Now and then I get curious about people I used to know. I Google them. Nine times out of ten there’s no reference whatsoever to their names, or anybody sharing their names (there are dozens of guys out there with my name), and I always find that hard to believe. How can the interwebs fail to locate some minute mention of nearly every living American? Or dead, for that matter. You’d think that all of us have done something, written something, participated in some generic event, or had our names listed on some roster that would pop up (in pdf form, no doubt) in a broad search.
Recently I finally got results for a woman I worked with long ago. I’d always been curious about her, since we were both fiction writers and we’d become pretty good friends in our three-and-a-half years together in a cramped La Jolla office. When I moved to San Francisco and she moved to Long Island, we lost touch -- a few letters exchanged of the newsy sort, announcing the births of her daughters and more pack-up-and-moves. Her husband is a neuroscientist with a lengthy resume; they’ve moved a lot. The truth is, though, that along the way I got tired of her lack of interest in me, so I stopped writing back, and that is why I’ve felt a little bit guilty over the intervening years. I know I could have kept our friendship going if I really wanted to. I could have let her go through her phases, even while I managed my usual enthusiasm. I always expected to hear that she had won some fiction award or had had a novel published, but no. Instead I was the one who published a novel, but I never heard from her about it. Maybe she was never moved to Google me.
This time, after I typed in her name -- her husband’s actually -- some links popped up that guided me to her. She had moved again, thanks to her husband’s career. Briefly, a couple of years ago, she had a blog. About knitting.
I wasn’t sure it was her, once I popped in on the blog. This woman didn’t sound anything like my old friend. She sounded, somehow, wounded, tragic, lost. She’d found God somewhere in there, her idiosyncratic version of Christianity, anyway. She was doing good works, though: collecting people’s unwanted knittings -- blankets and things -- for the homeless. I had to admire that. I often think about doing such good works, but the quotidian always seems to interfere or distract, or, more likely, provide a ready excuse. She was actually doing something.
But in her voice was a tone of emptiness. It was the voice of someone who had been searching for herself or her rightful role in life and was surprised not to have found it in motherhood. She’s been in therapy, in Al Anon, deep in church activities, and I’m sure she’s been a terrific mother too. Yet she hadn’t found it. The one thing. Now she’s doing another blog with her sister -- a very personal back-and-forth that I’m not sure they mean to be public -- and her slow-burning desperation is coming through there too. She revealed that her husband is a year out from a cancer diagnosis. There is a worried edge to her writing, but an elder sister’s confidence too, an “I’ve been there” message between the lines. It’s obvious that she loves her family and her church, she’s fearful for her husband, and she’s trying to keep a fun face on the outside. But I’m stunned at how needy and damaged she seems now, when twenty years ago she was a bright, light-hearted, talented, hilarious young woman who had a chance to do big things with her writing.
It seems to me, from this huge distance, that something went wrong for her. On the inside. But I’ll never know, and I’ll never try to find out either, because she has moved too far from my reach (Christ isn’t in my bag of tricks, I’m afraid). We’re nearly opposites now.
Strange, how two people in their early thirties have taken such different paths to fifty.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Observatio
Barry Hannah died not very long ago. He was one of those writers I was glad to have discovered, even if most of the time I didn’t quite grasp what he was trying to say through his madcap, absurdist, even bizarre tales. Often I laughed as I read him, but when I finished something like The Tennis Handsome, I’d shake my head and say to myself, That was interesting. It never occurred to me to emulate him, just as I’d never try to emulate Tom Robbins or Salman Rushdie, or Nabakov, or Twain. You can’t emulate the utterly unique.
But last night I read a short piece in Harper’s: “Why I Write,” by Barry Hannah. It was a speech at Bennington College in 2002, and it touched on what I think are the two most important drives any serious novelist must possess and cultivate. One is the drive to own the past in a comprehensive, personal way, and the other is the drive to venerate language. In the past lay the details and resonating emotional spikes that get deep into what it is to be human, the triumphs and humiliations we can’t forget, the seemingly inconsequential moments that somehow manage to form us though we may shrug them off at the time. Like Hannah, I can remember things my father said to me forty years ago, which, when he said them, had no context but the moment in which he said them. All these years later, they are draped with significance and large meaning, they deepen my sense of human contradiction and self-preservation, and they help to define him in a way he couldn’t have meant to project at the time. The past is where all your material comes from, even if you write about the here and now.
Language, Hannah says in the speech, “still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores. At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, it can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”
You might have in your junk box the picture fragments of the time you found a young rabbit at the bottom of the basement stairs, its pink bowels protruding from a belly no thicker than the skin of a balloon. The cat did it, failed to finish the job out of boredom. You can’t let the thing die there like that, in a slow way, not with its dark, soap-washed eye looking up at you in something between fear and pleading. You will have to kill it, but how? And how do you tell the story of killing it, retaining every detail so that someone else can know what it was like?
Only language, with precision and surprise, is up to the task. Mr. Hannah knew it. All true writers do. And that is why there will always be a need for the writer who is first an artist (as distinguished from those who are first entertainers): so that we will know what we have been through and what it meant, and means.
But last night I read a short piece in Harper’s: “Why I Write,” by Barry Hannah. It was a speech at Bennington College in 2002, and it touched on what I think are the two most important drives any serious novelist must possess and cultivate. One is the drive to own the past in a comprehensive, personal way, and the other is the drive to venerate language. In the past lay the details and resonating emotional spikes that get deep into what it is to be human, the triumphs and humiliations we can’t forget, the seemingly inconsequential moments that somehow manage to form us though we may shrug them off at the time. Like Hannah, I can remember things my father said to me forty years ago, which, when he said them, had no context but the moment in which he said them. All these years later, they are draped with significance and large meaning, they deepen my sense of human contradiction and self-preservation, and they help to define him in a way he couldn’t have meant to project at the time. The past is where all your material comes from, even if you write about the here and now.
Language, Hannah says in the speech, “still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores. At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, it can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”
You might have in your junk box the picture fragments of the time you found a young rabbit at the bottom of the basement stairs, its pink bowels protruding from a belly no thicker than the skin of a balloon. The cat did it, failed to finish the job out of boredom. You can’t let the thing die there like that, in a slow way, not with its dark, soap-washed eye looking up at you in something between fear and pleading. You will have to kill it, but how? And how do you tell the story of killing it, retaining every detail so that someone else can know what it was like?
Only language, with precision and surprise, is up to the task. Mr. Hannah knew it. All true writers do. And that is why there will always be a need for the writer who is first an artist (as distinguished from those who are first entertainers): so that we will know what we have been through and what it meant, and means.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Consternatio
It's raining in mid-May. That's unusual for this part of the world. It scares me.
Then there's this giant X that appeared over my house a while back. It scares me too. There a many things out
there that scare me.
Et alia
So I took a two-year sabbatical. What of it? And in the interim other people seem to have pilfered my title for different bloggy endeavors, but I had it first so I’m going to keep it. I raised my flag back in 2006, with a whole ‘nother thought in mind about what this might be. It’s not that anymore, but I can’t say what it is either.
What brings me back now I’m not all that sure of. A certain restlessness that produces ideas I want to save or highlight? Maybe. A notion that if I keep everything I think to myself I might as well not think it? A narcissistic desire to claim a tiny bit of space on the interwebs as my own and decorate it however I want? That’s pretty close. All of the above, even closer.
Since January 2008, I’ve been every bit as observant, opinionated, and consterned as before, but I held back because I didn’t think anybody was listening. The difference is that now I don’t care if anybody’s listening.
A few items that have come to mind along the way:
Conservatives really have a problem with their own suppressed homosexual tendencies. Most of their “values” are more in the category of self-loathing.
John Edwards goes down in history as one of our major douchebags. Then again, so does Mark. Sanford of SC.
Tiger Woods too.
3D technology will not be saving the movie business. Avatar was cool enough to watch, but the story was warmed over Little Big Man.
Enough with celebrity chefs. I happen to know one, or an aspiring one anyway. He’s a pompous ass with no redeeming qualities.
There will always be one natural (or man-made) disaster or another to amuse and entertain us. Quite a few came and went while I was away. Most of them are quickly forgotten, or at least displaced by the next one. I hate to think of what will displace the BP oil spill.
We can’t let the Tea Partiers off the hook so easily. They strike me as lazy thinkers who believe that having read the Constitution once or twice and a handful of the Federalist Papers makes them patriots. It doesn’t. I suspect my father is one of them.
One day we’ll be able to admit that there’s no point in going to the moon again. Not when we can’t even have an intercity bullet train, or true universal health care, or food that’s guaranteed free of E. coli. That day hasn’t yet arrived, though.
This vegetable garden craze -- sometimes I wonder. For the cost of seeds, soil and soil amendments, tools, water, fighting gophers and other annoying wildlife, and my time, I could buy all the produce we can possibly handle. Something tells me I’ve been had. Still, there’s no better way to get your hands on a tomato like you had when you were a kid.
We believe what we want to believe. I’ve read a lot of atheists vs. the faithful tracts these past two years, and it has finally sunk in: These two groups don’t live in the same universe. They live in parallel ones that overlap, so do yourself a favor. Whichever one you’re in, they don’t speak your language in the other one. Not worth it to try and convert the savages.
On that note, disce pati.
What brings me back now I’m not all that sure of. A certain restlessness that produces ideas I want to save or highlight? Maybe. A notion that if I keep everything I think to myself I might as well not think it? A narcissistic desire to claim a tiny bit of space on the interwebs as my own and decorate it however I want? That’s pretty close. All of the above, even closer.
Since January 2008, I’ve been every bit as observant, opinionated, and consterned as before, but I held back because I didn’t think anybody was listening. The difference is that now I don’t care if anybody’s listening.
A few items that have come to mind along the way:
Conservatives really have a problem with their own suppressed homosexual tendencies. Most of their “values” are more in the category of self-loathing.
John Edwards goes down in history as one of our major douchebags. Then again, so does Mark. Sanford of SC.
Tiger Woods too.
3D technology will not be saving the movie business. Avatar was cool enough to watch, but the story was warmed over Little Big Man.
Enough with celebrity chefs. I happen to know one, or an aspiring one anyway. He’s a pompous ass with no redeeming qualities.
There will always be one natural (or man-made) disaster or another to amuse and entertain us. Quite a few came and went while I was away. Most of them are quickly forgotten, or at least displaced by the next one. I hate to think of what will displace the BP oil spill.
We can’t let the Tea Partiers off the hook so easily. They strike me as lazy thinkers who believe that having read the Constitution once or twice and a handful of the Federalist Papers makes them patriots. It doesn’t. I suspect my father is one of them.
One day we’ll be able to admit that there’s no point in going to the moon again. Not when we can’t even have an intercity bullet train, or true universal health care, or food that’s guaranteed free of E. coli. That day hasn’t yet arrived, though.
This vegetable garden craze -- sometimes I wonder. For the cost of seeds, soil and soil amendments, tools, water, fighting gophers and other annoying wildlife, and my time, I could buy all the produce we can possibly handle. Something tells me I’ve been had. Still, there’s no better way to get your hands on a tomato like you had when you were a kid.
We believe what we want to believe. I’ve read a lot of atheists vs. the faithful tracts these past two years, and it has finally sunk in: These two groups don’t live in the same universe. They live in parallel ones that overlap, so do yourself a favor. Whichever one you’re in, they don’t speak your language in the other one. Not worth it to try and convert the savages.
On that note, disce pati.
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