Different Roads to To Kill a Mockingbird (Part 2)

It seems though, that To Kill a Mockingbird is the sort of book that gives something to me every time I return to it. This year, it’s Bob Ewell I’m paying attention to, though I hadn’t planned on taking a closer look at him.

My drive to school these days isn’t terribly interesting. It’s mostly highway driving, and save for the leaves that bloom with color in the fall, there’s not much to look at. I feel more that I am driving away from something, then towards it. I am a mother now, to Hadley and Harper, and I haven’t gotten used to the fact that the three of us fumble through most of our days separately, when just a while ago we did it together. I know once I start teaching, once I see my students, I’ll step into a role I love. Teaching awakens a side of me that is vibrant and bold and I love that gal when she comes out. But every day I begin my commute, I ache a little.

So I think about Bob Ewell, and it occurs to me that he and Atticus Finch have something in common: both of these men have wives who died. We don’t know how they died, and we don’t know how Atticus and Bob mourned; perhaps they are still mourning when we meet them. I press my foot to the accelerator because I can’t wait to point this out to my students. What will they think about Bob now? What will they do with this information?

In the classroom, I write “Atticus Finch,” and “Bob Ewell” on the board in a Venn diagram, and ask my students to do the same on pieces of notebook paper. “lawyer,” “educated,” “takes care of his kids,” on one side and “drunk,” “illiterate,” and “beats his kids,” on the other. “White,” and “male,” are in the center.

“What else?” I ask, tapping the whiteboard.

“One’s good, one’s bad?” a student suggests.

“OK, but they have something else in common.”

The kids look at me in disgust at first, but I wait and one says, “They don’t have wives!”

“Yes!” I say.

“Because they’re both dead!” one exclaims.

“Atticus and Bob are dead?” another one, who is confused, asks.

“No! Their wives! They died!” three or four say in unison.

We are so excited about this realization, and I don’t believe it’s because we’re relieved that Bob had a bad thing happen to him. I think we’re pleased because we might’ve discovered another layer to him.

“Maybe he wasn’t always like this, you guys,” I say, pointing to the word, “drunk” on the board. The class is shiftless and silent—a sure sign they are captivated. I take this as a miracle I must not waste and dive in.

“What do you think Bob’s wife was like? Do you think they had a love story? Do you think he has any good memories?”

I ask everyone to get out another piece of paper. I tell them to write as though they are Bob Ewell. “What else can you say about him that goes beyond racist, ignorant, and negligent? What happens when you look at him as a human that was wonderfully and fearfully made?” And then I whisper because I’m afraid to say it: “Bob Ewell has been made in the image of God.” Their eyes dart up from their papers. Fifteen wide-eyed adolescents look at me and I wonder if I’ve gone too far.

A few years ago I pulled a similar stunt with 8^th graders. I suggested to them that maybe Judas had been forgiven. Maybe God could do that. The next day an infuriated mother walked into my classroom and screamed, “Judas is in hell! He’s in hell!” I shutter at the memory but continue with my experiment. “Go ahead and write,” I tell my students. “Let’s see what you come up with.”

“I am thinkin’ ‘bout my wife again,” one student writes. “I wish she could make her famous cornbread pancakes. I wish I could stop drinkin’.”

Another writes to Bob’s dead wife. “I don’t know why I write you these letters and bury them by your grave, but it makes me feel better. Every time I look at our children, Mayella especially, I feel an anger. I don’t know where it comes from but it consumes me. Mayella grows beautiful and strong, and she reminds me of you every time I see her.”

Some students reflect on Atticus: “Me and Atticus lived in the same neighborhood. We weren’t friends, though. I was jealous of him because he went to school. I always wanted to learn new things but my parents didn’t have time to teach me. Plus, they would be fighting every day.”

One wrote about Bob fishing as a young boy when his father was off at the bar, drinking. “Those were the best days,” he writes, “Sam and I would always jump in the pond and swim around.”

The class is subdued when they finish writing. There’s a feeling of confusion while they pack up and get ready to head home. I think they’re in the thick of wonder—when wonder is dark and mysterious. I hope I’ve introduced them to the real work of writing.

But as I drive home, I begin to second-guess myself. Was I wrong to encourage my students to imagine there is more to Bob Ewell than what we read in To Kill a Mockingbird? Should I have waited for his final murderous intention in the woods before I had the kids evaluate him? Have I set them up?

Different Roads to To Kill a Mockingbird (Part 1)

The first time I taught To Kill a Mockingbird to a group of 8^th graders, I was student teaching at Stephen K. Hayt School on the North Side of Chicago, just a few blocks from Lake Michigan. Each morning, I drove down Lake Shore Drive towards my students, wondering if there would be a time when I’d tire of looking at the skyscrapers and the water.

My dad worked at Northwestern University’s city campus, and normally was at work hours before I left the house. But the days I took my first steps into my career, he stayed at home until I was off Lake Shore Drive and setting up my classroom. He blamed crazy drivers, but I think he was more concerned about my driving. I found any excuse I could to take that windy road, and I think he worried I’d get distracted with the views and my habit of blasting the car stereo. He knew telling me a better was pointless. Since I’d had my license I was on Lake Shore Drive—by myself or with friends—whether my parents told me it was OK or not. So my dad made a compromise: I could drive on Lake Shore Drive if I took the cell phone and called him when I got to Sheridan, where the road ended on the North Side. He’d wait to start his workday until then. It wasn’t exactly the compromise Atticus and Scout make when he promises to continue to read with her if she agrees to keep going to school, but still, it is an example of a father giving his girl a chance to explore the world the way she wants to explore it.

Those days, 8^th graders with names like Gurendapal, Shacondalah, and Fatou howled at Dill, Scout, and Jem when they first met them. “Those are some weird names!” they all agreed.

“I suppose they are,” I said, deciding against telling them that if I were to ever have a baby, I’d like to name him or her Radley.

My students loved the scene where Scout gets in a tire and Jem rolls her down the street. They shrieked with haunted delight when she bumps into the Radley steps and is too dizzy to get up and run. They wanted to re-enact it. “I know the best house to ram into,” one said. “We just need a tire.”

 ---

A new set of 8^th graders. A new neighborhood. This time, I was in South Bend, Indiana and my commute to school took me over the St. Joseph River where the Chinook salmon and steelhead trout swam upstream to lay their eggs before they died. I rounded a corner where Corby’s stood—a neighborhood bar my husband Jesse and I spent some evenings after football games or summer nights drinking Four Horsemen and watching fireflies. It took me past the University of Notre Dame, where Jesse was pursuing a doctorate in hurricane storm surge.

I could see the Golden Dome from just about anywhere, and it reminded me of being able to see the Sears Tower from anywhere in my neighborhood growing up, though the comparison stung. I have learned that I will forever be homesick for Chicago, but back then the ailment was so palpable it was hard for me to resist turning the car around and heading West towards the skyline, and not to school. A couple times, I did.

But I was there the day my students and I were struck by Mayella Ewell’s red geraniums that “popped in slop jars in her yard.” How did I miss that, I thought as I stood in front of a group of thirteen and fourteen year olds who were waiting for me to explain to them what we are to do with the sort of beauty that shouldn’t belong in the heap of the Ewell yard and the Ewell lives. I had no answer for them, but we all decided this scene needed to be illustrated so I passed out paper, they took out crayons, and we all tried to make Mayella’s flowers as beautiful as we imagined them to be. “I feel so sorry for her,” one student said as she colored. “I didn’t before; thought she was a jerk doing what she did to Tom Robinson.” She examined a red crayon before she looked at me, and said, “It’s more complicated than that, though.”

The Labor of Transcending Love

When I sat down recently to start a short story, I wondered what kind of stuff I was bringing to the creation. Maybe I was over-analyzing my thought process, but I already had these images, ideas, and tones and had yet to create even a single character. If our stories are to have life-giving meaning and value, what do we start with? My hunch borders on love: love for our readers, love for our characters, love for language.

I started reading this idea into the novels and movies I enjoy the most. I see this love in Marilynne Robinson’s characters in her fictional Gilead. So much so she’s written three novels about them. It’s not a love that gives everyone a happy ending or a success story. It’s an authorial love for complexity and conflict, for tragedy and new ways of seeing the world.

In John William’s novel Stoner, it’s about a love of language. This is an inclusive love, which is why the divine can be so powerful and evident in Ian McEwan’s Atonement or J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, where atheist novelists give us language for forgiveness and praise. I feel this love, overwhelmingly, in Terrence Malick’s films. More so in character’s whispered meditations and the captivating images.

Love can also be a missing piece, even in stories about love. The plot of Interstellar hinges on love transcending the laws of physics as we know them, allowing Cooper to exist outside of three-dimension space-time and manipulate the past through gravity. All because the connection he has with his daughter (whom he abandons to save mankind) allows him to communicate with her from the future. If Christ's love can transcend time and be our lone saving grace forever, then why do I harp on such a small plot piece in an epic movie, a love that transcends? It's because love in Interstellar is cheap, just one of those givens. Cooper abandons his family to save earth, but he still really wants to return to them because he loves them. I don’t buy it. It's not earned. We have to accept it, regardless of how it appears for the sake of the plot.

David Brooks would disagree with me: “‘Interstellar’ will leave many people with a radical openness to strange truth just below and above the realm of the everyday. That makes it something of a cultural event.”

But I want something more. For a movie that says a lot about science and mankind, it doesn't say enough about humanity. It’s not based in a love for characters as it is in love for ideas about relativity and a post-earth mankind. It has all the furniture and tools, but that doesn’t make a home. We can have stories full of stuff, but we also need them rich in truth, not just strange truth, but truth that speaks to us from the past into the future. There’s a certain kind of work that crafts characters and narrative that’s more than epic. It’s a sublime labor based in love. We need to point to that kind of work; keep striving for that kind of love to truly transcend time.

A Space of One’s Own

“Been doing any writing?” my sister asked me at Thanksgiving.

“No.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“Psychotic.”

I should have said, of course, “Hyperbolic and clichéd,” since I’m not feeling exactly psychotic, but more like imbalanced or disoriented—like when you wake in the dark and don’t know where you are. And the cliché: “I need to find time to write,” says every writer in the world.

But for me it’s actually more akin to finding space to write. The best writing I’ve done this fall, I confessed to a writing friend, was during my commute. “Confessed,” because doing it was dangerous bordering on reckless, even when I qualify this confession by noting that I meet perhaps five cars during a forty-five minute stretch of my drive.

More pertinent to why I write then is that space opens up then. Sometime after the stop sign in the unincorporated town of Kenneth, with the bar that will have eight cars parked out front in the evening. Typically after the descent into the long valley of Champepedan Creek with the ghostly cottonwood, its long arms stretched above its head to bless the creek pasture and its cattle. Sometime after the midway point of a ten-mile flatland, marked by three cottonwoods grown up as sisters in a touchless dance. Before the road bends in deference to the next river, the Kanaranzi, which is said to mean in Dakota, “where the Kansas were killed.” Somewhere in this space, inspiration—or at least the deep, irresistible impulse to write—comes upon me.

And I do write, right or not, and drive with my knee.

I know when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own, she had something a little different than this in mind, but my commute reminds me that a writer needs a space of one’s own, that time when the quotidian recedes or, conversely, coalesces into a present that launches writing. One of these spaces, in a semester of chaos, happens to be my commute.

Another one of these spaces, a better one, though not necessarily safer depending on what kind of God one might meet there, is a worship service. Amongst the words of scripture, catechism, and hymn; lost in the long prayer, in the wonderful interminable sermon. Then, too, I find myself in a space of my own with something lurking in the spaces between the words and all those rapt consciousnesses. Then, too, things come clear, words suggest themselves and I make notes madly along the edge of the bulletin. I would stay in that moment because something has opened up—a where and a when, a place and a time, a space.

We would do well to cultivate such spaces, but also take them where we find them.

(Painting by Edvard Munch)

Advent and the Absence of God

In the bleak mid-winter, Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone. 

– Christina Rossetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter”

The raging, fertile excesses of summer are long gone and the world lies deep in Advent, this wending of the human heart in prayer and penance before the Nativity of Christ. In the spare gray-gold light of these mornings just shy of the winter solstice, we might sit where we sit each day to “meet with God,” our Bibles, rosaries, or prayer books at the ready. Outside, bare branches clatter against a wide, windy pewter sky, nature’s brittle resonance with the bewilderment and hardness of heart toward God many of us feel, hardly knowing where to begin to find his presence amidst the external noise that seems to increase around Christmas time.

We worry about having God’s presence, like it’s something to own. And in Advent, adventus, the season of coming and arrival, shouldn’t I expect even more of this presence, like a sparkling early Christmas gift sliding into my hands? We are consumers and we gotta have that presence, just like we gotta have a bunch of other things to feel significant and successful. But what about God’s absence? This Advent, I’m considering that Christ’s perceived absence is as much a gift as presence is. In his heartbreaking and passionate meditations on God and prayer, Prayers by the Lake, the Serbian bishop Nikolai Velimirovich says this about God’s absence: “You promised, and I bear the seal of Your promise in my soul. If You have not come yet, it is not Your fault, but mine. You are tender and compassionate, and would not wish to make me ashamed of my unpreparedness. Therefore, you approach slowly, and continuously announce Your coming.”

Relinquishment to God’s perceived absence seems to have very much to do with the nature of Advent itself. The natural world lies in faded dormancy, its glory stripped until spring. We too can accept dormancy, until in God’s good time the manger of our hearts is filled with the holy One who will make us fit for heaven.

A (Wo)Man of Infinite Jest

My friend and I are in one of those ironic restaurants where everyone wears dark-rimmed, nonprescription eyeglasses and the sommelier fills wine goblets to the rim. On our table is a steak served on thin, waxy cardboard accompanied by a fork and casually tossed chef’s knife; two sweet potatoes snuggled in a brown paper bag; a china bowl filled with an unidentified cream sauce; and a pile of rock salt that the waiter threw onto the table before strutting away to the beat of the techno remix that accompanies our meal.

“I don’t have any silverware,” I whisper to my friend. “I don’t know what to do here.”

He laughs, tears the bag open, and breaks off a corner chunk of the sweet potato. He dips it in salt, then the sauce, and hands it to me. “Eat it.” I replay lessons on dinner table etiquette as I comply.

“Good?” he asks. Warm, smokey-sweet sensations soothe my social anxieties. I’m in Israel with one of my favorite people eating one of my favorite foods. I am happy. I nod and enjoy another bite.

“I should Facebook this,” I think, but that timely process will take me away from what I really want to do, which in this case is eat. On the other hand, a part of me wants to let everyone know that while they were waiting for delivery, I was eating something that was probably a descendant of a sweet potato Jesus ate.

Sometimes my Facebook is this self-controlled paparazzi that transforms every detail, every opinion, every meal of my life into the news the people need, and I wanted those people to feel the twinge of self-loathing that comes with reading statuses like “I am doing amazing things with my life, have just been named ‘Most Amazing Person in the World,’ and had kale for breakfast. #humbledbyhowamazingiam” I realize how that sounds, but before you judge me, consider that the Ten Commandments condemn jealousy, and not gloating.

In Infinite Jest—which I might be mentioning so you’ll be impressed that I’ve read it—David Foster Wallace’s character confesses a similar obsession with fame to his teacher. “You burn for a hunger that does not exist,” his teacher warns. “To be envied and admired is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are more enjoyable than the feelings associated with the envy of fame…Do not believe the photographs.” Photographs convince us that if something happens in a forest and no one liked it online, it didn’t happen, that the value of our experiences can be judged by likes and retweets, and that food never gets cold. However, no evidence proves that internet recognition changes the taste of a sweet potato, the way the sunset dances with the surface of the water, or the comforting company of a friend. The world was created without any thought to and without ever receiving a hashtag, and it was called good.

Just outside the restaurant, my friend and I prepare to wander the streets of Tel Aviv. “So did you like it?” He reaches out and takes the hand that would have held my phone if I could have found it in the black hole that is my purse.

“Yeah,” I answer.

“Me too.”

I smile with the feeling of this single, physical like far exceeding all the virtual likes in the world.

What is a festival?

Cold is cold: the undersized parsnip-like fingers and toes of children offer no more resistance to Jack Frost’s ravages than anybody else’s. But still, there is something to the burning cold ears of winter days that makes Christmas special. Indeed, it was usually during those particularly nasty December nights that my folks would decide to go for a family stroll through the highly celebrated, candy-cane decorated, light bejeweled, oversized Charlie Brown blow-ups neighborhood of the city. The dazzling lights, sights and sounds distracted me from the sting of ice’s tongued lashes at my triple-sock layered toes. Singing Santas, dancing reindeer, plump penguins and jolly gingerbread people cookies abounded from yard to yard, all proclaiming “‘tis the season to be merry.”

Except one.

Near the end of the block was an acetic yard that boasted one solitary green flood light, casting a Spartan hue on a drab and droll snowman cut-out: “Keep Christ in Christmas,” it read in faded and boring black block print.

It was in front of that house in particular where I would be reminded of the gelid condition of my nose and toes. Fingers clinched inside my stinky little second-hand gloves, toes futilely furled inside too-big boots, and frozen bits of snot clinging around my chaffed nostrils, I never understood that snowman or his sign; it seemed he was trying to keep more out of Christmas than in it. He reminded me of the physical cold that all the other yards temporarily charmed me out of thinking about. Rather than seeing a protest to consumerism, I saw that snowman as a stolid, legalistic killjoy. I saw no invitation to a deeper, fuller and longer lasting refuge from the cold, whatever form it would take throughout my life. I never knocked on those peoples’ door and I most likely mistook their intentions, but I wonder how many other folks may have mistaken their intentions, too? What exactly were their intentions; I suspect maybe even they didn’t fully know.

Josef Pieper, the highly celebrated German Catholic philosopher of the 20^th century, has much to say about our approach to festivals like Christmas. If I understand Pieper correctly, there is little room for a life of pure asceticism if Christ is our centre. For the believer, a festival is time taken off in celebration of something compellingly extraordinary and transcendent. Festival then, is not merely a time of vacating or ceasing from the daily tasks of utility; it is not just relief from labour meant to restore and reinvigorate us back to our employment; it is not a time to preoccupy ourselves out of true contemplation by giving ourselves to the consumptive force of consumerism; it is none of these things. Instead, we celebrate the festival of Christmas because the incarnation is the ultimate contrast to the cold of the world. On the metaphorical block of Christmas bedecked yards, ours is the most inviting one. Not because it is the most charming, but because it is the most lasting and real. It is the gloriously warm reminder that our meaning does not come from our ability to acquire things; it comes from the acknowledgement there is something intrinsically good about our God-breathed life. We have festivals because we have something to celebrate. So my prayer this season? That amidst the cold, our hearts will find the warmth of true festival that Pieper invites us to celebrate.

For more information on Pieper’s idea of festivity, a good place to start is In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity.

The Universe Unending

magritte-634568

The week was thick with doubt; I couldn’t see past my nose. On Sunday, I’d begin a two-night run as Cyrano de Bergerac within a majestic, historic theatre, upon a stage framed by a gilded proscenium, before an audience seated upon velvet chairs beneath a central dome of stained glass. What justice could I possibly do (I could not stop thinking) to the grandeur of that play’s great space—the one built when my city was young, and the one Rostand made of words?

And so, on Thursday, I found myself printing a dozen copies of Thomas Hardy’s “In a Museum,” and setting the tiny stack in motion, hand to hand, counter-clockwise, around my classroom’s oaken table. “Listen to this,” I said to my students, and to me.

 I

Here's the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,
Which over the earth before man came was winging;
There's a contralto voice I heard last night,
That lodges with me still in its sweet singing.

II

Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird
Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending
Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,
In the full-fuged song of the universe unending.

As I read, the waves of Hardy’s words, a century after they found lodging in his page, fledged into the room, pushing and pulling air, winging their way toward the heat they would become. Such a dream is Time.And when we spoke of resonance, of memory’s essential mystery (fossil-moulds of time we carry unseen until recollection breathes them into being and their life is brought to ours)—when we spoke of the unending blending that makes us whole, our words’ wakes merged the space between us, and then went on, beyond our knowing.

We go on, I hear Beckett’s speaker of The Unnamable say from somewhere I cannot name, for he never said it quite that way. Was he even speaking at all, I wonder, that voice who came to feel composed solely of words that came before it? “Is it possible certain things change on their passage through me?” he wonders. Certainty; doubt: the space between, a dream.

My sophomores adore Rostand’s play. Each year, when we finish reading it aloud, half are actually in tears, half are outraged. “I hate the ending!” they shout to one another before shouting at me. And then: “Can we read it again?”

I know something of what passes through them as they read. At seventeen, awkward, gangly, with a mother dead and a grieving, distant father, with pages of poetry and albums of songs for company, I read of a man who disappeared into words, and of a beautiful woman waiting for him there. It sustained me for a time.

That Thursday in the week of my uncertainty—those final days before Rostand’s words would have to make their passage through my consciousness and history toward those of family and friends and strangers, so many strangers—I needed to keep going. And so I entered that tiny museum of Hardy’s finding: that vast space where ancient breath is held and breathes anew, given our breath. Every poem worth its salt is such a space. Every play. Every life, real or imagined. The least we can do is go on.

(Painting by Magritte)

What are you playing at?

In my mid-twenties, in a time of profound personal crisis, I began trying to draw things. I wanted, as always, to write, but I could not write at that point—I could barely talk. It was the first time since early childhood I'd even made an attempt to draw anything: I knew by then I had no aptitude or natural skills as that kind of artist. What a surprising delight to find that I was better than I expected, even with just a tiny bit of instruction, some space to work, and a few hours of attentive play. I began to learn some of what I assume most beginning art students do: how to look; how to see the whole of a thing and its parts sandwiched between back and foregrounds; how the surface and texture of a thing suggests or conceals what is underneath and inside; how to estimate proportion, the size of a thing relative to another; how to direct the trajectory of the next stroke; how light on things makes shade; how a simple thing on a table can become beautiful—a wonder; how to take these things in, and then to render. It was fun—it was true play.

It is harder for me to say how this and other experiments with art (watercolors, carving, cooking, music, photography, filmmaking) have helped my work as a writer, but I'm convinced they have. The rudimentary skills I just described with my foray into drawing overlap or translate pretty directly into a good skill-set for writing, sure. More than anything related to the craft of writing, though, it is the play that has helped me, I think. Experiencing, maybe rediscovering, the joy of dabbling, of failing without cost, of being lost for a while in the act of making: it's playing when I can't (or won't) do the work of writing that has helped me most, though I can't (or won't) say how, exactly. It's too soft or sacred a thing to say directly.

Last summer, my wife bought me a thing I'd been wanting but didn't want to spend the money on. It's called an Olloclip, and it is a tiny set of interchangeable lenses that fit over the camera built into my iPhone. The set she got me has a fisheye lens, a wide-angle lens, and what I most wanted: a macro lens. The macro lens lets me take extreme close-up photos and video. It basically straps a 10X microscope to the HD camera in your pocket. I have spent hours inching my way across the living room shooting subjects I never saw as subjects before. The carpet. Rocks in the fish tank. My pant leg. You may have no idea how thrilling dirt and dust is, until you get real close to it. I would say Extreme Close-Up Vision is a pretty lame superpower for a superhero to have, except that all of my favorite authors seem to have it. May I get real close to you, right now, and ask in a 10X whisper: what are you playing at?

(Photo by Michael Dechane)

Hope: Small and Large

If you have not seen the Emmy-winning HBO series True Detective, it would be impossible to bring you up to speed on who the characters are who engage in a final dialogue as they are leaving the hospital at the end of the series. Suffice it to say that the principal character, Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, has articulated a dark view of the world throughout the eight episodes. He and his foil, Marty Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, regularly engage in discussions in their car (they begin as police detectives and eventually end as PIs), which invariably end in a despairing take on whatever the subject might be.

All this changes in the last scene, when Cohle is fleeing the hospital in his patient’s gown. After a moving discussion of a vision Cohle had while he was in a coma, he returns to a theme the series often centers on—the theme of story. Cohle says he now believes all stories are just one story: Light versus Dark. Hart looks up at the sky and says, “…it appears to me ‘dark’ has a lot more territory.” Cohle agrees with him.

After a moment’s reflection, though, Cohle changes his mind:

Cohle: “You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.”

Hart: “How’s that?”

Cohle: “Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”

The camera then tilts up to a pitch-black sky in which stars begin to appear as the music comes up and the series ends.

There are many appeals to Genesis 1 in this dialogue; the episode is even entitled “Form and Void”. But one doesn’t have to look far to find the most important thing about this final statement. It is the sea-change in Rust Cohle from despair to hope, and it is as encouraging an ending to a story as I have seen in film or television in a long time. Cohle’s statement of hope is a big one. One feels a strength and an optimism about life, when this man who has endured so much and has been so self-destructive ends his story so optimistically. I didn’t know whether to shout or cry when I watched the episode the first time.

Contrast that with the way Marilynne Robinson ends her quiet novel, Gilead. The novel consists of its main character, John Ames, writing a memoir for his young son to read when he grows up and Ames is gone. Ames is a pastor in the small and dying town of Gilead, Iowa, and the portrait drawn by Robinson is of a man who is both scholarly and caring, but often despairing of the worth of his life and ministry.

Bleak as Ames’s vision is at times, Robinson includes this in his last ruminations: “This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope.” Ames then affirms his love for the town and thinks of his own burial as a “last wild gesture of love,” promising to pray for his son that he will grow up “a brave man in a brave country” and, in his characteristically understated way, that he will “find a way to be useful.” Ames closes his memoir (and Robinson her novel) with the poignant, “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.”

Rust Cohle’s hope is a large one, that in all the universe, the light is winning. John Ames’s hope is a small, localized hope—a desire that his son will “find a way to be useful.” Don’t we need both in our lives? Doesn’t God provide both?

Advent and Godot (Part Two: Delivering The Comedy)

I will anoint them with oil to give them gladness instead of sorrow. ~ Isaiah 61:3

 With bleakness as its backdrop, the absurdity of Waiting For Godot exists in its dialog riddled with non sequitur and its circular structure where almost nothing changes though time appears to pass. Those are the fixed elements. But as with any production the pathos, or meaning, has to be communicated through the performances of the actors. And while actors do not manifest meaning, they are nevertheless its agents and must be strong enough in character to deliver the play's potential.

Beckett was famous for not saying what Godot was about. The New Yorker printed two of his letters in response to producers' queries you can read here (if you have a NY account). By not doing so, he created a space for libraries of commentary on the play that might never have been ventured if he'd said anything definitive. It allows its mysterious questions to be newly engaged with each viewing.

But actors need a little more help.

Director Stephanie Courtney: “Mostly I invoke the removal of the observer in my student's pretty little heads. They are in love with observation—and judgment—rather than being in love with action. They want to be the object and the observer.”

Director David Fox: “In working with actors, I do try to be specific with what they're playing and why. Actors need some concrete answers to questions. Ambiguity, however, is part of the Beckett experience, so telling an audience what the play is ‘about’ is far less important to me than saturating them with a deeply felt experience. Perfectly appropriate for spectators to emerge from Beckett with more questions than answers.”

And then, there's the comedy. Once, in a kind of type-casting for the Theater of the Absurd, Steve Martin and Robin Williams starred together in a production of Waiting For Godot. Martin, who trained in theater and philosophy in his earlier years, sagely said, “The language of the play takes care of itself. The structure of the play takes care of itself. But the comedy must be delivered.”

Comedy is the stealth cloak. It is the spoonful of sugar. And sometimes it is the message, all by itself. David Misch (his bio is a gut buster) was a writer for Mork and Mindy and many other projects. In his book Funny: The Book is a chapter titled “Comedy vs. The Universe:”

If you don't think the bleakness of life can be funny, talk to Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. (Beckett got the name Godot from a Keaton movie). Or Laurel and Hardy—actor Michael McKean points out that all their films are about them failing: “We know they're doomed, and that's why they're we're laughing.”

Are we cruel to laugh? No. We relive, and relieve, the delightful horror, the agonizing hilarity of being in a similar fix.

It's Advent. For Christians, it is the time between God's first and second coming during which He is withholding judgment and watching the play. In Waiting For Godot, Godot never comes. Is this the ultimate joke? Is it the exclamation point on a life sentence of misery? Or is it something else—a clue to life staged in the only way we could see it—life as a kind of tragic drama replete with absurdity in which our part is to deliver the comedy?

Whether one's worldview affirms the existentialism of Godot or rejects it from rationalism, it is impossible to ignore the richness portrayed in lives of little means. The players make something practiced of the dust. A craft that arrives on its own terms as laughter through tears.

Merry Christmas.

Advent and Godot (Part One: Isolation)

He seems to say that only... amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void. ~ Richard Ellman

A family viewing of Waiting For Godot is not a traditional fixture of Advent, but its careful observation may offer a light to examine our modern traditions for the season in both critical and affirming ways. I invite you to watch this version of the play recommended to me by Stephanie Courtney, a theater director in Dublin, Ireland, for its fidelity to authentic Irish humor.

A native of Ireland, author Samuel Beckett lived during the early 20^th century and wrote Waiting For Godot in mid-career. In the course of his early life, Beckett saw the emergence of the Irish Republic, became a scholar, and served in World War II. His writing was often charged with the particular misery of common people subject to the futility of European upheaval. Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 “for his writing, in which—in new forms for the novel and drama—the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.”

Several people cautioned me as I set out to write about Godot, especially on maintaining a strict objectivity and to try to avoid judging the play from a particular worldview. This was hard. Ms. Courtney helped by giving Godot an essentially Irish context. “I don't think Americans are able to understand futility the way the Europeans can,” she says. “When I walk to work, I travel through a city more than 1,000 years old. I walk along a street that was cobbled before the Vikings invaded Dublin—and I work in a theater built in 1662. Those stones will be walked on for another thousand years after I'm dead. I'm merely passing through and that comes across in my experience of the people here, too. There is less pressure here to leave a mark. You make the most of your time and then you die.”

The set of Godot is minimal and desolate. As with several of Beckett's plays, it is space, sound, bodies and movement. Here are the first lines as Beckett writes:

A country road. A tree.

Evening.

Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. 

He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.

As before.

Enter Vladimir.

ESTRAGON:

(giving up again). Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR:

(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.

ESTRAGON:

Am I?

Some of the play's biggest themes are set in those few words. Over its course there is night and day and very little changes. The men are friends of fifty years and speak a language so particular to them that the whole of the play sounds like nonsense. They flit from complaint to levity in a blink and move easily between imagined and real worlds. Critics of the day referred to Godot (as well as other plays in the genre) as Theater of the Absurd due largely to the departure from the realist forms. But the absurdity is like a Petri dish that allows the questions of Beckett's isolated culture to grow.

As the play progresses, a lightness emerges in the bleakness. It is located in the only place it can be—in the complex relationship of the characters and their conundrum. David Fox is a professor and theater director at Wheaton College. He says Beckett's genius lies in his marriage of vaudeville and existentialism. “Strange bedfellows, to be sure, but the combination creates all of the dynamic contrasts [in the play], and presents life as the tragicomic experience we all love and fear. The clowning element infuses his work with tremendous humanity.”

Last Saturday I interviewed a friend with expertise in Heidegger's concept of being as dasein, or, “being in the world”, that I thought would be helpful in articulating what I thought I saw in Godot. I wanted to be sure I understood the nuance of “concern” for the world extant in the term. We grabbed an outdoor table at a local watering hole in an eclectic part of town. It's a convivial place on a busy street. A man I'd characterize as homeless took the table next to ours. He talked freely to everyone and himself. His words were mostly unintelligible and over-dramatized but the subjects of his conversations seemed parroted from media talking points as exhibited in his own circumstances. He'd have sounded just like us, with better clothes and without the alcoholic slur. As he was, he was evidenced as a fool or ignored. Estragon's line was ringing in my ear like a taunt.

Great theater has a winsome way of making its point with a light hand and, if given space, never runs short on commentary. It makes a place to befriend the darkest places of humanity and allows for light that shines on the real cost of beauty. If we can just withhold the easy judgments. Perhaps that is a tradition worth making.

How the Light Gets In

Buildings are expressions of humans, of us. . . . they have eyes. Windows are the eyes on a building. — Michael Pollan, NPR interview, 19 April 1997

This past summer I had a cabin built in the woods—a place for weekends and summers, for visiting with friends, and for writing. Before the cabin was built, I spent some hours (agonizing at times) on the design of the small place. It is, after all, only 400 square feet, not including the front and back porches. For anyone to live well in a small space, the design needs to be not just efficient but also pleasing. While planning the cabin’s inside features, I also had to think about outside details. Design is an organic process: all the particulars are fundamental to the soundness of the whole structure.

Windows became one of the more significant aspects that I had to deal with. Windows are meant to work both functionally and aesthetically, as portals and barriers, as frames and passive light contrivances. Everywhere that I thought to place a window, to give me a view of the surrounding piney woods, I also had to give up wall space. I had to think about where the sun rises and sets because the cabin sits in a southern latitude where the summer sun is a bigger concern than winter’s weak light.

Before I began the process of cabin design and building, I read Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own. Although I didn’t plan to build the cabin myself, I did have to think about what materials to use, where the cabin would sit, and how the site would be prepared. My thinking also ran to whether or not I could keep the cabin off-the-grid, and if not, how the cabin could be designed to use very little electricity. Windows, from this perspective, serve as an important source for heating and cooling.

For me, the aesthetic function of windows is as significant as the environmental function. From the outside, windows add to the character and personality of a home. They are part of a structure’s face, as Michael Pollan notes. And I am drawn to clear panes of glass, not only in a house, but also in office buildings, stores, and churches. A long time ago, I fell in love with leaded glass windows in old houses and the way they divide the incoming light. It’s no surprise then that I also fell in love with the light of the “plain church” style when I attended a Congregational Church. The clear-glass windows provided perfect openings to use as a focus point during prayers and meditations.

Plain church style, with its clear windows, finds its precedent in twelfth-century Cistercian architecture. Because Cistercians believe that “prayer involves listening as much as asking,” their architectural principles emphasize “simplicity and an inner sense of quiet,” explains Thomas Davis, abbot of the Abbey of New Clairvaux. The early Cistercians built their monasteries of limestone with windows of clear glass. The light coming in through the windows is meant to link the monks to God.

Though I don’t have such high aspirations for my cabin, I wanted the windows to let in the natural light in a way that would frame the day and night and the changing weather patterns. So I chose clerestory windows for the southern face, and below them, large, divided-light windows—windows that when they are open will nearly erase the boundary between cabin and woods and let in generous breezes. In this way, I want to honor creation, the part of creation in my neck of the woods.

Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren spent a lot of time in homeless shelters in Chicago. This was in the 1940’s and 50’s. He wasn’t homeless, but when you read his novels and stories—especially when you realize the measures he took to get them right—you get the impression he wished that he was. He used to go to Pacific Garden Mission, a giant homeless shelter still in operation in Chicago to this day, and sit down with the drunks and down-and-outers. He’d eat dinner with them, play cards, and shoot the breeze. There’s one picture, taken by Algren’s photographer buddy Art Shay, which depicts a junkie with a hypo showing Algren how he shoots up. All of this produced the world’s first National Book Award-winning novel in 1950—The Man With the Golden Arm. Algren’s protagonist, Frankie Machine, a struggling dope addict, is based on one of the men he used to play poker with. It is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever written and certainly the most underrated. What makes it so good is what Algren inherently understood and then portrayed so sharply in the book: human civilization can actually only move forward at the pace of its least-of-these. That is to say, the speed of human progress is the speed at which a homeless man shambles down the sidewalk, peeking into garbage cans and begging for change.

Where Algren gets it right—and where I get it wrong time and time again, both as a writer and as a plain old human being—is that he dared to consider how beautiful the ugly things are. There’s a Christian tune I heard with the lyric “beauty from the ashes” but suppose the beauty is actually already in the ashes?

I don’t know if Algren was Christian or not. Probably not. Besides homeless people, he also hung around with existentialists and Marxists, archenemies of the Christians back then. This was at a time when a lot of Christians figured the appropriate approach to those that Christ Himself spent so much time with was to screech the Gospel at them from afar. But judging by the way Nelson Algren lived, not to mention the content of his body of work, he acted like a Christian—the way they’re supposed to act. My prayer for myself is simply, “Dear God, make me as good of a writer and as good of a Christian as Mr. Nelson Algren. Amen.”

Denise Levertov’s Birthday

Very recently, I turned thirty.

It’s a bit of a no-man’s land, emotionally, this turning thirty business. Anyone older, even by a few months, will dismiss all your grumbling (and will probably be strongly tempted to dismiss this post) with a patronizing chuckle and an eye roll. Anyone younger will take your grumbling far too seriously, and will try annoyingly hard to commiserate with and console you.

The morning of my 30th, facing my mortality, I scanned my bookshelves for some appropriately somber reading material and found Denise Levertov. I thumbed through to find one of Levertov’s long poems, “Relearning the Alphabet.”

I love this book. I’ve read it many times. Yet for the last three years or so, it has been gathering dust. As I re-read, I was shocked to discover that certain lines brought up vivid memories. Especially a passage near the end:

Heart breaks but mends like good bone. It’s the vain will wants to have been wounded deeper burned by the cold moon to cinder.

At twenty-three, heartbroken, I scratched my ballpoint pen emphatically beneath those lines and felt the haze of a painful breakup begin to lift. My twenty-five year-old self, devastated by the loss of a teaching job, found the lines again and muttered, “mends like good bone” like a mantra through the difficult end of that year. At twenty-seven, mourning a soured friendship, I circled “the vain will” and swallowed my pride.

I’d like to forget those low points, those past versions of me. They embarrass the cooler, calmer, older me. I hadn’t meant to revisit them on my birthday morning, of all days. But oddly, I drew strength for the coming year from those memories. Strength that I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else.

I once heard Robert Pinsky say that the reason poetry differs from all other writing is its physicality. It’s written to be spoken, so you not only hear it, you feel it—even reading silently, he said, your body imagines the words spoken within you. Perhaps it’s because of this physicality that poetry can carry memory, just the way a scent or a song stores memories.

Here’s my advice, from the crone-ish perch of this third decade (cue the well-deserved eye-roll): Find yourself a few poems that will travel with you, like dear friends. And visit them often.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

Art is universal

“Art is universal,” wrote James Jackson Jarves. “It unites mankind in common brotherhood. . . . art is the connecting link in the chain of great minds. Through its language, thought appeals to thought, and sympathy echoes feeling.”

Jarves, a 19th century writer and art critic, beautifully captured the sentiments that ran through my mind while I was deep in the halls of the Chicago Art Institute. Of all the amazing works in that museum—works that span hundreds and thousands of years and come from every continent of the globe—I was struck most by a small, green, comparatively unimpressive plate in a hall of Chinese pottery. It was “Foliate Dish with Bovine Gazing at a Crescent Moon,” and my first reaction was to laugh. It’s a strange motif. A cow looking at the moon sounds absurd, like something out of a nursery rhyme.

My second reaction was absolute amazement. That plain, light-green dish seemed suddenly like the most amazing thing in the museum. Think of the implications of that plate! A man—a real man, who lived in real life, in a real house—looked at a farm animal in a field in China hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And he was so inspired by that cow that he went home and made a dish with its picture on it.

Think about it! It’s amazing! A real-life man saw a real-life cow, and that man put that cow on a dish, and now we can see it more than a thousand years later! That man had a name, and a home, and a family, and an appreciation for small, everyday sights like a cow in a field. He could never have fathomed that we would go see his plate in a museum on the other side of the world. He could never have known that a tourist from Lakeland, Florida would ever see his dish and feel a sudden kinship with him. The cow on the plate looks like any one of the cows that loll around the fields around my hometown, and it was captured in clay more than a millennium ago! What a wonderful thing!

Maybe I’m not making my point. Maybe, from your perspective, I sound like a crazy person raving about a weird dish and the fact that it has a cow on it. I don’t know. But I do know that, for a while, I felt a deep friendship with a long-dead Chinese potter whose plate was in a glass case a thousand years after he made it. I knew what Jarves meant when he wrote that “Distinctions of tongue or boundary lines disappear before the power of truths, which, like the rainbow, charm by the beauty of variegated hues, or, combined with light, illumine the universe.” I knew what he meant when he referenced a chain of minds connected by art—in my case, I experienced a chain of gazes. A cow gazed at the moon, a man gazed at the cow, a woman gazed at the man through a window in time opened by a small green plate.

Art is a remarkable thing . . . even when it takes the form of a rather unremarkable dish. The chain of minds Jarves references is accessible everywhere! You just have to look.

(Painting by Jamie Wyeth)

Inheritance

This mad house is my home. ~ Barbara Weston

The film August: Osage County opens in the home of Violet and Beverly Weston. Their decades-long marriage has been an attempt to blend their divergent natures; Beverly’s is poetic, Violet’s is mean. She wreaks emotional violence against anyone who gets too close to her frayed center. Beverly navigates her tumultuous waters by gripping the gunwales. As the film starts, he is bearing the tempest that occurs when Violet learns he has hired “an Indian” (the tragically and recently deceased Misty Upham) to help care for her through her developing stages of oral cancer. Having provided for Violet in this way, Beverly launches a boat on the lake where he is later discovered to have drowned. His family considers it a suicide. His death brings their three daughters back home, as well as Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae; her husband, Charles; and their son, a grown man they call Little Charles.

We see the effect the marriage and Violet’s nature has had on each of the daughters. They are unhappy, resentful, and floundering well into adulthood. We suspect there may be similarities between Barbara and her mom as we see her relate to family members, including her husband Bill (from whom she is separated) and their 14-year-old daughter, Jean. The messes amass as each generation finds they cannot separate themselves from the sins of their fathers.

Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be The Verse,” talks about the dark side of family heritage and brilliantly complements August:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

The poem and film share the same black humor and subtlety; they’re not as bleak as they seem. Larkin’s use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s line “this be the verse” from his epitaph is humorous. It asks us to imagine coming upon a headstone with his poem as the inscription, and contrasting it with Stevenson’s tones of contentment and repose.

In August, the family attends Beverly’s funeral and then gathers at home for a meal. Violet and Barbara brawl on the floor as a result of their dinner conversation. The weekend catches Barbara in the convergence of opposing forces: her mother’s will against her own, her own against her husband’s and daughter’s. This is a maelstrom we can relate to. If we suffer the battered heart and ravished soul that Donne expresses, isn’t it often from the emotional dynamics of relationship? And isn’t family one of God’s most effective tools for shaping character? Through the turmoil, Barbara realizes that her nature is wound like a double helix to her mother’s. This revelation leads her to a nuanced turning point where she begins to see a house not built by hands.

The Poetry of Loss and Resurrection

Sometimes, especially when I’m most in need of meeting myself—the actual Jill long lost within the daily, rigid busyness of life—I hunt for myself in the files on my computer.

I look for me between the lines of what I have managed to write down, in words and images that, over time, come together in patterns and threads and whispers. And I try to understand what I believe I have been trying to tell myself. I have discovered that the Jill who has been writing these past few months is one who can’t stop talking about the past, about memory, about loss.

A few months ago, I stood in the cold corner of a funeral home with a twenty-one year-old college student whom I have come to love and admire very much over four years of teaching her. Just a day earlier, she was taking notes in her English literature class. Now, she was standing near the casket of her mother, killed on impact in a tragic car crash. And just like that, the month became not her first month as a college senior, but the month in which her mother died, the month she would forever associate with brutal and unexpected loss.

I know that grief and loss almost always find us when we aren’t looking. And even when we are looking, our God-given human instinct to exist, to expect others to continue to exist along with us still baffles our ability to navigate what we somehow feel was never meant to be—this road of vanishing faces, this road of vanishing moments. We feel we are made to last. We feel those we love were made to last. And yet, like pencil etchings on a growth chart, our human lives can feel so measured by the losses we endure, the grief we live with.

A few weeks after the funeral, I read a poem by Lisel Mueller that stunned me in all the aching and haunting ways the best poems do:

“When I Am Asked” by Lisel Mueller

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died, a brilliant June day, everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench in a lovingly planted garden, but the day lilies were as deaf as the ears of drunken sleepers and the roses curved inward. Nothing was black or broken and not a leaf fell and the sun blared endless commercials for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me.

I think the poem haunted me because of how powerfully Mueller’s images portray a collision of experience—that relatable and agonizing experience of being alone in a cheery, bright world with your own dark grief. The placement of a hard “stone bench” in both the middle of her poem and the middle of a garden communicates something of the hardness and ruttedness one faces in the middle of loss. The flowers bloom beautifully and unsparingly, advertising their wholeness in a season where “nothing is black or broken” except the mourner, sitting on a gray bench, stuck between bloom and loss.

Mueller’s poem helps me understand the self I have discovered in the files of my computer. I think I write about loss and memory and the past because those things never really are lost or past. I think we write poems and read poems because, among other things, poetry becomes the landscape of resurrection. When Mueller finds that language, that poetry will “grieve” with her, she not only resurrects the memory of her mother, but she also raises up her own grief and gives it a safe space to unfold, to exist. In our busy lives, it does seem that there is little room to negotiate loss. But in the world of the poem, there is space, not only for those we mourn but also for those who mourn.

(Photo by Robert Friedus)

How to Swim Naked

“Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.” —Diane Ackerman from One Hundred Names for Love

You pull back the curtains shielding you from the ocean view. Rub your eyes. Step back from the window frame. Your body tells your head it is time to visit the water. The child in you remembers this need. You take a walk with your husband to the beach. The sun dips beneath the lagoon. Your husband brings his portable speaker and iPod tucked in one of his vest pockets, the kind of vest that makes him look like an explorer. He plays Yo-Yo Ma Bach sonatas. You wander toward the middle of the beach where there are piles of seashells. You search for the shells that catch your eye. Your husband is drawn to the broken pieces. “It wouldn’t be hard to turn this into a blade,” he says as a curious child. You look for moon shells, even the shattered ones, and you look for tiny shells that are complete except for a hole you can slip thin cord through and make a tiny shell garland. You watch watermelon clouds streak over the lagoon, radiating behind three towering condos. Still beautiful, you think. You turn to your husband and tell him you’re tempted to skinny dip. He wanders toward the surf and stares at the waves. You turn your gaze to the piles of seaweed and shells mixed with a plastic bottle cap and cigarette butts. You soon realize that staring hard at the litter will not make it disappear. You look up in time to see your husband—running—into the water—stark naked—a smile filling his entire face—giddy. You rush toward his crumpled clothes and get stuck on a knot in the leg of your pants. You do not want to miss this moment. You have never been naked in the ocean with your husband. Never. You work the knot as fast as you can. Strip down. Run to the water and into the rolling waves. “Woooo! This is cold,” your husband shouts. You both laugh and shriek and smile and hold each other. The water holds you, and something…leaves your body. In a split second, three worries accidentally slip into the Gulf Stream. The needling fear a cough may be symptomatic of something worse, a splinter in the toe will become infected, a spider bite will make your husband’s beautiful body go septic. The water makes you forget these ghosts for the time being. It’s only a few minutes, and your husband is ready to get out. First, a kiss, you say. You kiss a slippery salty kiss. Your husband walks tall out of the water. You remain and dive into the waves. Feel the shore on your legs, bottom, and back—places normally covered in elastic and polyamide. You love this feeling. You walk out of the water and say a silent thank you for the laughter and dripping. You dress in what is only necessary. Yo-Yo Ma still plays his cello.

You and your husband walk side-by-side, in the gathering darkness, back to the condo. You bob up and down on the white sand. Your bra pokes out of your pocket. Your husband is in his boxers and carries his shorts folded over one arm. He looks good in the straw hat he purchased at the Orange Beach hardware store. You pass the parking attendant who is giving a tour to visitors. “Good evening,” she smiles. “Good evening,” your husband returns. You enter the elevator with your husband, two buoys riding up, hungry for gumbo and music and dance. The light from your kitchen can be seen from the jetty a half-mile away where the beach and the water and the sky are now one inky color. The neighbors must surely wonder about the distant Cajun melodies and the smell of roux drifting down condo corridors. Tonight, the two of you will sleep inside a star.

Founding Mythologies

A place isn’t a place until you tell stories about it, says Wallace Stegner in “The Sense of Place.” In fact, Stegner says, “[N]o place is a place until it has had a poet.” He has Yeats in mind, who claimed about Ireland that “there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend.” Stegner goes on to worry about the American “mythless man” who “lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”

As an undergrad, I had the pleasure of visiting Yeats’ County Sligo. I can hardly imagine a more Romantic place for an aspiring writer to visit. Even the names of the places—Glencar, Thoor Ballylee, Coole Park—were bewitching. Reading “Under Ben Bulben” while looking up at Ben Bulben, I knew what kind of writing I wanted to do, and I knew what my Ben Bulben was: Blue Mounds.

The first piece of writing I ever published was about a regional landmark called Blue Mounds, a place where the rolling prairie swelled into a bluff and caught my imagination. Once caught, I followed the imaginative trail to local species, specifically big bluestem, the prairie grass that gave Blue Mounds its hue. From there, the path led to the novelist Fredrick Manfred, who lived and wrote on the mound, and then to history: I mistook the cliffs at Blue Mounds for a buffalo jump, which they were not, but that imaginative mistake landed me squarely in Native America and in myth.

Arguably, the founding myth of the place originates not from Blue Mounds but from just up the road at Pipestone, Minnesota, and the National Parks site that protects the red stone used to make the pipe sacred to tribal people. Among the founding legends of that place are these: White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the sacred pipe to the Lakota, an act of special revelation; the stone found at Pipestone is the blood of Lakota ancestors who perished in a great flood caused by the water monster, Unktehi.

If Yeats and Stegner are right—and I think they are—and literary art should be tethered to specific places and myths, then we writers in an American context have some work to do. Not only do we have to learn and understand the myths of the places where we live, but we also must handle them with care: the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman is not my story and I cannot appropriate it without doing continued violence to a people group who continues to be underrepresented.

But the call for writers to know our places remains, despite the dangers. Writers going back to at least Washington Irving, who imported European myths, have most often looked past the mythology of the American continent. Even Stegner notes how Americans have been “[p]lunging into a future through a landscape that had no history.” It does have a history—and a mythology—and it’s one we must get to know to do justice to the places we live.