Heart Feels Better, Then

Head, Heart
Lydia Davis
from Varieties of Disturbance

      Heart weeps.
      Head tries to help heart.
      Head tells heart how it is, again:
      You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
      Heart feels better, then.
      But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
      Heart is so new to this.
      I want them back, says heart.
      Head is all heart has.
      Help, head. Help heart.

A Beast That Big Could Wreck Us

The Searchers
Tracy K. Smith
from Duende

after the film by John Ford

He wants to kill her for surviving,
For the language she spits,
The way she runs, clutching
Her skirt as if life pools there.

Instead he grabs her, puts her
On his saddle, rides back
Into town where faces
She barely remembers

Smile into her fear
With questions and the wish,
The impossible wish, to forget.
What does living do to any of us?

And why do we grip it, hang on
As if it's the rib of a horse
Past commanding? A beast
That big could wreck us easily,

Could rise up on two legs,
Or kick its back end up
And send us soaring.
We might land, any moment,

Like cheap toys. There's always
A chimney burning in the mind,
A porch where the rocker still rocks,
Though empty. Why

Do we insist our lives are ours?
Look at the frontier. It didn't resist.
Gave anyone the chance
To plant shrubs, dig wells.

Watched, not really concerned
With whether it belonged
To him or to him. Either way
The land went on living,

Dying. What else could it choose?

From One Joni to Another

Joni Mitchell presents John Kelly with a dulcimer after a performance of Paved Paradise.

Hot and All Over the Place

from "An Old Virgin"
Mary Gaitskill
from the collection Don't Cry

A car pulled up beside her, throwing off motor heat. The car was full of loud teenage boys. The driver, a Hispanic boy of about eighteen, wanted to make a right turn, but he was blocked by a stalled car in front of him and cars on his side. He was banging his horn and yelling out the window; his urgency was hot and all over the place. Laura stared at him. His delicate beauty was almost too bright; he had so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark. He yelled and pounded the horn, trying to spew it out, but still it surged through him. It was like he was ready to kill someone, anyone, without any understanding in his mind or heart. That thought folded over unexpectedly; Laura pictured him as a baby with his mouth on his mother's breast. She pictured his fierce nature deep inside him, like dark, beautiful seeds feeding off his mother's milk, off the feel of her hand on his skull. She thought of him as a teenager with a girl; he would kiss her too hard and be rough, wanting her to feel what he had inside him, wanting her to see it. And, in spite of his roughness, she would.

He turned in his seat to shout something to the other boys in the car, then turned forward to put his head out the window to curse the other cars. He turned again and saw Laura staring at him. Their eyes met. She thought of her father showing his aunts the stars and all the planets. You are good, she thought. What you have is good. The boy dropped his eyes in confusion. There was a yell from the backseat. The stalled car leaped forward. The boy snapped around, hit the gas, and was off.

Laura crossed the street. How to explain that? she thought. How to know what it even was. She thought, I told him he was good. I told him with his eyes and he heard me.

On Going Home

A funny thing about being back at home after several months away is facing up to the fact that so much has been forgotten. I'm talking about the minor things: the wireless password, the function of each TV remote, which key works which door. The phone number, for God's sake. It is endlessly entertaining, and only disconcerting in that the life you hold dear--or at least the little facts binding it all together--almost seems to want to be lost.

Foolproof

from "The Constant Gardener"
Bernard Cooper
reprinted in The Best American Essays 2008

"Here's some important information I'd like you both to have," M. interrupted. She handed us a folder titled "Home Infusion." It showed a black-and-white illustration that at first looked to me like a drawing of a kite on a string, but on closer examination turned out to be an IV bag trailing a tube. M. noticed me squinting at the image. She switched off her cell phone. She sighed the sigh of a woman whose work was cut out for her. "I take it," she asked me, "that you'll be in charge?"

I plucked a Kleenex from a nearby box and tamped by forehead. "I realize I must look a little frazzled, what with racing in at the last minute, but please understand that I take this responsibility as seriously as anyone without medical experience can take it. Not that my not having medical experience will be a problem. What I'm saying is, despite my lack of medical experience, I'm ready and willing to learn everything there is to know about giving foolproof infusions."

"Foolproof?" she asked.

Brian and I looked at each other.

"The authorities have ways of determining if an air bubble has passed through the filtration system and killed a patient on purpose."

"Listen," I said to M., "I know you don't know me from Adam, and I appreciate your concern, but believe me, there's no way I'm going to kill him on purpose!"

She kept on staring.

"Not by accident either!"

"He won't," mumbled Brian, a Lomotil on his tongue.

"We've been together for over twenty years," I told M., realizing too late that a twenty-year relationship might seem to her like a reason for foul play instead of against it.

Some Unseen Thing

Halfway through our ten weeks in California, I started to feel a need to be back at home. The sense of rootlessness bewildered me, especially because we felt fortunate to be spending an extended period of time in a beautiful part of the world. January was bliss. Rides to towns along the coast, walks through the mountains. And then? I was looking back through my blog posts, and I could feel a shift in my voice around the time of our next door neighbor's death in early February. I'm talking about the man who died in the paragliding accident in Pacifica. I don't mean to be simplistic--human restlessness could never be attributed to any one thing --but I think now of how our windows faced his house and yard. His house was the subject of ours. There wasn't any way out of it unless we closed the drapes, and who would have wanted to live like that? The sun, when it came out, meant everything. And then there was that morning when I walked out back to see his wetsuit and torn-up parasail hanging out on his fence. I'm sure the relatives or friends who put it there never expected anyone to see that, but I remember stopping in my tracks, making an "uh" sound, before I went back in the house to pour a glass of cold water. And went on with the day, of course.

I think some unseen thing was taking place over there now. I mean, the house missing the man. The books and plants and trees missing the man. He apparently was very funny and knew how to make people laugh at parties.

Palo What?

At some point last Wednesday I said to Mark, So we're going to forget all this soon. We were driving down Bryant Street in Palo Alto, and I was talking about Palo Alto itself. Not so much the general character of Palo Alto, or even the senses I associate with the streets and yards: the smell of cough drops on the air whenever it rains on the eucalyptus. But I meant street names, town names, where to make copies or buy gas or Kombucha, all the concentration and retention that goes into making a foreign place feel like home for a few months. But one has to forget it all to make room for the next set of details, right? I wondered whether taking all that in wore out the brain. After all, we've lived in probably ten other places, temporarily, over the 14 years we've been together, but Mark proposed that it kept us stimulated, awake. Sometimes I'm inclined to agree with him; sometimes I think I'm going to wake up one day with snow-white eyebrows.

In any case, I was thinking of another take on memory and forgetting, which appears in today's New York Times, by my friend and former student, Robert Leleux, the author of the wonderful Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, which he started in my first workshop at Sarah Lawrence all the way back in 2001. Robert's belief is that his grandmother's loss of memory from Alzheimer's helped to bring the estranged members of his family back together. Grudges forgotten, fights forgotten: once all that went in and out of her mental picture, Robert's grandmother could begin to spend time with his mother again. To see her, ironically, with clarity. To read his lovely and astute essay, click here.

Speaking of time and its passage... It's funny and great to think of one of my students getting a piece in the Times. Allan Gurganus, one of my teachers in grad school, used to refer to me as one of his babies whenever I did well and/or got a book published. Now I have some babies of my own.

A Great Noise That Became Louder and Louder

I'm not sure what brought me to page through Dorothy Day's autobiography. (I know what you're thinking: isn't the Black Party tonight?) But for years I've been fascinated by the splits in her character: her progressive politics vs. her old-fashioned piety. Plus, her love for her cottage by the beach on Staten Island. I knew she'd written several books, but I had no idea she was a beautiful writer. Such a clear, strong voice on the page, always dedicated to accuracy, the complexities of being.

from The Long Loneliness
Dorothy Day

In Oakland (I was eight then) we lived next door to a Methodist family who had a little store with a tiny apartment in back. The entire place smelled of fresh shingles. Birdie, my neighbor, took me to Sunday school and church with her, and then I began to experience real piety, in the sense of the sweetness of faith. I believed, but I did not know in what I believed. I became disgustingly, proudly pious. I sang hymns with the family next door. I prayed on my knees beside my bed. I asked my mother why we did not pray and sing hymns and got no satisfactory answer. No one went to church but me. I was alternately lonely and smug. At the same time, I began to be afraid of God, of death, of eternity. As soon as I closed my eyes at night, the blackness of death surrounded me. I believed and yet was afraid of nothingness. What would it be like to sink into that immensity? If I fell asleep God became in my ears a great noise that became louder and louder, and approached nearer and nearer to me until I woke up sweating with fear and shrieking for my mother. I fell asleep with her hand in mine, her warm presence by my bed. If she connected my fears with my religious attitude, she never spoke of it.

Even as I write this I am wondering if I had these nightmares before the San Francisco earthquake or afterward. The very remembrance of the noise which kept getting louder and louder, and the keen fear of death, makes me think now that it might have been due only to the earthquake. And yet we left Oakland almost at once afterward, since my father's newspaper job was gone when the plant went up in flames; we were on our way to Chicago within a week to a new life in another city.

A Collage

The reading with Alistair McCartney and Mike Albo at Teachers and Writers Collaborative was huge fun last night. It was great to share the stage with two guys whose work I admire so much. I think we managed to make a big collage together, the three of us pulling scraps and pieces from everything we could think of: Virginia Woolf to Justin Timberlake to The Underminer himself, who made a special appearance. I'll post the audio of the reading when Teachers and Writers puts it up. In the meantime, here's a selection from Alistair's excellent novel.

Wildy, Hilda
from The End of the World Book
Alistair McCartney

My grandmother on my mother's side was born in 1898 and died in 1975 when I was three. From the few photographs I have seen of her, I know she was thin and strung as tightly as a tennis racket. She often wore her hair in twists and wore violently and exuberantly patterned dresses from another era, the Victorian equivalent of the psychedelic. There's even a photo of her holding me in her arms, taken not long before she died, but of course I have no memory of this.

Once I went to the cemetery where she is buried, and, after much wandering around, I finally found her grave. I heard something coming from the grave, a kind of mumbling, and I knelt in the dirt so as to hear better, putting my ear to the ground, just like I used to put a glass to the door of my sisters' room so I could listen in on them gossiping. I remained in that position for a long time and sure enough, it was my grandmother talking to me, but, alas, everything she said was unintelligible.

Goodbye, California

Three Geese in Mendocino

Three Dogs in San Francisco

Three Goats in Pescadero

A Dog on the Beach in Santa Cruz

On the Way to Ano Nuevo

A Late Eichler in Los Arboles Addition, Palo Alto

Paul's Shoe Repair, Berkeley

The Big Oak at the House Next Door

Sweet Door in the Rosebush

This Wren
Paul Otremba
from The Currency

For no reason at all this wren, this little mound
of pencil shavings. But what appears is too bleared,

too gray sluice of clouds covering the window
so the kitchen goes dim. So this wren eating beneath

scratches of juniper, of field grass, little mounds
of graphite in the beak. For no reason I let

the sauce simmer, the reduction gone syrup.
Then she enters, asking about the drawing, a turkey,

five fingers dragging a wind through the grass,
and the wren goes on with the little mounds of seed.

More questions arise about the timing, the meat of it,
the delicacy of a still, cold center. For no reason at all,

rosemary, Money Jungle, track “Fleurette Africaine,”
and the wren finds a hole in the rosebush,

while she places heavy plates in orbit around the table,
singing a wordless “Fleurette Africaine,” a little wren,

a little monster, sweet door in the rosebush.
For no reason at all a monster in the wren’s nest.

Sweaty Work and Lucky Breaks

The Great Churches of Wood and Dust

The Story
Jason Shinder
from the collection Stupid Hope, forthcoming.

One night while my mother slept,

I read a story by Raymond Carver about a man
who kept finding his true love but always

got the address wrong. To look again was all he could do.
Once he offered to trade his shoes for a bus ticket

to ride past the great churches of wood and dust of Indiana.
And then he silently undressed himself in a room

at the end of a hall. Which is a place I know. Only
when I go there, love be damned. Get it myself, I say.

But that's wrong. I want to be lifted above the walls of my cell.
But I'm scared I can only be this body

that casts one shadow. It can't be the passing of years that kills
the man in the story. But it is. Just off the road.

A Clutch of Bells on a Strap

from "Don't Cry"
Mary Gaitskill
from the collection Don't Cry

In the dirty hotel restaurant, we had dry bricklike croissants and lots of good fruit—papaya, mangoes, bananas, oranges, and pineapple. The coffee was burnt, so we decided to go to the espresso place we’d been told was just a few blocks away. We never found the place, although we walked a long time. At first, we walked on a crowded street made of pavement, with department stores, an Internet café, and a grocery with a big Magic Marker drawing (green and red) of fruit and vegetables in the window. Starving dogs wandered freely. The pavement abruptly fell off and gave way to rocks. We saw another wedding party, in a Mercedes decked with rich-colored flowers, moving through a herd of donkeys, the herders lagging behind, talking on their cells. Beggars swarmed around us, shouting and showing us their deformed limbs, their blind eyes. We forgot our espresso. The rocky street gave way to dirt with pools of muddy water. Houses, patched together with tin, plastic, canvas, and wood, bulged out, sagged in, lurched and leaned this way, then that. Beggars swarmed us, chanting. Wedding guests in gold pants and silky shirts pushed their broken car through slowly parting pedestrians. A little boy marched along blowing a horn; he was followed by a smaller boy, who was shouting and rhythmically shaking a clutch of bells on a strap. The smell of fresh shit rose up suddenly and mixed with the odors of sweat and cooked meat. An old woman seated in the roots of a giant tree sold bundled sticks and dresses mounted on smiling white mannequins. Trees made soft, blunt, deep green shapes with their boughs. Katya turned to me, her face dazed. “We’d better go back,” she said. “We’re getting lost.”

All Contact is Contact

I decided to take a break from packing--will we actually be back in Manhattan in a few days?--and walked to the store to pick up lunch. Walking toward me were two women in their twenties, cheerful, in green shirts. I don't know when I figured out that a guy with a guitar case strapped to his back, was yelling at them, but that was clear soon enough. It was also clear that the level of rage in his voice was out of control, out of proportion to the matter at hand. I asked them, "What happened?" and they said, "nothing," indicating that the best thing to do would be to hurry on, with a nervous smile. And I said "take care," and then the guy starts spewing at me, or at someone in general: something about territory, something about "on my block," something about "the guy in the jacket." I cringed. Not again. Luckily, he got on a bike, biked on, silent now. I'm not sure any of this had anything to do with homophobia, but it did feel like yet one more sign that more and more people might be losing it. If this is happening in Palo Alto...

Back at home I found a worksheet from last fall's NYU workshop on top of one of my boxes. I'll just say that I want this piece to work better than it actually does. (Who couldn't respect its empathy, its interest in taking responsibility?) But when one of my students read the whole thing aloud on our last day of class in December, I believed in every syllable. I should say that the incident it describes is not meant to refer to what happened in North Beach last Friday, but it did made me think some about what we--meaning all of us--really might want.

Accident
Dave Eggers
from How the Water Feels to the Fishes

You get out of your cars. You are alone in yours, and there are three teenagers in theirs. The accident was your fault and you walk over to tell them this. Walking over to their car, an old and restored Camaro which you have ruined, it occurs to you that if the three teenagers are angry teenagers, this encounter could be very unpleasant. You pulled into an intersection, obstructing them, and their car hit yours. They have every right to be upset, or livid, or even violent. As you approach, you see that their driver's side door won't open. The driver pushes against it, and you are reminded of scenes where drivers are stuck in submerged cars. Soon they all exit through the passenger side door and walk around the Camaro, inspecting the damage. "Just bought this today," the driver says. He is eighteen, blond, average in all ways. "Today?" you ask. You are a bad person, you think. You also think: What an odd car for a teenager to buy in the twenty-first century. "Yeah, today," he says, then sighs. You tell him that you are sorry. That you are so, so sorry. That it was your fault and that you will cover all costs. You exchange insurance information, and you find yourself, minute by minute, ever more thankful that none of these teenagers has punched you, or even made a remark about your being drunk, which you are not. You become more friendly with all of them, and you realize that you are much more connected to them, particularly to the driver, than would be possible in any other way. You have done him and his friends some psychic harm, and you jeopardized their health, and now you are so close you feel like you share a heart. He knows your name and you know his, and you almost killed him and because you got so close but didn't, you want to fall on him, weeping, because you are so lonely, so lonely always, and all contact is contact, and all contact makes us so grateful we want to cry and dance and cry and cry. In a moment of clarity you finally understand why boxers, who want so badly to hurt each other, can rest their heads on the shoulders of their opponent, can lean against one another like tired lovers, so thankful for a moment of rest.

A Walk Across the Golden Gate

Like You Would Cut a Grapefruit

For Harvey
from My Vocabulary Did This to Me
Jack Spicer

When you break a line nothing
Becomes better.
There is no new (unless you are humming
Old Uncle Tom's Cabin) there is no new
Measure.
You breathe the same and Rimbaud
Would never even look at you.
Break
Your poem
Like you would cut a grapefruit
Make
It go to sleep for you
And each line (There is no Pacific Ocean) And make each line
Cut itself. Like seaweed thrown
Against the pier.

Undulant in Some Uncapturable Curve

A Few More Thoughts About What Happened Last Night

--I hate nothing more than coming up against people like that because it's inevitable not to lose some dignity. There's nothing worse than yelling at a stranger, though I did somewhat enjoy saying "What happened to your soul?"--as absurd (and literary) as it sounds to me tonight.

--My guess is that there a plenty of forces out there that want to make sure North Beach remains a hetero-centric party zone. Maybe they think that tourists or people from the suburbs will stop coming to the restaurants and bars if too many gay men are in sight.

--Some people hate powerful gay men with a special vengeance.

--One is more likely to come up against homophobia in supposedly gay-friendly places. Mark, for instance, had more run ins with gay bashers in Provincetown than anywhere. And we've lived in some unlikely parts of the world including Salt Lake City and Wilmington, North Carolina, where we never had any problems.

--San Francisco is obviously much more stratified than I knew.

--I have felt like crap all day, though I'm not moping.

A Night in North Beach

A few images of our night in North Beach--there's Lawnboy on the shelves at City Lights--before it all turned creepy and sour. I can tell Mark's writing an account of things just now. I don't have enough perspective to tell the complicated story just yet--what to leave in, what to leave out. And it seems like it should be funny in the telling, but it still isn't funny at all. Let's just say we walked into a scene straight from The Sopranos, or a David Lynch movie, or something by Flannery O'Connor, and though we got away without getting beaten up or killed, we were told by the owner of a certain restaurant that we belonged "on the other side of town, in the Castro." Among much uglier things, which I don't have the energy to reproduce just yet.

Click here for Mark's blog post.

And here for more thoughts.

And You Want to Get Moving, And You Want to Stay Still

I'm probably overdoing it in the Joni Mitchell department, as I tend to do from time to time. But this one was too good to pass up: Josh Schurr's take on "Barangrill" from For the Roses.



Click here to check out Jonimitchell.com, revamped as of today.

Mr. Blue

This fine bird was both sunning himself outside the window of my study yesterday afternoon. After a little research, Mark found out that he's a Western Scrub-Jay. Here's a little bit about his food storage habits, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Western Scrub-Jays, like many other corvids, exploit ephemeral surpluses in food supply by storing food in scattered caches within their territories. In the process of collecting and storing this food, western scrub-jays have shown an ability to plan ahead in choosing cache sites to provide adequate food volume and variety for the future. Western scrub-jays are also able to rely on their accurate observational spatial memories to steal food from caches made by conspecifics. To protect their caches from these potential 'pilferers', food storing birds implement a number of strategies to reduce this risk of theft. Western scrub-jays are also known for hoarding and burying brightly colored objects.

(If you embiggen the second image here, you'll actually see a berry inside his beak.)

Moving Us Around, Dusting Us Off

My Father Full of Light
Michael Dickman
from The End of the West

Tonight the moths are beating the shit out of themselves against
      the screen door

It looks like smoke

So does the light
inside his rings, his
wristwatch

The blood swimming around inside his face
in lightning blotches
beneath his skin
like the residue of beets
on a cutting board

also
emitted light

A blizzard of wings


He thinks God
is going to clean
everything up

Hands made from Light and Feathers, moving us around,
      dusting us off

Everything
settling back into the warm
colors of autumn
instead of getting
ground down
into glass

which, I get the feeling
diamond after diamond
is what's really
going to happen


I could have
whatever I wanted
once a year

Whatever you want
it's on me

Coconut cream pies rotated slowly behind bright windows like
      the cities of heaven

The register sang
Flies collected
on our water glasses

My father, for a moment, was full of light

Men came and went

I knew

our waiter was the son
of someone

A Song So Wild and Blue

Pacific Grove to Ano Nuevo

Mark and I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz, where we both taught day-long writing workshops at the poet Ellen Bass's house. My day was Saturday, Mark's was today. After dropping him off this morning, I drove for a while south to Pacific Grove, then north to Ano Nuevo. Here's a record of my day in pictures. The fourth of these, by the way, is not of a Golden retriever but of a pensive sea lion, who'd dried off after being out of the water for a while. I caught him from overhead resting beneath a pier in Monterey. Who knew they had fur like that?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mark Your Calendars!

2020 VISIONS: MIKE ALBO, PAUL LISICKY, AND ALISTAIR MCCARTNEY
Friday March 20 – 7:00 PM

At the Center for Imaginative Writing, Teachers & Writers Collaborative , 520 Eighth Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), Suite 2020, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10018

Mike Albo is a writer and comedian who lives and loves in Brooklyn. His second novel, written with his longtime friend Virgina Heffernan, is the cult humor classic, The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. His performances of the character have become Internet hits and can be found on Youtube, like everything else in the world. Albo’s first novel, the critically acclaimed Hornito, came out in 2000. Albo has written for zillions of magazines and websites, and he is also known as “The Critical Shopper” columnist for the New York Times. He’s performed numerous solo shows, including Spray, Please Everything Burst, and My Price Point, as well as with the comedy trio Unitard. Check out www.mikealbo.com for upcoming shows, his spaced-out blog, performance clips, and recent writing.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder, both published by Graywolf Press. His recent work appears in Five Points, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, the Seattle Review, elimae, Truth in Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Lisicky has taught in the writing programs at Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Fairfield University, and Antioch University, Los Angeles. In fall 2009, he will be a visiting professor in the MFA program at Rutgers University, Newark. Lisicky’s new novel and a collection of short prose pieces are forthcoming.

Alistair McCartney is the author of The End of the World Book: A Novel (University of Wisconsin Press 2008), which is also an encyclopedia, A to Z, of obsessions, memories, nad philosophical/homoerotic fixations. As the Seattle Times wrote, “Novel? Memoir? Encyclopedia? Fantasia? The End of the World Book is all these things at once. And it’s brilliant … so sharp and alive that you feel as though bright, perverse balloons of insight are expanding—or exploding in your mind as you turn the pages. If you like Australian literary maverick Murray Bail or the order-obsessed imagination of Peter Greenaway, you won’t want to miss this.” McCartney was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1971. His writing has appeared in Fence, Bloom, James White Review, and other literary journals, as well as in a number of fiction and creative nonfiction anthologies, including Wonderlands (University of Wisconsin Press) and Between Men (Carroll and Graf). He is based in Los Angeles, where he lives with his partner Tim Miller and teaches creative writing and literature in the MFA and BA programs at Antioch University, Los Angeles. McCartney is currently working on the second book in a triology.

An Undercurrent of Throbbing Obedience

from As a Friend
Forrest Gander

I loved those times when the two of us were sent out together. I loved watching him, feeling my own neck and shoulders make little sympathetic adjustments to the way he moved. It didn't matter whether he was walking into a room full of people or leaning into the transit in the middle of a field, he was more hypnotic than anyone I'd ever seen. It was a strange electric quality like when leaves take on the first shimmer of color in the fall. And maybe it was his death in him, pressing early to the surface of his skin, that gave him some kind of radiance. There was something purely erotic about it. And when we surveyed, whether he was speaking to me through the two-way or calling out matter of fact questions and numbers, I felt an almost masochistic charge, an undercurrent of throbbing obedience to him that weakened the sockets behind my knees and sometimes gave me inconvenient hard-ons.

Cursed and Charmed

Just up on Youtube: Paved Paradise, John Kelly as Joni at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. An entire concert!

Crucial Music

I was just asked to contribute something to the Fairfield MFA blog, and I thought I'd copy my post here. The following is a revised, abbreviated version of a piece I wrote a few years back for Bret Anthony Johnston's Naming the World.

* * *

Style is a very simple matter; it is all about rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words... Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

I came upon that quotation from one of Virginia Woolf’s letters a few years back. I circled it, came back to it again. I typed it out and found myself quoting it, days later, to the students in my fiction workshop. Woolf seemed to say something I’d been trying to articulate to myself for years: what exactly happens on those rare occasions when it feels as if the work’s coming from some source outside us? I don’t think we’re talking about latching onto a cluster of quirky details, though that may be part of it. I don’t think it’s simply about coming to know one’s characters so fully that they begin to take on independent lives, though that may be a part of it too. It seems to me that that sense of supreme immersion might have something to do with matters of rhythm--or more precisely, finding a rhythm that matches the meaning of the drama. A rhythm that isn’t decorative or distracting but crucial: the crucial music that makes a piece of writing sing. Of course this is something that can’t be willed into being. Talk to any poet and she’ll assure you of that, which is probably why poets, unlike prose writers, might be more sporadic creators than we are—we poor, poor prose writers, with our chair-bound work ethic. I wonder what the interrelationship is between rhythm and the condition we typically describe as “inspiration.”

So my question is, how can we bring one of the central tools of the poet to our work and be more conscious of pauses, sentence-length, stops, even alliteration and assonance in the prose we read and write? Not to will our work into being, but to open ourselves up to our own rhythms--the patterns of our everyday speech, the quirkiness of the way we move and walk--and to engage those on the page.

Torn Out of One Birdsong

Calling a Distant Animal
W.S. Merwin
from The Shadow of Sirius

Here it is once again this one note
from a string of longing

tightened suddenly from both ends
and held for plucking

tone torn out of one birdsong
though that bird

by now may be
where a call cannot

follow it
the same note goes on calling

across space and is heard now
in the old night and known there

a silence recognized
by the silence it calls to

Edge of Red on Gold Fur

from The Bird is Her Reason
from Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream
Connie Voisine

There are some bodies that emerge
                                         into desire as a god
rises from the sea, emotion and
                      memory hang like dripping clothes--this
              want is like
                                   entering that heated red

on the mouth of a Delacoix lion
          stalwart, always that red
                         which makes
my teeth ache and my skin feel
            a hand that has never touched me,
                                 the tree groaning outside becomes
                      a man who knocks on my bedroom window,
edge of red on gold fur,
                      the horse, the wild
flip of its head, the rake of claws
                      across its back, the unfocussed,
                                                              swallowed eye.

How Many Would it Take for the Season to be Called Spring?

from The Vagrants
Yiyun Li

The day started before sunrise, on March 21, 1979, when Teacher Gu woke up and found his wife sobbing quietly into her blanket. A day of equality it was, or so it had occurred to Teacher Gu many times when he had pondered the date, the spring equinox, and again the thought came to him: Their daughter's life would end on this day, when neither the sun nor its shadow reigned. A day later the sun would come closer to her and to the others on this side of the world, imperceptible perhaps to dull human eyes at first, but birds and worms and trees and rivers would sense the change in the air, and they would make it their responsibility to manifest the changing of the seasons. How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring? But such naming might mean little to the rivers and flowers, when they repeat their rhythms with faithfulness and indifference. The date set for his daughter to die was as arbitrary as her crime, determined by the court, of being an unrepentant counterrevolutionary; only the unwise would look for significance in a random date. Teacher Gu willed his body to stay still and hoped his wife would soon realize that he was awake.

Feed Your Head

It's probably not a wise idea to grab for one's camera while driving at 65 MPH across the Dumbarton Bridge at twilight, but I couldn't resist that numinous Pacific sky. And now it occurs to me that my impulse to take a picture was informed by that shot of the Port Arthur bridge, which I posted with Jericho Brown's "Track 5" a few days ago. I've been reading Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences which makes the makes the case that Joel Myerowitz's photographs of the World Trade Center site are informed by the paintings of Vermeer, Bierstadt, and Rembrandt. So there you have it: the shot of the Texas bridge is no Piranesi, but I must have been holding its image in my head when I felt the need to balance the camera on the steering wheel. I love what that suggests about the imaginative impulse: a (sometimes inadvertent) conversation with another piece. Spark to spark. Fire to fire.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about Palo Alto, especially now that we'll be back in New York in a few weeks. It's curious that a place with so many beautiful houses, so many beautiful redwoods, so many cars with all the right bumper stickers might not be the best place to get writing done--why should that be? I pull out my notebook here, and it feels like homework. I pull out my notebook in San Francisco, and my imagination's back--even when I'm sitting on the chairs outside the shopping center on Market Street, hunkered beside the tower of the huge Safeway sign. I don't exactly get it, but now I understand why all the Stegners live in San Francisco and Oakland. What's not to like? I still think that as I walk down the street here. And all the Eichler houses--there are more Eichlers in Palo Alto than in any other town, over 2200, and anyone who's read any of this blog knows how much those houses stir up my latent Famous Builder fantasies. And yet? And yet?

So I walked into the Whole Foods down the street last night and what should be playing but Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." Irony upon irony. Grace Slick, former Palo Alto resident-outsider. Once transgressive song recast as reassuring wallpaper. Pro-chemical anthem in natural foods emporium. And I lifted the spoon for a sample of organic raspberries....