Let Your Light Shine

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“As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.”

I’ve had that quotation of Thomas McGuane floating around in my mind for several days.

A language for the real. OK. I like that. But what’s real?

Is it real to say that my life is a continuum of bird-dog training, or sleep, or eating, or music, or silence, or suffering, or joy, from the spring of 1961 to the middle of December 2014? No, that is not what I see as true. I see fragments. And what I believe is real about my life – and possibly about yours – is that reality cannot be very simply said.

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That Small Rain

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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.

Anyway, I’ve heard there’s more rain on the way. So here’s a poem I posted a couple of years ago, when we were between storms.

Amends

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If I have hurt you, but I know
I have hurt you and left your love
wasting like a dove stunned
on a wire, through countless days
of incredible sun, forgive the sun.

I have wandered off again,
looking for the perfect way
to make amends. I can’t imagine
finding it, before you fly away
and leave the wire trembling.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
11-22-2014

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Useful Stuff

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I see a lot of content online that I find useful to me as a writer, inspirational, and worth sharing with other creative people. I usually don’t mention it here in this blog because I’ve come to think of Metaphor as a place only for my own creative output. So I share those things on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Tumblr. (Using Friends+Me to syndicate a single post.)

The thing is, those links don’t get much engagement in those other places. My audience for creative topics is actually here at WordPress. And I used to share a lot of links and thoughts here, about writing tools, computer issues, and a wide variety of topics.

Things changed, so they can change again. So I’ll try a return to sharing things I enjoy – but which were created by others – here in this space. If this material gets some positive feedback, cool; if not, that’s cool too.

Let’s start with a post today by Evernote — part of their NaNoWriMo series — called

How Neil Gaiman Writes with Evernote.

I use Evernote a lot to keep track of ideas for writing, to save interesting ephemera, household flotsam, and for business.

A Chewy Subject

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“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.

Stalling Death

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One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.

So said Carlos Fuentes, who failed as do we all, and died in 2012. He was born on November 11, 1928, which is why it’s been brought up now. And you can still read his books, so there’s one way to cheat death if it won’t be deferred.

I confess that when I see the word Scheherezade, I don’t think of the mythical Persian queen. She told stories to the king so he wouldn’t kill her. As much as I’d like a few of my words to live beyond me, I tend to think of Rimsky-Korsakov. He’s dead too, but his music still lives. Well played, Nokolai.

What She Said

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Here’s a bit of flash fiction, a scene of departure. Someone I love said the first sentence to me once, years ago, in a much different context. I wrote it in my notebook and in time it morphed into this small piece. An earlier version was previously posted in this space. I think it has improved. 

“You have no idea how much you’ll miss me. Just so you know, you really have no idea.” That’s what she said.

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Garden Window

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roses_delano_1960s_1

I always loved music. Trumpets and guitars especially, or a nice clear piano. Dance music or grave ballads, it didn’t matter. But here, only scratching sounds come through my window, like when the record ends and the needle skips against the label. Rats’ feet on dry boards. Not so much sound as the impression of it, the idea of someone whispering about me in a faraway room, about my problems and how I am nothing. So if a sound like music came through, perhaps two or three notes as from a tuba or a vibrating pipe, I could try to have hope.

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Nightland

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Scan-023b_back_yard_delano (Medium)

We lived for years and everything
was easy. Our fingers understood
thorns, so we could touch each
other’s hair and roses had a scent
that the mind wasn’t forced to imagine.
Clouds appeared and passed slowly,
so we only had to look up.
In life — Dear God — there were oranges,
rivers, violins, and hours just
waiting for the bread to rise.

In the Nightland, years go by
as we struggle just to remember
those gifts. There is no fruit
no sense of taste, no gentle breeze
to bring the clouds toward us
from the sea. We spend a century
imagining brown hair tucked
behind a girl’s ear, then go on thinking
of papers tacked to a crumbling wall.
Because now we are merely dreams
that never end, forever fading,
slowly forgetting the living world.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
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I took the photo above about 30 years ago, in the back yard of my grandparents’ home in Delano, California. As I was editing the poem I began to think about the photo, which I hadn’t seen in years, and about trying to find it in the old albums. All photos start out as images of places, things, or people. But over time, some become images of memories.

The photo has been cropped above. See the original here.

Tiny Kites

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These are my words.
See how each lines up
behind another and they wait
like tiny kites to be lifted
by the wind. I think
maybe they are nervous,
shocked by the fall to earth.
So they lie among shards
of paperbark in the long grass,
strangely happy, just glad
to see that I am near.

J. Kyle Kimberlin
4th Draft, 10.05.2014
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