The Year of True Connection

Only connect! They’re the words from one of my favorite novels—treasured for its humaneness and its forgiveness and emotional generosity towards humans. Only connect! Do not live divided within yourself, Forster urges; do not isolate your evaluation of others from the feelings and knowledge and history you have with them. Those two can’t, in fact, be separated. The lens of love and empathy and humility is the proper lens to truly draw people into their proper focus; to see them; to know them.

I fashioned my sister and brother-in-law’s wedding vows around this imperative. It means to me what it means in the book and is also a credo I take to be as expansive as the willer wills it. I think of it as a gift. As a prayer. 

Ironically, of course, the whole notion of being connected has been co-opted by the idea of connecting cables, “staying connected” (but not keeping in touch, with its more sensory and personal imprecation)--availability as a little green light (Leah, that’s for you). Availability as an ephemeral state that is not crossed as a physical distance but rather crossed with the flag of a notification or the sound, like a pachinko parlor’s chime, interrupting what you’re currently connected to in order to connect you to the next byte of speech, the next compact morsel of text.

But I’m not on a screed about virtual connection so much as I’m thinking about real connection, Forster’s Connect!, and what it feels like.

In 2017, I visited Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum and left mostly struck with the idea of radical connection—the elimination of borders between people through sheer repetition and profusion. It’s a powerful thought—the idea of a collective humanity reached through an erasure of borders. A recognition that the self is itself a porous membrane that we are capable of extending, of obscuring, of transcending. 

Close-up of part of the Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017. In this part, patrons participated by adding stickers to a white room and furniture.

So there’s that connection. And there’s also connection that I’ve felt in such a solitary way; where the border of myself blurred even as I felt so profoundly, so gloriously, the barrier point of my human skin; the ample rooms of my own thoughts; the tender chapel of my silence.

I’ve written often about the meditative silence of snow and the spell it casts for me, the listening it compels. But today I’m thinking of something else. How, when I ski alone on a lonely trail, it’s the sound of my own bellowing breaths that accompanies me, too. There, the borders of the self are sharp; the breaths, one by one, piercing the cold. I’ve written about my breathing as accumulation; as the accretion of being alive. But today I’m thinking of them as an even more basic affirmation of me. How I delight to hear them, even somewhat melodramatically coughing and clearing my throat in the silence so that I can hear my own exertion as well as feel it. So I can amplify the sound of my living body, be that body intensely, even in the midst of this white landscape that treats me always as both stranger and guest. I listen to myself and I exist and that is all. I am both connected to the landscape and vitally connected to myself as a mammal—a creature of blood and sinew and movement. 

Snow in Seattle.

How often as a child I retreated to mindscapes like these, stacking the verge of my top bunk with six journals and books. Writing down quotes and pasting photos of writers to my wall so that they could look down at me in all their benevolent Victorian-era knowledge. I’m thinking with longing of the time I gave myself then--without even thinking of time as something to be parceled—to daydreaming, recording thoughts of the day, to thought that produced no “product” but meandered through strange fields, returning with stranger fruits. In my head, I was always in the midst of a serial story of some kind. I adventured, honoring where the thread of the story had last been dropped before picking it up again. I longed to be in those spaces, so furnished with the self I continued to discover.

I long, too, for the letters I wrote more frequently. The aimless walks. The phone conversations with the mouthpiece warmed by my own breath. The friendships where no one had to be anywhere. For “hanging out.” For time unstructured and boundless, and what grew there, in all the luxury of that blank time. I see writing as related to these activities, to boundless space, to unceasing wander.

I have kept some moments for being and stillness. It’s the view of Rainier and the water I look at every day as I cross the 520 bridge. I have seen the water as shocking blue glass and imagined the sunset shadows of buildings and lights as a subterranean world where everything is flipped—where the buildings that seem to float on the water instead have a glimmering and quivering twin. And it is in my wandering thoughts, still, on walks. On the leaning trees and drooping iris tongues and merry windows of people I do not know and yet witness, just by walking through. In the sudden rounded stones that finish sentences for me, whisper towards the meaning of intuitions; finish the narrative arc of novels and their metaphors. And more and more, the last vestige of this connection, this presence, has been in the giving of my own time. While I have to be more conscious in the bestowing, I am aware that this is still a muscle of connection I have. Something I can give. Something I can receive. Something I can be. A friend. A listener.

Winter rambles.

Connection in the other sense I mentioned is what impinges on the deeper seeing; the deeper knowing of self and other—the other as perceived through the fullest sense of the self. It’s the scrolling and “checking in” that encroaches into commutes. The weightless popcorn of leisure. The day “getting away from me.” As if the day were a balloon I accidentally released and instead of retrieving it, I can only watch it as it ascends up up up, out of sight, unreachable. Being connected often stops me from connecting. All the wholesome and nourishing rituals of the self are starved of frequency. The wander stops, congeals. The body carries itself, in weariness, from place to place, appearing at appointed places at appointed times. Carries itself to repose that isn’t restful but merely blank. The balloon floating away.

Acutely, I’m aware that shallow connection inures us to the pain of others. My notice should shine truly onto the people who suffer in our world. It should love them more with its gaze, and put more energy into closing the gaps between us—gaps of knowledge, help, privilege. I know this, yet I still disappoint myself at times. On a surface level, I am keeping up with the suffering, tending it as one more flag and chiming reminder. But I know that truly acting towards a more just world requires not just spurts of action and resolve, but consistency. Hands that are callused. Muscles that must learn to do new things. Only connect! Do not live divided from others. Do not forget their pain. Do not forget to help; to know them; to go beyond comfort into unknown territories. Only connect. With that in mind, I am turning back towards finding a regular commitment that brings me back to the presence of real people, to be with them. To connect. 

A month ago, a super blood wolf moon (say that three times fast) passed over Seattle on an unusually clear January night. A super blood wolf moon is a connection of its own, or more accurately, a confluence. The earth in its orbit interposes itself between moon and sun, bending the sun’s rays of light and causing them to appear red on earth. At the same time, the moon is at the closest point of its orbit to earth and appears significantly larger. Home alone that night, a friend sent me and another friend a message, reminding me to look at the moon. I went out to buy something mundane at the drugstore. Inside the store, a woman was on the phone to her mother, “I just saw it, mom. Look at the moon.” The buzz was around me. Look up. An imperative.

I did. A scarlet-orange smear appeared, smudged over the moon with a slice of pale brilliance still visible in its corner. I stared. Went back upstairs to my apartment. Go look at the moon, I texted boyfriend, friends, and family. Scanning the street below, I saw neighbors converging outside the front door of our building, propping up the legs of a telescope and gazing together. I felt a pang of envy commingled with shyness. I craned for a view from my window, but the moon had moved too far the southeast, and I couldn’t see it over the top of other buildings. I took a breath and went downstairs, presenting myself to the small group of strangers united in that common directive to look up.

One of them waved me over immediately. “Do you want to look at the moon?” he asked. 

It turned out that he was one of my neighbors from across the way—the one with the curious cat in the window and the colorful prayer flags adorning the window. I’d often passed by his apartment window, but had never made eye contact or said hello. His father had joined him for the moon gazing, and it turns out that he lived just a block away. Peering through the telescope lens was spectacular—I could see the dark grooves of the moon’s face; the border where scarlet limned to garnet and then to carmine. The passage of light. Of time. Of orbits.

I drank from a flask of homebrewed whiskey and we chatted about why the moon had taken on its reddish hue, Norwegians in the Seattle area, and our Wallingford neighborhood. It was the first time I’d chatted with any of our neighbors for longer than a quick greeting in passing.

“Come look at the moon!” the pair beckoned to anyone who walked past. A young couple stopped. Another neighbor walking her dog stopped, too.

When I went inside, the red disc, that unearthly blemish, had begun to slide away from the implacable, shining face of the moon. The night remained cold and crisp. Father and son had packed it in, resolving to meet each other at an Orangetheory spin class the next morning, early. We said farewell, but now when I pass by the neighbor’s window, I wave.

Only connect.

Sometimes we meet people because of a celestial event.

 Sometimes we are neighbors.

Sometimes we are nothing but humans, in thrall to the heavens, to the earth, to the atoms of our cells and the flecks of dew in another’s eyelash.

Sometimes we are quiet.

We look up.

The border dissolves.

That’s all.

Look up.

What the lens of an iPhone can see.

On walking home in the rain after Alice Notley

If poems are grafts onto sound waves then maybe mountains are grafts on the air. I looked at a crack in the pavement upon which rain was falling—it seemed to simmer—and I thought about what to call it until I realized it was a seam of obsidian. It named itself to me. Something much darker is there, and I’m not talking about the color, I’m talking about how deep it can go, and how in its liquid pool it suggests a depthless depth. It suggests, even, eternity, and here it is only a sly slick in the road.

The tree branches were furred with blossoms; these I reached out and touched with my hand. The rain fell into my hair. I thought about what Alice said, how’d she’d taken her lantern into the bowels of an epic because this was difficult, and no path had been forged there before of woman’s foot. Men, you see, long to think of themselves always as the only one doing a thing. A male writer loves to be alone and think himself alone. Woman are disobedient and multivocal and fractious and other. We are others to ourselves and others to others and essential to everyone.

I’m tired of thinking about how men write or what they do.

I’m most at ease with the many voices, or the single voice who perceives the many. I am tired of your bent, condescending listening, and though it is a treasure to me, I am tired of imagining my face as it appears to others. I am tired of imagining my mouth forming words.

All the invocations of spring have dogged me, those dogwoods. Deferential daffodils; the glad rain; the crocus joys; the conceit of easy time. Call to me clouds of blossom; call to me dread bloom and dread pink.

This is the woman’s season, the woman’s womb: fecundity and riot, the same coin. I reject it.

Somewhere in winter, I was already full in my knowing.

Somewhere in winter, I surfaced from a blade of rain, from a shear of snow. I came complete to the scene, surveyed it, and readied my hand to hold only the most delicate things: a perfect bead of dew, a leaf.

Your biggest complaint is that we live in miniature, but you never hold out your hand. You are never humbled to receive.

He that does not bow cannot know.

A woman with long, unruly gray hair told me she was tired tonight. She had breathed fire, and it had spent her.

A body and a star, in one person.

Even now I crackle on the ember of her burning, and even now imagine a new myth and a new day.

The world begins anew despite the season you have claimed. Imagine relinquishing all body; imagine rubbing out your boundaries as if with oil. It takes a heavy thumb, but it can be done.

Sometimes a hero is not a person at all; sometimes a hero is a sound wave; sometimes a hero is a song; sometimes a hero is a soothsayer; sometimes a hero is a dream; sometimes a hero cannot be named.

Sometimes a hero is being changed.

New Essay Up at The Rumpus!

I'm very excited to share that my essay, "An Audience with the Husband," is now up at The Rumpus. I started writing this piece in the autumn of 2015 and sending it out about a year ago, so it's been a long journey to see it in print. To have "An Audience" find such a perfect home at a magazine I've loved for years is a surreal, pinch-me kind experience, especially after weathering a series of rejections. This was me receiving the news:

I guess the writerly cliche of never giving up is, indeed, apt. Terese Mailhot, Saturday editor at The Rumpus, was wonderful to work with, and I love the essays she's been selecting. Despite my prior rejections, I knew the piece was good, and deserved to be read. Also, at the urging of my friend Carly--whose photograph is included above--I recorded myself reading the essay. Listening to it multiple times imbued it with new creative life--it made me believe and simultaneously helped me tweak any of the language that stuck out like a squeaky wheel in the recording.

Although the events of that spring are two years behind me, I find myself changed by them still. Today I feel humbled and grateful. Thank you for reading.

The Year of Boundless Love

In the past year, I have lost count of how many times I’ve moved: I’ve moved into and out of the apartment that I own, returning only to retrieve more books, which I then rescued at 4 am from a stinging rainstorm after I’d left them in the back of a pick-up truck. Few things could make me spring from my bed with more alarm. As the huge box disintegrated in my arms in the protean darkness, books from ten years of history and moves thudding to the pavement, the symbolism could not escape me—the way I’ve uprooted myself endlessly in a restlessness partially driven by words, but also by a nostalgia for things I’ve possessed and places I’ve been. In the end, you have to marvel at the resilience of a book: after they dried out, the pages only curled slightly in homage to this nocturnal chapter (pun intended) of their time in my hands.

Since the summer of 2015, I have crashed on sofas and in guest rooms; I’ve housesat at least three times; I’ve subletted 5 times; stayed in 5 different rooms in the same AirBnB. I’ve dragged suitcases and bags for blocks, onto light rails, into cabs, up and down the stairs. I drove to Montana. I stood on a shifting pile of stuff in my storage unit, facing down my life in boxes, accretion begun at age 18; it was 10 degrees; my breath fogged the air.

My name has not been on a lease since then, nor have I changed my address. It has been my vagabond time, a time of maddening and joyous and painful journey. But that ends now, at least in the superficial particulars.

As I know it has been for so many—most in ways far, far worse than me—this was not an easy year. Throughout, I made vulnerability my rallying cry, getting back into the arena (as Brene Brown calls it) and exercising the gumption to ask for clarity, to walk quickly away from situations that weren’t right without spending as much time or emotional energy pondering why. A bright flame of bravery, of buoyant selfhood seemed to run through all of this risk, but after a certain point, that bravery flickered in exhaustion, dimmed beneath the bell jar of anxiety over my future. I felt ready to stop living conditionally; the “What’s next?” of life glimmered opaquely, out of view.

At last, my heart broke. After the strain of a year of risking and surmounting rejections, two happened simultaneously—one of the heart and one in my interminable job search—and they simply knocked me down. I think I believed that the Universe was starting to give me answers to that tantalizing “What’s next?” question and that it would be okay to relax my vigilance and striving for a little while. When that turned out to not be the case, it really felt—briefly—like I couldn’t bear it. November 9 happened soon after.

That is the dull prologue. What happened next is actually the point of everything.

St. Mark's Cathedral

Even before this, I felt almost abashed and yet so heartened by the kindness of my family and friends. So many of you—and I hope I’ve thanked you adequately—literally took me in, fed me, included me like a family member in your households, and accompanied me on all kinds of journeys into art and nature and mysticism that brought all the laughter of the year to my doorstep. After this specific heartbreak, I thought about the work I’d been doing in vulnerability and self-exposure and did something the old me never could have imagined. I posted on Facebook about being heartbroken, sharing this pain with hundreds of friends and acquaintances. I’d reached the limit of doing what I knew how to do to help myself and tried something new.

So many friends wrote and responded, sharing compassion and perspective. Most people I hadn’t even seen in years, and yet they shared their own vulnerability with me in beautiful ways. They were open and honest and brave in response to my own bald cry for help. Friends and family showed up for me immeasurably. There are too many to list, but I found myself inundated with phone calls and visits and treats and heartfelt messages and letters. My sister snatched me straight out of Seattle and brought me to the rarefied, bright air of Colorado so that I could see her and be with two of my childhood friends.

It makes me cry even thinking about it now: the kindness of this community that formed around me, ad hoc and instantaneously. I was at a point where I really couldn’t offer anything in return: in my adult life, I have rarely felt lower, stripped of security, leaking tears and brittle with heartache. It made me deeply uncomfortable and I’m not ashamed to admit that. I felt like I spent a year being a burden to other people in my uncertainties and in my greater-than-usual need for support. At the same time, existing in that discomfort and accepting the love and care from other people changed me. I came to realize that the discomfort and the leaning into it—and commensurate leaning into the care of others—was the point of everything that happened; the lesson I resisted at first but came to treasure.

Returning to Jackson in November feeling fragile but the first tremors of better, I drove to the mountains at sunset and wept in gratitude. Accepting help and love made me feel, in every shade and cranny of myself, more alive.

On the first day of the year, I attended compline at St. Mark’s Cathedral, a traditional evening sung prayer service that I’ve attended a couple of times before. I love these services: you are asked to take on a habit of quiet and sit closely with strangers in the quiet church. The prayers and hymns are sung without the adornment of music, reverberating in the vaulted and yet relatively austere space of the cathedral. For much of it, I kept my eyes closed, a tear marking my cheek as I asked whatever spirit there is in the world to help me do what is right and stand up for others. What I have realized this year is that kindness is not a debt that we pay, and neither is love. They reinforce each other in an endless loop. My vulnerability drew others closer to me in their own vulnerability, like dropping a mask and touching each other truly as humans. I’ve learned that love is not a resource that runs out nor can be spread too thin. Time, energy, money—yes, those things force us to ration. Love and courage and truth grow exponentially in both the giving, and in my case this year, the unprecedented receiving.

The art that's moved me most this year has been art about crossing the space between people, or even permanently inhabiting the windy corridors that exist there, fraught with uncertainty, wracked by doubt and desire. From Rebecca Solnit’s Faraway Nearby to the Frye’s just-closed exhibit Dear Seattle, I have been moved all year by artists exploring the journeys we make, ultimately, between ourselves and others. Much of their work has also been about making the work itself—a reminder that in being creative, we continually remake ourselves and re-forge our relationships to strangers, loved ones, and communities. Empathy itself is a making space. Friendship. The symbol made by one body embracing another.

When I opened my eyes during compline and looked around at all these strangers, I felt so moved to watch them in their naked silence. They lifted their heads; closed their eyes. We were all transported—and better—by being there together. I have felt joy many times in my life; I have been so lucky. Yet when the presence of others matters most is not in our moments of joy, but rather in our need for succor. Among all these strangers, I knew we consoled one another and were consoled, all without speaking a word.

Thank you to everyone that consoled me this year.

Returning to Seattle.

To end on a note of pure joy and radical hope, I must return to another crossing, this one in November on a Wyoming road:

One night I stood in the dark and felt afraid for how beautiful and how urgent the elk were, moving unseen in the sagebrush flat just beyond me. They bugled—eerie calls that sound like nothing else in the world. Beneath the ocean, I believe you could compare them to whales.

Just days before, the same herd crossed my path at night as I drove home.

The elk know what it is like to live in hostile territory; their range encroached, fuels choking their lungs; their bodies in the sights of guns. Their species follows old ways and logics laid down in invisible instinct. We have taken much from them. They live in this occupied space every day, where things are out of balance. They dodge cars, streetlights, headlights, navigating the sage. What a sight, then, to see a herd picking its way across the road at midnight. The bull caught in my high beams, admonishing me with his look. I switched my lights off and stopped, snow lancing across the sky. He looked at me, full rack to either side. He looked and then crossed, the does crossing behind, all while I waited. At that moment, my stereo burst forth in a crescendo of drums and ululations. The song of greetings and birth. This, then, seemed the image of resistance. The bull with his antlers holding the moon. The bull affixed in the midst of joyful song, defiant beauty that goes on and on. Their herd will find a place to bed down, however small. They will continue to wander the seams of the human world, obeying the beauty of instinct and dusk and dawn. It is not only the bull holding joy between his ears, it is the joy I felt in seeing him and his boldness. These proud stands signify. They remind us of what is most ancient, the blood that beats in our ears and that we ignore, the world that molded us from its clay. Should we fear that our time has become hostile to us, there is still the radical seizing of hope on the borderlands, the dissent and the beauty that lives in the fissures. The animals pass through, despite danger, because they cannot disobey the law of imperative.

And now we pass through, too.

National Elk Refuge

Plotto #1

Last month, inspired by a contest on Tin House's blog, I wrote three short shorts based on prompts published by 1920s dime store novelist William Wallace Cook in a book he called Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. I will share each one with the original prompt. This is the first.

Prompt: {A}, a novelist, meets personally in real life a fictitious character from one of his stories.

 

To Write From the Gut

The meeting began, actually, as a stench. He jibbed the end of his pen in frustration and a stream of ink made a pattern upon the white parchment. This stunned him. As if he was in need of another shifting shape to transmute into yet another febrile, palsied, sea-rimed spume of words. But there it was— The imprecation of another sentence, written in the sheer surprise of it all.

The smell was that of darkness, of things that have died—or even lived, briefly, in the process of dying—while tipping back and forth in a rhythm only matched in age by the moon. It was of baleen, of krill, that salt sure fish, of secrets swallowed and then made flesh.

While he couldn’t be sure who—or what—had opened his chamber door, there could now be no doubt of the water pouring in. It rushed over his boots and his paper floated down to it to toss there kelp-like, all insensate and blurring the lines of his only-now-just-composed-sentence.

He was sitting, he realized, up to his knees in water, holding his arms around his limbs; he rested his head, tired suddenly; but then, this was a suddenly humid place, full of mysterious drippings and belchings like foghorns carried up from somewhere dimly remembered, like the first heraldic glimmer of a star.

Oh, darkness; oh, salt.

While he still clutched the pen in one hand, he knew that these sentences would remain inkless. There was no container big enough, he thought, no container to match that which only contains. The writer was the sort of man to always wear over-long sleeves; he frequently sneezed, impatiently wiping his nose upon the sleeve. Yes, he knew himself well. Oh he of wild beard and eyes. Oh he that stood in drawing rooms always like a metal rod, uncomfortable of divining.

It was rather a fitting epitaph, he reflected, water still rising. Here rests he that imagined a world swallower; thus he sat, swallowed in kind.

The belchings, the swaying, even the stench of salt death congealed then into a sort of song. Did a tear prick his eye, or only the seawater? For what a song it was, ancient and melancholy. He thought of stars again, calling out to one another from where they spun in a fixed vastness. All the world that he had indeed tried to put down now rocked him, not unkindly, here, in the belly of the beast. Anyhow, he would welcome a tear, he thought, now rueful. Oh he of sentiment and scurvy.

Soon, the water would rise to douse the ceiling lamp, but not yet. At the moment he was still a man living in a story, traveling in the belly of the whale and prepared to bring good tidings to the crowds assembled upon the shore. Oh he of the world-beginning story. He could almost picture their shining faces lifted up in praise.

Thank you, Madame Secretary.

Dear Secretary Clinton,

            It’s taken me a couple of weeks to formulate my thank you to you, but I’ll start simply: thank you for your grace, dogged determination, and searing intelligence while you ran a successful campaign for President of the United States. It was a successful campaign, and here’s why: You won the popular vote of the nation. You inspired countless citizens across the country to unite under the banner of a more inclusive and equitable dream of what America can be. You helped women across the world envision what it might look like to see themselves in power. The glass ceiling did not break this time for reasons far beyond your control (and which I will leave outside this letter), but as a 33-year-old woman who has admired you since the 90s, I feel it will break in my lifetime. And it will be because of you. So, thank you. Thank you for believing in us; thank you for fighting for us; thank you for living your incredible, boundary-breaking, history-making life. I hope you have more contributions still to come. America still needs you—now, in fact, more than ever.

            This might seem unrelated to my thank you, but bear with me. Several months ago, my mother retired from the residential special education school in rural Wyoming where she served as the principal for more than two decades (I honestly lost count). Before that, she worked as a special education teacher in the state. My mom has always been an important figure to me in terms of providing a role model of what being a working woman can look like. My sister and I both went to graduate school. I am now a writer and editor and my sister earned a doctorate in psychology and primarily works with other women as a successful clinician. We certainly grew up with the message, implied every day by our mom, that there was no glass ceiling to our ambition or to our desire to make a mark on the world.

            I learned something interesting from my mom after she retired. She was reminiscing about her early years as a principal. It turns out she didn’t think she could do it at first. She already had three young children and a spouse who also worked full-time. She worried she would miss out on our childhoods if she dove into such an intense job. But then she got wind of who else was being considered for the position and she simply knew, deep down, that the kids she cared about deserved better. She felt the call to serve. And she did. During my whole childhood, my mom’s colleagues were also in our lives as family friends. I babysat their kids; I listened on the outskirts of their conversations about students and teaching; I met my mom’s students at school events, in our home, and through the Christmas presents my mom and another passionate staff member facilitated every year. My mom is such a present and loving mom, but I’ve always been aware of this whole other world for her. The influence of that has been immeasurable. She has also inculcated in all of us the imperative to champion those whose voices aren’t always heard or acknowledged in the mainstream—for who is more vulnerable than a child?

            During her retirement party alongside fellow inspiring educators and administrators (all women!), I got to know my mom the leader through the perspective of her staff. I learned how she led through kindness and compassion for everyone that she worked with. One long-term staff member and friend shared how my mom once saying, “I’m disappointed in you” impacted him far more than anything else she could have said. She built an environment where staff cared for one another and wanted to do their best, every day. I couldn’t stop crying. It’s an amazing experience, to think you “know” someone like your parent and then to see this whole other side of her, a side you knew was there and yet rarely witnessed firsthand as a daughter. You get to see your mom as a leader—smart and admired and capable and strong and relentless in her quest to do her best and caring and tracking down new research and guiding others through example while providing a safe place for some of the most vulnerable children in the state to learn and live.

            When I saw you take the stage the night before the election and then again during your unbelievably graceful concession speech, Madame Secretary, you reminded me of that moment. You reminded me of all the selves we can be as women; the tension that lies between these selves, which is a tension that probably won’t be resolved, even when we gain the Presidency at last. Frankly, my mom will be embarrassed that I wrote this. She never did any of this to get attention or praise. She did it because she always knew she wanted to be a special-ed teacher and advocate. Then, she led because she saw the need and she knew she was the right person for the job. She would be the first to say, like you, that it takes a village. This is especially true of a school. Still, I thank her every day for the inspiration that ripples through my life to this moment. I can be all these selves, too. So can my friends and sister, who also inspire me every day with their unending intelligence and determination. Thank you for so selflessly putting so many of your own selves to the side because you felt called to serve our country. You made a beautiful sacrifice for us, and I won’t forget it.

            It doesn’t matter who takes office in January. This is our world. A world of young people of all genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds who will not be stopped. We have inherited this earth and because of leaders like you and others in our own communities, we will make our mark, too. Yes, I want to be a mother and a partner and a daughter and a sister, but my power is not in my relation. It is right here within me, without condition or concession to any other identity. This power is your legacy. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Kirsten Rue

Small Prayer for the Supermoon

I want to offer up something good to the world. Tonight, the moon is closer than it has been in 70 years. In those days, the smoke still cleared from one scourge. It comes close now again, melancholy for how inevitable this moment seems. A face pitted with countless wars and deaths; a pitted face of tides and return; relapse and retreat. Come again, come again, the moon says.

If it is the sun that lights up the world after the night, let it be the moon that sees our sorrow and cruelty and yet does not abandon us. For there she is, closer than ever before. There she is, the inevitable companion to leaven the dark.

The moon is here to guide us to the dawn.

Notes on Sadness

What do you do with your sadness? Do you roll it like cream cheese around crescents of dough? Does it keep things stuck together, or does your sadness make things fall apart?

Down this whole blue block, snow is falling.

Snow, they say, is a benediction or special sort of forgetting.

I say that’s a myth. Your sadness falls with the snow. It falls with the rain.

At night, something is always trickling down the outdoor eave, timbred precisely to your ear, and yours alone. That is your sadness—as personal and persistent as the dripping no one else can hear.

And when it comes awake, every night, to trickle, there is no shame at all to feel some comfort in its return. No shame in it.

You can call your sadness an event or an occasion—these things occasion sadness. You can call it a situation or a state of being or the way your eye—and only yours—looks out the window. You can call it all these things, but I say, you are never not hemming its great cloth with the fabric of your tears. Look here, the cloth says, I am made of all of your hands, the tiny habituations you make with the thread, the way you’ve hitched one finger over another since you began to hold things, since you began to make.

Your sadness is repetitive. You greet it without surprise. It has different looks and different sounds, yet its aspect is the same. It is there at tide-in and tide-out. It is there when things are floating up, and when they are falling back to earth. There is nothing it is too light for.

Your sadness has its ways. You can make light of your sadness, but it is still the truest thing you know.

Every night, half the world is dark, you know.

Every day, half the world is dark, you know.

Your sadness knows. Things are thought to be two-sided, but anyone that knows sadness, knows that is has no sides at all. Sadness both squeezes small and unrolls with the tedium of dirt or plains or anything that in its omnipresence must be made of things even smaller and more tedious than itself.

Your sadness is the most beautiful thing about you, the star your eyelash pulls down with every blink. It is the thing that makes way station towns especially ugly and fields of lavender especially purple. Your sadness blows paper in the gutter at the same time that comets are fizzing past the earth trailing your powdered teeth a million years from now.

Your sadness is inevitable, like a closing mouth or a mouth already closed. Your sadness is riding alone in the boat made of hope you sent out on the water. It bobs out there, and it hovers back on the dock with you, too. In both places, it’s giving off its light, its shade of blue.

You think your heart is breaking, but your sadness knows more than you. It, companion, is the tune by which you sing your way to the center. It, elastic, returns you always to the start—that first cry of shock upon entering this world. It, sage, tells you that even if you never moved in space, the sadness you feel was the reason for it all, the song that told you what was beautiful, and the song that in the singing, became you. Your sadness is the whole you that is knitted to the world, flowing inward and staying put, touching the lips of others and touching the snow with your tongue and tasting the salt of the sea.

Without your sadness, love, we could not be.

Poem for the Winter Woods

What we love about snow is its accretion: boughs, branches laden. It weighs; tamps down a wheedling winter; sets all to wait. We spend minutes pushing it around; months. Yet, funny thing with snow—you can only disperse it, never transmute it. For that, greater powers are needed.

I glide through on my skis; I think about the stuck and unstuck I do. My lashes close, then open. The windshield wipers push a ledge of snow back and forth, in a V. The clock faces push a V around, too. In all of this, the shapes repeat. My breath—it sticks; un-sticks; stacks onto the breaths before.

For every inhale, silence itself is apportioned—a ration of the chest, the heart, the soul.

If I come unstuck here, that’s alright. That’s alright, this whole scene seems to say. Spring’s creeks are muffled; the world’s sealed up its seams.

That’s alright.

There’s this: my exhale; another return of the line that makes marks against the white. Stack these silences, one on one on one. Push your breath in and out. You cannot change; only grow, flake to flake. Live to breathe and live to wake.

The sum adds here. This waiting in the woods, this tree. The refrain; the wind that gives your body shape:

You are she. You are she.

Inversion

It is the fourth day of a cloud inversion in Jackson Hole, and the fourth day of wonder for me. Quite simply, an inversion happens when cold, dense air is trapped within a valley like ours and warmer, clear air rises to the top. From above, perched on mountain vantage point, the whole valley is a sea of clouds. From below, where I am, it feels like a great hand has cupped itself over the known world, cocooning us in low cloud that obscures all distances and hangs down almost to the point of impermeable fog.

This is a bell jar if there ever was one, and its stillness has produced another remarkable effect: daylong hoarfrost. Usually only glimpsed in the early morning and then dispersed by sunshine, hoarfrost coats twigs, shrubs, and trees in delicate, vaporized water crystals: precise, uniform, eerie. The last four days have dawned white, full of whitened, unmoving trees blending almost completely with fields of equally still snow. All has remain hushed, bewitched almost.

Hoarfrost

The imaginative possibilities of what this word inversion might mean have been haunting me since. I’m drawn to the imagery of an upended world, where sky’s kingdom has lowered, taking possession of the world’s edges and rendering an understanding much like an ancient cartographer’s chart of the world—a curling edge where one can tip off. I’m drawn to the idea of topsy-turvy, of life lived backwards and out of sync: a sky/earth flip; a mouth/heart schism. Swimming upwards could be swimming downwards.

And when will we knock our heads upon the lid of it all? That could be the question, I suspect. Just as when luxuriating in happiness: do our toes sense the scratch of the bottom? There is always a bottom or a top; the direction is merely symbolic.

There's something still in the neighborhood.

At the beginning, I turned straight to lyric and obtuse water imagery.

An inversion: tip the world over; trap us in the softly padded liminal of the dream shore—space disappearing; the possibility of walking into mystery.

It’s a fugue state, and I feel like I should hush myself. My heart hushes, too, not beating in a sharp jaunt, but tipping gently back and forth like a boat knocked by the sea.

The edges of the world blur and contract, drawing us to the center, the color of chaff, the color of no-color.

Tender-shooted stalks of crystal have taken hostage our trees. Mirage of mirrors, of whiteness: things are both at their clearest and indistinct.

This world: replace. That world: swim in. Drift in. Be.

I will be quiet within it, I swear. I will never leave it, I swear. Stay, stay, is my incantation. It’s written in the italics of my breath, made by the shape of my fingers in the cold. My lashes bid it: we are all one part.

Just so, the world reminds: what it greens, it strips. What it endows, it undermines.

Living under the convex bubble, I will flip my intentions at will, chancing where I never could. Take not a thing for granted; forget what you can.

I’m told, above the clouds, everyone does things just the same. I’m told, above the clouds, that we are a memory, like busts rimed by the sea, found smooth-eyed in the deep.

Tree lyric

And so on.

Now that I’ve had four days under the inversion, and the skies are beginning to crack and clear, pushed by the ledge of the mountains, I am mourning its loss. Will anything feel so silent, so bell-dumb again? Will the world once more be upended?

Well, yes. It is likely to be so. How multifarious the earth is; how completely delighting in surprise. Once, I rhapsodized about snowy spaces and their details, identifying what I called the thrum, which is nothing more nor less than the breath of all things, the vibration that the silence makes…or call it the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Whatever it is, it is the great generator: turning us on our axis and producing the visible world and also the invisible trickles and flubs and gurgles that propel what’s visible.  To continue the artificial imagery of hand-lettered cartography—it’s a bit like a great balloon contraption, powered by whistles and snorts of steam that are almost beyond our ken, but not quite.

Perhaps that’s what I’m reaching for: this tangible artificiality that brings all closer and more uniform in aesthetic and purpose. That’s the inversion at work, and its act of closing in, cupping and miniaturizing the globe; transforming all to curio.

Yesterday, while out skiing, my friend bade us stop several times and just listen to the silence. I heard the rushing of all of this. There was the literal crush of a creek, tumbling under ice, and over that, an arching of unbroken silence—the imagined sound of the hoarfrost crinkling or snow sweeping. But really it was just silence.

How good to find it always there: not artificial in the least, enclosing us all.

Today, I’ll walk into the distances that seemed obscured by cloud only days before. I whisper my thanks to the short memory of the imagination; I bless days that engage my fumbling, dreamy love for metaphor, even when very real things conspire to bring us to sadness beyond the edges of the known world.

The edges of the known world.

Border

The Year of Inhabiting Light

The end of another year; another road. Because this is Wyoming, the stop and start is obscured by the drift of downy flake (to quote the Frost poem, apt as it is to almost every winter day). As one year has hunkered into a new one, I am left in that familiar place where I hold together the pieces of the mirror that was one marker of life lived and look forward to the next with a renewed intention: these are kernels more than anything, and they always unfold in ways that I could not expect.

2014 was supposed to be the (rather unglamorous) year of becoming an adult—embarking on an “adult” job, crossing those T’s, dotting those I’s, getting my finances in order. Of course, it veered into adulthood in ways that were unpredictable and often painful instead. Adulthood, I re-learned, is often about experiencing loss; it’s about recognizing the loss that those you love are experiencing; it’s about beginning to entertain those dangerous hypotheticals that our culture so studiously tries to avoid, and that I have so often avoided myself.

I felt 2014 presented me with a choice: to show up; to not let my own fear of being emotional capsize the small craft of hope that I could offer in the darkness. The other choice was to withdraw and let the muteness of the landscape speak for me, to let routine press me into a preordained shape. To be remote. There are two fallacies here: that there is anything mute about the places that you change by walking through them and that remoteness can save anything.

I chose (mostly) to be present, and all the joy that emerged for my life was the phoenix, the flint-struck and hard-blooming fire of this choice. I’m closer now to friends and family; I hope I’ve learned how to love better and with my actions. I can see, too, how these forks will continue to present themselves. I’ll falter and I’ll make the same choice again, and sometimes I won’t, and will regret it. In this inscrutable white landscape I’m crossing, my thoughts shamble and drift. However, a few things repeat: qualities of light; sails; windows of glass, air, and ice.

And so, this:

1. “It’s a good thing,” I thought to myself, “that I’m so inspired by the light, living here.” Some would call this a white-out: the Tetons blurred from existence by low, blowing snow; the delineation between land and sky flat as a fresco. Land and sky as one canvas. But it was within those veils of snow that I could, actually, discern movement. The spindrift, the breath of light appeared to push through the snow, inflating it with brightness like a sail filling with wind. It took a shape, and the brushwork of the trees almost vanished as it spread out, claiming all this vastness as its own.

2. I read recently about the Chartres cathedral being restored in its interiors—coated in paint, stripped of centuries of grit and gloom—and the aesthetic massacre this presented of the cathedral’s power, which has always been to deliver light. Few aesthetic experiences do so completely cross over into the emotional, and this is one. Aware of the huge gothic ceilings vaulting over one, yet barely able to see them in the murk, this profusion of deep blue and red funnels towards the viewer; light boiled down to color so saturated, that it feels, in effect, true. That was the power I remembered of the space: I had been frozen on the spot, replete with a grandiose sense of the world’s great beauty and mystery; absolutely unprepared for it all. It was a gift of light.

3. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Imaginary Iceberg,” the poet describes “a breathing plain of snow…the ship's sails…laid upon the sea as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.” This image is so lovely that I’ve been carrying it with me ever since: a ship held in my mind’s eye, sails quivering just above the glittering expanse, delicate and translucent as a paper moth. And yet, there is a profound stillness in the poem, too. The sailor is struck dumb; the sight compels rhapsodies that he cannot voice. The iceberg itself “cuts its facets from within”—its brightness all accretion and intensification of itself, both entrancing and too awesome to bear. Icebergs, Bishop says, are self-made, like souls, of the “elements invisible.” Standing, they are erected “indivisible.”

All this light; the way it inhabits things and landscapes. Its presence even in the witching hour, in fields of rippled, moon-toothed snow. Its undeniable presence, bending color to our poor perception; the heavy chord Emily Dickinson picked out all those years ago—the “certain slant…oppressing like cathedral tunes” and imparting us a “heavenly hurt.”

Here is my wish for the new year, whatever it brings—a wish, really, for myself. May I be the vessel of whatever lightness there is. May I act as the sail and the blazing accretion and the window, transmuting light through what I can give and bear. May I recognize it when it has been gifted back, and through doing so, keep that white craft on black waters however shakily afloat. May I embody the light through acts of love and presence, remaining grateful, always, for its breath across the world, its silence, its indefatigable hope.

It will be the year of inhabiting the light.

Just Shelved

My Goodreads review of Duplex, by Kathryn Davis. (3 of 5 stars)

Want to know what time folding in on itself like a noodle might feel (or at least sound) like? The prose here is striking: repetitive in a good way, in a "worlding" way as it combines artificial and natural imagery. It's the ideal strategy for this melange of speculative fiction and fairy tale fiction, for menace and innocence. I think if I read this book again, more attuned to the "hinging" of the Duplex metaphor and its overt exploration in the plot, I might inflate my star rating. As it is, I was never completely engrossed in this book, and my intermittent reading only led me to feel that I had missed a few key narrative repetitions that would have matched the richness of the telling itself.

One authorial choice that feels especially apt is the ritualistic 1950's social veneer placed on gender roles and the sameness of families sharing streets and secrets with one another. Another is the focus on girlhood and its own "preparatory" rituals--sometimes it takes something fabulist to truly peel back the insidiousness of what all this can mean. Rigid social patterns are meant to protect us from chaos, but a chaotic Universe lies across that inscrutable body of water, and in the potential of every dusk. We are within it at every moment, and that comprises the most powerful symbolism in Davis' novel.

More marginalia...

In the Museum

In the end, all I wanted was to reach out my hands over something warm, something with incandescence to it. I told myself: don’t photograph the art; experience it. Nevertheless, I left with a field of people hovering under luminous, billowing fabrics; a Rodin mouth open in pain; an Eiffel Tower diced to its geometries.

Most of all, a Chagall window, glowing bulbs hazy within panes of synonym-less blue.

At a certain point I had to sit down. There had been a thicket of Monet branches; there had been a peevish girl leaning awkwardly on her elbows.

“What do we really know of shapes in space?” one of the artists asked. Mark Strand had just died, and he said he kept moving to keep the space whole behind him.

I kept moving.

I watched myself elongate in a tall golden bead, imported to Chicago with marvelous foresight. I am no person; merely a line, merely a moving mark. I watched myself travel out of the room; drop from the rim of the gleaming surface. In the modern wing, I kept reading that I should decipher fish and jawbones on the edges of bright spatter canvases. I couldn’t see them; I could see nothing but an inkblot test.

I laughed at a Miro: two suitors for the same monstrous woman of lobed color. The best joke I have seen all day. I thought of how lovely the Dalis were—sinister-faced poker players crouched at the doors of the unconscious. They are playing. It had not struck me before.

Eventually, I went on a mission for the real: bilious Byzantine angels and crowds with their proscribed gold squares of atmosphere; saints’ faces knocked out with a knifepoint. It has always been my favorite thrill: the thought of anonymous brains and hands. The thought of the blade hitting the wood panel, Our Lady with her perennially disappointed eyes bearing the wrath.

I read that Roman women were all sculpted as archetypes: you cannot tell who are the goddesses and who are the mortals. You can never tell, can you?

There was a small engagement ring, inscribed to the bride.

Upstairs, the frankness of Van Gogh’s face had been newly surprising, his sideburns combed with blood.

The March of Memory was, in actuality, a march of knucklebones and vertebrae, single file to the horizon, lances held aloft. There, at last: the martial bones I had been looking for.

Whenever I gazed at a woman purely because of her beauty, I was informed that the artist had made a turn, deliberately, back to the decorative. The same could be said of ivory-inlaid pianos and Italian grotto chairs resembling sundials. We have deliberately turned in this direction. Lest you forget.

I tried to exit through the gift shop, but could not.

Everywhere I turned, I thought about how I could get back to the Chagall blue. A poet jumped from a window into a cityscape simmering with neon; I paused. Picasso’s guitarist—one of the first paintings I read about as a child—reminded me of a story. In it, famous artists ordered paint as if it were food: orange and lemon and blueberry and mashed potato. They were never satisfied, or full.

I tried to exit through the gift shop, but I couldn’t decide what had meant the most to me, or if I had had an experience at all.

“You can’t go through this way,” the attendant said. I had to turn around.

When at last I left, I realized how lonely I was. My mind had been crowded for hours; I had been standing, dazed, missing certain things like the up-thrust nose of Degas’ imperious little dancer; the long-necked women of Matisse. Really, I had been missing women altogether.

When I walked up to the train platform, the lights were going on in a row and I joined in with another crowd. The moon appeared—briefest watermark—over the tops of skyscrapers. We chugged on, the city blinking down to a spectral violet.

The whole time I thought only about how to get back to that Chagall gold and blue: how to make love apparent in the color of a window.

It’s harder than you think.

Beam Me Up, Scotty

Last week, I encountered a curious thing. The cold snap was in the snap of snapping, tilting towards a predicted low of -17 degrees; a scouring night, dotted with stars faint and mysterious as compacted tears. Darkness lies flat everywhere in Wyoming; goes everywhere except for where the snow jests back. That night there were also lights. And how do I describe them? I mistook them for the Northern Lights at first: an otherworldly, luminescent green smudged over the rim of the town, filling a space normally dipped out by shadow.

I got in my car and began driving. The lights followed. Except now, they were distinguishing themselves as individual spotlights—beams—radiating ostensibly from earthly sources but vaulting towards the void; pointing at points beyond knowing. The cause, it appeared, was quotidian: streetlights, the green throb of traffic, lights switched on above garage doors and twinkling above gas stations. Meanwhile, I drove entirely alone through the eerie, emptied town. Pillars soared up all around me, shining. I laughed out loud. These were tractor beams trawling the raised shell of the earth. These were, perhaps, illumined celestial fibers spiraling from a mantle of stardust both borrowed and blue.

The phenomenon was real. I saw it, and I’ve never encountered the like before or since. Was it caused by a low-lying mist and nothing more (or less) than the lens of my eye, swinging on its faulty frame? Can cold itself pull apart the world like so much taffy, wrenching the glow of a fixed point into whatever shape it fancies?

That’s my hypothesis.

If I should join it, I imagine an ecstatic stretching: the regular made wondrous. I imagine a face beaded with the same cold that holds all the carbon of space in its soundless, depthless doom. Pulled apart and reaching, I’d slough shape and skin. Pulled apart and reaching, I’d make someone gasp below, crying to herself about this beautiful world.

I wouldn’t even know it: no more I in know.

Back to the Sketchbook

I think one of my favorite things about being a writer—or more accurately, living my life with a side-brain that’s always assembling words like a ticker along the bottom of my perceptual screen—is the constant mental stretch to describe. I’m not sure if other writers or artists feel this way (I suspect they do, because why else would one paint the same scene over and over again?), but I think the most pleasurable and maddening of this reaching occurs in contemplation of familiar views.

Today, the creek that fascinates me daily is a bright, chlorinated green color—it seems to have drained all the light from the sky to whip itself into small and glittering peaked waves. By its edges, tall, bleached reed fronds higher than my waist sway: straw on jade. A storm is coming; everything else has closed in with a sense of knitting darkness, and this is the last play, the last dazzle. The reeds put me in mind of nothing so much as the bulrushes in the story of Moses’ escape as a baby, and I am amazed that at this remove of years, I can now understand just how they were at the riverbank, and how they might have been wended into something strong enough to bear the weight of a singular, preciously heavy child. Until today, I could never picture it: I grew up in a place where we couldn’t count on nature to obey or assist.

There have been mornings of piercing blue stillness, the water drawing in the colors of the bank and muddling them up like the haphazard clouds of a painter’s palette. Everything lucid and smooth, but not like glass—like something that I’ve been waiting to describe, and haven’t yet. It’s a poured, liquid mirror, flawed in places, nubbed in places. Roundabout, and then what have I done but only describe water again? Here is where the stretch occurs: at this point.

As it is autumn, most mornings I see are a high, clear amber—the mystery of the dawn already scattered and thrown out to the balding hills behind, gold thickening in the middle of the stream. But sometimes I have surprised it: pre-dawn and moon-lapped, silver-branched. Reluctant and heavy with mist, verdure in place of arid; English in place of West. I can understand how everything in this world can impersonate everything else. I can understand how the same view ripens within its own story and exists wholly apart from it: only to be formed, only to be made anew by my own assignations. I forever alight in this in-between place of trying to forge a truth with words, and trying only to touch off, spinning upwards into whatever can be spun and fabricated into facsimile.

It’s the ocean of the Pacific Northwest; light cleaving through stone; and it’s also everywhere I’ve been or imagined or read or re-imagined. It is the constant reach for metaphor: the constant tug to locate a word and a narrative. It is work that never finishes, because it isn’t precisely work at all. It’s simply my lucky way to experience the world. Simply the best part about being alive. 

On Driving Western Roads

Was it Sacajawea buried here? All the people carrying burdens to hold over the Pacific ocean. All the ways a horse can lay down its head. Roads unfurling into what? The forests of Seussian trees; the carpets of wildflowers: resourceful, jaunty. Outside of Ennis, Montana, the foothills roll into blue real hills. The real blue hills fold into real blue sky. Big Sky. Plains and glaciers. Glaciated plains with their screes of debris. Cows roam. When did you decide on blue and gold? When did you decide on green? The road unfurls into dilapidated farms. The image of a Ford driving away down the road. The image of the first timid deer over the doorstep. And they – deer and antelope and foxes – flushing out onto roads or wandering the stalks of corn. The real cowboys with their round chew silhouettes; rubbed raw, back pocket. And you can still be born and still go to high school and still die in these places. The ladies used to come and look in consternation at the lakes, fanning. You can see where the photographers brought their plate glass and curtains thousands of feet up. A bear is above you; the sunset’s unfurling below. The sunset is a cloud threading its hand over the crags. The sunset is the ring of blood on the trees. The bones of original ancestors lie here. The Blackfeet called this the backbone of the world. Even Sacajawea was buried here. Even she. 

The Year of Living Questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Just Shelved

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bow down to the collage novel! Long live the hybrid text!





My Love Is A Dead Arctic Explorer by Paige Ackerson-Kiely
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This collection intrigued me and I stuck with it, though in the end, it didn't stick to my ribs or blaze through with an unforgettable line. I think the more colloquial, story-telling prose poems were the most accessible of the collection, though they, too, seemed to deliberately elude a complete grasp.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alternately helpful and discouraging meditations on writing; worth it for the portions set in the Pacific Northwest alone.

The Wheel of Love by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admit that by the end of this large collection of stories, I was praying to myself, "please don't go crazy, please don't go crazy." Madness, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, drug use, familial death, and physical disfigurements all feature heavily in these dark pieces, all originally published by 1970. These are stories of their time, too: racial integration, counterculture in conflict with suburbia, trapped housewives, the decline of Detroit.

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is by far the most famous story here, and it's really not overrated, in my opinion. I would group it among the most perfect, unsettling short stories written in the past 100 years. It's a distinctly American classic. Another classic would be "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Corrections and Began My Life Over Again." Love and sexuality loom as disruptive forces for the men and women of these stories, especially the women. Characters are paralyzed in adulterous hell or transfixed in moments of despair over a life that stretches predictably ahead. On the other side, those who choose the bohemian way fare no better. They are flying dangerously free, unmoored and despised.

Oates' stories depict a culture at a crossroads and railing within it. The smoothness of artistic production can be ripped apart by the intrusion of the other. The burden of performing personality is a sentence of permanent psychic anxiety.

From a stylistic standpoint, these are also worthwhile fictional experiments. Rather than conventional plots, many of the stories in this collection rely on snapshots in time of the same character. Sometimes, they are told backward. Sometimes, groupings of experience and advancing psychological states are captured beneath obtuse or leading subject headings. I enjoyed this organizational ingenuity and the way Oates' distinctive prose lingers on mental states and character impressions. Nothing is described dispassionately; in contrast, everything is experienced as intense, jarring, and grating on the senses. This technique does a good job in creating unease for the reader and illuminating the interiors of Oates almost uniformly troubled characters.

This was my first time reading Oates at length, but I definitely would like to read more of her fiction. I feel after completing The Wheel of Love that I've experienced that time period more viscerally than I have before.


View all my reviews

Artificial & Natural

Like many amateur smartphone photographers (and before smartphones, iPhoto & point-and-shoot aficionados), I take great pleasure in going to beautiful places and snapping eminently editable photos. Not that many areas in the Jackson Hole region need much of a boost in color saturation or sharpness, but still, the small tweaks here and there or the revelation of HDR make me feel that I've somehow done more than aimed and clicked. I've

photographed

.

Recently, I've been exploring the Gros Ventre region, which is full of pleasurable place names such as the Red and Lavender Hills, and is also the home of the most charming backcountry cabin I've ever encountered. Set betwixt a ridge and a burbling creek at the end of a scenic little dale, its outside was so perfect that I thought it might still be in use by the occasional Forest Service ranger. However, on closer examination, I found the cabin actually split in two and long-abandoned, even though its front windows still wavered with their original glass. In one side sat a 1940's era stove, and on the other, a built-in shelf and table. As to its owner, an hour of feverish internet research produced nothing, though I did uncover a snooty entry from an evaluator criticizing another Gros Ventre cabin's entry in the National Register of Historic Places. Historian snobbery, alive and well.

Klimt Stone

The Gros Ventre is defined by a massive 1925 landslide that brought an entire side of Sheep Mountain down in a crush of tons of rock and trees. The slide, in turn, dammed the Gros Ventre River to form Lower Slide Lake (the "Gros Ventre Slide" is also a locally-beloved breakfast dish at

The Bunnery

). Two years later, part of the dam gave way, flooding the nearby town of Kelly almost out of existence. Because of its devastation in the flood, Jackson stepped forward to become of the county seat of Teton County.

Evidence of the slide has not dissipated in the ninety odd years since it happened. Huge boulder fields and drowned trees rising eerily from the lake still attest to this past natural violence. Primarily composed of sedimentary Tensleep Sandstone, the rocks and boulders ejected from the mountainside have sometimes an orangish hue and are speckled with bright splotches of many-colored lichen. In my head, I've begun calling it Klimt Stone because this reminds me of Klimt's metallic, speckled, and variegated paint textures.

Burnt trees also lend themselves well to being re-interpreted and morphed into looming, portentous signifiers. The following was on an unnamed ridge (at least, unknown to me) bordering Granite Creek, which is south of Jackson. Against bluer-than-blue skies, the carbonized skin glitters--a stalk of coal.

And this brings us to cloudscapes--perhaps the easiest to manipulate into technicolor visions, mimicking the layering of paint pigment in the depth of the alabaster, the lemon, the champagne. Dialing up a cloudscape brings baroque and rococo heavenly vistas to mind--those windows into ethereality usually guarded by chubby

putti

 with trumpets and garlands. The cherubim don't work for free in Wyoming, however. I've seen plenty of rare animals, including a wolverine (!), but so far, no swirling celestial babies. I'll keep you posted.

As I continue to walk the woods, thinking of my book, and continue to indulge my side interest in documenting new hikes and spectacles, the vividness of real nature and the artificiality of art and nature-translated-to-image continue to inform one another. Sometimes reading is the most vivid thing of all; sometimes writing feels like the shoddiest paintbrush to communicate what is real. Regardless, the richness of a life lived in art 

and

 in landscape imparts a reverence for all that hallows, communicates, and beautifies experience. The one is essential to the other.

(Painting: "Adele Bloch Bauer," Gustav Klimt)

Green Vibrations

I am thinking over a phrase of Annie Dillard's this morning, encountered in her collection of meditations on writing, appropriately titled The Writing Life. "There is no shortage of good days," she writes. "It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life."

It's an uncomfortably wise insight. Although I have never confused sensation-seeking with writerly preparation, it has nevertheless been an underlying motivator in many things I have done. I always feel an anxiety about missing things, or allowing experiences to remain undiscovered. In Jackson, it is some mythical canyon that haunts me: somehow obscure and crystalline; a field of wildflowers where no one is walking; a view from so high, that as I wrote once, "I can feel the cold on my eyes." Other places, it is about the potential of art, the potential of hitting just the right point of intoxication on food or wine, the potential that some person hides behind one of many turned shoulders, and that person has keys to unlock any number of things. It's what leaves me hungrily scanning the walls of cathedrals, looking for the original, homely paintwork, obsessed with even the humblest joints of the ceilings. I'd hate to think I missed it.

I think my assumption has always been that these moments of beauty will accrete, one layer of sand to the next, to make my soul altogether something fine and glittering, honed carefully and curated as I go. And yet, I often write so little of it. Why, I wonder.

Summer is upon us now, with its exquisite songbirds and trails, cleared at last of snow. In mid-May, it seemed that all the aspens and cottonwoods turned green at once. I thought of it as a susurration of some kind, completely undetectable to human ears, but nevertheless communicating spring through the groves, vibrating the landscape into a new incarnation of being. The green was so new; the operation itself so delicate. A miracle was gifted in a day, but a quotidian miracle, too, happening each May in a sudden sweep. And then summer. And then the sun and the obstinate eggshell blue.

It is a time of golden water in the evenings, and green trees etched in gold around it. The yellow of balsamroot flowers and the sentinels of violet lupine and monk's hood. Baby elk, tremulous on newly-jointed legs; a rather fat and pleased-with-himself marmot, like a caricature of an English friar; a miniscule duck who fed at the edge of a quiet stream, buoyantly bobbing up after each quarry.

A hard thing it is, to revise, when all of this is happening outside. The outdoors are a constant imprecation to leave the room and abandon the work. That mythical canyon taunts like a mirage. But ho hum,  another chance to gather strength and plug along anyway. To remember the life of the spirit. So many moments of muster, and then finally, I write about this color of green at last, and let go of that last nagging sensation, returning concentration to where it ought to be.