Category Archives: Writing

Day 293 4/15/14: The Way of the Animal Powers

by in Art, Dreams, God, Literature, Memory, Writing and tagged , | 1 Comment

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Revisiting the work of Joseph Campbell, I came across this passage from his book “The Way of the Animal Powers”:

“The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants, ibexes and gazelles are in cages in our zoos. Man is no longer the newcomer in the world of unexplored plains and forests, and our immediate neighbors are not wild beasts but other human beings, contending for goods and space on a planet that is whirling without end around the fireball of a star. Neither in body nor in mind do we inhabit the world of those hunting races of the Paleolithic millennia, to whose lives and life ways we nevertheless owe the very forms of our bodies and structures of our minds. Memories of their animal envoys must sleep, somehow, within us; for they wake a little and stir when we venture into wilderness. They wake in terror to thunder. And again they wake, with a sense of recognition, when we enter any one of those great painted caves. Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those caves descended in their trances, the same must lie within ourselves, nightly visited in sleep.”

 

Day 267 3/20/14: Shark Dreams & Devil’s Teeth

by in Dreams, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Behavior, Shark Conservation, Shark Sighting, white sharks, Writing and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

If you love great white sharks, and haven’t read Susan Casey’s book “The Devil’s Teeth” a riveting account of studying white sharks in the Farrallon  Islands a place thirty miles west of San Francisco where “thirty knot winds, blanketing fog and fifteen-foot seas are standard,” do yourself a favor for GOD’S SAKE and order a copy!

You’ll uncover the fascinating history of this stark, forbidding island of stone, and learn all kinds of odd, fascinating facts (white sharks can actually get sun tans). You’ll meet sharks like Cuttail and 17-foot fish like Betty, Mama and Cadillac (collectively known as the Sisterhood)  and cranky 5,000 pound Stumpy who doesn’t like decoys.  Living in the rugged isolation of the Farallons, the logbooks that the researchers keep–records of feeding events, shark encounters, birds and other wildlife observed on the islands  “are the closest things the islands [have] to a native religion.”

The logbook also serves as a kind of dream diary.  51JVGXKEJHL._SY344_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_

“For years, I had a recurring dream—actually it hovered on the edge of nightmare territory—in which I floated at night, surrounded by large, unearthly fish. I could never see them clearly, but I knew the water was alive with them, all these hidden creatures, sweeping and circling. When I saw the Farrallones…the memory of these phantoms vaulted out of semi-retirement and into my consciousness. This was some weird water. What was going on beneath the surface?”

After Casey sees sharks for the first time at the Farallons, her dream phantoms appear again:

“That night the water dream returned, but this time the image was clearer. I recognized the sharks gliding by: Stumpy, Cuttail and the unknown Sister with her monstrous tail. For once, though, the dream didn’t strike me as strange. Out here shark dreams were so vivid there was a section in the logbook devoted to recounting them;  Scot had confessed that he still had them every night. In my dream it was dark, and I was alone, drifting in a small boat. Once again, I looked down as shadowy creatures swam beneath me, just barely visible by moonlight. And all night, majestic and terrible fish cruised through the…bedroom in otherworldly silence.”

Day 256 3/8/14: The Song Hospital (Pt.2)

by in Loss/Grief, Memory, Pop Culture, Writing and tagged , , | 1 Comment

“Bring your song to the Song Hospital.” I found the ad at the back of a 1940s magazine on amateur photography, one of many other ads offering the services of “song doctors.” I’d obviously heard the term “script doctor” but song doctor had such poetic possibilities—it made me wonder if songs had the potential to be broken, injured and healed.

This morning I woke up hearing “Save it For Later” in my head and I remembered another album I played and re-played to the point of physical destruction. Not even the most talented song doctors in the nation could have saved this record.

In 1982, my mother and brother and I moved to Ojai, California from a little town in Massachusetts. Everything felt exotic to me, the orange groves across the street, the huge mountains and that summer’s baking heat so different from New England humidity. The heat melted the tapered candles in their very colonial looking candlesticks, until they began to softly droop. School hadn’t started. I stayed inside the shady and cavernous living room, watching Twilight Zone episodes and at night listening to records.

I played Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” endlessly that summer. Moody and spare, the music did not match Ojai’ s pink mountain sunsets and horse ranches and oak groves. Each time I played the record again, my brother would groan and blast “Sex Bomb,” by Flipper to obliterate “Nebraska’s” harmonica, its mournful evocation of Midwest interstates, of killers, war veterans and state troopers:

Me and Frankie laughing and drinking

Nothing feels better than blood on blood

Taking turns dancing with Marie

While the band played Night of the Johnstown Flood

Even when I wasn’t playing “Nebraska,” it played in my head. I had an orange cat named Vincent. Late one afternoon I found his body by the side of the road. I wasn’t sure how he’d died, but I decided not to burden my mother with the news right away. So I buried Vincent in the overgrown backyard, thinking as I wielded the shovel that digging a grave by moonlight, did feel like something out of the black and white world of “Nebraska,” that I’d finally begun to live the songs that until then I’d merely memorized:

Everything dies baby that’s a fact

Maybe everything that dies someday comes back

By September, “Nebraska” became unplayable. The two sides somehow merged, melting into each other until the songs spoke to one another in an avant-garde dialogue.

I took a strange pride in this, as if I’d taken music to some new extreme, the frontier of teenage loyalty. I’d passed into the grooves themselves.

I’m not so reverent, so fanatical anymore, but as a writer music remains to me a vital companion. To evoke a particular mood right, I do what so many writers do. I play the same song over and over. And I am amazed at how durable these songs are, how long the spell can be stretched out without losing its power, how a good song can reach into so many different directions at once, each of which is true—a love song is an otherworldly invocation of the next world and a world-weary reflection about being a cocaine-fueled rock star all at the same time.

When the wind blows and the rain feels cold

With a head full of snow

With a head full of snow

If I listen to “Moonlight Mile,” by the Rolling Stones, I exist at once in two places: the actual road I am trying to evoke on the page, a blue road in the country, that I’ve walked many times and another road where the dead travel, one that seems familiar beyond memory. As long as the song is playing, I can see both roads, blurring and vanishing into each other, and I am rooted to the ground, echoing in the emptiness of the air.

Day 255 3/7/14: The Song Hospital (Pt. 1)

by in Inner Turmoil, Loss/Grief, Memory, Writing and tagged , | Leave a comment

I’ve been listening to the same song for three days. No news. No movies. Nothing. Just one song. In my car. In my apartment. I want to see what lies beyond the fog of the too familiar, beyond the edge of boredom. Can a song heard so many times become new again? Will the ending sound less wistful when I know it’s going to start again for the fortieth time?

The song is “Save it For Later” by the English Beat. In the 80s, I kept a radio vigil for it, along with “Talk of the Town,” by The Pretenders. I saw the English Beat perform it at “New Wave Day” at the US Festival in 1982, the same day I saw the Clash and A Flock of Seagulls. It had been a long hot day of rock in San Bernadino, but when the English Beat came out, all skinny and New Wave, I felt reborn.

***

The song is fast. The unfolding spell of memory is slow. It’s the summer of 1983 and I’m in the country, at my father’s house waiting for a letter. I can feel the cold grass under my feet. When I hear a car on the road I shade my eyes with a biography of Keith Moon and look out toward the mailbox. The song won’t give me any more than that. Just a loop. Sun and cold grass. Keith Moon. Waiting.

***

 I’ve heard it 100 times and there are still lines I cannot decipher: “My seven seas are rotten through? The seven seas I’m walking through?” But I’m afraid to look up the words. If I know the muddled parts, maybe I’ll lose the grass and sun and whatever feeling rushed through me years ago when I waited for the song, for the letter to set me free.

***

When my father drank too much, he played songs over and over. As a child, I once played “Yellow Submarine” about 35 times at his request.  But my father shattered this record one summer when he played “Against the Wind” by Bob Seger fifty times in a row. In the line “deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out,” Bob Seger had effortlessly channeled my father’s daily struggle at the typewriter banging out stories about ax murderers and Boston politicians, about defrocked priests and lady blacksmiths. Combined with the potent melancholy of “drifters days” and “seeking shelter” “Against the Wind” conjured a spell against which my father was powerless.

I could do nothing but sit with him at the bar he’d created off the kitchen, under the genuine wagon wheel lights, and dime store dream catchers drinking cold well water and listening to “Against the Wind,” until some of my cynicism melted. Upstairs, I slid into a creaky bed in a room cluttered with newspapers all of which contained my father’s stories.

I guess I lost my way, oh so many roads….

Each time I came home, I cut some of the stories out of those papers. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t dream. I couldn’t find the crooked scissors I usually used to excise his words from the dry bulk of the Boston Herald. I heard the shuffling of slippers downstairs. I could hear my father cough and open the cupboards rooting around for crackers.

 

I’m older now and still running

 

I listened and somewhere in that slim fragment of darkness, waiting for the song to begin again, I felt the interminable open out into something vast and tender.

***

I’m 17. “Save it For Later” comes on at the Halloween party where I am dressed as a slutty vampire, my hair electrified with Dippity-Do. The guy I’m with is 24. He’s embarrassed to be at a high school party. I sit on the edge of the chair where he’s sitting.  Cold saliva pools around my fake fangs. I rest my hand on his shoulder, in silent rapture. When the song is over, we’ll go into my friend’s room, but not a moment before.

 At the moment Ranking Roger sings Don’t bother trying to explain…Just hold my hand while I come to a decision on it

I want to hold his hand. To see if he notices.  To see if I can finally match song with world.

Day 251 3/3/14: “When There Were Ghosts”

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popcorn18If you like poetry, sign up for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day e-mail. It’s pretty great. I loved today’s poem by Albert Rios. It reminded me of the first time I saw “Jaws” and how all the cigarette smoke rose from the front row creating wraiths of fog around the screen.

When There Were Ghosts

On the Mexico side in the 1950s and 60s,

There were movie houses everywhere

And for the longest time people could smoke

As they pleased in the comfort of the theaters.

The smoke rose and the movie told itself

On the screen and in the air both,

The projection caught a little

In the wavering mist of the cigarettes.

In this way, every story was two stories

And every character lived near its ghost.

Looking up we knew what would happen next

Before it did, as if it the movie were dreaming

Itself, and we were part of it, part of the plot

Itself, and not just the audience.

And in that dream the actors’ faces bent

A little, hard to make out exactly in the smoke,

So that María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz

Looked a little like my aunt and one of my uncles–

And so they were, and so were we all in the movies,

Which is how I remember it: Popcorn in hand,

Smoke in the air, gum on the floor–

Those Saturday nights, we ourselves

Were the story and the stuff and the stars.

We ourselves were alive in the dance of the dream.

Day 250 3/2/14: If You’re Feeling Lost….

by in Death, Environment, Loss/Grief, Meditation, Memory, Poetry, Writing and tagged , | Leave a comment

This is a poem by Robert Frost called “Directive.” 

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town.

The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you

Who only has at heart your getting lost,

May seem as if it should have been a quarry—

Great monolithic knees the former town

Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.

And there’s a story in a book about it:

Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels

The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,

The chisel work of an enormous Glacier

That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.

You must not mind a certain coolness from him

Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal

Of being watched from forty cellar holes

As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.

As for the woods’ excitement over you

That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,

Charge that to upstart inexperience.

Where were they all not twenty years ago?

They think too much of having shaded out

A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

Make yourself up a cheering song of how

Someone’s road home from work this once was,

Who may be just ahead of you on foot

Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.

The height of the adventure is the height

Of country where two village cultures faded

Into each other. Both of them are lost.

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself

By now, pull in your ladder road behind you

And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.

Then make yourself at home. The only field

Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.

First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,

Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,

The playthings in the playhouse of the children.

Weep for what little things could make them glad.

Then for the house that is no more a house,

But only a belilaced cellar hole,

Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.

This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.

Your destination and your destiny’s

A brook that was the water of the house,

Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,

Too lofty and original to rage.

(We know the valley streams that when aroused

Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)

I have kept hidden in the instep arch

Of an old cedar at the waterside

A broken drinking goblet like the Grail

Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,

So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.

(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)

Here are your waters and your watering place.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Day 248 2/28/14: “All Places Exist in the Body”

by in God, Inner Turmoil, Loss/Grief, Meditation, Memory, Writing | Leave a comment

Some truths we think we know. Then we actually live them. For me, one such truth is: “All places exist in the body.”  I first fell in love with this concept in 1995 at U.C. Berkeley when a poetry teacher of mine mentioned it.

In the class, I wrote a short piece about a guy I’d been absolutely nuts about when I was very young—this poem was economical, but full of dreamy sensuality and ribs rising, and concluded with a kind of hazy philosophizing that nothing was really lost if “all things exist in the body.” I changed “places” to “things” thinking there was really no difference.

But I didn’t know then that remembering with the body means more than a breathless nostalgic lust, or the addled mind throwing the mostly forgotten body a bone.

All places exist in the body. The distinction matters.

When my father died, leaving the house I had known and loved and returned to for 44 years to his mentally unbalanced wife, I became an exile. We’re all exiles. We were born exiles, after all. But we live here a while and we forget. Then someone dies or the door forever closes on some beloved place.

I learned that losing a place does not feel the same as losing a person.  And while I know better than to apply linear timelines to grief, when the initial shock and frequent, exhausting crying jags over my father subsided, the house, the fields, the woods moved in.

They took residence in my body in a way that memories of the dead never have. The opposite of an exorcism, a new settling began. I now understood that properly remembered, a well was also a throat, that doors were breasts, that the lifting of old latches, the bark of disappeared trees, all the obscure pleasures of warm mud and cold stone had to have some place to go. But not to become projections–the ever-thinning, forever looping films of the mind. These things had to go where they could grow, a place where all the restless spirits of habit could find their place.

This kind of remembering, this very physical presence that aligns the outside with the inside, so much that teeth take on the silent weight of stone walls, this kind of memory-as-occupation feels at times almost supernatural. I tried to tame it with a poem:

A moon-bright field raises hairs on the arms.

Wrists go numb remembering dark brooks.

Horses become instinct, thirst.

What it can no longer return to

in the old way, the body rebuilds, reclaims

as if to say: there was always only here.

Is this wholeness at last?

The translation of all loved things

to their essence

The barn less brick

than silence that agreed for a time

to gather itself into manger and beam

The poem ends, but the house still shows up. What does it want of me? There is no danger of forgetting.

Maybe only a simple transmission of information, the declaration of an obscure fact:

On the cellar walls, long ago strangers recorded snowfalls in soft pencil, along with recipes for elderberry wine. We added to these our own statistics of startling snowfalls, how much fell, how little stayed. In the barn, the births and deaths of horses are written in blue on the inside door of a hay strewn cupboard.

I don’t know what this means. Carried in the body, it no longer even feels like a memory, just a code that if finally broken, might save someone else.

Day 232 2/12/14: “JAWS” & Feminism Part 2

by in Feminism, Jaws, Pop Culture, Writing | Leave a comment

Virginia-Slims-Wonder-WomanWe left off yesterday lamenting the elusive female orgasm and speculating about Ellen Brody’s signature scent.

Predictably, many ads in the October 1974 issue of Cosmo focus on personal hygiene and its not-so-subtle campaign to engender women with self loathing. The Mark Eden Developer promises “A Perfect Bosom for the Girls of Summer.” My nostalgia for the word “bosom,” almost lulled me into forgetting how gross this is. Dig the breezy copy: “The Summer Bosom is high and full and firm and proud…and looks enchanting in the bright, brief clothes of Summer.” I don’t think “Summer Bosom” is a copyrighted term, but  the capitalization sure adds dignity and presence. The ellipses encourage the reader to reflect on just what it means to be “high and full and firm and proud,” while I confess that “bright, brief” evokes more than just skimpy clothes to me. It is the fleeting season of Summer itself. I am almost half tempted to clip this Mark Eden coupon out of the page and send my $9.95 & 50 cents for postage and handling to San Francisco and wait for my discreet plain wrapped package (not a cream, or artificial stimulator, but an “exclusive exerciser” that has delighted millions. One more ad before I go on to the serious discussion which a title like “JAWS” & Feminism demands.

Like signs for Burma Shave or Wall Drug that greet the traveler along the American highway, the reader navigating the landscape of Cosmo finds little ads at the end of articles asking questions like: “Do men ignore your legs because you ignore your feet?” Then a smaller, insistent sentence: “Every girl should have pretty feet.” Finally on page 261, we get to the ad which features a woman’s legs from the lower thigh down. Her knees are coyly touching, one foot is raised. The ankle is held by the hand of a nude man who reclines on the ground in a quiet, smiling “HI THERE” pose. “Pretty Feet. Because a girl should snare a man, not snag him.” Haunted by Ellen’s obsessive shaving, showering, powdering and perfuming, I read: “A girl should be soft. All soft. Not just her eyes. Or her lips. Her toe tips, too. Yes, every girl should have soft pretty feet.” I recalled the boyfriends I’ve snagged with dragon claws. The fleeting shame. The laughter. The promise to clip. The end.  How differently things play out in the advertising universe when the tiniest flaw could result in some sort of…what? Banishment from womanhood itself?

But Cosmo, is of course a big contradiction. Right next to the ubiquitous cigarette as emancipation Virginia Slims ad, is an article by feminist novelist and critic Elizabeth Janeway that boldly declares: “Not womankind but the weak among men and women alike–the subordinate, the submissive, the symbolically raped  are THE REAL SECOND SEX.”

As my students so often, so lamentably write, “This really caught my attention,” because of a section in “Jaws” that is just eye-rollingly absurd or downright offensive depending on your point of view. Will a 2014 audience understand the insane ridiculousness of Ellen declaring that her only sexual fantasy is “The usual. You know, rape,” and that her “date” Matt Hooper can barely stop drooling as he asks, “Is it a black man?” I tend to read a long entertaining disclaimer at the beginning of the reading just in case.

Maybe I should just read this article instead.

I like Janeway’s honest analysis of the psychological threat of and “visceral reaction” to the Woman’s Movement. Janeway explains that dividing the power structure of the world by sex binds men both the powerful and influential and the weak together by virtue of their anatomy. But if women are suddenly to be seen as equal to men, it sends a message to men that they can expect to be treated like women—as objects and others, not doers, but those to whom something is done:

“Closing the male/female split means a drastic rearrangement of the barriers between the weak and the powerful…the weak become the second sex–subordinate, submissive, subject to rape. (Though in our society the fear of rape by men of menus not often acknowledged, it exists, and the underlying premise is quite clear: if power has no bounds, it will extend to physical misuse. The paradigmatic act of the powerful, performed up on the weak is rape.)

Now, rape need not always be performed by force. Indeed, one of the charms of pornography is that it records session after session of guiltless rape in which the powerful are licensed to have their will of the weak because the weak “really like it that way.” Last Tango in Paris, the story of encounter between strangers offers a brilliant example of this theme. Only symbolic rape is present here, because the woman accepts subordination and asks for abuse, but we can regard it as psychologically equivalent to physical rape because the relationship  involves dominance of female by male to the point which society usually considers degrading. The heroine, who is not presented as a individual, but rather a mythic projection of “what they really like,” is deputized as wanting degradation and returning willingly to the male in order to receive it. In the end she can free herself only by violence, can win back her autonomy and reassert her identity only by killing him–leaving us with the moral that it is a law of nature for men to be dominant and the only means by which women can reverse this edict is murder. In other words, equality is nonsense and women who ask for it are dangerous fools who end up slaughtering men.”

This last bit about women resorting to violence reminds me of ANOTHER (non-Ellen Brody) moment in “Jaws” when Officer Hendricks is at his desk reading a detective novel called “Deadly, I’m Yours,” as the phone rings (a missing person’s report: nude swimmer, Chrissie Watkins, the shark’s first victim): “the heroine, a girl named Whistling Dixie, was about to be raped by a motorcycle club. Hendricks let the phone ring until Miss Dixie castrated the first of her attackers with a linoleum knife she had secreted in her hair.”

Who would have thought when I sat in a tree in my Wrangler jeans, eating Apple Stix and trying to figure out the weirdo sex passages of this book that it would yield, so many years later, such a complicated feast of gender trouble? Reading Janeway’s article helped me entertain the possibility that Hooper’s titillation was only a projection,  a symptoms of a much deeper fear of subordination and identity loss. But I still wish Ellen had read this article before she met him for lunch.

Day 223 2/3/14: On Story and Healing

by in Animal Welfare, Death, Dreams, Environment, God, Literature, Meditation, Writing and tagged | Leave a comment

imagesI am privileged to have Deena Metzger as my teacher. When I read her recent essay What Story is And How it Heals, I thought FINALLY! an understanding of story that makes sense to me.

P.S. What does it mean to enter into a council with animals? Click here to read about Deena’s work with elephants in Africa.

Day 211 1/29/14: Why I Write

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I wrote this as an assignment in a workshop that I’m taking & thought I would share.

It’s interesting to remind myself why I continue to  write when I bitch about it constantly.

WHY I WRITE

In adolescence, I felt driven by a mania to record, an anxiety about days slipping by. No experience had been fully lived until I transcribed it in my notebook. I remember the minutiae of make-out sessions, the margins full of life. Now at middle age I’m even more aware of time passing, but I’m gathering up all those journals I’ve kept since 13, choosing only a representational sentence or two from each year and throwing them away. I want to record my feelings about time.  Will tossing piles of antique store ledgers, cheesy clothbound “nothing” books will feel like liberation, or a bandage ripped off too soon?

I will write about the experience of turning many books into one.

            Writing is a way of seeing. I’m not a painter or a scientist, although like Keats said, I’m aware of how the poet inhabits other ways of seeing. Although I love painting, I don’t see the world in terms of line or color.  I love nature, but I am far too messy to be scientific.

I write because I’m haunted by language. Lines get stuck in my head. In the summer of 2001, I could not stop thinking: “Late at night, when the signal is clear….” I don’t think I ever used it, but it led me deeper into the experience of summer. The landscape seemed to conform to it. Through its effortless repetition in my head, I saw correspondences, communion where I might have simply seen house, grass, trees, stonewall. That thin fragment unified everything.

I can’t figure out why I’m alive, so I write to justify my existence. I agree with the philosopher who said, “We all come here with sealed instructions.” Mine must have to do with writing, since it is the only skill I have. Through willed ignorance, learned helplessness and genuine indifference, I can’t do much of anything else. I’m in awe of  friends who make clothes and fix sinks, dig gardens and train dogs. I think of a certain line over and over, wearing it down in my head until the marrow shines through, or let it drift so it retains its essential lightness on the page.

My brother can build a house. I construct and dismantle shelters of words. Leaky, eccentric, or structurally unsound, but still I build and rebuild. Sometimes I inhabit one for a while, but I never get too comfortable. In writing, there’s only a fleeting sense of “home.” But if I can articulate that absence incisively, or at least beautifully on the page, then at least I’ve created a temporary refuge.

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