Category Archives: Influence

What I Know About Thunder

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In my creative nonfiction course this quarter, we do an exercise in which they have to introduce themselves with a one-liner story.  “When people say ‘tell us about the time,’ what story do they want to hear from you?” I ask them.  Then, we write those one-liners as three to four paragraph narratives.  And then, I have them choose a title from a set list of four.  “Don’t pick the one that you think is an obvious fit,” I say.  “Now, write another paragraph that ties that title and that story together.” 

This is what I wrote in class Tuesday.

 

When I was two, my parents believed I was reincarnated from a poor black child.  I had a heavy Southern accent and would paint myself all black with water colors.  I spoke often of “Tom and Peggy.”  “Who are Tom and Peggy?” they’d ask.  “My parents,” I’d say.  “From my other life.”

One day, the UPS man came to the door, and I answered. “Hi,” I said, looking up at him, a tall African-American.  “We’re all white here—except for my dad.  He’s black, too.”

There were no African-Americans in my western Kansas town.  There were Hispanic field workers and two adopted Korean children.  And my dad wasn’t black.

Years later, I’d ask my dad if he remembered me talking about Tom and Peggy.  “Oh god, yes,” he said.  “That used to creep me out.”  My mom read a lot of Shirley MacLaine in those days, so she was down with the past life idea.  When my grandmother died, I asked my sister how she explained death to my four year-old niece.  “Oh, you know–the reincarnation stuff Mom told us:  energy, moving into anther life.”  We’d grown up Catholic, and the niece was being raised Methodist.  But sitting on my lap after the funeral, she stared hard at a woman wearing all white, consoling us.  “Are you my grandma’s new body?”  The woman smiled sweetly.  “Oh, I’m sure your grandmother has a new body in heaven now.”  “Noooo,” I said.  “She wants to know if you are actually our grandma’s new body.”

What I know about thunder is that it is an indication something’s shifting in the atmosphere.  It rolls across the plains like a finger swiping right on Tinder, starting a conversation:  thunder calls, lightning responds, and then the sky cracks open with the rain.  My “past life” opened me, even as a child, to the possibility that difference was in me, that Western Kansas was not the world, that a black man at your door might be a brother from another mother.  My niece, at four, was looking for a way to give a voice back to the dead, and we had an atmosphere for that possibility in my family.

Poetry Dance Break!

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We interrupt this series of musical meditations because the author took a poetry and photography workshop Saturday with Sierra Nelson and Rebecca Hoogs, and it felt so good to write poems again.    

I have a theory on poets versus prose writers, and I’ll share it here, at the risk of irritating the prose writers:  whereas prose writers are, whether they like it or not, on the alert for a good narrative, poets are interested in the moment and only find it come together as they write it.  Maybe that’s true for prose writers, too, but I like to think I’m a poet at heart, loving the way the language feels as I find it, not always knowing or caring where it takes me.  That’s why I still think of my essays in terms of Walter Pater—episodes of burning with the hard, gemlike flame, instead of sacrificial offerings to the pyre of a good story.  

Recently, a friend asked me if it seemed like maybe these essays would turn away prospective suitors.  I told her about how Jason once emailed me, the year before we dated, to tell me he’d been reading my essays.  We weren’t active friends, hadn’t ever hung out—we’d run into each other at an event, and he added me on Facebook.  So I was surprised to find he’d been reading the essays, that he looked at my Facebook world at all.  “For what it’s worth,” he wrote me then, “I really like them and think you’re doing something worthwhile there.”  A year later, when I wrote an essay about us falling in love, I got another email:  “After years of reading these, it’s so moving to have one finally be about me.  Thank you so much, you sweet woman.”  That essay still seems like a poem to me:  incomplete in its insight, fragmented, merely time spent, in writing, with the feeling we both were having, a feeling neither of us thought would end.  

I would write two more essays about him because we thought we had a narrative, but we were wrong.  

So maybe I should have stuck with poems.

If this all sounds like an elaborate defense for these prose essays, it may be because all writers face that moment when someone wonders aloud if your writing records your life or if you’re using your life (and the lives of others) to seek out the good story.  I made a mix tape once for a guy, with liner notes for each song, and he broke off things with me.  “I get the feeling I’d just be another flavor on your emotional schmorgesbord,” he wrote.   I can only hope those I’ve loved believed, as Jason did, those moments were for burning, not for research.  If it seems I move through hearts in search of the next story, be kinder to me:   I’m just a poet who can’t keep it short.

 

The Poems

With that, here are two poems from the Poetry and Photography workshop.

Prompt #1:  Use a photograph from your past (or one that was never taken).  I used two photographs  taken of me and a college friend in Spain, at the Prado.  Who wants to come over and help me figure out how to scan them into this?

“Photo Album, Age 20, the Prado, 1994”

One picture has us, backs turned,

before a painting of which I no longer know the name

(her green parasol, his red hat)

our waist-long hair like the “before” pictures

in make-over-gazines.

 

Your blonde hair will get a lot of whistles; we’ll learn

“Sueca” is the word for “easy Swedish babe.”

My red hair’s not my own:  you too can have this color,

but I’m the only one who does.

 

Still, we are so innocent, big sweaters and round faces,

in awe of flesh tones and Velazquez.   Even

la Infanta Margarita, age 5, looks wiser than we are

about where men’s eyes go.

 

But I am alone with Goya—

you’re back with Bosch in the Garden of Earthly Delights—

and it’s just me and her,

la Maja so Desnuda.

 

She knows I understand at last her gaze,

all pillow talk and stop-talking-now,

the one that you won’t know until

your wedding night three years from now,

 

and there’s no photograph of this,

except the postcard that I buy, in secret, then,

and send to him.

 

maja

 

Prompt #2:  We will pass a series of images to the right; you have 30 seconds to write a word or phrase before passing it on.  We will do this for 10 minutes.  Then, pick a term from this glossary of photographic terms as your title.  (This one is crazy—but it teaches me a lot about how I do move towards narration or synthesis.)

“Correction Filters”  (for Sara Wainscott)

Grotto of the foxes, still and gray,

the dime store photo booth reveals

the picnic that my best friend thinks she had,

but no Norwegian eats those onion rings.

 

Hands off!  The cake is mine (I hope),

but I don’t know which end to plant.

We’re going to save those books,

no matter what sharp knives it takes.

Let’s slice up the sky—how raw.

Let’s stick it all on poles.

 

You cannot drag your own eye socket down, you fool,

and there are easier ways to give a cat a bath.

They’ll turn out all too fluffy, much too full; their

ears will grow three times, then melt.

 

Why you have to look so sad, my friend?  There’s

still dirt enough for all.

 

I cannot keep a straight face in my coven

with all these horns.
Take this, bitches!  I’ll ribbon up your wishes

for the fox back in the grotto:

their fuzzy tails amoeba like,

their Goldies locked (wrong story now, wrong beast),

but the debris cuts me to pieces now

(it used to tie me down).

 

This isn’t what we meant to do with moss.

 

All the damned birds want condos now,

except the pigeons—but who else can rest

on all those nails?

 

Nobody’s fooled—a palm tree, by another other space, is still a lie,

and

what we all cry for is real.

 

When even I find it to be too much,

the lounging carpets on the walls,

the rabbits turned to ottomans,

I’ll wrap my ribbon ’round a sword

and pray to Mary, foxes,

or whichever beast leaps nearest

to the gods.

 

 

Valentine’s Day Writing Challenge–Day 5: My Best Friend’s Best Friend

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The Song
“Love” by The Sundays

The Memory
This is not a memory about a lover at all. Instead, it is one of those myriad associations stored up in memory, a link that may seem weak and yet, in fact, makes me feel like there is an ever-stronger web of joy netting me into this life.

When I think of this song, I think of J.E. Johnson’s friend Tobias Becker. There are layers of removal from intimacy there: one of my college best friend’s high school best friends. I probably only ever hung out with Toby under ten times. I know he loved girls wearing sundresses and once made the most beautiful teapot in ceramics class–one with the face of Hermes on it. I know that now, he is happy, with many babies. What was always clear was that he was a gentle soul, and he loved this song, and I remember him singing his favorite line from it, unabashedly:

Well, if yoooooou
don’t have a clue about life
then I’m happy, happy, happy to say
neither have I
although I’m not going to shrug my shoulders and suck my thumb
Thiiiis time

Sometimes, people I adore move in and out of my life with a speed that should make me nauseated. As a teacher, I’m only just now getting used to the fact that students who bond with me during their four years (or even just in their first year) will probably disappear into the ether after graduation, our closeness like a B-12 booster for their growth.

Of course, the opposite is true, too: I maintain many, many deep connections with many, many people.

But part of Valentine’s Day for me is always about the time-lapse film of connections running through my head. It could feel like a string of losses. Or–and this is what I like more–it could feel like the end of Cinema Paradiso: a reel of all the good parts, spliced together, separate from their narratives but beautiful all alone.

The Sundays – Love

Valentine’s Day Writing Challenge: Day Two–How 80’s Music Ruins Our Lives

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Day 2
The Song: “For Just a Moment”–the Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.

The Memory
This isn’t a love memory for me as much as it is a memory of driving. During high school, I took piano lessons thirty minutes away, in another town. There were no towns in between my town and that town. There was a feedlot and some scattered roadside farm houses. Every week, I would drive myself to piano and, since it was the early 90’s, I listened (on tape) to SO MANY love songs. I preferred sound tracks , in those days, and this love song, I would argue, is typical of the kind I favored: a song about lost love, nostalgia for a time gone by, or simply the pain of growing older, time passing as we speed towards death. (Others of its ilk included “Separate Lives” from White Nights and a song from a movie called Stealing Home, which I watched obsessively on HBO, every time it came on.)

I was 17. What did I know of love at all, much less love lost? I was always moving towards pre-emptive nostalgia, missing the thing before it had happened. Did all those songs prepare me for the worst or prepare me to let go too soon?


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.