The Somedays Between Now and Then

When I committed to writing about getting older, I thought the words would come easily. After all, aging is something that has been happening to me for my entire life. I was born. I turned 10, 16, 18, 21, and 25, and someday I will be 40, then 60, then maybe 85. But before that, I will turn 27.

When I was 11, I had a very clear picture of what I thought my life would be in my twenties. I remember thinking I would be married and living in New York City. I expected that I would drive to my job as a ballet dancer in a black SUV with tinted windows. I thought that I regularly would take in deep breaths of clean air, revel in unobscured views of blue skies, and shove my manicured fingers into the pockets of one of my many puffy vests. These seemed like perfectly realistic goals.

Now that I am actually in my twenties, here are the things I can check off: puffy vests (without the manicure). There are some days—these are the days when I choose takeout over a Pinterest recipe or store bought cookies over something baked from scratch with love, or the days when I post a picture of coffee instead of a selfie of me and my other half—I feel like a failure as an adult. I feel like, in the words of Nora Ephron in “I Remember Nothing,” “On some level, my life has been wasted on me.”

I have to take a break from musing and confess that, much like my life, this piece is not going as I planned. I thought that at about this point this collection of feelings would culminate into some really hopeful and clever words of wisdom. I was thinking something like, "Here I am, soon to be 27, floating in the ocean of time as my Someday (this is a When Harry Met Sally reference) approaches. I cannot gauge the upcoming wave, but I know how to swim, and I am ready for whatever the future brings.” Every time I read it, my voice changes to something that sounds like the narrator of a My Little Pony audiobook, the one that comes with a booklet of scratch-and-sniff stickers. It is irritating and kind of dumb.

I am struggling to tie these pieces together into a box that looks like it came from Pottery Barn. I am searching for story development, the clear plot structure, the moment where the ending becomes clear. I do recognize that I am searching for this ending in the middle of my story, but it is easy to feel that time is moving faster than my ability to acclimate to being grown up. It turns out that aging, much like writing, is hard. At some point in my life, probably when I thought that writing would be fun, I became obsessed with deadlines. While you can impose deadlines on creative pieces about life, you cannot, it seems, always apply them to life itself.

That's pretty tidy. I could end it there, but the question that I'm trying to answer is what exactly I'm supposed to do with that information. At this age, I should know things, but I don't think I do. I haven’t gotten to the point where I feel like I know what I’m doing. That is probably more frustrating than life's need to ruin my plans.

In “The O Word,” an essay Ephron wrote at 69, she says she spent a bit of time thinking about the secret to getting older. “I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven’t. I just try to figure out what I really want to do every day…I aim low. My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the park (followed by a Lactaid).”

When it comes to conjuring up a profound ending to my own musings, I too come up short. At 26, there's no way to talk about aging without sounding like those newlyweds that love to give out relationships advice. While I may be old to my five-year-old students, and old enough to switch to an anti-aging moisturizer, according to the expected lifespan in the US, this is only a quarter-life crisis and not one in the middle. So here is what I am going to do. I will call the Thai restaurant down the street. When the owner asks for my name, I will tell him, and he will say “Ah, yes, Chrysta Spicy Gluten-free,” as if that is what is printed on my ID. I will find it endearing and also a little embarrassing, but I will get over it long enough to find satisfaction in eating the food straight from the container and not having dishes to wash afterwards. Then I will go to sleep, and when I wake up, I will be one day older.

Power of Meditation

Is it possible that William Fisk, the arch-villain in Marvel’s Daredevil TV series, admired Thomas Merton? That was the thought that came to my mind after hearing him look down at the nearly dead hero, Matthew Murdoch, and calmly state, “I find it difficult to meditate. My mind won't quiet. It’s a character flaw, I suppose.”

Touché Mr. Fisk, touché.

I also took much pleasure from the fact that it was the bad guy who was saying that. Now I know for certain that the writers didn't put that line there for no good reason. They, like so many of the TV shows of the day, are also trying to educate their audience in some way. But while in many cases it’s a bit cheap— take for example the continual mawkish jabs which the TV series Elementary takes at tobacco and car idling—I was quite moved at such a nicely delivered snub to a more rooted problem in our culture: the near aversion to silence and its sibling solitude.

So you probably can see how Merton (contemplative extraordinaire) might have come to mind. And indeed, Merton would have probably had even harsher words about the near whole of our society being little able to quiet our minds than simply calling it a “character flaw.” Perhaps because while a character flaw is something that is individual, the near entirety of our society is antagonistic to a quieted mind. Yet at the same time, I believe Merton would have softly suggested that this perpetuation to an un-quieted mind is something that is remediable too, both in an individual and a society—though it might require more time and patient effort on the latter front.

So, first for the individual. It’s important to note that Merton believed that when it came to both solitude and silence, and the important role they play in our contemplative lives, people shouldn’t assume that it’s a topic only for monks or hermits. Rather, Merton made the strong case that a developed contemplative life is needed for all of us to live meaningfully and joyously.

Important to keep in mind is that solitude is assuredly not individualistic or rooted in desires for individualism. Merton says, “the true solitary is not one who simply withdraws from society. Mere withdrawal, regression, leads to a sick solitude.” That is to say, the person who simply seeks solitude to avoid the company of others will find a solitude that lacks both meaning and fruit. Indeed, for Merton, “false solitude separates a man from his brothers in such a way that he can no longer effectively give them anything or receive anything from them in his own spirit. It establishes him in a state of indigence, misery, blindness, torment, and despair.” The desire for true solitude will be best represented by “those who live for God, live with other people and live in the activities of their community.” Thus, “the true solitary does not renounce anything that is basic and human about his relationship to other men. He is deeply united to them.” In fact, in a later writing, Merton cautioned that “in prolonged separation from other men[,] there is a real danger of delusion and mental derangement.”

And just where best are we to find this solitude? Again, it doesn't lie in individualism. Merton clarifies that one certainly doesn't have to go out into the desert either: for “the desert does not necessarily have to be physical – it can be found even in the midst of men.” In fact, our contemplative guide assures us that “as soon as a man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be—in the country, the monastery, the woods or the city.” And so, back to Mr. Fisk, perhaps he is an apt reminder that without cultivating our capacity for the true solitude of inner stillness, we indeed risk endangering ourselves from experiencing the fullness of our humanity.

He Is Not Here

It is Holy Week, Maundy Thursday to be exact, and I am standing in line at Target waiting to pay for Sulfamethoxazole. I have some sort of infection that started in my nose, spread to my sinuses, and, worst, has manifested itself on my hands: little round bumps that itch and fester. They’re disgusting. I’m disgusting. I’m certain that if this were medieval times, I’d be put to death due to my condition.

I have no plan to take my medicine. I’m going to tell you it’s because of the side effects. I’m going to tell you that after reading every word of the document attached to the red pill container, I have decided I will surely die if I swallow these pills. It’s what I tell my husband, Jesse, while I’m waiting to pay for the medicine I have no intention of taking.

“I got it,” I text him, “but there’s no way I’m taking it.”

“Callie,” he begins and I can see from the little moving bubbles on my phone there’s more coming but I cut him off.

“You wanna know what I could die from? Diarrhea! I’m not dying from diarrhea!!!”

He doesn’t text back. He knows I’ll pay for the medicine. He knows I’ll bring it home, unfold the side effects document, flatten it on our bathroom counter, and place the corresponding pills on top. He knows I’ll be frantic. He knows that I will be so afraid that I’ll go for a run.

Jesse knows that I am grieving, or that I don’t know how to grieve. Maybe it’s that I refuse to grieve. He knows my pills are a scapegoat for a deeper fear, an unquenchable sorrow, a gaping loss. Almost eight years ago, my Aunt Lucy died. She went to the doctor thinking she needed gall bladder surgery and it turned out that she had pancreatic cancer. She was dead two months after that; about ten days before my daughter Harper was born.

I think I probably worshipped Lucy. I know that since I was a kid I wanted to be like her. She was fierce and she was fancy. Once, I saw her kick a garbage can over in a spaghetti strapped silk midnight blue gown and I thought, “I want to be exactly like that.”

I loved her style. I loved how she decorated. I loved her laugh. I loved that she blasted Jim Croce throughout her home so that my cousin Tara and I rocked our baby dolls to, “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim.”

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off that ol’ Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim.” Lucy was Superman. Lucy was the Lone Ranger. Lucy was Jim. You didn’t mess with Lucy.

***

On Easter Sunday, I learn that Mary Magdalene and Mary ran, too. They came to the tomb and an angel told them He was gone. “Trembling and bewildered…the women left because they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)

I still haven’t taken my medicine and I have Band-Aids around my fingers to cover up my marks. I’m pretty sure I have a fever. The sinuses under my eyes are throbbing. But when I get home, I will run. I will take off my heels, and unzip my blue dress that my older daughter Hadley gave me for Christmas. I will pull on shorts, and a tank top. I will lace up my shoes—carefully because I don’t want to hurt my fingers. I will put on my Calvin baseball cap and pull the bill low. I will run until I cry. It will take about twenty-five minutes.

On Easter, I imagine myself running with the Marys, and I imagine Jesus and Lucy watching us. I begin a conversation with these women:

“Hey, Mary and Mary, Jesus and Aunt Lucy want us to be still and know.”

“Yeah,” says Mary Magdelene, “forget that.”

“I’ve been still. I know too much,” the other Mary says.

“So let’s keep running,” I say.

I round the corner towards home but decide to go further; me and my imaginary friends. We run and we cry because we lost somebody we love and we don’t know what to do now.

***

On Easter Monday, in the middle of the night, pain from my right index finger wakes me up. The infection has gone underneath my nail bed, swelling my finger to the width of a hot dog.

“Jesse,” I whisper frantically. He rolls over.

“My finger,” I say and he puts his hand over his eyes for a second, then pulls himself to a sitting position. He takes my hand and turns it over, examining it. He gets out of bed, and walks to the bathroom. I hear him filling a glass of water and then opening the medicine cabinet. I hear the pills shake in their red bottle.

Jesse walks back to bed, hands me the water, opens the bottle and spills a pill onto his palm. He gives me the pill and I take it.

“I don’t want to die,” I say and begin to cry.

“I know,” he says.

“I don’t want Lucy to be dead,” I whimper after I’ve swallowed the pill.

“I know,” Jesse says, and walks to his side of the bed while I drink the rest of my water.

I lay down and begin to position myself as I usually sleep, arms folded and clenched to my side, hands in fists. But I can’t bend my right index finger, so I turn over onto my back and open my palm so it’s facing the ceiling. I hate just lying here. I hate being still. I begin to move my right foot from side to side.

Jesse takes my hand. “It’s okay to live. It’s okay to see what happens.” I fold my three working fingers around his.

“Sometimes I’m afraid to see what happens,” I tell him.

“You don’t have to be afraid.”

It is the last thing he says before we fall back to sleep.

Boyhood, Birdman and the Problem of Existence, Part 2

In last month’s blog, I mentioned that Birdman and Boyhood shared more than the race for the Best Picture Oscar last year. Though the two movies were as different as can be imagined in tone, form, subject matter, pace and just about every other movie-making category, they were unified in pushing to the forefront a philosophy that goes back some fifty years, but seems to be gaining momentum as a philosophy of life: existentialism. I wrote about Boyhood and its thoroughgoing, but hopeful, existentialism, and accused it of cheating since classic existentialism was anything but hopeful because of one single factor: death.

Birdman doesn’t make that mistake. In the film references abound to death, particularly suicide, as its main character, Riggan Thompson, played superbly by Michael Keaton in an Oscar-nominated performance, struggles with his celebrity, the emptiness of his power, his own hubris, the effect he is having on others, his need for love.

Birdman portrays Thompson as a popular but shallow superhero actor who wants to be taken seriously, so he writes, directs, and stars in a Broadway play based on a Raymond Carver short story. The film spans the few days between final rehearsals and opening night. Shot in the St. James Theatre in New York, Birdman is distinctive, if not unique, for its very long takes, sometimes as long as twenty minutes or more without a cut. This, and a constantly playing jazz drummer rasping in the background, adds hugely to the fast-pace of the dialogue and action to create a feeling of one long moment for the film. Small wonder, given the existential themes explored particularly in two scenes near the end of the film.

[Spoiler alert!] Riggan, unbeknownst to anyone else associated with the play, decides to commit the meaning-creating act of his life by committing suicide on stage, but messes that up either by accidentally missing his head and blowing off his nose instead, or by changing his mind at the last minute (or possibly, but I think unlikely, planning only to blow off his nose all along). What happens before that in two important scenes tells us what the filmmakers were intending.

The first of these takes place in Riggan’s dressing room on opening night near the end of the play, when his ex-wife, Sylvia, played by Amy Ryan, visits him to tell him how well she thinks he’s doing in the play. Riggan declares his love for her and for Samantha, their daughter, and their exchange brings together the themes of family, responsibility and what is actually real:

Riggan: I love you. …And I love Sam. Sylvia: I know. Riggan: I really wish I wouldn’t have videotaped her birth, though. Sylvia: Why? Riggan: ‘Cause… (sighs) I just missed the moment, really. I don’t have it. I should have just been there with the two of you. You know … just the three of us. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t even present in my own life, and now I don’t have it… and I’m never going to have it. Sylvia: You have Sam. Riggan: Not really, I don’t. I mean, she’s… Sylvia: Oh, no, no, no, listen, she’s just going through … Riggan: No, I get it, I understand. She needed a dad; instead she got this guy who was a …three day viral sensation. It is so pathetic, I can’t… Sylvia: No, come on. There are things more pathetic than that. Riggan: Yeah, like? Sylvia: That moustache. (Both laugh.) They kiss. He tells her to get back to her seat. He pulls down a real gun from a shelf, not the toy one he’s been using in rehearsals. He checks and makes sure it’s loaded.

Riggan regrets not actually living the moment of his daughter’s birth instead of trying to do so vicariously through a videotape. Note how he says, “I wasn’t even present in my own life,” a telling admission that he doesn’t really believe he exists because he did not act authentically. He doesn’t have that moment and he’s never going to. So much more could be said about the idea of cynically dismissing the medium of videotape in a movie about a play, but the key for us is this: Riggan does not exist because he has not acted authentically and with passion.

Even more important is the penultimate scene in the film, when Riggan is on stage. In the play, he is Eddie, who has just broken into a motel room where he discovers his wife (Naomi Watts) with her lover (Edward Norton). He brandishes a gun at both of them. She admits she doesn’t love him, and his answer forms the heart of the struggle of the “real” Riggan Thompson within the story of the movie: “Why? I just want you to tell me: why? …What’s the matter with me? Tell me what’s the matter. Why do I always have to beg people to love me? …I just wanted to be what you wanted. What you wanted. Now I spend every fucking minute trying to be something else. Something I’m not. …I don’t exist. I’m not even here. I’m not even here.”

Riggan points the gun at the Norton character and goes “Bang!”, like a very dangerous child playing with a real gun. Then he points the gun at the audience and does the same thing: “Bang!” The terror for the movie viewer is palpable; it looks like a real gun. It is a real gun! Riggan then shoots himself, blowing his nose off, but we don’t know that until later. It looks like he has committed some existentialists’ one authentic act: suicide. The audience stays silent for the slightest of moments, then they wildly applaud—a thumping, rousing standing ovation for the apparently dead actor on the stage floor.

What do we as Christians think of this? Riggan, not finding the love he so craves, a love that takes the form for him of gaining from the audience respect for himself and for his art, chooses to kill himself in order to win that respect. Albert Camus fought this conclusion in his famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” opting instead for an acknowledgment of the absurdity of life and a life lived in revolt against that absurdity.

But why? Stay tuned for part three next month.

Speaking Mt. Sinai

I overlooked a small detail in the Elijah story. It’s right after God’s fire comes down from Heaven in glorious proof that He is God. Right after Jezebel threatens Elijah’s life and he runs away exhausted, ready to be done with all this prophet business. It’s a small and obvious detail I overlooked and it changes the story for me. After an angel feeds him and lets him rest, Elijah travels to a mountain called Horeb. I should get it when it’s described as the mountain of God, but I didn’t realize we’ve been to this mountain before in the Bible story. I thought he went to some random mountain. I didn’t realize Elijah purposely travels to this mountain also called Mt. Sinai—where God's presence has been before—without food or water for 40 days. He went looking for God. I always thought he was just running away, going where the angel directed him. But his journey is more purposeful. He's seeking out God's presence. Maybe hoping God will sweep him up to Heaven on arrival. But going toward God nonetheless.

It's the little details that can drive a story. It's the nuance. While sweeping narrative arcs and plot turns are attractive and desired, it's the details that matter, especially little ones—like the name of a mountain.

This is true of our everyday language. One word can reshape our narrative and drive us to new and unexpected places: personally and collectively. Words like justice, joy, hope, peace, and forgiveness.

We can go toward those themes but we have to name them, we have to say them out loud. They can't be generalized, clichéd trivialities. They can't always be implied. They must exist on our tongues and lips. They need to beat in our hearts and roll out of our mouths. We have to fill the words with our literal breath.

At a recent worship service I listened to a grandmother and her seven-year-old granddaughter sing the lyrics:

And on that day when my strength is failing The end draws near and my time has come Still my soul will sing Your praise unending Ten thousand years and then forevermore

The stark difference between the voices caught my ear. The fervent, raspy older voice compared to the gawky sweetness of the child singing about death and eternity, things beyond her understanding, but not beyond her imagination.

The small details of the lyrics took us somewhere far away. A place of mystery filled with words and words pronouncing mystery. Let's name that mountain in our stories, poems, our everyday language, our songs, and in our lives. We might not understand the magnitude of it all or know what will happen when we arrive, but those small details can connect generations and direct our hearts toward Mt. Sinai.

Dragonfly

One autumn in the seventeenth century, the haiku master Basho was walking near a pond with a student. Observing dragonflies in the tall grass, the young man was seized by the surge of perception, composed a poem, and eagerly recited it to his master:

Red dragonflies! Take off their wings, and they are pepper pods!

Basho was not pleased. He shook his head. (Some accounts even have the man who made “Deep autumn— / my neighbor, / how does he live, I wonder?” flare with indignation.)

There is nothing of haiku in that, he said. To make haiku, you must say instead,

Red pepper pods! Add wings to them, and they are dragonflies!

Descent and ascension; destruction and the elevation of life. The samurai wear the dragonfly on their swords and arrows in hopes their weapons’ flight will be as swift as the insects that rose to the mind of the land’s first divine emperor, Jimmu Tenno, when he reached a mountain’s summit: “The shape of my country is like two dragonflies mating,” he said in one version of the story that gave Japan its ancient name, Akitsu-shimu—Dragonfly Island. Twice in the thirteenth century, it is said, dragonflies were heralds of divine victory, arriving just before the kamikazes that wrecked the Mongols’ fleets. On the evening of the summer feast for the dead, souls ride the dragonflies’ backs, returning to their beloveds. Each of its four gauzy wings has a life of its own: a mature dragonfly can hover for a full minute, dart in six directions, and then skim the tips of vegetation at a rate of one-hundred body lengths per second. Its vision is panoramic; its eyes comprise 30,000 lenses.

And for all this, they enter our sight when their lives are nearly spent. For years, they struggle beneath the water’s surface. One in ten survives to climb a shaft of grass at dawn and cling for half a day, waiting for wings.

Art is a measure of compassion. How often I have been that student—seduced by my own eyes, in love with perceptions because they’re mine, indifferent to life beyond the flush of pride that comes of my imagining. How often I’ve clipped the wings of the present moment.

“You must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself,” says Basho. “Learn about pines from the pine. Learn about bamboo from bamboo.”

Cruelty, I see now, is a failure of imagination.

Mary Szybist and Kevin Young: A Dialectic

In late February, on a dreary night, I attended a poetry reading, featuring Mary Szybist and Kevin Young, an unlikely pair. It would have been easier to stay home. After all, it was midweek, pitch-black outside, and wet cold. Yet life’s promise is nothing if not contradictory, for this reading at Wortham Center in downtown Houston provided inspiration enough to carry me, and I daresay many in the audience, out of winter and into spring. Szybist read from Incarnadine, many of its poems focused on the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation. Young’s poetry, from his Book of Hours, reveled in the birth of a son and grieved for the loss of a father. Heaven and earth.

In “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary,” Syzbist leans into the Virgin Mary’s troubling acquiescence to the news the angel Gabriel has given her: “I am looking at the postcard of Anunciación . . . I taped it to the refrigerator next to the grocery list because I wanted to think of you, and because I liked its promise: a world where a girl has only to say yes and heaven opens.” She follows later with, “All I see is a girl being crushed inside a halo that does not save her.” The speaker’s antithetical views are wrapped up in the longing for divine possibilities and the reality of Mary giving over her life, to serve only as a virgin vessel for God’s business. Szybist’s voice is low and calm, but the reading is electrifying.

Follow this with Kevin Young on stage, his voice rich and full, his presence imposing, impressive. He reads “Crowning,” about his wife giving birth to their son:

                       And I saw you storming forth, taproot, your cap of hair half in, half out, and wait, hold it there, the doctors say, and . . . [my wife’s] face full of fire, then groaning your face out like a flower, blood-bloom, crocussed into air.

This is real, this is visceral. On the surface, it is at variance with Szybist’s poetics, and yet Young’s work is every bit as galvanizing, and as devotional, as Syzbist’s. The wife’s face “full of fire” and the emergence of the son, his face a “blood-bloom,” portrays the reality of birth, even while Young also shows us a speaker awestruck by the moment of birth.

Whatever brought these two poets together that night (maybe it was just a happy accident), their readings and remarks made for an evening of contrasts and incongruities. That life in general is often a mess of contradictions, Young and Szybist demonstrated this in their poems, making startling connections. For several weeks after, my friends and I talked about what we had heard. What a difference they made one bleak night in a winter that had gone on too long.

World Religions

I’ve always loved studying different religions. It started when I was first grade and started studying the religions of the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs. It carried over into high school, when I became fascinated with the pagans of the pre-Christian British Isles, and it got even worse when I took Florida Southern College’s Myth and Legends class.

My fascination with different religions—from the classical myths to the inscrutable totems of Göbekli Tepe—has raised many eyebrows. After all, I do live in a part of Florida that seems to have a church for every neighborhood (sometime two), and I was raised by very devout Christian parents. But I would hazard to say that more Christians should study other religions, and that they do themselves a disservice if they do not.

This idea hit me forcefully the other day while I was reading a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text dating from the fifth to the second century BCE. In it, the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna are together on a battlefield. The two have a long conversation wherein Krishna teaches Arjuna about his duties as a man, about life and the nature of life, about Krishna as God himself, and about the nature of the universe and man’s place within it. Many of Krishna’s teachings are remarkably similar to many of the teaching we Christians also embrace. His descriptions paint a portrait of a God very like our own—omniscient, omnipresent, unchanging, at once loving and just—and Krishna offers many lessons that would not be out of place in our neighborhood churches.

Many of my friends and family would likely be aghast at the suggestion that Krishna’s teachings mirror the teachings found in the Christian Scriptures. But if one considers Romans 1:20, which says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse,” one can not discount the idea that all men have, in some way, glimpsed certain aspects of God. If we take Romans 1:20 seriously, we should expect that those glimpses are evident in different religions.

And yet so many become defensive at the thought of learning about the religions of others! Tension between religions are the root of conflicts all over the world, and are the basis of much fear and discrimination here in the States. To you Christians who are reading this, I would urge you to pick up a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, or a copy of some of Joseph Campbell’s books, or a primer on world religions. You won’t agree with everything. You don’t have to. But you will learn more about the other people in the world, you’ll understand more about humanity, and you will see, here and there, a glimpse of God, of his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature.

The Grip of Entertainment

I went to a casino for the first time several weeks ago. I am as numb to stimuli as the next person, but in that place, I felt an extreme sensory overload. Bright, flashing, loud, smoky, and crowded, every sense assaulted. Curiosity and excitement melted into confusion—I had no idea how to do nearly anything in that place—and then into a sadness that reminded me very much of how I eventually came to feel about strip clubs, about 15 years ago. I lost what little money I committed beforehand to losing in about half an hour, mostly over a half-dozen hands or so of blackjack. I wandered outside into the cold, clearer air and began earnestly trying to justify to myself the urge to get a little more cash out of a little machine that sponges dollars from far away bank accounts so I could play a little more. That’s all I’m doing here, I told myself: just playing. The signs everywhere confirmed this: we are all here just for entertainment’s sake, just for fun, you see. Later that night, riding home with my old friends I spoke up out of a prolonged silence: “That was a great place to make some terrible decisions,” I said.

I didn’t really get angry until the next day, in the morning as I had my coffee and journaled and tried to sort out the previous night’s expedition. All the signage about entertainment is what got me, gets me still. I saw faces of people likely having a great time. I saw others that I’m sure were hiding ruin and addiction and wreckage I can’t even bear to imagine much about. “Entertainment” comes to us by way of the late Middle English, before that, the French, and on back to some glued up Latin. “Among” and “to hold.” I don’t know how to put those things together, but the last bit arrests, holds me: we are entertained when we are held by something. When our eyes, mostly, are held by something, and they, in their turn, hold onto something else: let’s say our attention, let’s say our hearts. Let’s say awe diluted to silent gorging; let’s say wonder diminished to wandering curiosity; let’s say praise transmuted into bastardized worship: we cheer and call for more and more, already on our knees and we know not who our Daddy is, as we are entertained, just here for some fun, held, among others, in whatever audience.

I think “entertainment” and I think first of a king slouched on his throne, bored in his court, who calls for his jester. I don’t care about the jester or his act right now, it’s the king I see: him who does not see, who will not look out on what he has been given to rule. He would see only problems to be dealt with, if he did, or faceless subjects with nothing to offer him but troubles and a dirty throne room floor. He cannot delight in what is his, so bring me someone, bring me something that will at least amuse me, if delight is so out of the question, he roars, and enter the jester in his suit and bells. He is a foolish king, I see, and false to his calling, his kingdom, even to his bored and all too human self.

And then I imagine what I cannot see: how unlike him the King is. The one who sees and is not bored. The one who cares most deeply for what he has made, and what he rules, and what he was given. The King that will not be held by any one or thing against his will and yet sits enthroned and arrested by his children he delights in, calling them before his throne, name by name.

Imogen's Disney Books

I love to read to my kids. Imogen, my eldest daughter, has a particular set of Disney books. They’re uber-condensed versions of Disney’s biggest animated movies—Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast and several others. The set, though, came with a reader. It’s this little push-pad device that lets you choose which of the books you want to read and then there’s this syrupy voice that reads whatever book you chose. You have to push certain buttons on the device to cue the voice that you’re done with one page and that it can start reading the next one. Concurrently, you physically turn the book’s pages. But even though the voice does my job for me, Imogen always wants me to sit with her while it reads to her. Or to us. (That she wants me to sit with her warms the cockles of my father-heart, by the way. This I will cherish when she is sixteen and curses me because I won’t let her date “Octopus the Maladjusted Senior*.”) Because I’m not doing the reading, I find myself paying attention to the books in a way that I don’t when I am reading them.

I’ll be the first to admit that I know jack about feminism. I think men and women should be treated equally, and that’s about all I know. I wish I could give you a smart-sounding dissertation on gender roles. I can’t. But I noticed something in Imogen's books. In some of the books, the female protagonist, the princess, is functionally a mannequin. Like, Cinderella? Nothing that happens in the story is her fault, whether for good or bad. She doesn’t cause anything. She doesn’t choose to go to the ball, for example. The prince invites all the ladies in the kingdom to the ball to, essentially, celebrate him. Cinderella doesn’t choose a fairy godmother. Rather, one just shows up and, without really asking Cinderella’s opinion of any of it, bibbity bobbity boo’s all that glass slipper business right down on top of her. After the clock strikes midnight and Cinderella runs away, the prince finds her; she doesn’t go out looking for him. What I’m saying is that Cinderella is about 98% purely passive.

It’s different in, specifically, Beauty and the Beast. Really, Belle is the hero in that one. There’s Gaston, whose advances she keeps at bay. She’s not falling for his expectorating hunter bullshit. She reads books like a house on fire, so she’s smart and has real opinions on stuff. Then there’s her father, a bumbling old guy who means well, but is…way too bumbling. Belle is the brave one who takes her father’s place as the Beast’s captive, and it’s out of sheer love that she does it. Even the Beast, as big and strong as he is, ends up dead. It's Belle who chooses to love him. Her active choice of love a.) saves him and b.) turns him back into a man. (Which, personally, would have pissed me off. “My horns! My sweet fangs! NOOO!”)

I want my daughters—I have Ingrid as well as Imogen—to be opinionated and active and brave. That doesn’t mean I want them to be manly, whatever that means. (Maybe Gaston is manly, spitting and hunting and all of that.) Above all, I want them to be loving. Loving in the real sense. How could Cinderella, poor girl, be loving? I predict divorce for her and the prince within six months after the prince finds out she doesn’t. Do. Anything. He probably has to feed her. “I’m outta here, Cinderella. I’m tired of shoving figs in your mouth and then working your jaw for you.” Loving as in sacrificial. Loving as in making hard choices. Loving as in putting other people’s well-being ahead of their own. You get what I’m saying. Loving as in Belle-ish-ness.

*Don’t even think about stealing “Octopus the Maladjusted Senior.” I’m going to write a rock opera about him. Don’t touch.

I Feel the Air of Another Planet: What’s to Love About Picasso, Silliman, and Schoenberg?

“Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms. Art hurts. Art urges voyages— and it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready.” - Gwendolyn Brooks

I recently attended a show of Dali and Picasso works that were exhibited side by side. The gallery was a forest of people listening through headsets to a self-guided tour. On two occasions I came upon someone standing back from a painting, head cocked, telling a companion “I can’t see it.” One even approached a painting and, being careful not to touch the canvas, outlined a particular area in explanation for a friend who shook her head in response. Those two—Picasso and Dali—always trying to shake up our ideas of what is art (and maybe, reality). In Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair, I couldn’t see the woman either. But somewhere along the line, I lost the propensity to search out recognizable shapes in paintings (which oddly enough, coincided with my ability to see shapes in clouds). The less I try to find the woman, the more I find other things. In the gallery, I approached this perplexing painting and happily discovered a nice blend of colors, texture that begged to be touched, and a thought provoking juxtaposition of shapes. I was surprised to notice a block of leopard print which I took to be a cuff of the invisible lady’s dress. Though it could just as easily be a portion of a rug because by leaving the meaning ambiguous, Picasso welcomes the viewer to participate in its interpretation.

Inviting the audience to weigh in on the work’s meaning is also a goal of Language poets like Ron Silliman. Silliman’s poem “BART” is one, ten-page sentence. You have to let go of your dependence on grammatical elements because the work is disjointed and lacks the usual clauses and punctuation. But I really like how this openness allows me to make my own associations. As Silliman spends a Labor Day traveling and writing on a Bay Area Rapid Transport train, his non-linear approach gives my imagination freedom to explore. Here’s how BART begins: “Begin going down, Embarcadero, into the ground, earth’s surface, escalators down, a world of tile, fluorescent lights, is this the right ticket, Labor Day, day free of labor, trains, a man is asking is there anything to see, Glen Park, Daly City, I’m going south which in my head means down but I’m going forward,…” (Read the rest of it here.) Silliman leaves meaning open for his readers to discover. As Picasso used juxtaposition of shapes, Language poets un-anchor clauses and phrases at odd angles to stir our thoughts beyond a sentence or paragraph’s usual track.

The cascading walls of shape and meaning, and the beckoning of other worlds are also what draw me to atonal music. Schoenberg does with notes what Picasso does with shape and Silliman does with words. In 1908, when Schoenberg performed his Second String Quartet (traditionally made up of a viola, cello, and two violins), the audience was surprised when he introduced a soprano in the third movement. Actually, they hissed and shouted for her to stop. The lyrics are from the poetry of Stefan George, itself full of feeling but complicated by the soprano’s scripted part in the disharmony. As the piece became progressively atonal, the audience grew progressively hostile. Schoenberg opens the third movement with a dusting of notes reminiscent of a sci-fi spaceship, and these words from George, “I feel the air of another planet.” Schoenberg accurately, if unknowingly, predicted how his innovations would alienate and rub his audience “raw,” an image Brooks uses later in her poem.

As these artists set us adrift on voyages, their work chafes and intrigues. Can this be one way art imitates life? Maybe by leaving “the nice beer ready,” we are able to encounter new spheres. A further power of these kaleidoscopic works is that they add new dimension to the more linear and harmonious expressions when we do return “home.” Silliman says this about disjuncture in his poetry: “I’m more or less working on methods that allow people to experience the world as freshly as possible as constantly as possible.” Surely, we need answers in life. But maybe art is more about the questions. Bon voyage?

(For further exploration, find Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, Opus 10 here. Under “Show More,” you’ll find the four time marks for each of the four movements. Follow Stefan George’s poem in the last two movements in German and English here on page 6. Read the rest of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Chicago Picasso” here.)

Building Space

My grandfather was a builder. Self taught, he came home after a grim year in a WWII German prison camp, took a few architecture classes on the G.I. bill, and began building houses that still stand all over Winn parish. He could make anything out of nothing in particular, and as a child of the Great Depression, he had grown up tough, gruff, and unbelievably resourceful.

I still have the peashooter he carved for me from scrap lumber. Most mornings, my coffee cup rests on the table he made from odd cuts of Louisiana pine. Once, when he fell from a tree stand in the dense woods of North Louisiana, he managed to piece together a crutch from fallen branches and staggered nearly a mile with a broken leg and a handmade crutch to his parked truck. And though I have forgotten some of the details of his funeral, I distinctly remember this: a bearded man even my grandmother struggled to place shook her hand profusely, saying over and over, “He built our house stout. ”

When I was a kid, my grandfather built our first real house, too. My sisters and I played in hills of scraps for months—piles of sawdust, wedges and squares of cut wood. Best of all was the huge hunk of discarded concrete, shaped as if a giant ice cream scooper had ladled a vanilla rock out of fresh slab and rolled it under a sweet gum tree that grew alone, raggedy and twisty, somehow a survivor of the dozer that cleared the path for our gravel road. I loved that ugly rock and scraggly tree.

No one but me had any desire to sit in the Louisiana sun under a mostly branchless tree and read LM Montgomery books and write stories. And because my desire was so odd, so unlike what my sisters wanted to do, I sought a space of my own, a quiet, strange and solitary space where I could unabashedly keep company with the characters and stories in my books and journals. I had read enough to know how witches and frogs and velveteen rabbits had all been loved into beauty and reality, and I loved that concrete block and tree into an importance that no one looking at it from the road would ever have imagined.

In what may be his most famous poem, “Digging,” Seamus Heaney honors the way his father and grandfather built their lives in the soil, digging turf, “stooping in rhythm” (line 8), “nicking and slicing neatly” (line 22), and planting potatoes like craftsman and artists. Heaney admits that he has “no spade to follow men like them” but offers this alternative: “between my finger and my thumb/ the squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with it” (lines 28-31). While Heaney’s family worked in the realm of the tangible, crafting something solid and palpable from land, writers can sometimes feel left out and invisible—like a girl sitting on an old rock under an old tree, making something that no one can really touch or see.

Perhaps, part of being both human and an artist (in whatever context or medium we work within) means longing for spaces and communities to which we belong in particular and authenticating ways. And while writers often experience this sort of community in beautiful, brief oasis moments at conferences and writing residencies, we don’t get to stay in those places. We go home to the sweet gum tree and the old rock, often missing feeling known and significantly part of a unified group, or starving for the experience of a firm handshake and an acknowledgement that we have built something “stout.”

I don’t know that there are any clear answers on how to find and build writerly communities in the miles and times between those meetings and moments. But ever my grandfather’s girl, I believe in honoring whatever resource the space I live in offers. After all, writers build whole worlds from the slightest scrap of sound and image. Part of living in any space or community means learning to live in the long distances between gatherings and validation. Perhaps in learning to honor the space I reside in, in making the most of the raggedy rock and tree, that space can become more than anyone looking in from a distance might imagine it could be.

At the Supermarket

The first time I was introduced to the idea of a supermarket was in an American Literature course, in Updike’s classic short story “A&P.” “I bet you could set off dynamite in an A&P,” says Updike’s cocksure narrator Sammy, “and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering ‘Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!’ or whatever it is they do mutter.” Before Sammy, I had never considered that a supermarket was anything noteworthy or possible to disdain. Then came literature.

This March, I went into Walmart to buy my son a birthday present. When I found a particular Lego set he wanted in a clearly marked clearance section, I was sure I had struck gold—or at least a bargain. Then, the wrestling began: after a stocker’s blessing I was met with a clerk’s questioning, then waiting and waiting for a manager’s override, interspersed with another customer cashing out a voucher she wasn’t apparently supposed to. Between my bargain shopping and this other customer’s shady action, I suddenly had a vision of this clerk as gatekeeper between a multinational leviathan and middle-class Midwesterners who felt they were carting away riches one pocketful at a time from Sam Walton’s hoard. Finally, someone came over with a key and punched three buttons, and I made my getaway with the Lego set at—get this—less than half price. I had fought the dragon and won.

Like Sammy. Except not at all like Sammy.

By now, I know that the supermarket and its psychic data—that’s Delillo’s White Noise talking—is a trope. I was reminded of this again recently in stumbling upon supermarket scenes in both The Hurt Locker and The Wrestler, both of which feature the supermarket as the setting for the male protagonists’ crises. In The Hurt Locker, as Sergeant First Class William James faces a wall of cereal boxes and supermarket muzak, we can feel its absurd impenetrability. In The Wrestler, meanwhile, the cereal boxes are the perfect props for Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s meltdown and blood-smearing exit—Sammy on steroids. If in Updike the supermarket signals sameness and conformity, in The Hurt Locker it signals seemingly infinite choice and resulting meaninglessness, and in The Wrestler, it becomes just one more faux backdrop of the human bodily tragedy.

Something about these scenes conjures up ­Moby-Dick in my mind: Moby-Dick as a wall “shoved near” to Ahab, as the “pasteboard mask” that Ahab would “strike through.” For James, the cereal aisle is a brick wall; for Randy “The Ram,” it’s a façade beyond which is just another aisle.

Of course, it’s not just a façade. In Being Consumed, philosopher William Cavanaugh reminds us how the practices of consumption can actually detach us from the material world. There is a chain of production with iron links from raw materials to the Lego factory down to Walmart all the way to my purchase, and at each link in the chain are specific people. It’s these links that modern consumerism seems to want to keep from us. And it’s this abstraction, says Cavanaugh, that the embodied practice of the Eucharist counteracts.

To see anew the transactions of our lives—to recognize the leviathans and the gatekeepers and the hoarding and the misplaced heroism—may be the first step toward meaningful embodiment and understanding our need for Eucharist. And it’s those moments of recognition that can open up in a work of art, even at the supermarket.

Missing

Great acts of destruction haunt us: photographs of Nazi book burnings, piles of shoes, the loose paper that floated in the air after the Twin Towers were attacked. These losses find order in lists. We engrave the names of our dead in war monuments. We catalog our libraries and museums in order to notice loss.

I have been reading through French poet Henri Lefebvre’s recently translated list poem, “The Missing Pieces.” Compiled from various sources, it is an 83-page list of objects, memories, and people that have been lost, destroyed, or never made.

In some instances the losses are heartbreaking—“Totally deaf, the father of the writer Regis Jauffret never heard the voice of his son”—but other times, the loss is also a creation—“In 1961, the sculptor Arman pulverizes a contrabass in front of Japanese television cameras.”

We are captivated by lost treasure, unsolved mysteries, the compelling questions of what happened and what could have been. It seems that every year another headline touts the discovery of a garage sale painting that is a missing masterpiece. Vivian Maier lived her entire life in obscurity; her photographs were very nearly lost. Vincent Van Gogh’s brother bought all of his paintings in order to bankroll his brother’s lifestyle. In so doing, he kept them safe from destruction.

To be lost is Biblical. We are found in Christ. But what about the things that have faded away? The never-was? The never-again-will-be? What did we lose the three days Christ was dead? But also, what did we gain?

Ezra Pound wrote a sonnet a day for a year. At the end of the year, he destroyed them all.

The sonnets are lost. But the process of making them—of rhyming and metering and twisting the phrase—was gained. The ghosts of art linger.

Austrian artist Otto Muehl said, “I cannot imagine anything significant if nothing is sacrificed, burned, destroyed.”

Spatial Concepts

In the late 1940s, Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) took a knife and slashed a canvas that had been painted in a solid color. He called the piece Spatial Concept. Over the next two decades, Fontana produced a large number of similarly-slashed and similarly-titled works in a wide variety of sizes and colors. One of his last pieces was produced in 1964. It was white and contained twenty-three slashes. In February of this year, it sold for over $12.4 million.

Fontana's work was not without forethought and purpose. By relieving the canvas of its tautness, he sought to smudge the lines between two- and three-dimensional art and grant the surface a distinctively sculptural quality. In this sense, his Spatial Concepts seemed to stand as a protest against traditional art, particularly the work of Flemish still-life artists. After all, the depth, texture, light, and perspective of a Flemish still life is artificial. It is an illusion created by fooling the eye through technique.

The space depicted in Fontana's work can be measured. The space depicted in a Flemish still life is just a story.

Or so it seems.

Fontana's slashed canvases may have been "accurate," but the stories told by these Flemish still lifes said infinitely more. Many were chronicles of an individual's life summed up in the artifacts he or she owned. The best of them almost always included a memento mori. These "mementos of our morality" might be presented in the form of a bleached skull, a diminishing hourglass, a half-eaten apple, or an extinguished candle. Each served as a vivid reminder that the story of life is told best when we remember that we are but a vapor called to abide in the One who is from the beginning.

I guess that's the power of all good stories: Sentences with nouns and verbs. Rich imagery and tumbling metaphors. Stories about people, and places, and circumstances. People different from us, but also people a lot like us. Good stories measure.

Will I find myself in that story?

Aaron’s Forearm

A year ago at this time, I was fresh from completing graduate school. Ink wasn’t drying on a diploma—that would come the following month—but was scored into the skin of my forearm. It was my first tattoo and it will not be my last and I will not tell you what it means.

O.E. Parker, in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back,” could not tell you exactly what the Christ-figure on his back meant to him. He couldn’t even see it, which was the reason his back had remained the only part of his skin without a tattoo. But like Parker, I felt that same sensation for desiring a tattoo. The one that finds you “turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”

So, why a tattoo? Why, like Parker, experience the pain associated with it, even if it was “just enough to make it appear… to be worth doing”? As a kid, I thought tattoos to be the indulgences of people with other vices. They were on the arms of the addicts and alcoholics to whom our church ministered. People who would stand and curse at my father during the Sunday service with outstretched green arms. I saw them with the same coiled eyes of Parker’s wife Sarah Ruth, as the “vanity of vanities”, or the sin of sinners.

Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber, herself tattooed, flipped my perception of tattoos—“[h]uman bodies carry stories, and some people choose to carry those stories on the outside.” Grad school was ending and life was irrevocably headed in a new direction. Third child in tow now and a possible continental-sized move a-comin’. A longer road lay ahead, but I had been pivoted. So, I carry a story, now, on the outside of my body.

But why get a tattoo with a meaning I won’t share with those who ask? It’s not for not wanting too. You can use my son’s spy book to understand the symbols. But I can’t explain to anyone why the bread and wine doesn’t just taste like bread and wine.

Parker’s attempt to win the love of his wife, by getting a tattoo he believed she would find meaning in, ended with him being beaten to tears by Sarah Ruth and called an idolater. In a gesture of sacrament, I stretch out this wordless story as I write. Because, as O’Connor has said, “If it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.”

The Character Arc of Nightcrawler

“A novel happens to any one of us when we give ourselves over to it.” So says the novelist Alice McDermott. But what happens when the novel, or in this case, the story, gives itself over to the character? The result is a movie like Nightcrawler. Written and directed by Dan Gilroy and set in present day L.A., the dialogue of Nightcrawler, all of it, every sentence, is a negotiation. Lou (played by a gaunt Jake Gyllenhaal) negotiates the entire movie. He negotiates payments, job positions, relationships, and scenes. 

Gilroy describes what he was doing with Lou’s character as opposing tradition. "There’s no character arc! When I started to write the character I realized, ‘this guy isn’t going to change.’ Every film you’re commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.”

Gilroy begins with an evil character and ends with an evil character. But you can’t describe Lou as a flat character because his change—his arc—is industrial rather than moral. He begins at the bottom and builds his own successful business. Lou is an American success story. He negotiates and manipulates himself to the top. More specifically, Nightcrawler is a critique of L.A. culture. A magical place we imagine has long forgone any moral direction for the spotlight. Lou secures his place in the spotlight as the story’s antihero.

While we may not approve of Lou’s actions, we’re captivated by his end goal and how he chooses to eliminate the competition, negotiate deals, and curate his trophy case. In one of the most intense scenes, Lou creates a violent meeting between gang member and police officers. He manipulates the situation for the perfect ingredients and then turns on his camera to film the carnage.

Nightcrawler reveals an exaggerated and virtually realistic capitalist-driven world where everyone plays to win. Where words are only used to negotiate and death and violence become the daily dose of entertainment. Gilroy may not see a character arc to Lou, but Lou changes. He becomes more of a reflection of ourselves and where we could all be headed. That's a fascinating story in itself and a reminder of cultural forces defining the narrative arc of our lives. If Lou's narrative path can oppose tradition, is it possible we have that same power?

On the Longevity of Typewriters

When I was about seven years old, my grandmother let me sit at her electric typewriter. Her office, housed in a cold and unfinished basement, had equine pencil drawings from a talented granddaughter on one wood paneled wall and photos of her and grandpa posing with a variety of friends on another. The chrome chair boasted about seven mismatched seat cushions of differing colors, textures and sizes. On the back of the chair hung oversized wool sweaters, cotton throws and a crocheted blanket of a startling mixture of colors. The result was a chair that looked something like a tiny vanilla cupcake loaded with five inches of layered pink, yellow, blue and green frosting, sprinkles, and patriotic flags, all sliding off to different sides.

Because she was notably hard of hearing and spent surprisingly little time in the kitchen, search and find was usually always a better option for locating her in their big creaky house than mere call and listen. Down the squeaky parquet stairs, I could usually find her perched atop her heaped and leering chair: my grandmother, the perpetually cold, tall, boney, straight backed and bespectacled woman who was always in a warm mood. “Oh honey,” she would say, “I’ve got to finish this one thing first, but then we’ll make some lunch. You must be hungry.” Time of day or proximity to last meal: these things had very little reign over her appetite. And if she was hungry, naturally anyone around her must be too. Of course her hunger, and subsequent offerings of poorly tasting snacks (my grandmother, a Scot, ran the blandest kitchen I’ve ever step foot in), was an avenue for the expression of her compassionate spirit.

————

I really don’t think it had much to do with her age, her tendency to intermix names of family members: mine, often intermixed with my mother’s, confused with a cousin’s, or an aunt’s. Early on, grandma just interweaved some syllables from the names of her two daughters as a multi-purpose designation for both—voila! Confusion avoided. She only had to call the one name and both faces would appear. Years later, when the girls left home, this technique continued to be just as handy for grandma, or at least she continued to employ it. The interesting thing is that, to my knowledge, no one in the family found this practice insulting or diminutive to their sense of individuality or relationship with her. Perhaps they unconsciously understood something about the nature of affection that others of us are still learning.

I’ve been reading Time and the Art of Living by Robert Grudin. In it, he describes a dream in which memories of his younger brother are mixed with feelings for his son. He goes on to suggest that just as one may have emotions of homesickness in college when leaving parents, so too homesickness may strike in moments of separation from one’s own children. He concludes that recognizing the common denominator in these feelings is important in recognizing the very nature of love and our capacity for affection. As guests on an interconnected planet; as parents, children, siblings, spouses, nieces and aunts, our expression of affection links us as fellow human beings; our capacity to love and be loved reminds us of our commonality. Grandma was far from demonstrative with her affections, or even materially generous, if we’re being completely honest. But, perhaps during those moments when she called us by the name of another, we were secure enough in her affection for us. Her very lack of self-consciousness when misnamed introductions were made to strangers increased our confidence that we didn’t need to be self-conscious either: her affections were broad enough we needn’t be intimidated at the prospect of temporarily sacrificing a mere name; her love saw the family as an interconnected whole. And that was enough.

—————

That day she sat me behind her typewriter had no reason to be so vivid in my memory. Nothing exceptional happened. Tipitty-tap-tap, Tapitty-tip-tap-tap, my fingers purposelessly sashayed from key to key. It was the sound of pushed and released keys I was after, not the meanings of their combined impressions on the paper. Perhaps it was in the imitation of her boney fingers moving from key to key, the slow, but rhythmic dance of colons and space bars and commas and dashes that entranced me. Perhaps it was just sitting on her elaborately pillow bedecked chair. Perhaps it was being between those two walls that evidenced care. It wasn’t until nearly two decades later I even had aspirations to write. Sometimes though, I wonder if the feeling of warmth, safety and security in that basement; that keen intimation of a profound place in her interwoven world of love, the unmistakable sound of pushed keys and acceptance regardless of articulation had a role in my now unshakable urge to continue tapping those keys.

Vacancy At the Place of the Skull

Today is suspended upon the tree, He who suspended the earth upon the waters. A crown of thorns crowns him Who is the King of the angels . . .

15th Antiphon of Holy Friday

 The 15^th Antiphon is a stark hymnal summation of the great paradox that is the Crucifixion of Christ: the holy God-man dying for want of holiness in humankind. This haunting papadic chant is sung by a soloist in Orthodox churches on the evening of Holy Thursday, the darkest service of the year. Set in Byzantine tone six, the chant expresses the ironic mood of the Crucifixion, the “bright sadness,” the joyful sorrow, ranging musically over the emotional landscape of the worshipper’s response to God’s life-saving act of love.

We see every element of the incongruity of God in the correlating icon of the crucifixion, starting with the pathos of the human figures assembled at the foot of the cross to succor Christ in His agony. A picture of abject lamentation, Christ’s mother reels, disoriented. In one hymn of the day, her state of shock pleads with her Son that they return to the wedding at Cana, a happier time. Yet, it was she who chose to live for the moment when a sword of agony would pierce her heart. The disciple who once listened to the very heartbeat of God now recedes within himself in misery in the moment God’s heart stops beating. The Roman guard is high in position and encased in armor, the only one present with worldly power. Despite his authority and fortitude, Longinus sees with the eyes of his spirit past the politics of the corpse before him, declaring the despised Jewish criminal to be the Son of God.

The rest of the human community is obscenely absent. Except that it’s not. The earth at Christ’s feet has been rent in an earthquake, disclosing the origins of human history in the bones of our forbearer Adam, here at the hill called Place of the Skull. Adam’s unseeing eye sockets should rend every heart—this archetype of the failure to see the consequence of impulse, to manage the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. No one is left out of this scene under the blood red moon. Though most of us, in the flesh, would have been as cowardly as the apostles were, in His mercy God provides for our presence, even though it’s the bleakness of that ancient, forlorn skull.

How to Read a Poem

I am a sucker for a good how-to, easily taken in by the alluring simplicity of a numbered list of steps. Luckily, this is the age of the Internet tutorial, with the tackling of all manner of life’s mysteries now available in slideshow format. How to build a yurt. How to clean a dishwasher. How to make a fishtail braid.

However, not all how-to’s are created equal. Last month, I followed a free tutorial for a maternity dress and ended up with a house-sized pink-flowered pillowcase that would have comfortably clothed me and two of my pregnant friends—an interesting challenge, but not exactly what I was going for. Sometimes, one man’s how-to is not another man’s treasure.

Tania Runyan’s How to Read a Poem is a glittering exception. It’s a pocket-sized literary guide and anthology that does—perfectly— what I’ve long tried to figure out how to do: introduce the new and skeptical reader to the necessity and beauty of poetry. Or perhaps not Poetry with a capital P.

This is a book about how to read a poem, just one poem that knocks the wind out of you. That’s how you get hooked, and poem by poem, eventually gain the confidence that develops into passion.

With simplicity, friendliness, and humility, Runyan gently guides the would-be reader of poems into a world she is clearly familiar with. She uses the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry” as a chapter-by-chapter template for encountering and enjoying a poem. After each short chapter, she offers a handful of startling and widely-varied poems to consider, encouraging the reader to try out a new lens with each grouping: imagery, sound, line breaks, discovery. Her selections are personal and unusual, modeling the way a reader of poems collects pieces that are meaningful to them, not necessarily those that are well-known or serious or understood.

Reading her book as I get ready to lead a high school writing workshop, I feel a sense of relief and excitement. I don’t have to have all the answers to a poem before introducing it to a class. I don’t have to explain what can’t be explained, because if I “get” it on a gut level then it’s likely the students get it, too. We can talk about that.

How to Read a Poem does that rare thing few how-to’s do: it admits its own limitations. It leaves the essential mystery of poetry intact, respecting the space between reader and poem where vital connection happens.