Heaven's Work

“Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.”—Rumi

I’ve recently fallen headlong in love with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I was swept up by the video of Proms musicians playing its complexities. Beyond the power of its rhythms and sounds, I was captivated by the orchestra's energy, and its intense and graceful movements. The piece is dynamic in passion and work. So dynamic, it has me considering the correlation between work and joy. Will we work in heaven?

We often consider work on Earth to be a result of the Fall. Roberto S. Goizueta speaks of the benefits of aesthetics and how they enhance life, but he leaves work off his list of activities that are integral to fulfillment. “Play, recreation, and celebration are the most authentic forms of life precisely because, when we are playing, recreating, or celebrating, we are immersed in, or ‘fused,’ with the action itself, and those other persons with whom we are participating. Thus, we are involved in and enjoying the living itself.” It’s as if he’s saying, while we all know work is important, we only find joy in these other aspects.

In the language of Genesis, God established the pattern of work and rest before the Fall. He “finished the work he had been doing,” and “he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” As Philo of Alexandria put it, "God never ceases to work; but as it is the property of fire to burn, and of snow to cool, so of God to work.'' And Jesus said, "My Father is working until now, and I am working." Adam and Eve worked in the garden and cared for it before the Fall. Wouldn’t these points make work, in a sense, a grace of God, and a gift?

The poet Wendell Berry challenges a claim that “more free time” might increase our happiness. “The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.”

If work and happiness are interrelated as Berry suggests, wouldn’t they be integral parts of a perfect heaven? The fact that God himself “worked” might be the greatest reason we can anticipate joyful work in heaven. But the Proms Rite of Spring is a close second.

The Beauty of Obstructions

In 1967, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth wrote and directed a 12-minute experimental art film. The name of the film was The Perfect Human. Like a lot of experimental art films from the 1960s, The Perfect Human was quirky collection of black-and-white images accompanied by a minimalistic soundtrack and a odd voiceover. The voiceover said:  

Here is the human. Here is the perfect human. This is what an ear looks like. This is what a eye looks like. This is the perfect human shaving. This is the perfect human putting on a bow tie. This is the perfect human eating. This is the perfect human dancing.

Okay, it was no Crime and Punishment.

In 2003, director Lars von Trier collaborated with Leth on a film he titled The Five Obstructions. As the film opens, von Trier announces to Leth that he wants him remake his 12-minute movie with specific "obstructions" that von Trier will supply. Leth agrees. For one version, von Trier tells Leth to make the movie in Cuba but to allow no shot to last for more than a half a second. Leth argues that the film will look "awful and disjointed." Von Trier insists and the film is made. For another version, von Trier insists that the film be made in the streets of India with Leth playing the role of the lead character. Leth protests, explaining that he doesn't want to serve as both actor and director. Again, von Trier insists and the film is made. For yet another version of the film, von Trier tells Leth to remake the movie as an animated film. Leth confesses that he hates animated films. Von Trier insists and Leth makes his cartoon.

Interestingly, in the next scenario, von Trier tells Leth to do whatever he wishes. Leth jumps at the chance. He picks an exotic location in Brussels and shoots his film in a widescreen format. It is fancy and expensive and full of clever split-screen effects. The net result is a cross between a James Bond movie and a luxury car commercial.

So here are four films: Three with limitations and one without.

Guess which was the weakest of the four?

For some reason, von Trier's obstructions and limitations birthed something in Leth's art that was not there when Leth was left to choose as he chose. I'm not sure I want to say this, but I think the same may be true in life. God speaks, and what he says is rarely to my liking. He calls me to a certain constraint; he calls me to a certain love. Given free reign, I'm sure I would choose differently. But hey, that's the price one pays for art!

Pastoral

We stood at dusk among the new construction of what will be a $4 million addition to the local school. The work site was quiet, the powerful equipment left temptingly idle to men and women—the women among us seemed significantly less tempted—of our caliber, decision-makers of the school board. We felt self-satisfied, there’s no doubt, definitely influential, maybe powerful.

To make room for the project, the school had torn down the simplest of buildings, a Quonset that served as a kindergarten classroom for 45 years. The removal of that old building, itself an anachronism, had revealed the backside of the line of houses directly to the east, houses of a different ilk than the 2-, 3- and 4-car garage structures that go up around town in varying shades of olive drab.

Our eyes were drawn to one house in particular, the outbuildings of which included a garage with an impressively sagging roof, a small shed patched with various pieces of various-shaded tin, and a lean-to chicken-wire pigeon coop. The predominant white of the buildings had grayed with time, was now bluing in the twilight. Down to the color, it reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ “Pastoral”:

When I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. No one will believe this of vast import to the nation.

Someone among us brought up the word “eyesore;” I was immediately offended.

Then again, I’m offended by Williams’ title itself. “Pastoral” is a bell that startles me from my reverie. What about “the houses of the very poor” is “pastoral”? They are perhaps only pastoral as they “[please] me best of all” in my romanticized voyeurism.

So “pastoral” grates on me, makes me blush. I live in a small town that strives for—is even a sucker for—the pastoral: the corn, watered this spring by rains as regular as those of God’s own garden, stands at freakish heights for miles around, the leaves gently rustling in the evening wind as fireflies rise to intermittently light the night; then just this week, a state newspaper reveals that our lakes and rivers are among the most contaminated in the region thanks to the chemicals that push the corn to freakish heights.

Pastoral indeed.

I must confess I don’t know who lives in the house we were contemplating, whether Boo Radley or a darker figure, or what kind of life the person leads. Still, there’s no doubt the house-all-out-of-line has a kind of beauty to it, especially compared to the new construction that takes its cues from the rather narrow range of a suburban ideal. Williams’ poem, though uttering “pastoral,” is about taking beauty where we can find it, in the odds and ends and corners, in stasis rather than progress, in sustainability rather than freakish corn. Yet with one word, “pastoral,” it pushes us perhaps most of all to self-reflection on our own idylls.

We’ll soon have a new school building and that will be good, but we lost a homely little hutch where for generations six-year-olds held hands, sang songs, painted with their fingers, and sat in the lap of their teacher while she told stories. That may be a net loss. Or this, too, may be a “pastoral.”

No one will think this of vast import to the nation.

You Can’t Fake a Picture Like That

In A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord portrays Giacometti’s struggle as his art. It’s a daily wrestling that requires a commitment to begin again. Giacometti’s constant exasperation at his own work colors the story, but adds the interesting layer of uncertainty and attainment that ebbs and flows by the hour, and sometimes the minute, as he paints a portrait of Lord. When Lord suggests Giacometti fill in the background, Giacometti replies by saying, “You can’t fake a picture like that. Everything must come of itself and in its own time. Otherwise, it becomes superficial.”

I sometimes act like Lord, saying to myself, just fill-in the story. And while it’s easy to fill-in, it doesn’t create a compelling narrative. In order to make sure something does come of itself and in its own time, as Giacometti says it should, then one must continually work. This work might often be “fill-in,” but allows for something more to be made, something that can begin to become itself. This also takes time. Time to develop, time to form, time to reveal, and time to transform.

​I've found there's a process to finding a things own thing. For me, it's a struggle. Nothing is clear. I have to work through the haze, through the mental frustration, fatigue, my own doubts and fears, and gently excavate the brittle bones and structures of a story.

​In other words, everything must be earned. Which is why work with potential can turn out as superficial. The pace is rushed. Scenes and characters are posted like flannel pieces instead of developed over time. Instead of formidable and conflicted characters I write silhouettes producing cheesy dialogue everyone has heard before.

We need time to let our fill-in become something more and that requires a daily wrestling and a commitment to begin again and again. Show up. Take the time. Don’t fake it.

Stealing Grace

When I lived in South Bend, Indiana, I had a friend who, for one night, tried to teach me how to sew. As with all my DIY pursuits, the fabric I bought for a giant pillow I convinced Meg she could teach me how to stitch together got mutilated, and I don’t remember a thing she tried to teach me.

What I do remember about that night is a conversation Meg and I had about writing and seminary. We sat on my living room floor and spoke about what we hoped we could do in the same manner one digs her heels in the wet sand to test whether she can stand in the undertow after the rush of the waves. I also remember discussing journals, and what kind we like to write in: lined or unlined, spiral bound or loose leaf. I don’t know which Meg preferred, but I remember her saying something about being anxious about breaking rules when she begins a page. Whether it was that an unlined blank page gave her too much freedom, or that the faint blue lines of notebook paper were too strict, I don’t know. It was her comment on the rules that struck me.

I don’t attend too much to rules, or directions for that matter. This is probably why nobody can teach me how to sew. When it comes to writing, I’m not sure if it’s arrogance or ignorance in my capability to tell a story, but I don’t care if I’m writing on a napkin or a Moleskin journal. Telling the story is all that matters to me. I’ll worry about what’s right later.

And so it was that two girls in their mid-twenties sat together piercing holes in fabric and secretly admitted to one another what it is they’d really like to do someday.

About eight years later, I was in my church’s nursery, when my husband Jesse walked in and said, “Callie! Meg’s preaching!” He walked towards me, took the baby I was holding and said, “You go. I’ll take your place.”

I darted out of the nursery to hear Meg.

Meg had completed her seminary work and was the Pastor of the Washington DC CRC, a church nearby my own. When she moved, we met for coffee a couple of times, but this was the first time I’d get to hear her preach. I ran down the hallway towards the sanctuary, giggling, and remembering the no-sew night years ago.

I sat in the back of the sanctuary in front of a man I will call Jacob, who lives in his van. Just before we were to pass the peace, Jacob sneezed, and what came out splattered all over my back. I was wearing a sundress and I could feel snot running between my shoulder blades. I was supposed to turn, shake Jacob’s hand, and say, “Peace be with you.” Instead, I walked out of the sanctuary and into the bathroom to wash my back.

I was so angry as I scrubbed my back with a brown paper towel. I was grossed out, annoyed that Jacob didn’t put his hand over his mouth, disdained that he looked at me expectantly to pass him some peace, and frustrated that my friend was standing at the pulpit and now I was missing it. I walked back into the sanctuary and sat down in front of him; my back pulsating from how hard I had scrubbed it.

Meg’s sermon was on the Prodigal Son, and she told three versions of it. The first two were the stories Jesus probably should’ve told if he wanted to impress the Pharisees. They end with the son who left being punished, his father shrugging in nonchalance at his return, the other son, the one who stayed and followed the rules was celebrated and rewarded.

Meg suggested the Pharisees would’ve nodded in agreement at Jesus’ anecdote. “It’d be true-to-life,” Meg said, then waited a beat and added, “but it isn’t a very good story.”

I wrote those words on my hand, inched forward and tried to make eye contact with my old friend who whispered that she thought she might like to preach someday as she tried to show me what a whipstitch is. Gone was that girl who concerned herself with the rules of lined or unlined paper.

She went on to tell the rest of what happened, the real story where the father cries in relief at the sight of his son, where he throws the world’s greatest party at his return, where the older son sulks because he did it all right and he doesn’t get a party. It’s not fair. “Jesus Christ was many, many wonderful things,” Meg said. “But fair doesn’t rank high on the list.” No, I thought. And fair doesn’t have much wonder in it.

I was working on an MFA at the time I heard Meg preach, and the residencies reminded me of the party the father of the prodigal son threw for him. I approached these parties with a lot of trepidation. This was because getting an MFA was not only about becoming a better writer. I am unable to separate my learning from my faith, and I believe experiencing grace means wrestling with something I barely understand, and grasping and clenching on to a piece of it. Grace haunts me. It baffles me. It terrifies me. I do not write because I know something. I do not write because I believe I will figure something out. I write because I am tormented and I yearn for that agonizing grace. Writing is the only way I know to experience it. Maybe that’s why I don’t care about rules. I am a thief for stories. I will use anything I can for grace. I approached those residencies I imagine the same way the Prodigal Son approached his party; both of us understand we don’t deserve to be here.

“Tell us of the banquet where everyone gets invited!” Meg writes in her sermon. One where it doesn’t matter what rules you’ve followed, or what you’ve failed at. Tell us about the party we want so desperately want to be a part of even though there’s nothing we can bring to it that would get us in. Tell us an unfair, wonderful story, Jesus.

I stood behind Jacob and waited while Meg shook each of the congregants’ hands at the back of the sanctuary. She saw me as she was shaking Jacob’s hand, but she made sure to speak to him as though he was the only one there. When it was my turn, we hugged each other and held up the line. “You did it,” I said, and her hand pressed into my back where Jacob had left his mark previously.

The three of us, strangely linked together, would eventually leave this party, taking whatever grace we thought we had with us, and move on to do whatever it is we would do.

I’m a Recovering Church Dramatist

I’m a recovering church dramatist. Back in the day, I worked with a performance team. We wrote sketches and performed them during Sunday services. We had a lot of fun and we were, dare I brag, pretty funny. This was in Chicago where improv is king. We'd craft scripted sketches out of improvised scenes we made up related to the pastors’ sermon topics. It was fairly organic at first and, for the most part, we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted. As long as we didn’t swear or anything.

I was proud of what we created back then, but as I reflect on those sketches now, there’s a bit of a dark, nagging undertone that I’m not sure I noticed at the time. It’s not that what we did was bad, but it never could have stood alone. What we produced was inextricably linked to those sermons, subserviently linked in fact, and in the big picture, subserviently linked to the evangelical purposes of either a) saving souls or b) edifying saved souls. Art, if you can call what we did art, was a serf to the vassal of the modern evangelical church.

A be-all-end-all definition of art is difficult to come across, but one thing I'm certain of is that art is not a slave. Roping art to a cause of some kind is a misuse of it, one that demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the stuff. But stating what art isn’t begs the question, "What is it?" Ha. You might just as well ask, "Who is God?" especially if you're up for some maddening non-answers. There are some pat answers—"Art is human expression," "God is love"—that aren't necessarily false. It's just that they can only ever be partially true.

Art is inherently mysterious. I think the typical human response to the grandly mysterious (like art, like God) is a knee-jerk, semi-conscious attempt at appropriation. If we can’t fully describe something, we yank it from its own empire and compress it to grasp-able suburban terms, not realizing that as we compress it, we shear it of its essence, the thing that makes the thing the thing. Art is no longer art, but propaganda, and propaganda harangues with one of two choices: Are you with us or are you against us? Your life teeters on your answer. Answer now.

Art, like God, permits an infinite number of responses to itself. It piques curiosity, provokes introspection, picks at our core values, and invites us to return over and over again. Those who patronize the arts correctly remove their crowns and listen. Those who patronize incorrectly first seek themselves in the painting, the novel, the symphony, and give up on art all together when, in fact, they find themselves.

The leadership at my church back then eventually chopped our sketches from the services permanently. I never knew why exactly. We didn’t swear, not even once. Probably because first they made us quit writing our own stuff and use Willow Creek Community Church’s pre-written stuff. But whatever the reason, it was for the best. Though we were ultimately mistreating art, it never shunned us. Art, like God, was kind to us.

Joseph Brodsky’s Utter Happiness

Poet Joseph Brodsky began spending winters in Venice in 1972, and his holidays there continued for years. In 1989, he published his reflections of those winters in Watermark. In this lyric essay, Brodsky makes a rich physical and metaphysical journey into that city, where he calls up the primordial and the eternal, the fixed and fluid properties of the watery landscape, and the real and impressionistic architecture of the city.

Yet more notably, in this setting Brodsky is smitten with “utter happiness.” Newly exiled from his native Russia in 1972, he had come to live and teach in the United States, his “Purgatorio,” while Venice became “my version of paradise.” For one thing, the watery city reminded him of St. Petersburg, Russia on the Baltic Sea, where he spent his childhood. What’s more, the visual delights of Venice signified Eden to him. On first entering the city at night, Brodsky described entering “infinity,” traveling on a vaporetto over the water’s black surface. The city itself, he wrote, is “a porcelain setting by a crystal water,” where the Spirit of God might move upon the water’s face. Here, he wrote, people want to cover themselves because of all the surrounding beauty, “the marble lace, inlays, capitals, cornices, reliefs, and moldings . . . angels, cherubs, caryatids . . . and windows.”

I think we all have some notion of what is Edenic to us, a place, imagined or real, that brings on feelings of joy or comfort or rest. Like Brodsky, I appreciate both wintry and foggy landscapes—not because they remind me of my childhood, but because I am a creature of the endless Southwestern sun that often obliterates the views with its white glare. And like Brodsky, I “take heat very poorly.” No wonder I often find woods and forests, mountains and hills divine, especially in the summers. Yet even when I must summer in the boiler that is Houston, the softened panorama of clouded days and the obscurity of fogged mornings can remind me of God’s garden, however briefly.

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker discuss early Christian concepts of paradise in their book Saving Paradise and especially in the article, “This Present Paradise.” The authors write, “In the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. Early images of paradise in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies and teeming water of the Mediterranean world as if they were lit by a power from within.” This world, they say, was “a world created as good and delightful.” God was present in it, for in early Christian images, a ladder often appears, where not only people could ascend to heaven, but God could come down to earth.

In Watermark, Joseph Brodsky delights in the “present paradise” he finds in Venice; and I am easily pulled into in his enchantment with it. When I read Watermark, I understand the poet’s sentiments, his overarching love of place, the watercolor of Venice. Wandering in Brodsky’s descriptions, I think of my own moments of heaven on earth. In such moments, peace, utter happiness.

When I Talk About Mud Runs

So maybe I have a hyper-competitive side; it’s been present since my youth. In Little League baseball, I was the first kid in my city ever ejected from a game. I’m also still bitter about the time I lost a foot race against Howard Schaap.

So at 35 with diminishing athletic skills, I find it harder than ever to satiate that nature. But I have to try, right?

This past month I ran another obstacle course race (OCR). Six miles through mud, ice baths, barbed wire crawls, log hurdles, creek sprints, and fire jumps. The terrain: a ski slope. This was my fifth OCR; it was the hardest. My wife, now a veteran of these races herself, asked me why I run in them—we were at the starting gate. It is the kind of question that goes unanswered when you’re staring up a thousand foot incline, as we were. The motionless chair lift above mocked like gargoyles.

The answer—if there is one, I think it changes—is also the answer to why I write and have faith. But to say “I just do,” empties the habit. There’s a grueling beauty present in endurance, though it abides like pebbles in your shoe. I might be justified in abandoning any task the second it sees the slope upward. But I don’t. Not even after weeks of writing draft after draft of a story that still exposes itself as shitty as that first draft. I don’t abandon my faith because I live in a world that doesn’t have the sense to get itself “undamned.”

So when I talk about mud runs and writing and faith, I know I’m talking about why I need community. I desire to be surrounded by people of all abilities pursuing the same end. Some who know that feeling of finishing a story. Or can scale a muddy twelve foot wall in three bounding leaps (let’s see you do that, Howard!). Or know, what Christian Wiman describes, as the “moments when we reflect a mercy and mystery that are greater than we are.”

I believe and write and race because others reach a hand down over the ledge and pull me from the muck. They say a part of the creed for me that I cannot say, uncover a character’s motivations I could not identify.

When I talk about mud runs and writing and faith though, I’m also talking about how sometimes it’s only me against me. And how I just have to sink the balls of my feet into the mud and ascend.

The Disaster of the Unedited Life

One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends. – St. Nikolai Velimirovich (1881-1956)

The noted novelist who taught the fiction writers workshop I attended said this a lot: “Assume your reader is smarter than you are.” As a reviewer of self-published works for an online indie book review site, I see a lot of writing that makes me wish every author kept this in mind. Too often I have to sit down with a heavy heart to write a far less than glowing review for a book that’s somewhere on the continuum between lackluster and disastrous, sometimes (though not always) because it wasn’t properly worked over by a ruthless professional editor who’s trained to see what that writer couldn’t. Did the author of the repetitive, structurally weak self-help book riddled with disjointed and patronizing narrative, confusing syntax, careless typos, and myriad formatting issues think his readers would be that oblivious, that willing to settle for mediocrity, because after all, this guy wrote it, so it must be great? It seems obvious, but apparently isn’t to some, that before the glorious final unveiling of one’s chef d’oeuvre, serious dues must be paid.

Then I wonder: What if in my personal life I’m as disjointed and uninspiring as that book? What would happen if I sat down with a good friend and asked her to hit me with my greatest character flaw, the one that might break me in the end if I don’t get a clue? Alas, our brains are hardwired to pretty much see perfection in ourselves, which is part of why writers often can’t detect the weak story arc that’s going to doom their novel if they don’t take a hard look at things, much less spot their own typos.

They say the devil’s in the details, but so is God. A writer determined to be stellar will endure even a brutal editor if he senses the guy is on the money. The lure of a glowing end product makes temporarily wounded pride worth the wait. As to life, the Serbian bishop Nikolai Velimirovich was so receptive to refinements of character that he called his torturers in the Dachau death camp “cruel friends” because he claimed their evil ministrations enlarged his capacity to love others. With that kind of humility, imagine the novel he could have written.

Real Girls: What Amanda Palmer Taught Me About Vulnerability

I have a friend who has this gnarly summer job—she calls it an "opportunity." The thing is it's not, in truth, gnarly at all. I mean, if picking rocks in the broiling sun is immensely amusing, or if spending most of a day uncomfortably bent over with a linoleum knife hacking away the weeds from inside small prickly spruce trees is an escapade of frivolity, or if cutting heavily tractor packed sod with a shovel is a thing to delight in, then I guess her job really is "gnarly." When she gets back from her summer job—at least she has a rocking hot tan—I offer my sympathies to her: "Whatever, pays the bills, right?"

"No!"she says, "whatever makes me happy ... or at least makes it possible, THAT’S why I do it."

"Cool, cool," I reply in a mollifying tone. Hey, you don’t want to ever mess with someone who can chuck rocks, slash deftly with curved knives, or is used to manhandling (personhandling, I should say, just in case she is reading this) large chunks of sod or tree stumps. She could easily devour a prissy MBAer faster than she can slay a patch of undisciplined barbellate thistles, which is very quickly. So, I keep all this in mind. It’s healthier that way. Mainly for me.

My friend though, despite being able to kick serious ass probably will never have that sinewy side seen by more than a select few people. Other people see her and think she is little other than peach cinnamon pie with prettily puffed whip cream. "Oh, if only you knew," I muse under my breath. And yet, while she is a pugnaciously hard worker and tougher than titanium, she is also a delicate artist and girl, and thinker, and saint. (You should see her with baby birds.) I mean, if Wendell Berry were younger and single, he would be after her.

No, really.

In the same vein, don’t a lot of us feel that way about our parents? Or that heroic individual that few others, except us, really know? Why is that? How can we know—deep down inside—that our mum or dad or brother or sister or certain friend is such a supremely groovy gift to humanity?

Here is a thought: is it because we are open to them and they are open to us? Like, in a way that is unique and allows for vulnerability? There is more, of course, but the act of being vulnerable to another person seems to be, to me anyway, significant.

A little while ago I had the pleasure of reading Amanda Palmer’s biography/philosophy/guide to life. It’s called The Art of Asking. Her words went inside my softer parts and made my emotions do exercises which they weren’t used to. Maybe it was like emotional yoga? Anyway, her startling honesty and willingness to uncover/divulge/display the tender parts of her artistic musician soul and heart made me wonder just how much better those of us who are more prone to emotional seclusion would be by being more vulnerable. (Not to everybody, because without a certain degree of interpersonal-confidentiality there could be little interpersonal-intimacy.)

One of Palmer’s central points is that everybody desires to be seen. Because to be seen means that something in us was recognized. Something of our identity was noticed by another and recognized as unique to us. And yet, for Palmer there are two parties responsible: the outside viewer who actually gives a hoot to see beyond just themselves, and the person themselves who must be willing to be seen. And this last part is where the vulnerability comes in.

And so going back to my friend, I wonder what she would think about Palmer’s philosophy of vulnerability. Surely there is a satisfaction in knowing certain parts of ourselves are neatly packaged and hidden, only to be seen by those select few who have been invited into the sanctum of knowing. But if, as Palmer suggests, vulnerability begets vulnerability, perhaps by learning to gradually expose ourselves, we could in turn increasingly recognize the beauty that surrounds us—and sometimes be the beautiful too.

Icebreakers

 

It is a Saturday. I am 18. I’m at one of too-many college orientation events.

Even though all of my materials read “Chrysta,” my nametag reads “Crysta.” I added in an “h” with a black sharpie. They’ve assured me that the spelling will be fixed in time for tomorrow's activities and I am oh-so-thoroughly relieved and stick the typo on my jeans, out of site.

The introductory activity is an acrostic poem using the letters of our name. My subsequent eye roll is unavoidable. Whenever I am in a situation in which adult says “We’re going to start with a quick ice breaker,” my eyes take the path of least resistance toward the back of my skull. My neck throws itself back, and my nostrils flare. The act is not quick. It is not unnoticeable, but I pick up the pen and write.

C-Creative H-helpful R-Real Y-Why did you spell my name without an “h" STA-Start from the beginning and do it right this time.

It would probably shock you to know that I have never made a friend because of an icebreaker. Not one.

***

It is a Wednesday. I am 26. I am at Starbucks.

I've asked the barista for a London fog. She calls her manager who informs me that Starbucks doesn’t carry London Fogs. “You do,” I say, weary and un-caffeinated. “It’s an Earl Grey tea latte with vanilla syrup.”

“Oh,” the manager says. “So you would order that by asking for an Earl Grey latte with vanilla syrup.”

The outer edge of my left eye twitches behind my glasses. “I think," I smile in a way that's really just cheek flexion, “that is what I did when I ordered a London Fog!" But what the barista hears is “Okay, great.”

“What’s your name?” she asks with her Sharpie at the ready.

“Chrysta,” I answer. I pay with my Starbucks app and walk over to the pick-up counter.

“Would you like to add a tip?” the app prompts.

The barista slides my drink over to me and I stared at the cup that reads “Krystal” in scratchy black letters.

I clear the notification and put my phone back into my purse.

***

People are always misspelling my name. My least favorite misspelling is anything that ends with l or n. Those letters create a different name and were combined to describe a different person who is not me. My favorite misspelling happened at a bookstore coffee shop. I picked up my coffee and saw “Christ” written on the cup. That is also not my name, but wouldn’t that be fun? Just imagine.

Introductions: Hi, I’m Christ. Restaurants reservations: Christ table for 13! Picking someone up: Christ is here for you.

When I was growing up, I wanted my name to be Tia. Tia was mature, had a leather jacket, wore heels, and she was extroverted, easily approachable, and likable. Tia is made up of three easy letters. You have to try really hard to misspell it. Chrysta, on the other hand, aspires to maturity. She loves sweatpants and flip-flops. She is quiet. The spelling is not instinctual. You have to spend time with it, figure it out, and remember it. She is me.

In Sloane Crosley’s essay collection, I Was Told There Would Be Cake, she writes of her own struggles with an atypical name and its spelling. “Yes, my name is my cross and my co-pilot.” In place of the exotic, affluent, or adventurous childhoods that other children had, the terrain of her upbringing was contoured by her “vowel-heavy name inscrutable to people of all nationalities.”

That's not completely true for me. Upon hearing my name, a Greek man paused and said, “Chrysta…. Are you Greek?"

I squinted my eyes and shook my head. “…No…” I answered, uncomfortably running my hand through a short afro.

***

I am 27. Another icebreaker, another team building activity. “Define yourself with one word.”

Our names mark and distinguish us. Look into a container marked with “wires,” “shoes,” or “Butterscotch Krimpets,” and you should find wires, shoes, and Butterscotch Krimpets. Names describe and define, not only things, but also people. There are distinct differences between a Matt, a Mark, and a Britany. Krysta is not to interchangeable with Crysta or Chrysta. They are all different for a variety of reasons, starting with what you call them.

“They,” Crosley writes of her parents “wanted me to have something I could point to and say: This is where I’m from. This is who I am.” So they named her Sloane.

I pick up my navy blue sharpie and write, “Chrysta.” That is it. That is all.

Forms of Love

The British newspaper The Guardian recently invited a handful of writers to discuss the words that they cherish the most. “One of my favorites is the Cumbrian word glisky,” wrote novelist Sarah Hall, “meaning a kind of bright flashing light that you get after it has rained, when all the surfaces are wet and reflecting.” 

Aminatta Forna, a Scottish-born writer, described an Orkney word: “Plitter: to play about in water, to make a watery mess.”

Clot, claret, nesh, thrawn, slipe, whiffle-whaffle: all were extolled. (Will Self lovingly recalled a compound word that formed a complete thought: “Pipe-down!,” one of his father’s “interwar slang expressions that are long departed from the common lexicon.”)

The chance to luxuriate in the materials of one’s craft is irresistible; reviewing The Guardian’s feature, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead could not help but tender a richly branching sentence concerning a word she holds dear:

I cannot say the word ‘procrastinate’—a useful word for a writer—without hearing embedded therein 'cras,' the Latin word for 'tomorrow,' which, St. Augustine noted, sounded like the croaking cry of the dilatory raven that was sent from the ark and never came back.

My wife, a writer, could not even let me finish describing The Guardian’s assignment. “Luscious!” she exclaimed. And then, slowly, “luminous.” And finally, “Frangelica. It’s fun to say.”

According to the compendium Favorite Words of Famous People, the first word the exuberant stylist Nicholson Baker loved to say was broom. From there, the list evidently grew so quickly and lavishly, it required the most exquisite attention:

Of abstract nouns containing the letter l, my favorites are 'reluctance' and 'revulsion.'  The ‘luct’ in 'reluctance' functions as an oral brake or clutch ('clutch' and 'luct' being sonic kin), making the word seem politely hesitant, tactful, circumspect—willing to let the hired tongue have its fun before completing its meaning.

Ocean is one of the words I love most. I love the surging sounds it makes: from the slow, enfolding swell in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, when the forlorn men watch Shield Sheafson’s funeral pyre disappear “far on out into the ocean’s sway,” to the menacing rush that occurs when the word, amassing an extra syllable in the mouth of Henry V, overtakes the bounds of our modern ears:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility, But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage, Then lend the eye a terrible aspect, Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon, let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

There’s no telling what Shakespeare himself would have written in response to The Guardian’s query. But if frequency of contact is an indication of affection, it is worth noting, as Brad Leithauser did in a 2013 New Yorker piece, that sweet and its kin appear in The Complete Works close to a thousand times. A search of the Shakespeare concordance on OpenSource Shakespeare reveals a word that arrives with nearly the exact same frequency: time. Joining that pair is think. Good arrives three times as often, as do thou and shall. Death (918) and life (890) are separated merely. And all are surpassed by the forms of love.

The Power of Humor

Twice a year or so, my boyfriend Dave starts showing me YouTube videos and makes me question our relationship.

I mean, not really. I wouldn’t actually end our relationship over the YouTube videos he shows me. But I do look at some of them and wonder what on Earth he finds funny about the things he finds on the Internet.

Dave has a particular appreciation for surreal humor which, I will freely admit, I do not share. Shows like Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!; Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule; Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared; and others are so awkward and weird that they make me almost physically uncomfortable. He’s always maintained that they were “actually really smart entertainment” and would joke that someday my sense of humor would evolve to be on his level.

He actually had a point. The more I started paying attention to the shows he watched (although I often watched them under protest), the more I realized that they weren’t just awkward, uncomfortable shows. They were satirical shows that took common television tropes—cringe-worthy late-night television shows, family-friendly prime time sitcoms, children’s shows, etc.—and exaggerated them to the point that they became surrealist commentaries on life as we know it.

These shows aren’t the first of their kind, either. Surreal humor has long been used by authors and playwrights to comment on society. It really became popular with the dawn of postmodernism, which, in the aftermath of World War II, became the dominant zeitgeist of a society dealing with a destabilized world and a deep distrust of authority. Surrealist humor was a way for people to deal with political and social uncertainty, the tension of the Cold War, the rapidly-accelerating development of technology, and morphing religious and moral norms.

No wonder surrealist humor is alive and well! Today, world politics are tense. War is everywhere. Technology is increasingly advanced and intrusive. Constant scandals have further weakened trust in established governments, religions, and social figures. Our generation’s surrealist humor has moved off of the stage and onto the Internet, but it’s still wrestling with the issues addressed by Samuel Beckett and others. They deal with topics like the ever-pervasive Internet, the idea of teaching children with television, concepts of identity in a digital world, and fame.

I’m still not a fan of Dave’s shows. Watching a bunch of puppets devolve into shrieking, hysterical versions of themselves as they delve into the Internet is not fun for me. Steve Brule makes me cringe. But I understand how they’re “smart humor” (even though I still roll my eyes at the “your-humor-will-evolve” joke), and I understand why they’re important.

Who knows? Maybe, someday, people will watch Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared like we read Samuel Beckett. We might not love them, but we’ll see more clearly how significant they are.

Lars and the Real Girl

We were driving home from a family wedding in Jacksonville. We are attending these gatherings with increasing frequency, but whether marriages or funerals, outside the formal event and appropriate attire, our family conversation is the same, fraying and reweaving itself out of our particular social and cultural fabrics to an quilted knit of unqualified goodness. So, somewhere between Lake City and Gainesville I imagined us home in Tampa, ragged out and crashed around plates of left-overs and a movie. Lars and the Real Girl cropped up in our impromptu movie reviews, so that's what we watched.

If you have not seen Lars and the Real Girl, I hope you will. Says Christianity Today, “Lars and the Real Girl is a sweet and endearing film about a shy, reclusive man who strikes up a chaste relationship with a sex doll that he orders over the Internet...” And further, “we might as well note that the film's risqué premise actually serves to underscore the man's decency and goodness. Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) has brought the doll into his life, and named it 'Bianca,' because for some reason he cannot let himself get too close to anyone, not even his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer). And he certainly can't handle the thought of dating an actual woman, even though he has an attractive, perky co-worker named Margo (Kelli Garner) who sings in the choir at his church and is obviously interested in him.”

It is easy to ask the wrong questions about Lars and the Real Girl. You can get distracted by comparing it with comfortable mindsets that curtail discussion. You can ask “chicken or egg” questions about Lars' clinical state, its causes, or standard therapies. You can make easy criticisms about individual and corporate responsibilities, or how science and faith act outside their ordinate categories. The movie challenges all manner of convention.

Better questions might come along these lines:

• In what ways is sex portrayed?
• Why is the taboo of sex such a good fulcrum to visit cultural questions?
• How does the implausible situation help get to the bigger questions?
• What in the film is being made? What is made real?
• How does the movie engage creatio ex nihilo (creating out of nothing)?
• Where in the film and in what ways to we find simple acts of caring?
• How do these simple acts signify a caring community?
• What is it “to sit and to knit?” What Psalm uses knitting as a metaphor?
• Lars' brother rarely finishes a sentence. At what important point are they complete?
• How does the film deal with the connection between death (or suffering) and maturity?
• How do the seasons change over the course of the film and what does that say?
• What does the hard scene of Bianca's death at the lake convey to you?
• How is Paul's “put to death what is earthly in you” possibly considered?

During the week of the wedding the national media was full of existential questions: the Charleston murders, ongoing Middle East wars, trans-racial and trans-sexual identity, political machinations from global trade to greenhouse gases. But at the reception and dinner we checked all those conversations at the door. And not despite, but because of them we got lost in the fray of foolish small talk and made imaginative whole cloth of our colorful oddities.

At the Seashore

The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be— The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea. - Robert Frost

The sea predates us, and—judging by literature—its significance in our lives can’t be overstated. The sea represents brokenness, beauty, loneliness, our own inner depths, mystery, tragedy, and wisdom, to name some of the themes it has inspired. Despite this influence, Revelations tells us that one day there will no longer be a sea. This is notable because it's the reverse of the usual order. Usually we lose things here (loved ones, health), only to have them restored to us there. In the same way, we will give up heaven and earth for a new heaven and earth. But though we have the sea now, we will not have it at the end of time. Won't we miss it? The sea has had a vast affect on poets and writers. Their vision reflects our own encounters with the sea.

Pablo Neruda finds brokenness and a paradoxical beauty washing to shore in an assortment of debris:

Petals crimped up, cotton from the tidewash, useless sea-jewels, and sweet bones of birds still in the poise of flight.

And in another poem he speaks of his dependence on it: “I need the sea because it teaches me./I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,/if it’s a single wave or its vast existence.”

The Anglo-Saxon poet speaks of the sea in terms of loneliness. In the Old English poem, The Wanderer, the warrior reveals the wounds of exile:

Care is renewed for the one who must send very often over the binding of the waves a weary heart.

Cut off from loved ones and his own familiar language, he finds that the waters “bind” or imprison as they present an obstacle to returning home.

In an essay, Robin Ekiss says the sea’s “vastness suggests the infinite depths of the self or the unconscious, even danger, which also lurks beneath the waves.” We don’t doubt Melville’s insight into the human heart with passages like this from Moby Dick:

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Wallace Stevens sees the sea in terms of mystery and tragedy, calling it “The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea.” In “The Sea is Acquisitive,” Cecil Hemley considers how it takes lives to itself, saying “I am fearful for a man who loves/The sea too much.”

There are pleasant aspects of the sea. In “The Birth of Venus,” Hayden Carruth speaks imaginatively of a beauty and wisdom that originates in the sea:

She gave us beauty where our eyes Had seen but need, and we grew wise. For wisdom could not fail the gift Bestowed in that superb undress, Value consigned as loveliness From ocean’s riches, ocean's thrift.

Humankind has marked its emotional, physical, and spiritual rhythms by the sea. What does it mean that this treasured sea will no longer exist? Maybe God, who sometimes speaks in the language of imagery – stars, and wings, and branching trees—will close this age and open the next with the sumptuous metaphorical flourish of vanishing the sea. Isn’t the reason we can give the sea up and never miss it because of the relationship that will restore and surpass all that’s represented by its metaphors of brokenness and beauty?

The Wilderness of the Unexpected

One summer day in Cuchara, Colorado, hiking on a mountain, my family and I found we had diverged from the trail, not far, but the particular path wasn’t well marked. And some storm clouds had appeared farther up the slopes. Because our kids were quite young then and hard to corral up the mountain, we usually began our hikes in early morning and completed them by noon, to avoid too much grumpiness or mad hunger or sudden storms and lightning. On this day, the clouds had gathered earlier than expected. Should we keep going up, or begin our descent?

In a couple of minutes, we had relocated the trail, with the help of a few signposts, which I later learned are called “reassurance markers.” In “Trail Signing,” the National Forest Service remarks, “To keep travelers on course, use reassurance markers at all intersections and locations where the trail could be uncertain,” to “reassure travelers.” The text also explains the materials, sizes, heights, and locations for all kinds of trail signs. And because of the Forest Service’s work, we could hardly get lost in the wilderness today. This is how I and many others, I suspect, experience the wilderness in relative safety these days.

Wilderness, in symbolic terms, is often portrayed by forests and deserts. We have the thick, mysterious forest in The Scarlet Letter and the jungle in Heart of Darkness. In our sacred stories, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years before they entered the Promised Land. Later, Jesus spent forty days in the desert, wrestling with evil. In these texts, wilderness symbolizes a place where danger and chaos reside. In the wild, people and characters are cut loose, facing the unfamiliar without a reliable guide, unable to read the signs. On the flip side, wilderness can bring about transformation, where the unfamiliar produces new ideas and revelation. Humans can be nourished and discover new strengths, by leaving the familiar for a time and facing a strange, unpeopled landscape.

In my own life, I have come to see unexpected situations as a type of wilderness, because I must grapple with conflicting ideas and emotions before I know how to move forward. When faced with my aging mother’s dementia, I have felt bewildered over and over, as her condition has progressed—from having her in her home with caretakers, to eventually moving her into a facility where she receives round-the-clock care. Moreover, I knew nothing at first about how to navigate the system of medical and social services to help my mother. I was nearly unmoored by the situation until my sister-in-law, who is a medical social worker, stepped in to guide the family in obtaining the right services for my mother. One aspect of this wilderness is the length of time I have wandered in it—this is the sixteenth year of my mother’s demise. Another facet is the unfamiliar and distressing condition of having a relationship with a woman who no longer knows that she is my mother.

On our morning hike in Colorado that summer when a sudden storm surprised us, we made the decision to turn back. We did get caught in a rainstorm halfway down the trail, but we had reached a place where we could shelter safely. In that case, I felt some exhilaration in finding refuge and waiting out the storm. Yet in the wilderness before me now, in dealing with my mother’s condition, I confess that chaos and unfamiliarity still form the larger part of the landscape. That I roam here in companionship with my family, the health care team, supportive friends, and yes, even with my mother, is no small part of the experience. At times, there’s a definite direction we take; other times we rely on one another for reassurance.

Laughing in Class

It’s the first day of the poetry unit for my freshmen composition class. All morning, I rehearse my opening lines like a high school invitation to prom: Would you like to read poetry with me? I promise we’ll have a good time. After a few minutes, I advance to the break-up speech: No really, it’s not you. It’s me. I can’t help it. I just really love poetry. It’s ok. You can admit it—I know you hate it. Maybe we should just break up.

Of course, I don’t say any of this. What I actually offer my class is a poem. I tell them that I’ve even chosen a funny poem. I tell them I’ve done this because poetry is often funny. And I avert my gaze in an attempt to ignore the dubious glances that follow.

At this point each year, I get worried. The problem is that in over ten years of teaching in both high school and college, I am not surprised when my students express their past experiences with poetry as sterile and cold, overly academic and irrelevant to their everyday lives.

Dana Gioia famously wrote in his highly lauded essay, “Can Poetry Matter?,” that poetry’s readership has been severely divided into classes of academic and common readers, noting that “outside the classroom—where society demands that the two groups interact—poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.” I realize despite all their years of being tested on literature, many of my students have yet to engage with a poem in any sort of personally meaningful way. However, I know poetry is more than what they’ve experienced so far; good poetry establishes a meeting point between the poem and the reader that, at its best, is both warmly and meaningfully human. I want them to find even one poem they can hold against their humanity until it illuminates something about what it means to be human in a particular skin, in a particular moment, and in a particular place. I want that for them more than I want them to write a decent paragraph.

And I’m counting on a “funny” poem to wedge open the door between my passion and their doubt. So, anxiously, excitedly, I begin reading this poem.

Prof of Profs BY GEOFFREY BROCK For Allison Hogge, in memory of Brian Wilkie

I was a math major—fond of all things rational. It was the first day of my first poetry class. The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass, told us that we could “make great poetry personal,”

could own it, since poetry we memorize sings inside us always. By way of illustration he began reciting Shelley with real passion, but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”— because, with that last plosive, his top denture popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair.

He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture, a promise so splendid it made me give up math: “More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.” Source: Poetry (July/August 2008).

When the first giggle emerges beneath the bill of a baseball cap in the corner of the classroom, I exhale and think that nothing really terrible can happen for the rest of the day because a student laughed at a poem in my 8:00 class. Apparently, I have nailed the lisp. Also, I discover that my students enjoy the poem. They tell me that they would love to read more poems like this. They ask me if any more exist. I am giddy. Yes. YES, I say, working hard to stifle the middle-schoolish glee I feel manifesting itself in a snort laugh.

Anne Sexton once wrote: “Watch out for intellect,/because it knows so much it knows nothing/and leaves you hanging upside down,/mouthing knowledge as your heart/falls out of your mouth.” Her poem indicates the danger in courting the intellect at the exclusion of the heart. Her words further illustrate what “Prof of Profs” so humorously acknowledges. Bock’s poem emphasizes the intersection between the academic and the “ordinary,” and the poem shines with the playful way the two worlds inform each other, contrasting their concerns and realities in a “plosive” and humorous tone. A studied engagement with art should not nullify our human-ness but rather increase our awareness of it. There is no checking humor at the classroom door because humor belongs to the experience of being human both inside and outside the world of the poem and classroom. Truly, art often makes space for such worlds to collide. And for a brief moment, in the grip of a good poem, my students and I bear witness to the glimmers and sparks that follow such collisions.

A Shimmering Mass

"Thus, writing narrative—and reading it—is an act of faith that places us in time and space, locating us in a chronology that suggests by its very order both the cause and meaning of our lives." —Leslie Leyland Fields in Christianity Today.

*****

Lubomyr Melnyk has spent his life pioneering a new kind of music for piano: continuous music. "The basic concept," he says, "is that it's a continuous stream of sound, unbroken. There are no phrases of slow notes, rapid notes, and pauses, the way other music is built.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbzU7MT-lHU

Listening to continuous music takes some getting used to. (This is especially so when you hear the music live. The sounds move through a room and bounce off walls differently than they do in a recording.) It requires a kind of attention that I, at least, had to cultivate, not unlike meditation. Melnyk himself has spent decades cultivating these skills: he’s trained his hands to play almost twenty notes per hand per second, and some of his pieces last forty-five unbroken minutes or longer. The effect is fundamentally different than classical and other conventional forms of music. It’s music to get lost in—you must get lost in it in order to follow it.

Continuous music is not built around the traditional structure of melody; rather, it is a sonic space Melnyk creates in which the sound of the piano itself flourishes. Notes build upon and interact with one another in a way that is fluid and almost out of control, almost like chaos. Once you get used to this, classical piano compositions start to feel stiff and incomplete in contrast. Melnyk compares himself this way: "Classical pianists, they live in the music they're playing. They live in the sonata; they live in the piano concerto. They don't live in their fingers."

Continuous music fascinates me in part because it seems like an antidote to an over-emphasis on story. I’m suspicious of story, of the popular push to understand our lives as part of a larger narrative. God’s narrative. In part, story is an alternative to the conception of Truth as propositional—laws, dogma, rational systems, assertions to be proved or disproved. When Christians understand their faith as participation in a divine story, Truth can operate in many different ways—experienced, incarnated in individual lives, unspeakably complex.

But I suspect that the idea of life in a narrative structure—even if it’s a structured unknowing—is shaping my expectations in a way that stops me from being entirely present. I wonder if, when I imagine my confusions, pains, encounters, and observations as material to one day be grasped and threaded together into a coherent arc—I wonder if I’m stopping short of a threshold where life is more unwieldy, but also deeper and more luminous.

When he plays, Melnyk keeps his foot on the sustain pedal, lifting the dampers away from the strings, allowing them to vibrate freely and the notes to decay naturally. With the dampers lifted, surrounding piano strings can also vibrate in sympathy with strings whose vibrations are mathematically related to their own, meaning that many strings vibrate without being struck. New patterns emerge from their interactions. At times, it’s difficult to tell if their swells are real or imagined.

When I live in anticipation of divine narrative in my own life, I suspect I’m living in the sonata, in the concerto.

I want to know what it’s like to live in my fingers.

Instead of a melody, a progression of notes, the notes in Melnyk's music are a shimmering mass, accumulating and undulating through the space around him. When you are in a room with Melnyk playing piano, you are in a room where sounds and harmonic relationships are bouncing through the space and compounding one another, creating swells and ripples in the air. There is Melnyk, alive in his fingers, and there is the music, continually escaping structure, continually expanding.

What else is there to do but listen?

---

Paintings above by Alex Kanevsky

Thoughts from the Air

Early in June, I flew out to Tacoma, Washington for the weekend. It was a short trip—21 hours of travel, including a red-eye return flight, for three days vacation.

Once the anticipation of arriving wore thin and the in-flight movie began, I settled in to the wait. I pulled out a novel too thick to read anywhere else. I looked out the window. I shifted my weight and tried to not bump the elbow of the person sitting to my right.

The disorder of familiar streets, rutted and potholed roads, are orderly from the air. The stitches are lined-up and straight. But the order of the air is also a kind of disorder—the sprawl of human passions is insignificant when compared to the breadth of the horizon. Not to mention the limitless space overhead. The pattern of the trees and rocks is more timeless then anything we can construct.

I didn’t notice when the dusty Texas high plain replaced the luscious green of the Mississippi river valley. Roads wound like termite trails in wood.

In the 1960s and 70s, Georgia O’Keefe was inspired by an airplane flight to paint a series of paintings depicting the view from the window. Instead of a ceilingless sky that is a blue so deep it has weight enough to fill the crevasses of desert valleys and the spaces in skulls, O’Keefe depicts clouds cobbling the sky. More marshmallow then textured bodies of gaseous water, the clouds are steppingstones to a horizon that is unreachable. She paints a landscape void of any human’s touch.

On the ground, my cast shadow is capable of all kinds of things. It crawls walls, curls into corners, stretches the length of a street, and puddles beneath my feet. It taunts with freedom. But in the air, my shadow (or rather the plane’s shadow) runs itself along the ground, unable to find its way free of the surface upon which it is being cast.

Flying is a separation of feet from ground. From self from a place. In the air, we are nowhere. We are between the Earth and space. In this purgatory we prepare for where we will be, and recover from where we have been. We are insignificant. An airplane ride is the closest most of us will ever be to outer space; to seeing our world to scale.

​Giacometti’s Vision

In James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait, Alberto Giacometti often refers to Cézanne out of reverence for his work and competence. At one point, Giacometti says, “Cézanne discovered that it’s impossible to study nature. You can’t do it. But one must try all the same, try—like Cézanne—to translate one’s sensation.”

I find the word sensation to be so precise in what I try to create with words. Sometimes I try to copy nature exactly as I have experienced it, and sometimes I try to create a new sensation. But even Giacometti knew that “a semblance, an illusion is, in any case obviously all that can be attained...But an illusion is not enough.” It’s not enough because one is compelled to go further and to perfect one’s vision.

Giacometti never stopped perfecting. When Lord thought that he was done with the portrait of him, Giacometti would continue it further, seeing something that could refine his vision. Some might call this madness. (Madness perhaps exactly what is needed to create something never seen before, to display the inspiration and originality.) What Giacometti strove for “was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence.” Which is why the story I write in my head is never completely the story that I write down on paper. It’s always different and off. I can move closer to it the way Giacometti moved closer through his continuous rebuilding, and the closer I nudge and edit and strengthen, the closer the work becomes “both ridiculous and sublime.” But that is never easy. It can be both discouraging and freeing.

It’s inspiring to read the way Lord describes Giacometti floundering and how he continues to work toward the small hope he believes is present in his work. Which is why the best writing advice is to always keep writing. Keep working. Even when it seems the work is getting worse and worse and impossible to do. It’s a daily wrestle that requires a commitment to begin again.