One night last week I had a bad dream: I was with my sister and we had just discovered her old gray cat Moonshine, dead on the barn floor, and she wept and keened and managed to pick him up despite my urging her not to. In her arms the cat was rigid and thin, and in the dream I felt his deadness the same as if I'd been holding him myself. When I woke, I remembered right away that Moonshine had in fact been gone for more than twenty-five years; still, the dream had an air of urgency, of immediacy, that made it hard for me to convince myself it hadn't just happened. For two days afterwards I walked around thinking that it must be the start of an essay, somehow, but all these days later, nothing more has come of it.
It's been a string of nights full of dreams just like that, which is one of the things that my brand of insomnia does for you: I don't sleep well, but I sleep enough to dream, anxious dreams (no doubt because they're the products of a tired mind) that I generally remember since I'm always right on the verge of waking up, or have just woken up, or am lying in the dark thinking about the dream I just had while I wait to fall back asleep. At least it's been some time since I've been troubled by this. A year ago, I can see right in the entries here, I was plagued by sleeplessness, although then, it was rooted in my being stirred back into life after a long dormancy while I got accustomed to my widowhood. This year, who knows. I wonder if it's not a seasonal thing now. You'd think that the increased light would have a beneficial effect on me, helping me to emerge from the damp ground the way it's bringing my daffodils out. Instead, more light translates into more illumination of the things that trouble me, back in the deep recesses of the mind.
All day yesterday I tried to get here to write, mostly because it was the last day of the month and I didn't want to entire thing to have gone by with just one entry from me. But the truth is that lately, this is the last place I come to write: I'm still slogging along with the poem a day (#61 today, as a matter of fact) and most mornings I manage at least a short entry on the blog I keep on myspace, so if you don't find me here, chances are you'll find me there. And, having determined a course--finally, I think, the right course--of action to pursue as regards my essay-writing, the rest of the time I have to give over to this, pretty much goes to that.
And so I didn't manage to get here yesterday and honestly, because I didn't write it down anywhere else, I no longer remember what it is I intended to write about here. I hate to think that I have arrived on those shores of no longer being able to trust things to memory, but it may be that I have. I wonder how much of this is avoidable. Yesterday I taught in a middle school math program, one designed for the lowest of the low-end kids. As they worked over their sheets on simplifying expressions, they were encouraged--in fact, they were ordered--to use their calculators for the basic arithmetic functions of add and subtract. I thought to myself that surely, that reliance would weaken their minds. I thought about the old bardic orders, and their disdain for the printing press; surely, their argument went, that mind would weaken which was no longer required to memorize. But I can see the wisdom in keeping a small notebook and a pen always at hand. I always wonder what else I may have forgotten.
The past several days, when I haven't been tossing in bed, or having bad dreams, or trying to make myself useful in the classroom, I've been spending a lot of my time moodling around Jon Katz's wonderful Bedlam Farm although not, unfortunately, in person--the farm lies some four hours to the East of me. But his site is wonderful, the farm journal now a daily must-read, and it's got me thinking once more about the question of home, particularly as I look at it from a spiritual angle. I've concluded that what I really need is to create the outer set of circumstances that will more accurately reflect my interior world--when I read about Bedlam Farm I think to myself that that's what he's built for himself there, even though the journals mostly address that obliquely, with their focus on his hospice work, his photography, his sheep and, of course, his dogs. When I lived in New Hampshire I was fond of saying that I liked it there, but I didn't love it there, and mostly that was true. But the one thing I really did love was how I lived in a place where I could take a 6-mile walk--and often did--and barely encounter a car going by, let alone another soul. I miss that solitude. Where I live now, on a main street in a village that, for all it is small, is still a village, I feel hemmed-in, claustrophobic some days. To tell the truth, I don' t like it here at all, with the notable exception of one thing: I moved here with the thought that doing so would enable me to write, and write I have: when I look over the output from the last, say, thirteen months or so, I've written more in that time than I did in the previous thirteen years all put together. So now I need to find a way to synthesize the two.
I was just saying that to a friend last night, and remembering that made me remember what I was going to write about here yesterday. It rained; and first thing in the morning the rain made me remember other rainy mornings. That got me to remembering springs when I was in college, and how on some of those rainy days I wouldn't be able to help myself, I'd skip class and push my desk up by the window that overlooked the Commons in the town where I lived, and I'd sit there and write. I can remember the girl I was in those days, the writer I was at that young age, can still feel her the way I could feel the dead cat in the dream the other night--there, but not there. In those days I was hopelessly smitten with all things hopeless, which showed itself no where more clearly than in my love life, which was largely a series of disastrous entanglements with the sort of guy I'd always assumed I'd marry--someone artistic, controlled by creativity and instinct, someone a little moody, a little--or a lot--dark. Someone, in other words, just like me. Even when I'd been married for a couple of years and got to grad school, I'd still look around at the big shaggy men who lumbered in and out of my writing workshops, dragging around poems about their father-and-son angst or how they wanted to bang the papergirl and I'd think, why didn't I end up with someone like that? Luckily my own instincts outsmarted me there, and the man I eventually married was sort of the opposite of all that, and turned out to be just what I needed. When I met Dave I was involved with a guitar player, a man in whom musical talent was only outstripped by his capacity for substance abuse. Early on in our courtship, my soon-to-be husband tried competing with the other man on that man's terms, and so one night I had an hours-long serenade on Dave's old guitar while he strummed his way through--many, many times--the only song he knew how to play: House of the Rising Sun. Luckily, the musical talent portion of the pageant wasn't really part of the larger audition, and we ended up together anyway. Late in our marriage, after Dave had developed a real love for Americana music, I bought him a banjo one Christmas. This would have been the year before he had his recurrence, and so he got about eleven months in which he was able to pull the banjo out and practice--slowly, and more than a little painfully. It's actually a difficult instrument to play--those strings hurt, much more than any guitar strings do--and Dave never did learn to read music, so had to content himself with trying to teach himself through tablature. When his recurrence came, of course, the cancer rebloomed in his spine and robbed him of much of the use of his arms, and that was the end of his banjo days.
I sold the banjo the summer we left New Hampshire. I posted an ad on craigslist and a nice young couple, sort of throwback peaceful hippie types, came up from where they lived near Boston. The man picked the banjo up and took it in his arms and immediately it began to sing; he strummed, and picked, and cocked his ear and listened, and then he told me how he had a big family and they all got together frequently and played music together on the wide front porch of his parent's house. He paid me for the banjo what I'd asked for it, and they drove away again, and I was glad to think that it was going to go someplace where it would be played, and probably played a lot. I still have Dave's old guitar, which is warped beyond the point of being playable by now. But it sits in the corner of my bedroom and I think from time to time of covering it over with a beautiful glass mosaic, something green and gold and vaguely Arabian, although I have no idea why I think that, but I think that it would look nice, and that the guitar would enjoy its next life decked out in that garb.
And that is the story of two more of the musical instruments I've had in my life, and it was the rain falling down yesterday morning that made me remember it all. And the poems I've written in the last three days have all been about the rain.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Best Thing. The Hardest Thing.
(note: I previously posted this piece on the daily blog I keep on myspace; because I know there are different readers here, it seemed worth posting it again. Also, the fact that I haven't written here since January--I've been busy!--there's teaching! Mothering! Writing that daily poem [number 41 today, or it will be, once I've written it] has left me feeling rather guilty. I've never thought guilt was a terribly useful thing, but there you go, I seem unable to extricate myself from its grasp completely.)
When I got home it was time to take a look into the future, this time by way of the internet rather than my crystal ball. Or even my magic eight ball. Yesterday was the day admission letters went out from Phillips Exeter Academy--acceptance or rejection--and this year, the decisions were also to be posted on the personal accounts of all applicants, the one they set you up with when you begin the process so you can track what the office has received, what they still are waiting on. Sure enough, there was Maeve's decision, and the first line read: Congratulations!
A couple of months ago I sat here for a long time and struggled with writing my "Parent's Statement" which was about the final part of her application process. I still have a copy of what I wrote--what I don't have is a copy of the internal process that was going on while I wrote it. In fact I had put it off about as long as I was able to do so...in fact, it may be--I don't remember now--that it wasn't even a mandatory part of the process, whether or not I had any opinions one way or the other about her was likely inconsequential. I can't imagine any parent not having an opinion, but I know those parents are out there. At any rate. I wrote my piece about her, all the while painfully aware that what I was doing was trying to convince them to take my daughter away from me. I told them about her intense intellectual curiosity; I told them about the sponge-like way she soaks up learning and about how math is what's hardest for her, although that hasn't stopped her from signing up for the tough courses, or, for that matter, from pulling high 90's in them. I described her enthusiasm: gold in her pocket, I called it. I told them the story about how, as a sixth-grader, she spent two weeks away from us at Girl Scout camp and how the first day had been horrible, the second day had been a little better, and by the end, when we'd picked her up and were on the way home, she turned to me in the car and said you know, Mom, it's too bad I have so long to wait before I go to college, because I think I'm ready to live away from home now.
Finally I told them how difficult it was for me to write all of this because their saying yes meant my saying good-bye a full year before I'd thought I would. If you get to know her the way I know her, I added, you're going to miss her as much as I'm going to miss her. And, well, here's where we all get to find out how much, how deeply, that's true. I'm glad that I won't have to do any of this during the college application process, because I'm pretty sure at some point my own heart would give out and I'd start saying no, it's not true, she can't leave, give her back, make her small again and let's somehow freeze time right there, shall we? That's been the oddest thing about this impending change, how the shock waves from it have had the effect of knocking me back in time, in memory: since I found out, all I've been able to think about is the beginning, my pregnancy, her birth, what those early years were like, how different everything has grown. My wise friend Inanna wrote to me from Chicago last night: yes, first it's school, then it's off for the good job, then marriage, then grandchildren for you...it's called life, Anne. Of course it is. But true to form, I still feel as though I'm in dress rehearsal, not quite ready to go out there and convincingly deliver my lines. As of this morning, Maeve still hasn't decided whether she's going to go--making her pro/con list, there turn out to be more cons than you might imagine, given the opportunity this presents. Which ever way she decides to go, I'll of course back her up.
A.A. Milne wrote, "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." Right before Maeve was born I learned of a superstition--Balinese, I think--that babies are believed to still belong to the gods for the first hundred days after they're born, and so are never allowed to touch the ground in that time. I'm superstitious anyway, and was never more so than I was around childbirth, and so for the first hundred days of Maeve's life I never set her down except when she went to sleep; on the hundredth-and-first day we made a great show of letting her finally touch the Earth. And then I was never away from her until the day I gave birth to her brother, when she was nearly three years old. What I'm saying is that somehow we've managed to stay close--freakishly close, as she sometimes says, Lorelei-and-Rory-Gilmore close. And so I know that Maeve's going to hate it when I write this, but here it is anyway: no matter where she goes and no matter what happens to her on the way, in an enchanted corner of my own soul a woman and her little girl will always be spending their day together in that little house on the lake beside the woods, where they first started out all those years ago.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
What Takes a Year and a Day
Back at the beginning of the year 2000, I was studying with a women's spirituality group and had, in the course of that study, all sorts of projects handed to me to complete, all manner of things to examine. In that first month of the new millennium--everything so strange, no one accustomed yet to dating their checks with this odd new century--the assignment came through to undertake a pilgrimage, following that same worn path taken by so many spiritual seekers through so many spiritual traditions. I remember the day I got that assignment: it was a bright, cold, January afternoon, and I was shivering in the room where I wrote in those years, a room with stone floors and windows on two sides. I looked out one of them at the sun reflecting off the snow; I looked at the thermometer, which hadn't gotten out of the teens for a week. I decided that it was too damned cold to even think about taking off anywhere, and for that reason, thought to myself that maybe I could make my own pilgrimage an interior one.
And, I knew exactly how to go about doing it, because I'd just read a little newspaper story about a man who had recently done the same thing. I'm not sure where the idea to spend a year writing a poem every single day originated from; maybe it was with Emily Dickinson, who I understand did the same thing one year (and in fact, enjoyed it so much that she followed up that year with a second one just like it). I wasn't at all sure that undertaking such a project would exactly equate to a physical pilgrimage like the one described to us--after all, in the Canterbury Tales there is no scribe who stayed at home and called her story in. But I was pretty sure that spending such a year would likely leave me with some things to think about.
And so I began, and liked it so well--not as well as my friend Emily, for it took me four years to try it again--but liked it so well I did go through it again, the second time around also on the Leap Year, and by now it's beginning to feel like a tidy little habit, and so today once more, set off on the poem-a-day journey. The first time through much changed: that year, my mother died from cancer, and then my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the writing year ended not too long after his initial surgery). In the second year, we were a few months into his recurrence when the cycle started up again, and by the time that year was finished there were still several months left before he finally died from his disease. What I found was that I could in fact continue writing in the face of pretty much anything; what I also found is that so far, I've been unable to adequately write about what the experience is really like. I'm hoping this third time will be the charm for that, though. We'll know how that turns out in about another year.
Last night I had two dreams: in the first, it was a winter holiday, likely Christmas but maybe New Year's, too. I was in my living room with my brother-in-law and his wife, and they handed me the last remaining box there was to open. In it, there was a magnificent robe: it was hand-knitted, and hooded and long, and was designed of fantastic rows of color and pattern running around it in horizontal bars. There were dark orange, and black, and brilliant turquoise as the primary colors; and everything else in the background, yellows and greens and other shades of blue in dizzying, joyful patterns of diamonds, checks, waves, almost too much to take in visually, let alone describe. I said to them, how did you know I wanted this? It was perfect. It came to me that I hadn't known myself it was what I wanted, or at least had not been able to articulate that.
I might have forgotten this dream except that I woke then, with the idea in the back of my mind that there was something important that I needed to do, and gradually it came to me that today was the start of my third time along this path, the third time I'm writing my poem a day. In that early hour--I'd woken nearly an hour before the alarm would have gone off--I began to panic a little bit: what on Earth was I going to write about? And then that more peaceful, higher octave of myself said that's easy, write about your dream. At which point I remembered it, and also remembered this one that I had either when I was waking up or when I was drifting back off to sleep again: I had made a set of squares out of some sort of clear, resinous material. They were about three inches across, and there were four of them in the set. The idea was, you tilted them around a bit and inside of them--they were slightly domed on top--black and white images began to bloom, sometimes a little abstract, sometimes more representational. And then you arranged the four pieces together to form a sort of vignette, or snapshot, or fractured image, and the thing was called: Becoming You. You could pick them back up and tilt them around again, and other images, other little stories would appear, and you could play this game for hours.
I stayed in bed for quite some time while I memorized both of these dreams, and then I wrote for a little while in my head, the first three lines anyway of what will become the first poem in this year's journey. I am writing about the multi-colored robe, because I understand intuitively that it's something that was meant for this journey (and I also understand how it rhymes with the dark red cloak I was given by the entrance to the cave in my birthday dream). As I'm writing this I'm still thinking about how I'm going to write about that, and worrying a little bit about when I'll find the time today.
But so far, I do have my opening stanza, and I remember that the very first time I did this exercise, it played out exactly the same way: I woke early, and in the cold light of morning started to write and got part of the way through my poem before I was interrupted by the needs of the day; I remember too that the ending suddenly came to me as I sat in the car pool lane at my son's elementary school, getting ready to drop him off at kindergarten. It's nice to think that the rest of this particular poem may come like that, suddenly and unbidden (although in one sense, I'm bidding for it like crazy here). But, it was a nice way to begin the day, two dreams, a stretch of incubatory darkness, what feels like a magical gift of a magical robe. After I'd memorized the dreams and written my lines and memorized them, too, I got up to start the day. On the way downstairs I stopped on the landing and peered through the blinds as I sometimes do. Outside, the sky was blooming in mottled tones of black and white and gray, just like the resin squares in my dream, chrysanthemums, fogscapes. Behind it the waning moon, invisible at just that moment, was backlighting the whole thing and my imagination arranged the pieces of the vignette this way and that, while I tried to determine how to interpret them. And then I let the blinds fall closed again, and, my head stocked with what feels like provisions for the entire year ahead, descended the rest of the stairs while the world and I both moved toward morning.
And, I knew exactly how to go about doing it, because I'd just read a little newspaper story about a man who had recently done the same thing. I'm not sure where the idea to spend a year writing a poem every single day originated from; maybe it was with Emily Dickinson, who I understand did the same thing one year (and in fact, enjoyed it so much that she followed up that year with a second one just like it). I wasn't at all sure that undertaking such a project would exactly equate to a physical pilgrimage like the one described to us--after all, in the Canterbury Tales there is no scribe who stayed at home and called her story in. But I was pretty sure that spending such a year would likely leave me with some things to think about.
And so I began, and liked it so well--not as well as my friend Emily, for it took me four years to try it again--but liked it so well I did go through it again, the second time around also on the Leap Year, and by now it's beginning to feel like a tidy little habit, and so today once more, set off on the poem-a-day journey. The first time through much changed: that year, my mother died from cancer, and then my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (the writing year ended not too long after his initial surgery). In the second year, we were a few months into his recurrence when the cycle started up again, and by the time that year was finished there were still several months left before he finally died from his disease. What I found was that I could in fact continue writing in the face of pretty much anything; what I also found is that so far, I've been unable to adequately write about what the experience is really like. I'm hoping this third time will be the charm for that, though. We'll know how that turns out in about another year.
Last night I had two dreams: in the first, it was a winter holiday, likely Christmas but maybe New Year's, too. I was in my living room with my brother-in-law and his wife, and they handed me the last remaining box there was to open. In it, there was a magnificent robe: it was hand-knitted, and hooded and long, and was designed of fantastic rows of color and pattern running around it in horizontal bars. There were dark orange, and black, and brilliant turquoise as the primary colors; and everything else in the background, yellows and greens and other shades of blue in dizzying, joyful patterns of diamonds, checks, waves, almost too much to take in visually, let alone describe. I said to them, how did you know I wanted this? It was perfect. It came to me that I hadn't known myself it was what I wanted, or at least had not been able to articulate that.
I might have forgotten this dream except that I woke then, with the idea in the back of my mind that there was something important that I needed to do, and gradually it came to me that today was the start of my third time along this path, the third time I'm writing my poem a day. In that early hour--I'd woken nearly an hour before the alarm would have gone off--I began to panic a little bit: what on Earth was I going to write about? And then that more peaceful, higher octave of myself said that's easy, write about your dream. At which point I remembered it, and also remembered this one that I had either when I was waking up or when I was drifting back off to sleep again: I had made a set of squares out of some sort of clear, resinous material. They were about three inches across, and there were four of them in the set. The idea was, you tilted them around a bit and inside of them--they were slightly domed on top--black and white images began to bloom, sometimes a little abstract, sometimes more representational. And then you arranged the four pieces together to form a sort of vignette, or snapshot, or fractured image, and the thing was called: Becoming You. You could pick them back up and tilt them around again, and other images, other little stories would appear, and you could play this game for hours.
I stayed in bed for quite some time while I memorized both of these dreams, and then I wrote for a little while in my head, the first three lines anyway of what will become the first poem in this year's journey. I am writing about the multi-colored robe, because I understand intuitively that it's something that was meant for this journey (and I also understand how it rhymes with the dark red cloak I was given by the entrance to the cave in my birthday dream). As I'm writing this I'm still thinking about how I'm going to write about that, and worrying a little bit about when I'll find the time today.
But so far, I do have my opening stanza, and I remember that the very first time I did this exercise, it played out exactly the same way: I woke early, and in the cold light of morning started to write and got part of the way through my poem before I was interrupted by the needs of the day; I remember too that the ending suddenly came to me as I sat in the car pool lane at my son's elementary school, getting ready to drop him off at kindergarten. It's nice to think that the rest of this particular poem may come like that, suddenly and unbidden (although in one sense, I'm bidding for it like crazy here). But, it was a nice way to begin the day, two dreams, a stretch of incubatory darkness, what feels like a magical gift of a magical robe. After I'd memorized the dreams and written my lines and memorized them, too, I got up to start the day. On the way downstairs I stopped on the landing and peered through the blinds as I sometimes do. Outside, the sky was blooming in mottled tones of black and white and gray, just like the resin squares in my dream, chrysanthemums, fogscapes. Behind it the waning moon, invisible at just that moment, was backlighting the whole thing and my imagination arranged the pieces of the vignette this way and that, while I tried to determine how to interpret them. And then I let the blinds fall closed again, and, my head stocked with what feels like provisions for the entire year ahead, descended the rest of the stairs while the world and I both moved toward morning.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Five Pieces From This Sunday
1.
The sun today is laughing at me, I am sure of it: this is the first fully-sunny day in six weeks, and at the height of it the temperature stands at just 11 degrees. All that sunlight, meanwhile, is reflected in a thousand different mirrors, as it bounces back in every direction from the white snow. It is painful to see. I stand beside the radiator as I watch the ice blooming on the inside of my windows, and consider the wind in the landscape: it is like the desert outside, only instead of the great storm of stinging sand being blown up it is a whirl of stinging snow. There are times you cannot see the houses across the road, although even then, you can look up and see the blue brilliance of the sky. Which remains unavailable to you. My son comes down the stairs and I remark on how like a desert of sand the landscape looks today. Only cold, I say, colder than you'd think a desert could ever be. My son says the truth is, deserts get very cold: especially in the night, even the warm ones quickly freeze. He tells me, that is because there is nothing there for the heat to hold on to. And nothing in the sky to hold it in.
2.
I own a toy, a kaleidoscope I found in my mother's house after she died. I'm not sure whether it's old or whether it was only manufactured to look old; the legend inscribed around the lens says Corning Glass Works so in truth, it could be very old. Or very new. I keep it by a northern window in the kitchen and from time to time, usually when I'm watering the plants over there, I see it and remember to pick it up and have a look. This morning the tumbling glass pieces first formed what made me think of an embroidered robe, like maybe something I'd have been dressed in had I been born a princess and not your average Anne. I spun it around once more and was looking at a green-and-amber forest screen, and the symmetry and the colors made me think that I'd like to replicate the pattern, maybe make it into a tile backdrop for some piece of wall in my own home. While I stood trying to memorize the scheme, I shifted a little, and the colors tumbled again, and I was back in my grandmother's garden, with the purple faces of the pansies she grew forty years ago come back to life, nodding at me from among their green leaves. Asking me--as I imagine my grandmother would ask, if only the kaleidoscope could summon her too--asking me, how have you been?
3.
Every morning starts out the same: I feed the dog, I pour my coffee, I draw a series of tarot cards for the day. For that I've invented a system which uses three decks and eight different cards, and it's a system that is intuitive and inexplicable and which makes perfect internal sense to me. This morning I am surrounded by swords: the three, the six, the nine, the nine again, and the eight. The Queen of Swords is a widow like me, but this morning she has not come around. Still, I frown at these cards for a long time: heartbreak, something going away, nightmare, nightmare, being bound. I try to reassure myself that swords are only secondly struggles, that their primary nature is to be thoughts. But thoughts of course are things.
4.
Last night's dream was a minor nightmare of the sort that I have not had in years. In it, I was taking a final exam in English, and I knew that my answers were going to be achingly on the verge of genius and also knew that I was going to fail. I was allowed to sit outside while I took the test, and was handed a piece of black felt and some markers to take it with. First I had to invent the question, and then answer it. I decided to begin by illustrating my essay, and drew some lines; but immediately something went wrong, and in the middle of the ebony cloth there appeared a large white patch, and that apparition stumped me more than any question could have done. Since I didn't know how it had gotten there I was vexed as to how to remove it again, and so began to walk up the road looking for someone who could help me, for the antidote, for anything. As I walked I began to suspect that I was forgetting something even more important, that maybe I was supposed to be at work or was supposed to be picking one of the kids up somewhere. I climbed back into the van that I'd been sitting in when I began to take my exam. It was still a sunny afternoon, and I couldn't find the keys, and on the seat beside me where I'd tossed it, the black felt test paper with its glaring white error looked back at me.
5.
Everything today keeps circling around to the wind. For awhile in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, curling up in a recliner in the living room and pulling a blanket over me. I walked down that long tunnel that runs between the world to which I wake and the one I enter as I fall asleep. Do you know this place, does it exist for you, too? Early on my way through, I hit a patch of ice and my feet flew out from underneath me. In the chair my legs jerked; the motion woke me up, but next I realized it was really the sound of the wind intruding on my consciousness that made me skid this way. Presently I began to sleep again, and the image of an old lover's face came into view: it is the man I was involved with when I met the man who became my husband. I had not thought about him in many years, and as I watched him look at me, I thought that if I was seeing him now it must be because he had recently died. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but instead of words I heard the wind blow a hard gust, and so was pulled awake again. The third time I attempted to sleep, I suddenly came to understand the connection between the way the stories in the Decameron are organized and the cards that came up for me that morning in my tarot reading. Why had this not occurred to me before? Excited, I woke for the third time in twenty minutes, and this time, the wind blew steadily, holding its own in conversation with itself. Gradually the tarot-Decameron connection began to be less clear to me, but rising in its place was the conviction that I was meant to be awake then, that had I slept, I would have slept straight through an idea that was trying to come. Then I remembered that this had happened one other time recently, that one morning I was sleepless at 4:30 and grumpy about it, but I wandered downstairs and looked out a window and saw Venus shining low over the Eastern hill, and in that moment an essay presented itself to me, wholly formed, and I had thought then that had I been asleep, this idea would have entered my house and slipped right out through my walls again, without me being there to catch it. I think about that other essay until I'm sure I've memorized it again. Outside the wind continues on and on, and I think that it is beginning to sound like voices singing a children's round, and if I listen long enough pretty soon I'll know it well enough to be writing down those words, that tune.
The sun today is laughing at me, I am sure of it: this is the first fully-sunny day in six weeks, and at the height of it the temperature stands at just 11 degrees. All that sunlight, meanwhile, is reflected in a thousand different mirrors, as it bounces back in every direction from the white snow. It is painful to see. I stand beside the radiator as I watch the ice blooming on the inside of my windows, and consider the wind in the landscape: it is like the desert outside, only instead of the great storm of stinging sand being blown up it is a whirl of stinging snow. There are times you cannot see the houses across the road, although even then, you can look up and see the blue brilliance of the sky. Which remains unavailable to you. My son comes down the stairs and I remark on how like a desert of sand the landscape looks today. Only cold, I say, colder than you'd think a desert could ever be. My son says the truth is, deserts get very cold: especially in the night, even the warm ones quickly freeze. He tells me, that is because there is nothing there for the heat to hold on to. And nothing in the sky to hold it in.
2.
I own a toy, a kaleidoscope I found in my mother's house after she died. I'm not sure whether it's old or whether it was only manufactured to look old; the legend inscribed around the lens says Corning Glass Works so in truth, it could be very old. Or very new. I keep it by a northern window in the kitchen and from time to time, usually when I'm watering the plants over there, I see it and remember to pick it up and have a look. This morning the tumbling glass pieces first formed what made me think of an embroidered robe, like maybe something I'd have been dressed in had I been born a princess and not your average Anne. I spun it around once more and was looking at a green-and-amber forest screen, and the symmetry and the colors made me think that I'd like to replicate the pattern, maybe make it into a tile backdrop for some piece of wall in my own home. While I stood trying to memorize the scheme, I shifted a little, and the colors tumbled again, and I was back in my grandmother's garden, with the purple faces of the pansies she grew forty years ago come back to life, nodding at me from among their green leaves. Asking me--as I imagine my grandmother would ask, if only the kaleidoscope could summon her too--asking me, how have you been?
3.
Every morning starts out the same: I feed the dog, I pour my coffee, I draw a series of tarot cards for the day. For that I've invented a system which uses three decks and eight different cards, and it's a system that is intuitive and inexplicable and which makes perfect internal sense to me. This morning I am surrounded by swords: the three, the six, the nine, the nine again, and the eight. The Queen of Swords is a widow like me, but this morning she has not come around. Still, I frown at these cards for a long time: heartbreak, something going away, nightmare, nightmare, being bound. I try to reassure myself that swords are only secondly struggles, that their primary nature is to be thoughts. But thoughts of course are things.
4.
Last night's dream was a minor nightmare of the sort that I have not had in years. In it, I was taking a final exam in English, and I knew that my answers were going to be achingly on the verge of genius and also knew that I was going to fail. I was allowed to sit outside while I took the test, and was handed a piece of black felt and some markers to take it with. First I had to invent the question, and then answer it. I decided to begin by illustrating my essay, and drew some lines; but immediately something went wrong, and in the middle of the ebony cloth there appeared a large white patch, and that apparition stumped me more than any question could have done. Since I didn't know how it had gotten there I was vexed as to how to remove it again, and so began to walk up the road looking for someone who could help me, for the antidote, for anything. As I walked I began to suspect that I was forgetting something even more important, that maybe I was supposed to be at work or was supposed to be picking one of the kids up somewhere. I climbed back into the van that I'd been sitting in when I began to take my exam. It was still a sunny afternoon, and I couldn't find the keys, and on the seat beside me where I'd tossed it, the black felt test paper with its glaring white error looked back at me.
5.
Everything today keeps circling around to the wind. For awhile in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, curling up in a recliner in the living room and pulling a blanket over me. I walked down that long tunnel that runs between the world to which I wake and the one I enter as I fall asleep. Do you know this place, does it exist for you, too? Early on my way through, I hit a patch of ice and my feet flew out from underneath me. In the chair my legs jerked; the motion woke me up, but next I realized it was really the sound of the wind intruding on my consciousness that made me skid this way. Presently I began to sleep again, and the image of an old lover's face came into view: it is the man I was involved with when I met the man who became my husband. I had not thought about him in many years, and as I watched him look at me, I thought that if I was seeing him now it must be because he had recently died. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but instead of words I heard the wind blow a hard gust, and so was pulled awake again. The third time I attempted to sleep, I suddenly came to understand the connection between the way the stories in the Decameron are organized and the cards that came up for me that morning in my tarot reading. Why had this not occurred to me before? Excited, I woke for the third time in twenty minutes, and this time, the wind blew steadily, holding its own in conversation with itself. Gradually the tarot-Decameron connection began to be less clear to me, but rising in its place was the conviction that I was meant to be awake then, that had I slept, I would have slept straight through an idea that was trying to come. Then I remembered that this had happened one other time recently, that one morning I was sleepless at 4:30 and grumpy about it, but I wandered downstairs and looked out a window and saw Venus shining low over the Eastern hill, and in that moment an essay presented itself to me, wholly formed, and I had thought then that had I been asleep, this idea would have entered my house and slipped right out through my walls again, without me being there to catch it. I think about that other essay until I'm sure I've memorized it again. Outside the wind continues on and on, and I think that it is beginning to sound like voices singing a children's round, and if I listen long enough pretty soon I'll know it well enough to be writing down those words, that tune.
Monday, January 7, 2008
We Walk
...these nights, the dog and I, through the lowering autumn, through winter's coffin, through breathless spring, and latest of all we walk through the summer nights, deep in the dark, long after the last light of the sun has gone. We walk, and through the month the moon comes and goes, and comes again, and Orion hunts what we cannot see, and eventually stalks off to where we cannot see him.
I wonder what it is he is after.
On some nights when the weather is shifting the air gathers itself in little pools that are now warm, now cool, as you pass through them on your way to wherever it is the path is taking you. When I was younger and unafraid of what I couldn't see I thought nothing of jumping into murky water. In small ponds and deep lakes, I would sometimes encounter unexpected springs just like that, now a cold patch in the water, now a warm one come to entice you under. In those years I had a mermaid alter ego but somewhere along the way gave up my glittering tail for legs, gave it up, after all, not for love of another but for love of the form I was born to. Still, these nights the pooling air is there like a little rhyme half-remembered from childhood. I note its presence, and walk on through.
We walk, and sometimes here and sometimes there I hear the phantom jingle of an invisible dog as it strains against its invisible chain, and I think that it must be the ghost of a good dog gone by, lunging after anything that might intrude on the little arc of its domain. I imagine it must hear us as I hear it, invisible in the night but plainly there. If he is barking at me, I do not hear him, and if I spoke, he would not hear me, too.
There is one stretch of the road where the light the street lamps throw is lunar and dim. Most nights there, I watch the shadows the dog and I make and then a third shadow joins us, traveling along just behind me and sometimes to my left and sometimes to my right, and it is there while I count out eight paces or ten, and then is gone again. We walk, and after that I sleep deeply through the night and dream, and in my dreams I am telling a story to an invisible listener, in my dreams the road unwinding is also a story I am following, and in the morning I wake thinking: there are so many words in my life that have started with these words: last night I took a long walk...
I wonder what it is he is after.
On some nights when the weather is shifting the air gathers itself in little pools that are now warm, now cool, as you pass through them on your way to wherever it is the path is taking you. When I was younger and unafraid of what I couldn't see I thought nothing of jumping into murky water. In small ponds and deep lakes, I would sometimes encounter unexpected springs just like that, now a cold patch in the water, now a warm one come to entice you under. In those years I had a mermaid alter ego but somewhere along the way gave up my glittering tail for legs, gave it up, after all, not for love of another but for love of the form I was born to. Still, these nights the pooling air is there like a little rhyme half-remembered from childhood. I note its presence, and walk on through.
We walk, and sometimes here and sometimes there I hear the phantom jingle of an invisible dog as it strains against its invisible chain, and I think that it must be the ghost of a good dog gone by, lunging after anything that might intrude on the little arc of its domain. I imagine it must hear us as I hear it, invisible in the night but plainly there. If he is barking at me, I do not hear him, and if I spoke, he would not hear me, too.
There is one stretch of the road where the light the street lamps throw is lunar and dim. Most nights there, I watch the shadows the dog and I make and then a third shadow joins us, traveling along just behind me and sometimes to my left and sometimes to my right, and it is there while I count out eight paces or ten, and then is gone again. We walk, and after that I sleep deeply through the night and dream, and in my dreams I am telling a story to an invisible listener, in my dreams the road unwinding is also a story I am following, and in the morning I wake thinking: there are so many words in my life that have started with these words: last night I took a long walk...
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Stories in Three Winter Voices
Frau Holle:
If you're a brave enough girl to jump into the well,
I'll send you back home with a story to tell
About what it's like, life with me here below:
How we tended the hearth, and tended the bread,
And saw to the orchard, and changed the bed,
And shook out the bedding to bring down the snow.
You can tell how you loved me, who is fearsome and old.
When you're ready to leave, you'll go laden with gold.
Tomte:
The tomte comes, the tomte comes!
Set out the porridge, warm up your drums,
And dance at your leisure on this, my own land.
Be merry at Christmas with pudding and plums,
Set aside your old hardships--the tomte comes!
The tomte comes! The tomte is here!
I'll fatten your pigs and help brew your beer,
I'll see to your mares, your best stablehand.
Let go of your worries before the new year:
Though winter is frightful, the tomte is here!
Knecht Ruprecht
Always remember how quickly I can
Get into your house that dark winter's night,
With ashes above me and ashes below,
With ashes to cover me, I creep in
And can see who's good, who's not, and who might,
Most benefit from getting a birch-rod blow...
Which brings me to my stick.
It's a curious thing, how that magical stick
Can show me the whole year just gone away,
And whether a child has been good or not,
Whether he's earned a gift, and the right to stay
In his bed, in his home. But if not...?
Well, and that brings me to my sack.
You see how it's empty, spun of rough cloth,
And I only use it to carry off
The worst of the worst, those who have stayed bad all year.
(If that is not you, you have nothing to fear.)
Heed well the Knight Rupert, heed well Ashen Nick!
If you're a brave enough girl to jump into the well,
I'll send you back home with a story to tell
About what it's like, life with me here below:
How we tended the hearth, and tended the bread,
And saw to the orchard, and changed the bed,
And shook out the bedding to bring down the snow.
You can tell how you loved me, who is fearsome and old.
When you're ready to leave, you'll go laden with gold.
Tomte:
The tomte comes, the tomte comes!
Set out the porridge, warm up your drums,
And dance at your leisure on this, my own land.
Be merry at Christmas with pudding and plums,
Set aside your old hardships--the tomte comes!
The tomte comes! The tomte is here!
I'll fatten your pigs and help brew your beer,
I'll see to your mares, your best stablehand.
Let go of your worries before the new year:
Though winter is frightful, the tomte is here!
Knecht Ruprecht
Always remember how quickly I can
Get into your house that dark winter's night,
With ashes above me and ashes below,
With ashes to cover me, I creep in
And can see who's good, who's not, and who might,
Most benefit from getting a birch-rod blow...
Which brings me to my stick.
It's a curious thing, how that magical stick
Can show me the whole year just gone away,
And whether a child has been good or not,
Whether he's earned a gift, and the right to stay
In his bed, in his home. But if not...?
Well, and that brings me to my sack.
You see how it's empty, spun of rough cloth,
And I only use it to carry off
The worst of the worst, those who have stayed bad all year.
(If that is not you, you have nothing to fear.)
Heed well the Knight Rupert, heed well Ashen Nick!
Monday, December 31, 2007
Year's Last
All day I've been skirting the edges of this space, wanting to sign on and begin writing but not signing on, wanting to write but not knowing what, wanting to say something with absolutely no clear idea how. Well. I finally realized I was ignoring my own advice, or at least what I always tell my students: it's a mistake, I say to them, to think you already know what you're going to say when you sit down to say it. You miss a whole lot that way, and I really mean it when I say it although usually, it's advice that's meant to quell their early-onset writer's block. I tell them it's okay--preferable--not to know, that you sit down and start anyway and see what happens.
So I've finally sat down here to see what there is to say, and whether or not anything major comes of it still, I feel better thinking I'm ending the calendar year on a writing note. And of course tomorrow I must write as well--superstitiously, then, since I like to do on the first day of the year what I hope to do on every day for the rest of the year. Even though New Year's Day is an arbitrary thing, a date that doesn't make sense on any internal feeling or external event that I might base it on. If the decision was left to me, which day would I pick for a New Year's Day? I'm not sure, but mine would probably fall sometime in the autumn, around the equinox, perhaps, or the first of November. I base that decision on--nothing, really. Maybe on the onset of the school year, which still, this many years later, feels like the real beginning of things to me, or maybe it's rooted in Celtica, or in the moody distribution of the year into light and dark, into summer and winter, with winter always having the slight edge of ascendancy, at least in our imaginations. If I was going to think about an agricultural year, I suppose I'd begin mine in early spring. February might not be too early for that; some farmers start their crops that early, and I even see vestiges of that in the feast cycles of the church year.
But, here I am in 21st-century America (at least in this lifetime) and January 1st it is, and I am left feeling rather at loose ends about the whole thing. Part of this comes no doubt from stuffing myself with folklore the way I was stuffing myself with Christmas cookies a week ago. Because I want to call down as much good fortune on this household as I can, I get frantic about not making any missteps now--what is the right thing to eat, to wear, to bring into the household, to wish, to say, to do to greet this year and make it look favorably on me? For years we ate black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, although we never ate them any other time; and at this very hour my Southern boyfriend is in fact stewing up a big pot of them for his lunch tomorrow. The trouble is, that doesn't feel quite right to me--I get how you eat things that are supposed to resemble money (in other places they eat lentils for the same reason) and that's why the traditions extend to include things like lettuce and cabbage (for the green) or a whole fish (head-to-tail, so that your year is blessed from beginning to end--but I think this tradition is Chinese). And my mother's admonition, that I've never heard anywhere else: on New Year's Day, only eat pork or beef, and never poultry. The reason is that pigs and cows both root forward, but chickens scratch backwards, and thus you don't want to hobble yourself with a backward-looking life. Black-eyed peas just don't feel like money food to me, and I don't eat meat very often; I almost think it would be preferable to eat bread that you've made by hand (staff of life stuff) or even chocolate cake (so that life is rich and sweet). The one tradition I've never wanted much part of is the drink-until-you're-ill tradition. The year I bartended on New Year's Eve--this would have been in 1986, I think--was enough to convince me I didn't want any part of those behaviors, yikes: I see now why they call it amateur night. I suppose there's nothing lucky at all about starting the year off with alcohol poisoning. I think this year, I'm just going to eat what I feel like cooking or what the kids feel like having for dinner, and we'll see what happens.
I did spend part of the afternoon making English muffins, and although the process is a little fussy and a little time-consuming still, this feels like wealth, to have those couple of dozen golden circles spread out on the cooling rack and to think about my children eating them sometimes for breakfast, in that quiet twenty minutes they spend at the table before the school day starts. Maybe by the time the breads are gone, spring will be in the neighborhood. Maybe I was inspired to bake them because they make me think of the sun, and at this time of the year, I am ready to be done with winter and wish that the sun would make a fast return. The days have been noticeably longer for the past couple of weeks--sunset started coming later long before the actual solstice--but it's still cold out there, the furnace still has to run in the evening, there was snow overnight last night and likely, there will be snow again tomorrow.
And, although I always swore I would not be one of those older people, the truth is I'm really done living in the frozen north, really done with winter seasons that consume a good five months of the year. I don't know if it's the unmanageable costs of the heating bills, or the incredible pain-in-the-ass that is the constant shoveling, or the fact that I don't like sweaters, only sweatshirts (but you can't wear a sweatshirt to teach in) or the way that I hate slip-sliding around on the roads out there...well, it's all of the above, no doubt, plus a few things more.
The positive aspect to winter is reading about it. For instance, Rima Staines in her lovely blog has been illustrating a different winter creature from the Northern myths for the past several days, and there is something to be said for being forced, by the weather, to sit indoors and invent things. Years ago I had in mind to write an anthology all by myself--and yes, I know that traditionally, that's not what an anthology is--of winter stories for children. At the time my own kids were very small and we read constantly, and so everything used to look to me like it was a pretty good idea for a children's book. I may still write it, one day. In my children's Winter Book, the first story began at the end of autumn--canning, if I recall it right, a story about working in the kitchen all night to get the harvest stored as the year's first hard frost advanced on the other side of the steamy windows. In those days, I was also working on a farm, and so my perceptions of things tended to come in shades of agricultural concerns.
Just start, and see what happens. A year ago I wasn't looking forward to much of anything, and if there were any one thing I ought to be writing about now, it would be about what a mass of changes this year brought with it. For starters, I wrote a lot: the records here show that I began this blog in February (see? Maybe that is the true New Year) and this will be the 34th essay I've put here--there is still one under construction, so it would have been 35; but it's a piece that's going to be difficult to write, and I want to get it just right, so it will appear when it appears. I also kept smaller blogs on two myspace sites, writing for a period of about 4 months as a plant (essay about that experience to come) and since the plant went to sleep, writing a short bit most days on the other account. Between the two of them, I posted 151 times; not a bad year's work, especially from a woman who spent fully six years in the grips of a writer's block. That time should warrant an essay of its own, though partly it was already written in the form of the story of Inanna.
So, I wrote a lot, I met Buck, and this was the year I began to breathe again after the long stretch of years in which my husband's cancer was the unimpeachable Lord of Dark Rule over both our lives. This will be the third New Year's I will have passed since David died and by now, the grief has gone from acute to almost soothing and better yet, now that I'm on the cusp of 50 years old, I think I'm finally beginning to grow up. Loren Eisley wrote about that in one of his essays, and said he was 50 the day he turned into an adult; when I first read that passage, nearly half my lifetime ago now, I couldn't imagine what he meant. Now I know exactly.
In the past couple of weeks a lot of ideas have been coming to me, some of them almost wholly-formed when they get here, some of them a little shyer than that, requiring more of me to draw them out. It reminds me of lovemaking, in an odd way: some days you initiate things, other times you get gotten. And this: I've gotten to where I anticipate my time at my writing desk the same way I anticipate seeing my lover, and I like that I have this relationship with my creativity now, like that it's a joy, and never a burden, to come here and write. I was thinking the other night about the fact that it took me this long to turn into this kind of a writer. Truth is, years ago, I just didn't have that much to say. And now that I have begun to find my voice, the better part of it is that the things I used to think were important--recognition, money, landing fat book contracts--all strike me as terribly beside the point now. I cannot tell you how freeing that is. In a very real sense this has been a year with bigger changes for me than any other year I can remember. This week, in fact, I think the first piece of housekeeping I need to do is to update the profile on this page--very little of that seems to be who I am anymore!
So, here's to good things continuing along into January--words that keep coming, relationships that stay blossoming, time to walk every day and the strength to do so. Maybe I'll go make that chocolate cake while I'm at it, too.
So I've finally sat down here to see what there is to say, and whether or not anything major comes of it still, I feel better thinking I'm ending the calendar year on a writing note. And of course tomorrow I must write as well--superstitiously, then, since I like to do on the first day of the year what I hope to do on every day for the rest of the year. Even though New Year's Day is an arbitrary thing, a date that doesn't make sense on any internal feeling or external event that I might base it on. If the decision was left to me, which day would I pick for a New Year's Day? I'm not sure, but mine would probably fall sometime in the autumn, around the equinox, perhaps, or the first of November. I base that decision on--nothing, really. Maybe on the onset of the school year, which still, this many years later, feels like the real beginning of things to me, or maybe it's rooted in Celtica, or in the moody distribution of the year into light and dark, into summer and winter, with winter always having the slight edge of ascendancy, at least in our imaginations. If I was going to think about an agricultural year, I suppose I'd begin mine in early spring. February might not be too early for that; some farmers start their crops that early, and I even see vestiges of that in the feast cycles of the church year.
But, here I am in 21st-century America (at least in this lifetime) and January 1st it is, and I am left feeling rather at loose ends about the whole thing. Part of this comes no doubt from stuffing myself with folklore the way I was stuffing myself with Christmas cookies a week ago. Because I want to call down as much good fortune on this household as I can, I get frantic about not making any missteps now--what is the right thing to eat, to wear, to bring into the household, to wish, to say, to do to greet this year and make it look favorably on me? For years we ate black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, although we never ate them any other time; and at this very hour my Southern boyfriend is in fact stewing up a big pot of them for his lunch tomorrow. The trouble is, that doesn't feel quite right to me--I get how you eat things that are supposed to resemble money (in other places they eat lentils for the same reason) and that's why the traditions extend to include things like lettuce and cabbage (for the green) or a whole fish (head-to-tail, so that your year is blessed from beginning to end--but I think this tradition is Chinese). And my mother's admonition, that I've never heard anywhere else: on New Year's Day, only eat pork or beef, and never poultry. The reason is that pigs and cows both root forward, but chickens scratch backwards, and thus you don't want to hobble yourself with a backward-looking life. Black-eyed peas just don't feel like money food to me, and I don't eat meat very often; I almost think it would be preferable to eat bread that you've made by hand (staff of life stuff) or even chocolate cake (so that life is rich and sweet). The one tradition I've never wanted much part of is the drink-until-you're-ill tradition. The year I bartended on New Year's Eve--this would have been in 1986, I think--was enough to convince me I didn't want any part of those behaviors, yikes: I see now why they call it amateur night. I suppose there's nothing lucky at all about starting the year off with alcohol poisoning. I think this year, I'm just going to eat what I feel like cooking or what the kids feel like having for dinner, and we'll see what happens.
I did spend part of the afternoon making English muffins, and although the process is a little fussy and a little time-consuming still, this feels like wealth, to have those couple of dozen golden circles spread out on the cooling rack and to think about my children eating them sometimes for breakfast, in that quiet twenty minutes they spend at the table before the school day starts. Maybe by the time the breads are gone, spring will be in the neighborhood. Maybe I was inspired to bake them because they make me think of the sun, and at this time of the year, I am ready to be done with winter and wish that the sun would make a fast return. The days have been noticeably longer for the past couple of weeks--sunset started coming later long before the actual solstice--but it's still cold out there, the furnace still has to run in the evening, there was snow overnight last night and likely, there will be snow again tomorrow.
And, although I always swore I would not be one of those older people, the truth is I'm really done living in the frozen north, really done with winter seasons that consume a good five months of the year. I don't know if it's the unmanageable costs of the heating bills, or the incredible pain-in-the-ass that is the constant shoveling, or the fact that I don't like sweaters, only sweatshirts (but you can't wear a sweatshirt to teach in) or the way that I hate slip-sliding around on the roads out there...well, it's all of the above, no doubt, plus a few things more.
The positive aspect to winter is reading about it. For instance, Rima Staines in her lovely blog has been illustrating a different winter creature from the Northern myths for the past several days, and there is something to be said for being forced, by the weather, to sit indoors and invent things. Years ago I had in mind to write an anthology all by myself--and yes, I know that traditionally, that's not what an anthology is--of winter stories for children. At the time my own kids were very small and we read constantly, and so everything used to look to me like it was a pretty good idea for a children's book. I may still write it, one day. In my children's Winter Book, the first story began at the end of autumn--canning, if I recall it right, a story about working in the kitchen all night to get the harvest stored as the year's first hard frost advanced on the other side of the steamy windows. In those days, I was also working on a farm, and so my perceptions of things tended to come in shades of agricultural concerns.
Just start, and see what happens. A year ago I wasn't looking forward to much of anything, and if there were any one thing I ought to be writing about now, it would be about what a mass of changes this year brought with it. For starters, I wrote a lot: the records here show that I began this blog in February (see? Maybe that is the true New Year) and this will be the 34th essay I've put here--there is still one under construction, so it would have been 35; but it's a piece that's going to be difficult to write, and I want to get it just right, so it will appear when it appears. I also kept smaller blogs on two myspace sites, writing for a period of about 4 months as a plant (essay about that experience to come) and since the plant went to sleep, writing a short bit most days on the other account. Between the two of them, I posted 151 times; not a bad year's work, especially from a woman who spent fully six years in the grips of a writer's block. That time should warrant an essay of its own, though partly it was already written in the form of the story of Inanna.
So, I wrote a lot, I met Buck, and this was the year I began to breathe again after the long stretch of years in which my husband's cancer was the unimpeachable Lord of Dark Rule over both our lives. This will be the third New Year's I will have passed since David died and by now, the grief has gone from acute to almost soothing and better yet, now that I'm on the cusp of 50 years old, I think I'm finally beginning to grow up. Loren Eisley wrote about that in one of his essays, and said he was 50 the day he turned into an adult; when I first read that passage, nearly half my lifetime ago now, I couldn't imagine what he meant. Now I know exactly.
In the past couple of weeks a lot of ideas have been coming to me, some of them almost wholly-formed when they get here, some of them a little shyer than that, requiring more of me to draw them out. It reminds me of lovemaking, in an odd way: some days you initiate things, other times you get gotten. And this: I've gotten to where I anticipate my time at my writing desk the same way I anticipate seeing my lover, and I like that I have this relationship with my creativity now, like that it's a joy, and never a burden, to come here and write. I was thinking the other night about the fact that it took me this long to turn into this kind of a writer. Truth is, years ago, I just didn't have that much to say. And now that I have begun to find my voice, the better part of it is that the things I used to think were important--recognition, money, landing fat book contracts--all strike me as terribly beside the point now. I cannot tell you how freeing that is. In a very real sense this has been a year with bigger changes for me than any other year I can remember. This week, in fact, I think the first piece of housekeeping I need to do is to update the profile on this page--very little of that seems to be who I am anymore!
So, here's to good things continuing along into January--words that keep coming, relationships that stay blossoming, time to walk every day and the strength to do so. Maybe I'll go make that chocolate cake while I'm at it, too.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The House Ghost, Revisited
Wyatt came home from school a few days ago and wanted to know where he could go to find out information about the history of our house. I told him my best guess, but of course I wanted to know why he wanted to know. Well, he said, I think we have a ghost. He went on to describe the things he sees--I already knew how, some nights, he thinks he sees lights hovering in his room (I probably shouldn't belittle his experience by saying he thinks he sees, but I do remember what darkness in childhood is like, how it's often your own mind that's haunting you, that it's always your own mind filling in the blanks when your eyes see something they misinterpret or don't completely understand.)
Then he said this: the other day when I came out of the computer room, I looked at the picture that's hanging on the wall there, and reflected in the glass, I saw a little girl standing. When I looked over, she wasn't there. Now, that got my attention, and my first thought was, I knew it was a little girl I heard running down the stairs...and my second thought was, this is getting a little creepy. What I said out loud was, that's your mind, honey, putting together pieces and adding information that isn't really there. It's very human, it's what everyone does. I stopped short of telling him outright that he's seeing things because again, I remember what it feels like to be a child and nobody believes you...
Here is what I know about our house: it was built in 1875 by a wealthy family named Faulkner. It was in that family for many years, and has in fact changed hands relatively few times--I seem to remember someone telling me I was just the fifth owner in its nearly 135-year history. But my mind may have made that up, may have filled in information I forgot to find out on my own. I know that the land around me, now filled up with mostly modest houses, was once all farmland. I do know that sometimes I wake up at night and hear my children murmuring in their sleep, and when that happens I always feel a bit uneasy, and it's difficult for me to get back to sleep afterwards.
And, I also know that this doubt of mine over whether we are, in fact, possessed of a ghost in this household--never mind the doubts I still harbor over whether they exist at all!--is turning into my own preoccupation with what it is I'm actually seeing go on around here. This is what happened the past few days: our stockings are all hung with care just now, across the front of a long bookshelf in my living room, as it happens, and the other night, I noticed that Maeve's had been turned around on its hook, so that the backside faced out into the room, and its toe marched counter to the other four stockings that hang there (we still put Dave's up, and of course the dog has one, as well). Both kids were in the living room with me: who turned that around, I asked them, but of course, no one had. A day or two later as I sat at the dining room table, I noticed that the child's rocking chair that sits in the doorway between that room and the next was also turned around, facing into the dining room instead of away from it. Again, no one seems to know how it came to be that way, and although I imagine there are probably any number of so-called logical explanations for it, the one I keep coming back to is, we've got a ghost, and it's feeling mischievous.
Or, perhaps it's my own forgetfulness and my perpetual distractedness that together are the real ghost here, and I'm moving things around without being aware and forgetting where I set things down, which is why stuff disappears for awhile and then reappears in odd places later on. Perhaps Wyatt, sensitive and imaginative, takes too much to heart the paranormal shows he watches on The Discovery Channel, and perhaps the children whisper and sigh in their sleep because that's what teenagers do, what with all those hormones coursing around and keeping things on edge. Perhaps my own hormones are beginning to shift, and that accounts for my jittery sleep, my own restlessness in the face of what is more-or-less a good life.
Or, maybe if there is a house ghost, we can appeal to it to become a helpful member of the household. For instance, I'd like some help in finding the television remote, which has been missing now for nearly a week. For that matter, I need to remember where I put that one box of Christmas presents, which I think got delivered here sometime in the past week--although I can't decide if that's an invented memory. But even if it is, it's one so strong it had me searching every cupboard and cranny and hidey-spot in my house last night. To no avail. My son tells me that ghosts sometimes become active if they're upset over changes to their households. It's a fair deal, I think, and so if there is a house ghost here, I promise to leave your place the same as I found it, if only you'll promise to leave my things alone, as well.
Then he said this: the other day when I came out of the computer room, I looked at the picture that's hanging on the wall there, and reflected in the glass, I saw a little girl standing. When I looked over, she wasn't there. Now, that got my attention, and my first thought was, I knew it was a little girl I heard running down the stairs...and my second thought was, this is getting a little creepy. What I said out loud was, that's your mind, honey, putting together pieces and adding information that isn't really there. It's very human, it's what everyone does. I stopped short of telling him outright that he's seeing things because again, I remember what it feels like to be a child and nobody believes you...
Here is what I know about our house: it was built in 1875 by a wealthy family named Faulkner. It was in that family for many years, and has in fact changed hands relatively few times--I seem to remember someone telling me I was just the fifth owner in its nearly 135-year history. But my mind may have made that up, may have filled in information I forgot to find out on my own. I know that the land around me, now filled up with mostly modest houses, was once all farmland. I do know that sometimes I wake up at night and hear my children murmuring in their sleep, and when that happens I always feel a bit uneasy, and it's difficult for me to get back to sleep afterwards.
And, I also know that this doubt of mine over whether we are, in fact, possessed of a ghost in this household--never mind the doubts I still harbor over whether they exist at all!--is turning into my own preoccupation with what it is I'm actually seeing go on around here. This is what happened the past few days: our stockings are all hung with care just now, across the front of a long bookshelf in my living room, as it happens, and the other night, I noticed that Maeve's had been turned around on its hook, so that the backside faced out into the room, and its toe marched counter to the other four stockings that hang there (we still put Dave's up, and of course the dog has one, as well). Both kids were in the living room with me: who turned that around, I asked them, but of course, no one had. A day or two later as I sat at the dining room table, I noticed that the child's rocking chair that sits in the doorway between that room and the next was also turned around, facing into the dining room instead of away from it. Again, no one seems to know how it came to be that way, and although I imagine there are probably any number of so-called logical explanations for it, the one I keep coming back to is, we've got a ghost, and it's feeling mischievous.
Or, perhaps it's my own forgetfulness and my perpetual distractedness that together are the real ghost here, and I'm moving things around without being aware and forgetting where I set things down, which is why stuff disappears for awhile and then reappears in odd places later on. Perhaps Wyatt, sensitive and imaginative, takes too much to heart the paranormal shows he watches on The Discovery Channel, and perhaps the children whisper and sigh in their sleep because that's what teenagers do, what with all those hormones coursing around and keeping things on edge. Perhaps my own hormones are beginning to shift, and that accounts for my jittery sleep, my own restlessness in the face of what is more-or-less a good life.
Or, maybe if there is a house ghost, we can appeal to it to become a helpful member of the household. For instance, I'd like some help in finding the television remote, which has been missing now for nearly a week. For that matter, I need to remember where I put that one box of Christmas presents, which I think got delivered here sometime in the past week--although I can't decide if that's an invented memory. But even if it is, it's one so strong it had me searching every cupboard and cranny and hidey-spot in my house last night. To no avail. My son tells me that ghosts sometimes become active if they're upset over changes to their households. It's a fair deal, I think, and so if there is a house ghost here, I promise to leave your place the same as I found it, if only you'll promise to leave my things alone, as well.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
My Solstice Fortune
I admit to still being in love with what I call the pagantides, those eight points of the wheel that come around in their regular pattern of long-balanced-short-balanced light and dark. I like midwinter, in spite of the things that drive me crazy about the season, the high heat bills, the back-breaking labor of clearing snow, the stupid-as-a-sack-of-hammers snowmobilers who, despite my requests that they not cross my property, continue to regard my land as their right-of-way. Up goes the fence!
But overnight (and uncharacteristically) last night, most of my chronic irritation melted away. I woke today with a delicious--and decidedly seasonal--craving for solitude. All morning the sky has been cloudy and low, although now a wind has picked up and the green pines and the gray branches of the maples are blowing around in it. The movement reminds me: things are alive. I woke wishing that my house were situated in the midst of a vast tract of acreage, field upon field and wood upon wood, and that I could be free to walk out through it alone with my thoughts and in danger of meeting no one. I like the energy of this, the shortest day of the year, and think that it naturally lends itself to going within, to deep thought and focused reflection. When I'm lucky enough to uncover the treasure that's patiently waiting there, I realize that it's the real thing I want for Christmas, and every other day of the year as well: the only thing on my wish list is that I be given an idea I can develop, and the time to develop it. And that I then be given the next one. Usually those discoveries come to me through writing--contrary to what a lot of people think, most writers don't know what they're going to say when they first sit down to say it. Or at least I don't. And of course, sometimes that treasure comes along through writing's corollary, walking (which in my experience is a kind of letterless adaptation of writing). That's what I try to tell my students: I love to write because when I do, when things are really in flow and your self is truly engaged with your self, it feels exactly like flying.
Today of course the reality is somewhat removed from solitude's ideal: my house is just one of a number of houses clustered around this block in the village, my son was awake early and so came downstairs practically on my heels, even now, as I write upstairs at my computer, the dog has arranged himself beside my chair making me aware of the other heart beat in this room besides my own. And at that moment, as if my writing a sentence about him had been the same thing as calling his name, the dog got up and nudged my arm and forced my attention away from these words for a moment and we both enjoyed a good long scratch behind his ears.
But, the urge to make a story out of the day has not passed, and despite the inevitability of the million other things I'll have to do today, there's still that long silver road spinning out in front of me to think about, and that road is the impulse to write, to make an image of or otherwise translate some experience that captures my attention at just that moment, or this one. As long as I can see that road the potential to walk down in exists, and everything else, the distractions or difficulties that rise up ahead of my getting there, are pretty much secondary.
Yesterday I spent the day with a kindergarten class, and while they colored away in a book full of illustrated Christmas carols, I sang the words to them and sometimes they sang along, as they could, and sometimes they stood up and did interpretive dance to the words. I never enjoy singing more than I do when it's for an audience who doesn't even notice that I don't sing well. I even amused them by making up my own words to some of the songs: "We wish you a merry CHRIST-mas/Get down off that chair!" (Prior to their class, I'd been reading a chapter in Stephen Fry's marvelous The Ode Less Travelled and reading about meter and rhyme always makes me start thinking in meter and rhyme.) This in turn made me remember, as I always do this time of the year, that there's a large body of work out there done rewriting the old Christmas songs to turn them back toward their pagan roots. I don't think there's anything wrong with this--at my core I'm a spiritual anarchist and anyway, I think that song-making is a fine occupation for this time of the year. I've already decided that this year, my solstice present to myself is going to be picking one or two favorite tunes (here I'm thinking Greensleeves and Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child) and making them my own, creating the lyrics that will fit the music and that will also reflect my own experience of this deep dark time of the year. That will be one part of the walk along that silver writing road today, just as writing in this blog space is also a part of that walk.
This morning I threw the I Ching and got the hexagram that translates, roughly, into "staying still," which is perfect advice, I think, for the day. Kind of a gifting message, I think: just sit still and see what your stillness attracts. let creativity come a-courtin' you. It's a happy state of anticipation. What do people do, I sometimes wonder, what do they think about, who do not seek out this state of inspiration? In my personal pantheon, at least, I arrange on the uppermost tier those divinites who grant that inspiration, placing them ahead of all the other spirits of weather, fortune, luck, and light.
But overnight (and uncharacteristically) last night, most of my chronic irritation melted away. I woke today with a delicious--and decidedly seasonal--craving for solitude. All morning the sky has been cloudy and low, although now a wind has picked up and the green pines and the gray branches of the maples are blowing around in it. The movement reminds me: things are alive. I woke wishing that my house were situated in the midst of a vast tract of acreage, field upon field and wood upon wood, and that I could be free to walk out through it alone with my thoughts and in danger of meeting no one. I like the energy of this, the shortest day of the year, and think that it naturally lends itself to going within, to deep thought and focused reflection. When I'm lucky enough to uncover the treasure that's patiently waiting there, I realize that it's the real thing I want for Christmas, and every other day of the year as well: the only thing on my wish list is that I be given an idea I can develop, and the time to develop it. And that I then be given the next one. Usually those discoveries come to me through writing--contrary to what a lot of people think, most writers don't know what they're going to say when they first sit down to say it. Or at least I don't. And of course, sometimes that treasure comes along through writing's corollary, walking (which in my experience is a kind of letterless adaptation of writing). That's what I try to tell my students: I love to write because when I do, when things are really in flow and your self is truly engaged with your self, it feels exactly like flying.
Today of course the reality is somewhat removed from solitude's ideal: my house is just one of a number of houses clustered around this block in the village, my son was awake early and so came downstairs practically on my heels, even now, as I write upstairs at my computer, the dog has arranged himself beside my chair making me aware of the other heart beat in this room besides my own. And at that moment, as if my writing a sentence about him had been the same thing as calling his name, the dog got up and nudged my arm and forced my attention away from these words for a moment and we both enjoyed a good long scratch behind his ears.
But, the urge to make a story out of the day has not passed, and despite the inevitability of the million other things I'll have to do today, there's still that long silver road spinning out in front of me to think about, and that road is the impulse to write, to make an image of or otherwise translate some experience that captures my attention at just that moment, or this one. As long as I can see that road the potential to walk down in exists, and everything else, the distractions or difficulties that rise up ahead of my getting there, are pretty much secondary.
Yesterday I spent the day with a kindergarten class, and while they colored away in a book full of illustrated Christmas carols, I sang the words to them and sometimes they sang along, as they could, and sometimes they stood up and did interpretive dance to the words. I never enjoy singing more than I do when it's for an audience who doesn't even notice that I don't sing well. I even amused them by making up my own words to some of the songs: "We wish you a merry CHRIST-mas/Get down off that chair!" (Prior to their class, I'd been reading a chapter in Stephen Fry's marvelous The Ode Less Travelled and reading about meter and rhyme always makes me start thinking in meter and rhyme.) This in turn made me remember, as I always do this time of the year, that there's a large body of work out there done rewriting the old Christmas songs to turn them back toward their pagan roots. I don't think there's anything wrong with this--at my core I'm a spiritual anarchist and anyway, I think that song-making is a fine occupation for this time of the year. I've already decided that this year, my solstice present to myself is going to be picking one or two favorite tunes (here I'm thinking Greensleeves and Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child) and making them my own, creating the lyrics that will fit the music and that will also reflect my own experience of this deep dark time of the year. That will be one part of the walk along that silver writing road today, just as writing in this blog space is also a part of that walk.
This morning I threw the I Ching and got the hexagram that translates, roughly, into "staying still," which is perfect advice, I think, for the day. Kind of a gifting message, I think: just sit still and see what your stillness attracts. let creativity come a-courtin' you. It's a happy state of anticipation. What do people do, I sometimes wonder, what do they think about, who do not seek out this state of inspiration? In my personal pantheon, at least, I arrange on the uppermost tier those divinites who grant that inspiration, placing them ahead of all the other spirits of weather, fortune, luck, and light.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
His & Hers
I've had a few recurring dreams in my lifetime, and I've been fond of them all: I have written elsewhere how all of these involve houses, and how house dreams are really about your own inner world, and so the nicest thing is to fall asleep and find myself there. Whenever I reemerge into one of those rooms, I always check to see what's new since I was there last, what is the same, what I had failed to notice before.
A new one of these, and a new type, has appeared on night's landscape, however, and although I've only had it twice, still, that makes it recurring, and I am uneasy now lest it come back again. This one is not about a house. The problem, in the dream, is simple: I need to call Buck, and someone hands me a phone. I start to punch in the numbers and find that on the phone I have been given, there is no number "3." (In the morning, when I will phone him for his usual wake-up call and tell him about this, Buck's real phone number will contain the numeral three three different times. You begin to understand the difficulty in the dreamscape.)
I fret all day: is it an unlucky omen? The dream seems poisonous. Buck tells me that the next time I'm near a pay phone, I should pry the little metal cap off the numeral 3 and put it in my pocket. That way, he says, you'll always have a spare. The night he tells me this, Buck has this dream: he has been given a box full of strips of cloth; they are an inch or so wide and about a foot long. They are all sorts of colors, but one color--by morning he can no longer remember which--is missing, and in the dream he looks and looks through the strips for the color that is not there...
...which he does not find, and that sets me into a tizzy: these dreams are bad omens, I am sure of it. Not at all, he replies, it just means that something's missing, and what's missing is you being with me and me being with you. It seems so obvious when he says it. Why is it, I wonder next, that I live in the grasp of an imagination that itself seems to have no such grasp of the obvious?
A new one of these, and a new type, has appeared on night's landscape, however, and although I've only had it twice, still, that makes it recurring, and I am uneasy now lest it come back again. This one is not about a house. The problem, in the dream, is simple: I need to call Buck, and someone hands me a phone. I start to punch in the numbers and find that on the phone I have been given, there is no number "3." (In the morning, when I will phone him for his usual wake-up call and tell him about this, Buck's real phone number will contain the numeral three three different times. You begin to understand the difficulty in the dreamscape.)
I fret all day: is it an unlucky omen? The dream seems poisonous. Buck tells me that the next time I'm near a pay phone, I should pry the little metal cap off the numeral 3 and put it in my pocket. That way, he says, you'll always have a spare. The night he tells me this, Buck has this dream: he has been given a box full of strips of cloth; they are an inch or so wide and about a foot long. They are all sorts of colors, but one color--by morning he can no longer remember which--is missing, and in the dream he looks and looks through the strips for the color that is not there...
...which he does not find, and that sets me into a tizzy: these dreams are bad omens, I am sure of it. Not at all, he replies, it just means that something's missing, and what's missing is you being with me and me being with you. It seems so obvious when he says it. Why is it, I wonder next, that I live in the grasp of an imagination that itself seems to have no such grasp of the obvious?
Friday, November 16, 2007
The House Ghost
I noticed a little bit after the fact that when you buy a house, there are no disclosure requirements about ghosts; I didn't think to ask about it until it was too late, all the papers signed and my big check written and cashed. I think we had been living here about two weeks when I first heard it: it was in the middle of the evening; the kids had just gone to bed and I was sitting alone in the downstairs living room, which is a newer addition to my house (which is itself what you'd call an older home, built ca. 1875, and so of course you wouldn't be surprised to discover a ghost living here, would you? I've wondered that sometimes as I've been out walking around where the McMansions are cropping up and I think to myself, how does any soul ever manage to dwell in such an unsoulful place? Luckily for us we live in a home that's one of a number of other older homes on the block, else I think I'd likely be overrun by spirits looking for an appropriate place to hang.)
I have already decided that when I'm able to (by which I mean, at the point where my kids are grown and educated and my financial involvement with their lives is largely over [which, at the rate things are going, is probably going to be tomorrow: my niece was here with her new baby last week, and she said, well, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be walking all over the place. No, I told her, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be applying to college..] ) but when I'm able to, I'm going to return to college one last time and get that Ph.D. and I'm going to study folklore and my concentration is going to be ghosts. And then maybe I'll have finally figured out what I'm most curious about, when I think about ghosts: what exactly is it they want?
Mine seems to want to run down the stairs. The first time I heard it, as I said, both kids had just gone to bed and I assumed the thudding down the front staircase that came right after was one of them--I thought my daughter--heading back down to say something they'd just remembered, you know how kids are when it's bedtime but there's that one last thing on their minds. I waited, and I admit I waited a little annoyed, since I didn't want to deal with one single more interruption (you know how mothers are when it's the end of the day and the only thing that's on their minds is some silence and solitude). So I waited, and no one appeared--thankfully, I now think to myself--and I forgot about it until the next night, and the next night after that, when the same footsteps ran down the same length of staircase and by that time I was pretty sure I wasn't dealing with any figment of my imagination, and the thought of it and the sound of it kept me in a state of low-grade uneasiness for awhile, enhanced by how we were all three already uneasy much of the time, living as we were in a new house, in an unfamiliar town, and all the rest of it.
It doesn't confine itself to the late evening hours, this ghost of mine. One night my daughter heard it too, as we sat in the living room together and that familiar thump thump thump came on the stairs and she looked up and said oh, Wyatt must be coming down for something. I waited, watching her out of the corner of my eye, because I knew that Wyatt wasn't going to appear and I wanted to see her face as she began to figure it out. Either she never did, and forgot about it, or else she's keeping it to herself, because she didn't mention it again, and after a few minutes our conversation picked back up on another thread altogether and so far, house ghost is not a story we have told each other.
I have told a few other people about it, though, but just a few. One night I mentioned it, on the phone, to my boyfriend; he came to visit me some time after that and on a Saturday night, I fell asleep on the couch while the rest of them watched television. He woke me when it was time to go to bed, and sounded a little shaky when he told me, I heard your ghost. Same thing as me: the kids had gone to bed, a few moments later he heard someone thudding back down the steps, and waited to see Wyatt enter the room. When Wyatt did not, he realized what it was he'd heard--I don't think it scared him, necessarily, but I don't think he'd quite expected it, either.
I'd grown used to thinking my ghost was a little girl, my boyfriend thought it was a boy, judging by the way it clomps on the carpeted stairs. I'm not sure, but now I'm thinking we were both wrong, and this is why: last week the steam boiler that runs the radiators in the old part of the house quit working. The first thing I tried--the only thing I could try--was replacing the batteries in the thermostat that operates it. That wasn't the problem, and of course, when I took the batteries out everything reset, so I had to run through the program redoing the time, the date, that sort of thing. I could not get the temperature gauge to reset properly, though, and so I left that for the repairman I called to deal with. When he came in the next day he asked me, why did you set this to military time?
Well, I had not, but I think I know who might have. When I bought this house I bought it from a woman who was selling because she'd become widowed. Her husband had died here about a year earlier; all I knew about him was that he had died from kidney cancer, and that he had been career military, retired from the Air Force. I told my boyfriend when he called that night, I think I know who the ghost is, I think it's probably the Colonel. Who else would reset the only clock I have that can be set that way, to military time? And since I said that out loud, the footsteps at night have fallen silent, the evening hours are quiet again, and now I think, maybe that's the only thing a ghost ever wants, is for someone to know its real name.
I have already decided that when I'm able to (by which I mean, at the point where my kids are grown and educated and my financial involvement with their lives is largely over [which, at the rate things are going, is probably going to be tomorrow: my niece was here with her new baby last week, and she said, well, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be walking all over the place. No, I told her, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be applying to college..] ) but when I'm able to, I'm going to return to college one last time and get that Ph.D. and I'm going to study folklore and my concentration is going to be ghosts. And then maybe I'll have finally figured out what I'm most curious about, when I think about ghosts: what exactly is it they want?
Mine seems to want to run down the stairs. The first time I heard it, as I said, both kids had just gone to bed and I assumed the thudding down the front staircase that came right after was one of them--I thought my daughter--heading back down to say something they'd just remembered, you know how kids are when it's bedtime but there's that one last thing on their minds. I waited, and I admit I waited a little annoyed, since I didn't want to deal with one single more interruption (you know how mothers are when it's the end of the day and the only thing that's on their minds is some silence and solitude). So I waited, and no one appeared--thankfully, I now think to myself--and I forgot about it until the next night, and the next night after that, when the same footsteps ran down the same length of staircase and by that time I was pretty sure I wasn't dealing with any figment of my imagination, and the thought of it and the sound of it kept me in a state of low-grade uneasiness for awhile, enhanced by how we were all three already uneasy much of the time, living as we were in a new house, in an unfamiliar town, and all the rest of it.
It doesn't confine itself to the late evening hours, this ghost of mine. One night my daughter heard it too, as we sat in the living room together and that familiar thump thump thump came on the stairs and she looked up and said oh, Wyatt must be coming down for something. I waited, watching her out of the corner of my eye, because I knew that Wyatt wasn't going to appear and I wanted to see her face as she began to figure it out. Either she never did, and forgot about it, or else she's keeping it to herself, because she didn't mention it again, and after a few minutes our conversation picked back up on another thread altogether and so far, house ghost is not a story we have told each other.
I have told a few other people about it, though, but just a few. One night I mentioned it, on the phone, to my boyfriend; he came to visit me some time after that and on a Saturday night, I fell asleep on the couch while the rest of them watched television. He woke me when it was time to go to bed, and sounded a little shaky when he told me, I heard your ghost. Same thing as me: the kids had gone to bed, a few moments later he heard someone thudding back down the steps, and waited to see Wyatt enter the room. When Wyatt did not, he realized what it was he'd heard--I don't think it scared him, necessarily, but I don't think he'd quite expected it, either.
I'd grown used to thinking my ghost was a little girl, my boyfriend thought it was a boy, judging by the way it clomps on the carpeted stairs. I'm not sure, but now I'm thinking we were both wrong, and this is why: last week the steam boiler that runs the radiators in the old part of the house quit working. The first thing I tried--the only thing I could try--was replacing the batteries in the thermostat that operates it. That wasn't the problem, and of course, when I took the batteries out everything reset, so I had to run through the program redoing the time, the date, that sort of thing. I could not get the temperature gauge to reset properly, though, and so I left that for the repairman I called to deal with. When he came in the next day he asked me, why did you set this to military time?
Well, I had not, but I think I know who might have. When I bought this house I bought it from a woman who was selling because she'd become widowed. Her husband had died here about a year earlier; all I knew about him was that he had died from kidney cancer, and that he had been career military, retired from the Air Force. I told my boyfriend when he called that night, I think I know who the ghost is, I think it's probably the Colonel. Who else would reset the only clock I have that can be set that way, to military time? And since I said that out loud, the footsteps at night have fallen silent, the evening hours are quiet again, and now I think, maybe that's the only thing a ghost ever wants, is for someone to know its real name.
Monday, November 5, 2007
The Cave Birthday
I was born in early November; and it may be that the atmosphere at this time of the year shaped my personality or it may be that my personality predisposes me toward Novembrishness, but however it happened, we're a perfect fit, this landscape and I, the lowering skies, the 40% chance of mournfulness. When November holds its mirror up to me, I reflect its own face back. And it suits me. This year, for instance, I am living several hundred miles away from my lover and spend much of my time lonely, but it's oddly welcome, a little ache I rarely mind, to feel that melancholy drifting in, right at home in the drift of the season's last leaves and in the abbreviated daylight as it sifts slowly down.
Still, it has been lonely for both of us, and so when I write, for instance, that we got together for the weekend the phrase is impotent even in my own mind, failing, as it does, to convey how that feels, the heightened anticipation, the brief conjunction of our orbiting paths, then separating again, which I invariably start to fret about long before I ought to. But, we manage it, and I wonder sometimes if eventually, I might think back on this time and decide it wasn't so bad, after all, think it's even possible I might grow lonely for my own loneliness. I miss everything, once it's over. I have known for a long time that nostalgia is the real landlord in my life, it's where all my rent goes, and my tithes, and everything else right along with it. My nostalgia is in season now, these Novembers, and I notice myself thinking that things had better hurry up and turn painful somewhere, else what will there be to think about when I want to sit and stare out the window? Back in the spring when I was first falling in love I realized it had been years since I had understood the season at all, if I ever had. I took a picture one morning, that late April, of the ornamental cherry tree outside my kitchen window. Its branches were wild with flowers that day, flagrantly so, obscenely so, and when I sent this new man the picture I wrote: I have the most vivid flowers in my neighborhood because this year, I'm the happiest person in my neighborhood. The tree has gone bare again by now, of course, and a few days ago some of the outer limbs snapped off in a wind storm. I watch it scratching at the sky these afternoons as the sun goes down, and we nod at each other and I think, I know just how you feel.
But this year, on the weekend before my birthday, we met in central Virginia, my lover and I, landing in a sort-of midway point between upstate New York and North Carolina. Since we both like being outdoors, and since the area is famous for its caves, we drove on the day before my birthday to a well-publicized one in the town of Grottoes, VA. I thought I'd certainly live in a town called Grottoes, although when we were driving through, we noticed that mostly it was agricultural, that mostly the houses there were for sale. There's an Alcoa plant there in the town, and we wondered whether it might be closing down, thus precipitating the rush to move on out of there. It's always a little sad when you see that, lots of people moving away, and you imagine them sorry to go even though the reality may be much different, perhaps everyone has found a better job somewhere else and in an even nicer climate, or perhaps they've all finally met True Love At Last and are off for the next great adventure. Even the weather that day seemed to be hinting at something better about to happen: the trees were muted but still full of leaves, much more than they were in the New York landscape I'd left behind, and the sun was out that day, pale though it is in November. There's a poem Rod McKuen wrote about lovemaking that works that image in, something about our bodies like clouds and the pale November sunshine and even though he was a terrible poet and you don't like to think about the fact that you're remembering him, never mind quoting him, now, thirty years after the last time you picked up one of his books, still, he got that right: the pale November sunshine.
But I was thinking that I might like living in a town called Grottoes, until we first stepped into the cave and at that moment I mentally moved myself out of any of the Houses For Sale that we'd seen and set up housekeeping in my head right there in that cave, forever, I loved it that much, right away. It was my first time in one, and besides being in love I was startled on two counts, beginning with how you enter it. When we were driving down I was thinking about Merlin in his crystal cave, about the magicians of Lascaux, about the Tuatha dé Danaan; about oracles and hermits and the assorted holy folk who wander through all the stories you've spent your life absorbing. I was thinking about cave-as-tomb, cave-as-womb, and so I guess I expected to have a bit more of a preamble to the initiation. Instead, this is what happens: one minute you're standing in a sort of science museum, studying exhibits of bats and examining broken bits of stalagmites, and the next you've opened a door and walked through, and there you are, standing in the first chamber of the place. And so you arrive at your initiation without your ritual dress and purifying bath, with no hallucinogenic smoke to help you to see things and very little in the way of instruction, and you think about that and stare around for a moment and wonder, how did Merlin ever manage it?
After the shock of unexpected initiation came the shock of how little the cave looked like what I thought a cave looked like. However I got the idea, I've always guessed that caves resemble stony birth canals, cramped, smooth-walled little places you pass through for the express purpose of getting yourself back out again, pronto. The reality was so much better than my imagination, however, and I couldn't have been happier to have been wrong. The initial room was high, as most of this cave was high, with a ceiling that rose some forty feet above us. It, and the walls, and most of the floor, as well as the various hulking formations that gathered themselves up and out of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, all of these surfaces appeared to have been made by a mad mosaicist with infinite materials, a pocketful of genius, and no brakes on her time. There was little smooth about the place (my expectations about that shattering nicely on the million spiky edges that poked up everywhere) and nothing I could quite line up with my previous, non-initiated experience. Without the usual reference points of sky and horizon, once you stepped in, most of what went on in the non-subterranean world stopped registering and so you forgot about the waning sunlight you had just walked away from, forgot about all the bad poetry being written there and the people abandoning those rooms they'd been writing it in. The first thing I noticed was my lack of any sense of direction, in particular any sense of the direction down. Our path led us, in total, three quarters of a mile into the Earth and some 200 feet below it, but the journey through there felt upright and level, and I barely thought about how far down we were or how much weight slumbered above us, except for when we passed under enormous cracks in the overhead rock, deep fault lines running there, and then you couldn't help but think about it plenty. But everything stayed put that day, and when I asked I was assured that no, Virginia isn't prone to earthquakes.
Most of the cave, we learned, was made up of a calcium compound, which was why so many of the walls sparkled white in the light. There were bands of other colors, too, mostly muted green which turned out to be algae, and red, where the calcium had aged out, and black, which was either manganese or torch marks left over from visitors who had come there before the age of the electric light. The algae grew on account of those lights; people had been wandering through this particular cave for some 200 years that we know about, and I was glad to have been in a group that wandered through in these days of electricity and wiring. At one point our guide put all the lights out, holding up just a candle in his hand, and then he blew that out, too. I probably don't have to tell you just how dark dark can be, and I thought it went on just a little too long, the guide talking quietly in the cave-night as he told us a story about a party who had been trapped there for a couple of days, once, when all their lanterns blew out together. Imagine it, he said, imagine all those hours in this dark. He talked on, and I thought about reaching out my hand and trying to find my lover's hand, but knew I would start to panic if it turned out he wasn't standing where I thought he was. Mostly I could orient myself two ways: by the direction of the guide's voice, and by the whiskey breath coming off the man from the other family in our group. It was just noon then and we had watched him drive up with his nine-year-old son perched in the truck next to him, and the sharp, sour smell of the alcohol made the me turn my face whenever he happened to look my way. The mother was there, too, but distracted: her daughter-in-law was in labor, her water had broken just before we all entered the cave together. It would be the first grandchild. I thought about telling her: I was born now, too, this is a good time to be born. But who knows, with a baby about to come into a family that didn't smile or look one bit impressed by a single thing in that cave and the grandfather drinking mornings and driving around anyway, and so I said nothing. That may turn out to be a story his grandmother tells him, though: on the day you were born, I went for a walk in a cave...I think of the child a few years from now, bored with having heard this story too many times and none too impressed by a cave himself, looking away and out a window, thinking about the grayness of the month, thinking about the hidden sun and all the bad poetry being written out there in the world, thinking about whiskey breath in the morning. He may think to himself, when he is a little older still, all of this suits me...
There are two hundred years of records about people exploring it, and in that time, the cave has acquired a lot of names, different ones for the different chambers you come through as you walk the length of it. There is a place where someone carved risers out of the side of the wall, and once upon a time the traveling preachers used to come there and sermonize, everyone protected inside from the rain and snow. They would have gathered by candlelight or torchlight, too, and I imagine all that darkness coupled with all that shouting about Satan must have been a sure way to scare the bejesus out of a person, or into him. There is a ball room, where they held real dress-up dances a hundred years ago, complete with a flat rock stage where the orchestra sat. There were little chambers off to one side where the ladies could go to change into their ball gowns, making it unnecessary for them to wear them, dragging, in through the mud. There is a room called Dante's Inferno. (Sadly, there is no Oracle of Delphi, although there is a rock creature who guards the path about half-way through the cavern: we were told it's called George Washington's Ghost but my guess is, it's a case of mistaken identity.) My daughter and I read The Inferno a couple of years ago, and I wanted to go see, but it was hard to get to, and not well lit, and so I did not. That time, at least. I may go back and get myself in there; I keep reminding myself to memorize some cantos before then, to have something to chant as protection against the walls falling in, against my slipping into a hidden hole. Someone described to us how these caves got discovered, and we all squinted up our eyes, imagining it: the slow belly crawl through the dark and the unknown, and toward more darkness and more mystery, all the while knowing that if the little space we squeezed through turned out to be a false start, we'd have an even more difficult belly crawl retreat, this time scraping along backwards. I feel myself clouding over at the idea, having been born devoid of the discovery gene. One of the men from the hapless party whose lamps all blew out volunteered to try crawling out and so save the group; he fell into a hole somewhere along the way and although he didn't die, he was there for ten hours after the rest of his companions had been located, rescued. Imagine yourself, ten hours longer in that total dark, convinced you were feeling what eternity felt like while around you, the old old cave huffed and dripped and spoke its one invisible thought, if you think this feels like an eternity, just you wait.
The caves in this part of Virginia are known as solution caves, formed when the acidic ground water percolates through the fractures in the limestone and wears it away: creation by subtraction. It leaves behind the slate skin of the place, the minerals that seep in from the Earth. All of that takes one eternity to create. The limestone getting there in the first place takes another eternity, of course, the bodies of small marine organisms dying off and piling up and eroding down and settling in, hardening for millions of years. Pretty soon time as it's passed on the Earth begins to assume the proportions of distance as it unfolds in space, a scale that is always just outside your ability to comprehend it. In centuries past, tourists were avid--and reckless--collectors of the stuff of caves, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we say it is because they didn't know just how long these things take to form. The solution cave has found its true calling as a sculptor, and everywhere we looked there were formations with names like shields and draperies. There were the structures I already knew, stalactites for example, no less fabulous for being more familiar. All of these form when the water drops evaporate and leave behind a little calcium trail, a microscopic footprint of the minerals that water drop collected as it seeped down through the earth. You can imagine that this takes a long time. I liked the draperies, which reminded me of organ pipes, and the shields that looked like oversized pendants a bold woman might wear on a chain around her neck. I wished I could figure out a way to play the draperies; I wished I was that woman who was comfortable wearing bold jewelry. For the entire mile and a half we walked, I felt like we were being watched, because everywhere there were smaller formations rising up that looked like statues of people, sometimes couples holding children, sometimes rows and tiers like choruses, and at one point, a white round figure that I knew was the Buddha of the cave. He stood on the other side of a pool and none of us could reach him to rub his good-luck belly. Our guide told us that it takes about 150 years for a cubic inch of these formations to grow. We came to a natural tower growing up in the middle of the path: the Tower of Babel, the guide said was its name: 30 feet high and 80 feet around. When I got home I asked my daughter for the formula to figure out the volume of the piece. At a cubic inch of growth every century and a half or so, my rough estimate for the age of that Tower of Babel puts it at around 122 million years old. I thought of myself confronted by that colossus on that Sunday afternoon, and realized that of the two of us, I was the elderly one, standing there with the absurdity of my soft tissue, this ridiculous little life span already so much used up.
We stood in a small room that had been carved out of the rock, off to one side of the main chambers we'd just come through. The entrance to this room was an arch in the wall, with rows of pointy small stalactites hanging down like teeth, and it reminded me of being inside the whale's mouth and looking out, perhaps a little mournfully, at the life you were just about to say goodbye to. As I watched, a drop of water grew with elegant precision at the end of one of these teeth, and I thought to myself, I'm going to stand right here, and when it starts to fall I'll open my mouth and let the cave water drop right in. But the drop never fell; it gathered itself there and then hung quite contentedly, and then we had to move along. Immediately as we came around the corner there stood on the side of the path a tall ceramic jug. Our guide told us, once upon a time they used to keep these jugs set up at strategic places along the trails, and they'd catch water, and you could drink it. This jug, he said, is a relic--we've found two of them, and the other is back in the museum, in a display case, in shards. He said, the legend is that if you drink this water, you'll get eternal youth. He said, probably what will mostly happen to you is you'll get kidney stones, what with all the calcium in it. As soon as he had turned away to walk on and everyone else had turned to follow him, my hand went into the jug and I dipped some water out and had a little drink. Of course I did. It was underworld cold, and tasted like stone. When I caught back up to the group I looked back and saw my lover emerging from the shadows behind me, although a moment before, I was sure he had been in front of me. He was smiling, and as he got closer whispered to me, I just had a drink of that water. Me, too, I whispered back, and we leaned our heads in, laughing at ourselves, eternally youthful together, eternally conspiratorial. I like to think the cave was laughing, at that moment, right along with us.
You see things in caves, because it's human nature to do so, you notice faces in the walls, see people in the shapes growing up from the floor, same as I saw fat Buddha sitting there with his smile, same as I saw all those choristers standing around to sing us on through. We walked into a room they call the Bridal Chamber: a huge white shield formation hangs down in front of you, with white draperies flowing off of it. There are two white lovebirds perched on one wall, and the outline of two hearts near them. None of these things, as far as the cave is concerned, are there (although despite this, the occasional small wedding is held in that chamber, even now. People just can't help themselves.) The word for this kind of recognition is pareidolia, and it means the tendency we all have to see meaningful images in otherwise meaningless patterns. It's how constellations came into being, it's why all children pick shapes out of the clouds, and it's why, the whole time I walked through that cave, I walked in the company of vast populations of people I recognized, faery-sized to ogre-sized, and every one of them right at home in their cave landscape the way I was right at home up top, then, in my November world. I thought for a minute that I wanted to learn to be like them. You don't want to die, of course, or at least not any time soon, but it came to me that once upon a time I might have died near a cave like this one, and someone would have painted my body red, and someone else would have set me inside the cave, and entombed thus in the center of the slow procession of cave time, my soul would have begun the long dream toward reincarnation and however long it took, it still would have been nothing to the cave that held me, with its cubic inch of progress every century and a half, its statuary built up over a hundred thousand millennia, that long and patient mystery with the recognizable face.
Maybe it was the water we drank that made us dream that night, and it may be that by eternal youth they really meant vivid dreams, and if so, that's still a deal I'm happy to take. That night we slept neither deeply nor long; when we woke, it would Monday, still the middle of the night, and time for us to get in our cars and drive off in opposite directions. It was the morning of my 49th birthday, and this was his dream: he had a trained cat, and when he cued it, the cat would leap from its position atop a counter far across the room, and land perfectly in his lap. The cat performed this trick over and over. This was my dream: I had gone back to the cave with my lover, where an invisible woman waited for me at the entrance. She handed me a long and hooded dark red cloak that I was supposed to carry, not wear, and she gave me a riddle. I understood that I would find the answer to the riddle as I walked back through the cave carrying my cloak. We then entered together, my lover and I, and at that point he became invisible, too, and the woman remained at the opening to wait for me. In my dream, I retraced all the steps we had taken that day, through every chamber, around every corner, and then all the way back out again, but I did not find the answer to the riddle. As I came back to the entrance I explained that to the woman, and she said it was fine, that I'd find the answer the next time I walked back through. I then told her that I was going to forget the riddle as soon as I crossed back over the threshold and left the cave, and she said that was fine, too, that was exactly what I was supposed to do. Just don't forget, she cautioned me, that you have the red cloak, that's the thing you're supposed to bring back with you. And I woke then, and felt the weight of the red cloak draped across my outstretched arms just beginning to lighten.
When I was in elementary school I had a twenty minute walk home at the end of the school day, and I was always a little tired then, and usually hungry. A few blocks from my house there was a commercial bread bakery, and most afternoons the smells of sour yeast and wholesale quantities of baking bread floated around on the afternoon air, fueling my hunger even though they were making white bread there, and I didn't care for it. I disliked school in those days, disliked most things. The world felt heavy to me then: the monotony of studies, the incomprehensibility of my life, even my own body as it dragged me along through my bewilderment. I have a strong memory of a certain walk home on one such day, probably in the late autumn or early winter because the air was chilly, making the bakery smells particularly sharp, and the sidewalk I plodded over was full of wet leaves, and slippery. In that town, in those days, most of the sidewalks were still made of slate. As I trudged along I thought to myself that I couldn't wait until I was 48--I remember picking that age exactly, although I have no idea why--I couldn't wait until I was 48 because by then, I knew, life would be staid and I would feel settled at last and all the current wrongs in my world would have evaporated, leaving behind a small perfect residue of contentment. When I was ten that's what I envisioned my 48th year to look like; and instead, I arrived like this at the door of my 49th and stepped through, with a red cloak, a riddle, and a second chance. After I woke I thought about that for awhile in the dark, and told myself the story of the dream a few times so as to be sure to remember it all. And then in the last moments before the alarm began to ring, I turned to the man who was stirring beside me and began to tell him the story, too.
Still, it has been lonely for both of us, and so when I write, for instance, that we got together for the weekend the phrase is impotent even in my own mind, failing, as it does, to convey how that feels, the heightened anticipation, the brief conjunction of our orbiting paths, then separating again, which I invariably start to fret about long before I ought to. But, we manage it, and I wonder sometimes if eventually, I might think back on this time and decide it wasn't so bad, after all, think it's even possible I might grow lonely for my own loneliness. I miss everything, once it's over. I have known for a long time that nostalgia is the real landlord in my life, it's where all my rent goes, and my tithes, and everything else right along with it. My nostalgia is in season now, these Novembers, and I notice myself thinking that things had better hurry up and turn painful somewhere, else what will there be to think about when I want to sit and stare out the window? Back in the spring when I was first falling in love I realized it had been years since I had understood the season at all, if I ever had. I took a picture one morning, that late April, of the ornamental cherry tree outside my kitchen window. Its branches were wild with flowers that day, flagrantly so, obscenely so, and when I sent this new man the picture I wrote: I have the most vivid flowers in my neighborhood because this year, I'm the happiest person in my neighborhood. The tree has gone bare again by now, of course, and a few days ago some of the outer limbs snapped off in a wind storm. I watch it scratching at the sky these afternoons as the sun goes down, and we nod at each other and I think, I know just how you feel.
But this year, on the weekend before my birthday, we met in central Virginia, my lover and I, landing in a sort-of midway point between upstate New York and North Carolina. Since we both like being outdoors, and since the area is famous for its caves, we drove on the day before my birthday to a well-publicized one in the town of Grottoes, VA. I thought I'd certainly live in a town called Grottoes, although when we were driving through, we noticed that mostly it was agricultural, that mostly the houses there were for sale. There's an Alcoa plant there in the town, and we wondered whether it might be closing down, thus precipitating the rush to move on out of there. It's always a little sad when you see that, lots of people moving away, and you imagine them sorry to go even though the reality may be much different, perhaps everyone has found a better job somewhere else and in an even nicer climate, or perhaps they've all finally met True Love At Last and are off for the next great adventure. Even the weather that day seemed to be hinting at something better about to happen: the trees were muted but still full of leaves, much more than they were in the New York landscape I'd left behind, and the sun was out that day, pale though it is in November. There's a poem Rod McKuen wrote about lovemaking that works that image in, something about our bodies like clouds and the pale November sunshine and even though he was a terrible poet and you don't like to think about the fact that you're remembering him, never mind quoting him, now, thirty years after the last time you picked up one of his books, still, he got that right: the pale November sunshine.
But I was thinking that I might like living in a town called Grottoes, until we first stepped into the cave and at that moment I mentally moved myself out of any of the Houses For Sale that we'd seen and set up housekeeping in my head right there in that cave, forever, I loved it that much, right away. It was my first time in one, and besides being in love I was startled on two counts, beginning with how you enter it. When we were driving down I was thinking about Merlin in his crystal cave, about the magicians of Lascaux, about the Tuatha dé Danaan; about oracles and hermits and the assorted holy folk who wander through all the stories you've spent your life absorbing. I was thinking about cave-as-tomb, cave-as-womb, and so I guess I expected to have a bit more of a preamble to the initiation. Instead, this is what happens: one minute you're standing in a sort of science museum, studying exhibits of bats and examining broken bits of stalagmites, and the next you've opened a door and walked through, and there you are, standing in the first chamber of the place. And so you arrive at your initiation without your ritual dress and purifying bath, with no hallucinogenic smoke to help you to see things and very little in the way of instruction, and you think about that and stare around for a moment and wonder, how did Merlin ever manage it?
After the shock of unexpected initiation came the shock of how little the cave looked like what I thought a cave looked like. However I got the idea, I've always guessed that caves resemble stony birth canals, cramped, smooth-walled little places you pass through for the express purpose of getting yourself back out again, pronto. The reality was so much better than my imagination, however, and I couldn't have been happier to have been wrong. The initial room was high, as most of this cave was high, with a ceiling that rose some forty feet above us. It, and the walls, and most of the floor, as well as the various hulking formations that gathered themselves up and out of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, all of these surfaces appeared to have been made by a mad mosaicist with infinite materials, a pocketful of genius, and no brakes on her time. There was little smooth about the place (my expectations about that shattering nicely on the million spiky edges that poked up everywhere) and nothing I could quite line up with my previous, non-initiated experience. Without the usual reference points of sky and horizon, once you stepped in, most of what went on in the non-subterranean world stopped registering and so you forgot about the waning sunlight you had just walked away from, forgot about all the bad poetry being written there and the people abandoning those rooms they'd been writing it in. The first thing I noticed was my lack of any sense of direction, in particular any sense of the direction down. Our path led us, in total, three quarters of a mile into the Earth and some 200 feet below it, but the journey through there felt upright and level, and I barely thought about how far down we were or how much weight slumbered above us, except for when we passed under enormous cracks in the overhead rock, deep fault lines running there, and then you couldn't help but think about it plenty. But everything stayed put that day, and when I asked I was assured that no, Virginia isn't prone to earthquakes.
Most of the cave, we learned, was made up of a calcium compound, which was why so many of the walls sparkled white in the light. There were bands of other colors, too, mostly muted green which turned out to be algae, and red, where the calcium had aged out, and black, which was either manganese or torch marks left over from visitors who had come there before the age of the electric light. The algae grew on account of those lights; people had been wandering through this particular cave for some 200 years that we know about, and I was glad to have been in a group that wandered through in these days of electricity and wiring. At one point our guide put all the lights out, holding up just a candle in his hand, and then he blew that out, too. I probably don't have to tell you just how dark dark can be, and I thought it went on just a little too long, the guide talking quietly in the cave-night as he told us a story about a party who had been trapped there for a couple of days, once, when all their lanterns blew out together. Imagine it, he said, imagine all those hours in this dark. He talked on, and I thought about reaching out my hand and trying to find my lover's hand, but knew I would start to panic if it turned out he wasn't standing where I thought he was. Mostly I could orient myself two ways: by the direction of the guide's voice, and by the whiskey breath coming off the man from the other family in our group. It was just noon then and we had watched him drive up with his nine-year-old son perched in the truck next to him, and the sharp, sour smell of the alcohol made the me turn my face whenever he happened to look my way. The mother was there, too, but distracted: her daughter-in-law was in labor, her water had broken just before we all entered the cave together. It would be the first grandchild. I thought about telling her: I was born now, too, this is a good time to be born. But who knows, with a baby about to come into a family that didn't smile or look one bit impressed by a single thing in that cave and the grandfather drinking mornings and driving around anyway, and so I said nothing. That may turn out to be a story his grandmother tells him, though: on the day you were born, I went for a walk in a cave...I think of the child a few years from now, bored with having heard this story too many times and none too impressed by a cave himself, looking away and out a window, thinking about the grayness of the month, thinking about the hidden sun and all the bad poetry being written out there in the world, thinking about whiskey breath in the morning. He may think to himself, when he is a little older still, all of this suits me...
There are two hundred years of records about people exploring it, and in that time, the cave has acquired a lot of names, different ones for the different chambers you come through as you walk the length of it. There is a place where someone carved risers out of the side of the wall, and once upon a time the traveling preachers used to come there and sermonize, everyone protected inside from the rain and snow. They would have gathered by candlelight or torchlight, too, and I imagine all that darkness coupled with all that shouting about Satan must have been a sure way to scare the bejesus out of a person, or into him. There is a ball room, where they held real dress-up dances a hundred years ago, complete with a flat rock stage where the orchestra sat. There were little chambers off to one side where the ladies could go to change into their ball gowns, making it unnecessary for them to wear them, dragging, in through the mud. There is a room called Dante's Inferno. (Sadly, there is no Oracle of Delphi, although there is a rock creature who guards the path about half-way through the cavern: we were told it's called George Washington's Ghost but my guess is, it's a case of mistaken identity.) My daughter and I read The Inferno a couple of years ago, and I wanted to go see, but it was hard to get to, and not well lit, and so I did not. That time, at least. I may go back and get myself in there; I keep reminding myself to memorize some cantos before then, to have something to chant as protection against the walls falling in, against my slipping into a hidden hole. Someone described to us how these caves got discovered, and we all squinted up our eyes, imagining it: the slow belly crawl through the dark and the unknown, and toward more darkness and more mystery, all the while knowing that if the little space we squeezed through turned out to be a false start, we'd have an even more difficult belly crawl retreat, this time scraping along backwards. I feel myself clouding over at the idea, having been born devoid of the discovery gene. One of the men from the hapless party whose lamps all blew out volunteered to try crawling out and so save the group; he fell into a hole somewhere along the way and although he didn't die, he was there for ten hours after the rest of his companions had been located, rescued. Imagine yourself, ten hours longer in that total dark, convinced you were feeling what eternity felt like while around you, the old old cave huffed and dripped and spoke its one invisible thought, if you think this feels like an eternity, just you wait.
The caves in this part of Virginia are known as solution caves, formed when the acidic ground water percolates through the fractures in the limestone and wears it away: creation by subtraction. It leaves behind the slate skin of the place, the minerals that seep in from the Earth. All of that takes one eternity to create. The limestone getting there in the first place takes another eternity, of course, the bodies of small marine organisms dying off and piling up and eroding down and settling in, hardening for millions of years. Pretty soon time as it's passed on the Earth begins to assume the proportions of distance as it unfolds in space, a scale that is always just outside your ability to comprehend it. In centuries past, tourists were avid--and reckless--collectors of the stuff of caves, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we say it is because they didn't know just how long these things take to form. The solution cave has found its true calling as a sculptor, and everywhere we looked there were formations with names like shields and draperies. There were the structures I already knew, stalactites for example, no less fabulous for being more familiar. All of these form when the water drops evaporate and leave behind a little calcium trail, a microscopic footprint of the minerals that water drop collected as it seeped down through the earth. You can imagine that this takes a long time. I liked the draperies, which reminded me of organ pipes, and the shields that looked like oversized pendants a bold woman might wear on a chain around her neck. I wished I could figure out a way to play the draperies; I wished I was that woman who was comfortable wearing bold jewelry. For the entire mile and a half we walked, I felt like we were being watched, because everywhere there were smaller formations rising up that looked like statues of people, sometimes couples holding children, sometimes rows and tiers like choruses, and at one point, a white round figure that I knew was the Buddha of the cave. He stood on the other side of a pool and none of us could reach him to rub his good-luck belly. Our guide told us that it takes about 150 years for a cubic inch of these formations to grow. We came to a natural tower growing up in the middle of the path: the Tower of Babel, the guide said was its name: 30 feet high and 80 feet around. When I got home I asked my daughter for the formula to figure out the volume of the piece. At a cubic inch of growth every century and a half or so, my rough estimate for the age of that Tower of Babel puts it at around 122 million years old. I thought of myself confronted by that colossus on that Sunday afternoon, and realized that of the two of us, I was the elderly one, standing there with the absurdity of my soft tissue, this ridiculous little life span already so much used up.
We stood in a small room that had been carved out of the rock, off to one side of the main chambers we'd just come through. The entrance to this room was an arch in the wall, with rows of pointy small stalactites hanging down like teeth, and it reminded me of being inside the whale's mouth and looking out, perhaps a little mournfully, at the life you were just about to say goodbye to. As I watched, a drop of water grew with elegant precision at the end of one of these teeth, and I thought to myself, I'm going to stand right here, and when it starts to fall I'll open my mouth and let the cave water drop right in. But the drop never fell; it gathered itself there and then hung quite contentedly, and then we had to move along. Immediately as we came around the corner there stood on the side of the path a tall ceramic jug. Our guide told us, once upon a time they used to keep these jugs set up at strategic places along the trails, and they'd catch water, and you could drink it. This jug, he said, is a relic--we've found two of them, and the other is back in the museum, in a display case, in shards. He said, the legend is that if you drink this water, you'll get eternal youth. He said, probably what will mostly happen to you is you'll get kidney stones, what with all the calcium in it. As soon as he had turned away to walk on and everyone else had turned to follow him, my hand went into the jug and I dipped some water out and had a little drink. Of course I did. It was underworld cold, and tasted like stone. When I caught back up to the group I looked back and saw my lover emerging from the shadows behind me, although a moment before, I was sure he had been in front of me. He was smiling, and as he got closer whispered to me, I just had a drink of that water. Me, too, I whispered back, and we leaned our heads in, laughing at ourselves, eternally youthful together, eternally conspiratorial. I like to think the cave was laughing, at that moment, right along with us.
You see things in caves, because it's human nature to do so, you notice faces in the walls, see people in the shapes growing up from the floor, same as I saw fat Buddha sitting there with his smile, same as I saw all those choristers standing around to sing us on through. We walked into a room they call the Bridal Chamber: a huge white shield formation hangs down in front of you, with white draperies flowing off of it. There are two white lovebirds perched on one wall, and the outline of two hearts near them. None of these things, as far as the cave is concerned, are there (although despite this, the occasional small wedding is held in that chamber, even now. People just can't help themselves.) The word for this kind of recognition is pareidolia, and it means the tendency we all have to see meaningful images in otherwise meaningless patterns. It's how constellations came into being, it's why all children pick shapes out of the clouds, and it's why, the whole time I walked through that cave, I walked in the company of vast populations of people I recognized, faery-sized to ogre-sized, and every one of them right at home in their cave landscape the way I was right at home up top, then, in my November world. I thought for a minute that I wanted to learn to be like them. You don't want to die, of course, or at least not any time soon, but it came to me that once upon a time I might have died near a cave like this one, and someone would have painted my body red, and someone else would have set me inside the cave, and entombed thus in the center of the slow procession of cave time, my soul would have begun the long dream toward reincarnation and however long it took, it still would have been nothing to the cave that held me, with its cubic inch of progress every century and a half, its statuary built up over a hundred thousand millennia, that long and patient mystery with the recognizable face.
Maybe it was the water we drank that made us dream that night, and it may be that by eternal youth they really meant vivid dreams, and if so, that's still a deal I'm happy to take. That night we slept neither deeply nor long; when we woke, it would Monday, still the middle of the night, and time for us to get in our cars and drive off in opposite directions. It was the morning of my 49th birthday, and this was his dream: he had a trained cat, and when he cued it, the cat would leap from its position atop a counter far across the room, and land perfectly in his lap. The cat performed this trick over and over. This was my dream: I had gone back to the cave with my lover, where an invisible woman waited for me at the entrance. She handed me a long and hooded dark red cloak that I was supposed to carry, not wear, and she gave me a riddle. I understood that I would find the answer to the riddle as I walked back through the cave carrying my cloak. We then entered together, my lover and I, and at that point he became invisible, too, and the woman remained at the opening to wait for me. In my dream, I retraced all the steps we had taken that day, through every chamber, around every corner, and then all the way back out again, but I did not find the answer to the riddle. As I came back to the entrance I explained that to the woman, and she said it was fine, that I'd find the answer the next time I walked back through. I then told her that I was going to forget the riddle as soon as I crossed back over the threshold and left the cave, and she said that was fine, too, that was exactly what I was supposed to do. Just don't forget, she cautioned me, that you have the red cloak, that's the thing you're supposed to bring back with you. And I woke then, and felt the weight of the red cloak draped across my outstretched arms just beginning to lighten.
When I was in elementary school I had a twenty minute walk home at the end of the school day, and I was always a little tired then, and usually hungry. A few blocks from my house there was a commercial bread bakery, and most afternoons the smells of sour yeast and wholesale quantities of baking bread floated around on the afternoon air, fueling my hunger even though they were making white bread there, and I didn't care for it. I disliked school in those days, disliked most things. The world felt heavy to me then: the monotony of studies, the incomprehensibility of my life, even my own body as it dragged me along through my bewilderment. I have a strong memory of a certain walk home on one such day, probably in the late autumn or early winter because the air was chilly, making the bakery smells particularly sharp, and the sidewalk I plodded over was full of wet leaves, and slippery. In that town, in those days, most of the sidewalks were still made of slate. As I trudged along I thought to myself that I couldn't wait until I was 48--I remember picking that age exactly, although I have no idea why--I couldn't wait until I was 48 because by then, I knew, life would be staid and I would feel settled at last and all the current wrongs in my world would have evaporated, leaving behind a small perfect residue of contentment. When I was ten that's what I envisioned my 48th year to look like; and instead, I arrived like this at the door of my 49th and stepped through, with a red cloak, a riddle, and a second chance. After I woke I thought about that for awhile in the dark, and told myself the story of the dream a few times so as to be sure to remember it all. And then in the last moments before the alarm began to ring, I turned to the man who was stirring beside me and began to tell him the story, too.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Night Sky
My son and I have gotten in the habit of walking together for an hour or so early in the evening; these days when we go the sun has already set, and this week the moon has been rising in time to accompany us, or was, until last night. The reason for going is, ostensibly, to take the dog. Because he's nearly nine, he needs the exercise now more than ever, needs to keep moving so that he will be able to keep moving. But the truth is that I need to go, too, and physical health isn't the half of it. Someone told me that every hour you walk adds another hour to your life. I pass this information along to my son, and in turn we consider whether that might translate as well to the dog's life, and in that case, is it dog hours and dog years they'd be talking about? We don't know. We do know that everyone has more energy as a result of these walks, we're all losing a little weight, we all sleep more soundly at night. It's good for us, good for our bodies and good for our heads, too. And it's good for the two of us to have some time by ourselves: in our household, my older child, a girl, tends to dominate the conversation. I was an eldest child too and never really thought about what it was like for my sister to occupy the seat of youngest child, or didn't think about it until I saw how the dynamic winds itself out between my own two children. These nights are also giving me a more intimate understanding of how the young male mind winds its own self out, me, who grew up in an entirely female universe, no father, no brothers, just one bad-tempered grandfather who did us all the favor of dying on the young side (mercifully so, as his dementia was beginning to get dangerous, or so I thought later, when I was older and could understand what had been going on during those years). Once I watched during a long sweaty August afternoon as he walked slowly back and forth, back and forth, past the two windows of the living room where I sat. Finally he came into the house, wiping his bald head and complaining bitterly about how damned hot it was, trying to mow the lawn just now. But of course, he hadn't been pushing a lawn mower at all, had just been walking back and forth and back again in the blazing summer sun. Later that month, he laid down on the couch in the morning and my grandmother, pausing at the top of the stairs, turned her head for a moment in time to hear the death rattle in his throat.
So, these nights I walk around the back streets of our town for an hour or so with my son, and he talks, and the dog rambles, and while I never hear much about how the day went for him, my son does like to talk about the things that are most heavily on his mind--those things gain their heft, I believe, precisely because he is afraid to talk about them. So he monologues about his belief in ghosts, wants to know whether he's descended from people with unusual psychic abilities, talks about how he's torn between becoming a brain researcher, or becoming a cryptozoologist. I think to myself that he must get that from the distaff side, as they used to say--his father was a pragmatist, a logical guy, really my intellectual opposite-but-equal. I wonder what my son's ideal partner will look like. I do know that right now, the girl who has become his first real crush is also the only student in his accelerated classes who is consistently able to edge him out, grade-wise. So we know he likes smart women. When he talks to me about her at all, which is admittedly very little, what he seems to like about her most is that she's nice to him. I like that too, kids who are nice to my kids.
While we walk and he rambles in his conversation and the dog rambles around with his nose pressed to the ground--the dog so single-minded that last night I watched him walk smack into a tree while he chased, nose down, the trail of some irresistible scent or another--my own thoughts like to escape a little bit as they can, when there's a lull in the conversation, or when my son seems more like he needs to get the words out than that he requires any response from me. The painter Paul Klee said that drawing is like--or that it's only, I can never remember which--taking a line out for a walk. Which is exactly what I think writing is, it's simply taking a thought out for a walk, and the best way to walk it around is to get out there walking yourself. It's what's always worked best for me, anyway, and it's something I discover all over again every time I pick the habit back up. I've walked a lot over the years, and I always wish that I walked even more, even when I'm walking an hour every day the way I have been lately. It really is a peculiar form of worship, I suppose, meditation and magic and conjuring and inner work and outer work, all in one basic and repetitive motion. Last night I noticed that my legs felt so strong, I thought I could probably start to run and not tire out. I wonder if eventually, I might feel so strong beyond that, that I'll think I could probably fly?
In the years before I went to college, my mother, sister and I lived in a house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town a block over from the river, and I walked constantly then. Constantly, and often at night, or very early in the morning. Anyway I spent a good many hours traveling through the dark, and never felt unsafe nor, I'm sure, was I. I do remember my mother telling me that, if I grew up and moved to a city, that was going to be the one thing for sure I'd miss, being able to walk around freely at night. The irony was that in the place I lived for the past decade, I never could walk at night, precisely because it was too rural. There were fisher cats there, and the occasional bear, but most of all there were no streetlights on any of the roads around me, so if the wildlife didn't get you, the careening cars with their night-blind drivers most likely would. I walked a lot in that town, but always in daylight.
And for many years prior to that I worked nights, so wasn't walking then, either, and now that I've started taking night walks again my first thought is always, why did I ever stop doing this, until the second thought comes along and reminds me, that's just the way life has been. But I'm back to it now, and the same night sky is there to walk beneath, the same night air is there to breath. One difference is having a child along for the journey. Once both of my kids were too afraid of the dark to ever want to go outside at night even, for instance, the year we lived in New Hampshire and the comet came. Sometimes they'd look at it through a bedroom window. My daughter is still nervous about the dark; my son is learning to be a little more at ease there. Lately in his Earth Science class they've been studying their astronomy unit, and that helps with his curiosity. At night we go out, and if the moon isn't up yet and the big stadium lights at the sports complex aren't blazing away, we get a good look at the starry field of the autumn sky. He can find Polaris; he can pick out the subtle shape of Cepheus and the winding path that is the constellation Draco. He is always curious about the planets. And last night, because it was just setting, I was able to show him the constellation Sagittarius. He had just been explaining to me the reason we can't see the mad explosion of stars that lies at galactic core. I pointed to Sagittarius and told him there, if you look off in that direction, that's where the center of the galaxy, the one you can't see, lies...
It is no small feat, I think, to be able to orient yourself even in that small way, in the midst of such vast distances.
When we were a few blocks from home last night, on the way back, I looked up to the north and the east and there in the sky hung a star I'd missed before. It shone vividly like Venus shines, although I know right now, Venus is coming at us in the morning; it glittered there so impossibly bright I wondered for a moment how I'd managed to miss it just a few minutes before, when we'd been standing along the corn field on the side of an unlit road. In fact I opened my mouth to say just that, how did I miss pointing this one out to you?--but Wyatt was talking, I wanted to figure out just what it was I was looking at, and in the seconds that elapsed then the bright star suddenly began to fade, as though thin clouds were passing between me and it. But the sky was cloudless last night, the star simply faded back into quiet star commonness, and afterwards, I was left wondering what exactly it was I'd just seen--a variable star? An aircraft of some sort? A trick of the night and my 48-year-old eyes? I want it to have been something rare and lucky, something that is so unusual to see that science can't predict it and you're only likely to have seen it if your gaze just happened to have been wandering across that particular place at just that particular time. I want this to have been something that earned me a new celestial star setinto my earthly crown.
These morning it's still dark when I begin my day, and this is the time of year when the old Celtic method of reckoning a day as the period that occurs between sunset and sunset makes a lot more intuitive sense. Today I put the dog outside early, as I always do, and looked for the moon which is directly overhead in the predawn sky right now. I used to look at the moon a lot, same as I used to walk at night a lot, and I miss having those particular roads unwind ahead of me, as well. Let me describe to you what the moon was doing this morning: directly around her waning gibbous form there was a reflected halo of light, this one tinged, improbably, with purple, with green. Farther out in a big sweep that took up a good third of the visible sky, was a vast and perfectly-formed white circle of light, looking for all the world like an enormous ring of snow was bounding the moon at its center. In fact someone told me that the appearance of such a ring means it's going to snow; I have also heard that if you count the number of stars inside the ring, it is the number of friends who are soon to die. I hope that's not the case, since this morning's count was five or six. I think that the bad omens that come along with these phenomena are more a reflection of the fear we feel when confronted with the moon- and starlit parts of our interior lives. I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little afraid of that, but I do think that once you go there, you start to fear it less. It helps to have someone to travel along with you, too, I think. A companion, and the chance to be by turns chattering, silent, rambling, snuffling, imagining, thinking, learning to locate the center of the galaxy, learning to be at home in your dark corner of it.
So, these nights I walk around the back streets of our town for an hour or so with my son, and he talks, and the dog rambles, and while I never hear much about how the day went for him, my son does like to talk about the things that are most heavily on his mind--those things gain their heft, I believe, precisely because he is afraid to talk about them. So he monologues about his belief in ghosts, wants to know whether he's descended from people with unusual psychic abilities, talks about how he's torn between becoming a brain researcher, or becoming a cryptozoologist. I think to myself that he must get that from the distaff side, as they used to say--his father was a pragmatist, a logical guy, really my intellectual opposite-but-equal. I wonder what my son's ideal partner will look like. I do know that right now, the girl who has become his first real crush is also the only student in his accelerated classes who is consistently able to edge him out, grade-wise. So we know he likes smart women. When he talks to me about her at all, which is admittedly very little, what he seems to like about her most is that she's nice to him. I like that too, kids who are nice to my kids.
While we walk and he rambles in his conversation and the dog rambles around with his nose pressed to the ground--the dog so single-minded that last night I watched him walk smack into a tree while he chased, nose down, the trail of some irresistible scent or another--my own thoughts like to escape a little bit as they can, when there's a lull in the conversation, or when my son seems more like he needs to get the words out than that he requires any response from me. The painter Paul Klee said that drawing is like--or that it's only, I can never remember which--taking a line out for a walk. Which is exactly what I think writing is, it's simply taking a thought out for a walk, and the best way to walk it around is to get out there walking yourself. It's what's always worked best for me, anyway, and it's something I discover all over again every time I pick the habit back up. I've walked a lot over the years, and I always wish that I walked even more, even when I'm walking an hour every day the way I have been lately. It really is a peculiar form of worship, I suppose, meditation and magic and conjuring and inner work and outer work, all in one basic and repetitive motion. Last night I noticed that my legs felt so strong, I thought I could probably start to run and not tire out. I wonder if eventually, I might feel so strong beyond that, that I'll think I could probably fly?
In the years before I went to college, my mother, sister and I lived in a house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town a block over from the river, and I walked constantly then. Constantly, and often at night, or very early in the morning. Anyway I spent a good many hours traveling through the dark, and never felt unsafe nor, I'm sure, was I. I do remember my mother telling me that, if I grew up and moved to a city, that was going to be the one thing for sure I'd miss, being able to walk around freely at night. The irony was that in the place I lived for the past decade, I never could walk at night, precisely because it was too rural. There were fisher cats there, and the occasional bear, but most of all there were no streetlights on any of the roads around me, so if the wildlife didn't get you, the careening cars with their night-blind drivers most likely would. I walked a lot in that town, but always in daylight.
And for many years prior to that I worked nights, so wasn't walking then, either, and now that I've started taking night walks again my first thought is always, why did I ever stop doing this, until the second thought comes along and reminds me, that's just the way life has been. But I'm back to it now, and the same night sky is there to walk beneath, the same night air is there to breath. One difference is having a child along for the journey. Once both of my kids were too afraid of the dark to ever want to go outside at night even, for instance, the year we lived in New Hampshire and the comet came. Sometimes they'd look at it through a bedroom window. My daughter is still nervous about the dark; my son is learning to be a little more at ease there. Lately in his Earth Science class they've been studying their astronomy unit, and that helps with his curiosity. At night we go out, and if the moon isn't up yet and the big stadium lights at the sports complex aren't blazing away, we get a good look at the starry field of the autumn sky. He can find Polaris; he can pick out the subtle shape of Cepheus and the winding path that is the constellation Draco. He is always curious about the planets. And last night, because it was just setting, I was able to show him the constellation Sagittarius. He had just been explaining to me the reason we can't see the mad explosion of stars that lies at galactic core. I pointed to Sagittarius and told him there, if you look off in that direction, that's where the center of the galaxy, the one you can't see, lies...
It is no small feat, I think, to be able to orient yourself even in that small way, in the midst of such vast distances.
When we were a few blocks from home last night, on the way back, I looked up to the north and the east and there in the sky hung a star I'd missed before. It shone vividly like Venus shines, although I know right now, Venus is coming at us in the morning; it glittered there so impossibly bright I wondered for a moment how I'd managed to miss it just a few minutes before, when we'd been standing along the corn field on the side of an unlit road. In fact I opened my mouth to say just that, how did I miss pointing this one out to you?--but Wyatt was talking, I wanted to figure out just what it was I was looking at, and in the seconds that elapsed then the bright star suddenly began to fade, as though thin clouds were passing between me and it. But the sky was cloudless last night, the star simply faded back into quiet star commonness, and afterwards, I was left wondering what exactly it was I'd just seen--a variable star? An aircraft of some sort? A trick of the night and my 48-year-old eyes? I want it to have been something rare and lucky, something that is so unusual to see that science can't predict it and you're only likely to have seen it if your gaze just happened to have been wandering across that particular place at just that particular time. I want this to have been something that earned me a new celestial star setinto my earthly crown.
These morning it's still dark when I begin my day, and this is the time of year when the old Celtic method of reckoning a day as the period that occurs between sunset and sunset makes a lot more intuitive sense. Today I put the dog outside early, as I always do, and looked for the moon which is directly overhead in the predawn sky right now. I used to look at the moon a lot, same as I used to walk at night a lot, and I miss having those particular roads unwind ahead of me, as well. Let me describe to you what the moon was doing this morning: directly around her waning gibbous form there was a reflected halo of light, this one tinged, improbably, with purple, with green. Farther out in a big sweep that took up a good third of the visible sky, was a vast and perfectly-formed white circle of light, looking for all the world like an enormous ring of snow was bounding the moon at its center. In fact someone told me that the appearance of such a ring means it's going to snow; I have also heard that if you count the number of stars inside the ring, it is the number of friends who are soon to die. I hope that's not the case, since this morning's count was five or six. I think that the bad omens that come along with these phenomena are more a reflection of the fear we feel when confronted with the moon- and starlit parts of our interior lives. I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little afraid of that, but I do think that once you go there, you start to fear it less. It helps to have someone to travel along with you, too, I think. A companion, and the chance to be by turns chattering, silent, rambling, snuffling, imagining, thinking, learning to locate the center of the galaxy, learning to be at home in your dark corner of it.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
She Inspires Me
I am very happy today to be able to take myself out of my own head long enough to tell you about one of my favorite artists in recent memory, and most specifically to mention that she's begun a blog of her own--do check her out. I first learned of Rima and her wonderful world when she posted on a message board on the Sur La Lune fairy tale site (another enchanting place to get lost in when you have some time). When you visit Rima's blog you can find links to her web site, other places you can see her amazing work, and more.
I adore Rima's art, and am fascinated by her inner world. I first encountered her during a difficult period in my own life: widowhood was still new then, and still stung; I'd just moved my family to another state where I knew no one, had no prospects, and had managed, I was convinced at the time, to make a real mess of things. Rima's images reminded me of how magic can still persist, even in the unlikeliest of places; if I had to analyze my response I'd say it has something to do with the way she interprets the mythic, manifests something concrete out of the imagination. But this is an instance when I prefer the pleasures of enjoyment to the work of analysis. This morning, looking at her new work, and at her old work again, I am reminded once more of how it feels to live in the world when you're open to possibility. I bought a few of her prints last year and enjoy them as much today as when they first came into my home. What can I say? I'm a big fan. I hope you'll all become fans, too. Because I know for sure that now, there's nothing I'd rather do on this gloomy and atmospheric autumn day than hole up in my study and let my words make some magic of their own. And I can't think of any higher praise for an artist, than that her work sets you happily off in pursuit of your own.
I adore Rima's art, and am fascinated by her inner world. I first encountered her during a difficult period in my own life: widowhood was still new then, and still stung; I'd just moved my family to another state where I knew no one, had no prospects, and had managed, I was convinced at the time, to make a real mess of things. Rima's images reminded me of how magic can still persist, even in the unlikeliest of places; if I had to analyze my response I'd say it has something to do with the way she interprets the mythic, manifests something concrete out of the imagination. But this is an instance when I prefer the pleasures of enjoyment to the work of analysis. This morning, looking at her new work, and at her old work again, I am reminded once more of how it feels to live in the world when you're open to possibility. I bought a few of her prints last year and enjoy them as much today as when they first came into my home. What can I say? I'm a big fan. I hope you'll all become fans, too. Because I know for sure that now, there's nothing I'd rather do on this gloomy and atmospheric autumn day than hole up in my study and let my words make some magic of their own. And I can't think of any higher praise for an artist, than that her work sets you happily off in pursuit of your own.
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