The other Walden

Lately I’ve been introverting. I had such great plans earlier this month, only to be stymied by some events. So I decided to crawl into my shell, where one feels safe (whether this is true or not). Synchronistically enough, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, where she reflects on certain insects. Grasshoppers, mantises, moths, giant water bugs, and so forth: Possessors of exoskeletons, quite unlike us, whom Dillard describes as “soft-side-out.”

Which is why, I’m thinking, I need my shell. My Great Wall, my cave. At home, the presence of another person (who has, once upon a time, rifled through my journals) is so draining, I want to cry. I love her, but these days when I go home, I just want to be alone. I want to go to my alone place where nobody disturbs me, nobody judges me, nobody makes demands, nobody makes me do anything or be anything. The world is so distracting. It eats you up until nothing is left but a vague wistfulness.

Or maybe I’ve just had enough of where I am. For more than 10 years I’ve been angsting about not being a match with my school, the school of the superficial, the extraverted, the technocratic, the facile. I don’t want to be really old by the time I realize I’ve spent my one life in a place where I had never belonged. Thoreau wrote that the mass of men lived lives of quiet desperation. I’m going to need a lot of courage to change certain things. On my terms.

In front of Thoreau's woodpile beside his hut, in Walden, Massachusetts

Letting Go, in Three Movements

How many words have we for loss?
We invented zero. Perhaps when we say
absence, we mean the orbit
of protons, the distance between
planets. The cosmos is full of space:
I saw a hundred faces on the street,
not one of which I can recall.
The photograph I have of you
is not you. If you were a tattoo
written with the ink of my blood

the pain is over and the sign is not you.
Perhaps when we say flux, we mean
the years we wandered the savanna
swinging from tree to tree. Our webbed palms
tell of an incursion into sea
before our ancestors turned back. Loss is
the fins and gills we never grew.
It is a lineage of unknown faces,
tens of thousands of souls woven
into our DNA. My memory of you

is the nucleus of my cells.
It is the path a raindrop follows
on the window pane, losing more and more
of itself on the way down. When we say
ending, we mean how the branch
bows with the weight of a fruit
until it falls. Or if you like,
the single-minded riot of vines
until the trellis runs out.
You are, my dear, the empty air.

Bliss

Why does sleeping feel so much better—certainly easier and more natural—than reading, or any other activity, for that matter? This is a problem for me or anybody who has a perpetually burgeoning to-be-read pile. If I should ever be imprisoned for anything, it wouldn’t be too much of a punishment if I always had a book with me.

Yet how do I spend my Sunday? Plastered on my couch! Much as I would like to think that it’s the couch’s fault (for being ultra-soft), I know the gentle rain and cool weather also had something to do with it.

These are happy days, I think. It’s not unbearable to be (in) (my) conscious(ness). It’s even nice, as I can spend long minutes just following my train of thought, amused, fascinated, and rarely despairing. As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve some projects lined up. Now if I could only climb out of the blissed-out sensation long enough to tackle one of them….

Tomorrow, Valentine’s Day, a group of friends and I are getting together to discuss “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger! I can’t wait!

Heaven is a place on earth. Image from photobucket.com

* * *

The other day, I had a very fruitful session with Ma’am K., discussing short stories my classmate and I had selected because we wanted to emulate that writing style. I discovered Tess Hadley, my classmate’s choice, who penned this very subtle short story about two women and their “Exchanges.” (One keeps giving the other decorative eggs, while the other keeps giving her friend jugs. For two days I had puzzled over what these symbolisms meant.) My own choice was Ursula Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them,” which is about animals and Nature and a certain attitude to them that is not one of domination.

I can’t say I’m a fiction writer, although I’m attempting to write a short story. My deadline for the workshop draft is in less than two weeks! I’m happy though that thanks to our last session, I was able to figure out the sorts of things I want to write, and how to write them. I am now officially abandoning the Sherlock Holmes pastiche I had started to write about a month ago, and which is 1/3 of the way through. It’s just not working. I think I’d try my hand at quotidian themes.

The Bardo State

Lately I’ve realized that I’m in a bardo state, that state of being neither here nor there, of being in transition, the no-place of flux. In a sense, one is in a perpetual such state, but often there is a clear identity—work, thing, person—that has an anchoring effect, something reassuring, something that locates your ship in the ocean. These days I’ve set sail again, owing to a truth-telling conversation last week that allowed me to let go of something.

Nature abhors a vacuum, Murakami observes in 1Q84. My recent confrontation with the void has gifted me with a lot of energy. I have a number of projects lined up, and frankly I’m  excited (though sad sometimes, missing what is gone). I suppose one of the skills I’ve acquired as a 30-something is the ability to recognize a real crisis. There is a story that is done—or a chapter, anyway—and when I’m not grieving, I’m actually feeling… happy. I remember what a friend of mine had said, more than a decade ago: Kung may iiwanan ka, may pupuntahan ka rin.

Benedict Cumberbatch as the great detective in BBC's "Sherlock"

One of my bardo projects is to return to blogging. I used to write ropes and ropes of prose, thick coils of them snaking around the Internet like Rapunzel’s hair. But at some point, when I thought a change of style was in order, I cut most of it off, and published mostly poetry. But now I’m trying my hand at prose again. The return to this manner of blogging is also my way of practicing the sort of writing required by fiction, which obviously gives one a larger canvas—an entire universe, really—that demands to be populated by plot, character, dialogue, setting, etc. Having returned to the MFA program—after a break of more than two years!—I had enrolled this term in a special class in fiction writing. My teacher is the award-winning novelist Katrina Tuvera, author of The Jupiter Effect. So far, I’m in the midst of writing a short story—a Sherlock Holmes pastiche—about, well, a Sherlock Holmes aficionado who catches a serial killer of blue-eyed men. Creating a fictional world feels so heady. I haven’t quite mastered the form yet: it might take years, and many, many thousands of pages. But I feel good about this direction.

Maybe one of my bardo lessons this time around is, it’s time I tried my hand at being happy. I’m thinking maybe I had spent most of my 20s not allowing me to look away from despair, as though it were some kind of existential duty. Or maybe I was just too busy looking for a justification for inner storms. Perhaps because of this, my external world necessarily became stormy. Now it’s time to enjoy the blue sky and the invincible sun—after Camus’ “invincible summer”!

Whale Song

And she wondered at this tendency
to be swallowed by it

like flowing into the open mouth
of a whale and falling asleep

on the bed of its tongue. Memory
is the circumference of a song

radiating from the center
of dying, being born, squalling.

She had chosen none of this,
as no human could influence

the eclipse, the ambit of dawn
or the penumbra of a shadow.

A feeling follows from a premise
and the malady is conclusive

as seawater bursting from its nostrils:
Sometimes one wakes up, in love.

Resistance

I feel it crumbling, as Sisyphus might
watching his burden roll back down,
cracks snaking on the surface of his heart.
The rock is demanding retrieval again.
As to why he keeps at it, perhaps

it is for the same reason that we read
meaning in things: Tracery of veins on a leaf,
network of bones that make up a wing.
Skeins of galaxies in space, the integrity
of a single snowflake & starburst ice

crusting on a lake. But it takes so little
for patterns to unravel. A rock can shatter
what’s not even especially fragile. Unexpected
death, inability to love. Evil that will not be
reconciled. Nonetheless, if you can,

resist the instinct for sadness
over shriveled leaf & broken bird
or the revelation that the Hubble telescope
can see only the past. Forgive the unforgiving
winter & the dangers of thin ice.

Continue pushing the rock.

The Color of the Wheat Fields

“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

You know the story, how the fox
insisted on taming, how it must lead
to the day of parting. We are past the middle
of the book. I have wrenched it into a spread
to show you the conversation between
the little prince and his familiar. The fox
speaks in riddles about the color
of wheat fields. Every time you leave,
he seems to be saying, an abyss
yawns in my brain. To fill it, I am always
looking for a shade I love. Mammals evolved

the limbic system. In humans, it ends
under the cortex, in a fissure where attachment
blooms like a flower. So we know that goodbye
is a ritual too. It prisms light into a profusion
of yellow and russet. A boy’s blond hair.
The way that rust eats up the stern of ships.
Memory must be why barnacles cling,
why our skin has an instinct for salt.
Like treasure hunters, the left behind
can tell you where exactly in the deep
the wound, though old, gleams like gold.

32

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Absence Muse

What is the real? The first
philosophical question
about the word
which seemed more tangible
than the world tangible.

The letters meaning
something. How r u?
on the cell phone screen,
text-speak on two texts
speaking, an interface
of emoti(c)ons
and w r u? I am outside
grammar’s jurisdiction,
an entry in a dictionary
as yet imagined
by arbiters of sense

and sensibility, this body
of words is you: a shower
of hieroglyphs, the aste-
risk of your kiss,
the ampersand
of your hand
the alphabet
of your hair, wet
from the rain dance.

When the real gives—oh
how it pours!

The Necessary Connection

Homeward now, sunset. Steel cranes on a half-finished building
point up, blaming sky. You wonder how these are relevant
to anything, or is it just the dreaming that creates
the illusion of height. There must be a connection

between traffic and trees, houses and rain
the occasional bird and telephone wires. Meaning,
is it secreted by sewers? Does it fall from sky?
Will it be enough to nourish a drought? And why

do you keep vigil by the car window, each passing thing
like a rosary bead. In memory’s interstices,
a necklace of mysteries. You call it
the human condition, or asking why a person

should walk off the ledge and its converse: Why not?
You imagine the cranes would care to dip down
winch up the broken body and offer it to dusk,
demanding no explanation.