The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  Snow coming down steadily.  Yesterday's 30 inches or so now joined by today's one-inch-per-hour.  We'll be close to four feet by afternoon.  So much for yesterday's back-breaking driveway shoveling/car clearing.  I'll be out again once it tapers off, using my ka-nees as much as possible; then likely drawing a very hot bath.  The plow trucks do not work on Sundays--so we're likely in for the day.

The reading list this month--as I've cleared away some things and given myself license to make a "community" of the books and authors drawing me in, silencing (or at least quieting) the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--has been long and various.   It is a time for simultaneity, apparently--partly because a few in the mix are 500 pages-plus, and I want to move through them steadily while also connecting elsewhere.  Something like deeply enjoying an intense, needy friend, but not wanting to allow that friend the sole short-term domination she might require--life is short, there is much to read.  Your commitment to that friend is life-long, anyway--which is ultimately really what she needs.

Proust--Swann's Way--is one of those hefty, long-term commitments.  We're about four weeks and 300 pages in.  It's evening reading, somehow.  The Brothers Karamazov is another in this category. I started over a year ago, put it away, and am back into it with FMD.  An essay on Dostoevsky by the late David Foster Wallace, from his essay collection Consider the Lobster, adds fuel to the resolve to finish.  Balzac's Pere Goriot (inspired by Proust) is one I'm listening to on DVD, during commutes to and from the city and on my ipod (while shoveling, walking the dog, etc.).  Moments of Being, a collection of memoir-essays by Virginia Woolf, given to me as a gift and awful lovely and sad.  As yet uncracked--and due back to the library in two weeks--is Rose Tremain's novel The Road Home.

In poetry, over coffee in the morning, sometimes just before sleep: Rilke (the Galway Kinnell translation), Kinnell (his first three collections collected together, along with The Book of Nightmares), Denise Levertov's This Great Unknowing, and Jane Kenyon's Otherwise.

Somewhat "central" in all this readingabout is Paul Elie's The Life You Safe May Be Your Own, a kind of quadrography of the lives of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy--ardent Catholics and artists all.  Each living a kind of monastic existence, even if not literally (except for Merton).  The title of Day's autobiography--The Long Loneliness--rather than that of O'Connor's short story, may have been an equally apt title for the book.  The book pushes 500 pages, I wasn't sure (during the first 100 pages) that Elie's style or his vision for the thematic/personal web among these four would keep me engaged; at p. 280, I'm hooked the way one is hooked by a good novel.  Here are four writers who, you could say,  gave themselves license to make a community of the books and authors that drew them in, silencing (or at least quieting), the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--with compelling results, i.e. an honest and deep and, yes, often painful, life in letters.

Of Self-Blessing

A spring (ish) poem for the middle of winter. In some ways, most appropriate for a dark, snowy night such as this.

"Saint Francis and the Sow"

by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Zen and the Art of Valve-Control

Too many days in the city, and I am restless, hungry for quiet. My head is filled with "stuff." The greatest temptation of city life, when you are working on a book or your own art work, is to allow "what other people are doing" to fill your head. And numerically speaking, there are just so many "other people" here.

It is the difference between being the subject, or the object, of your own life. Here in the city, information and activity come tumbling over you, whether you like it or not. Someone has the radio on, or the TV on, people are talking talking talking, all the news--gossip especially--fills every space in which you move. You want to walk down the street and pick up a carton of milk, or take the subway to the library or post office, and all of it--in the space of four, five, ten blocks--assaults you. Suddenly, your head is full.

The battle of the city--I am finding, I am recognizing recently--is a battle of valve-control. You are trying to write something, to think something, to make something; your brain must be active, alert, clear, able to move in multiple directions as you work. Once city noise has cluttered the space--if the valve is wide open, information overload has already tumbled in--your mind, your imagination, are boxed in--like alternate side of the street parking days, when people double park and trap you in your space.

If you love city life, you don't experience it as noise or clutter or a trap, but as energy. Wondrous diversity. The world alive and vibrant in one city block, one subway car. Yes. True. But valve-control may be the secret here, too. Or maybe it's more like a Rorschach inkblot test, beauty and chaos moving in and out of relief. There is a zen to this, regardless. It takes work.

Today, it takes a lot of work. Between Mumbai, industry bail outs, and close-out sales on Senate seats... I'm struggling to get out of my parking spot.

Guerrilla Poetry and Fawning Over Fauns

It's hard to know what to make of the upcoming reading/performance which will be taking place at my local library here in the country. Alix Olson, described as a queer-artist-activist-spoken word-revolutionary, will be appearing at the Tusten-Cochecton Branch Library. Is this city and country colliding in full glory?

I suppose not. We are but 15 miles from the site of Woodstock, after all. But I wonder what Norma, the octagenarian librarian with whom I've recently become friendly, will think of Alix.

At any rate, I am glad to have renewed my library membership, which I let lapse into delinquency over the last six months. It's good to be back. Wi-fi has also come to Tusten-Cochecton (no cell service still--No Towers! they cry).

The hunters are out. Yesterday, I believe, was the opening of deer hunting season. I assume this because trucks full of men in camouflage and orange vests drove up and down my road all day. The pup and I walked sheepishly along, and every time I saw a deer--they're everywhere, travelling in families--I'd psst, psst and whisper-shout Run for your lives. Shoot anything, I say--but the deer? Innocence incarnate.

Heading back to the Bx today after a productive two weeks here. Rumor has it a new bookstore has opened in the 'hood.