sylvia

Sylvia Plath would have been 82 today. One of the three defining writers of my life (Stephen King and Raymond Carver being the other two), I long ago ran out of words to say about her work, her life and what it has meant and continues to mean to me. Instead, as I have done before and almost certainly will do again, I will share my favorite poem of hers:

The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

ostia (coiled)

Snow.

I watch the snow. I have never seen it snow. There are bones underground and monuments atop them. You can hear the bones humming in the afternoon beneath the austere sky. I don't know where the snow comes from. There are thousands of words for snow. I will never learn all, or even most, of them.

I have never seen it snow. I watch the snow. A warm body lies atop the bed. Boxes of photos lie beneath. You can hear the photos rustle during the night. The ceiling light does not work and the bulb in the lamp is almost burnt out. Snow is white. I will never learn all, or even most, of the colors.

An earth mover made of bones digs a hole and the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out.

I will not have to worry about riding the carousel at the carnival as neither of these things exist. I use the bones to dig. They hum and are not brittle. They like to be put to use.

The first act of death is getting in an automobile.

Austin Spare hides under a pile of corpses. He can hear the bones humming.

The snow looks like cherry blossoms. I do not know if all snow looks like this. Snow eradicates the world. I use the bones to scrape away roots. I kneel, and my body breaks. It does not belong to me. Nothing belongs to me. Not even the bones. My bones.

Together the bones and I hum.



--10/16/14 and 10/23/14

a notebook and a pen

There is comfort in having a notebook and a pen nearby. My handwriting, never great, has badly deteriorated through lack of use. But I still pick up the notebook and pen on occasion. The computer has never once offered comfort. I don't believe it capable, honestly. The notebook and pen have been my lifelong friends and companions.

I've kept every notebook I've ever done any creative writing in, as well as my handwritten journals. What value could they ever possibly have to anyone? None, except to me. Not for inspiration, but as proof. Proof to myself that I actually lived. I had some thoughts and tried to express some things. The notebooks are by and large not flattering--the writing is mostly awful and most were composed during some rough years when I was young. When I read through one of the notebooks a couple of months back, I cringed at the arrogance in some (but, to be fair, certainly not all) the writings. Such insecurity in my life and only on the page was there any confidence. Clearly I overcompensated. Only the young and stupid believe themselves to be some kind of visionary. Only the young and stupid care about being some kind of visionary. 

I largely stopped writing by hand in the mid-90s. Within a year or two I essentially stopped writing altogether (minus the occasional journal entry.) For close to a decade, I did little writing, having convinced it was pointless as I have little talent. When I started back up again in the mid-aughts (having missed the joyous feeling of creativity, the occasional catharsis, and deciding that since no one saw my work anyway it didn't matter if I had no talent) I composed almost exclusively on a computer. This has its advantages--I can type much faster than I can write by hand--but it lacks the intimacy, the companionship of writing by hand.

I find writing by hand ideal for prose and poetry, but I've never been able to compose stories very well with the pen. The pen simply slows me down too much, and that is not good for the volume of words a story requires, especially in the first draft. For poetry and prose, which are largely more contemplative and slow to the page, it is perfect. 

Lord my handwriting is bad now. Yet it doesn't matter. That is the great thing about the notebook and the pen--they do not judge. They warm to your touch, even when the harshest words are laid down, the loudest cries of despair. They comfort you and let you vent, support you when you struggle to say something meaningful, even when you are only composing a conversation with yourself. It is a blessing to have such good friends, ones who do not care if you go away for awhile. They will always welcome you back. 

Note: yes, this was composed by pen in notebook. Putting it here on the blog makes it much more legible.

the ones that got away

Some of the stories don't work out. Let me clarify: a lot of the stories don't work out. Maybe they got one draft. Maybe they got one page. Maybe they got one line. Well, ok, I've never abandoned a story after one line. If the line was that good, it was repurposed somewhere. (I've never written a line that good.)

I'm thinking tonight about some of the stories that didn't make it. There was the one about the moon rides. I always think about that one this time of year. Just couldn't make it work, it's too bad. A fast start that devolved into mush no matter what angle I took. Then there was the one about the guy who was busy masturbating when he heard a crash and, after awkwardly getting his pants back on, discovered a cat in his kitchen he'd never seen before. As if that wasn't bad enough, the cat kept accusing him (in a human voice) of making a mess. 

About a year ago there was the one about the light bulbs. It was revealing itself to be a post-apocalyptic story, but there are few things more tired than the post-apocalyptic story these days, and I wasn't bringing anything fresh to it. So I abandoned it. I did dig this part, though:

“Block 12, from Lancaster to Warren, is contaminated.” His face, puffy and red, would be considered cherubic if we lived in a different world.

“You’re sure,” I say. This is not good.

 

“Five reports in the last two hours. The block has already been closed off.” 

“Christ, how did it get there? That block was sealed off six months ago.”  I can’t believe this.  We honestly thought we had the situation under control. I’d say we were even adjusting to living in this world. If the threat had not been eradicated, it was at least reasonably under control. But three days ago there was an outbreak in block 37, and now this today. My stomach churned, and I was glad I had not eaten any breakfast. 

We’d gotten complacent, in the face of something we didn’t understand.
  
“Have the executed the Koch brothers yet?”  I ask as my laptop wakes up. 

I mean, not great prose, but we all dream of a world free of the Koch brothers, no? I have no shame about these stillborn tales, but I am kind of bummed about some of them not making it. Sometimes, though, it just ain't working and you have to move on.  

can't speak

I can’t explain why I love books. Seriously. I can’t talk about books—or any other type of art--in an intelligent way.

In my day job I often have to speak to things I don’t fully understand, but still project a voice of authority and, in many cases, ensure that a client is confident that any issues will be resolved and/or I know what the hell I’m doing. Even if I don’t. This is pretty common across many lines of work, and it’s a skill I gradually learned over time. I believe I’m fairly successful at it, if my professional track record is any indication.

But of books? Or any form of art? For a guy who, you know, writes stories, I am unable to actually talk about art at all. It’s in my head but I can’t get it out in the general framework of how we talk about art in any terms beyond “I like that” or “I don’t like that.”

I have a big skeleton in my closet: I am uneducated. I graduated from a small rural high school that had, let’s just say, extremely low educational standards. I was living on my own young, dealing with a host of issues, and working full-time from the get-go. I have attended a grand total of one semester of community college. One. That is the extent of my higher education—three classes (Intro to Existentialism, where I realized I had already read the textbook in high school, Beginning Anthropology and Pacific Northwest Native American History.) While I have always been a voracious reader (reading Dostoyevsky in junior high, to pick one of many examples) and I consider myself to be a capable critical thinker, I have never learned how to talk critically. How to discuss a work of art in aesthetic or academic terms (I question how much value the latter has, but that’s also essentially a reaction of ignorance, isn’t it?) I’ve never attended lectures or debated art or participated in a writing class—all things that teach one how to interact on this level. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I can say that the rare times I find myself around discussions of art, I say almost nothing. Because I have no way to articulate what I may be thinking—it may not even be clear to myself. It would be useful, considering a decent amount of the most important art in my life comes from genres that skirt around some sketchy edges (horror, exploitation, heavy metal, transgressive cinema.)

Historically, I have been tremendously insecure about my intellect (ask my long-suffering wife.) Close to ten years ago, however, I found that I had moved up in my profession to the point that my co-workers were more likely to have PHD’s than not and that there was no room for any insecurity or I’d get eaten alive. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? And I did. I mean, nearly all of my friends are highly educated. And professionally, I knew I had something to offer, a lot of experience that made me successful in my career to that point and was the reason I was there in the first place. It was good to go through this: I became much more confident professionally. But this has never translated into my creative life.

Do you know what it’s like to have someone you respect want to discuss a piece of literature with you that you both love but while they can discuss it from a hundred different angles—theme! Setting! Context!—you can’t do much beyond nod your head and say “I like that book a lot.”? To not be able to articulate in your own head why you like that book beyond “It captured my imagination and moved me.”? Yes, sometimes that is enough—I mean, that’s ultimately the most important thing—but it makes for awfully boring conversations. It is deeply frustrating. I don’t even know if I have a valid perspective on anything because my head doesn’t think in those terms. BUT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE BOOK! (Or the record, or the film.) I want to passionately discuss it all night because I’m a driven creative person and the work of art is meaningful to me! I have an opinion—but I have no ability to back up that opinion or debate that opinion. I’m incapable of critically discussing subjective work.

I am insecure about my actual creative output, for sure—what creator is not, at some point or another? But that is based on my valuation of the actual work I create itself, whether it accomplished what I wanted it to, whether that vision in my head got anywhere close to being on paper (hint: it never does. My talent is meager, and I’d never claim otherwise.) But in a way, it’s much easier to deal with this kind of insecurity, because it’s small and private and doesn’t actually prevent communication with others. Also, there’s a part deep in me that knows how valuable I really think a piece of my own work is, and it’s brutally honest without being full of my other hang-ups. It gives me a pretty good radar and lets me know when I should tell myself to shut up. In other words, I just keep working at writing to varying degrees of success. It’s fully in my control because it doesn’t take two to tango when you are creating. (That’s not to say you can’t collaborate, of course—many do so successfully. But it’s an option, not a prerequisite.)

Sharpening one’s critical discussion skills requires opportunity, and truthfully I don’t have many. Particularly with literature, I have few friends who have an interest in the same stuff I do. Ironically, I think that makes this worse—because I’d like to be able to discuss it with people who *aren’t* necessarily interested, who maybe have no context. Trying to explain why a piece of art resonates with you can be hard in the best of circumstances, harder when the work may run afoul of commonly accepted norms. (I suppose one definition of art is to push those norms, but that does seem a limiting definition of art to me. A work should be judged on its own intrinsic value, which in my eyes is how you reacted to it personally.)

I don’t think it’s a matter of conversation skills: I can converse with people in general, though I’m no great conversationalist and too much of an introvert by nature. It’s that ability to talk intelligently to a piece of art that I lack. It’s deeply frustrating and on the worst days, incredibly depressing. Fortunately there is always the work of art itself, there to take me away to different worlds and make my own world more tolerable, more beautiful, more mysterious. The magic lives.