Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
Mark Vonnegut
I’ve been neglecting my blog. I’m writing a lot but it’s mostly journaling. I’ve become a rabid – I mean avid – journaler. There is a new poem about our dog, which I might post later today. And there’s a blog post about the death of focus and deep work in the epoch of screens. But it’s only half done. I keep getting distracted. I think I’m learning, though, that distraction isn’t exactly the problem. It’s an epidemic of addiction to psychological stimulation. The smartphone-enhanced brain of 2019 is constantly seeking the dopamine hit of incoming stuff.
Well, I like that. I’ve never cared for the word “blog,” either. It’s up there with “moist” and
“hangnail” on my list of words unworthy of creative expression on any level. But this website isn’t my journal.
I’ve kept an occasional journal of exceptional events for many years. At some point several years ago, I switched from a fountain pen to a computer. I’ts just not fun, doesn’t draw me in. I prefer pen and paper now. I write in it twice a day, since resuming in earnest last fall. Since Halloween I’ve filled a 240 page notebook and half of another. I write about gratitude, my sleep patterns, my sensations of well being (or unwell), about Being and Time and how hell is mostly other people. Present company excepted, of course.
I’m a big old introvert, so writing time also makes me feel recharged.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
— C.S. Lewis
In my journal, I’m trying to hold on to my life: to people I genuinely care about, to frustrations and celebrations and gifts and sorrows and everything that’s draining away. So it goes.
You?
~~~
Wow. I wrote that then told my Echo to play songs by Moby. This is the first one it played. I kid you not. A kindred thinker.
Let there be a poem now.
Let one appear in the center
of the room, in the air
above the desk, and hang
like a cloud, like a spirit
conjured out of absurdity
and desire. Like a pear
without a tree.
And I will bear
it down and slice and serve
it up, pretending
that it came from me.
As I was working that little poem out of my notebook, I noticed the single unintentional rhyme of pear and bear. I thought about Bear Mind. Not like bear this in mind. Bear Mind. I don’t know where it comes from, if I made it up or heard it somewhere in a poetry reading or a retreat, but it goes something like this:
Imagine you’re sitting in a chair and you have a slice of baloney in your hand. There’s a dog in front of you, watching, and you waive the baloney back and forth. The dog watches the baloney and when you throw it across the room, the dog runs after it. The dog will do this every time. No matter what else the dog might have to look at, listen to, or think about, it’s going after that baloney.
Now imagine it’s not a dog but a bear. You waive the baloney back and forth but the bear is not watching the lunch meat. The bear is watching you, a much larger piece of lunch meat. So when you throw the baloney across the room, the bear doesn’t even blink; he’s not distracted, not even a little. In fact, you may have tossed your last baloney in this world.
I want a mind like that bear. One that stays centered, focused, and doesn’t go chasing after every distracting slice of baloney that gets thrown past his nose. So my goal is to dial back on the inputs of storm and stress, drama and covfefe, that plague my daily existence, and focus on being more mindful, calm, and clear. Building the Bear Mind.
Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.
~Maya Angelou~
“The writer’s job is the job of a clown,
the clown who also talks about sorrow.”
– Kenzaburo Oe
All through the month of February, I had this idea stuck in my head: The Suffering of Things, or The Sorrows of Things. Not the suffering or sorrow of people or of animals, or even of the insensate entities like trees, but of inanimate objects.
There is something here, I think, that’s an important symbol of shared consciousness. Exploring this idea seems a portal into a creative place, so I’m trying to track it down. If we’re going to write about the emotional landscape of humans, it’s important to understand what else – who else – occupies that ground.
When we were young children, we loved certain things so much that they became Real to us in a way that meant something different than merely existent. There were certain toys that became playmates and not just playthings, and which comforted us in a world we were growing to understand. And for many of us who are perhaps more sensitive or sentimental, or in need of such comforting, that tendency has persisted into adulthood.
My ordeal began about the 1st of February. While drinking my morning coffee, I stumbled over a passage from the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.
Do you know the story? There’s a good summary on Wikipedia. And you can read the entire text online for free. Essentially, it’s the heartbreaking story of a little boy (unnamed, just called the Boy) who loves his stuffed rabbit, and the toy rabbit who just wants to be loved. It ends sadly, though I suppose that’s subjective.
In this passage, the rabbit asks an older and wiser toy what it takes to be Real, to be loved.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
The rabbit story reminds me of a favorite comic of mine, Calvin and Hobbes, about a boy and his stuffed tiger. When they are alone, the tiger is Real. When anyone else is present, Hobbes looks like a toy.
I thought about these relationships for a long time. And what the Boy and Calvin don’t know – but what the Rabbit and the tiger Hobbes almost certainly know – is that Calvin and the Boy are doomed to grow up anyway.
Dragons live forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant strings make way for other toys.
And then what? What magic remains from the childhood world, for those of us now grown up, pondering death and taxes?
Are there some things that we love so much that our love changes them?
Does our love for them change us?
Do these things suffer, hope, or somehow love us back?
If all of the above or none of the above is true, does it matter?
Of course it matters. I write fiction and poetry. I use metaphors – symbols. The world I inhabit, if not understand, is made as much of spirit and emotion as of earth and sky.
Come to the orchard in Spring
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
— Rumi
I’ve been told that a writer’s – at least a poet’s – job is to observe the suffering of others and take good notes. And we’ve all seen the survivors of great calamity sifting through the rubble and saying things like, “my aunt’s teapot is gone. A million pieces. She was kind and that was all I had of her.”
I think I see. For the child, it’s about imagination and play, and security. For the adult, it’s about memory and love. When I see the quilt my grandmother made for me, I still feel her love. When I wind the clock that my grandpa wound, I remember our bond.
That was the easy part. The next step is: do some of these things have feelings? Can they suffer? Are they Real?
The second part of my pondering ordeal arrived about a week into February. My bother called to say that his pickup truck, which used to belong to me, was dead. He was kind in telling me, knowing that I was sentimental about the truck we called Old Blue. I drove it for almost 18 years. And just a week before, my brother had sent a photo of the odometer as it passed a milestone.
Of course, it’s just a machine, a tool for transportation. But have you ever spent so much time with a thing, covered so many miles, seen so much sun and fog and cold rain and darkness, that the thing seems to take on a life of its own?
We say that some things that mean a lot to us take on a life of their own. I believe, rather, that they take on our life, simply because our life – our capacity to love – seems to overflow. They are with us so long, or have such a connection to meaning and memory, that they become invested with our emotions.
We don’t want to part with them, or throw them in the trash when they lose their shine. They have become Real; more real than a can opener or a DVD player. They have somehow acquired feelings. But not their own feelings, our feelings. Something of our fleeting time – our consciousness of life in the world – is sitting there.
So when I learned about the blown head gasket, etc., I didn’t think, “That’s unfortunate, it was a useful machine.” I thought, “Oh well, he had a good long life, got to see so many roads. So it goes.”
Old Blue will not be missed, not really very much, because it fulfilled its purpose, accomplished its task, and did not die young. But we can’t just let such things go unremembered, just walk away without appreciation and not look back, because they have feelings. Of course things have feelings because we have feelings.
The universe is consciousness. Everything is aware because everything has the feelings we give away. Everything I touch has feelings. The fact that the truck’s feelings are my own seems less important than the fact that the feelings are Real.
Maybe I cast my feelings into the things around me – sparks into the rain – because I’m an introvert and I spend a good deal of time alone with things. So I find consolation in the memories that I find there. Life is memory and memory is fragments. So it goes.
We loan our emotions to the world around us, whether the world likes it or not. We make friends with some of the objects in ours lives because we love the memories they represent, the feelings they conjure. And they have been faithful, which is a consolation in solitude.
Love is everything. Everything is love.
Besides, imagining a long treasured possession as friend is simply fun.
Finally, I’m looking at a little copper elephant that roams about my desk, keeping papers in place. He came from a zoo. I got it when I was – I don’t know – a little kid, and our family went to San Diego on vacation. I like my little elephant very much.
And there is something you love, isn’t there? You have a teddy bear or a doll, propped up among pillows or resting in a dresser drawer. Or a family heirloom; something from the life of a parent or grandparent, an item which mattered to them.
There are people that we love and there are things that we cherish. Perhaps because they connect us to those people, or maybe they connect us with memory.
Sometimes the people we love and miss the most are ourselves; we miss our childhood, our innocence, and our peace. We are trying hard to hold on to a world that is rapidly moving on, becoming more tenuous as we grow older. The empathy of suffering things helps, don’t you think?
What remains is just the most important question I still have:
Is it possible, in the time that I have left, for me to become Real?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here’s some music.
So Many Roads by The Grateful Dead. (And Jerry’s wearing shorts and a blue t-shirt!)
Let Her Go, by Passenger.
“Maybe one day you’ll understand why
Everything you touch, surely dies.”
I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
My thought for the day, from Dune by Frank Herbert.
I woke up this morning with a line from Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot floating in my thoughts:
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word
I don’t know why. Maybe it was just a bit of dream flotsam, but it was hard to shake the hunch that it was supposed to mean something. Maybe it’s a sticky note from my unconscious mind. So all day long I’ve let it hang there in my peripheral awareness, along with the fact that it’s New Year’s Eve, in hopes of decrypting the meaning.
Now an Eliot scholar might tell us that the larger stanza is a metaphor of the incarnation in the world of God. The divine condescension of Infinity. The Word, as in the first lines of Genesis – a prefigurment of nativity – possibly connoting the repudiation and crucifixion of Christ by an unhearing Mankind. But that’s not why it was buzzing in my brain as I woke up.
By Jove, I think I’ve got it. The whirling, the unstillness – My mind was groping for an image of Time whirling around the center of eternity. Because I have wasted too much time this year. I’ve wasted too much time every year. And it seems to me that time is precious. We should endeavor to avoid wasting it, or allowing others to do so.
Hasn’t it been truly said that there are no ordinary moments? Then let’s make our moments, hours, and days count for all we can in the year to come. Let’s try to spend as few moments as possible almost writing, almost doing, almost loving, not quite living.
And let’s forgive ourselves for not quite living up to that. God is with us and we are loved.
For me, 10 minutes until the ball drops. So it goes.
We had rain two days ago; a great big storm of it pushed into southern California. It was great. And all that day and into the next, this little line of old poetry kept dripping through my mind:
That small rain down can rain.
It’s from this fragment of anonymous 16th century poetry:
O Western wind when wilt thou blow
That small rain down can rain —
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
Wonderful, isn’t it? It makes you believe what Stephen King says about writing being a kind of telepathy; that thoughts can be transmitted from one mind to another, across centuries, by means of writing. There is so much longing in those four short lines.
How far we can wander from our purpose, from the home of our hopes, from the elusive moment when we last held ourselves in love and hope of love. Our soul cries out to the God of our understanding to guide us home again.
“My dear fellow, I may be dead from the neck up, but rack my brains as I may I can’t see why a chap should need 30 pages to describe how he turns over in bed before going to sleep.”
So said a French literary editor to Marcel Proust, on rejecting volume 1 of In Search of Lost Time. It was a century ago and the subject was consciousness, not events or people. One can imagine such a book to be a challenge for the Marketing Department, especially when the writer’s style has all the pop and sizzle of a damp wool carpet.
I’ve not read much Proust. I used to have a 1921 edition of Remembrance of Things Past and I found it oh so dull. As advertised, it was good reading when trying to fall asleep. But my little dog thought the leather cover was tasty, so there went that.
It begs the question, though: if the subject is consciousness, as I think it can be, where can you go with that? Consciousness is the matter with which we are all most intimately familiar, yet we no almost nothing about it. So by means, we writers should explore the inner life.
Two years ago, I posted a flash fiction piece called Shining Leaves. Here it is, complete with audio reading. The second section imagines the consciousness of a dog, its life still touched by subtle joy yet aware of aging and loneliness.
I was clearing a few things out of a desk drawer and found a yellow sticky note with this phrase written on it:
“Intangible things are the writer’s business.”
I Googled it but I can’t find the source of this quote. It used to be the tagline of this blog, Metaphor, and now Google only points back here. (I switched to the quotation from Keats, above, in April 2010.)
I don’t think I made it up. It’s too brilliantly succinct to be me. I believe it though. We are surrounded by a cloud of the unknowable, unnamable, unspeakable and formless. The artist’s job is to give its particulars form and name, color and voice. The rare willingness and arguable ability to do so is the reason why we creative types get the big money.
Probably the first intangible, nebulous thing that comes to mind is my identity. I don’t mean the identity that a hacker can steal and use to buy stuff. I mean my self image. Who am I? Am I a good man or a self-centered jerk? Can questions of identity be that simple?
I remember studying the pathos of self image in college psych classes. I hope it’s not too wrong to say that your self image is who you believe you are, right or wrong. It’s what gets offended and bruised when someone misjudges you. And if you suddenly discover that the image of yourself that you’ve believed for a long time has been wrong, well that shit is really going to hurt.
Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
If my sense of myself is intangible, isn’t my sense of belonging, of community, even more so? Can we expect our images of self to fit together like Legos? And then how is it even possible to dream, to have dreams, if we know so little about who we are?
“If you want a certain thing, you must first be a certain person. Once you are that certain person, obtaining that certain thing will no longer be a concern of yours.” ~ Zen proverb
I don’t know who I am, except that I go through most days with a vague sense of disappointment and a wariness against pride. I am, as Douglas Adams said of planet Earth, “Mostly Harmless.” I place a high value on Albert Schweitzer’s “Gentle hands and kindly words,” and love the first sentence of the anonymous 19th century Russian book The Way of a Pilgrim:
I am by the Grace of God a Christian man, by my acts a great sinner.
I can tell you more about my fears than about my dreams and desires. I know what and whom I love, that I have loved and been loved, that I am loved for today. But I’m not sure what I want, except that I’m sure I will always want love in my life. No one wants to be lonely.
If I don’t know myself, I certainly don’t know you. I’m still struggling to understand Kyle and everyone I’ve ever known. William Stafford said it best:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
Do you know for sure who you are? Is that a question you like to explore? I imagine you do. Such intangible things are common among us, being tribal creatures. Perhaps the world’s remaining elephants would nod in agreement and commiserate.
I’ve quoted this passage from Stegner’s “All the Little Live Things” before.
“I am concerned with gloomier matters: the condition of being flesh, susceptible to pain, infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death. My life stains the air around me. I am a tea bag left too long in the cup, and my steepings grow darker and bitterer.”
The writer’s job, then, is to walk the common thoroughfare, observe the suffering therein, and take a few notes; to reach out now and then and touch the hand of a fellow pilgrim on the way to infinity. Not a bad gig, right?
The problem, fellow pilgrim, is the fog, isn’t it? The blinding, low-down tule fog of the mind. It obscures everything: the road ahead and behind, the ditches by the side of the road, the trees and hills, the reason why your character can’t sleep, never finished building his boat, or became a long haul trucker.
I don’t know about you, but I write to find my way through that fog. This effort to see, to understand, to try to share the shapes forming in the thickly settled gray, is the path of all poetry. Poets are explorers of the intangible.
I remember one early morning in 1985, coming down the Sacramento Valley at Christmas. The fog was so thick, I had to open my door and look down beside me to see the line painted on the road. I survived.
Here’s a photo of me with my grandparents, taken in 1983. The fog in the background was lifting and I was eager to get on the road, back to college, and on with my exciting and promising life. I just had no idea how long the fog would stay on the ground.
In her book on writing and life Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott devotes a chapter to the topic of index cards. She quotes Henry James, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” and explains that she keeps cards and pens around the house, and a folded card in her back pocket when she goes out. If she has an idea, or sees or overhears something memorable, she writes it down on her card.
Lamott wrote her book in 1994, before we all started using computers and carrying cell phones. And today I take a lot of notes with my iPhone. But I valued this lesson from Anne’s book, and it served me so well for so long, that I usually still carry cards with me. I prefer 3×5 inch cards, blank on both sides, but that’s not important.
What matters is that the people around us frequently say things so profound, without even meaning to, that their words ring like bells for a long time afterward.
One day, my Dad said to me, “The mums are blooming,” and it just stuck. I wrote it down. And when I looked at it again, I thought of that scene in the movie Phenomenon, where John Travolta says to the little boy, “Everything is on its way to somewhere. Everything.”
Stories About Us
Dad says the mums are blooming as the tulips fade into summer. Tomato vines work their random course, they twine and clutch.
We open the door and go in. There is a breeze from the open windows but the day is warm. What do we become after this?
It’s almost time to stand and go, drive east against the clock, keeping low to the land and finally the sun will rise.
Maybe we should weep a while first, for everything. A ritual purge, a chrismation to purify our souls for high deserts.
After this, we are butterflies silent among the particles of dust, there where sunlight falls into the house in slanted shafts.
Lying on the rug, a child reads stories to herself, and the stories are all about us. Outside, an engine strains to rise and lift away.
“When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
– Robert M. Pirsig
Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a philosophical novel I read during my college days. If you read the book – which I recommend – you’ll find that Pirsig knew a lot about doubt.
Zen was personal reading, not assigned for a class. In fact, I remember it took some effort to convince the professor of a Modern Novels class that it was a novel at all, so that I could write a paper on it. He said I should save Zen for a philosophy paper, and choose a nice novel – something actually fictional – for the assignment. Though he was right, he let me do it anyway. But in order to make his decision, my professor had to read the book, which he did overnight. Over one night.
One of the things I loved about college was that I was surrounded by people far smarter than me. (Or is is smarter than I? …Me. “Smart than I” sounds so pretentious.)
Me still meet smart people, but me don’t feel surrounded anymore.
Another thing I liked about college was that there was very little dogma going on. Within the religion of the double space type and the one inch margins, we were encouraged to put our own twist on Knowledge.
Once we were discussing religion in one of Prof Dunlap’s seminars, and he invited us – optionally – to tell what religious group we belonged to, if any. When it came my turn, as I joke I said, “I’m a Druid – Reformed.” I made that up on the spot and thought it was pretty darn funny. Without missing a beat or blinking an eye, Dunlap said, “Is that a local coven or back home?” It’s been 30 years, and that still makes me smile.
Metaphor 