Author Archives: Bryn Gribben

About Bryn Gribben

Bryn Gribben holds a Ph. D. in Victorian literature from the University of Washington and a secret MFA in her heart. She teaches literature at Seattle University, with courses focusing on such topics as beauty, dignity, and visual culture. Bryn also taught a course on "Writing for This American Life" at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle and can be heard on episode 4 on the podcast "Closed for Logging." Once, she participated in a celebrity spelling bee, under the name of "Sylla Belle."

Interlude: Ordain Me Now

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This post is actually a mini-essay I discovered on my hard drive today. I must have written it in 2002 or 2003, years on my mind right now, as I reconnect with people from that time. What strikes me now is my distance from intimacy in it, the doubt in myself that clearly inspired this. I don’t feel like that anymore.

For many prophets and gurus, their calling comes to them in dreams, a voice across space and time, a light that fills them so suddenly and fully that others respond and follow. For others, it is the conviction in charisma, a sense of self that goes beyond self. When my best friends Erin and Blaine called me one month and asked me to perform their marriage, I took the calling literally and went to the website of the Progressive Universal Life Church. Whereas Satan sat Jesus on a pinnacle and promised him death or power, I was presented with similar but much easier options: Cancel or Ordain me now. I chose the latter.

You can ordain yourself for free with the Universal Life Church, but for $19.95 to the Progressive Universal Life Church, you get a certificate and a wallet-sized card, which my friend promptly laminated for me. The laminated card is important; it is what I pull out to remind me of my duty when times get hard or when someone questions my credibility; and, in a pinch, I can stick it through the collar of a black button-up shirt to double as a priest’s dog collar.

It took me seven years to finish my doctorate in Victorian literature. In five minutes, I was the Reverend Bryn Gribben. In fact, I am the Reverend Doctor Bryn Gribben. Like Martin Luther King. “I can be like Martin Luther King!” I told myself. And it’s not the doctorate that will do that. It’s the “Reverend.”

You can tell when something transcendent is about to happen, sometimes, when the ground on which you stand starts shaking. Sometimes, this is an earthquake; sometimes, it’s the clouds parting. For me, the year I became a minister had been a hard year—all those years in graduate school, if nothing else, make you tired of living for the future. But, like most major religions, they also convince you that in the sweet by and by, there’s manna in the desert. I needed that manna. I’d experienced the ever-humbling double whammy of being terribly in love and of being in my fifth year of teaching. The nearly unbearable sensation of being loved unconditionally holds within it the sneaking certainty that there has to be a hidden condition somewhere. Teaching creates the nearly unbearable realization that, at some point, especially if you’re an English teacher, you are a martyr to budgets and students who view education as a faulty product they want to return before they even open the box. Morever, you’re convinced that this martyrdom is both good and inevitable. How Jewish is that?

And while some say true love and a true vocation are the solid ground on which to plant your feet and find yourself, I was finding my love of teaching and my love of being taught pushing across each other like the plates of some kind of psychic continental drift . . . with the result more like Marx rather than Hallmark: “all that is solid melts into air.”

So when Erin and Blaine asked me to marry them, I felt like I’d been lifted from my sinking ground to a different plane, a better one. Only old friends, who remember you when you were cocksure of your own uniqueness in college, could or would ask you, their last single friend, to perform their marriage, give you credit for knowledge about things you haven’t done. And that means you need to figure out how to be special again.

Combatting egotism is a hard and necessary battle, it seems, for any chosen one. “My God, my God,” wails Jesus, “Why have you forsaken ME?” This, to the god who has it second in the Ten Commandments that “thou shalt not have other gods before me,” who kills nations for what we’d now consider healthily multicultural elementary school displays of mixed idols. When I was 20, one of my male friends insisted I was a goddess. Granted, we were drunk, and he was also insisting he could tell this because he was of “the darkness,” but when my friend Suzanne asked me to baptize her baby because I was the “most spiritual, secular friend she had,” I thought about what it might mean to be a secular priestess without being completely ridiculous about it.

In earlier times, I could have been a contemplative nun, shut away to roam cloisters where doubt was a secret as long as your vow of silence lasted. I could have been St. Theresa of Avila, a contemplative who voiced her criticisms of the Church , paving the way for “contemplative” as I now understand it: as a state in which you analyze it until you can’t stand it anymore and you insist that something must change. But just because I understand my contemplative nature in that way doesn’t mean anything changes, and my doubt never returns me more fully to any god. It just stays full.

The Progressive Universal Life Church insists that its only tenant is that you accept everyone’s chosen path as valid and useful for them. This is the part I have trouble with. I’ve tried to get around it by focusing on the semantic: if someone actually “chose” their path, then I might be able to roll with it. This immediately exempts anyone who’s merely continued along the religious pathway of their culture or family from my ministry, as well as born-again lunatics who insist they were touched by the spirit and couldn’t help but join the Lord. Those kind of sneak attacks don’t count as choice in MY Progressive Universal Life Church.

Years later, I still can’t explain the oddness, the fullness of choice I felt as I clicked on “Ordain me now.” I felt like I’d made a real decision, a decision with weight. I would try, I said to myself—despite the doubt I felt in my abilities, both intellectual and emotional. And I felt special—that suddenly, I had made ground materialize from the air, that somehow, when I said “by the power invested in me by the Progressive Universal Life Church,” it would stick. Or at least, I’d always have the card.

Day 7 of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, a Meditation Challenge: Sullivan’s Cold Rice Salad

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Oh, look at that—it’s months later, not, in fact, one day (or even one week later). Perhaps one of the trickiest thing about trying to develop a writing practice is that, in writing, you tend to lose yourself in time, which results in a heightened sense of Time as a Construction. We think we “lose it,” we think we never “have enough” of it, but really, as all writers know, it’s about “making it,” making Time, like you’d make a pie or a cold rice salad.

We return, thus, to The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook challenge, and on this final day of the “week-long” challenge, I reflect on Sullivan’s Cold Rice Salad. Sullivan was the grandson of Thisbe’s/Erin’s grandmother’s neighbor, and their visits to their grandmothers coincided enough to make a friendship of sorts evolve. (How often we make something out of what we have: mountains out of molehills, love out of nothing at all, friends out of random boys when there’s nothing else to do.) When their grandmothers’ neighbor Myrtle died, the authoress and Sullivan found themselves reunited, sitting shiva together, sharing the food brought by other mourners and their collective, if limited past. Erin/Thisbe brought Wacked-Out Will’s Chicken Wings (another recipe in this cookbook), and Sullivan brought a cold rice salad. It sounds really good—it contains almonds (I will eat anything with almonds), and, best of all, it makes use of leftover rice. You always have leftover rice. The authoress insists that it went extremely well with her chicken wings, which led her to contemplate whether she and Sullivan would have gone well together romantically, if things were different. But they weren’t, and nothing romantic ever happened, and so they grieved and ate together.

Moral of the story: Making do can be more than enough, but we always wish there could have been more.

As the super moon last week drew near, the man I’d been dating the past six months broke up with me. Just as the distant, shining globe of a moon pulled itself closer, an urgent partner interrupting a slow dance, Dan came suddenly into contact with the realization that he was done with our own dance. We’d orbited together, illuminating hours of the night I’d known only in insomnia instead with hours-long conversations and acts of intimacy. As the orbit drew its nearest to the earth, though, he noticed something he hadn’t in awhile: other girls. And it was time to go back to that world. He did it gently. “Please don’t tell people I broke up with you just so I could see other girls,” he groaned, and I know it wasn’t just that. He wants to be present for his age and the experiences it brings, instead of in a private universe of two. I miss him, but I don’t fault him. Whenever you date with a considerable age gap between you and your lover, there are some things you accept—not as inevitable, but as probable and possible.

But I’ve been surprised by many friends’ easy dismissal of this relationship. We began dating shortly after my major break-up, and to some, it might have seemed that he, like Sullivan, was simply sitting shiva with me, a lover found simply by looking to the side and picking who was there rather than by a vetted and careful deliberation about suitability and shared interests. Even Dan shared this perspective, to some degree: we first kissed over the drinks we were having because he’d heard about my break-up and wanted to check in on me. We had a lot of drinks. But we also discovered we went really, really well together—like chicken and rice. We are both quick, both curious, both able to shift topics and make connections in ways that create new things, instead of just fragments.

Primarily, though, saw himself as a companion to me during a difficult time, a fragment disconnected from the larger wholes of our separate lives, visitors thrown together, like children visiting their grandmothers. When I asked him, near the beginning, how he imagined our relationship ending, since neither of us envisioned a longer-term relationship with each other, he said, “I imagine you will meet a Spanish intellectual who will whisk you away and be the partner I can’t be. And I’ll find my ax wench who wants to live in a basement and play D and D with me, when we both don’t need five hours of alone time.”

So, we had dinner every Monday and Wednesday night: pizza and gin or Thai food and white sheets and cool white wine. We were reading Tennyson’s Idylls of the King together; we were up to “The Marriage of Geraint.” We had a cafe and a place to get Stockholm Buns, which we’d eat as we walked on Golden Gardens beach on Thursday mornings. I made him CD’s, even though he said he didn’t like music, and he made me a Valentine, which he walked over to deliver to me on Valentine’s Day proper, even though I wouldn’t be getting home that day until much later and wouldn’t see him. I wrote him poems. “Brynny! I deserve humorous limericks! Not beautiful poems with complex rhyme schemes and intricate imagery,” he wrote in response to the poem at the end of this piece.

But that’s what happens sometimes. The person you thought was simply beside you is a real person, and I love real people. I found that I loved this real person: full of confidence, able to make me laugh uncontrollably by imitating his dog becoming suspicious while eating, someone who claims to be bad at conflict but who was often first to offer a useful solution, the deep voice in the dark night, a man already, despite his own ambivalence and the hobbies he claimed would always keep us apart.

At some point, we all think that what we DO is who we ARE; we believe our hobbies and beliefs MUST be shared, in order for someone to prove they know us well and that they approve of what we know. How else would we know how to play, when we are small? I have Barbies, and you have Legos; it can be hard to share a landscape, even in imagination, so we begin with what seems most obviously to hold us together. But what I know at this point in my life is that it’s not the toys that make the landscape: it’s us. And even if we start out side by side, accidental friends in our grandmothers’ apartment complex, sometimes we find the way to real love, our differences complementing each other, as do spicy chicken wings and cold rice salad. We need others—not just to define who we are through difference but to have our own flavors enriched.

Rice salad alone . . . it’s ok, I guess. But, having had enough, I would rather have more.

“Terza Rima for Dan”

Once-near star, his lost light
lingers, fixed by all cold space,
still, vast, and endless as a blight.

New star, I look upon your face,
our constellation from a different sky,
now shining in this place.

The Southern Cross is flipped
like a light switch. I’m in darkness there,
on fire here, an ember dipped

into the ether. Your hair,
my legs, our lips erase
the stars, leaving this night.

The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook Meditation Challenge: Day 6—Love Can Never Be Junk Food

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Today’s story: We meet today Ralph, of “Ralph’s Popcorn Cake.” Firstly, I find it incumbent upon me to remind everyone that these are not my stories. This cookbook is an ACTUAL cookbook by Erin Ergenbright and Thisbe Nissen, who, my friend Catherine informed me, teaches at her university in western Michigan. (And look at Thisbe’s super-cool notebooks on osperies! She and I should be friends.) Thisbe has a Wikipedia page; Erin does not. Oh, writing: it’s hard to determine what makes someone visible in the literary world. They both did MFA’s at Iowa—the very Iowa to which Hannah from Girls was accepted. On the show, they act like it is a big deal—and it is . . . but it’s not like being in the Mafia, where you can become a “made man.” One thing I find hard, with flashes of finding it wonderful, is that every time you achieve something big, you think you’ve got it made. Sometimes, one big thing opens you up to other big things. Sometimes, you (meaning me) hit it big and then simmer. I hesitate to say “recede.”

This leads us to Ralph. Apparently, Ralph made one of the authors popcorn cake, and she fell in love with him for it, only to “spend the next two months trying to extricate yourself from a relationship that was suddenly not what you thought it was.”

I had a popcorn cake for, I think, my seventh birthday. Or ninth. It was good—think “bundt cake-shaped popcorn ball, with M and M’s.” This version includes gumdrops, which seems like overkill, and pushes it into that category of Midwestern “delights” that you make for a coastal potluck, years later, and can’t believe you ever ate multiple pieces of something that sweet.

The lesson: One big hit does not equal a lifetime of love.

Jerry Seinfeld put it another way:

Of course when you’re a kid, you can be friends with anybody. Remember when you were a little kid what were the qualifications? If someone’s in front of my house NOW, That’s my friend, they’re my friend. That’s it. Are you a grown up.? No. Great! Come on in. Jump up and down on my bed. And if you have anything in common at all, You like Cherry Soda? I like Cherry Soda! We’ll be best friends!

Yeah. I still do that.

If you’ve been reading my “Music and Intimacy” essays, you KNOW I still do that.

I offer my love for a song, literally, pretty often. When I was at Kansas State, a guy drove me out into the country and played Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill” for me, while we lay on the warm car hood and a cool summer breeze blew over us. It was the first time I’d heard the song. If you didn’t fall in love then, you are made of stone.

Other times, it’s a sentence a student writes that shows they are moved by something in the world, or a sympathetic look someone gives you at a party that makes you think that even though they don’t know you at all, they totally know. One of my favorite UW students, Nicolene, told me about her deep bond with a friend over a misreading of a line in The Catcher in the Rye. My own best friend from high school, Amy, and I often ended conversations with the words “You know?” “Yeah, I know.” As if tacit understanding was all you needed.

But sometimes, it is. Why does this lesson usually have the implicit moral of “and so, don’t do that again”? It’s true that the “Running Up that Hill” guy wasn’t as spiritual as I thought he was; he was just Christian. Also true is that the student’s beautiful sentence doesn’t always bespeak a complex intellect and struggling soul.

I don’t care. I think I could count on one hand–maybe even one finger–the times those connections really weren’t worth it. Is it really wisdom to start mistrusting those small offerings, those tiny gestures that reach you, even if that person wasn’t reaching out? Are you shallow if you respond equally to a shared secret and popcorn cake? Last week, I told my already-wonderful, brilliant British literature class that I had started watching Game of Thrones. Later in the week, one of them was talking about Heathcliff or Hareton (almost same diff), how he was both part of the family, yet not part of the family, and I said, “So, he’s a Greyjoy?” They erupted in laughter. I swear to God (on all the gods that be!!) class has been even better, even livelier.

I think of my beloved Walter Pater, whose conclusion to The Renaissance inspired the title of this blog: “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” This is why I will never be the kind of cool that listened to punk rock. Although (of course) I love the Ramones song, I don’t wanna be sedated. I want to be ignited—even by the tiniest of matches, even if, like Hans Christen Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl,” the flame burns out quickly. She is left colder than before and dies, when her matches run out.

I will never run out of matches.

Day 5 of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook Meditation Challenge: I Will Always Love the False Image I Had of You

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Day 5 of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook Meditation challenge finds us with “John’s Spinach-Orange Salad.” The authoress meets John, an art history grad student, at a laundromat, where she astutely surmises that he is, in fact, a grad student because he’s doing laundry—with a stack of papers to grade and a six pack of beer—on a Saturday night. (Once you’re actually done with graduate school, you are just home on a Saturday night, listening to “The Swing Years and Beyond” or watching your 90th hour of Game of Thrones. With a bottle of wine.) He does something truly amazing—he asks her over for dinner the NEXT NIGHT, which leads her to believe he is going to be awesome. And I will say this for graduate school: because you have so much to do, so incredibly, terribly, so much to do, you never ONCE say, to a person in whom you have any romantic interest, “I’ll call you later.” You will jump at the chance to stop working on your dissertation, particularly if it means real human contact. (Again, once out of grad school, your connection to the real world seems to contract and you will, instead, watch two days of Game of Thrones—sense a pattern?—before remembering you met a cute girl on the bus. Oh yes–by “you”? I mean “dudes.”)

Anyway, she goes to John’s house and is somewhat startled that this seemingly classy art history graduate student has plastered his walls with pictures of scantily-clad women—not “vintage” pin-ups but, like, Victoria’s Secret “angels.” (Oh, Coventry Patmore—is this what you had in mind with “The Angel in the House”?) Worse, each image has a thought bubble, attesting to John’s sexual prowess, making requests more suitable to a bad OK Cupid creeper than a seemingly suave art history student. But, as with Rhett of “Rhett’s Quesadilla Things,” the narrator stays for dinner, and John takes her picture . . . before they have a “nasty fight about the validity of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and [she throws] a glass of wine in his face.”

The best part is that, four pages later, she gives us a recipe for “Josh’s Spinach-Strawberry Salad.” Josh was—you guessed it—John’s twin brother.

The lesson for today: I called in my neighbors, Natalie and Andy, on this one. Natalie, who self-reports as unsentimental and “not the type to nickname,” asserts that the moral is “Some people take themselves too seriously”—by which she means the authoress. “He was being ironic,” says Nat (who is nicknamed, and often, herself). “He’s basically doing the equivalent of ‘That’s what she said.’ He was ahead of the curve.” Andy agreed. When I hedged, they asked me if I would have thrown my glass of wine in his face, and I said, “When I was in early grad school? Yes.” I once had a “nasty fight” with an ex-boyfriend, Colin (I’ll provide a link when I post my music essay about him later), when I realized in his 300+ CD collection, he had one—ONE—CD by a woman. Misogyny!! Worse than misogyny because unintentional!! Blind to his own tendency to oppress!! Patriarchal secret agent!

I probably wouldn’t throw my glass of wine in anyone’s face now, but that’s probably because I wouldn’t stay for dinner. The last time I even came close was when I found out the guy I was seeing was a Republican. (I was having a dry spell, and I was so unhappy I didn’t even let myself suspect it, preferring, instead, to just keep making out and letting him make me dinner. It was a dark time.)

I think there might be two lessons here: one specific, one general. The specific lesson might be that some “clever” men of a certain age don’t decorate for themselves—they decorate for other men. Or men don’t think anyone will ever come over to their apartments. Or they don’t think the women they invite over can read. Or see.

The general lesson might be that everyone in whom you are interested will manifest at least one deeply revealing, if seeming contradiction. With John, it was that a dedication to art history doesn’t make one classy.

This week, I went out for drinks with a 24 year-old friend; we made friends with the handsome bartender, who was 34 and seemed really thoughtful and complex. He gave Katie his number. I felt somewhat hurt and, then, incredibly, sheepishly aware of my egotism. I was hurt because I thought someone that thoughtful was clearly capable of being attracted to a 40 year-old woman—namely, me. I went first for the satisfying interpretation (actually articulated for me by another male friend, lest this post read as unjust in its male representation): men would rather try for the woman 10 years younger than the woman closer to their age because it is easier. BUT—thank you, Natalie and Andy—maybe I am missing the more obvious, less complicated point here. Katie is totally beautiful and smart and fun, and I date younger men all the time. Maybe he just thought she was prettier, and I am a big hypocrite, despite my fancy-free approach to what-is-appropriate-in-dating.

As you drive down Olive Way, in Capitol Hill, you will pass a mural on the side of one building. It’s a mural I’ve loved since Colin-who-listened-to-no-women’s-music and I lived two blocks away. A woman stands with one arm raised, holding up a wreath of real, rusty nails; across her chest is a Miss America-style banner that reads, “I will always love the false image I had of you.” Was the bartender less complex than I thought he was? Or am I?

Capitol Hill Mural

Day 4 of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook Meditation Challenge: When is a Quesadilla Worth It?

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Day 4 of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook Meditation Challenge: Rhett’s Quesadilla Things. I have to just quote the author on this one: “Is it karmic law that at some point everyone has to put in her time with a devastatingly attractive, brilliantly witty, total misogynist jerk who’s incredible in bed? He was everything I’d never wanted in a boyfriend: didactic and argumentative, moody and uncommunitive. He assumed all women read Cosmo, was prone to statements such as ‘You know, I probably know more feminists than you do.'”

The lesson for today: Hmmm. This is harder. I think it might be this: when you find yourself putting up with more than you ever thought you would, there must be a pay-off to which you’re drawn. It might be a negative one. It might be a quesadilla.

I’ve definitely put in my time with these guys, but really, not for long. I don’t have much patience with someone telling me what I “really” think or need, which is not to say that I haven’t had to hear it. Please step forward if a guy has never broken up with you on the grounds that he knows what’s best for you, and tell me how you avoided hearing that single most obnoxious statement uttered because I would pay my eye-rolling weight in jeweled gerbils for that secret. But back to the jerky boyfriend. Many people assume that you must have low self esteem—that you believe you “deserve” to be treated that way. I am 100% confident that, like the authors of this cookbook, I fall firmly into another camp: the camp of “I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear you say that because there is just no way anyone attracted to me would say that.” It’s not that you believe you deserve it—it’s that you can’t believe it happened.

But when you do, finally, believe, you have to figure out the pay-off. As the authors note, really great sex is . . . sometimes it. But there’s no finite market on that—the road to hell is paved with irritating, virile young men.

How did this meditation help me understand anything this week? Well, I’m still teaching Wuthering Heights, a novel in which every single character puts up with lies, rage, abuse—we’re talking Heathcliff throws a KNIFE at Isabella, and it sticks below her EAR—all in the name of love. They put up with it, largely, because they live on the MOORS, which sounds romantic until you visit them and realize they look just like parts of Kansas—which means you can watch your dog run away for three days. There is simply no one else around. Cathy, Jr. badgers Hareton, then falls in love with him, because the pay-off for hating him is simply more isolation. It gets boring. She got bored.

So, we turn to love, sometimes, when we are tired of feeling superior.

Elsewhere in my life, I took a yoga workshop intended to help us transition into Spring. Jessica, my beloved yoga teacher, has also been working through a break-up, so she was focusing us, literally, on rebounds: on the possibility of the mind, the body, and the spirit to snap back, to be resilient. It was a concept that I realized I don’t honor enough because, frankly, my default to happy is pretty quick. I don’t really “earn” my resilience; it just happens, usually. I don’t have to struggle to find the pay-off; “happy” is usually the pay-off. (Brady Becker is the exception here–the relationship in which I decided “hilariously funny” is not an adequate pay-off for “unkind.”)

But the idea of finding the rebound when we are pushed down made me think about my own rebound relationship. For what it is, I have some happiness. I am not purely happy for the obvious reason: it’s not the partnership for which I felt ready, at this point in my life. Occasionally, I hear faint echoes of the detested “I know what’s best for us both” in his assertion that he “causes suffering” and that he only wants me to stay as long as the happiness outweighs the suffering. But he’s not a jerk. When our limited relationship makes me sad, it does not depress me thoroughly–a deep thumbprint in the dough. The (light) weight of the connection means I can try to grow in small increments, openly acknowledging what doesn’t make me happy and talking about it with him, without having to push or be pushed hard in order to get some sense of spring, of invigoration. When you are faced with a Rhett, their sheer, unbelievably bad behavior eventually yields you the high pay-off of knowing you are the better person. Sometimes you date them so you can hate them cleanly, later. Sometimes, like Cathy, Jr. you hate them until you’d rather date them. But hate is boring, if pure; it does not require you to think, aside from “What was I thinking?” And so, we find stimulation in these other, messier moments, putting up with low-grade annoyances, the pay-offs minimal but satisfying, like a good quesadilla.

The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook Meditation. Day 3: Kittens on Your Stomach

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Day 3 on The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook meditation challenge: Today’s story was “Poor Donald’s Chicken Enchiladas.” Donald was a blind date who had just done mushrooms before the author picked him up. He wouldn’t let go of her hand, insisted that she stay overnight with him, and his cat gave birth to kittens on her stomach.

The lesson for today: Sometimes, beautiful things can come out of going along on someone’s bad trip.

“Poor Donald’s Chicken Enchiladas” is my favorite story in the whole book.

It’s so awful, so ridiculous: you agree to go out with someone you haven’t even met, and he doesn’t even have the decency to try to put a working foot—much less his best foot—forward. As I try dating again, it is simultaneously so laughable, so painful to have something like this happen. It’s like somehow it’s become socially acceptable to agree to go out and make zero effort. “At least I tried,” such an effort seems to squeak, from its separate corner in the room, far, far, from your corner. But I guess I’ve never had someone show up on psychedelics before. Once, when my high school friend Amy was in town, I convinced her that it would be fun to pick up my new kind-of-lover and go watch the fireworks on Fourth of July. When we got to his house, he was drunk. I don’t remember what Amy said, but I think the phrase “Real Winner” was uttered.

Nothing beautiful came of that particular experience, and it was a hard meditation to impose on my day. I suppose it could apply to the fact that, in a bizarre twist of fate, I only have one person in my spring freshmen composition course—ONE—and I have to figure out how to make it interesting and less painful for that poor, intelligent, stranded student. She’s good and we are getting along, but no kittens on the stomach yet.

I suppose I could use the story to consider a new angle on my new sometimes lover. As I mentioned in the previous post, I have trouble with “sometimes.” While he’s actually very present and is neither on mushrooms, nor is he clinging to my hand and insisting I don’t let go, I find MYSELF clinging. I am Poor Donald. He reminded me last night that he has, in fact, done multiple things to show me he cares about me; in no way am I being left to go on my own bad trip, completely by myself. I oscillate wildly between kittens on the stomach and sick to my stomach. I enjoy our new, silly games; this morning, we composed a track listing for an album all about necrophiliac love songs. The album title? Necromantic, of course. But then I can’t help wondering how I will ever meet someone who wants to spend as much time with me as I like spending time with him. The new lover likes me; he’s just got other enchiladas to make, other kittens to fry. “You already see me one and a half times more than anyone else in my life,” he said.

It’s not that I doubt I will ever fall in love again or meet anyone again—with regards to THAT stuff, it’s kittens on the stomach all the time. I excel at finding love. It’s just that Eli and I met on my front lawn and literally didn’t separate for months. Over the years, I could count on him to meet me wherever I was, at whatever happy hour we were, with whomever I was. Now, I am trying to remember that there are, potentially, a lot of Poor Donalds, but the kittens will be up to me to find, sometimes. And I have to try not to BE Poor Donald—so wrapped up in your own trip that you don’t recognize when you have held onto someone’s hand so tightly it’s turned white . . . even if there are kittens in compensation.

The thing I like some much about this story is that it makes me think I would love the author: a woman who, like me, is so easily reeled in by the unexpected, so startled by the miracle of a shared experience, that she would overlook the insanity of the trip it took to get there . . . a woman easily blinded by all those kittens.

The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: A Meditation Challenge. Day 2: Immersion as Blindness

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Today’s act of bibliomancy centers on an entry titled “Jared’s Holiday French Toast.” Apparently, Jared made over $1,100 in 3 weeks playing Santa in a department store but lost either Thisbe’s or Erin’s interest shortly thereafter. (You really must get The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook by Thisbe Nissen and Erin Ergenbright –it is truly fascinating how these escapades belong, ambiguously, to both co-authoresses, as if to insinuate that, hey, it could have happened to the best of us–or all of us.) Why? Because he kept role-playing Santa, insisting that she sit on his lap and tell him what she wanted for Christmas.

The lesson here, I decided this morning, might be that obsession or immersion are admirable things, but we can’t expect others to stay immersed with us for very long. Too soon, the joke becomes old; the game becomes creepy. Personally, I’m just not that into French Toast, and romantic breakfasts of sweets alone become tiresome when one begins to crave the savory dish, the less predictable. Thus, we must be mindful of our obsessions, remembering that no matter how much you love it, not everyone will want it all the time.

It didn’t take long today for this particular meditation to sink in, turning to the random page, as I was, on my way out the door to have coffee with my sometimes new lover. The thing is, I’m not very good at the “sometimes.” Ironically, we are starting Wuthering Heights tomorrow in my class, and I have spent a lifetime trying to convince students of what I can never fully convince myself: that such a love, rooted in possession, mired in misidentification, is not love. Merged souls? Bad, bad, bad. Or, as Nelly Dean answers Cathy, as Cathy tries to answer why she has chosen Edgar over Heathcliff, “Bad . . . bad, still . . . worst of all.”

Yet here I was, trotting out hand in hand with someone who cannot be my partner, who, while fond of me, does not love me as, at times, I find myself wanting to love him. This is not news. This was the deal from the start: a role-play of a relationship, a chance to experiment with an old acquaintance in a different way. I’ve sat in his lap and (forgive me) Christmas has come more than once a year. We are not made of the same material. I will never haunt him. I have loved and lost so many that I put Tennyson, who coined the phrase, to shame. (He took seventeen years to write In Memoriam; I took twenty to really accept that my first love had been little more than one person’s chemicals dressed in the sheep’s clothing of romantic murmurs. See my post “These Arms Were Mine.”)

But I don’t go by halves–not even when they’re half my age. I never have. It’s why my first love still calls me when he’s in dire straits. Why my students don’t understand how hard it is for me to cut texts from the survey course, accept that if I teach Wuthering Heights, it means they might never read Jane Eyre or, worse, never read Villette–all texts, by the way, in which there is one speed, and that is All You Have. It’s why I teared up this morning, while having a perfectly good time with the sometimes lover, because I wanted to know again what it feels like to be part of a pair so immersed in the other that there’s no question of what you’re doing that weekend–you’re going to be with each other.

The famous lines from Wuthering Heights, of course, are these:

My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable . . . .

It’s disgusting. It’s the paragraph that has warped love for millions of readers, probably young women, who thrill to the notion of immersion in another. The Santa hat stays on forever, and Jared serves French toast for every morning. It’s the paragraph quoted in Twilight, for God’s sake. So, as I drop off my sometimes lover back at his house, I shake myself by the shoulders inside and whisper, “This is not your whole world, and it will never be his. There’s a time to strut and fret your little part upon the stage, but your life is not a stage.”

The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: A Meditation Challenge

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The Literature Review
(Warning: This post gets fairly academic–some days, what I teach consumes me. Note how I can’t resist starting to do proper MLA citation and everything, after awhile. I’ll write about cats or something tomorrow.)

If there’s one thing this blog represents truly about me, it’s my need to turn everything, ANYthing, into a map towards meaning. This is, perhaps, ironic, today, as I finished teaching Byron’s Manfred, in which the protagonist disdains all orderly pursuit of meaning and states “I know not what I ask, nor what I seek: I feel but what thou art–and what I am.” However, he also states, “I would not make, but find a desolation.” If my life, at times, lacks meaning, it will not be without some effort to practice, at least, the Paterian–to discern, as best I can, the bread crumbs between my mind and the universe . . . even as I drop the crumbs myself.

But I digress.

Welcome to Yet Another One Week Thought Experiment. Needing focus and inspiration, I will turn, each day this week, to a story/recipe from The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook by Thisbe Nissen and Erin Ergenbright at random and try to take lesson from that story/recipe. (Note: This cookbook contains stories and recipes from ex-boyfriends, not recipes for how to cook them.) In doing so, I take a page (this pun is funnier by the end of this sentence) from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, in which Gabriel Betteredge practices a kind of bibliomancy, turning at random to a page in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when in doubt. The implication here is that any text can readily replace the Bible–and in that sense, I bring together both Manfred and Pater, who both believed that we are, ourselves, the location of all meaning. Right? Can’t go wrong. Later in the day, I will post what experiences seemed to resonate most with the call.

Day One: David Goldberg’s Flourless Chocolate Cake
Apparently, he was a complex and contradictory man. The authors describe him as “an Earth First-er who smoked Menthols.” Appropriately, I think Passover is this week.

Morning: My guess at the lesson: Easter / Passover season requires us to accept contradictions, expect the unlikely. Today, I will try to be even more open to experiencing opposites neutrally.

Evening: Did I mention I just taught Manfred ? If the Romantics are interested in shattering habit, Manfred, as one student aptly put it, shatters the habits of the Romantics. If, for Percy Bysshe Shelley, “the great secret of morals is Love, or an outgoing of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful that exists in thought, action, or person, not our own,” Byron’s Manfred, knowing not what he seeks, predictably, then, finds only himself, becomes, in essence, his own sublime:

The face of the earth hath madden’d me, and I
take refuge in her mysteries, and pierce
to the abodes of those who govern her–
but they can nothing aid me. I have sought
from them what they could not bestow, and now
I search no further.(2.2.39-43)

It’s not the beautiful, exactly, but Manfred’s triumph is that he controls the terms of his own dying, the glory of his own limits. As spirits command him to “Prostrate thyself, and thy condemned clay, / Child of the Earth! or dread the worst” (2.4.33-35), Manfred replies, “I know it; and yet ye see I kneel not” (2.4.35-36).

If I’d written this last week, I would have spoken of Keats, whose ability to hold together discordant elements, irreconcilable opposites, leaves him wrapped in his own mystical ambivalence: “Was it a vision or a waking dream?” But it’s this week, and Byron reminds me that

the mind which is immortal makes itself
requital for its good or evil thoughts–
is its own origin of ill and end–
and its own place and time [ . . . ]
I have not been thy dupe, nor am I thy prey–
But was my own destroyer, and will be
my own hereafter. (3.4.129-140)

So much for embracing opposites neutrally. This is basically a more empowering version of “we all die in our own arms, anyway,” modified to “HELL YEAH, I’m going to die in my own arms.” This is starting to seem like some kind of bizarre Byronian pep talk for the single girl I am. Come, spirits!

I suppose another way in which to interpret this chocolate cake recipe is to consider why the description of someone as “complex and contradictory” moves us so quickly from a Zen-like balance of Life as containing Whitmanian multitudes to contemplating the exhilarating, self-willed death of a protagonist who both deeply repents that his love has destroyed the woman he loves and repents not at all the incest committed. But that interpretation would lead us right back to the same conclusion: met neutrally or fervently, on either end of the Zen-to-Byron pole, we meet a new puzzle, a new sense of what cannot be fully understood, of the sublime, of so much meaning and so little that we don’t create fully, all by ourselves.

Why Can’t I Be You?: Great Women I Admire, Qualities I Don’t Have

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This interview series was inspired by my growing awareness that comparing myself to others is–surprise!–not useful. Often, our admiration of others is mixed with envy, the slightly irritating feeling that if only WE had their chances, we could be successful / more creative / happier, etc. My experiences in graduate school and, to some degree, academia, reinforced the even more insidious notion that only certain qualities, certain kinds of personalities are useful or valid. Obviously, certain qualities are suited to certain jobs (you don’t want an irritable yoga teacher, a clumsy dancer), but I was finding myself dismissing my own perfectly useful, perfectly individual ways of being and wondering why I couldn’t be a whole range of things I actually had no real desire to be: more of a perfectionist, more of a workaholic. Ah, but then you run the risk of sour grapes: I would never “want” to be like that person, have their success at that cost. This interview series intends to listen well, to honor those I admire and to figure out how they found their paths in their own ways, while accepting and interrogating my own difference so that, through conversation, I can learn again to listen well to myself.

Interview #1: Carrie Simpson

Who She Is: Carrie is a playwright and poet, new to Seattle via Turkey, where she spent four years teaching English at international schools in Turkey and one year in Barcelona, Spain. It was in Ankara, Turkey, she met Stacy, my friend from our high school days at musical theatre camp; Stacy suggested Carrie look me up. As of yesterday, Carrie had a fourth interview with Alps Language School on Broadway in Capitol Hill. She was offered a high school teaching job elsewhere but hopes to get the ESL job since it would be a new kind of school and teaching for her, and it would give her more time to do that for which she came: to write.

Why She Seems Hard to Imitate / Why I Chose Her: Carrie seems particularly bold, self-possessed, and free, without that taint of escapism that sometimes marks those who’ve spent their lives teaching abroad or moving about. Originally from the East Coast, Carrie spent eight years in Whitefish and Missoula, Montana, in addition to her time abroad. What makes Carrie seem unique—and not like me—is that she doesn’t seem to see travel or moving around as “taking a break” from her real life. I know many people who want to travel, even many who don’t care if anything comes of their journeys particularly; they see travel as a sabbatical from “real life.” I’ve done that. Or I’ve traveled to achieve a very specific outcome: a job possibility, language acquisition, or freedom from another situation. But Carrie seems to combine that carefree curiosity with career-building, to mix devil-may-care with I-care-deeply as she simultaneously works on a play about her father’s death and volunteers to write high school curriculum for the World Affairs Council on the current unrest in Syria. Carrie has no one home base but in no way does she seem at a loss, lost, searching for a path. She’s on one—it just seems to evolve as she moves. To move forward as if it’s ALL real, all part of the plan, without resorting to the cliché of “everything happens for a reason”—that seems to be what Carrie’s about. But I don’t believe in that cliché, either—so, why can’t I be her?

The Questions:

Bryn: How do most people get to your current life position (note: this may refer to your cool job or state of being), and how did your path differ from that? What might some consider unusual about how you got where you did?

Carrie: I follow whims felt in the heart, rushes of feeling that shout, “I want to do that!” Is that called following your bliss? As I move along a certain path, I will have an experience or meet someone who introduces me to a new adventure I never thought of, and if the idea of it rings or shines, then that will become the next step in my journey. You can say I am future oriented, but because I always have just one step ahead of me planned, I am also very much in the present and open to changing that path, looking out for signs pointing to the next step.

Bryn: Ok, part of that sounds like me: I have the clarity of vision, moments that “ring or shine”—that’s a nice one, Carrie. And I can be at peace with the “one step planned ahead”; my job as an adjunct professor has required that I come to peace with that. But I don’t think I embrace that in the way you do—it’s not so much that only having one step ahead makes me anxious, but I think I see that as more of a necessary compromise, instead of a life choice. And maybe that’s why I don’t always feel like I have time or room to notice what “signs [point] to my next step.” Walk me through an example of how one sign pointed to another for you.

Carrie: For instance, while getting my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, a friend of mine I admired told me of her summer experience as a naturalist for the Student Conservation Association. That sounded fun, reminiscent of my family’s summer vacations visiting national parks out west, so I applied to SCA and was placed as an interpretive ranger at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota during a college summer. From that experience, I decided that after graduation, I would do seasonal work all over the U.S., seeing the country through its national parks. When I graduated college, I landed a seasonal job teaching outdoor education outside Glacier National Park, Montana. However, I connected to the place and the people so much, I worked there as a teacher-naturalist for four years and ended up staying in Montana for eight.

Bryn: Totally get that connection to place creating the next steps. Once you find a place you love, it’s often just about figuring out what you can do to stay there. I did that when I realized I needed to quit my tenure-track job in Missouri and move back to Seattle. What I did was still important, but it became secondary to staying in Seattle. What I also see in your story at this moment, though, Carrie, is an alternative possibility: that deep attachment to what you want to do can lead to a security no matter where you’re at. Sometimes I feel that way about teaching, but clearly, in the case of Missouri, the love of teaching wasn’t enough to counter the love of a good fit for me, regarding place. You’re starting to remind me of Dishwasher Pete—a man who decided his goal was to wash dishes in every state in the union:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/dishwasher-pete.

Carrie: During [my Montana] time, I began to long for a more creative life again. My writing self was pulling on me. So I went to graduate school to become a high school English teacher. While there, I focused my thesis on working with an at-risk population, which led me to student teach at a therapeutic boarding school in The-middle-of-nowhere, Montana, and it was there that I learned about the world of international teaching. My mentor had taught abroad in Pakistan and Japan and brought his rich experiences into the classroom through stories and slideshows. I decided immediately and with certainty that that was exactly what I wanted to do, so after learning that I needed two years of teaching experience in my own country before applying to international schools, I did just that at a high school in Montana.

Bryn: Ok, THAT’S probably where most of us would get stuck. “I need two years of teaching experience? Sigh.” Or we’d start the teaching and then become afraid to leave the U. S. job . . . although I haven’t taught high school. Maybe two years is all anyone can bear.

Carrie: After two years, I attended an international job fair in Seattle, very open to where I’d end up, and landed my first job in Ankara, Turkey. I thought perhaps I’d enjoy a two-year contract there then return home to Montana, but loved my experience living abroad so much that I stayed three years in Ankara, one year in Barcelona, and one year back in Izmir, Turkey.

At the moment, I’ve just returned to the U.S. to focus on my writing for a concentrated spell, as again my writing self began to pull on me (a theme in my life). I am here to see theatre in English, meet other English-speaking writers, go to writing conferences, all the things I have not been able to do while living abroad. I have a feeling I will return abroad again after a year or two, but I am also open to the possibilities waiting for me in the people and experiences I have yet to enjoy in Seattle.

Bryn: See, this is where the “traveling isn’t a break from real life—it IS my real life” thing comes in. In order to lend solidity and peace to this life style, it seems like you have to accept that you may not be in the “final” place. To some degree, your choice to give up teaching for a “concentrated spell” reminds me of poet and memoirist Nicole Hardy, who quit her high school teaching job to work as a waitress so that she had more time per day for writing. However, Nicole knew that was a life change she could and wanted to make permanent—at least for quite awhile. And she stays in one place. I wonder how much differently I would live if I knew for sure I would be changing careers and locations at least seven times.

Carrie: I am certainly not following a predetermined course; my path unrolls before me as I go. I would never have imagined at 20-years-old, while studying creative writing at Emerson College, that I would one day be in a writing group with other ex-pats in a bar in Spain, celebrating getting my first poem published in a Barcelona literary magazine. However, when I look back from my current position, I can connect the dots and see a solid path.

Bryn: Even though the point of these interviews is to identify and celebrate your unique individuality, do you have a personal maxim, or another’s words to live by?

Carrie: I discovered the poetry and teachings of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi while living in Turkey. Rumi was a poet and the founder of the Whirling Dervish sect of Sufi Islam who lived in
Turkey in the 13th century. Many of his maxims, such as the one below, entail the kind of surrender and faith that I try to embrace in my own journey:

“Are you searching for the river of your soul?
Then come out of your prison.
Leave the stream
and join the river
that flows into the ocean.”

Bryn: What is most important for you to have done or to feel at the end of each day?

Carrie: That I’ve planted seeds. That is, that I’ve put myself out there in good ways so that by the laws of the universe, good things will return one day. For instance, lately I’ve been reaching out to acquaintances, hoping they will return the initiative and friendships will grow.

Bryn: Like me! Good job, Carrie!

Carrie: Because I’m job searching, I also reach out to prospective employers and volunteering opportunities. These particular examples are very indicative of the stage I am in within my current journey: the beginning. A seed that I plant every day regardless of where I am in a particular journey, is that I write every day. Some days it’s not much. Maybe I’ll only have time for a half an hour of writing, and maybe what I write will be so bad that I will spend the next day erasing it. But even a half hour a day adds up to something, and before I know it, the first draft of a play will grow from these daily seeds I plant.

Bryn: Flannery O’Connor used to sit at her typewriter every day for two hours, “just in case anything happened.” It’s universal—as a writer, you have to accept that production is not always about quality but rather the sheer exercise of the desire to care, every day, that something might happen. Another poet friend of mine, Emily Beyer, said that she doesn’t write every day but that when she is on a more regular writing schedule, she feels like she’s “better—a better person.” You become more aware of your own possibilities, the ideas you didn’t know you wanted to care about. That’s what starting this blog has been doing for me: I tend to get bogged down in the generalities: “I’m not like that person. I don’t do that much.” But when I start writing about a long-lost friend or someone cool like you, I find I have more interesting reasons, deeper perspectives on why I am the way I am. In short, I find my own story wasn’t that obvious.

But onto question #3: What’s one compromise you’ve had to make in order to achieve that sensation of a day well lived?

Carrie: It’s not a big compromise. Since I write first thing in the morning, the compromise is that I sleep a little less or go to bed a little earlier.

Bryn: Discuss a particular event you consider a triumph, a failure, or an obstacle that might surprise others.

Carrie: I find transitions really difficult. This may surprise others because of how much I move. I do love change, but every initial landing is always very shocking and full of doubt and loneliness. However, I’ve learned to just acknowledge those thoughts and feelings and have faith that they will lessen each day and finally pass.

Bryn: Why can’t I be you? (You can answer this in one of two ways: a) Based on what you know of me, how are we most different? or b) What’s a defining quality of yours to which you’re more strongly attached than most people?)

Carrie: I’d say the qualities to which I am most strongly attached are a hunger and excitement for the present opportunities around me, [the ability to develop] coping mechanisms for the hard times, and faith that if I live my life well in the present, the future will unfold just fine.

I rarely fear the future or that I’ve made the wrong decision in the past, which helps me enjoy the present. I can throw myself in 100% to the life(style) I’ve chosen for the moment. I have a knack for finding the new or the different or the hidden adventure in most places and situations. I have lots of interests, and can always find plenty of reasons to get out and explore.

In difficult times, I can remember that this, too, shall pass. I have the initiative and courage to make choices that will get me out of hard times, and the coping mechanisms to help me get through them. When looking back on difficult times, I can always find the positive aspects, whether in friendships made or lessons learned, which helps put me back in the present.

Bryn: Ah, the George Harrison answer: all things must pass. That is such an important one. I’m curious and adventurous, too, but it seems like I’m always slightly saddened by the past as it’s passing, always slightly more worried about whether there is a “through line” in my life, if I’m staying true to a kind of personal integrity or if I’m getting sidetracked. I guess one way to find peace is to accept that all lines are “through lines.”

Bonus questions, Carrie:
What movie character do your friends think you’re like?

Carrie: Christopher Robin—the accepting one who’s in charge of all the others. That was, at least, how my friends saw me when I was younger.

Bryn: What movie character do YOU think you’re like?

Carrie: Max from Rushmore—the kid who starts all the clubs. Or Jim Carey from Yes Man.

Next month, I interview Rebecca Brinson, author of the column “Hustle and Prose” on the website The Toast, co-founder of the online editing service NW Essay, and former development director for the Hugo House. She’s responsible–so how did she live abroad for six months? And why does no one seem to irritate her? These mysteries and more–in October.

Walter Pater, You’ve Sometimes Made It Difficult

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This post is a preface to an upcoming series of interviews I’m currently conducting called “Why Can’t I Be You?” Each interview will center on a woman I admire but who seems radically different from me in temperament. Look for Interview #1 soon!

In Studies of the Renaissance, Walter Pater concludes that the secret to genius is to discern, at all times, the most private qualities of one’s experiences—to revel in the process of experience for the individual, rather than in the “fruits of experience,” what others can see or what benefits you later. “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” he says, and, in doing so, he ignites the Aesthetic movement, the philosophical and stylish doctrine practiced and extended by Oscar Wilde and others for most of a decade.

I read this first in college, as a senior. I don’t think I actually understood all of it, really. But I do remember thinking that his writing, that phrase, particularly, was the most beautiful reading experience I’d ever had. The fusion of “burning” with “hard” and “gemlike”—the geological solidity with the sparkling of the gem . . . the image stood out, apart from my college reading, and I heard someone who understood how deeply marvelous I thought life was. I burst inside, my own mind a disco ball illuminated with pleasure that this timid man, an Oxford tutor who preferred to entertain privately, found words for what I felt certain ruled each of my movements made in this world.

I burned all through my twenties when, I still maintain, it’s most crucial to do so. I burned, got burned, and sparkled and drank and tasted and kissed and bought plane tickets too expensive for me. I burned into my mid-30’s and read as much Pater as I could, but nothing’s ever been as good as that one line, as effective at exciting that part of me that knows how important it is for me to know that burning is true, that living so intensely is the only real way to live.

But lately, I’ve been thinking more about lines later in the same paragraph as the gemlike flame line—this line, actually: “Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.” And I think of this line because it is often raining in Seattle, and it is cold, and dark, and I am almost 40 and because I worry, more often than not, that I am sleeping and not burning. I get overwhelmed by the tragedy of the “tragic dividing of forces on their way.” I feel myself reaching painfully out to hold onto those things that are leaving, that exceed my reach. Or, worse, I simply look at the frost and sun and cannot discern why I should reach at all. And yet, I am not sleeping—I lay awake at night, most nights, worrying about how to be greater. Really, what I worry about most is why I don’t want to want more. I try to tell myself that letting go of wanting more—of being more productive as a writer or as a scholar or as anything else I want to be, partially—letting go of anxiety about producing is exactly what Pater means when he says that “it is not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end.” I want to believe that I am still burning, but burning in ways that illuminate smaller things, tinier gems—that I am discovering, in my late 30’s, the crystalline structures of an atom, instead of the crystal palace of my 20’s.

Why do I have so much capacity for experience, and so little desire to sit alone and write? Why does writing sometimes make me sad? Is it because I cannot stop burning long enough to write something beautiful, or is it, instead, because I am not burning brightly enough? To really, truly live Pater, I am going to have to walk through these fires, even as I am the flame itself, and pray that, in all that heat, something fuses that can fuel me. Pater says “only to be sure it is passion” that drives me to experience, and that those experiences produce a “quickened, multiplied consciousness,” I am giving myself all that I can, but I wonder what he told himself in the middle of the night, and what it felt like when his flame was low.