Monday Night Writing Group

What are the chances that in a group of six women, we'd have two Charlottes and two Janets?   We do!

Two were unable to come tonight, but the four who were here let me take photos in my Daily Collect App--and here they are, four lively wonderful friends!

One is spending the night--my second guest since we made a guest room, the first being Mary Elizabeth.

The playhouse is complete!

What Her Body Thought: Susan Griffin

This is a brilliant book about the ways the body thinks, what it feels, what it remembers, and what it wishes for.

Susan Griffin writes about repressed memories from childhood,  how healing it is to bring them out of repression, into the light. But the memories that contributed to her debilitation illness are not repressed at all; she remembers them in her mind and her body.

She also writes about suppressed memories--the things a person actually remembers but chooses for one reason or another to keep to herself.  She was abandoned by an alcoholic mother.  The memories were too shameful to share at the time they were happening and for many years afterwards.

The body of a democracy experiences desires as well.  (I'd never thought of it like that before.)  After describing the trauma within her body and within her family, she writes:

"I can feel it in myself now. A longing in my body for a kind of fluidity, a relaxation of boundaries, for trust to be the medium of my existence.  A desire for commerce aimed not at profit but as a way of being, as in the ecology of the forest, a valley, or the larger body of earth, which contains us.  Can a political body long too and, even unaware of its wishes, consume itself chasing phantoms of desire?"

What affects the individual body shapes the way it moves about in the world.  The diseases it is prey to, its gestures and postures, its voice.  What it chooses to do for pleasure; what it avoids.

Imagine that that may also be true of a nation's body, or a village's, or a continent's:  the boundaries we erect, the injustices we accept or overlook, how the powerful regard and treat the less powerful, the collective vision we carry about who we are.

I will be thinking about these pages for a long time, and I'll read certain sections again.  In some places,  Griffin's writing style borders on tedious, but overall, it is a profound, haunting, and unforgettable book.

My friend, Deb Pena

Deb and I had a great afternoon and dinner--and we scratched the surface at least in catching up!

She's teaching at UTSA and working on a book based on her dissertation about Caroline Miller, the Georgia Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Lamb in His Bosom.

While Margaret Mitchell, the other Georgia Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Gone with the Wind, received much acclaim, Miller is all but forgotten.  Deb is hoping to bring back her unpublished novels and renew interest in her writing.  It was fascinating to hear about Miller's work and life--and to hear about Deb's journey to resurrect a former writer from our shared home state.

 

Secrets and Lies

Untold secrets.  Truth and lies.  Without these, we'd have little literature.

On Friday night, I planned to start watching a film Gerlinde recommended, then go to sleep: The Retrieval.  I thought I'd watch just enough to get hooked, then finish watching today.  Like a  good book, I couldn't put it down.  It's a beautiful film that moves slowly along the ground, yet the closeup shots of the faces of the main characters takes you into every conflicting feeling.  This is a film I'll definitely watch again.

After it ended, I saw "If you liked this film, you'll like...."

It was after midnight, but again I thought I'd watch just enough of The Human Stain to jostle me out of the Civil War era film.  Again, I wound up watching the whole story.  Based on a novel by Phillip Roth, it centers around a powerful secret--and how that secret impacts the main character's entire life.

Tonight, Freda and I went to see Far From the Madding Crowd--an excellent film version of the Hardy novel I haven't read since high school.  Sometimes secrets are what we don't admit to ourselves.

I'd like to read the novels on which these films are based.  I think now of how I read certain books in high school without understanding or having a big enough view of the world to understand them.  I read voraciously.  I lugged books home from the library and stayed up late night reading.  But at the time, I didn't understand the universal themes that drove the plots.

"Let's Celebrate the Art of Clutter" by Dominique Brown

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/lets-celebrate-the-art-of-clutter.html?_r=0

An excerpt:

It is time to celebrate the gentle art of clutter. We live, and we pick up things along the way: the detritus of adventure; the vessels of mealtimes; the books and music of a life of the mind; the pleasures of our daily romps through the senses.

In accumulating, we honor the art of the potter, sitting at a wheel; we appreciate the art of the writer, sitting at a desk; we cherish the art of the painter, standing in front of an easel. (By this litany ye shall know that I have many books, many paintings, many pots — and many more things I love.)

Poetry of the Unwanted

I love wandering around on Saturday mornings, stopping at moving and garage and yard sales!

I've always thought of it as a bit poetic, "words" of what the former owners wanted scattered randomly on tables. This morning, I found an assortment of perfectly wonderful things, the whole bill totaling $21 at one sale, $8 at another:

Picture frames and wrapping paper in its original cellophane; a name-brand red and white polka dot raincoat for a dollar, a white shell-shaped chip and dip bowl from Italy for another dollar, a lamp, a bowl with 1948 on the bottom (my birth year), measuring cups and salt shakers, a silk scarf that's probably not real silk but pretty, books for Elena, an ice cream container with a blue top, and a brand new Guatemalan belt for two dollars.  I haven't unpacked it all.   There will be other surprises I'll find in my car after my nap.

Unlike clerks at stores who have no connection to their wares, sellers of their own stuff often say, "Oh, I'm so glad you're getting this!" or "I've had this for thirty years and have to let it go when we move."   Other customers see me trying on the polka dot raincoat and say, "If you decide not to buy that, I want it."

Freda and I are going to see Far From the Madding Crowd at six.  And Kate may stop by after a poetry reading and I can show her my finds.  Saturdays in the spring and summer are lovely days of discovery and play! I feel like a child on Saturdays.  School is out.  The possibilities are endless.

Emoji

Emoji (絵文字えもじ?, Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]) are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji).

In the past couple of days, I've learned something new:  All those grinning and frowning and angry little faces on the smart phones (the ones that we embed in our texts) are called Emoji.

If you're saying something potentially inflammatory and tack on a smiling face, or if you try to soften a remark with a Smiley, the message can be confusing: do I smile back or respond to the words?

That happened with two people this week.  Once, I was the receiver, the other time the sender. In both cases, the message was incongruent with the smiley face.  "Why did you send a smiley emoji when you said that?" my daughter asked me.

I had to look up the word.  I was trying to use a pictogram to convey a lighter tone than my words did.

Then, as things happen, I received such a text from Mike--and had the exact same response: I wanted to understand the tone of the sender. I felt, as Day had felt, that he was saying one thing in words, another in the emoji: "Let's laugh"--even though the words didn't strike me as funny.

Maybe emoji are new forms of nervous laughter.   Maybe they are our attempts to mimic face-to-face conversation on a tiny text screen. Either way, it's conversational shorthand that can undermine what we really mean.

Day Anna

My daughter, Day, was picked as Favorite Teacher at Falls Church High School this year!

And she was mentioned numerous times by seniors in the yearbook:

And she was asked to be the speaker at the Baccalaureate ceremony on June 18th.  "I hope you don't say, 'This is not an end; this is a beginning," I said--after congratulating her, knowing, of course, she's way too cool for that tired line.

She told me how she planned to tell the seniors that she sees them with double vision--as they were as freshmen and as they are now as graduating seniors.  She' will remind them to question advice, even good advice.

Some qualities are baked in to the person!

When Day was little, she'd ask, "Which shoes should I wear, the blue or the yellow?"

"Yellow," I'd say--and then watch her, every time, put on the blue.

Her mama sees her with double vision, too--the child is right there in the Favorite Teacher!

Conversation

The poet David Whyte's speaking voice (along with his late-friend John O'Donahue's) goes with me on long road trips.  When you listen to someone as often as I've listened to David Whyte, that person becomes part of your psyche and outlook.  His books interest me less than his spoken meanderings on CDs, especially Clear Mind, Wild Heart.  Sometimes a person comes into your life just when you need what they have to say--and this is the case, for me,  with David Whyte.

Often he uses the word, conversation, to describe not just conversations between people, but the conversations we live.  Whatever we do can be regarded as questions--and the questions are as important as answers.

His newest book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, reflects on the meaning of words, starting with Alone.  I have only read the sample of the book on Amazon so far, but the idea of the book intrigues me as much as the actual book.

How often in a conversation with a kindred-spirit friend does the talk pivot around the different understandings of a single word?  How often (among family members and friends) do we assume that we all share the same understanding of a word?  Our understandings of words are built, a layer at a time, by our experiences--and then re-shaped as we encounter new people and places and ideas.

I've given my writing groups a challenge for June, and I'm doing it myself: Make a list of words and put one word on the top of each page of a small notebook.  Going from one page to the next, write whatever comes up around that word.

Writing is, first of all, a conversation with ourselves. As we write one thing, then reconsider the words we set down, we keep going deeper and deeper into the cave of our own minds.  At some point, we wind up saying something we didn't know we knew, or we surprise ourselves by the words that appear on the page.  Maybe we say all the obvious things first (puppies are cute; bad things happen to good people; Paris is beautiful....)

But as we continue the conversation, new insight shows up that wouldn't have come up had we not pushed the pen across the blank page.

We can keep saying the same things over and over again, or we can push through the wall and find that what we always thought or believed about the subject is no longer what we think or believe to be true.

This happens, too, when we move our private conversations out into the larger world.  When we attempt to publish it, when we read it to a group or send it as an email, we widen our conversation to include other people who may or may not get it or love it. But we so want to be seen and understood that we go back to the drawing board, as it were, over and over, until the conversation comes alive.

Reading a book in which the writer talks in his or her own real voice, without too much literary artifice, I feel I'm invited into a conversation.

Truth has many facets and nuances.  Conversation keeps me from believing that my first draft is the whole truth.  It cracks open places that were closed and takes me down paths I never would have discovered without the other person and exactly what she said, or asked.

Not Seeing What's Right In Front of Me

All week as I've been spending time with Elena, I've been thinking, "Linda, you don't see half the stuff around you!"

While Mike was still here, I walked up on the patio one day and there was a huge snake who'd made his way over from the demolition across the street.  It was the first snake I'd seen since living in town--though I saw two huge rattlesnakes up close when we lived in Helotes.

I thought of the saying, "If it were a snake, it would have bitten you."  Mike said, "Oh, it's a good snake. You want to keep him."  He showed me that his head was skinny; that meant he wasn't poisonous.

I didn't want to keep him.  I figured I'd probably step right on top of him one night in my bare feet and have heart palpitations as loud as the yell Mike heard when I saw the innocent old fellow.  As it turned out, he died on his own a few hours later, and I wasn't sad to hear the news.

Elena squats down to look up close at insects.  She tells me my hair is getting yellow and that I have a "big booty"--adding, "That's what we call 'em in Spanish."  She wants to know the names of trees and flowers in my yard and Jan's and she stops on our walks to look at every blooming thing.  She gazes at things my eyes pass over. (I gaze at her!)  She points out things to look at that she sees and so often I say, "Oh, I missed it!"

So it was with that thought in mind that I began reading Pathways to Ancient Shelters by my friend, Mary Locke this morning.  Here is a poem in the book:

Seeing Games

Dancing myself
into a trance is
not my culture.
Though tempted,
I am terrified of
that much surrender.
I would like to be a seer
but scarcely see what's
right in front of me.

I play vision mnemonics:
look at that snake, notice texture,
attend to light and shadow,
focus on form, line,
color, tone, context,
and movement, especially movement.

Still I miss so much.
"If it had bene a snake,
it would have bitten me."
Once it was a snake, a king snake,
and I did not see until I almost
stepped on it, even though
I was looking for snakes.

See and name: wickiup, circle, tipi rings,
Rio Grande vega covered with cane.
See and name: ancient images drawn
on the shelter in the canyon.

See and name: a stat but
not enough.  I want more
even though I fear what might
be revealed and I dread
what might be asked of me.