Chapter Ten 2

     "I didn't remember it," Lucy said pointedly. "I wrote it. I'm a writer."
     This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Because it is so good I write another post on chapter ten. 

 There are those gaps you have to fill in. There are those names and faces and places and things you do not remember precisely. So nonfiction cannot be completely true. But what Lucy wrote was true nonfiction. She was a cancer survivor, yes, but a better writer first.

Chapter Ten

Lucy's favorite rhetorical question was, "Will I ever have sex again?"

     Lucy had plenty of other questions as well: "Do you love me?" "You think I'm pretty, don't you?" "Do you think I'm a good writer?" But the odd part was they were all so interchangeable. What all of the questions really meant was, "Everything is going to be okay, right?" 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beuaty

Lucy wanted to make sure she was going to be all right in the end. Lucy had her question answered in complete affirmation by Ann, almost all the time without any objection to why she was asked so many times a day and why so many variations? I can only imagine how hard it must be to have a face that is constantly changing. How confounding you would find yourself before a mirror and see how the face you remember from last week is replaced by a new one. So you don't know who you are, really. There is no connection between your face and your name. But you would be special--to be on TV and have friends all around you and be a bestselling writer. To be Lucy Grealy. 

Chapter Nine

     "I'm ugly," she said.
     "You aren't ugly."
     "I'm ugly and I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life."
     "Listen to me, pet. What you're going through is awful, it's really awful, but it isn't a judgment on your future. You aren't ugly and you aren't going to be alone forever just because things didn't work out with this guy."

     --From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy always wanted to be loved. And for that, she thought being beautiful was what it required. Lucy kept thinking she would never be picked up by anyone and thought that it was because she was ugly. I don't think she is ugly. She has eyes that draws you in and I can almost see her long lashes make shadows as she reads or writes a famous book. She is like a child. I think she is quite beautiful. 

Chapter Eight

There are trails to walk in the woods and rules that say if you pass someone during the day you may simply drop your gaze to the path as a signal you are thinking seriously about your work and do not wish to engage in conversation.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I like this rule. I don't think it's rude because I would like to walk on those trails and see what it feels like to drop my gaze when I meet someone. I can only be jealous of Lucy and Ann whom I imagine to have walked those trails countless times and dropped gazes at many other writers at Yaddo. 

Chapter Seven

Levi did kill himself after all, but it interests me greatly precisely because I am at a total loss to describe how I am different, how what I know now differs from what I knew then. This is a language problem: the disparity between the two selves, between the two sets of truths, is very real and clear to me, yet my ability to control this knowledge in any sort of narrative or verbal way veers off constantly. 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beatuy, an excerpt from Lucy's letter to Ann

Lucy comes to believe that there are some people out there who has suffered far more pain than she did. Levi is one of them. And here in her letter, Lucy is trying to find out the subtle difference "between the two sets of truths"--that separates her accusations of ingratitude towards others and her own lack of gratitude for what she already has: life. Later, in her book Autobiography of a Face, Lucy writes a very truthful and beautiful story of herself, ultimately about that difference, with stupendous poignancy. 

She did not veer off. 

Chapter Six

     As much as Lucy liked my friends, it was important for her to know at every moment that she was my uncontested favorite. There was nothing subtle in her methodology. When we had lunch with Elizabeth, Lucy would inevitably leave her chair at some point during the meal and come and sit in my lap.
     ..."Do you love me?" she said.
     "Of course I love you."
     "Best?"
     "Yes best, but you are crushing my thigh."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy has been frozen in her ten-year-old self; she is like a child even in her mid-twenties. She wants to be loved and she wants that love to be expressed to her directly. She asks for it, too, like a child. 

I used to be like Lucy. Did not want to feel less important. Asked the same question Lucy did to Ann, except I asked mom and hoped and hoped I was far more important and lovable than--well, of course--my younger brother. 

Chapter Five

There on Scottish TV in the dead of night was Allan Gurganus, talking about the publication of his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Allan had been my most important teacher in college. He was the person who had taught me to write. Now he was there in the living room in Aberdeen, handsome in his bow tie, calmly discussing his life as a writer. ... I decided then and there that I would be like Lucy. I would be like Allan. I vowed that I would write my way into another life. I, too, would try for everything.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Ann says she decided to try for everything by becoming a writer. She doesn't say she would try everything; there is a distinction, I think, that Ann adds the preposition "for." 

I know Ann is not happy on page 71. She has gone through so much with Lucy and without her. She is twenty-five and divorced. She is broke. She is a waitress in Tennessee. She does not write much, save her letters to Lucy. And here Ann decides to become a writer, to "try for everything." For Lucy. 

Chapter Four

     One night after work I was sitting on the edge of my mother's bed, reading her Lucy's letter.
     "Save all of those," she told me when I was finished.
     "I save some of them," I said, but she and I both knew I never was much on saving anything.
     My mother said it again. I was to save them all. "Someday you'll both be famous writers," she said. "And these letters will be very important to you."

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I save those long letters from friends faraway. I tuck them inside my journal. They are the extra pages of my book, and the book has become quite thick and ajar since I've tucked them all in. 

I love letters. I love photographs. Anything that contains the essence of a person. I even keep the article about open source with daddy's picture in it, even though I have no technological understanding of what great work he does. I keep your emails too, Mrs. Bell! (I know--this is beginning to sound like some fan letter...) 

I'm glad Ann read Lucy's letter to Mrs. Patchett. I'm glad Mrs. Patchett told her daughter to save them. I wonder how she knew Ann and Lucy were both going to be famous. She was more right than the fortune teller who told Ann she was forever going to be with Dennis (whom she divorced a year after their marriage) and told Lucy nobody's ever going to find her (Ann did!). I should listen to my mom more. 

Chapter Three

Grief isn't something to 'be gotten through.' It has no life of its own like that, it's just plain and simply there. It's one of the things which tells us we're human. It's funny, but I'm always forgetting I had cancer. It seems like a different person that happened to. ...
     It's much the same with my father. Like the chemo he comes back to haunt me all the time, but it's often a detached sort of haunting. Or it is very emotional, very joyous. That might sound odd, but often I feel better able to live and love life through remembering my father. James Tate has a wonderful poem about his father called "The Lost Pilot" (also the name of the book); have you ever read it? It's about the advantages (I don't mean to be crude, using that word) of his father's early death, how now as an adult he realizes his father would already be dead, or very old and decrepit. I have a very pure image of my own father, one that is almost a myth. It has more to do with me than with him. 

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

One of the letters from Lucy that Patchett kept. Or I should call her Ann. Reading her memoir brings me very close to her. Like I've known her at Sarah Lawrence or in Iowa or Nashville or the TGI Friday's she waited tables at. So I shall call her Ann. 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177311 

Probably Ann has already read this poem. I just finished reading it. It's lovely. I'm listening to him now. I think in every person who was once a child there is an image of whoever was dear to him or her kept frozen in time. I'm reminded of this frozen image. 

Chapter Two

     "You girls pick up hitchhikers?"
     "I do," Lucy said, meaning that if she had a car she certainly would.
     He nodded and we watched the back of his head, his long ponytail caught up in a greasy knot. "I tried to hitch from Chicago to Cedar Rapids one time," he told us. "Didn't have enough money for a bus ticket. I started walking on the interstate and not one person stopped for me. Nobody. Ended up having to walk the whole way. It took me three days and I'll tell you, it was cold. Not one person cared if I needed help."
     We were all silent. I didn't know whether or not I should apologize, since I was sure I wouldn't have picked him up either.
     "You got to stop for people," he said, punctuating every word. "That's what you owe me for this ride. You have to pick up somebody else up. Do you understand me? Pick them up no matter what they look like."

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wonder if I ever picked anyone up. I remember my first time skiing. I was too scared to go down the hill. But then somebody held my hand. He was not like my kidnapper when I was six in any way. (By then I knew how to distinguish a kind stranger from a kidnapper.) He held my hand and went down the hill with me and told me, "this is what it is to ski." That this kind stranger who came to my rescue was a middle-aged African American man contains something anthropologically important. He picked me up.

Antique

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed.
It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

--Robert Pinsky's "Antique"

I had meant to post this poem since a long time ago. I don't know why I forgot to. There is something in its meaning I wish to understand better. Like drowning in a fire and burning in a river. Of having you. Who are you? What does it mean to have someone? And I am left hanging, bereft of a verb in the twelfth line. (Yet I did not come to know this until the third time I read it.) So the frame must be more beautiful than you for that someone in the horrid future buys the picture, but why are you being studied so, that he will keep you? And the verb harbor. Harbor: v. 1. to keep (a thought or feeling, typically a negative one) in one's mind, esp. secretly 2. to give a home or shelter to. You must have lost the battle and hence  become anonymous--perhaps why your are less beautiful. But are you alive? Or are you kept alive by that someone--become an antique relic of a past? 

March 24, 2010

I want to right write all over the page with feverish speed and intensity, like how I imagine Beethoven to have written his music. I wish I wouldn't hesitate too much lest I misspell or write crookedly. I wish this ink were infinite and time irrelevant to the clock. I wish my hand would never fail this pen. I wish this pen would never fail you--my reader.
     "But perfection is my enemy." --Francesca Battistelli's "Free"

Journal entry dated March 24, 2010

It's so funny I misspelled "write" the first time I wrote this. Perhaps I wished to write right. 

Sea Level

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us


all these years—

the dry, white spot that opens like a moon at the back of the throat


the quieted tongue, the last of all words.

Our ever-faithful dinner guest—who kept her wet fingers lined up at the edge


of the world, who politely folded and refolded her napkin—stops 


passing the peas, leans back quietly into her chair to watch

what we'll do now. She's done, the sea quits, stands without comment on the shore, is


just another dumb, beautiful animal considering the cliff, the final leap 


back into itself.

At least say we were among those who kept the conversation up for so long—


you and I handed always and never back and forth again and again

while our arms distressed the surface.


Let's just say the table was too large, that we lifted the heaviest dish


and got tired—

that only the ocean knows how to spoon salt over a great distance


under any kind of light. 

--"Sea Level" by Kim Van Voorhees

Mrs. Bell, you're finally published! I was doing calculus drawing the polar curve of r=4sin2x when I suddenly remembered to google you! I listened to you reading it and I read it again (and again) and your poem is just lovely--I am officially your fan. I am going to write it in my journal tonight and will probably be very tempted to rip it out and keep it in my pocket or something--or I might even memorize it. But that's okay with you, right, because I'm your fan? 

http://www.slate.com/id/2253446/#add-comment  

Listening to Ann Patchett

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1892114  

I am listening to Ann Patchett talk about her memoir, about Lucy Grealy.
"I don't think this is a sad book. I think this book is about loving someone who lived to be thirty-nine years old and really, really accomplished a lot."

I should have bought Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face. 

Truth and Beauty

About Ann Patchett's friendship with Lucy Grealy.

Who is Lucy Grealy?

When I flip over her book, my gaze meets with a woman who looks sophisticated yet sad. The sadness comes from her mouth, which is a little crooked, and her jaw is somewhat misplaced. But there is depth in her eyes that one cannot easily swim out of. Lucy Grealy, the caption reads. But this is only her name.

History of a Disturbance

You said, "Do you love me?" Your voice was flirtatious, easy--you weren't asking me to put a doubt to rest. ... I said nothing. ... What was wrong with me? Did I love you? Of course I loved you. But to ask me just then, as I was taking in the night... Besides, what did the words mean?

     And if I hesitated, it was also because of you. There you were in the house. Already we existed in a courteous dark silence trembling with your crushed-down rage. How could I explain to you that words no longer meant what they once had meant, that they no longer meant anything at all?

--From Steven Millhauser's "Dangerous Laughter"

So here the healthy and successful forty-three-year-old man tries to tell Elena that words became meaningless to him. But how does he explain to his wife in words when the very act requires enough words to understand? She is undeniably confused, angry, stressed, in denial. And I don't believe he actually tells her, or even writes a letter. Perhaps he is talking in his mind, for words formed in that sacred space remains in that sacred space unless told or written. And so Elena never really gets to understand her husband's sudden loss of words. 

I must say the book is a little bit puffy. The pages are wavy and has another coat of thickness, a touch of antiquity, almost.

On Chesil Beach

"Then came a searchingly expressive Adagio of consummate beauty and spiritual power. Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself."
     And even if Edward had read that review, he could not have known--no one knew but Florence--that as the house lights came up, and as the dazed young players stood to acknowledge that rapturous applause, the first violinist could not help her gaze traveling to the middle of the third row, to seat 9C.

--From Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

Why did Edward forget Florence? Why did he not come to her debut performance and sit in seat 9C as he promised? How could he let her down when she played with every pulse in her heart? I was disappointed in Edward. And I can only imagine how much he hurt Florence. Because she played not as if she was in love with life itself, but with Edward only. And she wanted him to know that, but he wasn't there. Didn't even read the review. And how infinitely sad the narrator, to tell this story to me. 

How funny one must think to open the fridge in the morning and find a book lying next to last night's dinner. But that was what my science teacher in middle school told me to do: put a wet book in the fridge overnight and it will dry without wrinkles. So my water bottle leaked and soaked Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter, which happens to be a library book. I think the fridge idea worked. A little. Because I was too impatient to wait a whole day so I just took it out only after a few hours.

The Room in the Attic

He himself would love to have a nice little breakdown, to use that word, though frankly he'd prefer to call it a fix-up, but he suffered from an embarrassing case of perfect health, he couldn't even manage to catch a cold, something must be wrong with him. --From Steven Millhauser's "The Room in the Attic"

My brother used to be very sick once. Had fevers and I couldn't see him for a while. He got better, eventually, but I wondered why I was too healthy. Had perfect memory of names, faces, time, places. But it's funny one day during spring break I woke up thinking: "It would be so weird if you wake up one day and think you skipped a day. Either you overslept or just don't remember." Common symptoms of junioritis.