Place

I recently spent a week in New Mexico taking a writing class. Jumping from big eastern city to big rural desert and then back again was disorienting-- the place that I am plays a huge role in how I think of myself and of the world around me. But it was not disorienting in the way I had expected. I thought I would get to the desert and wonder why I was living in the city at all, when desert seems to fit me so well. Rather, I found myself making some peace with New York.

So, while the following poem-thing isn't directly in line with the contents of this blog, when I look back at what I wrote that week, this one seems important to my thinking, spiritual or otherwise.

Radio

Today it was the a.m. radio, murmuring news into my tent from the trailer next door, from where the man stood at the tiny kitchen window, washing his breakfast plate with slow circles of the rag.

The radio was not talking sense, rather, it was burbling like scratchy water, it was awakening me to something outside of myself, it was letting me know that I had let myself sleep in, something I will not do so often.

The sound was a strange tangle of red dirt and people walking on red dirt in sandals, it was nature and manmade, it made me remember that morning in the dunes and in the city hold some frequencies that are the same, that I do not let myself rest enough in either, that the morning of both places lift the fog of my mood just like the sun lifts up the mist that curled around the hills and the roof tops before dawn.

Yes, a radio is playing in a desert and it reminds me of 126^th street, of buses backing up and the murmur of children walking themselves to school, and someone in the kitchen washing her breakfast plate with slow circles of a rag, and I do not mind the memory, I find that I can be pleased with either morning, that as hard as I try to separate these places they will twist and weave in my half-formed thoughts of waking.

A Case of the Hiccups

As a senior in high school, once I had narrowed down my college choices to two or three and had to choose, I did not feel the late-night panic that seemed to turn many of my peers into drowsy, jittery creatures in first period. It was a big decision. I made pro and con lists, talked endlessly with my mother. But I felt a strong certainty in my diaphragm-- which sits horizontal in your torso, which I have always imagined to be like a tabletop for your lungs and heart-- that the college experience that would bloom from any choice I make would be fascinating and probably beautiful.

I could go to Lewis and Clark, and a few months later I could see myself saying, “I made the right decision.” I could go to Sarah Lawrence, and the same words would probably come out of my mouth. I chose Hampshire, and I am sure that those words did come out of my mouth. Yes, I had an angsty third semester where I considered transferring, but who's to say that would not have happened anywhere else? I might have even had a bad experience in college, but I realized it was equally likely to happen at any of those colleges.

I took comfort in knowing that we humans will never know “what could have been.” When I went to Hampshire, I had no alternate reality at another school to compare it to., no certainty that another option actually would have been better.

Humans regret decisions. But we regret decisions because of the outcome, not because we are missing what would have happened instead had we not made it. Even though we may feel that we know, we can not know the alternate outcome. Understanding this limitation has saved me from regret nine times out of ten. It calms me down, it frees me up.

I am sitting in my cubbyhole bedroom in New York City on a cloudy morning, thirty minutes before I need to leave for work, batting around a question that I have been seriously hitting at since January: When my housing and my job halts in August, where should I go?

In January, I asked, “What if I moved to Colorado?” and I knew “I will either move to Colorado or Washington D.C.”

In February, I asked, “What if I stay in New York?” and I knew “I will either stay here or move to D.C.”

Since then, I have fantasized about countless what might be scenarios as I bounce between NYC and DC. Struggling with uncertainty, in April I made a decision: if I do not have a job by August, I will move to D.C., and start there. I felt great about this for approximately three weeks.

Then, May hit. Old relationships solidified and new ones appeared, the summer sun came out, and I realized how much of a life I have finally, finally built here in New York. All year I have been wanting something like this, and I've got it now, for the final two months. I am terrified because my decision is no longer made-- in fact, I don't want to make a decision I have to, on August 17^th, when all of my belongings are packed up and need to go somewhere.

My diaphragm is still holding up my heart, but it is hiccuping a little. After so many moves from state to state, community to community, will it always be just as good or just as bad to move as it might be to stay?

A Mass of Connecting Lines

 In a time and place that feels distant to me now, I spent an afternoon in the living room of Norton Juster, retired architect and author of The Phantom Tollbooth. I was sent there by my freshman advisor when I was doing an independent study on Mathematics in Literature. As an author of fiction that discusses math, I intended to interview Mr. Juster about the connection between the two fields. A couple nights ago I found the essay I wrote to chronicle our visit, and I was re-tickled all over again by this man and by his outlook on life. So much, that I want to excerpt it here:

[cue 18 year old voice]

The first thing Norton Juster said when I called him on the phone was, “Spell your name, please.” I presume he writes down the name of everyone who calls him, telemarketers and all. Then he asked why I called. I told him I wanted to talk about mathematics and fiction, together.

“I’m not much of a mathematician, but I think there’s a lot of humor in any subject where people think of things like negative numbers. Call me back in a week-- I’m going out of town to speak.” His voice disguised his age well. He must be around seventy years old, but it was still clear and capable-sounding, with a tinge of a New Yorker’s accent. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve placed him in his late thirties.

I called Juster back a week later. He asked me to spell my name again and told me, again, that math has a lot of humor in it. He accidentally called mathematicians ‘mathemagicians,’ which is the name of the king of Digitopolis in his most famous novel, The Phantom Tollbooth.

“That’s a Freudian slip if I ever heard one,” he said. Then he told me to come over to his house next Monday so we could talk. 

His white house was a pleasant walk up a residential street about five minutes from Amherst's main intersection. It perched on a slope, with the garage on the lower level and the front door on the upper.

Juster let me in and led me past the kitchen into his living room. Every light was off. He told me I could sit on the couch and then crossed behind me to open the curtain, letting in cool afternoon light.

“I need a hardback chair on account of a bad back,” he explained as he eased into a folding chair with a canvas seat and wooden frame. An enormous potbelly covered in a blue knit sweater sat on his lap.

“Are you comfortable? Ok. Now. Tell me what you’re up to.”

I explained to him that I was studying fictional books that incorporate mathematics into their plots. Why do the authors do it? Is it good writing? Can numbers and letters, which aren’t supposed to get along, share a page anywhere except in a textbook? In The Phantom Tollbooth, the neighboring kingdoms of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis are in perpetual competition. I thought that Juster, if anyone, would have some ideas about how the two connect. It turns out he has a lot of ideas about how everything connects.

“I don’t precisely remember where the Digitopolis and Dictionopolis came from. But it’s the idea of words against numbers. People have the idea they have to decide which one’s important for their life—as if we have to choose,” he told me.

“I guess the way I came to it was that I was thinking about how I had trouble spelling as a kid, and then I got to thinking of all the things I had trouble with. My main motivation was remembering how, when you’re a kid, you wonder why all this stuff is being thrown at you and you don’t know why.” He held up one hand, touching all of this fingers together.

“Its like, you learn a fact. Bing.” He flicked his fingers outwards as if making a tiny explosion in the air. He went on. “Then you learn something else, and Bing, over here.” He exploded the air to his lower left. “Then another over here.” He did it again, leaving three explosions in the air.

“And its only later, and sometimes a long time, when you start seeing how these things connect, because everything connects. So as you learn, you draw lines.” He traced lines in the air with his pointer finger leading from one explosion to the next. “So me, as an old man, I have just a mass of connecting lines.” He leaned back to admire the imaginary web before him.

“Once a kid asked me what happens when all of the dots are connected, and I must’ve scared him to death. I said, 'You die.'

“I don’t know why I said that. But that is how it is, sort of, that’s what life is all about—connecting lines,” he concluded.

[end excerpt]

I can't entirely agree with Juster-- I don't think an understanding of how everything is connected is necessarily the main function of life. What, for instance, should you do once you've drawn a line? Just sit and think about it? Or do something? Maybe it doesn't matter, but I like to think it matters.

On the other hand, I see his interconnecting web theory as a gentle reminder to anyone who is trying to figure out what they want to do with their life. Back in that living room, I was struggling to decide what to study and wondering if seemingly unrelated topics I loved could be combined. Now, in the job world, I am wondering how to combine my incongruous catalog of work experience and interests-- outdoors and city, fair housing and middle schoolers, education and creative writing, counseling and journalism and social justice. In the lens of the Episcopalian Service Corps, you hear people talking about “discerning a vocation,” that is, figuring out what it is that God is calling you to do in your work.

But if there is no God calling me to do anything, the question becomes, is there a specific career path that will energize and invigorate me the most AND make the greatest positive impact on a community? I think Norton Juster would say yes, there are career paths like that, but plenty of them; and there's no reason why you have to choose one over another for the rest of your life, or even the long term. All of your experiences on and off the resume are dots that eventually you will have the wisdom to connect. (You hope.)

Bedtime Prayers

[Written last weekend]

At the monastery where I am spending the weekend, the monks pray fives times per day in the chapel. The final prayer, compline, is the bedtime prayer. Of the ones I have attended, it is my favorite.

I think that bedtime is a good time to take stock of the day, and to let one's stripped-down, essential self come out. In my life, night is not physically much more dangerous than day (unless I end up walking home a lot later than planned), but night is more dangerous in terms of emotional vulnerability, in the potential for mistakes, in allowing fear to direct actions. Problems seem bigger at night. Unrequited love grows unbearable. It is soothing to crawl into bed at the end of a long, difficult day, pull the blankets up, nestle down, close my eyes-- both because I need the sleep and because I feel a certain safety in my bed.

Last night at compline the monks sang a line something like,

'protect those who work while others sleep, night and day.'

In New York City it is especially clear to me that there are people working at all hours of the day. The overnight subway workers, for instance. They are visible yet ignored by the bleary-eyed folks going home, and forgotten by those already at home. Most likely, the subway workers are watching out for someone else, some loved one who is currently sleeping and who relies on their wages to eat. But who watches out for the worker?

If I believed in a world where a God protected those who other people pray for, then it seems like the only mutualistic, compassionate system for the day workers to pray for the night workers before falling asleep, and the night workers to pray for the day workers before falling asleep.

Since I don't believe in that world, what appeals to me about bedtime prayer, I think, is that it is an expression of one human's care for another. Asking a god to protect someone implies that you're going to try to protect them too-- even if we know that our efforts to protect each other from some things are futile.

Tonight, compline reminded me of another bedtime prayer. A few years ago, I was in a brief relationship with a close friend of mine, C. We slept in the same bed less than a dozen times. When he prepared to sleep, lying under the sheets, C would repeat the prayer he that he would say with his family as a boy. I listened as he recited the basic prayer, the words falling out quickly and fluidly, almost without him trying to form them. At the end, he would ask God to bless the members of his immediate family, one by one, ending with himself:

“Bless Mommy and Daddy and T and B and C...

Which is endearing in itself. But whenever he said this prayer in my presence, he would add my name:

“Bless mommy and daddy and T and B and C and Kelly.”

Asking God for my well-being, yes. But in doing so, making me a part of his family, right up there with his older brothers who I know he loves dearly. I felt especially protected those nights, like someone had laid an extra blanket over my body that was not bullet-proof, but that did protect from loneliness. 

Where's her Self Respect?

Joan Didion has a slick pen. I read her, I love her, I try to talk about her words, and then I slip on the ink and say something not quite as true. I worry that, in my mouth, her ideas will be less brilliant, and I won't be able to defend them properly. Fortunately, her essays can defend itself.

I first read Didion in high school, but I rediscovered her essay “On Self Respect” when I was at a particularly low moment five years later. I was embroiled in a very intense, very public conflict with some close college friends. It felt like my own respectability was on trial in the season finale of a prime time drama. At night, a certain housemate would listen to me as I sat in his desk chair and talked around and around the problem. He was both comforting and harsh, and either way I put too much stock in his opinion.

The evening after I reread “On Self Respect,” I brought Didion's book to him and told him to read it. It sat on his desk for the remaining months of school. When we were packing to move out, I took it back and found I didn't care anymore whether he'd read it or not. I was on my way up. To hell with what other people think.

One of the many quotable lines that struck me most at the time:

“Self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others-- who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.”

Self-respect is not the same as being respectable, or even about being moral. People too often act as if respectable-moral- and self-respecting are all the same. A woman gets on a subway in a low cut dress and a high cut skirt that clings everywhere it covers, and someone mutters to their friend, “Where's her self-respect?” As in, “I perceive her dress as promiscuous, I have a problem with promiscuity, so I am going to blame her for some deficiency.” It has nothing to do with how the woman in the dress perceives herself. At the same time, someone can look all put together, be admired by his peers, achieve high honors in what he does, and yet exist in an inner world of self-loathing and disgust.

Rather, Didion explains that Self Respect is a discipline of awareness and accountability. It means weighing the cost of your actions, and, if you choose to take an action, accepting and owning the cost. So while self-respect doesn't mean staying within your mothers', your friends', your society's expectations for you, it isn't free license, either. It means holding yourself to expectations that you know that you can sleep with at night.

Those with Self Respect don't writhe in guilt for failing to meet unhelpful expectations other people set for them (i.e. return that phone call, avoid that confrontation, don't masturbate, get married, be a vegan/vegetarian/carnivore, do something useful with yourself, etc.). Nor do they writhe in guilt for making decisions that they later realize were poor. Don't abandon yourself at the scene of the crime by wailing, I didn't mean to! If you practice Self Respect, you accept what you did or didn't do, and know the reasons you did, or didn't. Then move along. Get out of yourself, look outward, and keep weighing the cost of your actions as best as you possibly can.

Didion reminds me, too, that good decisions can also be tough, and have cost, and require sacrifice. Seeing these decisions through is what she calls character. In a white-people-problems sort of way, I think of 'character' in terms of not whining when you're on hour nine of a long day of hiking in the middle of a backcountry desert on some wilderness survival adventure. Everyone else on the trip is the same boat as you, and you signed up, so be accountable to yourself and don't make yourself a weight for everyone else to bear. Drink your water, tend to your blisters and maybe even try to cheer someone else up.

But that's really just character-building for the bigger stuff. Having the gumption to go for a career where there supposedly is no future of a big break, an open position, or good pay; or taking a difficult job full of difficult people for the half-victories that you know are worth it. It's getting sober and it's telling difficult truths that need to be told. It's sticking to the terms of a break-up you initiated, even if it feels terrible in the moment. It's speaking out against a system you find unjust, even when there is no one else in support of you.

In short, Self Respect is faith in your own judgment, and faith that you can develop your own judgment.

Heart Work (part one)

I am writing from a writing desk in my small room at Holy Cross monastery, where my intern program is visiting for the long weekend. The monastery perches atop a long slope above the Hudson river. In the morning, the water shines upwards as if it is raising the sunlight back up to the light's source.

The monks here observe The Great Silence from 8:30 at night until 8:30 in the morning, after breakfast. We join them. It is in the first few hours of the silence last night that I opened up my old friend, “The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,” translated by Stephen Mitchell. The book was hands-down my favorite book for four years. The summer after high school I put Rilke down, and have not really paid it much attention for another four years.

The book falls naturally open, the binding splitting, at The Ninth Elegy. My brain recalls the half-forgotten words almost before I read them. I have read it three or four times in the past 24 hours. The translation is bulky (they all are) but somehow intensely personal to me.

Disclaimer: This is going to be a post in which I geek out more than normal.

The Ninth Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leave (like the smile of a breeze)--: why then

have to be human-- and, escaping from fate,

keep longing for fate?...

We are humans. As intellectual and emotional creatures, we are the most volatile life form. We run from death, we fear the future, and yet we are always thinking about what comes next, saying, 'Things will be better when....'

Rilke, in his particularly volatile existential distress, asks, Why be human? Why not live as something else, like a laurel tree? They have life and yet remain serene.

(In the Metamorphoses, a set of writings by Ovid, there is a story about how Apollo loved Daphne, who was afraid of him. She fled from him and thus Zeus turned her into a laurel tree so that she could no longer run and Apollo could love her. Daphne as a laurel with Apollo crawling all over her sounds alarming to me, not serene. But we'll assume that being a laurel is not some sort of human trafficking and let Rilke get on with it.)

He was asking, “Why be human?”

Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

would exist in the laurel too...

For him, the purpose of being human can't just be to enjoy life. Happiness is fleeting, and superficial-- a feeling rather than a state, like joy. The purpose also can not just be to learn, or to practice for some afterlife. What is it, then?

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

This is where I start to really swoon. I love these words. To me, it brings meaning into a world without afterlife. Meaning is in the strange interrelation, the pull between human and outside world, which isn't really so outside at all. Just being part of it, feeling the force of that interrelation between human, animal, plant, earth, atmosphere, is so much.

We are witnesses in a way that animals and plants are not. Humans see the passing of time and the transience of things. And we recognize that we are transient too, that we will spend each moment once. Since we know this, we can place value upon those moments. And to create that value is worth it.

But, though we may try, it is rare to feel totally at one with the world, in the moment:

And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

Trying to become it.

But then what? What's the outcome of trying to feel the world, trying to truly experience it? (asks the human, concerned with the future:)

– Whom can we give it to? We would

hold onto it all, forever... ah, but what can we take along

into that other realm? Not the art of looking,

which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,

and the long experience of love,-- just what is wholly unsayable.

None of our physical skills will go on with us in death. The only thing that carries out of the physical world is that undefinable element: consciousness. (I would add: Maybe not our personal consciousness, with memories attached, but there's nothing to suggest that consciousness as a thing would not continue to exist without a physical world, or without souls or afterlife, even.)

So we can take “the unsayable” with us. But does the universe need us?

But later, among the stars,

what good is it-- they are better as they are: unsayable.

For when the traveller returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian.

Nah, the universe doesn't need humans to feel one with it in order to function. It doesn't really benefit a rock to feel at one with it. But there is something that humans contribute beyond mere functioning. Words. Analysis. Writing about the world, art about the world, talking about the world-- in short: interpretation of the world.

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--

at most: column, tower...

But to say them, you must understand,

oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves

ever dreamed of existing.

We are deeply a part of the world. But what we bring to the world is our power to interpret it. Building meaning, giving an extra dimension to the universe, is our reason for living.

Such as: a child's favorite teddy bear is not just a stuffed animal to him. To anyone who has read Ovid, a laurel tree is not just a laurel. If it is someone we know, a sick woman is not just a sick woman. A flag is not just a flag. We assign depth and metaphor.

Rilke calls this meaning-making heart work. Once I knew to look for it, I realized that this heart work idea extends out of much of his writing, like an expansion upon an expansion of the world he writes about... what dimension does that even put him in at that point?

Whew. Rilke. We're only halfway through the elegy at this moment, but I suspect we all need rest. Perhaps I will pick up the second half on in a future Someday.

Middle school spirituality

I hit my spiritual prime in middle school. It was the only time I admitted to spirituality without caveat, that it was a badge I wore proudly, that I considered some of my daily practices 'spiritual.'

I understand that when you hit puberty, besides periods, crushes, deodorant, etc, your brain also develops to the point when you start to have more questions about the metaphysical. Your view of yourself develops, your view of your parents develop, you start to wonder about big issues like the root of violence or whether there actually is a God or not. With a tinge of adolescent hysteria.

The primary location of my spiritual life was in my writing. In 6^th grade I started keeping a journal. I wrote in the journal every night before going to sleep, usually in the 9 or 10 pm hour, with Mix 100.3 playing on the radio. (This was when tortured boy bands like Vertical Horizon and Creed were popular.) I hated having to skip a day. It was ritual: I would lie on my stomach in bed, my face just inches from the open window, and write as the breeze breathed on me.

I wrote in the second person. I would pour out my thoughts to an undefined You. This You knew everything that I had previously written about. This You was a confidante, was the linearity I created for my life. Maybe You was not God, but it helped me to think that I was addressing something out there, separate from me.

Once I woke up at my Grandmother's house in the middle of the night, sat up, and wrote on a sticky note to remember later: “god is the glue that holds the circle of life 2gether.” Did I actually believe it or like the idea of it? Not sure.

In my case, the big questions started to seem big around the time that I started having the drawn-out, ridiculous infatuations with boys that we all hope to never have again past age 14. So my middle school spirituality was, embarrassingly, tangled up with my crushes.

I would write excessively about whatever boy I was pining after, and sentences later I would write about things I had never considered before-- was there a meaning to life? How do people cope with cynicism? If there is no god, is there no meaning? Are there souls? I grappled with 9-11, with my parents' divorce, with my first feelings of deep sadness and loneliness. I also gushed about exciting homework assignments, assigned great meaning to silly moments I shared with my friends. Because I was writing these things down for the first time, certain events I wrote down stood out, seemed mythic.

I signed every entry like a letter: “Love, Kelly.” I continue to end my entries this way, automatically.

I made my own metaphors and symbolism, and noticed them during the day, and then wrote about them. A paper crane, the coyotes howling outside, certain songs, all had special, crucial meaning. For some reason I no longer understand would write the names of my crushes on tiny pieces of paper and hide them in a ceramic jar I bought at the Renaissance festival labeled “freckles.” So freckles had certain meaning too.

I was restless and superstitious, sentimental and dramatic. But I could tell I was heading towards bigger thoughts, bigger epiphanies. My thirteen-year-old self described it thusly:

Feet won’t stop moving,

the cold nose grass

on my toes

watching the moths

fumble across smoke

on my nose it smells like night

My view out my window in those days was the suburban cul de sac of Eliza Court and the rolling fields behind it. I memorized my neighbors' nighttime habits-- the chubby man in long white shorts walking his dog, the moody college student that stood and smoked on the driveway of the gray house. They were important parts of the ritual too.

After I closed my notebook and turned the light out, I would lie with my head on the windowsill, eyes up at the stars, and listen to the coyotes in the distant fields howling and killing small family pets. I learned to follow the movement of the larger constellations, to greet Mars as a friend as it slowly travelled across the sky (and in 8^th grade, grew larger than it will ever be again in my lifetime). When my mind felt too full and my heart too tumultuous to sleep, I would sometimes talk very quietly out the window, out to the night. I would continue to talk to “You,” ask it questions, express my hopes and concerns. I considered it my own means of praying.

In 7^th grade, I had a crush on a boy in my class that primarily played out over aol instant messaging. We rarely hung out at school, but in the evenings we would have long conversations, usually about a topic of his choosing, usually about something existential. He was a bit older than I and seemed incredibly wise. We would also email poetry back and forth that we had written. His verse was formal and philosophical and (I thought at the time) very deep. I still remember how one began:

Love

What a joyous folly of the heart

In the end, he ended up 'dating' a 6^th grader and I got roped into accompanying them on one of their movie dates and I moodily walked through the fields in a snow-pink night after parting ways. Ridiculousness aside, he did challenge me to ask bigger questions, which I continued asking long after I got tired of him.

I had a special tree at the park that I would sit in to think about such questions. In reality, it was a bent up, half-dead mess of a tree in a drainage ravine right next to the local park. Teenagers would go smoke and drink there at night, leaving stray beer cans and smudges of graffiti on the tree. On weekend days, I would put on my soft, red baseball hat, backwards (like Holden Caulfield, whom I had not heard of yet), and walk the half mile to the park. I'd duck off the sidewalk onto a dirt trail and push through a wall of willows, descending to a tiny 'creek' of drainage water. The tree's bark was worn smooth from climbers, and the trunk was twisted parallel to the ground at one spot, where I could sit above the water and be hidden from the park visitors. I considered it the best place to be alone and think.

I cringe and laugh to read what I wrote in those days, but I do love remembering that phase of my adolescence. For all of the self-consciousness that comes with being 12 and 13, I was not self-conscious about my 'spirituality.' It was not meaty or well developed, but it was natural and I accepted it for what it was.