Melancholy Funk or Creative Ferment?

He saw a deep, redemptive connection between spirituality and depression. For him, depression was not a weakness but simply “one of the things that humans happen to be capable of experiencing.” It had its uses. “Depression turns you inward,” he explained. “In some senses the artistic calling becomes easier with a depressive illness.”

An idea from Joseph J. Schildkraut in the NY Times piece, "The Creative Mindreader" by Michael Kimmelman

A Candle for Saddam

C. S. Lewis said that when we first start to practice forgiveness, we should start with someone easier than the Nazis. He was speaking, of course, as a war torn Brit. He had something against the Nazis. They weren't simply a personification of the ultimate evil -- they were evil right next door, evil at his elbow. Personal evil.

I lit a candle for Saddam Hussein this morning. I felt like maybe I was the only one, although I know that isn't true. Surely there is someone in the world who grieves this man today, who remembers some moment of sweetness, maybe laughter, shared with him. But there were hundreds who applied to be his hangman, who wanted not only his death, but to have a hand in it.

I saw the news photo, the noose being draped over his head. He went calmly, at the end anyway, with surrender in his eyes and a Koran in hand. They did it during the morning prayers while most of us in the US slept. Even George Bush wasn't awakened for it.

I have no hatred in my heart against this man who died, this grizzled old man they dragged out of a filthy bunker and put in clean expensive clothes to sentence him to death. I have seen the photographs of the babies he had gassed. He was not a respecter of innocence or goodness or decency. He murdered, by command and probably by deed and by the trickle down inertia of hatred that flows so strong when it flows from strong people.

So it was easy for me to light that candle and say a prayer for his soul as it returns to Oneness. It was easy for me to breathe gratitude that he is now of the absolute again, joined with the souls of those who perished because of him. Home sweet home. My heart bears no scars from this man, no specific loss. He puzzles me, challenges my belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. His crimes diminished humanity as a whole, including the finite little scrap of it that is me. But forgiveness flows easy from me to him, a benediction that I have the luxury to offer since there is no wrenching personal pain in its way.

You have to get close to my heart to break it. Maybe that's why I've always kept people at arm's length, kept a cushion of distance between us so they couldn't reach inside the gear works and yank something loose.

But some people have. And for the most part, the grander part, the people I have let in have treated me with respect and kindness and understanding. And forgiveness.

There are exceptions.

This is where forgiveness gets pulled taut -- our own personal slights. It is easier for me to forgive Saddam Hussein than it was to forgive the people in my life who hurt me. Who said they loved me only to cease all communication with me. Not murderers, not war criminals. Just complicated people whose needs and wants clashed with mine.

I forgave. Be kind to everyone you meet for everyone is fighting a great battle. And so it is with them. I understand this now. Once I got that clear in my head, I was able to let go of the anger and the bitterness and the utter disbelief that it had all really happened, that they really were gone.

And so is the way of the bodhisattva wannabe, the one who makes kindness her religion. She releases everything that isn't love because everything that isn't is an illusion anyway. She releases the past and keeps only the blessing.

Yes and yes again. I can honestly say that I have released every bit of bitterness and anger. When I think of these people now -- my missing ones -- it is with gratitude that I miss them because they mattered so deeply. And still do. I still love them. My missing them is a pain that is testimony to a larger grace, to the blessing that they still are. They helped make me who I am today, and I am profoundly, utterly grateful.

If I have one remaining regret, it is this (and I am working on it, trying to release it too, but it is dug in very deeply). I do not know if they have forgiven me. I remain unforgiven, with no benediction of release. No blessing, no goodbye. It is a desert between us.

I bear responsibility for the collapse of our friendships. I acted out of fear. I demanded reciprocations. I tried my best, I really did, but my best was flawed. I love them and it wasn't enough. My fear was bigger than my love, or felt that way anyway. I see that now for the cock-eyed illusion it was, but then I made an island of my ego and set up base camp. I worried about what people would say, how I was being judged in the cold fish-eye of public opinion. I clutched at security, too scared to even look at what I was going to lose if I didn't make the right decision, like some metaphysical Let's Make A Deal. I needed them to be a certain way, to treat me a certain way. I had a playbook. I left them little room for error, and now the universe is returning likewise to me.

I crave forgiveness too, even as I understand that this craving does not serve the highest good. I don't know if they need to forgive me or not. It doesn't matter, in the end. My challenge is to forgive myself. And that is a great challenge indeed. It involves unsquinching my heart, stretching the cardiac muscle big enough to include myself.

I know this much -- their paths will lead them where they need to go, as will mine. All is meaningful and right in the fullness of time. So after forgiveness comes the real truth -- compassion -- and until I can treat my own soul with both, I cannot extend it fully either.

I am trying. Until then, I light candles for executed dictators. A baby step toward tomorrow, when perhaps I will have the heart to light one for myself.

Synchronistic Serendipity

Synchronicity -- the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality -- used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

Serendipity -- the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also, accidental fortunate gifts.

I have become a spiritual magpie, collecting sacraments. Everyday oracles. Postcards on the floors of elevators, fortunes from cookies, small rocks. Lyrics from songs, junk mail. I line my nest with these shiny bits of tin foil, waiting for some scrap to reveal itself to be gold or silver or maybe even a diamond, dusty with ordinary earth. Waiting for it to flare into meaning, profound and rich.

Vegetable 911

I rescued a pumpkin today. It was sitting in someone's garbage at the side of the road. I passed it on my daily walk, noticing it as I simultaneously noticed the trash truck rumbling and sputtering at the end of the cul-de-sac.

I was a large pumpkin. And I was tired. And it seemed silly. But the truck heaved itself closer and I caught the stink of diesel fumes and it was like catching the smell of a predator through tall grass.

So I went into this other person's garbage, this person I didn't know. My logical left brain kept poking at me -- this is illegal, you know, it said, you're trespassing and that's a big damn heavy pumpkin and oh God, it's covered in spaghetti sauce or something worse, just walk away and forget this happened . . .

I ignored this voice. The stranger's neighbor tending his yard saw me pilfering the pumpkin. He waved. I couldn't wave back with an arm full of pumpkin but I smiled and nodded as I hoped any harmless eccentric might, so I wouldn't alarm him.

The pumpkin was intact. No spaghetti sauce -- my left brain had been pulling a fast one. Someone had drawn a ridiculous face on it with a magic marker, a cupid bow mouth and seductive slanty bat-bat eyes. Miss Thang, said the inscription.

"Come here, baby," I said to it. "You've suffered enough."

I took it home to where it rests on my front porch, communing with the other pumpkins still left over from Halloween.

I don't know why I did this. Perhaps it is my new pagan sensibility that makes me notice such a rift in nature's cycles, the bright orange organic against the plastic soda bottles. I have always recycled but it has been out of duty -- yes, I am a good liberal and I know what's good for the planet and I will do what I must. But now I am finding something else in tucking vegetable peelings in a bowl to take outside to the compost bin. Something sacred. I do not toss that word around. I mean it. There is something larger in what used to be merely responsible.

So what is the larger thing? I contradict myself in the asking, because the importance of this pumpkin turned not on the larger but on the smaller, on something finite. Something small enough to get my arms around and carry home.

From "I Believe in Father Christmas" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer

I wish you a hopeful Christmas.
I wish you a brave New Year.
All anguish, pain and sadness
leave your heart and let your road be clear.

They said there'd be snow at Christmas.
They said there'd be peace on Earth.
Hallelulah Noel
Be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get, we deserve.

RIP William Diehl

One of my writing inspirations died Friday -- William Diehl. He wrote Sharkey's Machine and Primal Fear and was made very wealthy by his work. He inspired me because he was real and because he was smart and because -- truth be told -- he said I was a damn fine writer.

It was a set-up; he had no choice. My thesis director put him on the spot in front of an entire classroom full of people. He had no gracious way out.

I still hold him to it, though, took it right to heart, then immediately called him up and asked to come to his palatial home on St. Simons and bother him for an afternoon. Amazingly, he said yes. Sometimes my own audacity astounds me.

I interviewed him then (a little snippet of which appeared in Writer's Digest a looong time ago). I still have the cassette tape of our conversation. In the background you hear what sounds like someone hacking up a lung. It was one of his parrots, the one that could mimic a smoker's cough with uncanny parroty precision. The other parrot said nothing for almost the entire time I was there. On my way out, however, the telephone rang. And then it said, "Goddamn it!"

William Diehl taught me something I will never forget. "You won't lose your story," he said, "if you can always find its spine. Everything must attach to that backbone. It's how the story moves. Find the spine."

Death sux. But only for the ones of us still alive. A profound and vulgar friend once said that if there is a heaven, it is this -- to finally know it all, everything, and to understand it all, forever and fucking ever amen.

From what I knew of William Diehl, he would agree with this whole-heartedly, add his own vulgar hear-hear to it. His office overflowed, like he was trying to cram it all in -- live it, breathe it, suck the marrow from it (to paraphrase someone more eloquent than I). I believe he is there now, at last sinking into it with a big "ah!" Putting his feet up. Taking a drag.

What a mensch.

Fucking amen.

Empty Spaces

It was just a conversation, one of those eating-dessert-by-the-fire, reading-after-the-child's-gone-to-bed conversations. I was re-reading A Return to Love and my husband was paging through Scientific American. I don't remember what we were discussing, only that his point was that most people don't realize how ruthless evolution is, that the underpinnings of the universe aren't compassionate whatsoever, that competition is the engine that drives human life, all life. And it is a vicious thing, messy and lacking in aesthetics.

I told him to stop talking, that he was screwing with my spirituality.

Later, I was able to understand that what he was saying bears no relation on my spirituality whatsoever. Evolution is a bloodless machine, yes, and competition is its hard wiring. You cannot look for love in it -- it grinds out all love, all emotion, all spirit. It has a cold efficient beauty perhaps, in the end anyway. A breathtaking effectiveness certainly. A glorious watchmaker precision that runs on error, is fed by all that goes wrong -- such a concept, almost exploitive in its brilliance, like something Enron would think up, to drive the glory at my doorstep. The autumn leaves, the winging geese, the swirl of gold in the water bowl that is our pet.

But -- as I muse on my swing, lulled by the back and forth, the heartbeat of the universe -- I realize that what I am calling ruthless is in fact neutral. Competition is a word I judge, but it's really just a giant values sifter. I think of competition and I think of little girls not pretty enough for beauty pageants, crossing the finish line last, losing the big game. I bring to it the memories of an also-ran, of a sidelines girl. I invest it with psychic baggage. But it is neutral -- it brings to the top what we ask it to. If the values that we select for are compassion and consideration and -- yes yes -- love, then they will rise to the top of the machine as efficiently as ruthlessness.

Such is evolution as well. There is no poetry in it, only an equation. But perhaps that is poetry as well, even if it is an icy sort.

This is a conversation I had on my swing, with myself. My husband is not particularly interested in such musings. He will listen patiently -- a skill that has kept us married for fifteen years -- but it is the patience of an engineer who knows that if the wing strut is not adjusted just so, the whole thing crashes and burns. It is mumbo jumbo, like a Tom Cruise movie. He is not offended by my searching -- he doesn't tell me I'm a deluded wishful-thinking traitor to logic and reason, even if he thinks it. He tolerates my individual search for meaning. But it is very much an individual search.

My best friend tells me I think too much. She is Catholic and very happy being so, but she feels no need to conform to that playbook. She tells me I use too many big words. She says her conservative husband doesn't want her hanging around me anymore, that I'm a liberal nut job who's just gonna whack up her thinking too. She laughs when she says this because she doesn’t take him seriously.

My other best friend isn't speaking to me anymore; he's never said why. We used to have these long talks on faith. He was an agnostic who really wanted to be an atheist but couldn't quite pull it off. We debated whether religion was primarily a biological or socio/political construct. We discussed whether someone like him could maintain a relationship with a fundamentalist evangelical Christian girlfriend, a person who thought he was hot, yes, but who also thought he was going to hell. We told each other stories, like I'm telling stories now, and he listened this way too, with his full attention. I am guessing that in all that talking and listening, he finally ran up on something he couldn't say, that he couldn't have me hear. But it's all a guess on my part, an attempt to make our narrative into an arc that makes some sense to me.

Here is my point. I think we make stories to express a truth. But all truths -- even the kind that keep airplanes in the air -- have holes in them. My husband knows this -- he learned it at Georgia Tech in a class called differential equations. There are some values you cannot solve for -- you have to know how to fill in the blank and move on. In my world, a more right brain world than his, stories help us find out what might go in our empty spaces. They span them, like bridges, with their own rules of physics. They help us connect stars into constellations.

Because we talk of stars, of drinking them in. Starshine, stardust, star stuff. We adore our stars, make love to them with sonnets and telescopes. They define our nights. But in reality, if you stand outside and look up up up, what is chiefly visible is the darkness.

From "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who finds our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Autumnal

"By now, the wind has emptied the milkweed pods. The goldenrod has gone mousy. All the leaves are down, except for a few tenacious oaks and beeches and an ornamental dogwood that is a reprise of the entire season. Each tree looks more singular — and the woods more intimate — in this bare month than in the thickness of summer. October’s memory seems a little lurid from the perspective of mid-November. The sumacs down by the road might have been reading Swinburne the way they caught fire and expired, vaingloriously, in last month’s light.

But now the drama is over, as if the year had come up hard on a plain, Puritan truth and was the better for it."

From "A Private Month" by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the N.Y. Times

Why, Stevie, Why?

Miss Hisler, Stephen King's school principal and (perhaps) his first critic, said, "What I don’t understand, Stevie, is why you’d write junk like this in the first place."

My first experience with Stephen King wasn't writing – it was the movie Salem's Lot. Nothing – before or since – has terrified me quite so viscerally. It is the boogey-man of my generation, this movie. I watched it alone in my parent's bedroom, surrounded by every stuffed animal I owned. I sat there through all four hours of it, eyes fixed on the tiny black and white TV in the corner, protected only by pastel CareBears and litters of Pound Puppies. They were -- as expected -- useless. All it takes now is the memory of fingernails on window glass and my stomach juices congeal. I didn't sleep without nightmares for two weeks. My parents blamed Stevie.

He's continued to scare the bejesus out of me ever since. And now that I am daring to call myself a writer too, my respect for what he does with words has grown. He taps the deep primal, the dark vein. It's present in all of us, which means we guard it well, and yet we let him slip the needle in, over and over again, knowing it's coming -- the sharp prick, the bloodletting. I still bare my jugular for him, but not because I have a taste for being tasted by monsters. Not anymore. I have different appetites now.

In a 1993 essay, King wrote: “The question which haunts and nags and won’t completely let go is this one: Who am I when I write?” That's why I read him now, with incantations on my lips that maybe he'll find the answer, and that if I keep the faith and keep reading -- words like tea leaves -- I'll discover how he did it. And then maybe -- maybe -- I can see the answer for myself, blooming there in the bottom of my own cup.

Stories are Medicine

" . . . Whenever a fairy tale is told, it becomes night. No matter where the dwelling, no matter the time, no matter the season, the telling of tales causes a starry sky and a white moon to creep from the eaves and hover over the heads of the listeners. Sometimes, by the end of the tale, the chamber is filled with daybreak, other times a star shard is left behind, sometimes a ragged thread of storm sky. And whatever is left behind is the bounty to work with, to use toward soul-making . . ."

"At the Gates of the City of the Storyteller God"
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

From the NY Times review of The Clean House

“There are things, big invisible things, that come unannounced — they walk in, and we have to give way."

The chilly silence that follows this explanation is broken by Matilde, ready with her usual remedy: “Would anybody like to hear a joke?”

Of course it’s told in Portuguese, so you probably won’t get it. But this peculiarity epitomizes a fundamental message of Ms. Ruhl’s odd and enchanting play: We may never come to a full understanding of the jokes life plays, but the wisest and possibly noblest response is to have a good laugh anyway.

by Charles Isherwood

The Goodbye Drive

We are driven
by endings as by hunger. We must know
how it comes out, the shape o' the whole.

A. S. Byatt

Getting There, Hell and High Water

"[The] path to knowledge [is] a kind of madness. I'm interested in the route that people must take to arrive at a spot where they can be large and whole and responsive. And the kind of forbearance that we need to show each other because sometimes people can be doing things that seems really crazy and nonsensical, but when you look back at it, this was the path that they had to take, there was no other way to get there."

Scott Spencer in Crafting Scenes

Pointe Vierge

“A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

Albert Camus

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow, or a friend.

Terry Pratchett in Small Gods

"Don't put your faith in gods. We get the gods we deserve. But you can believe in turtles."

Dreamtime and Movietime

"And so you leave this buoyant, impish movie feeling a little blue: sorry that it had to end and also wishing, perhaps, that it amounted to more. But its fugitive, ephemeral quality is part of its point: dreams, after all, are hard to remember, and perhaps don’t hold the meanings they seem to. Without them, though, our minds would be emptier and our lives much smaller."

A. O. Scott
From N.Y. Times review of The Science of Sleep

Mark Z. Danielewski on Fear and Genre -- an Interview

"Danielewski also doesn't like the traps of genre labelling. He says he doesn't consider himself a horror novelist. Although he says that anybody who deals with big questions could be described as a horror writer.Hhe listed a range of writers, from Emily Dickinson to Nietzsche who approach the bigger questions and "ultimately unveil something that's terrifying." He had one woman come up to him in a bookstore and say to him, "you know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story." And she was right. He says that genre labelling is just a marketing tool.

He talked in an interview about the way he finds the genre of 'smart horror' encouraging, on a cultural level. This is because smart horror goes after the deeper origins of fear, so that it provokes thought rather than a simple adrenalin rush. Whereas, films in the 80's were all about action, and namely, anger. And this is what he feels strongly about. because in the eighties, there was no close examination of that anger. But anger is always a result of fear. If you're angry, you're afraid in some way, of losing something, of the world being too different from what you want. It covers multiple types of fear, but it is still fear nonetheless. So the reason he is encouraged is because it means there is a newfound desire to get past the anger response and deal with the more courageous questions of what am i afraid of and why?"

See Full Article Here

Leonard the Human Jukebox: Not A Memorial

At least I hope it isn’t, not in the traditional sense. But it is, of course, since it’s about loss, and memory, and honoring the bond between them.

It’s for Leonard.

I met him on October 28, 2004, down by the banks of the Mississippi, in New Orleans. It was a sunny afternoon, softly warm and languid, and my friend and I were sitting on the steps, watching the houseboats and the beaded tourists and the hucksters of various stripes. This was either before or after beignets and café’ au lait (of course it was -- I don’t remember a moment that wasn’t).

He introduced himself and said, “My name is Leonard and I am known as the human jukebox.” He gave us his spiel then, how he could sound like anybody from Nat King Cole to Marvin Gaye. I don’t remember the specifics, and it didn’t matter. I already knew him from my friend’s stories, had already seen his picture, in fact, that morning, a snapshot from almost a decade before, with the same blue sky and rolling muddy water behind him. He said he was seventy-eight and had lived in the city all his life.

“A song for the lovely lady?” he said. Or something like that, some charming irresistible cliché, and I smiled up at him.

My friend cocked his head at Leonard. “Can you do the one you did for me the last time I was here, the one you wrote? It’s called ‘If You Can’t Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean.'”

“That’s a popular one,” Leonard said. He took the folded bill my friend slipped him, coughed into his handkerchief. It was a harsh, worrisome cough, the rattle of something entrenched. He seemed used to it, though, and when he tucked the scrap of cloth away, he was ready for business.

“My wife had a lot of gentlemen calling our house,” he said. “And this is the song I wrote one day after I picked up the telephone and talked to one of them.”

It started with Leonard saying “Hello?” as if speaking into a phone. He held an empty fist to his ear, pantomimed holding a receiver. During the performance, I think we were lost to him, as replaceable as the next couple who would sit in that spot, the couple who had been there yesterday. Only we weren’t a couple. But that hardly mattered. Leonard was the constant. We were the flux and motion, always different, and in that difference, always the same. We were transient, three day butterflies. Probably already blurring in his eyes

When he was done, we applauded and he bowed and said thank you, almost before we’d started clapping. He said we got two songs for the price of one. I don’t remember the second. I just remember the slow deep river behind him and the powdered sugar in my friend’s hair and the glaze of sun on the grass. Leonard finished with us, then walked over to a family clustered around a park bench. I heard him begin the routine again, heard other voices blending into ambient noise. I remember how we sat without talking, my friend and I, side by side on the steps. We sat there for a long time, until the sun on my shoulders grew too strong for comfort.

I do not know if Leonard survived the horror that his city became. As is true for all disasters, the weak took the worst blows, but when I hear of the drowning and shooting and starving and bleeding, I can’t see the thousands. I can’t see the whole of it. I can only see Leonard. This is so self-absorbed of me, to think of that enormous loss this way, as a personal tragedy. As if I knew anything about it.

I wish I could know where he is, how he is. I wish I could make him a person again and not this metaphor. I wish I could think of him and not feel loss, so many kinds of loss, some concrete, some strange, some utterly unnamable.

I hope this isn’t a memorial. I hope it’s just a memory put into words. I hope that someday soon, a couple will hear that song and slip him a folded bill. It won’t be my friend and I, but I hope it will be someone. And I hope they will take his picture.

Why I Am Training for a Triathlon

"We must be connected to the truths and desires of our own spirits, if we are to live a lfe of sweet spots. And conversely, following your sweet spots can help you find your own life-arrirming spirit. By all means, find it and live it, and take very good care of yourself while you are doing it."

From Sally Edwards Triathlons for Women

Doing Violence to Language

Here are the words today, from Madeleine L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet:

If language is to be revived, like the phoenix, born of its own ashes, then violence must be done to it. . . . It means speaking to each other, destroying platitudes and jargon and all the safe cushions of small talk with which we insulate ourselves; not being afraid to talk about the things we don't talk about, the ultimate things that really matter.

It means turning again to words that affirm meaning, reason, unity, that teach responsible rather than selfish love. And sometimes, doing violence to language means not using it at all, not being afraid of being silent together, of being silent alone. Then, through the thunderous silence, we may be able to hear a still, small voice, and words will be born anew.

Caesura. The pause between.

Writing in A Circle of Quiet

Serendipity has brought me to another book, one I read years ago that had disappeared behind a cabinet. Now that we are moving everything around, it fell, almost literally, at my feet -- Madeleine L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet. I didn't get it then -- too young I suppose -- but one reviewer praised it as "great consolation to ordinary people who sometimes wonder why they bother to get out of bed in the morning."

Here's a little:

"I go to the brook because I get out of being, out of the essential. I put all my prickliness, selfishness, in-turnedness, onto my is-ness; we all tend to, and when we burn, this part of us is consumed . . . I think that the part of us that has to be turned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but our ontological selves; what we are meant to be."

Ontology. The word about the essence of things; the word about being.

She also talks about self-consciousness, how real play (creativity) takes one outside of self and outside of time. "When self-conscious," she says, "we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first."

Another thing she says -- the moment that humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. The pride of putting oneself at the center of the universe.

I am, of course. The center of the universe. Only so is everybody else. Now that's a paradox that makes sense even if I can't articulate it. But what better description of the Divine than something capable of having multiple centers all at once? Alpha and omega, the beginning and end.

I'm getting trippy this morning. But the real thing I like about this book is her very familiar struggle to integrate writing and mothering and marriage and earning one's keep. The fear of both criticism and praise and how both are dangerous if they get in the way of the work having its way. The struggle to believe in herself and her work during her long dry thirties, her "tired thirties" when no one would publish her, and yet she kept writing because she had to.

She describes one particular letdown, how she covered her typewriter and decided to bake pies and give up on being a writer. And then she realized that she couldn't, that even if she never had a published book, she would write. She says, "I'm glad I made this decision in the moment of failure. It's very easy to say you're a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, then it is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all."

She said she tells herself, "What matters is the book itself. If it is as good a book as you can write at this moment in time, that is what counts. Success is pleasant -- of course you want it -- but it isn't what makes you write."

And here, here is the thing she said in response to her editor's criticism that it had been said better before. "Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me, ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little, that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try, to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die."

Or we die.

I think I forget this sometimes. I get too mixed up in genre classification. I am trying to write the best book I can right now and that will be enough. It will, in fact, keep me alive.

When Someone Asks If You're a God . . .

My therapist missed my appointment last week. His wife/colleague/keeper of his schedule called him an ozone head and reminded me that I was not to take his word for anything related to appointments, that I was to check with her ALWAYS. I've never met her. However, she called during my session THIS week to request that my therapist rush home immediately to empty out the rat trap because -- and this seemed to be a surprise to her -- there was a rat in it.

They say people who study psychology do it to figure out what's wrong with themselves. I'm guessing that doesn't help them solve the problem, however.

Or maybe it does. My therapist doesn't seem to let his "ozone brain" come between himself and a lot of wisdom, of all kinds, the psychological and the spiritual, even wisdom of the horse sense variety.

I'm really grateful that my mental health is in the hands of human beings and not robotrons, sterile perfect people who are always punctual and who have no fear of rodents. It seems more like a team effort this way, like we're all in it together. Like we're pulling for each other. In fact, my therapist has mentioned this is a tenet of his practice. "When I say that I'm thinking of you," he says, "it means I am. I do." I like to think of his thoughts like a light up ahead, a friendly glow in the darkness.

This week, we discussed mystery, specifically the kinds of evidence that science has no explanation for. Ancient maps of far-off planets. Kirlian photography and chakras. The possibility that humanity is really just the result of some genetic half-breeding between protohumans and an advanced alien civilization.

Really.

I liked the idea that our gods and monsters are more than symbolic creations of a brain wired for myth-making, that our religions and superstitions reflect reality (or our best attempts to make sense of it). Of course aliens would look like gods to us. Of course they would leave as quickly as we'd mastered basic civilization. Of course they wouldn't come back until we'd outgrown our terrible two's.

This was a good session. I'm not sure it was therapeutic, but it was good. It was oddly comforting to know that not everything's been figured out yet, not even by ten thousand years of our best thinking. It meant that I'm off the hook for figuring out my little slice of the the time-space continuum. That even though my knowledge can never reach Knowledge, it should do for me, thank you very much.

So yes. Thank you very much.

A Poem by a Good Friend

Blame Bogart
by David Starnes (2003)

To those I've damaged, those
whose hearts I felt too hard, I fell
too hard for, darkening their view,
I love no longer for the sake of fire.

Blame Bogart, Brando, Clift and Dean,
blame cinema, the thrall
of make believe, the sainted looks
of heroes, unheroic, bound to lose.

To those I've lied to, died
inside for, trading honesty
for honey, right for ripeness on the vine,
I live no longer for the dying scenes.

Blame Bogart, Brando, Clift and Dean,
blame movie screens, the framed
persuasions of a manhood, images
quicksilvered over, quickening my age.

To those I've lost, I've found
no longing worth the distance there,
no having dear enough to hold.
Forgive me, those who gave me all, for taking more.

From Original Skin by David Starnes, 2004

Talismans

I have made a little shrine up on my desk with things that are supposed to remind me of what I need to know. I have a little wolf there, howling, to remind me that inside I am wild and fierce. The Chinese symbol for change and transition reminds me that I'm supposed to go with the flow of the universe. A red heart, for love. A labyrinth. And some hematite.

It's an interesting mineral, renowned for its spiritual and emotional healing properties. It's a grounding stone, one that protects and boundaries, providing emotional stability in the face of other people's psychic chaos. It roots you to your corporeal essence, which makes it good for physical healing, time travel, and fighting nervousness on airplanes. And it's good for your heart, in all ways.

Quantum Entanglement

"Not knowing is much more interesting than believing an answer that might be wrong."
-- Richard Feynman

The only kind of physics I like is the kind that rational people want no truck with -- the quantum. I have very little patience with equations and theories and laws that explain the universe neatly and precisely. Gravity is as inexorable as it is predictable, which makes it boring to contemplate in the abstract. But when I lie on my back in my driveway, with pavement behind me and night before me, and I realize that the only thing between me and the gorgeous dark yawning everything is the same force that helped break my coffee cup that morning . . . well, that's about as concrete as it gets.

That's why I brew my coffee dark and drink it slow. Because sometimes the only thing that can save us from the vast overwhelm of bigness is the small and specific.

My favorite non-scientific musing this morning is on quantum entanglement. Wikipedia describes it like this: a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. In his book Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics, Amir D. Aczel explains it this way: "Whatever happened to one particle would thus immediately affect the other particle, wherever in the universe it may be" (quoted in Quantum Entanglement, which is an excellent source for an easily read and understood explanation of the whole shebang. Many colorful diagrams! No math!).

I like the idea that two things can exist, separate and distinct, and yet be inextricably linked. It sounds romantic, like photons have a life of the heart, with yearnings and loneliness and melancholy. Soul mates at the sub-atomic level. Or maybe I'm the one who's enamored, moonstruck with the idea that connection can exist in ways that confound even the most brilliant among us. It makes a good case for love, big love, the kind that transcends place and time (and which I hope is never reducible to an equation).

I suspect physicists must get impatient with musers like me who want to make everything mystical. Scientists crank up the Bell-state quantum eraser, indulge in a little parametric down-conversion, and math comes out. They're happy with this. But I want to see God in there. I want some scrappy little clue. Maybe not the double helix of some divine DNA, maybe just a smudgy fingerprint somewhere, but something. Anything. I feel like a forensic investigator in this world, looking for evidence of something that should require no proof.

The act of observation changes that which is observed. I think that's why I write, why I make words and then -- in a process I have never even tried to understand -- send them into the ether where others can read them. It changes them somehow, even if no human eye ever graces them. Having a reader is a blessing. It creates a cycle of energy, a good organic flow. But just offering the words is also a blessing. A benediction of sorts, maybe even a prayer. We contain universes, are contained by them too, ever expanding at the furtherest edge. And sometimes it feels like those universes are watching me, tiny finite me, the conjunction of them all.

Stepping into the Next Spotlight

I have been very angry recently.

My therapist says this is a good thing, that being angry is an essential part of the human condition. I argue that it violates logic and reason. He agrees. I argue that it violates my spiritual philosophy. He agrees. "Not very spiritual," he says. "Ridiculous even. But necessary nonetheless."

I agree with this even if I don't understand it. After all, I just finished forcing someone I care very much about into a position where the only thing he could do was hurt me, and I did it just so I could work up a fit of righteous indignation against him. So he hurt me, just like I knew he would, and it did hurt, hurt bad. And then the pain burned into fury, incandescent. Bright. I rode that for a while, took energy from it. And then the next day it all melted into embarrassment, finally coagulating into this soggy lump of guilt. I am now looking back on the whole episode with puzzled quiet sadness.

But that fury part sure felt good. Oh how violent and right it felt, like moonshine going down.

I can't imagine Jesus doing this. But then I remember how he went ballistic in the temple, knocking over stalls, yelling at merchants, probably sending small children and chickens scurrying for cover. I imagine he muttered hot bad words, maybe even kicked things.

It's a comfort, this.

Of course anger accomplishes nothing. It's just pain made manifest and hurled at the world, or at one specific part of the world. But you can learn from it. Anger empties. It takes the pain and directs it outward, unlike hurt, which turns it inward. True anger is clean. It keeps us dynamic, takes us out of ourselves and our pain. Eventually we see clearly again. And then we act. And that is why anger is necessary. But it only works if we keep it in motion. Kept inside, it just mutates into hurt again, like a cancer, and begins to eat away at the center of things.

I forgot the motion part of anger. I saw it as something that needed tamping, so I stamped around it very virtuously, tried to put it out it with love and patience and hope and -- and this is the unfortunate part -- this niggly sense of duty, like a Girl Scout going for her enlightenment badge. I grieved, yes, with an intensity that took me to my knees some days, literally. But I tried to cool the anger, since I'd heard so often that anger is a coverup for a more authentic emotion, and I wanted to get to that so that I could move on with this letting go business. I wanted to get to the next phase, since this one didn't seem very Buddha-like. It was like being told that you had to be Denis Leary before you could be Ghandi.

Which, I guess, is true.

Anne Lamott describes it as being in darkness and seeing one spot of illumination just beyond your feet, a circle of light into which you can step. So you do. And it disappears. And then another appears, just ahead. "We in our faith work," her pastor Veronica says, "stumble along toward where we think we're supposed to go. bumbling along, and here is what's so amazing -- we end up getting exactly where we're supposed to be." (from "Mountain Birthday" in Traveling Mercies)

I thought I could get there from here, on my own. It didn't work. I could only get there from there. Anger was the next spotlight, and once I stepped into it, it disappeared. And now I can just see the glow of some new circle, right at the corner of my eye, right at the edge of my peripheral vision.

Why I Don't Wear My Glasses

I have to put them on occasionally -- to work at my computer, to read subtitles at the movies. I'm fine to drive without them, and I don't need them to read, so most of the time, my life proceeds in a gauzy haze, soft around the edges. Substituting rose-colored glasses for real ones.

The world is too sharp and unpleasant with them on, when I can see so clearly all the dust on the bookshelves, the little mosquito bodies on the window ledge. When I look at myself, I seem thinner in 20/20, but my skin looks much worse, like I have a hangover. And I can't figure out why my hair looks frizzier when it's not blurry. Shouldn't it be the other way around? The only thing I've found that improves with clarity is a cloudless, moonless night sky. Stars should be pricked against the dark, cut and polished along cosmic cleavage planes, faceted. Properly magnificent.

But I'd still miss the soft fuzzy darkness of my everyday nights, the milky lights running together. The friendly sky that's been my companion for so long.

I read this poem once about a woman glimpsing a burst of white flowers along an otherwise barren roadside, the hope she felt as she passed in her car, to think that even in desolate abandoned nothing, there can be beauty, springing up. But when she mentioned the incident to her husband, who had been driving, he informed her that the flowers had been a bunch of dirty diapers somebody had thrown out.

I wonder what I'll miss today, with my glasses tucked in my purse. And I wonder what I won't miss at all.

Losing, Losses, Letting Go

I just gave my sofa away.

It was a spur of the moment idea, one of those wild-hair things. Some nice people had come by the house to collect an old bed, a chest of drawers we no longer needed. And I said, hey, how about a sofa?

I should tell my husband. I moved the other furniture around, gave the end tables a little breathing room. Vacuumed the floor and picked up all the ancient change. Corralled the dust bunnies.

He's still gonna notice.

Right after my grandmother's funeral, I gave away a bunch of her dishes to a distant relative. I didn't ask anybody, just pulled them out of the cupboard, wrapped them in newspaper and put them in the backseat of this cousin's car. My family was horrified and bewildered. So was I. I loved those dishes.

So I know I am feeling bereft today. I know that I am trying to jettison something that's hurting me. I keep thinking of this poem that my friend David wrote. It's called "Vanishing Acts." This is the last stanza:

Everything happens for no reason but
what we reduce it to, depending on
our losses at the deeper end and how
we face the vanishing of all we meant
to keep: from flesh and blood to love and more
than love. My students understand the seeds
of conflict necessary for a tale
that's worth the telling, worthy of their time.
What gets them, though, are tales that end without
an end, with only loss, when loss is just the start.

Losing is not the same as letting go. So they tell me. It feels the same from this end, though, in the empty place, so this is not wisdom I can validate.

So much that we cannot hold, so many endings and never agains. Why, then, are we so careless with what we do have? Why do we -- in the name of pride or protection or just desserts -- let good things slip through our fingers?

I don't know why feeling lost makes me want to give things away, things like furniture and plates. I don't know what kind of wound I'm trying to balm. I just know that I'll be sitting on the floor tonight, on fluffy carpet that feels like new. And that's the closest thing to understanding I'll get.

The Three of Swords

Heartbreak.

It’s obvious when you look at the card -- three swords piercing a tender bloodied heart. Disappointment. Upheaval. Endings. Rejection. Betrayal. Isolation. This is the Tarot at its most visual and visceral. It evokes physically what its symbolizes metaphysically.

I’ve only seen it once before, in a spread of cards so full of anguish that I didn’t even read it at the time. I just wrote each card down, noted the positions, closed my notebook. A friend came in, saw the cards laid out on the bed and asked me what they said. I just swept them clear, wrapped the deck back in its cloth and tucked it away. “Pain,” I said. “Lots of pain.”

And so here it is again, today. And it gives me that same sinking feeling.

I don’t believe in fortune-telling. Fate and destiny lie in our nature and our nurture more than in our stars. But I believe that our intuition hides the truth from us, sometimes, and that certain images and metaphors tease that meaning from the shadows that our psyches throw. I believe we see things, and we know, if we allow ourselves that knowledge.

Maybe I believe the universe sends us little hints now and then, this card or that, falling into place, making a pattern. Maybe not. But I believe in the power of those messages, even if they’re coming from my own head.

Heartbreak. Our one undeniable birthright.

Penguin Love

Today at church, the visiting minister read the children's story. All the little ones gathered at his feet, and he passed out stuffed penguins for them to fondle and moon over. "This," he said, "is a story about penguins. And love. And families."

It was a sweet story, much better than March of the Penguins, which a friend claims should have been called The Sad Life of Penguins. No frozen corpses, no ravenous sea lions. This book was set in the Central Park Zoo.

"Now," the minister read, "It was that time of year when all the boy penguins started to notice the girl penguins. And all the girl penguins started to notice the boy penguins." And my first thought was, how sweet. A coming of age story, with feathers. And my second thought -- and this is a fine testament to just how much of a proud knee-jerk liberal I really am -- was all about the heterosexism of that statement. Surely there were some gay penguins, I thought.

And there were. Their names were Roy and Silo. And this was a book about them and the chick they raised that the zookeeper named Tango, because, as we all know, "it takes two to make a tango."

It ends with the sun going down on sleeping families all through the city. No snow. no ice. Warm all around. Just the kind of ending I needed today.

Why I Hate Happy Endings Now -- A Mild Existential Rant

We’re making an attempt at church to laugh more. Hence, Friday Movie Night. For our debut, we screened Something’s Gotta Give. Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Keanu Reeves. Love triangle. Clever dialogue. Mild inoffensive symbolism and metaphorical subtext. Some partial nudity with energetic overacting.

Funny, yes. Which surprised me. My sense of humor is usually skewed toward biting and vulgar, sweet and vulgar, cerebral and vulgar. I mean, I’m the girl who confessed that my sacred moment this Christmas was watching a Santa suit-clad Billy Bob Thornton -- drunken and half-dressed -- crawl up a driveway in a hail of gunfire to deliver a blood-splattered stuffed elephant to this kid he’d been trying to rob for most of the movie.

So surprised, yes, that I laughed. Until I got pissed off. And what pissed me off was the Hollywood ending. See, Diane falls in love with Jack against her better judgment -- against her will even -- and even though he’s in love with her too, he can’t admit it, articulate it, express it. They separate. She gets involved with Keanu (smart, funny, adoring) Jack has an anxiety attack/faux heart attack and changes himself into a man worthy of her. Tracks her down to Paris, finds her with Keanu. The three share dinner -- lots of flirtatious bonding and emotional poignancy between Jack and Diane -- and then, THEN, Diane kisses him goodbye -- awkward and tender -- and she gets in a cab and he stands on a bridge as the snow falls in the Paris night and says to himself, “Now who’s the girl, huh?”

The end.

I wish.

No. Of course not. Diane screeches back in her cab and says I never really stopped being in love with you and he says you have just made my life. Big embrace. Cut to warm-hearted montage six months in the future -- family dinner, granddaughter on knee, laughter and Italian food. Tasteful rich furnishings. Paul Simon playing.

The end.

Phooey. The whole point of the movie was that pain makes you. It beats open your heart, beats it bloody, and in that empty broken space -- tilled now, fertile -- something grows. And that something is you. And you are finally true then. That’s the gift of pain, that cracking open. And to suggest that that’s not enough -- that somehow there must be a happy ending -- is a violation of the principle. It cheapens the experience, makes it about the feel-good and not the feeling.

I remember disagreeing with a friend once about the movie Garden State. He wanted it to end with the girl sobbing in the airport phone booth, the love of her life on a plane back to California. I liked the real ending better -- the guy rushing back down the escalator, saying no, I’m not going, that was a stupid idea and I’m not doing it. I told my friend it had grown on me, that ending.

It think it was because THAT ending was about the rejection of big ideas that sound really Wise and Profound but are, nonetheless, stupid. There is no template for life, no script. Stay or go. Win the girl, lose her forever. It’s a moment, not a scene. It may not make sense or be fair or foreshadow a significant epiphany. It may not be part of something bigger. It may just be, but that’s the most important thing of all.

So maybe I've changed my mind about Garden State too. Maybe I want him on that plane, tears behind and tears before.

I’ve grown disillusioned with stories as ways of making meaning. Life has no arc. Its symbols are accidental and haphazard. The character development isn't clear, isn’t progressive, isn't always satisfying. Our brains crave stories, have evolved to process patterns and linear narratives and make meaning from them. We get confused and lost without our stories.

But sometimes life refuses to make a story.

I wanted that movie to end with beautiful black night and new snow and all alone with nowhere to go. I wanted that to be enough, I really did.

It's Not Giles Goat Boy, but still . . .

"Technique in art . . . has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity."
-- John Barth

Storytelling and Telling Stories

My grandmother always told me, “Now don’t you be telling no stories.”

But I always did. I couldn’t resist a story, even if it meant making one up for no reason but the making.

My grandmother said these were lies. My husband would agree. He’s an engineer, suspicious of the frayed edge that all stories have, the place where facts start unraveling. He says that fact and truth are the same thing. He says that if he started writing equations based on my ideas of truth, planes would fall from the sky.

It’s a point.

And yet my brain can’t make sense of all the facts around me; it’s an impossibility. Information overload. My brain has to leave out certain things for me to make sense of the rest. It edits my reality into something I can comprehend, leaving out this, focusing on that. It connects my present experience to the other experiences folded and tucked in my gray matter, and by doing so, creates a chronology, a sense of past and future, effect and consequence. The human brain is wired for stories, and it programs our consciousness accordingly.

Not facts. Stories.

Memory is useful not for what it records, but for what it erases. It takes out the extraneous -- however factual -- and leaves us with essence -- however slanted. And it is slanted; it must be. No true and perfectly accurate memory exists. Certain details, by necessity, weren’t captured in the first place, and every subsequent time your consciousness touches the memory, it further alters it, even as it carves it deeper into your brain. Jonah Lehrer explains it more eloquently than I can in his article "The Neuroscience of Proust" (from Seed magazine):

Every time we remember, the neuronal structure of the memory, no matter how constant it may feel, is delicately transformed. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. So the purely objective memory . . . is the one memory lost to you forever.

Our memory is a fallacy. All we have are our stories. All we are are our stories.

Which is why I write fiction -- because it's the only way I know to find something real. And there isn't an equation in the world that can do that for me.

I say I use lies to tell the truth. I have a friend who uses the truth to tell lies. I wonder which one of us is more dishonest?

Anfractuosity

As good a place to begin as any, with a word that I probably wouldn't know if Mark Z. Danielewski hadn't made such good use of it. Anfractuosity: the quality of being like a channel, crevice or passage full of windings and turnings. Sinuous and complex, maze-like, labyrinthine. From House of Leaves:

In order to escape [labyrinths] then, we have to remember we cannot ponder all paths but must decode only those necessary to get out. . . . Unfortunately, the anfractuosity of some labyrinths may actually prohibit a permanent solution. More confounding still, its complexity may exceed the imagination of even the designer. Therefore anyone lost within must recognize that no one, not even a god or an Other, comprehends the entire maze and so therefore can never offer a definitive answer. . . . All solutions then are necessarily personal. (115)

Life as a maze. Anfractuous. With monsters and rumors of monsters.

By the way, House of Leaves is a hell of a book and then some, but I don't recommend reading it. Friends don't give friends House of Leaves. It is a book that whispers to you. It gives you a fever. It get heavier as you hold it. It makes you look in closets. It makes you swear you'll never look in a closet again, that you'll hammer them all shut and mount crucifixes on the crossboards. It makes you question your sanity. It makes your sanity question you. It bludgeons you. It strokes you. And it changes you, so much so and in such mazey untraceable ways, that in the end you begin to wonder if you're one of the monsters in the middle of it.

So no, I wouldn't pick it up if I were you.