may be a fear that too many writers in the universe thin the broth. Especially in Los Angeles, where a car salesman used a test drive to pitch his script to a television executive of my acquaintance, we are abundant as recycled cardboard. Is publication the minimum requirement, or publication of a certain caliber? In the new, the seemingly expected and acceptable world of self-publishing, who is or is not a writer, or is the word available to all?

Because writing is something I have actually done for money - those were the days - and because it is now, as a volunteer, something I do seriously and with intention, I accept that I am a writer. There may be days when I am not clear about how successfully or brilliantly or voluminously I practice my craft. Those are the days I wonder about requirements, though I don't wonder for long.

Which brings me to dreams, the waking visions we have of ourselves and our lives. Is there harm in someone saying, "I am a writer," when the truth is they want to become a writer? If we cannot see ourselves moving gracefully, fluidly through the life, the receptions, signings and readings we imagine, I'm not sure we will get there. We also need to do more than fantasize about doing the actual work. No piece of writing has ever been wished into being.

There are writers whom I read on line, some with published books I buy and read and am made light-headed by the wonder of, and others whose daily, or almost daily, posts are so bright and suffused with feeling and truth, clarity and imagination, that I see it as an honor to be allowed, invited to ease into the worlds they share. Most of them also appear in literary journals, discriminating on-line magazines, invitational group ventures, public readings and performances. Yet if they have not yet been granted membership in that more limited club, I find it difficult to think they are anything other than writers.

Such a roomy planet, on which generosity is a replenishable resource. As long as authors who have no business being there end up on best-seller lists and brilliant word romancers who waltz phrases across the page in ways that make us weep are found in what the world considers small publications, the word writer seems free to land where it will. If this is your first day writing anything that wasn't a school assignment, if you are skipping around the blogdom, scoping the lay of the land before hitting "publish" for your first post, you've taken one giant step toward your city of gold. Dress the moment up with bunting and confetti, let the balloons cascade, declare victory and start calling yourself a writer.

On the road to order

This information has come to me before. I repeatedly forget it. It is similar to "...a long journey begins with a single step." Boiled down, it tells me that all I need to do in the process of restoring order is one thing at a time. One. Thing. Not conquering NOW the vast, chaotic disarray in the midst of which I shuffle along, not all in a day or a week or a month.

Today I opened half of the double accordion door to one closet. My knees didn't allow me to do this work standing up, so I sat on a folding chair and did a lot of reaching. Please believe me, I have pockets of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. The benefit of this is the surprise of finding goods of which I had almost no memory until I saw them again. As a drawback, I have unknowingly and on occasion replaced items that were not missing. In my defense, I am not prone to blackouts or amnesia. I endeavor to be frugal and wise and unconfused. But life comes and elbows the non-essential matters aside.

I retrieved the pillow that sent me, filled with hope, to the closet in the first place. The surprises included summer-weight shirts, many of them linen, others all cotton, contrasting companions for bright tees or tank tops; photos of my son when he was two or younger, some including loved ones no longer with us; origami papers and handmade paste papers; a notebook which contained the list of names we were weighing for our unborn child and a page of illustrations related to the first time the Pasadena Playhouse closed. It was done, based on its proximity to the names, in 1979. I thought I started drawing in 1994.

My son rolled his eyes at most of the choices we managed to avoid, saying they sounded like the names of serial killers. About the Playhouse drawings, he expressed wonder that ink was available back then.

Revised biography, enlarged portfolio, an unanticipated step forward. Tomorrow may be a rummage through never-worn shoes (don't ask) to see what else can upgrade my summer couture, the sorting of color pencils and shelving recently read books. I anticipate a better sleep with my plumper pillow. Perhaps it will signal increased energy, more sifting, fewer naps. Then, finding a spot for a gift typewriter due to be dropped off at the end of the day. The moment is racing toward us in which we will have to divest ourselves of something before anything new can move in. One of my things to do is develop a more rational attitude toward that edict.

Notes from the field

Melissa Green sent this poem yesterday, another voice for memory affirmed, for continuity.

DURUM WHEAT

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration

—no photographs, no diaries—

nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.

Just because you've got this idea

of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads

of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires—

just because somewhere in your memory

there's a rust-coloured pulse

taking its place among canola yellow

and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—

just because you want to

doesn't mean you can

build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you've imagined it,

that gash across the ripe belly of summer,

and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.

Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,

to escape the heat, out the Pontiac's backseat window

you just remembered it that way

because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.

But what can they know of faith?

To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.

This innocence that can't be proved: what the child saw

of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there's still time.

Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in wind.

While you're still young enough to remember

a flame planted along a road. While you're still

seeing more than there is to see.

LISA MARTIN-DEMOOR

Earlier this year, there was a post called, "Just say you're with the band." By whatever means it has come to be, I found this two nights ago:

It is a one-inch, pin-back button, offered by Portable Graffiti. Cost: $2.50 plus shipping. I know I must have it. Wish I could send one to each of you. Know that I do so in my heart.


If you have not discovered Jayne's blog, I will just say that she is a better source than my favorite, extinct, Saturday morning FM program for finding, knowing and sharing new music which usually involves stringed instruments.


Last night we watched, on Instant Netflix, AMERICAN: The Bill Hicks Story, about the brief life and career (1961-1994) of the controversial comedian whose final performance on David Letterman was pulled, only to be played some 12 years later, with an apology to Hicks' mother.

This is from one of the clips shown in the documentary, the one I found most moving and most closely aligned with how I see things. If you don't know his work, he continues to be relevant and hilarious and insightful:

"I'm gonna share with you a vision that I had, cause I love you. And you feel it. You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense each year, trillions of dollars, correct? Instead -- just play with this -- if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world -- and it would pay for it many times over, not one human being excluded -- we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace. Thank you very much. You've been great, I hope you enjoyed it."

Continuity

And then it was now...

My neglected blog fears that I've developed carpal tunnel syndrome or joined a cloistered order.

A thuggish cold/virus, with malice aforethought, set upon me and stole not only my breathing but any clarity of thought I possessed. I have been muddled and hazy since Sunday, about which I wanted to report. On Sunday morning I got to talk with the woman who became my first school friend when I joined her kindergarten class mid-year. As I was being introduced to the line of other end-of-the-war babies, I remember her stepping forward and offering me a piece of candy. We have known each other for 51 years; our birthdays are two days apart.

What hopscotched around in my head following our talk was the word continuity. Like Charles Baker "Dill" Harris coming to visit every summer in To Kill A Mockingbird, like knowing there would be Cornish pasties and sweet mixed pickles at any picnic my grandmother planned, like shopping for school supplies at Kress five and dime, certainties make us feel less adrift.

I am fortunate in having as a constant presence in my life since junior high, a friend first met in the fifth grade. She has seen and aided me through my worst moments, her mother's was the only adult voice to try and talk me out of a doomed first marriage at 18, and we still laugh (or cry) together every week. An ocean has separated us for more than 30 years but her gift for remaining in touch and her uninhibited willingness to travel...wherever...have given us grown-up adventures not too unlike our adolescent forays.

In the Sunday phone conversation, hearing someone speak of my parents as she knew them then, still young, gave credence to my memories. Which is not to say I had forgotten anything about them, it was simply confirmation that, I suppose, I didn't dream my life: it happened. It was not so much any specific event but the fact that we had been there together, that we could, hand over hand, rewind that ball of yarn and find ourselves at the same spot. Her recognizable voice and recollections helped anchor my tent so, rather than worrying that it could be carried off by some rogue gust, I could sit calmly and contemplate my world. A real world.

Thanks to Best Cupcake Recipes for the photo, not our Brownie troop but close enough.

That I also can depend on my somewhat younger brother to verify recollections has steadied me again and again. In a mind prone to fabrication, as the process for building a sentence or an illustration, questions naturally murmur...is THIS as invented as THAT, is there more embellishment than fact in this scene I think I recall?

Continuity means not only substantiation, it means exactly what it says: that in some form whatever was has support to continue. Back to the belief that we contain all our younger selves, that we are the aggregate of all moments, and, as a friend calls them, enlightened witnesses shore up the belief that we are who we think we are. As I write this, I feel I would give anything to have my less than five-foot-tall grandmother beside me, testifying, by her presence and arm around my shoulders, to the truth of souvenirs my heart carries from our hours and years together. Continuity is the difference between being the escaped helium balloon drifting toward the sun and the bobbing Mickey Mouse head tied firmly to my wrist.

In a life which now dances on without so many of the people who have mattered, to be affirmed as something greater than a ghost of my own imagining by someone who was there carries a gift I didn't know I was missing. Age does run its sly con game on us, it can turn us around and undermine our knowing, especially if some of our real history has elements of the fantastic.

Knowing too little about, I suppose the field would be physics leaves me defending on one leg the wonder of human life which is both the vessel carrying all previous moments and the unseen force of continual change; our two halves, conjoined twins, what was and is and what is becoming. That any of us blunders on in a state other than confusion is the miracle. Or maybe other people don't see it this way. That once caused me mild concern. Now I seem better equipped to embrace my unprovable theories. I've given up trying to pass for normal.

The lazy susan turns

With thanks to Chef Norm Services for the photo.

As the lazy susan of my mind twirls, what, I wonder, do these dishes contain?

Must I accept the last flight of the Space Shuttle, possibly the last American-directed manned mission into space? Am I futilely wedged in the past, wanting us still to be the fearless, imagination and science-fueled pioneers we once were? I heard John Glenn on the radio the other night: I want our astronauts to ride in OUR rockets, too. Something feels deeply, dangerously wrong about this.



Reading for the first time E. M. Forester, beginning with A Room with a View and only in Chapter 2, I marvel at the fact civilization survived those stiff-necked times when persons of a certain station could not speak to strangers, or be spoken to by them without collective gasps and intakes of air. Think of the blogging world under such constraints. We are only strangers until we speak, then our words and thoughts allow us to flow into one another. We step away, altered and enhanced.


I am capable of being the most stifling, inhibiting, spirit-crushing party-pooper to my creative, especially my artist, self. Luckily I lunged for this particular dish as it nearly swept past: I have, oh reincarnation of the scowling, scolding parent, kept myself from reclaiming my drafting table from disorder because there is other disorder in our midst and someone who is doing it right would take care of the other messes first. Art is play: no work, no play. (sound of screaming) In that dish, along with mixed sweet pickles which I thought they didn't make anymore, I found the note that reminded me - assume the whole castle has fallen into a fugue state, a Trance of Forgetting - that when I let the art come first, everything, repeat everything will be better. How easily I/we slip away from our centers and mistake ourselves for unhappy drones in human skin. I do not assume that mechanical devices are non-sentient beings.


For the past two nights, my son and I have watched, on Hulu via the PlayStation, samurai movies from the 1960s. They are part of the vast catalog of titles Hulu offers from The Criterion Collection. Conclusions we have reached through our extensive research of these and previous subjects: Japanese filmmakers in the 60s, likely reflecting what would have been sentiments of the time in which the films were set - say, the 18th century - had no respect or anything close to it for quasi-government functionaries, cruel warlords, their toadies and people who were likely to ride in sedan chairs and collect taxes. It causes me to wish we had movies with such themes today, and the impoverished, vagabond samurai who seem to have been placed on earth to champion the underdogs and send evil fleeing. In my fantasy, enough of these roving swordsmen might, just might, turn things around. I have taken many steps back from politics, feeling that any emotion I put into even thinking about health care or education is energy wasted. Ah, but with the samurai on the side of what will benefit the people most...They seem to enjoy wine, when available, and may be content with porridge when that's all there is. It is not an unpleasant dream.

A demonimation of one, Re-posted

August approaches and, with it, the three-year anniversary of this blog. Because I am still fitting together my next current post, I am falling back on the expedient re-post. While the two visitors who commented originally are friends and readers - thank you for steadfastness - it may be new to some of you. I know that, as much as I anticipate your new posts, there are not enough hours for me to mosey through your archives. Today is about all any of us can manage today. So I will drag a bit of yesterday into the humid light.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

A friend recently told me that she has, once again, official status enabling her to perform marriage ceremonies. She had been ordained in a particular denomination which, over time, became less and less a good match for her liberal, inclusive beliefs and she left that church for equally hands-on work in aspects of social service. She is my model as the first person I ever heard speak of being called to her training and eventual ministry. Since those days a few decades ago, I have come to believe that, if we pay attention, each of us is also called to whatever assignment requires our unique combination of gifts; I believe we each have a ministry.

In no way do I wish by the use of those words to diminish what has been known traditionally among our people as ministry, an over-simplified definition of which might be bringing the citizenry and a specific notion of God together, using biblical text and learned interpretation of God to give comfort in rocky times, steering us all the while along a path of discovering the best versions of our human selves. This is the ideal.

But take the premise that each of us is here, now, in this form to bring comfort or light or a sort of awakening to those we encounter through whatever it is that we do - how is that not a calling? Could a ministry not be art, music, kindness, the ability to listen, empathy, writing, acting, patience...anything which would fall into a category of gift or virtue? To reach others and ease their sadness, suffering, fear and alienation by whatever means sounds like a ministry to me. Do we have to speak OF God to speak God (or what my notion of godliness is) over one another? Isn't Love a fair substitution for a concept that many find unworkable? I have, after serious attempts when I was younger, to acknowledge that organized religion and I are not soul mates. Whatever ways I choose to commune with all that is Divine are my own; they work for me and include vast amounts of laughter, a delight in the absurd, an uncomplicated and unconfused identification of what is magic and miraculous, faith in beauty, goodness and things which somehow turn out for the best, even including bumpy, uncertain middle parts.

It is my unshakable belief that we are here for a reason. If that reason is not to make better the lives of people around us, what other possible reason could there be? I am no theologian; I don't know that there is a name for the handful of truths I cling to but my trust in those truths is sufficient to carry me through today and into tomorrow, endowed with grace that I hope has enlarged since yesterday.

Unless you object openly, I'd like to continue this exploration in the future. For those of us who have reached a certain number of years, we grow more conscious of our days being finite. The greater purpose to be found in them, the greater the joy.

Labels: ministering to each other, Purpose of life
2 comments:

Erin Perry said...

"vast amounts of laughter, a delight in the absurd, an uncomplicated and unconfused identification of what is magic and miraculous, faith in beauty, goodness and things which somehow turn out for the best, even including bumpy, uncertain middle parts" -
I have never heard a more wonderful definition of living a true spiritual life. Having been raised Catholic back in the '50's and '60's - I now stay as far as possible from organized religion - which I find has a lot to do with the people who run it and very little to do with a higher power or human compassion.
Yes, let's hear more!
Erin in Morro Bay
July 6, 2009 7:40 AM
Marta said...

You have certainly found a ministry with your words and artistic way of putting them into paragraphs...Minister Marylinn and her words of wisdom. Thank you.
Marta in Sherman Oaks
July 6, 2009 4:16 PM