The Blues: Another version

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."

Muriel Rukeyser wrote that in 1968, and it's been quoted innumerable times since then and emblazoned on T-shirts and bumper stickers.

It's an audacious claim for sure--which is why it sort of hangs out in the mind koan-like, tickling at your brain: how could one woman telling the truth cause the world to split open?  Is the truth so hard to tell that if only one woman could muster the courage to do it the world would crack apart at the shock of it?  

What I wrote yesterday were the facts of one particular day: Elena and I did go to the zoo; I did have a screaming leg pain in the car; and I did make it to Laurie's investiture just in time--and the next day I felt the blues rolling in. I spent the morning inside the blues cabin, sending out smoke signals.

I woke up this morning and re-read yesterday's post.  I couldn't even stand to re-read the whiny email I'd written to a friend first. What mattered was that my friend had--generously--read through the knots of too-many-words and gotten what I was trying to get at--which was enough to split open something, if not the whole world.

Smoke signal sent, received, returned, voila!  "Enough about my aching leg and aging already!" I said to myself.  "Let's move on!"

As the most seasoned and best writers teach us, good writing is not ego-driven drivel--though I'd bet that for all of those writers, they got to the good stuff by writing lots of drivel first.  Muriel Rukeyser didn't say "When one woman publishes the truth...." She said "When one woman tells the truth."

If a writer stays on the road of tangled briars long enough, she's bound to split open something and find her way. It doesn't happen just imagining the journey ahead, or planning to embark someday; it happens in putting on her old soggy shoes and starting out, not knowing where the path is going to lead.

As I was pruning my own writing of yesterday, I thought about Mark Twain's line: "I would have written a shorter version if I'd had more time."

On Tuesday night, Laurie read the poem that has been an inspiration to both of us--Mary Oliver's poem, "The Journey." That poem is one of the most generous poems I've ever read, beginning with the line: "One day you finally knew...."

It's a not a poem about Mary Oliver, but a poem about the universal "you"-- all of us, you and me, when we"finally" stop listening to bad advice and trying to "mend" everybody else.  It's a call to action to begin--"even though it's late."

"Sometimes a poem changes your life," Laurie said.  I could imagine our poet friend Gary Lane--who would have been there for sure that night--tearful all the way through Laurie's reading, Gary a man who knew how to cry so well.  Even though I never personally met him, I could also imagine Laurie's late-grandpa on the front row, so proud and happy that his granddaughter is now the poet laureate of San Antonio.

All those colorful fish under the surface of the water are like all the moving, swimming things under the surfaces in all our minds, all clambering for attention or feeding.  To just sit and look at them, without moving on right away to the bears and flamingos and reptiles: that would be enough revelation for any one day.  That would be a poem in motion.