My Wobbly Bicycle, 269

It’s mid-summer. Michigan summers are too short to spend writing blog posts. Furthermore, I have nothing to say today. Furthermore, who am I to pontificate? To tell you about my life when you have your own to deal with? All I can say in defense of writing this is that when I, myself, read someone else’s life, I feel an opening into my own that makes me more substantial in the world. I love myself more because I am also you, with your amazing talent, your amazing stories.

I’ve been reading Patricia McNair’s splendid short story collection, Responsible Adults. How did she write these? They are many worlds so different from hers. A daddy who shops at the railroad salvage store, a mother with serial boyfriends, a mother who uses her daughter in art photographs but hardly knows she’s there. And so on. But what we do as writers is appropriate (a bad word these days) bits and pieces, flashes we pick up from the atmosphere, from the lives around us, and attach them to something in us that responds.

Everything responds to everything. The whole universe is humming. There is, apparently, a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.

So all writing is appropriation. You go out on the dance floor and begin to imitate what the others are doing. It’s your own body, your own moves, but the music is there, and you just follow it in your own way. Stephen Crane, as you know, wrote his entirely believable and moving story about a young man going to war when he’d never gone, himself. He picked up the sense of it from what he’d read and heard, and danced his own dance with it.

More and more, I think we have a story. It’s a collective story, broken into shards. It has no beginning and no end, but is crucial in the telling, because telling is the bridge between us. It’s the way we dance together instead of alone. The story shifts from Dante to Chaucer to Bishop to Morrison, but it’s all Canterbury Tales, everyone entertaining the others on the way to the shrine. The shrine is also changeable, but it’s a place to go, a direction.

The direction of human life you might call evolution, if you need to think in directional terms.

I don’t know how much we’ve evolved. Sometimes I think we’re devolving. language becoming simpler, people continuing to murder each other, but with more and more potent weapons, people allowing other people to die of starvation or whatever. Maybe I’m just old.  When you’re young, it’s all going uphill. Unless it’s not. There’s so much despair right now!

Living is an act of sheer bravery. Writing is an act of sheer bravery. Those who keep on, year after year, deserve Nobel prizes, the whole lot of them. Even if the buildings are crumbling, culture is crumbling, nations crumbling, there’s more to it than that. There’s the background music. The gravitational ripples. You have to listen for them.

That’s all I got for today. We’re leaving for the lake mid-month to stay until mid-September. Ollie is growing fast! He’s still darling, bouncy, and curious about everything. There’s not a toy he has not mangled or lost under the stove or refrigerator. No despair for him!

I’m getting a cortisone injection for my back. My back hurts, but not unbearably so. I’m having aqua therapy, which is warm and feels good but I’m not sure how much it’s going to help. Swimming in our lake will help. I have long called it the miracle cure.

I’ve discovered the wonder of a sleep mask, the total dark. You should try it! There’s too much light even in a dark room. Little green lights on devices, streetlights out there through the blinds. Dark is beautiful and velvety. Whatever happened to it?

There. I’m passing my life on to you this way. Giving you these little pieces you’re free to make into something on your own.  

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Ann Sexton at work

Writers’ Retreats. I said last time I’d tell you about the summer retreat I was just a part of, as an example of how a such a retreat can go. Are you curious? This post is for those of you not involved in the writing world, except as readers.

Usually those who pay to attend a retreat have publication as a goal. Not that seeing your words in print is necessarily evidence of your excellent work. But it does mean that you’re working your way into the conversation among writers, which is itself a good thing.

This is how it might go in a retreat open to the general public:

Tina Fey at work.

            There are readings by the faculty and workshops focusing on particular aspects of writing, both prose and poetry. Workshops meet every day, usually for three hours, time enough to examine some examples from professional writers and then to try the technique yourself, then have a chance to read your work to the group. There is also often a “Writer in Residence,” for both poetry and prose. That was my role this time. People sign up for 15-minute “interviews” with me, to discuss anything about their work that they want some one-to-one help with.

Examples from some conversations with writers at this recent retreat:

1.     Has stage 4 cancer, is still pushing ahead with her work as long as she can. Wants to write about a deeply meaningful encounter with a person who had a breakdown on the road. My job here, I think, is to offer encouragement, help her see the incident as clearly as possible and allow its “meaning” to arise naturally, not force a meaning on it.

2.     Not sure where to focus as a writer. Her life, she says, is complicated. Talks a lot about her dogs and horses. All I can do here is help her identify where the most energy seems to be as she thinks about where to go. She’s new at this.

3.     Wants to write a series of prose poems called “Dementia Woman.” She’s interested in the funny aspects of memory loss. I think there’s sadness and grief under the amusement, but I won’t say that. If she keeps writing this, I expect that will emerge. But the funny is also worth exploring.

4.     Keeps moving back and forth between what she conceives as a fantasy story and a real experience. I’m not sure she is clear which is which. I tell her that things we think of as real may have a strong dose of fantasy, also. I’m not sure this story will get written. She seems to have more energy in the telling of it than in the writing of it. She’s not asking me any questions about technique.

5.     Wants confirmation that the end of her lyric essay is the right ending, wonders what else she could do with it. I like what she’s done, excellent work, don’t think she needs to go any other direction.

John Updike at work.

6.     Is working on a mother-daughter memoir and wants to talk about the direction she might go with it. There’s cancer involved, so how much should be devoted to that, and when to turn away from it. I think it’s too early in her process to offer advice about that yet. I encourage her to keep writing and sort that out later.

7.     Writing a poem about camping alone, an experience that’s very meaningful to her. She’s floating above the details as she talks about it, so I encourage her to tell me more about it and as she does, I point out the concrete aspects that could help the poem.

Toni Morrison at work.

You can’t teach someone to write, but you can help speed up a writer’s development. You can look closely at good writing and point out what makes it work so well. You can offer tips. And the conversation is helpful on its own. Writing is, and should be, lonely work, but writers need to talk with each other sometimes. If nothing else, it helps alleviate loneliness. Of course some people write better entirely on their own.

And eventually, you get to be your own critic. You edit in your mind before the words hit the page.

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Not me. I couldn’t for the life of me ever get into a full lotus. Also, I’d have to lose fifty years to be her.

I was sitting on my cushion, meditating this morning, when it came to me that I wanted this Wobbly to be about discipline. The difference in habit and discipline, maybe. And the limits of each one.

For many years, I had a very strong meditation discipline. When that began to feel no longer necessary, I stopped altogether. A while back, I re-started my practice, but this time for only 30 minutes a day. My original impetus (which includes all the more mundane reasons, relief from emotional suffering, etc.) was to see what I had been ignoring.  The impetus now (I think) is to steady my mind to help alleviate back pain. To keep my mind steady, in general. But also, it continues to be an interesting exploration.

Discipline, I guess, is what you do deliberately. You have a reason, a goal, whatever. Habit is what you fall into by repetition. Here I am, typing away at the moment, as I do every morning.

At this point in my long writerly life, I feel edgy, uncomfortable, irritable, if I don’t have writing time. It’s both my habit and my discipline. It’s nice when they work together.

My morning thoughts on this: discipline is a framework. A scaffolding. Not necessarily a climbing upward. It might be discovery, climbing sideways, swinging on monkey bars. It feels good, to have something to hold onto. Without it, you’d be a blob of jelly. The danger of too much discipline, or discipline for the sake of discipline, is rigidity. You miss a lot of your life because your eyes are always on the goal. Take writing (you knew I would). For those of us who write a lot, our discipline is simply writing stuff. No matter what, no matter its shape or direction. Just the words.

There comes a time, in the middle of all this discipline, whatever it is,  if the gods are with you, when you fly off the rails. You haven’t willed it. That doesn’t work. You’ve simply chugged along the track, and suddenly you’re airborne. It’s when your writing surprises you, when your meditation opens a door, when your tennis game leaps forward.

Habit is mostly good, I guess. Brushing my teeth is a habit. Turning left at the bottom of the stairs is a habit. But habit is suspect. The nature of habit is to ignore, to shut down, to become unaware. It’s possible to live your life sleepwalking, moving from one habitual action to the next. Or moving from one habitual phrase to another. Our thoughts and prayers are with you. Have a nice day.

You may mean those words, you may actually offer a prayer, or sincerely hope the recipient has a nice day. But those words rise like a shield between you and genuine feeling. In this sense, habit is robotic, empty, even dangerous.

I could go on about how parents aren’t teaching discipline, which I think contributes greatly to the anxiety and depression of our children. I think this is true. I have a tendency toward anxiety and mild depression. I realized way back in high school, in my chaotic life, that if I made a homework list and followed it, if I kept neat notes, I felt better. These days it’s get up at a certain time, do my exercises, meditate, write. I can name you dozens of writers who say their work has saved them from the pit of despair! Well, if my memory were better, I could.

You need, I need, we need structure.  Poetry? In the best contemporary poems, the whole history of form is contained in what may appear as loosely structured verse. The best poets understand blank verse, sonnets, villanelles. They know poetry’s history. They hear the rhythms of speech because they’ve studied them. They may strike out in new directions, but underlying the new direction is a feeling for the way sound works in a line, and for the way the line itself works.

The P.S. . . .If you go here, you can read two new springish poems in Blackbird: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v21n3/poetry/brown-f/index.shtml

I’m at Interlochen Arts Academy this week, as Writer in Residence at their brilliant Writers’ Retreat. I’ll report on that next time.

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Pete’s Woods in Arcadia Dunes, Michigan

I knew a faculty member at the University of Delaware who had a perfect memory. She could watch Othello, for example, tell you which edition it was, recite the variation from other editions, and tell you which edition those missing or altered lines first appeared. She forgot nothing. She said one time she worried that she remembered so much that she was missing out on other things as they passed.

I sometimes think I write because I can’t remember anything, otherwise. If I put it down, I can hold onto it better. I go back to my early books and think, oh yes, that’s how it was. I wonder if having a blank-slate mind, or a blank page, or at least the constant insecurity that you can’t hold onto things, is a prerequisite to being a writer. You’re always telling yourself, and others, to hold onto the epiphanies as they fly past.

Of course, you can’t hold on. Last week I went on a hike sponsored by the Club where we live to a natural area full of spring wildflowers—trillium, somewhat rare celandine poppies, violets, hairy Solomon’s seal, foamflowers, and so on. We had our guide sheets. One man complained to me, “I just want to appreciate things as they arise, not pin them down.” Names do that, of course. They’re our invention, not the flower’s. The flower is a bare blooming; it’s not its name.

On the other hand, when we name something, we develop a relationship with it. My name is Fleda. The name has become part of the complex combination that I call Me, and you call Me. Try not inventing a name for your beloved pet. It would be almost impossible. It’s a large part of the way we connect.

I used to tell my students that words/names are like pixels on a screen. The more you have, the larger your vocabulary, the better the resolution.

But I understand my former colleague’s worry. We can’t strip our minds of what they know, nor would we want to.  She was afraid she was so full of words, so cerebral, that she would float across the surface of what actually exists. There’s the danger of being left with a desert of concepts, the actual moist earth lost to you. You become a propagandist, a purveyor of what’s already been labeled.

---

This is in my collection of notes. I don’t know where it came from— “The empire is interested in dull language. It is interested in reporting that “collateral damage has occurred” instead of plainly stating that “a helicopter has bombed a wedding with 347 guests, including children.” The empire is interested in normative speech. The poet is interested in exactly the opposite, in the language of the senses.

---

“A poet must be a professor of the five senses,” says Federico García Lorca.

One remedy is meditation. The mind can be slowly trained not to always float over the surface of names. Another remedy is writing. To find the precise way to see on paper, you have to see beyond the easy names. The lazy, consequently poor, writer stops with the cliché. So there’s no real seeing.

By the way, I’ve discovered Trekking sticks! My physical therapist had suggested I buy some several years ago, but I wasn’t using them. I thought they made me feel old. Then my daughter sent me some for Mother’s Day, which reminded me I had mine in our storage unit. I sent hers back and started using mine. I suppose I am old, now, so I can use them! It’s amazing how much better I feel when I’m walking. They take the pressure off my poor, deteriorating lower back. I come home with less pain. I can walk farther.

I’m writing a series of walking poems. When I think I have nothing more to say, something arises every time. It’s like my walking buddy said, I just appreciate what arises.

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I was looking through blogs/Instagram posts about poetry/writing poetry, to make a list for my upcoming writing retreat participants. The Instagram poems--some aren’t so bad! Or you can get AI to write you a poem. Or you can “generate” a poem using all sorts of step-by-step prompts. “Generate”? I have a vision of huge huffing machine, Oompa Loompas turning a crank, spitting out poems at the top.

So, the poem spits out the top. I ask you, what’s the point? What are you after? Something that looks like a poem on the page? That’s easy enough. Put a bunch of words down and shorten the margin. Isn’t that simply performance, isn’t it inauthentic?  We writers, when we were young, probably started this way, performing, (“Look teacher/mother, I wrote a poem!”) but one hopes we got past it.

I’d say way down at the root of the poem is intention. And how can I know the intention of the writer? All I can do is read the poem, see what sort of real life it has in it, what earnestness.

What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

                        --Wiliam Blake

I have always taken Blake to mean we don’t have to see all of what we desire (in a poem, in a person). The outline will do, the lineaments of it. Words can only go so far toward saying what we mean, anyway.

Judging poems! I’m kind of done with that. Every day I read the few I’ve asked to show up in my inbox. Some I admire, some not. So what?

I am done with judgment. Admire is one thing; judge is another.

I’m reading the biography of the first celebrated Black woman poet in America, Phyllis Wheatley. When she was seven, she was brought from Africa a slave, but managed, via her intelligence and her benevolent owners,  to learn to read and write. Her poems are of the eighteenth century—stiff, formal, always praising someone, including God, but you can see her increasing dexterity of language over the years.

When I say her poems are of the eighteenth century, I mean they’re stiff, contained in form and rhyme, very public—praising George Washington, the evangelist George Whitefield, the Earl of Dartmouth, and others. I don’t “like” them, because they don’t speak to my generation, my sensibilities, but I admire them because they show dexterity of language, inventiveness, and sincerity.

If you want to see the great pumpkin, says Charlie Brown, you have to be sincere. You may be laughed at out there in the pumpkin patch all night, wrapped up in your blanket, waiting, but that’s what it takes.

I’ve read a lot of insincere poems. And prose. By that I mean the work has an imitative quality. It’s trying to Be something. It doesn’t come from the heart.  How do I know? I don’t. It’s a feeling I have. Just like with people. You can sense insincerity. Fake people. Fake language. Fake emotions.

Fake language doesn’t necessarily mean lying language, although it might mean that. By fake language, I mean the words are somehow removed from the true heart of the speaker. All about ego. Look how compassionate I am, how smart, how poetic I am that I can say these things.

We can sense the fake if we’ve read a lot and practiced a lot. In the real, birds fly out of the poem’s mouth, unbidden.

I’m rambling. My sinuses are miserable, I’m living today on DayQuil, the weather stays dank. The only possible reason I can think that you’d want to read this blog is just to see how someone else’s mind works, how it dips and swerves, how it’s alternately dull and smart. It should be an inspiration to you—the alternative to Facebook, where everyone has just won an award or published a book or a poem. In this blog, I am stumbling along, never knowing what to say next. Doesn’t that make you feel better? At least it’s authentic.

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What is “creative”? As in “creative nonfiction,” an oxymoron, as many have pointed out. Is it creative when I write anything that doesn’t sound like a robot, or isn’t actually written by a robot. Or can a robot be creative? Apparently, it can, although it can’t fool another robot.  It’s like we imagine some baseline of absolute fact where the truth lives. Yet everything we say is our take on things and so is creative in that way. Nothing is not creative. The bones of truth are seen through our eyes, are formed through our eyes, right?

[An aside from “The Origins of Creativity” in the new New Yorker: “Creating things today seems to be as cool as it ever was. Fewer college students may be taking literature courses, but creative-writing courses are oversubscribed. And what do those students want to write? Creative nonfiction.”]

I’ve written what I call a diary. And I keep writing poems. All filtered through my mind, all created and creative. The only thing changing genre does is change the angle of vision while the shape of the waters always in motion.

Traveling back and forth, poetry to prose, I’m noticing the shifts. Like when I write this blog, what is its point A and will it arrive at point B? It may be the most “creative” thing I do in the sense that it’s utterly free form. I depend on you to be interested in the unspooling of my mind.

Yesterday, Jerry was in a short readers’ theater presentation called “The Rehearsal.” In it, a group of people attempt to rehearse a melodrama, misreading the script because of the poor handwriting of the director. It was hysterical, but not because of the words on the page. It was that we knew the readers; we were hearing through their personalities—the one who’s always late, who speaks Spanish better than English, the one who can barely hear, the one who used to be a preacher, and two who used to be distinguished professors. Used to be, in each case, with the scent, the quality, still attached, filtered through the audience’s mind.

Hysterical, because we have this information. Hysterical because we’re all old and know it. Hysterical because the play is completely useless, made up of a cowboy hat, one-off lines and facial expressions. Comedy is useless, and that’s why it’s worth so much, right? Poems are useless, all movement of thought that doesn’t follow a trajectory from A to B is useless, right? But that’s where all the excitement is. In the fillagree, the dance, the song. It is also where the truth is.

Getting directly from point A to point B never happens in real life. The train takes a thousand side trips in our minds. It passes through the valley of despair, the mountains of aspiration, the fog of memory. It forgets where it was going. What was point B? Did I imagine it? Then what is the actual, scientific truth? Among the quarks, leptons, antiquarks, and bosons, try finding what doesn’t move. When we give names to the shadows of the shadows of what we think we’ve found, this is creative. No such thing as not creative.

At the moment my mind seems to have unleashed itself. It doesn’t want to be concerned with form. I deeply appreciate the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, the wild creativity that can sometimes come from a writer’s submission to these received forms. I’ve written a number of poems in form. But not at the moment. I wonder if age causes the mind to unspool. I suspect it does. I don’t mean losing your mind. I mean loosening its strictures.

It’s true that I am like the poet Maggie Smith, who says, "I enter every writing project as a poet." Smith thinks of poetry as a "sort of a sweet spot for holding seemingly oppositional emotions or impulses in the same compact space. It's sometimes more painful to live with that in life than it is on the page.”

Mary Delaney made this flower and hundreds others from paper.

Speaking of poets writing prose, I’m reading Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden, the story of Mary Delaney, her life and the intricate, amazingly exact and detailed cut-out paper flowers she started making at age 72. It’s a story of an eighteenth century woman beginning her creative life at that age.  It’s a tour de force, with Molly’s own life intertwined. I think sometimes we have to shed the strictures of our expectations to begin our work. Sometimes that happens early, sometimes late, but it’s always about shedding. I think all writers should pray for shedding.

The P.S. . . .

You may be interested in this: Kate Morgan, as her MFA thesis, wrote a lovely interview with me about The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). that was just published in the AWP Chronicle. There’s a short video at the end. https://www.mydigitalpublication.com/article/Women+Who+Love+Musicians+All+Their+Lives%3A+An+Interview+with+Fleda+Brown/4556207/788628/article.html

Another note: It’s true, I’m a bit of a hermit (hence my sitting at home writing this blog), but it’s time I read some of my new work out loud in front of an audience. Please let me know if you’d like to help me set up a reading, or if you’d like to read with me. I’d appreciate it.

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Thank you to my mother, who insisted we have rituals.  Easter dresses, white shoes (mandated after Easter, you know), hats, church, Easter eggs. Thank you to my father for the ritual of poems and songs. Thank you to both of them for our long walks, me being pulled in the little red wagon, or sitting on my father’s shoulders.

This morning I’m hearing the racheting honks of returning geese. Smaller birds have started passionately talking to each other. Bushes and trees have at last formed their tight little buds here in the north. It happens to be Easter as I write this. And Passover, for my daughter and her family.

A celebration of the return of spring, a religious service, a poem—all ritual, all set deliberate boundaries around the action. Ritual is designed to increase consciousness. “Look, I’m going out for a walk now.” “Look, I’m bowing my head. I’m saying Amen.” “Look, I’m putting on my dressy clothes.” “Look, I’m making this poem.” The common denominator is “Look.” Awareness.

The thing about ritual—it builds up energy from the deliberate slowing or stopping of time. If you fast for a few days, you know what it is to eat. If you quit talking, you know what it is to talk. If you end a line before the naturally occurring margin, you see the line, itself.

As you may know, this is National Poetry Month. My friend David Baker reminds us that It is also National Sports Eye Injury Month and National Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month. As he says, “Perspective, my friends.” Happily, I am writing poems after a nail-biting hiatus, which is ridiculous, as Jerry always reminds me. I think I will never write poems again. Every time. It may be necessary to approach the work from a position of poverty. Maybe you have to empty yourself, spiritually.

My poetry workshop group met to Zoom into David’s symposium on nature poems. There are so many kinds of nature poems, but lately I’ve been interested in poems prompted by walking, often through nature.  Poems whose impetus comes from a walk. I do a lot of that. Walking, that is. I have my routes, my rituals, radiating out in all directions. I’m avoiding the woods behind us until the soggy ground firms up a bit. You can find me headed toward the historic barns, or along the paved bike trail through the marshy areas, or looping in the opposite direction around the hospital.

I’m not exactly out looking for a subject. Well, when something interests me, like a very old copper beech tree, or a milkweed pod, or the mechanical guts of the hospital out back, I store it up. I bring it home. I have four of these Walk poems so far.

National Poetry Month. Poems go on all the time, but it doesn’t hurt to put a fence around one month, a ritual to pay special attention. I won’t bother to talk up the value of poems. Just as well talk up the value of walks, or breathing.  

I’ve left behind the Easter rituals, the eggs, the hat, the church. When I say behind, I mean I see them in my rearview mirror as lovely and meaningful markers of time. Markers of time the way a walk marks time, one step, the next step. But time seems to spread out differently for me in these years so that it somehow encompasses the whole field.

I think I’ve finished my “Diary” of moving into a senior living place. Interestingly, a friend just sent me an article about the screenwriter Paul Schrader, who is happily living in a high-end Assisted Living facility, while juggling dozens of film projects. His wife, who has Alzheimer’s, is in a different wing. He doesn’t need to be there, but he finds the luxury living and the proximity to his wife a boon to his work and his life. This is, in a less dire situation, what my diary is about. I’ll keep you posted on its fate in the Darwinian world of publishing.

Mike at Brilliant Books in Traverse City has curated a list of 30 poets to read. It’s a smart place to look if you think of yourself as a beginner, or not.  Here’s the link:

https://www.brilliant-books.net/30-poets-poetry-month?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Read%20the%20Article&utm_campaign=LocalWeekly230408

The P.S. . . .

A new poem from me in Image Journal:

https://imagejournal.org/article/you-thought-you-could-make-things-be-a-certain-way/

My Wobbly Bicycle, 262

Snow and more snow, drifting down, blowing sideways, drifting again. Not a lot, but steady, enough for the machines to rumble out along the sidewalks. March is often like this here. I’m appreciating it, actually, feeling how ephemeral it is, both for the moment and in the long run as the planet warms. Enjoy it now.

I’m sitting in our bump-out living room, windows all around, reading Endurance, the story of Ernest Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent. There I am, my ship suddenly trapped in the pack ice, watching helplessly as the specially built barkentine with its seven foot thick keel is completely crushed as if it were cardboard. There I am with the 27 other crew and the sled dogs, striking out on foot across the ice boulders, the tundra of ice.

I do love watching people figure it out, improvise. I love humans in nature, surviving. This is a good story. Presidents could take lessons from Shackleton, the way he keeps his crew working together. The way he stays fully in charge without becoming a dictator.

But what I really want to think about is snow, how it encloses, how it sends me downstairs to the library to pick a book I wouldn’t have thought of under other circumstances. Snow’s ruminating quality, the way it covers the delicate details so you have to see broader, wider. You’re not thinking so much about yourself as about the hugeness. Imagine Shackleton’s men, looking at snow and ice as far as they could see, and further.

Kids at one of the Fresh Air camps

What would the men and women, trapped by poverty in the inner city, be like if they had to figure out how to survive in the wilderness? There are reservoirs in people that cry out to be tapped into. Otherwise, a rot sets in. Drugs, for example, their pitiful substitute for real adventure. I’ve been donating for many years to an organization called Fresh Air Fund, that gives  New York City kids a trip out of the city to find out about the rest of the world. There are host families as well as camps. I think I started donating when I read a story of kids, bussed for the first time out of the city, who asked the name of those large animals in the field, and were told that’s where milk comes from.

Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, being crushed by the ice.

Adventure’s a human need. When the continent’s been mapped and the bottom of the sea’s been videoed, there’s the sky, the quanta, the recesses of the mind. The books. The ones that make the mind work, not the ones that lull the mind to sleep.

My synapses are getting a workout. I read Patricia Bosworth‘s The Men in My Life about the Actor’s Studio in the days of Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, Doris Day, Tennessee Williams, and then I take off for the Antarctic! I’m continuing to have this stubborn resistance to writing poems. What’s that about? My mind’s spent so many years pulling and pulling out of itself what it could. Now it wants to do nothing but greedily fill itself up.

Filling in gaps. That’s what it feels like. Nonfiction, memoir. While I was dreaming along in my self-absorbed growing up, caught in my own angst, what have other people’s lives been like?  The nitty-gritty of them. The prose of them. It’s interesting, the changes in me at the moment. There is some subterranean shift. I wonder if I’ll write better poems, if I’ll quit writing poems, if I’ll quit writing. This of course is only interesting to me. But you may at least find some sympathetic comfort in watching me wobble along on my bicycle.

The P.S. . . Snow’s almost disappeared overnight. Spring’s official though not actual.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 261

Rene Magritte, The Blank Page

Once again, the blank page. Every two weeks. I don’t “have to” write this blog, but I’ve committed myself to it. Generally, something will appear as I type. I look out the window. It’s early morning. Snow again, of all things, just when I had given up on a “normal” winter. I’m sitting here with my computer on its handy-dandy lap rack, thinking I’ve finished my “diary.” It’s short, 188 pages, but it’s as long as I want it to be. Now to scout out a publisher.

 I can’t seem to get started on anything else. Yet.

All this forward movement: Could I live any other way? Could I be without a project? Would it be more noble, more enlightened, to simply “be in the now”?

The woman who’s knitting a sweater, or shelling peas, has a project. If you’re reading a book, isn’t that a project? Reading the Sunday Times is a project! Can you only be in the now when you’re sauntering through the woods listening to the birds?

I seem to be in a period of watching and listening. That doesn’t mean I’m not putting words on paper, seeing if I can make something of them. Watching and listening doesn’t mean doing nothing else, does it? Maybe the watching and listening is going to mean more poems. Maybe not. I seem to be feeling out my surroundings to see what’s next, with as little prejudice as possible.

The between-time for writers is difficult, isn’t it? The blank page. If you’re a writer, maybe you never have a between-time. But I do. It’s scary. Even the time between one poem and the next. Maybe by the next time I write this blog, I’ll be happily into a new project, or maybe not. Maybe “project” is the wrong word. Maybe the best word is “intention.”

Intention could be so small you hardly notice it, like flipping the light switch. Or it could be huge, like getting a divorce or deciding to have a baby. The sources of the intention are so far below the surface, we only feel the results as they bubble up and become what we call our “choice.”

Like the choice to get a new kitty. Nah. Not a choice. Here the kitty came, and we simply took him. We were primed to take him. By the way, Ollie’s hysterical. He tilts his ears back and dives fiercely at everything. He started batting the steam coming out of our room-sized humidifier. That was so much fun, he sat on top of it and got his bottom soaking wet. Then the thing quit running. We had to dry it out for a day.

Is Ollie playing in order to practice being a predator? Is he diving at his toys, chasing madly after the laser beam, with the intention of becoming a skillful adult? You could say it’s the intention of the universe, to teach him. And it is, but that’s like saying the intention of the universe is that we breathe. It’s all inseparable, isn’t it, the act and the intention.  

Does that mean we have no free will? Wow. I used to argue this one with my father all the time. My father the materialist saw nothing but cause and effect. Indian yogis, on the other hand, would say that what they mean by free will is a freedom that transcends the physical world,  which would entirely bypass my father’s argument.

On the Indian yogi side, consider the things we thought were solid—waves, particles, time, distance—and how they’ve been dissolved before our eyes. When there’s nothing solid to stand on, it’s hard to talk about cause and effect the same way.

Instead, how about we talk about “conditionality”? “When one thing is present, another comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises.  When this is absent, that does not come to be; on the cessation of this, that ceases.” Sorry, I don’t remember what I’m quoting.

Maybe you could think of free will like a medical diagnosis:  By showing that the illness depends on a series of conditions, you can find the point at which the series can be broken, so it’s possible to cure it.

Good lord, how did I get in this deep? I was just drinking my coffee, looking out at the snow. I hope you like idle musing. Maybe next time I’ll float back down to earth. Maybe I’ll have a project.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 260

It’s my turn to name our kitty. I said Chaucer at first, but decided it’s too hard to say, all full of fricatives, its final r clipping off the word. It shall be Ollie. We’ve had Wally, dear loving Wally who dropped dead in front of us with a heart attack. Then Molly, with her bundle of fears. A little silly, I guess, the rhyming game, but Ollie rolls off your tongue. My heart is full. Cliché, yes. True, yes. I literally feel it in the region of my heart, a warmth. Such a dear little thing, a scraggly kid. All ears, eyes, and legs. White with large and random patches of black, a black face with a large triangle of white on the nose. He’s lived in a secure and loving family all his three months. His mother and father both live there, a second generation of security. He’s trusting, interested in everything, so busy exploring in the morning he barely takes  time to eat.

How can I type this? He’s playing with the keys, climbing on my shoulder. At night he started out sleeping on our heads, then decided it’s warmer under our covers by our feet. After our long and painful months and years with Molly, trying to encourage her to at least come out from under the bed,  then easing her as best we could through her cancer, he’s an absolute joy.  I think of my mother, after years of taking care of my brain-damaged brother, deciding to have another child. How could she do that? She had Mark to take care of! I see now the great healing another chance can bring. The atmosphere has changed here. Wide-eyed youth is everywhere, leaping at imaginary mice, batting the cords on the blinds, chasing the ball around the circle toy.

Fortified by Ollie quieting down on the back of the sofa behind me, I want to tell you about the documentary we watched here at the Club yesterday afternoon. (We’re having a week’s virtual trip to Vietnam.) The contrast is so stark. It was made by a Cambodian journalist who set out to record the survivors of the Killing Fields and ended up spending ten years sitting across the table from Nuon Chea, second-in-command under Pol Pot, of the Khmer Rouge, who after a long period of denying he knew anything, at last began to talk. He matter-of-factly described how they killed so many people his hand got sore from slitting throats. It was simply a matter of getting rid of the “problem.” Kill off those who stand in the way of a better regime. Near the end of the ten years, just before Chea was arrested, the journalist revealed that his whole family had been wiped out by Chea and his soldiers. The old soldier almost cried. “I am so very, very sorry,” he said. As the old man was led to the helicopter that took him to prison, the journalist said something like, “I am a mixture of feelings. I don’t forgive him, but I’ll miss him.”

Which tells me two things: you can’t sit across the table from anyone for ten years and not begin to see his humanity, his vulnerability, under the layers. Love is seeing the essential being and has nothing to do with politics. The second is that there is a great need for kittens in the world. Kittens demonstrate what it is to start again, to see straight to the heart. Kittens purr when they’re petted, they meow when they want fed, they sleep on the back of the sofa if you won’t let them play with the keys.

Meanwhile, I’m working on my diary. All this goes into it. I have 140 pages now. I’m aiming for something like 200, if the energy of the telling keeps up. I just re-read the whole thing yesterday. I like it, myself, so I’m feeling optimistic.