Landslide

 

I've been gone a long time. Three months and change. During which a lot has gone down that is not likely ever to find its way toward articulation. It's been a weird, hard time for everybody. The pandemic. The insurrection. The free-floating craziness and stupidity. I have found it hard maintain concentration on the sorts of projects that in the past have given me satisfaction. I have, for example, a stack of books each of which I made it halfway through before picking up another. I pretty much stopped making collages for a couple of months. Like everyone else, I guess, I've been feeling disconnected. Yesterday on some combination of impulse, boredom, and despair I took a blank piece of paper a Pigma Micron pen and started the first pen-and-ink abstract I've done in like forever. It felt good to focus down and watch the shapes emerge and see how they adapted to and talked with one another. 

 

 

The shapes came first, and evolved the rules of their generation as they emerged over the course of an hour or two. At some point I had to decide whether to fill in the entire paper or not, but it felt better to me to let the shapes exist in a dialogue with the larger field of white. So I did it that way. Today I inked them in, and that became a second exercise in attention and observation. While I was inking them in, I was considering what I would choose to entitle the piece, which began to present itself to me as a kind of archaelogical field. Titles are always problematic for me, in that once you have put a title on the piece you have essentially defined it down. A piece like this one, which could suggest or "mean" a lot of things in a lot of ways, is delimited or reduced by a title. Someone looking at the piece and then at the title is being given a frame that is going to affect the way the piece is perceived. As I was working I wrote down some of the titles that went through my mind: 

Because I Said So 

Systemic Inertia 

Elegy 

Little By 

Afterword 

Wrack 

In the end, I decided on "Landslide," which conveys some of the sense the completed picture gives me of various things falling one on top of another. (I'm a fan of Jean Dubuffet, and in many of his paintings and drawings, like this one and several of the ones here, he has what appear to be cross-sections of subterranean environments. So that was in the back of my mind as well.) So "Landslide" works, I guess, although I sort of like the idea of a constellation of possible names, each of which would provide a different filter for considering the work. But at least there is now new work to be considered, which I'm happy about.

 

Kindred Spirits

 

     A few weeks ago I got to spend a few days in a house which had an extensive collection of old books. I spent a fair amount of time pulling titles off the shelves and sampling their contents. My most interesting discovery was a two-volume collection of essays by a British cleric and educator named Vicesimus Knox, who lived from 1752 to 1821. His father had been headmaster of the Tonbridge School, a post which Knox himself held for some time as well. Knox seems to have become a controversial figure because of his his public criticism of British foreign policy as well as his outspoken opinions on pretty much everything else under the sun.
     I knew nothing of this, or of Knox himself, when I started sampling his essays. The first thing that caught my eye, as I was flipping through the book, was an essay entitled "On the Means of Reading with the Most Advantage," in which he offers advice to students on how to best approach their studies, being careful to strike a tone which is encouraging without being directive:

I wish to premise, that in what I now say, and in whatever I have said, in the style of direction and advice, I mean only to offer, not to intrude; to submit, and not to dictate.

I've spent my entire adult life as an educator, and I've done perhaps more than my share of such exhortations to students, encouraging them to read widely, and attempting to provide them with the analytical tools that might allow them to derive both pleasure and and intellectual enrichment from their studies. I've also been a lifelong practitioner of, and advocate for, the act of writing itself as a means of improving one's thinking. Writing makes thinking hold still, which provides the opportunity for first thoughts to become second thoughts. And writing is a powerful means of directing and focusing attention, which is the starting point for all thinking. Learning, engagement, delight: all begin with the decision to turn your attention in some particular direction. The quality of your engagement with what you are working on or what you are reading is determined in large part by how well you can channel your attention. Which is the argument that Knox makes:

 

Indeed, if we can once fix our attention very closely to a good book, nothing more will be necessary to make us love it: As in nature, when two bodies approach each other very nearly, the attraction of cohesion fastens them together; so when the mind attaches itself closely to any subject whatever, it becomes, as it were, united to it, and gravitates towards it with a spontaneous velocity. There is indeed no study so dry, but by fixing our attention upon it we may at last find it capable of affording great delight. Metaphysics and mathematics, even in their abstrusest parts, are known to give the attentive student a very exalted satisfaction. Those parts then of human learning, which in their nature are more entertaining, cannot fail of being beloved in a high degree, when the mind is closely and constantly applied to them.

All very well, of course, but not so easy to put into practice. Which Knox acknowledges:

In order to acquire the power and habit of fixing the attention, it will at first be necessary to summon a very considerable degree of resolution. In beginning the study of a new language, or any book or science, which presents ideas totally strange, the mind cannot but feel some degree or reluctance or disgust. But persevere; and, in a very short time, the disgust will vanish, and you will be rewarded with entertainment. Till this takes place, make it an inviolable rule, however disagreeable, to read a certain quantity, or for a certain time, and you will infallibly find, that what you began as a task, you will continue as an amusement.

I was quite pleased to make the acquaintance of a fellow educator, who some two hundred years ago was writing very carefully crafted essays, of a kind not unrelated to those I have written myself on these subjects. A kindred spirit, so to speak. I wound up finding his two books of essays online at a reasonable price, and have spent a number of hours over the last few weeks reading them and transcribing passages which I have found to be of particular interest.

There is much to admire here. He is an artful stylist, albeit over-formal by today's standards. Most of his sentences are artfully constructed; many are quite funny. I laughed out loud more often that I had expected to in reading these essays. He has a broad range of opinions on politics, on art, on the classics, on religion, on what constitutes morality, on what makes for a well-lived life. He takes those opinions seriously, and he has made it his life's work to fix them in words so as to share them with anyone who might stumble across them, even two hundred years later.

Which is not to say that I am in agreement with all, or even most, of what he has to say. He, like me, like all of us, is a product of his times and his upbringing, and much of what he has to say is grounded in assumptions that those of his class and his (Anglican) religion would have taken for granted, but which would ruffle many a feather for readers in 2020. He takes his duties as a moralist quite seriously, and trains his rhetorical skills, which are considerable, on a wide variety of targets, some of which he cannot quite resist—and this is surprising coming from the humble country parson—the temptation to wax vituperative. Here for example, is a passage from "On Supporting the Dignity of the Commercial Character":

A time has been, when merchants only retired to their villas when they had accumulated their fortunes. They now begin with a villa, as if it were as necessary as a warehouse; and end with bankruptcy as naturally, as unreluctantly, and as unblushingly, as it it had been the honourable object of their mercantile pursuit. Distress and difficulty excite meanness and artifice; fraud and injustice soon follow, and the dignity of the British merchant is sunk in the scandalous appellation of a swindler.

In another essay, one with the imposingly indignant title, "On the Vanity and Folly of Departing from our Proper Sphere to Become Authors and Orators, Without Previous and Sufficient Preparation," he argues, in essence, that members of the working class should be mindful of—and remain in—their places. In particular, he doesn't believe that such people have any business entertaining writerly ambitions:

     The unfortunate man who has once contracted this lamentable distemper immediately feels an aversion for his trade or manual employment. He considers himself as a great natural genius, who has been brought up by his injudicious parents to a business far beneath him, and for which he is totally unfit. He is too delicate for hard or disagreeable labour, and too volatile for the phlegmatic employment of a counter or a counting-house. But it is a certain truth, that we seldom succeed in the mode of life which we do not love; and distress of every kind is the certain consequence of relinquishing the service of Mercury to pay court to the Muses.
     I wish the literary trader or mechanic to consider how very much out of character a student by profession would appear, were he to invade the province of the work-shop, and to lay down the pen and the book for the chisel, or the hammer, or the last, or the needle, or the trowel. He would succeed but ill in his studies if he chose to spend his time at the counter and in the warehouse, instead of the library; and the trader and the mechanic may assure themselves, that notwithstanding the flattering suggestions of their own vanity, they usually appear no less absurd, and succeed no less unhappily, in writing verses, or composing orations, than the student would appear in making a shoe, or retailing cheese and haberdashery.

Nor, alas, is he a fan of the novel. He's all in favor of reading of classic texts as a means of self-improvement, and he thinks that books about travel and geography are fine. But the novel? Not so much. Here's a passage from "Of Novel Reading":

At an inflammatory age the fuel of licentious ideas will always find a ready reception. The sentimental manner seems of late to have supplanted it. But it is a matter of doubt, whether even this manner be not equally dangerous. It has given an amiable name to vice, and has obliquely excused the extravagance of the passions, by representing them as the effect of lovely sensibility. The least refined affections of humanity have lost their indelicate nature, in the ideas of many; and transgressions forbidden by the laws of God and man have been absurdly palliated, as proceeding from an excess of those finer feelings, which Vanity has arrogated to herself as elegant and amiable distinctions. A softened appellation has given a degree of gracefulness to moral deformity.

Knox has a very clear set of ideas in his head about what constitutes the moral life. And he thinks we must be constantly on guard against temptations, those things which will distract us from what should be most central and most important.  Novels, for example. Licentious. Dangerous. Extravagant. Indelicate. Transgressive. Morally deformed.

Reading itself is, for Knox, best understood and practiced as a means of self-improvement. In his essay "On the Efficacy of Moral Instruction," he explains:

The end which I have chiefly in view in submitting these remarks, is not only to recommend an attention to books and instructive discourses, but to produce, if possible, an alteration in the scope and object of that attention. I wish readers to take up a book with a desire to receive from it moral instruction,  and not merely literary entertainment. Every one of us, whatever be our improvements, is liable to relax in his principles, unless they are frequently renewed and strengthened by admonition. Fortunately for us, books of morality abound; and places, where instruction is given in the most solemn manner, are almost daily open for our reception. But alas! how few of us purchase and peruse a book with a sincere desire to be rendered better men; and how many attend to the preacher solely to gratify their curiosity and derive amusement! Bad, indeed, must be the book and the sermon from which any man may not, if he will, receive some hint, which, when seriously reflected on, would lead to improvement. But our want of humility, and our idea that subjects which concern our worldly interest and pleasure are the only subjects worthy of the anxious care of a man of sense, render all which the wisest men have collected for our guidance utterly abortive.

I do not agree with many of Knox's core assumptions. I don't think that it is or should be necessary for any of us to devote every moment of our lives to self-improvement. I believe that should be some room in our lives for recreation, for speculation, for exploration. I believe it is possible, indeed desirable, for us to take an interest in the world and to derive enjoyment from it, rather than to gird ourselves against any form of distracting innovation. And I am deeply suspicious of the ways in which self-righteous moral crusaders have throughout history been aligned with and served to foster oppressive treatment of women and minorities and members of what are understood to be the lower classes, and have characterized free thinkers of every stripe as heathens and pagans and infidels. The problem with self-righteousness is that it too often provides cover for dismissive and uncharitable behaviors that generate misery and unhappiness for those poor souls who are its target.

But the fact that I disagree with Knox does not interfere with my appreciation for what he is trying to do. He spends, in the pages of his book, an impressive amount of energy just trying to lay out what he believes and why he believes it, and to offer advice and suggestions to the rest of us according to his lights. His essays are an invitation, and a challenge: Here's what I think. What do you think? I'm glad that he chose to do that honorable work, and that his thoughts are still available to us some two hundred years after he wrote them down. That's the beauty of writing: it makes thinking hold still.     

And the guy does, in the end, have a sense of humor. Those of you who were ambulatory in 1963 may remember a novelty song by Jimmy Soul called "If You Wanna Be Happy," which made the (tongue-in-cheek?) argument that you'd be better off marrying an ugly woman than a beautiful one. But lo and behold,  here is Knox, two hundred years earlier, making the same case, in his essay "The Want of Personal Beauty a Frequent Cause of Virtue and Happiness":

     It may appear paradoxical, but I will assert it to be true, that women who have no great pretensions to beauty are usually found, as the companions of life, the most agreeable. They are, indeed, for the most part, I do not say always, the best daughters, the best wives, the best mothers; most important relations, and most honourable to those who support them with propriety. They who aim not at such characters, but live only to display a pretty face, without one domestic or social virtue, can scarcely rank higher than a painted doll, or a blockhead, place with a cap on it, in a milliner's window.
     There is something of an irritability in the constitution of women whose minds are uncultivated, which, when increased by opposition, and confined by habit, usually produces a termagent, a shrew, or a virago; characters which, from the torment they occasion, may be said greatly to participate of an infernal nature. Nothing but reading, reflection, and indeed, what is called a liberal education, can in general smooth this natural asperity. A woman who, by attending to her face, is led to neglect her mind, and who, besides, has been flattered in her youth by the admirers of her beauty, seldom fails, in the more advanced periods of her life, to vent the virulence of her temper, now soured and blackened by neglect, on all who have the misfortune to approach her. Her husband, if she has, peradventure, entangled some miserable wight, undergoes such torments as might justly rescue him from purgatory, by the plea of having suffered it already.

Hard to read that without laughing, or without imagining old Vicesimus chuckling to himself as he bent over his foolscap to pen those words. One of the reasons I like to write is that sometimes, in like manner, I manage to surprise myself by coming up with something funny or apt. I imagine that even I had been alive in England in 1820, I would not have been likely to encounter Vicesimus Knox, and if I had, I'm not sure that we would have been the best of buddies. But reading his work now from a distance of some thousands of miles and some hundreds of years, I think of him as a kind of friend.

Standard Deviation

Over the last month or so I've been working on a chapbook of sorts. I made a selection of twenty-one of my own collages and wrote a sort of prose poem to accompany each piece. Here are two examples:


 Outcropping

 

In the Blue Hills, rocks as big as houses lie scattered where they fell out of the receding glaciers—some from as much as a mile high—at the end of the last Ice Age, often broken into two or three pieces from the force of their collision with the earth.  Now they are surrounded by old-growth trees, saplings, briars, blackberry bushes.  The air crackle-crisp, the sky a hazy blue. We stand looking down at the winter lake glistening in the gathering dark, listen to the elders chanting as the Blue Angel steps forward to offer a prayer.

 Caballero  
 

They rode by late in the afternoon, covered in dust and sweat, trying to hold their heads up under the brutal heat of the setting sun. We all sat in the shadows of the jacarandas and watched them plodding stolidly toward the mountains in the west. The oddest thing was the sound of the song they sang softly in some language we had never heard, a song whose meaning we could only loosely infer from the fragments that reached our ears intermittently, conveying a mood of weariness and resignation, along with something like joy.

 

If you're interested, here's a link to the whole document, with a full explanation in the preface.

The Falconer

I read on average somewhere between 50 and 100 books a year, although I start more than that. It used to be that once I started a book, I'd commit to finishing it. As I've gotten older I've given myself permission to bail. I'll give a book ten or twenty pages and if it hasn't grabbed me by then I'll move on to something else. In a typical year, out of a hundred books I might find five or ten that really light me up.  (Some of those books are listed in the sidebar under the heading "Recommended Reading.") Every once in a great while I'll run across a book that is so good that as soon as I finish it I go back to the beginning and read it over again.

Early in August I ran across a warm review in The Economist about The Falconer, by Dana Czapnik, a novel set in the 1990's about a seventeen-year-old girl whose primary passion is basketball. I am (or was) a high-school English teacher, and I was for many years a high-school girls' basketball coach, so I thought it might be in my wheelhouse. It turned out to be one of the books that was so good the first time that I had to read it again. And I'm here to tell you that it was even better the second time, and the third.

Lucy Adler lives with her mom and dad in New York City. She attends Pendleton High, a private school where she is the star player on the basketball team, a circumstance which provides her with exactly nothing in the way of social status amongst her peers. She's an outsider. She's tall and she's athletic, but she's not cute and she's not sexy in any of the ways that are recognized as acceptable by her peers. She has two close friends: a boy named Percy, her best friend since elementary school who is also a basketball stud and for whom she has harbored a secret crush for years, and Alexis, one of her teammates, who is also a social outsider at the prep school. Lucy spends a lot of time with her older cousin Violet, an aspiring artist, and their conversations are both rich and revealing.

Those are the facts, and there is nothing special about them. Some characters in a setting. What makes the novel so startling, so alive, is the personality of Lucy herself. She's fierce. She's relentless. She pays attention to everything, and turns what she sees over in her mind, trying to figure it out. The entire novel takes place inside her head as she navigates the social landscape and the physical landscape of the city itself. Here, for example, she's considering her experience growing up as a girl:

I've known since I was little that the kids having the most fun were the boys. They got to run through the world, feral and laughing. Girls were quiet, played at being grown-ups with dolls, whispered into each other's ears and giggled behind cupped hands. They imitated each other's expressions, gesticulations. Found comfort dressing like each other and traveling in groups. At the playground, they'd draw flowers and politely seesaw, have competitions to see who could swing the highest.  I'd watch the boys with envy from a distance. They didn't want me to participate in their games of war. They'd tear through the playground like animals, and I so wanted to have that kind of abandon. Eventually, I found my place among the boys because I was a strong enough athlete that someone would occasionally want me on their team when they got some sort of organized play together.  I was sporadically allowed to participate but never allowed a say in the direction of the game.  A bit player. But it was okay not to have any power, as long as I was given a few moments to run roughshod through the world with my skinned knees and shins and hollowed-out mosquito bites, so much surface area of my body red and brown and scabbed. But then when I was given those permissions, as few as they were, I found that there was no place for me with the polite girls practicing penmanship during art class. I was not like them. They didn't understand me. The girls thought I was weird. That I wanted to be a boy. But I didn't want to be a boy. I wanted to be a girl who had fun. My version of fun. (61-2)

So, this is Lucy's dilemma. She has talent, she has ambition, she's smart and she reads with the same ferocious energy she brings to everything else she does in her life. (She's read and thought about Yeats, Shakespeare, Celine, Faulkner, Kundera, de Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Melville, and Tennessee William, among others.) She's drawn to risk, to disorder. At one point late in the novel, she has been watching a caretaker raking a sort of indoor garden in the city, and her response is typical of her mode of processing throughout the book: observant, thoughtful, trying to make connections, trying to figure out what's going on around her and how she fits in, or doesn't:

...He is methodical, walking north to the wall, then turning and walking south until the entire section of dirt is well hydrated. Then he puts down his watering can and gets a rake. Again, he goes back and forth over the dirt so that the moisture is evenly distributed.  He does not make a sound. He does not play music. He just goes about tending to the earth. Rake north. Rake south.
    There is something monk-like about him. Has he taken a vow of silence too? I've always been fascinated by the people who choose to do that. A vow of silence is an attempt to tamp down the wild parts. Maybe some people can't handle the disorder of the universe and so they have to impose some kind of order on a random segment of their lives to make the chaos more bearable. That's what I think of whenever someone describes themselves as "type A." Making lists just to cross them off. So silly. I may spend a lot of my time white-knuckling my way through human existence, but I prefer chaos. (189)

Lucy, is clear-eyed, open to experience, and at times emotionally raw. When you are drawn to the flames, it's likely you'll get burned. Some readers may be put off by Lucy's choices and by the language she uses to express them. There's a lot of casual obscenity in the book. There is a sexual initiation that does not go well for her, during or after. Lucy smokes the occasional joint. She steals basketballs from her school because she can't afford to buy them herself. She does a lot of other things that aren't in the good-girl playbook. But she's a fully engaged human being and I, for one, can't help but admire her spirit, her intensity, her intelligence and determination. She's a thinker, a ponderer, and she uses her engagement with the game of basketball as her refuge and centering point:

There is no silence like the silence in your own head when you allow it space to be silent. No sirens. No honking. No ka-klunk kaklunk. No shouting from the games on the other courts. No music. No playground screams. No stroller wheels. No creeping thoughts. No wondering. No melancholy. No happiness. Just: ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Ball on pavement. Ball on pavement. Feet on pavement. Ball on pavement. Silence. Air. Thwip. Again. There is a meditation in this. A nirvana. I cannot find it anywhere else but here. A ball. A hoop. And me. (241)

There are stylistic choices made by the author that are interesting to me as well. Often, for example, we will follow Lucy's thoughts through a series of observations that are inventoried more or less in list form. For example, early in the book she is walking through her neighborhood, and that walk is rendered as a list of impressions, with her reactions to those impressions at times interspersed:

Orchard and Grand. Laundromat. Lots of linoleum and rows of machines and a few people folding clothes in the window... Grocers. Dyed tulips and roses that will turn the water purple when they're brought home and put in vases by mothers or girlfriends, keepers of vases. Bruised oranges. Metal vats full of melting ice with Pepsis and Cokes floating on the surface like corporate-branded buoys...Nail salon. Fluorescent lighting and a row of dingy Barcaloungers with water buckets at their base. Only three customers. Asian women with lightly permed hair wearing the same dark blue aprons, filing away at strangers' nails. An emery board orchestra inside. Never had a manicure. You can't have long nails and play ball. (31-2)

Some readers might find such inventories tiresome. But for me, here and elsewhere, they serve not only to bring the neighborhood to life in my imagination, but to characterize Lucy as someone who is a habitual close reader of the world she inhabits. There's a two-part writing move that I often ask my students to practice: "Tell me what you see. Then tell me what you think about what you see." It's a good way for me to get to know the students and to get a sense of how their minds work. It's the same basic principle on display here, although in a much more fully developed way. We get to know Lucy by hanging out with her, seeing what she sees, and hearing what she has to say about what she sees. The book is replete with interesting conversations that she has with Percy, with Alexis, with Violet, and, in a stunningly revelatory turn toward the end of the book, with her mom.

Two other thoughts. The first is that The Falconer, perhaps inevitably, is being compared to The Catcher in the Rye. Fair enough, there are more than enough points of connection to justify that. (Is it a mere coincidence that Holden's school is Pency and Lucy's is Pendleton? That Holden wants to be the Catcher in the Rye and that Lucy wants to be the Falconer (depicted in the NYC statue shown at the top of this post*)? And so on.) But here's the thing: in my judgement at least, Lucy is a more interesting and multidimensional character than Holden, and The Falconer is the better novel. Salinger gets points for being a groundbreaker and writing what was at that time the only novel of its kind, which made it into a classic novel of adolescence. But The Falconer is a better-written and more broad-ranging novel.

The second is that I have read some commentary which criticizes The Falconer for using "too many f-words for a young adult novel." To which I have two responses. First, this is not a YA novel. It's a novel, period. (I have issues with the YA novel as a genre, but that's a topic for another time.) The Catcher in the Rye was not written as a YA novel either, although it seems over the years to have been shoved into that pigeonhole. Second, have you spent any time with teenagers in the last twenty years? I have, and I'm here to tell you that virgin ears are a thing of the past. The characters in this novel talk the way people I know actually talk. And I look at that as a value-add, not as a shortcoming.

* "Our ices continue to melt in our palms as we walk past The Falconer, a statue of a young boy in tights, leg muscles blazing, releasing a bird, only his toes on the ground, the falcon's wings in the midst of opening... I know I'm supposed to love the statue of Alice in Wonderland, being a girl and all, but I've always loved this one. It's reminiscent of the feeling when you hit the perfect jump shot. The way your body goes skyward and the ball is released at the tippy-top of your fingers and you know, as soon as you let it go: that shit's gonna fall in. (61)

Stories That Could Be True

One of my favorite poets is William Stafford. In 1977, he published a volume of new and collected poems entitle Stories That Could Be True, a title which I have become fond of over the years for reasons I'm sure he would not have anticipated. Because I've reached the point in my life where that title strikes me as being something of an oxymoron. I've come to understand that all stories are essentially fictions, even and perhaps especially when they are presented as—or intended by their narrators to be taken as—"true stories."

To tell a story is essentially to make a selection of events and present them in a sequence. It would not be desirable, even if it were possible, for any storyteller to include every detail in narrating an event. When I woke up this morning from my dream, what had I been dreaming about? Something about a basketball game? Or walking in the rain in the park? Both at the same time? No sooner had eyes opened than the dream was beginning to fade. I could attempt to recreate it now, but to do so I'd have to invent details that I've already lost, and those details of course not be "true."

The crow cawing outside that woke me up, did he caw once? twice? repeatedly? Was there in fact a crow there at all, or did I just put that in for verisimilitude? Was it perhaps a female crow? How would I know? (Or did I perhaps imagine or make up the whole thing about the crow?)

Did I raise my hand to my face before I took off the covers? Did I scratch my nose? On which side? With which finger? Did I use my right hand or my left to toss the covers aside? Which foot hit the floor first? Was I still lying down when the foot hit the floor, or had I already sat up. When I sat up—if I sat up—was there a cramp in my leg? Which leg? Which muscle? And how painful was it? How would I be able to quantify that pain in a way that would be "true."

You see the problem. Just to tell the story of getting up this morning, if I were to try to capture every detail, would take me all day, and I would not even get to the part about making breakfast. much less eating it. And inevitably I'd get some of it wrong, or leave some of it out. There's information I don't have access to. There's stuff I've forgotten. There's other material I might choose to leave out because it either seems extraneous to the story or it reflects on me personally in a way that I would prefer not to share. That dream, for example, might have been about something else, something potentially embarrassing or compromising that I might not want you to know about. It was only a dream, I know, but still.

Then there's my writerly desire to craft the story in a way that makes for good reading or good listening. I might want to select my details in order to reinforce a particular narrative arc. I might want the language to move in a certain way. And that leads us to yet another fundamental and inescapable reality in storytelling: stories are made up of words. Words are sequences of sounds that line up single file, one word after another. There's simply no way that words can accurately re-create the simultaneous multidimensionality of lived experience. As Stephen Dobyns, no slouch of a poet or storyteller himself, has observed

The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.

I had a colleague at a school where I used to teach who considered himself to be an evangelist for what he called objectivity. He labored mightily to impress upon his students the need to stick to facts when they were writing. He strove to be "objective" himself when responding to student writing, and was often highly and publicly critical of other teachers in the department—myself being one of them—he considered to be overly encouraging of subjectivity in student work and overly subjective in their evaluation of it.

I didn't agree with him then. Twenty years later, I still don't agree with him, and I think I understand more clearly why. The fact of the matter is, we are awash in subjectivity all day, every day, all the time. As human beings, we make sense of the world by telling ourselves stories. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just the way it is.

The problems arise when we lose sight of the fact that those stories are, almost by definition, fabrications. Over time and many repetitions, we become so invested in the stories we tell that we come to believe them, and to act, and think, as if they were true. This is the case with almost every religion. It's the case with local and national politics, where people's attachment to their own particular versions of the stories they believe to be true leads to the kind of toxic vituperation that seems to be dominating the news cycle not just here in the United States, but in Britain, Italy, Hungary, China, India, the Phillipines... just about everywhere.

Even at family gatherings on holidays, with family and friends, it's easy to forget that the stories we tell one another are merely today's version of what we think happened, or what we remember, or what we think will make people laugh.

This last weekend I was at Santa Sabina for a writing retreat run by William Stafford's son Kim, who is poet-laureate of the state of Oregon himself. He's a terrific writer and master storyteller, and he gave those of us at the conference many short writing prompts by way of encouraging us to connect with our own stories. One of the prompts had to do with recalling a time when you did something you weren't supposed to do. (This is a very good writing prompt, one that I have used—in a slightly different way—with great success over the years with students at all levels from elementary school through adulthood.)

So, I took a shot at it, and this is the poem that I came up with:

Balance

Walking home from school I stopped at the five and dime
for a Milky Way. On the way to the register at the back
of the store my eye was caught by a glint of metallic red light
from the tray on the counter to my left, a display of gyroscopes
with a diagram showing how it worked: you would wind
the twine around the stem, place the foot of the device
on a flat surface, and, holding the top steady with your finger,
yank the string, and then the little red wheel in the middle
would spin and the gyroscope would stand by itself, freed
for the moment from the constraints of gravity. Seeing that
Mr. Harvey was busy ringing up an old lady in a red dress,
I snatched a gyroscope and slipped it into my bookbag.
At home, I sat in my room watching the gyroscope
spin and spin, a thing of wonder and beauty, until suddenly
my mother walked in. Where did you get that? she said.
When I told her, she marched me out to the car, drove me
to the store, and made me give it back and apologize.
I told Mr. Harvey I was sorry, even though it was a lie.

If you were to ask me if this were a true story, I'd say yes. But in the writing of it I found myself making a lot of strategic decisions that were in essence falsifications.  For example, the name of the store was (I think) The Variety Shop, and it wasn't exactly a five and dime store. But for the sake of compression in the story I didn't want to get into all of that, so I just used the generic term "five and dime." (A term which also serves to set the story in the not-very-recent past.)

I don't in fact remember if it was a Milky Way I was after; it probably was not, since I got my candy bars, when I got them, not at the Variety Shop, but at the Gristede's market down the street. I included the Milky Way by way of trying to establish the age (and cupidity) of my main character, which is to say, a younger, somewhat fictionalized version of myself, and also because I just like sound of the syllables. (It could have been a Hershey Bar or a Three Musketeers, right?) The part about stealing a gyroscope is certainly true, but all of the details about their placement in the store and the diagram are invented, as are Mr. Harvey (I have no idea what the name of the store owner was), the old lady, and her red dress. The cash register was by the front door, not in the back. The conversation with my mother is invented as well. She did see me with the gyroscope, and she did make me take it back, but that's about all I remember, and in the absence of memory we fall back upon imagination.

The last line is a particularly egregious case of calculated misrepresentation. I put it in there because I wanted to make a point about my conflicted relationship as a child with parental and ethical expectations (which I would certainly not have been aware of as a child but am certainly aware of now), and also because I wanted the poem to have a punch line at the end. I was hoping, when I read it out loud, that people would laugh.

And they did, although I had, and have, mixed feelings about that, for reasons that should be clear at this point, because the writing of that poem gave rise to the writing of this post. I was very aware in drafting the poem of the somewhat treacherous ground I was traversing as I tried to be true to the experience I had as a child but also true to my sense of what might make for a dramatically effective poem. I was also ruefully aware, both in the writing and in the aftermath of it, of the essentially glibness and shallowness of the poem, as compared to the power and depth of many of the poems that I most admire, and many of the poems that my colleagues read the same night I read this one.

I would say that "Balance" as a poem succeeds in terms of its own limited ambitions. It's smooth. It's deft. It's clear. It meets the requirements of the prompt. And it successfully conveys some elements of the truth. It presents itself, like all other stories, as a story that could be true. But, like all other stories, it less true that it purports to be.

Is it Necessary?

We all have a limited number of hours on this planet. If we are going to dedicate ourselves during those hours to some particular endeavor, whether it be writing or art or music or public service or the accumulation of wealth, it would behoove us to spend that time doing work that needs to be done, that creates value in our own lives and, ideally, in the lives of those around us.

One of the questions that keeps recurring in my life as a writer has to do with what might be called gravity, or weight, or perhaps necessity. While I certainly respect writers who have taken it upon themselves to do the daunting and at times discouraging work of trying to get the words right, to construct poems which are thoughtful and well-crafted, often of late I have found myself looking for something more elusive.

A large proportion of the poems and stories and essays I read—and, alas, perhaps an even greater proportion of the ones I write—might be described as being entertaining or amusing.  But as a reader and as a writer I am always hoping to find my way toward a poem which is not merely artful or clever or funny or apt, but in some sense essential.

Last week I went to a poetry reading sponsored by the Marin Poetry Center at the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael. The featured poets were Troy Jollimore, whom I had head of before, and Lynn Emanual, whom I had not. Jollimore read first, and I enjoyed his poems, although they seemed mostly to be the kind of poems that would come across better on paper. Lynn Emanual's poems, on the other hand, had a dramatic quality to them, and as she read them the words seemed to embody a deep authority and to convey an immediacy and sense of seriousness of purpose that I found to be very impressive. The poems felt, well, necessary. You could sense that they had been important for her to write, and it felt, at least in that moment, like it was important that I had gotten to hear them.

I wound up buying a copy of her New and Selected Poems, called The Nerve of It, and I spent the most of the next day reading and re-reading her poems. One of the ones I like the best—which she had read the previous night—was this one:

The Dig

Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the Rock
gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at the café
where they drink their thimblesful of hot tea, beyond the valley
with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of irrigation,
and someone incising a dark furrow in a field, some plowman's black
gutter opening through the green, she is waist deep in this open grave,
staring at the delicate puzzle of my feet. Beyond her, in the shadow
of Tel el-Hisi, daubing and dampening the earth, another woman finds
the faint brickwork of a floor spidering the dust, on the hearth's
wedge-shaped arc of shadow, a scattering of charred millet.
Nothing else for miles. Nothing but this bluff of ruin,
one decapitated tower, one "window" staved into the brick,
the bouganvillea crawling across a wall dragging its bloody rags.
She is standing here thinking she cannot bear the way this foot—
my foot—wants to step out of the earth.  I don't care. I am using her
to leave the grave. And so we go on. We go on until we cannot go on
deepening my grave, and the trowel hits stone and I lie staring
while she makes the earth recede, reaches in and pulls me out,
my jaw wired shut by roots, my skull so full of dirt that suddenly
the intricate sutures come loose and, in her hands, the whole head opens.
In the shallow setting where I lay is the small triangular sail
of a scapula, the ribs like the grill of a car. She bones me like a fish.
She lays the little pieces, the puzzling odds and ends, into the dishes
of shellac and formalin. One carpal still wears the faint blue
stain of a ring. Wearily, I lay my reassembled head,
sutures rich with glue, against the wall of a filled beaker.
A fine sweat of bubbles on my chin. All night, through the window
of my jar, I watch her mend with glue and wire, the shallow
saucer of my pelvis. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.

I'll resist the temptation to do a detailed line-by-line analysis of this poem, because I know from my own readings that such analyses can be tedious to read even when they are thoughtful and well-written. But let me just say a couple of things.

First of all, there's the sheer audacity of the piece, the daring leap of the imagination that begins in line fourteen, when it becomes clear that the voice in the poem is that of the woman whose body is being excavated. Then there's the surprising twist that at least in her own mind she's the one in charge of this operation: she is using the archaeologist as the instrument of her resurrection, watching with approval as the broken pieces of her body are being reassembled and mended. Finally, there are the startling last two sentences, which shift the point of view in such a way as to open up the poem vertiginously.  Suddenly, it's not "I," it's "we." That "we" asserts the identification not only of the digger and the dug, but of the writer and the reader, and of all of us. We are nothing. Earth staring at earth.

And that, my friends, is of course the simple truth of the matter, even though it's a truth most of us manage to keep out of the range of our vision as we go about our daily routines, as if we had all the time in the world, as if we were in the world but not of it.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I know, children or adults, who regularly read poetry on their own. And most of those people are themselves writers. I would venture to guess that if you were to ask the average person why they don't read poetry, they'd say something like "I can't understand it," or "I don't have time," or "Poetry doesn't do anything for me."

William Carlos Williams famously observed—in a poem—that "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." If there's one necessary function that poetry can serve, for those who do choose to engage with it—it is to retrieve to our consciousness the simple truths that we so easily lose sight of. And that's what makes this poem so powerful to me.

I'll close with the last sentence of "Like God," the last poem in The Nerve of It, which suggests yet another simple truth about the unspoken contract between writer and reader:

                                           You
did not choose to be in the story of the
matron whose bosom is like the prow
of a ship and who is launched toward
lunch at the Hotel Pierre, or even the
story of the dog-on-a-leash, even though
this is now your story: the story of the
person-who-had-to-take-the-train-and-walk-
the-dark-road described hurriedly by
someone sitting at the tavern so you could
discover it, although you knew all along
the road would be there, you, who have
been hovering above this page, holding
the book in your hands, like God, reading.

Merwin

W. S. Merwin passed away this week, dying peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91.

I have on many occasions in the past had things to say on this blog about Merwin. (If you'd like to take a moment to review them, you can just type "Merwin" in the search bar at the top of the page.) Merwin was an outsized presence in my life. Even though I never met him personally, I saw him read on several occasions, and as a writer and as a human being he was an inspiration and a mentor to me. He was not only a highly original and deeply resonant writer, but he was as well the model of a human being who devoted all of the energies of his life to doing good in and for this world. He spent the last twenty years of his life on the island of Maui doing the work of restoration: taking land that had been stripped and used up for sugar plantations and painstakingly re-introducing native Hawaiian plants to heal the land. That work is documented on the web site of the nonprofit foundation he created to support this work, the Merwin Conservancy. He was a committed and eloquent spokesman for a view of the world which is under siege every day by politicians and businessmen and me-firsters of every stripe who seem to have lost all sense of shame or perspective. Here he speaks of what is at stake:

I believe that our real superiority as a species is not our intelligence itself but the quality of imagination and compassion (in itself perhaps, one of the blessings of language) that allows us to care about the welfare, suffering, survival of lives far from our own, and not immediately or obviously related to our comforts, our prospects, our acquisitions. Whatever we may call the sympathy that involves us with the fate of victims in war zones half a world away, the sonar torture of whales, the mutilation of women and the tortures of bears in Pakistan, or the last members of a species of rainforest honeycreeper, this regard for life apart from our own is something that, so far as I know, is unique to our species. We can glimpse ancestral forms of it in the family and group behavior of other animals, but its broader emergence is a mark of humanity. It is our talent and we have developed it in our own way. It is something that we cannot altogether account for. But if we do not live up to our gifts they do us no good. And what this gift demands of us constantly is a change of heart. What hope there may be depends upon whether or not we can believe in such possibility.
 
from the forward to Remains of a Rainbow: Rare Plants and Animals of Hawaii.

Several of Merwin's poems have worked their way into my life in ways that no other writer's poems have ever done. I'll post two of them today. The first is one that I committed to memory many years ago and which is still perhaps the most powerful tribute to intellectual humility (and the power of wonder) that I have ever encountered in print. (Note: the word maoli, used here as a personification, is a Polynesian word that means what is native or natural or true.):

Search Party 


By now I know most of the faces 
that will appear beside me as 
long as there are still images 
I know at last what I would choose 
the next time if there ever was 
a time again I know the days 
that open in the dark like this 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know the summer surfaces 
of bodies and the tips of voices 
like stars out of their distances 
and where the music turns to noise 
I know the bargains in the news 
rules whole languages formulas 
wisdom that I will never use 
I do not know where Maoli is 

I know whatever one may lose 
somebody will be there who says 
what it will be all right to miss 
and what is verging on excess 
I know the shadows of the house 
routes that lead out to no traces 
many of his empty places 
I do not know where Maoli is 

You that see now with your own eyes 
all that there is as you suppose 
though I could stare through broken glass 
and show you where the morning goes 
though I could follow to their close 
the sparks of an exploding species 
and see where the world ends in ice 
I would not know where Maoli is

The second poem is a kind of answer to the question that faces us on those occasions when we find that the world has failed us: how should we respond? Merwin's answer to that question is indicative of the openhearted wisdom that suffuses all of his writing:

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on the stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
(from The Rain in the Trees, Knopf 1988)