My Wobbly Bicycle, 170

“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,” said Gore Vidal. “Author Envy,” by William Giraldi, appears in the new  issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. I couldn’t imagine what else could be said about this subject, and I was right, but Giraldi did compile an impressive collection of other writers talking about jealousy, from Francis Bacon in 1625 to Angus Wilson and Cynthia Ozick. “Spend enough time around writers, Giraldi writes, “and you’re certain to hear it. Often it’s barely caught at the tail of a comment, or in certain murmurings, or else heard in an outright hiss or snarl. It can wear the cloak of sarcasm or ridicule or calm contempt.” “Writers, like academics,” he observes, “are easily pricked by envy because the criteria for success seem bewilderingly arbitrary, contradictory, even downright unliterary. . . . There’s often an echoic canyon between excellence and success.” Lord knows it’s true. Poetry (all art, for that matter) can be elevated to public attention partly by the writer’s influential connections, partly by happenstance, partly by the novelty and/or timeliness of the work. Is there such a thing as “good” and “bad”? Certainly. That’s a whole nuther subject. But sometimes it takes several generations to sort that out. (I think that even the ephemeral, though, feeds the general air that creates good and more lasting work.) What Giraldi doesn’t spend much time on is what to do about this envy. He says it’s mostly self-pity. If we had more self-esteem, he says. .  .  . And what is the magic formula, pray tell, for developing self-esteem? Working hard, studying the craft. But chances are, we’re just plain not as good as a lot of writers, dead and alive. And chances are our work is going to run through a shredder or be composted before our lives are over. Yes, but, we wash dishes every day, we sweep the floor, we go for walks. These activities aren’t useless because they pass away. Nothing lasts forever. Rachel Zucker, in an essay in the May/June American Poetry Review, writes,  "Rethink the virtue of timelessness. Do you want to write a poem . . .that will last forever? Really? Like plastic? Like toxic waste?" She also quotes the end of a poem by Alice Notley: "You are not great. You are life." Easy to say. But the point of writing is to be heard. The broader the hearing, the more satisfying for the writer. And considering that no writer I know is ever sure of his or her own work, the more praise, the better. I wouldn’t blame us for that. We can’t be sure of what we write because we’re making something new. Criteria of excellence are in large part based on what’s already been written. So the new has to face immense uncertainty. It has always been thus. The church imprisoned Galileo for heresy for his crazy idea that the earth revolves around the sun.  Climate change? Some people would rather see us all drown or die of starvation than admit that humans are changing their environment. Back to the question of how we writers can handle envy. Some thoughts: 

1. Admit the envy to myself. Fully, completely. Sample inner dialogue: “I am so jealous of her Guggenheim I could scream.” “His poems aren’t half as good as mine, but he just got yet another NEA award.” Watch how it makes me feel. Don’t try to push the feelings away. Don’t try to justify them. They’re just feelings. You didn’t make them happen. They just arose. They have a right to express themselves.

2. Ask myself deeply why I write. See if I can NOT write. Stop for a while. If I then return to the page, well then, I must write because it is my nature to write. That nature is to be honored. This is what might be called self-esteem.

3. Read other people’s work humbly, to learn from it, rather than to find fault. I’ve learned a great deal from work I don’t really like much.

4. Turn the gaze down toward the page, not out toward the imaginary applause.

5. Wish all writers well, as a matter of religious practice. Writing is hard work. It’s intensely lonely work. No one succeeds without dragging behind her the ragged hem of failure.

 I do think a writer who’s working hard doesn’t have much time to feel jealous, but of course it flushes over us sometimes. If we try to push it away, we can start a cycle of dishonesty that can cause us to lose track of our real self and contribute to the development of a false self. And bedrock honesty is a major criterion for good work. Furthermore, nobody ever said good writing is full of sweetness and light. It might be full of the rage of jealousy, or of anger, or bitterness, or, or, or. . . .       

My Wobbly Bicycle, 169

 I can see myself in my crib, pushing my fuzzy bunny from one side to the other, to see how it looks over there. I grew up in a very messy house, and I guess you could say that my decorating was to quell the storm. But more than that, I get aesthetic pleasure out of beautiful spaces. We had very little money when I was young, but that didn’t stop me. I painted a bookcase, I put up old curtains I found in a box. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I kept a notebook of decorating ideas. I pored over my favorite magazine, Metropolitan Home. I cut out pictures. I made a kitchen chandelier out of a metal flood-light shade. It’s a wonder I didn’t die of fumes from stripping and refinishing furniture. I recovered dozens of throw pillows. My thesaurus wants to pair decorate with embellish, adorn, garnish, bedeck. Those feel wrong, so maybe decorate is the wrong word. I was trying to bring aesthetic harmony to the whole. Not harmony, maybe—not accord, synchronization, or congruence, exactly. I was trying to make a poem. In a poem you feel the parts speaking to each other but not necessarily smoothly. You feel they’re right, together, but not arranged. I don’t think any of this had much to do with making an impression on others, although that’s nice. It was for me. It was—is—to please my own eye. Our smaller cottage , the one Jerry and I live in at the lake, has looked like a dorm room forever. When we inherited it, it had second-hand furniture my step-grandmother had gotten from somewhere. We donated the sofa and the kitchen table and chairs to Goodwill. We brought a small table from Delaware and brought a futon from the big cottage. This has been a long winter for so many reasons. I’ve had meniscus and hernia surgeries.  Not serious, but still. And my father died. And we’re coming to terms with Jerry’s very limited mobility. And I am in a funk with my writing. Not surprising, since I’ve reached an end point with two books. So as not to allow myself to sink further into the slough of despond, I have been doing what I can with the little cottage! I ordered a new sofa, sent it back, ordered another (This is like me. I had to drive the hour to the lake in each case, of course.) We went on several expeditions for a different coffee table and other objects. I’m a hunter. Give me a project, I’ll get my machete and basket and head into the jungle, all my senses on high alert. The more humble, the more inconsequential in the larger world, the better. I am the village woman, the picker of berries, the collector of bark for potions: you get what I mean. Two months later—in snow so high we got stuck getting out of there and had to be rescued—we tried out a different paint color for the living room walls. Barely different, but we got rid of the mustardy tinge to the brown. I found a vase that has the right shade of orange (my color) in it in a local antique store. Not expensive, but perfect. This is the thing. There is no difference in my joy in having found the perfect objet and my having found the perfect word. How do I know it’s perfect? I just do. I’ll fight to the death for that word, for that vase. It is somehow crucial. Later, I might change it, because the whole may have somehow shifted. But. I’ve done a lot of this from home, from my head, from websites. It’s all in my head, actually. I try out so many things that way that my head is a revolving door of possibilities. The real thing can’t compare to the internal adventures. Which, then, is the real thing? Hard to say.  Nonetheless, this aesthetic fiddling, as it has in the past, has gotten me through a dark patch. Surely the sun will shine soon, and the daffodils will begin to bloom. From the poet Linda Gregg, who died in March: "What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech." (Via The Washington Post)       

My Wobbly Bicycle, 168

I once took a course in speed-reading. Actually, I also taught it a few times. It was popular in the 70s. The idea was to learn to move your eyes over and down the page in syntactic chunks, to train yourself not to read word-by-word. We used a machine called a ratometer that could be set to move a guide down the page at a set speed. When you finished a section, there was a comprehension test. You had to get a certain score before you could advance to a faster speed. I guess it made a difference. I’m a fast reader. My eyes can fly over the page, or down the column, and get the gist of the material. I do miss things, sometimes important ones, but I can summarize the article pretty well. People who measure various kinds of IQs over time have noted that we as a culture have significantly advanced our visual IQ. We can see quick changes on a screen, we can absorb all manner of spectacle, sights that would have given our grandparents apoplexy. What does it mean, to "know"? Among the kinds of knowing, is there one that's "best"? Since the Enlightenment, we've privileged rational fact-gathering, yet recently it's become glaringly evident that we humans have, all along, been driven by irrational, or sub-rational, forces. Rationality tags along to justify, and to clean up the mess. Yet we got here--meaning, we learned to read, to do math, to form governments, to make and enforce laws. You have to respect this kind of knowing. You have to support it. But not pretend it's all there is. Sometimes I feel hopelessly sad. What's that about? Sometimes I wake up to a room filled with rationality, my clothes in their drawers, my IPhone telling me what's on for today. Speed-reading is akin to riding on a train, looking out the window as New Jersey passes by, declaring you have seen New Jersey. Technically. Conversely, I’ve been reading a lot of Virginia Woolf this winter. If you want plot (which I sometimes really do), go read a mystery. If you want to be so deeply imbedded in the non-rational moment that the very texture of the grass is evident on your feet, if you want to feel what it’s like to be inside the character’s mind as she finds herself painstakingly shifting from one perspective to the next, Woolf is your writer. Everything is built of molecular moments. It’s possible to speed the visuals up so fast that they turn into only the (measurable) outlines. But if the intention is to understand, it seems necessary to stand under. Stand under Big Ben long enough and you can see the hands actually move. Poems are not for the impatient, not for the goal-driven. Neither is Virginia Woolf, or Dickens or Thackeray, or Trollope, or any  of the luscious nineteenth century Russian novels. Neither is Annie Dillard, or W.G. Sebald. They are for immersion; they don’t sit well with the reader who’s intent on ticking off one more box on an accomplishment list, something to increase one’s self-image, or who wants the story serve a purpose. Well, yes, there is something to get, and a purpose to serve, but it’s not of the nature of passing a reading comprehension test at the end. Or getting to be the smartest. If you can summarize the meaning of a poem, you’ve pretty much lost it. Actually, I think the more we summarize (factualize) and evaluate anything—a movie, a novel, a poem, a person—the more we’ve lost it/him/her. Speed is the general case, in this century. But under the speed lie the slow undulations, and under them are the still slower ones. I’m thinking it’s not only a shame to miss the slower ones, but missing them leads to inaccurate interpretations of the faster ones. We really screw up, I think, when we believe our quick-glance prejudices. Prejudices are, after all, only the sensational book jacket, not the story itself.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 167

Last year, the attorney told me that settling my father’s (modest) Trust would not be hard. I understood him to say he could handle most things. What that meant, apparently, was that he would give me a nice, neat three-page list of what needs to be done. Unless we want to spend a fortune on attorney’s fees. I have kept an equally nice, neat file box, 11 items (investment accounts, retirement accounts, etc.) each in its own folder. This is not my area of expertise, for God’s sake, but I thought I had it under control. Okay, we are going to play Monopoly. No matter where you land, you must draw a card. Here are the cards: 

1. The National Service Life Insurance policy for $10,000 you just found (surprise!) in your father’s papers was offered to soldiers in WWII. You call the VA. You are at last routed to someone who says he converted it at age 70 to a less expensive policy, with a different name, worth only $5,000, which is why you didn’t recognize it. You had cashed it in in 2016.

2. General American Life is not the same as American General Life. You call. You find that your father’s two General American policies were sold to Metlife. You had already cashed them both in, one in 2016 and one in 2018. You knew that, but were unaware that they were the same as General American.

3. American General is also U.S. Life. Your father has a small U.S. Life policy. You did not know it is the same as American General. American General Group is AIG. They are also associated with The Variable Annuity Life Insurance Company, VALIC. After several inquiries, you ascertain that the VALIC policy is indeed the active one. And, by the way, so is the U.S. Life. Both small. Don’t ask why. Your father was just that way.

4. John Alden Insurance Company has moved its contracts to several different companies, although the name John Alden is still in business, although you can’t tell which company holds which John Alden contracts.

5. You discover that his Total Control Account is actually a Metlife company. Tracing most companies on your computer from their source names, you see that Metlife owns basically everything.

6. Chevron used to be Texaco, which explains the rogue receipt for Texaco stock in your father’s papers. Chevron stock is handled by Computershare. SunAmerica is handled by AIG. Guess which is where your stock is.

7. Enter the contract number you are calling about. We’re sorry, we can’t locate that number. If you would like to speak to an agent, press. 4. We are experiencing a large volume of calls. You can choose to wait on the line or you will find our website has answers to almost all your questions.

8. Go to the notary today. Go to the notary tomorrow. Go to the bank to get the bank manager to affix a Medallion stamp on your application to transfer or sell your stock. It can only be affixed by the bank manager, who is busy at the moment but if you’ll just be seated, there’s coffee and water. Help yourself.

9. Sorry, we handle only individual accounts. For annuity accounts, call this number. We’re sorry, we are experiencing a large volume of calls. You can choose to wait on the line or you will find our website can answer most of your questions.

  10. Wally the Buddha Cat says, “Chaos is inherent in all        compounded things. Leave me alone. I’m trying to sleep." 

My Wobbly Bicycle, 166

Gray and cold. Very cold, day after day. Reading a lot. I read Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf,  based on a short review in The New Yorker. I didn’t realize she would include so much detail about the death of her father. Maybe not what I wanted to read right now. But maybe so. Smyth seamlessly weaves Woolf’s To the Lighthouse through her own story. (“Perhaps there is one book for every life,” she writes). Both books are in their way about grief. Smyth’s father was a difficult man, an alcoholic, but funny, smart, and the center of her life. She takes us step-by-step through his slow decline, his death, and her long grief. Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsey, a beautiful, nurturing woman is the emotional center of the whole Ramsey entourage. After Mrs. Ramsey dies suddenly, the second half of the novel describes the dissolution of the world she’d built around her. Two unmoorings: Woolf’s (the book is strongly autobiographical) and Smyth’s. Smyth says, “My father was dead. How completely strange.” I say, even though we claim we get it, doesn't it still feel strange? We act as if we’re solid and somehow, against all the odds, permanent. When we see, firsthand, that we’re not, well, Smyth says, “Being a human being had suddenly become a more serious occupation than it once seemed.” Smyth:  “To grieve is to be floored, again and again, by a series of epiphanies that, put to paper, sound painfully banal.” Oh heavens, don’t you hate it when people try to tell you all about a book or movie? When all they really mean is that it touched something in them, triggered some emotion they can’t explain but somehow if they keep trying to tell you about it, they’ll get some clarity? Smyth:  “’Dad’s dead.’ Oh I said and cried a bit not because I wanted or needed to, but because it seemed the thing to do.”  I don’t know that I’ve ever read any better account of how grief seems to work. You think you should display it for others, because they expect it, but that might not be the moment it hits you. Or it might not be tears, but a dullness you feel, a flatness. The death of a parent is so primal the grief comes from a source farther down in you than personality. Not his personality. Maybe that, too, but deeper, a quake in the core of what you’re made of. So then I re-read To the Lighthouse. If you haven’t read it in years, or haven’t read it at all, be warned that, like all Virginia’s Woolf’s books, it’s like viewing life underwater. Slow. So deep inside the characters, emotions washing against each other and mixing so that they hardly know what they feel. Books, if they’re good and true ones, give you life to look at, held apart from you enough that you can sometimes see better. They don’t give you answers, because that’s entirely beside the point. They give you lives. All I have to say is, when there’s a major grief, it's likely to puncture a hole in you that lets out all the others, the older ones that have been lying dormant, have not been fully expressed, or need a different language this time. Maybe, too, the massive sorrows of this planet. All I have to say is, to echo Katharine Smyth, life is completely strange. Thank you for the cards. I’ve been glad to get them. *************Also, if you aren’t yet subscribed and would like a notice in your email when I post (approx. once every two weeks), send me an email at fleda@udel.edu. Just say “subscribe.” If you want to unsubscribe, say “unsubscribe.”           

My Wobbly Bicycle, 165

It was a beautiful day. I wanted to get my father out of his tiny assisted-living quarters. I took him for a drive up the Leelanau peninsula. This is a poem from my new manuscript: Not Dying He says he wakes and it feels momentarilylike he’s finally dying, a giving way, a sinkingor hovering, can’t say, but momentary: a window swungopen you don’t realize until a breeze. I take him for a ride along the tongueof land, west looking east, looking back at the cityfrom a point. Jet trails. He points them out, strunglike necklaces, one fresh, with its glint out front. We talk glaciers, how they stuttered and glinteddown Michigan, pools for each pause,those excellent lapses. And branches bare becausethe trees are all dead, he says, forgetting the time of year. No, I say, dormant. Road hum. Ducks with their flawless wake.It hurts to turn his head. I slow and turn. Each new thingneeds to be dead center, unencumbered.  The names:mallard, jet trail, Power Island. Boat slips claim blank water breathing in their hollows. He says it feelslike dying, he says it as if he had been lit up from the inside,a room waiting, a waiting room. Not an ordeal,but road hum and light. At night the aides come by. One kisses him goodnighton the lips, he says. Where? The lips.  He smilesas if he’s gotten away with something. He’s milesaway, a faint agreeable aftertaste. Nothing he can describe. I rhymed this one, in my own way. He would have much preferred the rhyme to thump hard at the end, Robert Service-like, phrases all wrapped up. He didn’t understand my poems. But he said, “You must be good at this, you have so many books.” He read several of my poems in his weekly “Poetry with Phillips” times at Willow Cottage, where he lived. But they were a mystery to him. I didn’t try to help him much, because whatever degree of autism he had, completely prevented his understanding of metaphor, of the intangible. No emotion makes it more clear that the body/mind is one function than grief. It floods and ebbs and flows as it will. It can’t be shut down and it can’t be called forth. Oh well, it can be called forth. An image can do it in a flash. What I would like to say at the moment about my father, who died a week ago Monday, is that he was the most intensely curious person I have ever known. Somehow the brain-glitch that prevented one aspect of his self to manifest held open a floodgate of awareness in other ways. I kept learning from him up until he died. I took my IPhone with me every time I visited him, because I knew he’d have questions about things I couldn’t answer myself, so we’d look them up. At 100, almost 101, and beginning to get fuzzier, he would ask about the life cycle of the emerald ash borer. Raised in a mechanical-Newtonian world, he was still struggling to understand the relativity of time and space. I’ve kept his ragged copy of “Einstein” because I’m as baffled as he was by the way the universe is made of nothing but shifting.