More Escaping into Fiction

July 1 already. I've been out of school for seven weeks already. Between the three weeks out of town, I've spent the time in and on the garden, and baking, and grocery shopping, and packing up to move out of my present office at school and into another one, and reading.  Little or no writing, for which I feel guilty.

Lots of escape reading.  I really plunged into the three detective novels of J.K.Rowling, writing under the name of Robert Galbraith.  Her narrative style and plotting just draw me in. They are not as good as the Harry Potter novels, but they are gripping:

The first,  The Cuckoo's Calling, introduces the detective Cormoran Strike.

 

The second,  The Silkworm, continues with more ghastly murders:

 

 

The third, Career of Evil,  unfolds more of Strike's character, and the character of his intrepid sidekick, Robin Ellacott, and introduces a particularly nasty psychopath.

 

 

 

I'm going to cut and paste from the very perceptive review that Charles Finch wrote about it in the New York Times:

 

 

"What Rowling writes these days, under the pen name Robert Galbraith, are crime novels: the closest equivalent adults have to the apotropaic formula of childhood literature, parading the unimaginable in front of us and then solving it, stabilizing it. It seems clear, perhaps, that Rowling feels at home as a writer in a certain kind of consoling narrative. But it also seems clear that she’s honest enough to push back against the self-deceptions that lurk within it.

This feeling of resistance is what gives such emotional depth to “Career of Evil,” her gripping third novel about the private investigative team of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, which (especially in its subtle shift of focus toward Robin) achieves a new candor about the gap between solving crimes and repairing their damages.

The first two Galbraith books established Strike and Robin’s relationship. He’s a big, lumpy veteran who lost part of his leg during a stint with the military police in Afghanistan, astute but matter-of-fact and also very attractive to women, despite looking like Beethoven “with a buggered nose.” At the outset of the series, his one-man London detective agency needs some temp help, and Robin arrives. She’s beautiful, capable if a little shaky in her confidence, and soon enough indispensable..."

 

Again, I am resolving to be more faithful in writing here.

 

 

 

 

 

My Summer Garden

I have not written in this blog for many weeks;  my mind has been occupied with the ideas from the conferences I’ve been attending.  But even more, it’s been occupied with my new garden, which is now displaying the fruits of my plantings and transplantings and plannings.

Here’s what it looked like in August of 2015:

 

 

 

And here's what it looks like now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This doesn’t begin to show the transformation.   I’ll try to add more in another entry.
I made a diagram of my garden plan ( the space layout was already in place, but  my plan shows where I planned to place things)

 

 

I know it’s hard to read, but you get the idea of the scope of the project.

 

An Active and Personal Devil

When I saw that the "Today's Post"  prompt was “Closet” ,  I immediately thought of the closet in my bedroom of my childhood home.  I used to play in there occasionally; close the door and sit down in the dark and imagine all kinds of things.

 

In my later years, that closet shows up in this poem:

 

An Active and Personal Devil

 

It has been reported by the New York Times…that as technology increases, more and more people are coming to believe in an active and personal devil. - Miller Williams

 

The door was wood, with peeling paint

and a china doorknob

white,cracked, spider web of

black cracks, but not chapped.

The door was closed,

but not too hard to open.

The devil sat behind the door,

hunched over a table, hiding.

She was thin and young.

I asked her why and she looked at me

and did not answer.

I left her, but left the door ajar.

I felt in my shoulders

two red tomatoes, like organs of the body,

red balls, and furry.

They tell me to watch out,

that I’m letting my heart go.

Soon I see a small white closet

with a black tile floor.

In back of it waits a

thin cherry door, a hoard of

copper pipes.

I see the door leads to another country,

Backed up by a stone

In a deep summer forest.

Laminate, I think, no,

Lamia.

Enchanted Forest, by Myrna Stubbs

 

 

 

And the mythical beast, the Lamia:

 

 

 

 

 

The Breath of God

Today's prompt from The Daily Post  is  "Breath."

This poem by Denise Levertov speaks to me about the breath of God:


In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being

Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath?  No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, in the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled — but only the saints
take flight.  We cower
in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly
on branches close to the nest.  The wind
marks the passage of holy ones riding
that ocean of air.  Slowly their wake
reaches us, rocks us.
But storms or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.

Here’s a poem from my book Life List :



Merlin on the wire on Bayshore Road


The memory moves faster than the pen.
The merlin lands minutely on the wire,
But flashes off in sunlight as I near.

Behind my eyes are attics full of rooms
whose only access lies in photographs.
The merlin lands minutely on the wire.

That window overlooking maple trees,
where winter sunsets blazed in molten red,
It flashes off in sunlight as I near.

The snowbird that I rescued Easter day
lay stunned but blinking, heating up my hand.
The memory moves faster than the pen.

The morning kitchen silence breaks and hums,
The rubythroat appears, and chirps, and drinks,
he flashes off in sunlight as I near.


The face of one long dead begins to form.
I see his thick brown hair wave in the wind,
He flashes off in sunlight as I near.

The breath of God upon my neck, so clear
and sudden once in one of those close rooms…
The memory moves faster than the pen.

I reach into the ocean’s briny mouth.
My hand emerges empty, wet with tears…
The memory moves faster than the pen.

The Leaping Greenly Spirits of Trees

Can't believe it's been so long since I wrote. 

I spent a number of hours rehearsing with the Lab Band at the Mount. Two of the students and the young professor who directs the band composed music to go with thirteen of my poems from Reconnaissance. Other students read the poems used by the two student composers, and I read the six poems that Mark used.  We put on this show for two nights - March 21 and 22.  It was an exhilarating and affirming experience for me.  I had never had anyone pay such close attention to my poetry!

Those rehearsals, and preparing for classes and marking papers, took me up to the Easter holidays.

At the very end of March, that next week, I was busy with my college alumnae reunion.  It's an all-class reunion; since my college closed in 1973, it is amazing that we still meet, but we do. I'm on the alumnae board, and so I get to go every year.  Over the years I have become friends with some marvelous women who were not even on the campus during the four years I attended.

Then, finally, April!

I had intended to write a poem a day in April as I did last year, but I have not been able to get down to it.  I don't exactly know why; I've had the time - more time than I had last year.  But I have been preoccupied with plans for the garden in the courtyard. Have spent many hours fantasizing about that.
Now I am finally able to get out there and plant some new things, and rejoice that the transplants from last year have survived and are emerging.

Then I've been escaping into the Matt Scudder novels - a detective series by Lawrence Block.

Now, I am trying to get back to writing. 

Again, I'm using the prompts from The Daily Post. Lately they have been one word prompts.

The prompt for April 9 was  "Green."

What came to mind for me was the wonderful color of green which now carpets the lawns and clusters on the trees.

I always think of e.e. cummings' poem "i thank you god for most this amazing day."

The first stanza:

i thank You God for most this amazingday: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes


The leaping greenly spirits of trees where I live:

Things That Have Been in the Fire

Today's prompt on The Daily Post is "Object."   The object that came to mind for me was an Elephant Ear sponge.

How's that for odd?  Actually, I wrote about, and posted a Marvin Bell poem about this sponge in some blog here a number of years ago.  So I am posting it again.  I love this poem.

Here's the sponge:

 

Here's a potter using the sponge:

 

 

Here's the poem, by Marvin Bell:

 

Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things that Have Been in the Fire

I can tell you about this because I have held in my hand
the little potter’s sponge called an “elephant ear.”
Naturally, it’s only a tiny version of an ear,
but its the thing you want to pick up out of the toolbox
when you wander into the deserted ceramics shop
down the street from the cave where the fortune-teller works.
Drawn by stones, by earth, by things that have been in the fire.

The elephant ear listens to the side of the vase
as it is pulled upwards from a dome of muddy clay.
The ear listens to the outside wall of the pot
and the hand listens to the inside wall of the pot,
and between them a city rises out of dirt and water.
Inside this city live the remains of animals,
animals who prepared two hundred years to be clay.

Rodents make clay, and men wearing spectacles make clay,
though the papers they were signing go up in flames
and nothing more is known of these long documents
except by those angels who devine in our ashes.
Kings and queens of the jungle make clay
and royalty and politicians make clay although
their innocence stays with their clothes until unravelled.

There is a lost soldier in every ceramic bowl.
The face on the dinner plate breaks when the dish does
and lies for centuries unassembled in the soil.
These things that have the right substance to begin with,
put into the fire at temperatures that melt glass,
keep their fingerprints forever, it is said,
like inky sponges that walk away in the deep water.


– Marvin Bell

Maybe this poem came to me today because yesterday in my Modernity class I taught them about World War II and the bombing of Dresden.  This was in preparation for our class tomorrow on Slaughterhouse Five.

I'll try to talk more about this tomorrow.

 

So Glad for March

On Leap Day, yesterday, the president of the university where I teach resigned.  This is a long story that I just don't feel like telling here. 

I think his resignation is for the best, but I still have mixed feelings about the way it came about.

Today I was really enraged by some of the remarks of one of the young alums on Facebook.   I taught this fellow when he was a freshman, and he graduated about ten years ago. I remember him in class and on campus as he still is:  self-righteous, bombastic, and obnoxious. There: I've said it. 

and furthermore,

and also,

I feel better this evening because I spent a good deal of time today out in the garden in the woods, beating back the poison ivy and other tenacious vines, and raking a mountain of leaves.  Great energy release!

I am so happy that Spring is coming.

The Garden of Forking Paths

Daily Post prompt for today was:  Pinpoint a moment in your past where you had to make a big decision. Write about that other alternate life that could have unfolded.

Just this past week, I was teaching the story "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorge Luis Borges  to my university class on Modernity in Literature.

  It's a wonderful story  - a spy story wrapped around a meditation on time.   One of the main characters says this about time:

"...In contrast to Newton and

Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He

believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent,

convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one

another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries,

embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these

times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both

of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have

arrived at my house; in another, while crossing the garden, you found me

dead; in still another, I utter these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost."



To me, this applies to the decision points of my life.  At age 67, I can look back and see them.  At age 18, I decided to go to Saint Joseph College, in a town far from home. Had I decided to go to West Chester State, in my home town, my whole life would be different. I would have probably married the fellow I was dating at home, had children, had lived in my home town all my life, and so on.  



If I follow Borges' philosophy, on another parallel level , I AM doing just that. 



I could go on and on , through the many decision points of my life, and imagine my life as it is lived on those other levels.  It becomes dizzying!

Borges has another one of his main characters leave us with this bequest:

A Long Ten Days

It's been a very long ten days.  February seems longer than usual, due in part to the miserable weather ( today we have snow/sleet/ black ice/ rising temperatures/rain/fog)  but due also to my worrying about my university.  The conflicts over our new president escalated , to put it mildly.  I don't feel like telling the story here.  Suffice it to say that we aired our dirty laundry in the press, and much angry response has appeared in the comments section of every news article and on Facebook and Twitter.  I have said many rosaries, since that prayer is one I am able to say when I am distressed and distracted. I have faith that something good will come from this debacle... eventually.

Enough of that.

Here's a wonderful poem by Jane Hirschfield that Garrison Keillor read on "The Writer's Almanac" yesterday morning:

Hope and Love   by Jane Hirschfield   All winter the blue heron slept among the horses. I do not know the custom of herons, do not know if the solitary habit is their way, or if he listened for some missing one— not knowing even that was what he did— in the blowing sounds in the dark, I know that hope is the hardest love we carry. He slept with his long neck folded, like a letter put away.     "Hope and Love" by Jane Hirshfield from The Lives of the Heart. © Harper Perennial, 1997. Reprinted with permission.

Voice Work

Today's Prompt on The Daily Post:  Your blog is about to be recorded into an audiobook. If you could choose anyone — from your grandma to Samuel L. Jackson — to narrate your posts, who would it be?

 

I couldn’t think of anyone at first. Needed a woman with an American accent.

Then another blogger was talking about Sylvia Plath.  Sylvia Plath was a gifted poet but an emotional disaster, and she committed suicide at the age of 32. I loved her voice.  If she had lived, she would be 84 today; she could still be writing!  What a loss.   But since she is gone, I tried to think of someone else.

 

Possibly, Mariska Hargitay, because I love her breathy voice. But it’s not really me.

 

Then I thought of Kathleen Turner. She would be good. She looks more like me, too.  Though I don’t look as good as she does.  But it’s the voice that matters here.

 

 

Optimism in the Face of the Blizzard

 

Out courtyard looked like this today at 1:10PM . Notice the drifts over the benches!

 

The prompt for today's Daily Post was:  How do you fuel the fires of optimism?

 

 

 

I took this from my window at 8AM today.  It is now 3:47 PM, and much more snow has fallen.   The weather people predict two to three feet, and with the wind, the drifts are already that high. I am by nature an optimistic person, assuming good will of everyone to the point of foolishness and gullibility.  I have lived with some suspicious, negative women ( yes, even in the convent they dwell!) and they have made me even more determined to be optimistic. Right now we are having a crisis between the faculty and administration at my university which has spilled out in leaked emails to the national media, and some of my friends are sending me outraged emails and phone calls.  I think they’ve gone off the deep end in emotional reactions; I think everything will turn out alright in the end.  But as I look out the window at the blizzard provided by nature, I can’t help feeling inundated by the blizzard of rage and blame.  I’m only a bystander in this, but I feel the raging snowstorm. It’s hard for me to be my optimistic self this afternoon. So here’s a poem I wrote a long time ago, during the blizzard of 1979:   Blizzard   The deaf snow speaks in sign like a prophet. His fingers remark the landscape swiftly, stolidly. They say This time I am serious. He cups his thick hand on the birdsnest, he levels the driveways, leans on the trees, pulls the sky down to the earth – nebulae swirl by the second story windows. This time I am serious. This time you will hear me.
photo of our courtyard taken in our last blizzard, five years ago.  I think this one is worse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reason to Believe

 

Today's Prompt from The Daily Post:   In Reason to Believe, Bruce Springsteen sings, “At the end of every hard-earned day / people find some reason to believe.” What’s your reason to believe?

 

Bruce Springsteen isn’t the only one to write a song with that title.
Tim Hardin wrote this one in about 1965:

Reason to Believe

                                             by  Tim Hardin

If I listen long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true
Knowing, that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried
But still I’d look to find a reason to believe
Someone like you makes it hard to live
Without, somebody else
Someone like you, makes it easy to give
Never think of myself
If I gave you time to change my mind
I’d find a way to leave the past behind
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried

But still I’d look to find a reason to believe
(Instrumental)
If I listen long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe it’s all true
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried
Still I’d look to find a reason to believe.

Rod Stewart recorded it, too, but the one I like best was recorded by Ian and Sylvia:

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dozauoU4Rbk

 

 

To answer the original question,  I have many reasons to believe.

Here’s one:  a Daylily named “Reason to Believe”   !

I believe that God is present and active in my life and in the world.

To me, the evidence in favor of this belief outweighs all the evidence to the contrary.

When Breath Becomes Air

 

 

 

A book by Paul Kalanithi -  He’s a very successful neurosurgeon and at 36 is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

 

Today I’m reading about this book in Brain Pickings Weekly – a wonderful blog by Maria Popova.  Each week she posts this compendium of really thought-provoking excerpts .

 

Today, this, commenting on Kalanithi’s book:

“Like the book itself, the anecdote speaks to something larger and far more powerful than the particular story — in this case, our cultural attitude toward what we consider the failings of our bodies: pain and, in the ultimate extreme, death. We try to dictate the terms on which these perceived failings may occur; to make them conform to wished-for realities; to subvert them by will and witless denial. All this we do because, at bottom, we deem them impermissible — in ourselves and in each other. “

And  this:

 

“Punctuating Kalanithi’s story are vignettes of those small yet enormous moments in which destinies pivot and the elaborate universe of priorities we’ve spent a lifetime constructing combusts into stardust. In those moments, there is a violent slamming shut of chapters we had naïvely thought would go on and on, leading to Happily Ever After and yet somehow not really ending there, for the endings we imagine for ourselves aren’t really endings. An ending is devastating and unsatisfying in its finitude, and the endings we imagine for ourselves are permanent states of ongoing, infinite satisfaction. “

That image – the violent slamming shut of chapters we had naively thought would go on and on –

That made me think of chapters in my life that shut but didn’t slam, but that shut nonetheless.

Simple doors that shut:  I have closed the door on riding a bicycle, on swimming, on eating nuts and fresh fruit.  To quote Elizabeth Bishop, I’ll miss these things, but it isn’t a disaster.  But it is a closing out of physical activities I took for granted.

 

 

I focus on the things I still can do:  bake and garden and watch birds and read and teach and walk and sing and drive a car… so many things. So many doors still open to me.

Three Wrenching Deaths

Probably I’m not answering this prompt in the way it was intended, but I can’ help myself.
In the space of a week, three people MY AGE, who were excellent artists and beloved, have died.
First, the musician: Davie Bowie,  age 69

Then, the American poet, C.D.Wright, aged 67

Then, the marvelous actor, Alan Rickman, age 69.
Never met any of them, but I feel a personal loss in their deaths.

If I Could Go Back

The photo is of myself in 1971, one year out of college and freewheeling around Baltimore.
Today’s Daily Prompt:
If you could return to the past to relive a part of your life, either to experience the wonderful bits again, or to do something over, which part of your life would you return to?


I’d return to those first six years of my twenties: the first two in college, the next three or four out on my own. Why? Because I loved those last two years of college, and because I wasted those following four. I spent them like a handful of change. So much I could have done during those years that I wish I could return to and do.
I thought I had all the time in the world. I wasted my time in a job I hated, and not writing, and not travelling as much as I could have, and not going back to school soon enough, and not placing myself where I could have met many other people , one of whom I might have loved and married. But of course this is all wasted energy. If I had spent those years in any other way than the way I did, I wouldn’t have the life I have now, which is a life I love.
I think it was the poet Shelley who said

“We look before and after, and pine for what is not…”

I have always loved a Tom Paxton song called “One Time Only”, especially the first stanza:

I spent my hungry young years running wild;
There was so much for me to do.
And I spent cities like a handful of change,
But I never quit looking for you.

And then there’s this Christine Lavin song:
“The Kind Of Love You Never Recover From”
I know a couple; she sits in a rocking chair
Working puzzles; he watches TV upstairs.
She’s got a secret she has never let out;
A man she thinks he never knew about.
She hasn’t seen him in thirty years.
The mention of his name doesn’t bring on tears.
If you ask her, “Are there any regrets?”

It was the kind of love you never recover from.
Even though she found another one
To take his place, She never will escape the truth.
At times like this when the moon is right,
When the air is foggy like it is tonight,
She’ll think about what might have been
If she had just held on to him.

( the next stanzas go on in the same vein, about other people)

I know a man who has done it all; He has sailed the oceans; climbed the mountains of Nepal. He lives high upon the avenue With a beautiful wife, lovely children, too. But there’s a woman he still dreams about; Certain things he has learned to live without. If you ask him, “Are there any regrets?” He’ll tell you, “No,” but he never forgets. It was the kind of love you never recover from. Even though he found another one To take her place, He never will escape the truth. At times like this when the moon is right, When the air is foggy like it is tonight,He’ll think about what might have been If he had not let her slip away from him.
I read about a woman who said she never regretted anything she’d ever done. Such arrogant words always seem to be spoken by those who then die young. So here am I looking at you. Oh, tell me, what are we gonna do? Am I destined to be your regret? Are you that one I’ll never forget? Years from now, will we curse the day You let me let you walk away? Isn’t this too dear a price to pay For the freedom of going separate ways? This is the kind of love you never recover from. Don’t tell me that I’m gonna find another one To take your place, I never will escape the truth.
For the freedom of going separate ways? This is the kind of love you never recover from. Don’t tell me that I’m gonna find another one To take your place, I never will escape the truth. At times like this when the moon is right, When the air is foggy like it is tonight, I’ll think how sweet life could be If you would stay with me, oh stay with me. This is the kind of love you never recover from. Don’t tell me that I’m gonna find another one To take your place, And try to face the truth. Let me hold you close tonight. The fog has lifted, the moon is so bright. Think how sweet life could be If you would stay with me, oh, stay with me. This is the kind of love you never recover from.

All of this is the stuff of song and the poetry of regret and yearning.

This next crazy poem, by Carl Dennis in his collection Practical Gods
imagines God regretting that the speaker’s life didn’t turn out better. In the end, the speaker concedes that God doesn’t work that way, and that he shouldn’t, either:

The God Who Loves You
 
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week–
Three fine houses sold to deserving families–
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.


With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

 by Carl Dennis