In The Frame

In the Garden

In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

So long as Mistress Mary's mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to her, though she was not at all aware of it. They began to push her about for her own good. When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy and his "creatures," there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired.

So long as Colin shut himself up in his room and thought only of his fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and reflected hourly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring and also did not know that he could get well and could stand upon his feet if he tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood. His scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and there was nothing weird about it at all. Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

"Where, you tend a rose, my lad,

A thistle cannot grow."

While the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away beautiful places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains of Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous; he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark ones. He had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had forgotten and deserted his home and his duties. When he traveled about, darkness so brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people because it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom. Most strangers thought he must be either half mad or a man with some hidden crime on his soul. He, was a tall man with a drawn face and crooked shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel registers was, "Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England."

He had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his study and told her she might have her "bit of earth." He had been in the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere more than a few days. He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots. He had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.

But the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had happened. He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he had been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted, any man's soul out of shadow. He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his. But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down to rest on a carpet of moss by a stream. It was a clear little stream which ran quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious damp greenness. Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low laughter as it bubbled over and round stones. He saw birds come and dip their heads to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away. It seemed like a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness seem deeper. The valley was very, very still.

As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the valley itself. He wondered if he were going to sleep, but he was not. He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots growing so close to the stream that its leaves were wet and at these he found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things years ago. He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind—filling and filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. It was as if a sweet clear spring had begun to rise in a stagnant pool and had risen and risen until at last it swept the dark water away. But of course he did not think of this himself. He only knew that the valley seemed to grow quieter and quieter as he sat and stared at the bright delicate blueness. He did not know how long he sat there or what was happening to him, but at last he moved as if he were awakening and he got up slowly and stood on the moss carpet, drawing a long, deep, soft breath and wondering at himself. Something seemed to have been unbound and released in him, very quietly.

"What is it?" he said, almost in a whisper, and he passed his hand over his forehead. "I almost feel as if—I were alive!"

I do not know enough about the wonderfulness of undiscovered things to be able to explain how this had happened to him. Neither does any one else yet. He did not understand at all himself—but he remembered this strange hour months afterward when he was at Misselthwaite again and he found out quite by accident that on this very day Colin had cried out as he went into the secret garden:

"I am going to live forever and ever and ever!"

The singular calmness remained with him the rest of the evening and he slept a new reposeful sleep; but it was not with him very long. He did not know that it could be kept. By the next night he had opened the doors wide to his dark thoughts and they had come trooping and rushing back. He left the valley and went on his wandering way again. But, strange as it seemed to him, there were minutes—sometimes half-hours—when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one. Slowly—slowly—for no reason that he knew of—he was "coming alive" with the garden....

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Chapter 27

O'Hara

    How many trees and frying pans
I loved and lost! Guernica hollered look
     out!
but we were all busy hoping our eyes were talking
to Paul Klee. My mother and father asked me and
I told them from my tight blue pants we should
love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures.
Wasted child! I'll club you on the shins!

Fuzzy People

I've been encountering blurry people lately and feeling a bit blurry myself. And it makes me think of Woody Allen's film "Deconstructing Harry." Do you remember the actor who develops a sudden case of the blurs. At first his film crew thinks the lens is dirty, but they clean the camera and determine that the outline of the actor himself is smudged. "I don't know how to tell you this but you...you're out of focus," a coworker tells the mortified actor. "Mel--now, look--I want you to go home, and get some rest. See if you can just sharpen up," advises his director. At home, matters are not improved: "Daddy, you're all blurry!" says his dismayed child.

People get fuzzy some times. I feel fuzzy some times.  It's not clear to the person who s/he is, what s/he wants, where s/he's headed, what intentions s/he has. A person can't really know oneself until someone else knows you. Most of us first get this clarity unconsciously from our mother's growing up. Books say that early on, mothers give us that sense of knowing who we really are by anticipating our needs, comforting us when we need it, helping us stretch our wings, modulate our emotions, relate with others, find the wind to travel through life, etc...and then later we're able to replicate this in our other relationships. Now, I grew up in a family of nine kids so I can't say my mom was busy anticipating my every need and unconscious desire. She was a master multi-tasker and delegator, not as a servant of our needs, though of course she was our servant times ten so we had one-tenth of a servant of our needs filled in with an older sibling who resented the fact that they were made into a servant/babysitter. I prefer to think this situation did not lead to blurriness but instead a sense of independence and needing to care and service and know our own needs. This is an old-fashioned, perhaps Spockian interpretation of my upbringing. Nevertheless, I did manage to develop some clarity and sharpness which on occasion lapses, just as Woody Allen so aptly conveyed in his film.

As with most folks sometimes we lose this knack, this sixth sense, this ability to be present with and possessive of who we are , and that's when we become a blur to ourselves, and others see a blur or a shadow of who we really are. We are told the only constant is change yet it's still hard to accept it.

But this going in and out of focus, this rearranging of our synapses, this losing and finding sharpness, is fascinating sometimes...and challenges us to continue to grow and change our relationship with reality, our perception of it, and our internal mind's eye. And really it's within the blurriness that clarity resides...or maybe....not. It was Mark Twain observed, a person cannot depend on the eyes when imagination is out of focus. That's bouncing around in my head and led me to Alice in Wonderland.

"Why, what are your shoes done with?" said the Gryphon. "I mean, what makes them so shiny?"
Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she gave her answer. "They're done with blacking, I believe."
    "Boots and shoes under the sea," the Gryphon went on in a deep voice, "are done with whiting. now you know."
    "And what are they made of? Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity.
    "Soles and eels, of course," the Gryphon replied, rather impatiently: "any shrimp could have told you that."
    "If I'd been the whiting," said Alice, whose thoughts were still running on the song, "I'd have said to the porpoise, "Keep back, please! We don't want you with us!"
    "They were oblidged to have him with them," the Mock Turtle said. "No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise."
    "Wouldn't it really?" said Alice, in a tone of great surprise.
    "Of course not," said the Mock Turtle.
"Why if a fish came to me, and told me he was going on a journey, I should say 'With what porpoise?'"
    "Don't you mean 'purpose'?" said Alice.
    "I mean what I say," the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the Gryphon added "Come, let's hear some of your adventures."
    "I could tell you my adventures--beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly; "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."
    "Explain all that," said the Mock Turtle.
    "No no! The adventures first," said the Gryphon in an impatient tone; "explanations take such a dreadfufl time."

Mr. Fear

String of Excerpts # 15

Mr. Fear

He follows us, he keeps track.
Each day his lists are longer.
Here, death. And here,
something like it.

Mr. Fear, we say in our dreams
what do you have for me tonight?
And he looks through his sack,
his black sack of troubles.

Maybe he smiles when he finds
the right one. Maybe he's sorry.
Tell me, Mr. Fear,
what must I carry

away from your dream.
Make it small, please
Let it fit in my pocket,
let it fall through

the hole in my pocket.
Fear, let me have
a small brown bat
and a purse of crickets

like the ones I heard
singing last night
out there in the stubbly field
before I slept, and met you.

=Lawrence Raab

Happiness…

String of June Excerpts #14--from Baccalaureate address by Tom Doelger @ Lakeside

Fifty-three years ago, on a hazy early autumn day, for the first and only time in my life, I met a famous person.  I see four of us on an old-fashioned, sun-filled veranda: my friend whose home I was visiting, two men in dark suits, and myself, an undistinguished seven year old boy.  One of the two men was the father of my friend, and the other, the prominent and acclaimed man, I recognized immediately – an individual considered by many to be the single most eminent and influential broadcast journalist of the twentieth century.  He stood behind a little wheeled cart with refreshments loaded on it.  He looked me in the eye, said hello, and asked me how I was. 

Well, I thought, he asked me the question, and he was a newsman asking for news, so I felt tempted to give him my full report.  I might have told him that every morning I rose reluctantly from bed, then dressed in my school uniform of scuffed brown leather shoes, blue shorts, white shirt, wrinkled jacket, and cap, to head out from the safe haven of home with a sense of unremitting dread to face instruction I didn’t understand, food I found impossible to eat, and teachers I thought merciless and malicious.  If I had known of Charles Dickens then, I might have seen myself as a kind Oliver Twist or David Copperfield figure, an innocent besieged by the cruelties of a cold, corrupt adult world. 

Here was news, all right.  The dark side was out to get me.  The year before, I had failed the second grade… and that autumn, the overwhelming forces of injustice required me to relive that torment all over again.  I feared my future.  I saw myself as one trapped into repeating the second grade over and over and over in some hellish, endless succession of humiliations, wearing scuffed shoes, blue shorts, wrinkled jacket and stupid cap at age 12, and 17, and 25, and 43, and 59, and on into my retirement, a gray haired man still beset by endless repetitions of incomprehensible lessons, sneering teachers, and plate after plate of deep fried breaded veal cutlets, or corned beef hash, or chipped beef on toast, or spam, all garnished with gray canned peas.  The brightest moment of the day came with the release from classes.  Heading home, I stopped off at the local newspaper stand, handed the kind, portly man behind the counter a nickel for my daily purchase of a Milky Way bar, my sole consolation and happiness following the mortifications of school...

...The boy on the porch wasn’t so happy, a word that meant to him mostly eating endless Milky Way bars, watching television, and playing in the park.  He had a stubborn vein of selfishness running through him, and so too, the man he grew up to be all these years later.  Like many, I have sought contentment, often by attending to my own acquisitive desires.  I know what it is to be acquisitive.  I have packed my closet with more and more… and more Lakeside Rummage Sale shirts, slacks, jackets, and fleece garments, and I have, for example, possessed, at one time, three superb, imposing, colossal, full sized, fake wood paneled, V-8 powered American station wagons – stately leviathans of the road.  With the leviathans, I was temporarily happy… until one of them broke down, or needed an oil change… or needed… gas.  Possession is such an ephemeral satisfaction, I have learned. 

    I do not object to selfish satisfaction, but I have a much higher regard for the Aristotelian notion of happiness: our word in English being a poor translation of the Greek word eudaimonia.  Similar to Martin Luther King, Junior’s assertion that love is not the answer but the assignment, happiness for Aristotle is an activity rather than a state of being, and the activity, above all else, is based on virtue – virtue that requires, at least in part, for us to be outer-directed.  As one scholar puts it, “We do not have the right view of [Aristotle’s notion of happiness] unless we see it as something which [people] can help one another to achieve -- instead of achieving it by beating their neighbors.”

    When I survey my life as I have lived it from this promontory in time, I see that its real substance, the source of genuine satisfaction, that which has bequeathed me with meaning and purpose, is when I have given instead of grasped.  Which brings me to you.  Who knows better than you that being a student in high school is not always a warm shower bath, a happy experience?   For my colleagues and myself, working with you has been no warm shower bath either; it has often been hard and challenging, but much more, teaching you has been immensely fulfilling, meaningful, and significant for us.   Serving you has given us meaning and purpose, and even joy, has made us happy, in the Aristotelian sense. 
I believe that for you to achieve eudaimonia, you will have to discover meaning and purpose for yourselves.  And what is the meaning and the purpose?   While there may be no pill to answer the question, nevertheless, I believe that to a great extent, Aristotelian happiness may be found certainly in family and friends, and in art and the appreciation of nature, but most of all, it is to be found in serving some purpose beyond oneself.  I hope discovering what to serve becomes for you your challenge, your quest, and your adventure, and amidst the mysterious interplay of choice and what some call destiny, may you may make that discovery.             
    Well, the man was waiting to serve me, so, standing on the veranda, I looked up at him again, and I said, “Ginger Ale, please.”  He smiled, poured the soda into the glass and… he gave it to me.
I am very happy tonight, happy to have known so many of you, happy you are heading out and away to a world that needs your considerable talents and services.  I wish for you every happiness, and meaningful, significant, and fulfilling lives.  I wish you eudaimonia.                     
The journalist completed each of his broadcasts with his signature sign-off.  I borrow his words now: to you all, “good night, and good luck.”

Shakespeare's Sister

String of Excerpts # 14

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sittingroom and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that prepartion, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

In the Honey House

String of Excerpts # 13   

In the honey house Rosaleen was on her cot with the light out and the fan going full blast. I stripped down to my panties and sleeveless top, but it was still too hot to move.

    My chest hurt from feeling things. I wondered if T. Ray was pacing the floors feeling as injured as I hoped he did. Maybe he was telling himself what a rotten excuse for a father he was for not treating me better, but I doubted it. Thinking up ways to kill me was more like it.
    I turned my pillow over and over for the coolness, thinking about May and her wall and what the world had come to that a person needed something like that. It gave me the willies to think what might be stuffed in among those rocks. The wall brought to my mind the bleeding slabs of meat Rosaleen used to cook, the gashes she made up and down them, stuffing them with pieces of wild, bitter garlic.
    The worst thing was lying there wanting my mother. That’s how it had always been; my longing for her nearly always came late at night when my guard was down. I tossed on the sheets wishing I could crawl into bed with her and smell her skin. I wondered; Had she worn thin nylon gowns to bed? Did she bobby-pin her hair? I could just see her propped in bed. My mouth twisted as I pictured myself climbing in beside her and putting my head against her breast. I would put it right over her beating heart and listen. Mama, I would say. And she would look down at me and say “Baby, I’m right here.”
    I could hear Rosaleen trying to turn over on her cot. “you awake?” I said.

    “Who can sleep in this oven?” she said.

    I wanted to say, You can, as I’d seen her sleeping that day outside the Frogmore Stew General Store and Restaurant, and it had been at least this hot. She had a fresh Band-Aid on her forehead. Earlier, August had boiled her tweezers and fingernail scissors in a pot on the stove and used them to pluck out Rosaleen’s stitches.
    “How’s your head?”
    “My head is just fine.” The words came out like stiff little jabs in the air.
    “Are you mad or something?”
    “Why would I be mad? Just ‘cause you spend all your time with August now ain’t no reason for me to care. You pick who you want to talk with, it’s not my business.”
    I couldn’t believe it; Rosaleen sounded jealous.
    “I don’t spend all my time with her.”
    “Pretty much,” she said. …

    “Rosaleen, don’t act like that. August might know things about my mother.”
    She raised up on her elbow and looked at me. “Lily, your mama’s gone” she said softly. “and she ain’t coming back.”
    “I feel her here,” I said. “she’s been here, I know it.”
    “Maybe she was. I can’t say. I just know some things are better left alone.”…

When I looked outside, I knew I would have to make my way by starlight. I crept across the grass, back to the edge of the woods, to Mary’s wall. Placing my hands on the stones, all I wanted was not to ache so much.

I wanted to let go of my feelings for a little while, to pull in my moat bridge. I pressed the paper with her name into a cranny that seemed right for her, giving her to the wailing wall. …
    I sat on the ground with my back against the stones and my head tilted back so I could see the stars with all the spy satellites mixed in. Maybe one of them was taking my picture this very minute. They could spot me even in the dark. Nothing was safe. I would have to remember that. …
    The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out. I sat there and studied the darkness, trying to see through it to some sliver of light.

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

The Bee Yard

String of Excerpts # 12

    Still, when August removed the lids, the bees poured out in thick black ropes, breaking into strands, a flurry of tiny wings moving around our faces. The air rained bees, and I sent them love, just like August said.
    She pulled out a brood frame, a canvas of whirling blacks and grays, with rubbins of silver. "There she is, Lily, see her?" said August. "That's the queen, the large one."
    I made a curtsy like people do for the queen of England, which made August laugh.
    I wanted to make her love me so she would keep me forever. If I could make her love me, maybe she would forget about Beatrix the nun going home and let me stay.

    When we walked back to the house, darkness had settled in and fireflies sparked around our shoulders. I could see Roaleen and May through the kitchen window finishing the dishes.
    August and I sat in collapsible lawn chairs beside a crepe myrtle that kept dropping blossoms all over the ground. Cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus.
    I could see how such music drew the ghosts out of dying people, giving them a ride to the next life. I wished June's music could've seen my mother out.
    I gazed at the stone wall that edged the backyard.
    "There are pieces of paper in the wall out there," I said, as if August didn't know this.
    "Yes, I know. It's May's wall. She made it herself."
    "May did?" I tried to picture her mixing cement, carrying rocks around in her apron.
    "She gets a lot of the stones from the river that runs through the woods back there. She's been working on it ten years or more."
    So that's where she got her big muscles---rock lifting. "What are all those scraps of paper stuck in it?"
    "Oh, it's a long story," August said. "I guess you've noticed--May is special."
    "She sure does get upset easy," I said.
    See Lily when you and I hear about some misery out there, it might make us feel bad for a while, but it doesn't wreck our whole world. It's like we have a built-in protection around our hearts that keeps the pain from overwhelming us. But May--she doesn't have that. Everything just comes into her--all the suffering out there--and she feels as if it's happening to her. She can't tell the difference."
    Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?
    Rosaleen's voice drifted from the kitchen window, followed by May's laughter. May sounded so normal and happy right then, I couldn't imagine how she'd gotten the way she was--one minute laughing and the next overrun with everybody's misery. The last thing I wanted was to be like that, but I didn't want to be like T. Ray either, immune to everything but his own selfish life. I didn't know which was worse.
    "Was she born like that?" I asked.
    "No, she was a happy child at first."
    "Then what happened to her?".......

No one belongs here more than you

I have a new favorite writer, Miranda July. She interviews Portland's Blow in McSweeney's this issue and has a crack-up piece in the New Yorker's summer fiction issue about a trip sitting next to a celebrity in first-class . Her web site "No one belongs here more than you." constructed on the top of her refrigerator, puts multi-million dollar promotion book budgets in the freezer.

The Cut Man Cometh perhaps

Geek Love is one of my favorite books by author Katherine Dunn who lives in Portland. Forever I've been wondering if she's got another novel in her and it seems perhaps there is one. See the interview, a little dated below. I like the editors quote about some authors are on free flow and others drip...

"I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out."

"I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on."
 
 

Where is the (follow-up to Geek) Love? The author has come un-Dunn.

The promise maker: Portland-based author Katherine Dunn

The promise:  Former WW columnist Dunn, one of Portland's finest writers and the author of National Book Award finalist Geek Love, pledged 17 years ago to write another novel .

What she actually said: Dunn told London's The Guardian newspaper in an Aug. 19, 1989, interview that she was busy on her fourth novel, then titled The Cut Man, which was already under contract with Knopf (the publisher of Geek Love). "'The cut man in boxing is the person who stops the bleeding in a boxing match. The new novel is about boxing and serial killers," Dunn said.

So what happened? No Cut Man, but lots of great journalism—Dunn remains one of the better boxing writers in the United States and contributed to the award-winning School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms. While that all may ultimately add great detail to Cut Man, fans of Dunn's vivid, warped imagination want fiction, not recaps of boxing matches.

What she says now:  Dunn politely refused WW's interview request. Her agent, Richard Pine, told The New York Times in 2004, "Katherine once told me that writers are like faucets ... Some drip and some are on free flow. She drips, and she's happy dripping." In a more recent email interview, Pine told WW, "I don't know when Katherine will deliver Cut Man, but I do know that she's working on it and, like her many fans, I look forward to reading it soon after she's typed 'The End.'"

Cutting through it all: Knopf is currently scheduling Cut Man for a September 2008 release. —Karla Starr

The Famous Silence of the Sahara

String of Excerpts #11, feel free to send me yours

    As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him. The twisting roads of the past weeks became alien, faded from his memory; it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the center.

    How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: “Your life is so simple.” “Your life seems always to go in a straight line.” Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: “You have chosen the easiest terrain.” But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way—and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance—that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: “Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?” as though there were nothing further to be said.

    The immigration authorities at the disembarkation had not been satisfied to leave a blank after the word Profession on their papers as he had done in his passport. (That passport, official proof of his existence, racing after him, somewhere behind in the desert!) They had said: “Surely monsieur must do something.” And Kit, seeing that he was about to contest the point, had interposed quickly: “Ah, yes. Monsieur is a writer, but he is modest!” They had laughed, filled in the space with the word ecrivain, and made the remark that they hoped he would find inspiration in the Sahara. For a while he had been infuriated by their stubbornness in insisting upon his having a label, an etat-civil. Then for a few hours the idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day’s thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning—namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing—should be clearly and calmly demonstrated. He had not even mentioned the idea to Kit; she surely would have killed it with her enthusiasm. Since the death of his father he no longer worked at anything, because it was not necessary, but Kit constantly held the hope that he would begin again to write—to write no matter what, so long as he worked at it. “He’s a little less insupportable when he’s working,” she explained to others, and by no means totally in jest. And when he saw his mother, which was seldom, she too would say: “Been working?” and look at him with her large sad eyes. He would reply: “Nope,” and look back at her insolently. Even as they were driving to the hotel in the taxi, with Tunner saying: “What a hellhole” as he saw the miserable streets, he had been thinking that Kit would be too delighted at the prospect; it would have to be done in secret—it was the only way he would be able to carry it off. But then when he had got settled in the hotel, and they had started their little pattern of café life at the Eckmuhl-Noiseux, there had been nothing to write about—he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper. …As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it. Where one left off, the other began, and the existence of circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part was sufficient to place writing outside the realm of possibility. But that was all right. He would not have written well, and so he would have got no pleasure from it. And even if what he might have written had been good, how many people would have known it? It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace.

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, page 205-207

Eat, Pray, Love Italian Style

An italian/american friend sent me this excerpt from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, so here goes String of Excerpts # 10. Send yours in....

I need to make some friends. So I got busy with it, and now it is October and I have a nice assortment of them. I know two Elizabeths in Rome now, besides myself. Both are American, both are writers. The first Elizabeth is a novelist and the second Elizabeth is a food writer. With an apartment in Rome, a house in Umbria, an Italian husband and a job that requires her to travel around Italy eating food and writing about it for Gourmet, it appears that the second Elizabeth must have saved a lot of orphans from drowning during a previous lifetime. Unsurprisingly she knows all the best places to eat in Rome, including a gelateria that serves a frozen rice pudding (and if they don't serve this kind of thing in heaven, then I really don't want to go there)...
    Of course, by now I've also made friends with Gionvanni and Dario, my Tandem Language Exchange fantasy twins. Giovanni's sweetness, in my opinion, makes him a national treasure of Italy. He endeared himself to me forever the first night we met, when I was getting frustrated with my inability to find the words I wanted in Italian, and he put his hand on my arm and said, "Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new." Sometimes I feel like he's older than me, what with his solemn brow and his philosophy degree and his serious political opinions. I like to try to make him laugh, but Giovanni doesn't always get my jokes. Humor is hard to catch in a second language. Especially when you're as serious a young man as Giovanni. He said to me the other night, "When you are ironic, I am always behind you. I am slower. It is like you are the lightening and I am the thunder."
    And I thought, Yeah baby! And you are the magnet and I am the steel! Bring to me your leather, take from me my lace!
    But still, he has not kissed me.
    I don't very often see Dario, the other twin, though he does spend a lot of his time with Sofie. Sofie is my best friend from my language class, and she's definitely somebody you'd want to spend your time with, too, if you were Dario. Sofie is Swedish and in her late twenties and so damn cute you could put her on a hook and use her as bait to catch men of all different nationalities and ages...Every day after class, Sofie and I go sit by the Tiber, eating our gelato and studying with each other. You can't even rightly call it "studying," the thing that we do. It's more like a shared relishing of the Italian language, an almost worshipful ritual, and we're always offering each other new wonderful idioms. Like, for instance, we just learned the other day that un'amica stretta means "a close friend." But stretta literally means tight, as in clothing, like a tight skirt. So a close friend, in Italian, is one that you can wear tightly, snug against your skin, and that is what my little Swedish friend Sofie is becoming to me.
    At the beginning, I liked to think that Sofie and I looked like sisters. Then we were taking a taxi through Rome the other day and the guy driving the cab asked if Sofie was my daughter. Now, folks--the girl is only about seven years younger than I am. My mind went into such a spin-control mode, trying to explain away what he'd said. But no, He said daughter and he meant daughter. Oh , what can I say? I've been through a lot in the last few years. I must look so beat-up and old after this divorce. But as that old country-western song out of Texas goes, "I've been screwed and sued and tattoed, and I'm still standin here in front of you..."

The Waves--3

String of Excerpts # 9

When someone comes in at breakfast, even the embroidered fruit on my curtain swells so that parrots can peck it; one can break it off between one's thumb and finger. The thin, skimmed milk of early morning turns opal, blue, rose. At that hour your husband – the man who slapped his gaiters, pointing with his whip at the barren cow—grumbles. You say nothing. You see nothing. Custom blinds your eyes. At that hour your relationship is mute, null, dun-coloured. Mine at that hour is warm and various. There is no repetition for me. Each day is dangerous. Smooth on the surface, we are all bone beneath like snakes coiling. Suppose we read the Times; suppose we argue. It is an experience. Suppose it is winter. The snow falling loads down the roof and seals us together in a red cave. The pipes have burst. We stand a yellow tin bath in the middle of the room. We rush helter-skelter for basins. Look there – it has burst again over the bookcase. We shout with laughter at the sight of ruin. Let solidity be destroyed. Let us have no possessions. Or is it summer? We may wander to a lake and watch Chinese geese waddling flat-footed to the water’s edge, or see a bone—like a city church with young green trembling before it. (I choose at random; I choose the obvious.) Each sight is an arabesque scrawled suddenly to illustrate some hazard and marvel of intimacy. The snow, the burst pipe, the tin bath, the Chinese goose—these are signs swung high aloft upon which, looking back, I read the character of each love; how each was different.

    “You meanwhile-–for I want to diminish your hostility, your green eyes fixed on mine, and your shabby dress, your rough hands, and all the other emblems of your maternal splendour—have stuck like a limpet to the same rock. Yet it is true, I do not want to hurt you; only to refresh and furbish up my belief in myself that failed at your entry. Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us—a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name. I am merely ‘Neville’ to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world. My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds. It lifts whales—huge leviathans and white jellies, what is amorphous and wandering; I detect, I perceive. Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart…
    There was the beech wood,” said Susan, “Elvedon, and the gilt hands of the clock sparkling among the trees. The pigeons broke the leaves. The changing traveling lights wandered over me. They escaped me. Yet look, Neville, whom I discredit in order to be myself, at my hand on the table. Look at the gradations of healthy colour here on the knuckles, here on the palm. My body has been used daily, rightly, like a tool by a good workman, all over. The blade is clean, sharp, worn in the centre…But I have seen life in blocks, substantial, huge; its battlements and towers, factories and gasometers; a dwelling place made from time immemorial after an hereditary pattern. These things remain square, prominent, undissolved in my mind. I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, page 213-14

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

http://www.marlysmagazine.com/

Qualities and Mathematics

Admittedly, it cannot be denied that in the non-mathematician's opinion all these primordial dreams were suddenly realized in quite a different way from what people had once imagined. Baron Munchhausen's post-horn was more beautiful than mass-produced canned music, the Seven-League Boots were more beautiful than a motor-car, Dwarf-King Laurin's real more beautiful than a railway -tunnel, the magic mandrake-root more beautiful than a telegraphed picture, to have eaten of one's mother's heart and so to understand the language of birds more beautiful than an animal psychologist's study of the expressive values in bird-song. We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream. We no longer lie under a tree, gazing up at the sky between our big toe and second toe; we are too busy getting on with our jobs. And it is no good being lost in dreams and going hungry, if one wants to be efficient; one must eat steak and get a move on. It is exactly as if that old-time, inefficient mankind had gone to sleep on an ant-hill, and when the new one woke up the ants had crept into its blood; and ever since then it has had to fling itself about with the greatest of violence, without ever being able to shake off this beastly sensation of ant-like industry. There is really no need to say much about it. It is in any case quite obvious to most people nowadays that mathematics has entered like a daemon into all aspects of our life....

    Actually the only people living in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples, the natural scientists, who felt no more of all this in their souls than racing-cyclists who are pedaling away hard with no eyes for anything in the world but the back wheel of the man in front. As far as Ulrich was concerned, however, it could at least definitely be said that he loved mathematics because of the people who could not endure it. He was not so much scientifically as humanly in love with science. He could see that in all the problems that came into its orbit science thought differently than the way ordinary people thought. If for "scientific attitude" one were to read 'attitude to life', for 'hypothesis' 'attempt' and for 'truth' 'action', then there would be no considerable natural scientist or mathematician whose life's work did not in courage and revolutionary power far outmatch the greatest deeds in history...[But]in science it happens every few years that something that up to then was held to be error suddenly revolutionizes all views or that an unobtrusive despised idea becomes the ruler over a new realm of ideas; and such occurrences are not mere upheavals but lead up into the heights like Jacob's ladder. In science the way things happen is as vigorous and matter-of-fact and glorious as in a fairytale. 'People simply don't know this,' Ulrich felt. 'They have no glimmer of what can be done with thinking. If one could teach them to think in a new way, they would also live differently.'

    Now someone is sure to ask, of course, whether the world is so topsy-turvy that it is always having to be turned up the other way again. But the world itself long ago gave two answers to this question. For ever since it has existed most people have in their youth been in favour of turning things upside-down. They have always felt that their elders were ridiculous in being so attached to the established order of things and in thinking with their heart - a mere lump of flesh - instead of with their brains. These younger people have always noticed that the moral stupidity of their elders is just as much a lack of any capacity to form new combinations as is ordinary intellectual stupidity, and the morality that they themselves have felt natural has always been one of achievement, heroism and change. Nevertheless, by the time they reach years of fulfillment they have forgotten all about it and are far from wishing to be reminded  of it. That is why many people for whom mathematics or natural science is a job feel it is almost an outrage if someone goes in for science for reasons like Ulrich's.
    However, since taking up this third profession some years earlier, in the opinion of experts, he had done not at all badly.

(The Man Without Qualities I, Robert Musil)

Lady Fortune where do you lead?

Boethius: Consolation of philosophy. This early printed book has many hand-painted illustrations depicting Lady Philosophy and scenes of daily life in fifteenth-century Ghent (1485).

Lady Fortune with the Wheel of Fortune in a medieval manuscript of a work by Boccaccio; Consolation of Philosophy was responsible for the popularity of the goddess of Fortune and the wheel of fortune in the Middle Ages.

An Incredible thing

An incredible thing happened in Petersburg on March 25th. Ivan Yakovlevich, the barber on Voznesensky Avenue (his las name has been lost and does not even figure on the signboard bearing a picture of a gentleman with a soapy cheek and the inscription WE ALSO LET BLOOD HERE), woke up rather early and detected a smell of newly baked bread. He raised himself a little and saw that his wife, a quite respectable woman and one extremely fond of coffee, was taking fresh rolls out of the oven.
    "Praskovia Osipovna,"  he said to his wife, "no coffee for me this morning. I'll have a hot roll with onions instead."
    Actually Ivan Yakovlevich would have liked both but he knew his wife frowned on such whims. And, sure enough, she thought:
    "It's fine with me if the fool wants bread. That'll leave me another cup of coffee."
    And she tossed a roll onto the table.
    Mindful of his manners, Ivan Yakovlevich put his frock coat on over his nightshirt, seated himself at the table, poured some salt, got a couple of onions, took a knife and assuming a dignified expression, proceeded to cut the roll in two.
    Suddenly he stopped, surprised. There was something whitish in the middle of the roll. He poked at it with his knife, then felt it with his finger.
    "It's quite compact..." he muttered under his breath. "Whatever can it be?...
    He thrust in two fingers this time and pulled it out. It was a nose.
    He almost fell off his chair. Then he rubbed his eyes and felt the thing again. It was a nose all right, no doubt about it. And what's more, a nose that had something familiar about it. His features expressed intense horror.
    But the intensity of the barber's horror was nothing compared with the intensity of his wife's indignation.
    "Where," she screamed, "did you lop off that nose, you beast? You crook," she shouted, "you drunkard! I'll report you to the police myself, you thug! Three customers have complained to me before this about the way you keep pulling their noses when you shave them, so that it's a wonder they manage to stay on at all."
    But Ivan Yakavlevich, at that moment more dead than alive, was immune to her attack. He had remembered where he had seen the nose before and it was on none other than Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, whom he shaved regularly each Wednesday and Sunday.
    "Wait, my dear, I'll wrap it in a rag and put it away somewhere in a corner. Let it stay there for a while, then I'll take it away."
    "I won't even listen to you! Do you really imagine that I'll allow a cut-ff nose to remain in my place, you old crumb! All you can do is stop your damn razor and when it comes to your duties, you're no good. You stupid, lousy, skirt-chasing scum! So you want me to get into troubles with the police for your sake? Is that it, you diry mug? You're a stupid log, you know. Get it out of here. Do what you like with it, you hear me, but don't let me ever see it here again."
    The barber stood there dumfounded. He thought and thought but couldn't think of anything.

The Waves--2

One observes curious hesitations at the door of the lift. This way, that way, the other? Then individuality asserts itself. They are off. They are all impelled by some necessity. Some miserable affair of keeping an appointment, of buying a hat, severs these beautiful human beings once so united. For myself, I have no aim. I have no ambition. I will let myself be carried on by the general impulse. The surface of my mind slips along like a pale-grey stream reflecting what passes. I cannot remember my past, my nose, or the colour of my eyes, or what my general opinion of myself is. Only in moments of emergency, at a crossing, at a kerb, the wish to preserve my body springs out and seizes me and stops me, here, before this omnibus. We insist, it seems, on living. Then again, indifference descends. The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And, what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar--forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones, and silence.

It is, however, true that my dreaming, my tentative advance like one carried beneath the surface of a stream, is interrupted, torn, priced and plucked at by sensations, spontaneous and irrelevant, of curiosity, greed, desire, irresponsible as in sleep. (I covet that bag--etc.) No, but I wish to go under; to visit the profound depths; once in a while to exercies my prerogative not always to act, but to explore; to hear vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths, to indulge impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding, impossible to those who act. Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy, which, unmoored as I am from a private being, bid me embrace these engrossed flocks; these starers and trippers; these errand-boys and furtive and fugitive girls who, ignoring their doom, look in at shop-windows? But I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

The Lake House

http://www.marlysmagazine.com/

One Way to Write a Novel

 

I've always wanted to write a novel but never have perhaps because it's too lonely an exercise for me. So inspired by my penchant for excerpting I've decided to do something that first occurred to me back in my twenties down in San Francisco during my youthful exuberant and experimental days. Back then I imagined creating a book that was a patchwork quilt, taking pieces from all the novels on my bookshelf, and simply putting them one after the other, (in the order they were arranged on my shelf was my thought at the time), and seeing what it would be like. Kinda like song sampling but for the novelist.

While I might not get that far with this little exercise, I'm lazy and need some blog material and I loved reading the Kerouac one, so I'm just going to pull out some bits and pieces from books on my shelves and day after day you can return here and have a 5-minute read of some excellent literature, just the highlights, some of which might have been underlined in my college English courses. And the point is just to enjoy and see the connections, and happily avoid reading through all the boring parts in those big long books, and perhaps spark an 'aha' for the day.

I guess I could also turn it into a puzzle and not identify the book I have drawn the quote from until later and in this way, folks would be encouraged to guess the origin of the quote. Maybe I'll give this a go; the only problem is that it might expose my readership too much!

Enjoy, Here goes the first one:

"But soon, too soon," said Bernard, "this egotistic exultation fails. Too soon the moment of ravenous identity is over, and the appetite for happiness, and happiness, and still more happiness is glutted. the stone is sunk; the moment is over. Round me there spreads a wide margin of indifference. Now open in my eyes a thousand eyes of curiosity. Any one now is at liberty to murder Bernard, who is engaged to be married, so long as they leave untouched this margin of unknown territory, this forest of the unknown world. Why, I ask (whispering discreetly), do women dine alone together there? Who are they? And what has brought them on this particular evening to this particular spot?...I have also seen that lady powder her nose three times in the midst of an absorbing conversation ---about love perhaps, about the unhappiness of their dearest friend perhaps. "Ah, but the state of my nose!" she thinks, and out comes her powder-puff, obliterating in its passage all the most fervent feelings of the human heart. There remains, however, the insoluble problem of the solitary man with the eyeglass; of the elderly lady drinking champagne alone. Who and what are these unknown people? I ask. I could make a dozen stories of what he said, of what she said --- I can see a dozen pictures. But what are storeis? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another. And sometimes I begin to doubt if there are stories. What is my story? What is Rhoda's? What is Neville's? There are facts...That is the truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture.

    "Now once more," said Louis, "as we are about to part, having paid our bill, the circle in our blood, broken so often, so sharply, for we are so different, closes in a ring. Something is made. Yes, as we rise and fidget, a little nervously, we pray, holding in our hands this common feeling, "Do not move, do not let the swing-door cut to pieces the thing that we have made, that globes itself here, among these lights, these peelings, this litter of bread crumbs and people passing. Do not move, do not go. Hold it for ever.'"

The World is One big Orooni

just thinking back to those Jack Kerouac days which seem so dim and distant in this clean, constructed, scheduled e-world--orooni we live in...

On The Road (excerpt) ( Top of Page         )        

'... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with bigsad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a         little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of youngsemi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni         ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the  front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti         ... oroonirooni ..." He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.



Dean stands in the back, saying,  'God! Yes!' -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating.  'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.' Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C's, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing 'C-Jam Blues' and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever,and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each set takes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody's head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is         slipped into his hand. 'Bourbon-orooni -- thank-you-ovauti ...' Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue ashe lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing   eyes of a mother to him. Slim said, 'There you go-orooni.' Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. 'Right-orooni,' says Slim; he'll join anybody but won't guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said, 'Orooni,' Dean said 'Yes!' I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the         whole world was just one big orooni.'

-----------------

Do you believe he churned out this book in 3 weeks on one big scroll he typed through his manual typewriter? I saw a play about it once that was very moving. Here's some (perhaps more accurate) background on the book Kerouac churned out, again from wikipedia, my favorite knowledge source on the net

       Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," Kerouac wrote what is now known as On the Road in April, 1951 (ISBN 0-312-20677-1).

Part of the Kerouac myth is that, fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, he completed the first version of the novel during a three week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. This session produced the now famous scroll of On the Road. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over several years. His technique was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous Joan Anderson letter, authored by Neal Cassady.^[3]

Publishers rejected the book due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of the United States in the 1950s. In 1957, Viking Press purchased the novel, demanding major revisions.^[4]