Paul, Chapter Two

            I was reading Kafka crossed-legged on the bed. It was ten. I knew I had to sleep but he was playing Liszt downstairs. I closed my eyes and counted the notes. I imagined his right foot pedaling. It was two when I woke to the sound of rain. His pillow was soft and cold. I walked out the room holding Kafka, turned the hallways lights on, and stood by the doorway rubbing my eyes. He was coming out of the guest room, I thought. He called my name. Was I all right? I’m okay, I told the wall. He took my Kafka. Something blinded me. It was not the light. It was his hand. Did he wake me? No, I told him. And then he hugged me. I blinked inside his hand. He never took anything from my hands, always was the one to be hugged. He smelled of coffee and he was shivering. I became lost. I must owe him so many apologies. I felt Kafka drop on my foot. I took away his hand to see, but he leaned on the wall, his head on my shoulder, shaking, so that the lights went off. I had not the faintest idea why he was awake at two, or why he had come out of the guestroom where there was nothing except my grandfather’s old rocking chair. I did not know what made him cry. He was saying my name, brokenly and incorrectly. Paul. Did you have a bad dream? I’m here. Please don’t cry. Paul? He was crying aloud. Tears and saliva and perspiration felt warm on my shoulder. I did not know what to do. I wanted to pat his back, but the wall was blocking. I held his hand. He hiccupped. Let’s go sit on the bed, I told him. Kafka felt wet under my bare feet.

            Please don’t cry. I said please like it would stop him from crying altogether. It was a word that became almost obsolete. It was thought as an antiquated symbol of man having to ask for something. But sometimes I would use the word, say things like “Please eat,” although he ate well. I got him a box of Kleenex and touched his ear. I waited, like he has always done with me, until he was done crying. I listened to the rain. I did not say anything. I studied his shirt become polka-dotted, thought of the day we married when I cried in the bathroom because everybody told me I was making a terrible mistake. Except grandfather, of course. He was always on my side. 

Paul

I wondered if ever he was tired of waiting for someone to talk to him first. Because he always waited. In the hallway walking toward him he would not smile nor wave nor say hi unless you smiled or waved or said hi first. I remember in class he never asked questions and never answered them.

            When I met him after college, he was reading the book I was looking for. It was called Jane Eyre, which went out of print and there remained only a handful of copies left. It was a rare luxury to have such a book in your possession.

            After we married, he would tell me about his dreams he dreamt every night. They were all strange and ethereal to me. I became jealous of him whenever in those few words he told me how real everything appeared inside his eyes. As if nothing was real inside this world. I never dream. So listening to him always made me want to go to bed, to see if something happened inside my own eyes. There is a reason why I never dream. I am an insomniac and in those sleepless nights I write him letters. Letters about what I would like to dream about and whether he is still waiting.

            Dear Paul,

            It is raining outside and I can hear the raindrops quietly drumming the ceiling. They make me think of your dreams, how it would rain at six in the morning and you would stand in this room, holding a yellow umbrella. “It was raining inside,” you told me. How all the books on our shelf dripped of black liquid because the rain was washing away the ink.

            I wish I could dream about you, to understand the parts of you that I fail to understand now and before. To find out why you often sing and only sometimes talk

            And at the end of every letter I would write, Until when will you wait? Then I would quietly place it on the piano next to his dense sheets of music. We never talked about the letters, but I knew he read them and kept them somewhere.

            I think there is something behind or beneath him that he avoids to tell me. I know he has a remarkably good memory that sometimes scares me. He remembers every meticulous detail, about a face or a sound or anything else. I imagine it must be immensely difficult to live a life like that. To carry with you the memories and dreams and times you hardly speak of.

            There is no distinct reason why I decided to marry him. Rather, I wanted to read Jane Eyre with him, loved him because he did not mind being together. He liked to be hugged and was always hungry. And in that way, he was still a child. He used rare words like “lovely” and “quaint” when he spoke. No one talked like that anymore. I loved him also because I did not want him to wait. To love him was to stop him from waiting.  

An elegy haiku for Robert Frost

Who else can take on
Two roads and a pathless wood
For once, than Someone?

George Szell

In music, one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.

George Szell

Even when you're humming. 

I'm Not Afraid of Anything by Jason Robert Brown

The creation of a character's history:

Jennie and Katie and daddy and mama. Me. David.

The question I have to keep asking myself while singing this song is, What am I afraid of? Because Jennie's afraid of water, Katie's afraid of darkness, daddy's afraid of babies, mama's afraid of crying. And David, well, he's afraid of me. (Why is David afraid of me? Why does he have to be afraid of love?) Perhaps I am afraid of love. Perhaps I am afraid of David being afraid to love me. There is a volta in this song; it is the "intense and tight" part that the music becomes an undercurrent of the A2 chord, drumming a million heartbeats in syncopation. And afterwards I keep singing, David loves me, David loves me, David loves me. Do I love David?

By the end of the song, after the volta, why, of course: yes. I am not afraid of anything or anyone because I love David more than he fears loving me. In the end, love prevails.

But going back to my parenthetical questions about David, I want to ask, why are we afraid of love? Are we not brave enough?

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H."

The Integumentary System

There is no magician's mantle to compare with the skin in its diverse roles of waterproof, overcoat, sunshade, suit of armor and refrigerator, sensitive to the touch of a feather, to temperature, and to pain, withstanding the wear and tear of three score years and ten, and executing its own running repairs.

Lockhart, R.D., Hamilton, G.F., Fyfe, F.W., Anatomy: The Human Body, 1965

A wonderful way to explain the epidermis. There is prose, but there is also poetry in the art of medicine. 

The migraineur

So I come back to Priscilla Long's article "My Brain on My Mind"--particularly because I happen to hit a sudden memory of reading about migraines. I had underlined and circled and densely annotated the part about it--for its scientific information and the poetry behind it, how Long also shares this "profound despair" with me.

When we have a migraine, three hundred times the normal amount of blood rushes to the brain in order to fire neurons in the chaotic electrical brainstorm. This firing neurons secrete an excitatory neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which constricts cranial blood vessels. But we migraineurs generally have an insufficient supply of norepinephrine, and when it sadly diminishes, dopamine, which counterbalances norepinephrine, distends blood vessels, activating trigeminal nerves. And alas begins the great and overriding despondency of migraine.

I think there is something else in that hour of excruciating pain besides all this. When I'm not suffering a migraine, I am thinking. I try to do the things I won't be able to do when I'm struck by that mean inconvenience. I am thinking about David--the person I am in love with while I sing JRB's "I'm Not Afraid of Anything" although thinking about him might induce a migraine. I can forfeit a fraction of my time for him--because I am trying to find out the history of my character she carries while she sings. Or I think of my own history and my own song I am living.

Prozac for the Planet

Perhaps it comes down to this: In an era of scientific illiteracy, commodity fascism, political shortsightedness, minute attention spans, and hyperactive media, the only overarching narrative about climate change may be, ironically, the weather itself. We may have to wait for truly heinous and bizarre weather to capture public and political attention. The lived, daily experience of global weirding may be what leads to the fraught denouement of geoengineering, which itself will be the beginning of another narrative about who we are, what time is, what the climate means, how nature matters.

Christopher Cokinos, "Prozac for the Planet," The American Scholar

Dr. Cedergren has talked to our AP chemistry class about this viewpoint. That our last resort may lie in that emergency moment of some unexpected and tragic and extraordinary climatic event. Do people really care about the environment? I can almost say, "no." During the summer I volunteered at the Field Museum, a special exhibit called Climate Change opened. It was not popular. Visitors were uninterested and unimpressed. To me it was quite saddening to know this--that perhaps the idea of a greener environment has become trite and palled. 

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo


On the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination:

I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

...

I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

(Original text found at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/)

At twenty-one, Rowling was not afraid of poverty. She was afraid of failure. What will I be afraid of when I'm twenty-one? Because right now,  I am already afraid of so many things. I am afraid of jellyfish and trains and insects. I am afraid of forgetting Chris. I am afraid of losing, both in the transitive and intransitive verb. But listening to Rowling, I realize it is my choice to be afraid. I can choose to let go of my fears and just be. 

Robert Frost

"No tears in the writing, no tears in the reading. No surprise in the writing, no surprise in the reading."

Robert Frost

Simply true--even from the man who wrote "Directive," who deliberately confuses his readers inside and beyond his poems. 

Elizabeth Gilbert

I have not read Eat, Pray, Love. I only know of its phenomenal success. Emily did a scene of it for Shakespearean Idol our junior year, and I thought it was absolutely poignant and witty. I do agree with Gilbert--being, and really, succeeding as a writer is not easy. But I think the challenge is worth it. Worth every word you put down, even the scribbled and crossed out ones that end up next to the apple core.

Norman Mailer

"Every one of my books has killed me a little more."

Norman Mailer

How do you live a creative life when it can kill you? 

I think of Franz Kafka, the insomniac who wrote during his sleepless nights. Kafka's creativity actually revived him, I believe, because what other anchor could he have held onto? 

Hemingway / Kafka

 The clock is in the cage with me and though it is the only furniture I have I do not recognize its ticking. The straws are yellow and thin and many, but I never touch them but only sit on them. On days when things went well I would stare into the sky and count how many colors I saw in it. These days things are not going well. There are not as many people as there used to be before and I see more colors in the sky.

            I remember the children when they came and stayed longer than any adult. They held hands with each other with mouths open and eyes wide looking at me as if I were a goat. But children meant that things were going well and after they have gone I felt very good.

            Things are unsuccessful now. I do not know how many days I have been fasting for no one is keeping count. I myself have given up counting. One day I was lying on the straws thinking about the children when the manager came to me and said, “Are you still fasting?”
            “Forgive me,” I told him.

            “Of course.”

            “I always wanted you to admire my fasting.”

            “Certainly we admire it.”

            “But you shouldn’t.”

            “All right, we don’t admire it. But why shouldn’t we?”

            “I can’t help it. I have to fast.”

            “Why can’t you help it?”

            “Because. I couldn’t find the food I liked.”

I saw in the manager the same look the children always had. And then I closed my eyes and he went away but the clock still ticked and the straw felt hard. 

This is my rendering of Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" in Hemingway' s monotony and surface simplicity. I actually like it. I wonder what Kafka or Hemingway might say when they read it. I wonder whether they'll recognize their works imbued in mine. 

The Road "Un-scene"

And afterwards he would dream about the library or what remained of it and in those dreams the books were always wet and ashen. When it rained they dripped of black ink, like some sacred ablution. There remained nothing inside the books for there was nothing left to leave behind. Empty pages. He thought of her books stacked on the piano. Books by authors whose names were long forgotten and meaningless to recall. She wrote in them, he could not read her dense writing but he knew it was profound. In another dream the boy was with him in the dank library. As they walked the pages rustled beneath their feet. There was no floor. Only ripped chapters of a bygone world. The man looked for food and shoes. He did not know why but in a dream there is an otherwise. She will come back from the dark. She will spare the third bullet. The boy bent down and lifted a book. A tome. The smell of burnt candles. He knew what it was but dared not touch it. Only the boy had the sanctity to hold it. What is it? the boy said. He could not say. That it was the beginning and you are holding it. It began to rain and the man woke up. The boy was next to him.

            Did you dream a good dream Papa?

            Almost. 

A scene from McCarthy's The Road that I imagine could have happened. I wanted to write about "the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water." I wanted to write like McCarthy, in his voice and timbre. 

"Prose is coffee. Poetry is espresso."

Mr. Freeman

Had to write this down in class the moment he said it. Coffee and espresso both contain the same substance; only, espresso is more condensed and stronger. 

Heart of Darkness

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

And this is why we work so hard. 

I was reading William Deresiewicz's article "Solitude and Leadership," and there the passage was! It runs parallel with Thoreau's deliberate life in the woods, to place yourself where other people's realities can't bother you. I would like to find my own reality, something me-driven. And in work I want to be happy.

Walden

"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is purpose in life, and Thoreau says it here. But there is also solitude. "To live deliberately" is to live in solitude, without distractions, without that directionless chaos. We all need this kind of lifestyle at some point in our lives, to take our time, to be alone in our thoughts. 

My Brain on my Mind / E

When you remember your grandfather's face, what are your neurons doing?

Priscilla Long, The American Scholar

What are your neurons doing? Other than making a million connections, sending signals along axons, shooting extraordinary starbursts? When I remember my grandfather's face I see inside my head his dented lines on his forehead, his dark skin, his still black hair. Does he have dimples? I cannot recall. And perhaps this is when my neurons are failing to make the marvelous zaps and fireworks. 

Dreaming

Can the blind still dream? I would like to know. For it must be the brain that dreams, not the eyes. And if the blind can dream, then perhaps it is less unfair. For seers may have insomnia or rarely dream. 

William Carlos Williams

"[Williams] was willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one,... learning from the first and then understanding through the second." 

Linda Wagner, Poetry Foundation

The doctor who wrote his poems on prescription blanks, who still found the time to write between patient visits. I want to be like him. I would like to become him. 

My Brain on My Mind / B

The Brain, wrote Emily Dickinson, is wider than the Sky, since it contains both Sky and You. ...

The geography of the brain ought to be taught in school, like the countries of the world. The deeply folded cortex forms the outer layer. There are the twin hemispheres, right brain and left brain. (We may be of two minds.) There are the four lobes: frontal in front, occipital (visual cortex) in back, parietal (motor cortex) on top, and temporal behind the ears. There's the limbic system (seat of emotion and memory) at the center. There's the brain stem, whose structures keep us awake (required for consciousness) or put us to sleep (required for regeneration of neurotransmitters.)

The brain also has glial cells, white matter. Glial cells surround and support neurons, carry nutrients to neurons, and eat dead neurons. Some glial cells regulate transmission and pulverize post-transmission neurotransmitters. Others produce myelin, which surrounds and protects axons. Glial cells are no longer thought to be mere glue. When stimulated , they make, not electricity as neurons do, but waves of calcium atoms. They also produce neurotransmitters--glutamate (excitatory) and adenosine (inhibitory).

So there you have the brain: a three-pound bagful of neurons, electrical pulses, chemical messengers, glial cells. There, too, you have the biological basis of the mind. "Anything can happen," says the poet C. D. Wright, "in the strange cities of the mind." And whatever does happen--any thought, mood, song, perception, delusion--is provided to us by this throbbing sack of cells and cerebral substances.

Priscilla Long, "My Brain on My Mind," The American Scholar

An abecedarium dedicated in memory of Long's grandfather. 

Last Saturday morning, I woke up and began reading this. I could not get out of bed until I finished the last alphabet of the abecedarium. This was just what I was looking for. A scholarly, artistic, literary, scientific piece of writing for someone like me, who has been searching for that middle ground, that intersection, that convergence.

"Medicine is an art." I believe some ancient Greek philosopher said this, and I very much agree. But it is literature that encompasses both medicine and its own art. I would like to write that. 

I would like to write from the beginning.

Leap Year

"I don't want to interrupt a good party, but I want to say thank you to my husband. I want to say, May you never steal, lie, or cheat. But if you must steal, then steal away my sorrows. And if you must lie, lie with me all the nights of my life. And if you must cheat, then please cheat death, because I couldn't live a day without you."

--Leap Year (2010)

Bride to her husband at her wedding. I wrote these lines down when I was watching the movie again. They're true. Any bride would want all this from her husband--because she has no misgivings about him. 

The Blind Assassin

I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else--to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know--because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose.

--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Atwood is so original, so Canadian. There is no reason to stop reading any of her work. It is almost as if she knows, in her writing, that you will keep reading her. 

My first poem I officially analyzed and wrote an expository essay on was Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." Atwood here reminds me of that poem. That nameless woman looking into another, almost falling into her, colliding. But in Iris there is something different. Searching, innocent. How did Richard look at her back? She must constantly have felt that she was being watched. Unknowingly, uncannily. It must have been daunting, to always feel that you are watched, objectively but like a voyeur, subjectively but like a critic. How did she manage to live with a man like Richard, I would never grasp. For her father, for his money. Not for herself. And in the end, what did she salvage? Neither her father nor his money. But Laura, whom Iris would lose anyway. 

Persuasion / 2

     "It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved."
     Captain Harville smiled, as much as to say, "Do you claim that for your sex?" and she answered the question, smiling also, "Yes. We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us."

Jane Austen, Persuasion

It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved to forget her truly beloved man. Because we cannot. Unlike men who have businesses in the city or hunt in the country, women are so restricted to the walls of the house that they can only remember. What is there to busy or entertain them but their own art of memory? 

Persuasion

...We shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you--all stories, prose and verse. ... I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness. But, perhaps, you will say, these were all written by men.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

As I was reading this past midnight, I thought, Finally--Austen does it here! I can only imagine how confined women like Anne Elliot must have been in Victorian England, in almost anywhere else at that time.We have been constantly persuaded by men, yes, but also by other women, that we are inferior, we do not stand alongside our husbands and brothers and uncles but behind them. As her last book to write before her death, Austen sends out a final message to all those men and women who will be reading this, centuries later, on the persuasion we will have come to flout.

Character

Do you have any regrets?

What Margaret asked each of our characters. We all said yes. For what will you do without regrets? They make you better in the end. Almost.

A Farewell to Arms

"I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it."

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

This is the moment the reader whips out her pencil and scribbles a question mark. Oh? This striking imagery of Catherine seeing herself in the rain, dead and wet. There is something about the rain she is alluding to. It is persistent and unpredictable and dripping. Yes, but also  foreboding. To Frederic. 

In the end she will die, the reader predicts. She does. It is Frederic who walks in the rain afterwards, barely alive and hardly dry. 

Chapter XX: The End of the Middle Ages

He carried her to the window, so that she, too, saw all the view.

--E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

He, being George Emerson, being the room with a view. 

Chapter IX: Lucy as a Work of Art

Lucy thinks of Cecil as a "drawing-room"--a room without a view--although to Cecil, Lucy is his only view. The paradox here of how they regard each other foreshadows their separation. For there cannot be a view in a drawilfng-room, and Cecil is left as a confined, selfish man despite his affected ambience of sophistication. When he asks Lucy what kind of room he is to her, and with what view, she unequivocally answers, "With no view, I fancy" and adds the rejoinder, "Why not?" as if Cecil should have known this already. As if it is no question whether Cecil is a windowless room, for he undeniably is. 

One Writer's Beginnings

I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.

These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. 

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

I was reading the Smithonian and stumbled upon this article about Welty--not only the writer, but also the photographer. I had read and analyzed a brief piece of her work in my AP English Language class for only forty-five minutes, but that was enough to convince me of her great writing. How as a young girl she had to put up with the "dragon" librarian and still kept reading nevertheless. How she became a writer--and also an artist.

I am done, I would like to say. I am done with words, as I write down my three thousand two hundred ninety-seventh word zephyr. But of course I will never be done. Never with words.

"The word is a flame burning in a dark glass."

--Shelia Watson

1452

1452. Frond: the leaf of leaflike part of a palm, fern, or similar plant


Freddy reared a freckled face and a pair of snowy shoulders out of the fronds.

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

I never thought I would come across a word like frond, except in biology books. But here is Forster using my 1452nd vocabulary! 

Fiction

Jon shouldn't have fallen in love with Edie. But he did, hence the story. I had to read it over a couple times because time is elapsed and Joyce is much older by the end. How Christie was so aloof about her own work and did not even have the faintest recollection of her violin teacher. In that way, she is like a piece of fiction herself. How she fabricated her identity not only as a writer but also as her own character.

You couldn't even be sure that she had recognized the title of her on story. You would think she had nothing to do with it. As if it was just something she wriggled out of and left on the grass.

Alice Munro, "Fiction"

Mr. Darcy Words

In my growing list of vocabulary:
606. chivalrous
806. dapper
819. debonaire
832. decorum

Council of Dads

I believe my daughters will have plenty of resources in their lives. They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad.

Will you help be their dad? 

--Bruce Feiler, Council of Dads

I came across this excerpt quite fortuitously. I was reading an article about the modern trend of married couples sleeping in separate beds by Bruce Feiler on the New York Times. At the end, it said that Feiler was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and asked six important men to be surrogate dads to his daughters, would I want to read an excerpt from his book? Of course--hence this lovely letter to his six friends. 

After nine months since his diagnosis, Feiler has been cancer-free, wrote the above New York Times article just a couple days ago, and is an affectionate dad to his two daughters. 

On Writers

"A writer is on whom nothing is wasted." --Henry James


"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." --Mark Twain


"The job of the writer is not to be immersed in experience but to contemplate it." --Flannery O'Connor

Coming back from forgetfulness. 


I had the best week of my summer July 12 to 16 at Ragdale. For the second time, I had these amazing writers sitting next to and in front of me writing and reading their works. I quoted some of their works for they were all so good I wished to steal them. The kind of phrases you think, I wish I could write like that. 


"I move through life, frame by frame." --Nina
"time thaws" --Kamal
"You cannot simply take down the picture." --Nicole
"dangling from the strings of your heart" --Molly

While I was searching our school's online archives, I came across this remarkable history I had not known about Ferry Hall: 


Traditionally at Ferry Hall each graduate chose an underclass girl to escort her down the aisle. After its merger with the Academy in 1974, girls began choosing male or female escorts, usually a relative or a friend. By the 1990s, however, this practice was abandoned for it was thought antiquated that girls needed support coming down the aisle. 


Today the graduating girls at the Academy process with confident independence in their lovely white dresses. 

“Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He’s the happiest man on earth when he’s performing, but when the show is over, he’s sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future. Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.”

Ilan Stavans, Professor of Spanish, Amherst College

From “The Writer in Exile: an interview with Ilan Stavans” by Saideh Pakravan for the fall 1993 issue of The Literary Review

Amherst gave me five choices. I chose to write about this one. 

I am going to write about Chris, but this is immensely difficult. I failed my first few drafts. I try to imagine Ann writing about Lucy. 

I wish I could say to him, I missed you. Instead of, I miss you. I will never be able to answer Nick's question if dying is hard. 

I have a reason for choosing to do this. In my journal last night I had written, "I want to remember and honor you by writing about you. In language I would like to have you. I would like to keep you." 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet."

--Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I was watching "The Road" when I thought of these two sentences. Nothing was more alive than the father's language and memory. 

Literature remains. 

Mushroom Man

"The fact that there are people who say this will never work is proof I'm onto something unique and novel." 

--Paul Stamets

Here is a man who believes in mushrooms. He believes they can cure diseases like cancer and tuberculosis, clean up the environment, serve as a potential biofuel, and become an alternative to insecticides. 

So don't give up. 

http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2009/01/the-mushroom-messiah/

The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either,
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. 


I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out--at work maybe?--
having a good day, almost energetic.


We seemed to be moving from some old house 
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative


by your face, the physical face of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without stain?


So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth 
and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.


Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Mark Doty, "The Embrace"

Reminds me of Chris. Some nights before I go to bed I think of how he is so there inside my head and why he is not here. There is a picture of him inside my journal. It is black-and-white but I can almost see the colors emerging behind it, as real as life. 

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.


What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon 
so often? Is it


that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me


something other than this
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.


Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out


of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet 
with a decent happiness. 

Robert Creeley, "The Rain"

In my dorm room the ceiling is rather thin and I can hear the raindrops fall against it. I have always thought that the sound is very poetic, and it reminds me of Jane's poem that starts, "I have fallen / I have fallen in love with rain." After I read this poem during my final week of school, although rain rarely fell and I missed the sound of raindrops, I could almost hear it in this poem. In my imagination of Creeley's voice, the sound of raindrops fall between his words and commas. 

I adore the last two stanzas. To me it is more than love; it is loving. And with the last sentence the rain stops falling. 

PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology/Yale

One other thing on Freud--just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, "Why can't you marry your mother or your father?" Now, that's actually a difficult question to ask--to answer for a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said--then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, "If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be?" imagining he'd make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, "I would marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts." [laughter] Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us. [laughter]

--Professor Paul Bloom, Session 4, Foundations: Skinner

It was purely by serendipitous chance I came across Yale's open course lectures. I was actually looking for a free audiobook download online, for something like Jane Austen's Persuasion or Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Instead I found professor Bloom.

A piece of iceberg. He meant the top part. Daddy was telling me on the phone that what can be seen may be deceptive. This talk was apparently linked to my applying to college, but I don't see the connection. A piece of iceberg--hopefully this is an encouragement.

Dimensions

     I will just say then: I have seen the children.
     I have seen and talked to them.
     There. What are you thinking at the moment? ... But I want to tell you ... they exist. I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got across to whatever one they are in. 

From Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness

He is not a criminal. Lloyd is only criminally insane. The only mystery I had yet to figure out in the back of my mind was whether he killed the children. 

He did. He used pillows to stifle them. And Sasha--he was a tricky one because was smart--he tried to escape. So for Lloyd to say that he saw the children in another "Dimension"--does that justify anything for Doree?

Doree intended to see Lloyd, to talk to him about the children and their "Dimensions" in her undisguised, truthful self. In the very end, however, she decides not to go to London. She decides to bring a young man's life back instead. Perhaps she finally finds the Dimension she belongs to.  

Too Much Happiness

In the bookstore I considered buying Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. It was on the top of a very tall shelf. I  reached for it on the ladder and carefully considered the weight of its pages. There on the ladder I read the first pages of the last chapter. Of course I could tell it was going to be a good story. But I did not buy it and I did not regret it. Because three weeks ago I got it from my favorite teacher.

Last

"Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts."

Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Chapter Eighteen.

     After I hung up the phone, it rang a minute later.
     "You think I'm talented, don't you?" Lucy said.
     "Of course I think you're talented."
     "Okay. I was just checking. Good-bye again."
     And then she was gone.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

The last chapter. The last words Ann exchanges with Lucy. I can't remember what my last words were to Chris. It was a Thursday evening the last time I saw him. I wish I had been a better friend. 

Is it okay to write letters to a dead person? One reason a letter can be mailed back to you is the recipient's death. I don't know if that's right or fair. But I guess you can't do anything about it. 

Written in my journal a week ago. Because I don't want to fail my memory. 

Chapter Seventeen

     "Don't stop loving me."

     "I'm always going to love you."

     "Don't stop taking my calls."

     "Lucy," I said. "Check your answering machine sometime. I call you every day."

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Chapter Sixteen 2

"I have the most extraordinary friends. I've never really understood why everyone has been so good to me, and now I can interview them, talk to them and see." Then she added as a gift, "I'll write a whole chapter about you."
     "I could write an entire book about you," I said, and laughed.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

She did. Beautifully. 

Chapter Sixteen

     When we were walking home, she softened and maybe felt a little sorry for making a scene, if only because she knew I hated scenes. She twisted her arm around mine. "Don't listen to me," she said. "I just get going sometimes. You know that."
     "I do."
     She pushed her head into my shoulder. "And you still love me?"
     I was still mad at her, furious with her, but that wasn't the question. The question was did I love her. And I always loved her.

--From Ann Pathcett's Truth and Beauty 

Such friendships are rare. The kind you always love and understand and forgive. The kind you see each other in years at a restaurant and slip into a conversation so easily. A first and singular and irreplaceable kind of friendship.

I pride myself in having one. And one is enough because Lizzy is brilliant and funny and of course, the only person I know who has read almost every Russian author's thick and impossibly long books. The letters and phone calls cover our fourteen-hour distance and although I have not seen her in--I lost count--six years, I know she's always there for me. 

Chapter Fifteen

Dearest Anngora, my cynical pirate of the elusive heart, my self winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace, how are you?

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy's letter to Ann. One beautiful way to ask Ann about the depth of her life.