My Graces

"...if your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem."
The Sisters of Mercy
by Leonard Cohen


Two versions of this by Beth Orton from the documentary I'm Your Man exist on You Tube, and neither of them will arrive at or appear on this blog. It could well be that I am not savvy enough to manipulate around whatever the obstacle is or...someone doesn't wish to share it. Likely you know the tune and the words.

In the center of some unrelated task - boldly carving a path to empty a bookcase that has been semi-unreachable for a shockingly long time - the need for, the noticeable absence of, a grace-filled, embracing moment of pure love sweeps in and leaves me flattened. There is no extraordinary sorrow, no recent loss, no tears, no apparent cosmic shift. One moment is occupied with busy hands and the next admits an ache that might have appeared without name, if not for Cohen's knowledge of this state.

So I speak love to myself, I enumerate appreciations. I still the noisy flailing of my mind to let my heart be heard. I grow narrow in my thoughts so the voices of lack have no room to navigate.

To see myself in this light is a new skill, practiced repeatedly, still imperfect. Compassion, forgiveness, love without qualifications are not my habitual responses to moments when emptiness looms. However the Sisters of Mercy are interpreted, they are my imagined Graces, dwelling within. They bring their comfort, their song, their staying hands against grief. I never dreamed restoration could be home-grown.

An invitation to word play

 

Book available here.

The notebook I keep by the computer is called A GOREY Journal, featuring the art and words of Edward Gorey.  It contains a number of his "Thoughtful Alphabets," an example of which follows and presents an opportunity for word play.

THOUGHTFUL ALPHABET NO. 4

Always burn correspondence.

Disregard everybody.

Faint gracefully.

Howsoever interpret John Keats.

Learn macrame.

Nibble only.

Protest quid pro quos.

Remember seasons turning.

Untangle vines.

Walk extensively yonder.

Zero.

Here is my first attempt:

Abandon bureaucratic claptrap.

Dally enthusiastically.

Find Godot.

Heartily interrogate jackanapes.

Kayak.

Look menacing naturally.

Orate, pontificate.

Quell rumors steadfastly.

Traipse.

Unexamined wretched excess yields zilch.

I hope you will compose your own alphabets to share in the comments, be they thoughtful or otherwise.  No limit - and, as you see in Mr. Gorey's eXample, there is leeway in certain areas.  Enter early, enter often.

Illustration from www.linesandcolors.com

Textile tales

Please visit today's posting at grrl+dog in which she shares information of a remarkable museum exhibit. I thought of the poetry these scraps could inspire.

Too early for Venus

Awake at 4 a.m., briefly. Not yet able to see bright Venus through the bedroom window. She is there to greet me at 6.

The dream that I left at 4 involved graffiti, art created from vegetables, affixed to utility poles. I was the documenting photographer. The artists I was aware of in the dream were Japanese, one a former high school classmate who had carved a daikon radish into a personable, smiling, somewhat ghostly creature. It worried me that, unlike inedible guerrilla art, these pieces would be removed and eaten. And that, once awake, took me to a passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.

'You look a little shy: let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,' said the Red Queen. 'Alice—Mutton: Mutton—Alice.' The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice; and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused.

'May I give you a slice?' she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.

'Certainly not,' the Red Queen said, very decidedly: 'it isn't etiquette to cut anyone you've been introduced to. Remove the joint!' And the waiters carried it off, and brought a large plum-pudding in its place.

'I won't be introduced to the pudding, please,' Alice said, rather hastily, 'or we shall get no dinner at all. May I give you some?'

But the Red Queen looked sulky, and growled 'Pudding—Alice: Alice—Pudding. Remove the pudding!' and the waiters took it away so quickly that Alice couldn't return its bow.

However, she didn't see why the Red Queen should be the only one to give orders; so, as an experiment, she called out 'Waiter! Bring back the pudding!' and there it was again in a moment, like a conjuring trick. It was so large that she couldn't help feeling a little shy with it, as she had been with the mutton; however, she conquered her shyness by a great effort, and cut a slice and handed it to the Red Queen.

'What impertinence!' said the Pudding. 'I wonder how you'd like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!'

It spoke in a thick, suety sort of voice, and Alice hadn't a word to say in reply: she could only sit and look at it and gasp.

'Make a remark,' said the Red Queen: 'it's ridiculous to leave all the conversation to the pudding!'

Absurd and surreal, the welcome companions who add what humor can be found to our daily lives. We have two remaining episodes to watch from Amy Poehler's comedy, Parks and Recreation, Season Two. I know that what makes us laugh is so individual, so personal that without knowing someone well, it is unwise to say about something one enjoys, "You'll love it." Let's try it, shall we?



By the time I reached the kitchen, both Venus and the third quarter moon, 50% full, according to those who keep track of such things, were framed by palm trees outside the kitchen window. As we ate our oatmeal (yes, we have converted), the thin wash of clouds turned a shade close to lavender. The lime-colored parrots, who careen raucously through the dawn skies as though to tell anyone whose curtains are closed that the sun has risen, began to settle on winter branches and utility lines for their morning ritual of grooming/squabbling.

What I can tell you is the vegetable-based street art seemed real, inspired...my dream self was in a state of continual surprise and admiration. I took it as an urging to spend today living from my unconscious mind - if that is possible - and not the fault-finding other one.

Leaving bickering to the parrots. Off to discover.

Using our resources

When the zucchini crop begins to multiply like cells dividing we give the squashes away, to co-workers, neighbors, we set them out on a table in the church hall, some preserve them, others grate them for breads and muffins. Their abundance is put to use.

On her blog Melissa Shook wondered what she might "do" with the 50 inches of snow that have fallen already in January. Mine is the reverse question: is there something beneficial I can do with sunshine?

Our apartment building, constructed around a courtyard, has two patches of what might be called land in the center. From one grows a jacaranda tree. The other has rose bushes inside an 18-inch-wide frame of lawn. The plantings next to the building are mostly in perennial shade. I will not be raising tomatoes or herbs here.

Obvious sun benefits are Vitamin D, our solar-powered water heaters, warmth, a balm for aching joints, good light for art projects - the colors are more true in natural light. I have made some unappetizing choices when working under incandescents. An Ott light helps, but as a second choice.

It seems that something so plentiful, so rich as an element in song and story, could be whisked like egg whites into a frothy meringue, creamed with sugar and lemon into a piquant curd to spread on toast. Could it be captured to fill quilts and pillows and mattresses, fluffy as polyester batting, lighter than air?

Such a blazing gift could surely be converted to a form that would heal our inner darkness. Compressed into tablets with no side effects, see its glow spreading along tired limbs, brightening glum thoughts, sparking like a jumped battery to restart a discouraged heart. Perhaps what ails us is the inability to ingest pure sunlight. It may be that we need to breath it in, not swallow. Every particle, nourished with oxygen and sun, if only it worked that way.

Dark days come, unannounced and unwelcome. They may or may not have any connection to real-world events. It could just be time for the inner rivers to crest, for the flood of uncertainties to sweep away yesterday's optimism, the goals so nearly achieved. A commodity so limitless and bright must have value in the soothing of our great or small sorrows. Even knowing they are temporary, possibly untrue, does not make them easier to bear in the moment.

In lieu of whatever magic it would take to transform day after day of benevolent sunshine into medicine, I can see why faith in its countless forms is turned to for respite. Whether it is trust in some underlying universal force, a more organized religious belief, the strength and suport of those who love us or intentionally choosing to see the glass as half full, grim imaginings are better faced in company.

But when the occasional shadows fall across what is hard-won and placid and I stare out the window at evidence of dispelling light in endless supply, I wonder how it is possible to stand beneath its radiance and still shiver. This may be why I so often draw the sun. Over here, I think, just enough so I can see the good outcome.

Robert Bly and the poetry of 1999

As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1999, Robert Bly tells that the poems in the collection display many different kinds of heat. He says:

"Heat in itself has been disappearing for some years from our English. It is said that in a single day in the United States more words appear on computer screens than are secreted in all the books in the Library of Congress. But as these words stream across our screens, freed from doubt or elegance, we can see that computer verbiage has become the model of cool and empty language. I'm not making an original claim here; we all agree that the language of the chat rooms is empty. It's as if some worldwide force were trying to free us all from literary style, and is succeeding. Many contemporary writers persuade themselves it is good not to have inwardness, not to have intensity, not to engage layers of meaning, not to have pungent phrasings, not to allow the heat of that sort of language that springs from the fight between God and donkey. It's possible that the particular heat which we call style amounts to recognizing and remembering the flavor of the decade in which one became an adult. We more and more have English now no longer stung by the mood of an Oklahoma afternoon in the thirties, or the flavor of an Illinois dusk in the forties. Hardy's language we recognize to be blessedly imprisoned in the mood of Sussex in 1880. When the irreplaceable flavor of a given decade disappears, our language loses its vigor and becomes merely useful. Sven Birkerts, in his new book of essays Readings, points directly to the decline of intensity that results from the shift from the page to the screen. "We are losing our grip, collectively, on the logic of complex utterance, on syntax; we are abandoning the rhythmic, poetic undercurrents of expression." He suggests that "postmodern" merely means the destruction of all style. Postmodern novelists have fallen headfirst into this release from period style, producing novels that contain only the melancholy emptiness that follows from the longing to become universal. When language cools, it becomes a corpse.

"American poets are fighting against this cooling in several ingenious ways. Not all poets, of course. One group of poets who call themselves "Language" poets work very hard to drain all the meaning out of the words they use, and in this way resemble those eighteenth-century doctors who treated all problems by bleeding, occasionally failing to notice that the patient had died from loss of blood. All of us, poets, essayists, and fiction writers alike, are being pressured by example to remove flavor from our work, along with our idiosyncrasies. We are fighting a front-line action against the cooling of language..."

Bly's introduction was written 11 years ago, yet I suspect we have not been able to abandon the front-line position. Considering his observation that we are "...recognizing and remembering the flavor of the decade in which we became an adult," I know the reading which brought me to that decade, the sixties, stretched back to earlier times. I carry the influence of that Oklahoma afternoon in the thirties followed by eavesdropping outside the walk-up office where an idealistic detective was hired but never told the whole story. From South Pacific battles of the forties to the beats or post-apocalyptic predictions of the fifties, this is some of the language I absorbed.

I am not sure what all this means since, at the moment, I write for pleasure. There is no editor, no publisher, no one to bully me into using English in any way other than the one I know. The word "postmodern" confuses me. It didn't come up all that often in the newsroom at my first daily writing job where words were called copy and the demand for them was immediate and insistent. I hope language is regaining heat. Judging by the writers whose blogs I follow, I know there are subversive pockets, muy caliente, where it scorches.

today...writing

As a teenager, I worked at the Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, then called simply the Huntington Library. Access was more limited in those times. The public was not admitted until early afternoon. That meant staff had some 120 acres of orange groves, desert planting, lily ponds, bamboo forest and meditative settings all to itself to explore during morning coffee breaks and lunch hours.

A writer walks each day, each waking moment, really, through acres of words, species rare and common from which to choose. As each sentence is built, we hope for a combination that is, improbably, unlike any that came before. Memory, vocabulary, experience, education, ear, subtle neurological connections, all determine the expanse from which we select.

This is a way of reminding myself that each seed, every stem, the entire observable world and what may hide behind its face, can find its way into the story. Today I read poetry, written as a list, a list that told me to reach farther than I think I can. When my fingers close around the exact phrase, I will know. Pull it from whatever obscure corner it has occupied and let it speak.