April 25: Utopian Strain, a Writer, Dreams

Merton has a conversation with his aunt about the future . . .

Now that I as going to go to school in England, I would be more and more under her wing.  In fact, I had barely landed when she took me on one of those shopping expeditions in Oxford Street that was the immediate prelude to Ripley Court--a school in Surrey which was now in the hands of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Pearce, the wife of Uncle Ben's late brother, Robert.  He had been killed in a cycling accident when, coming to the bottom of a hill, he had failed to turn the corner and had run straight into a brick wall.  His brakes had gone back on him halfway down.

It was on one of those mornings in Oxford Street, perhaps not the very first one, that Aunt Maud and I had a great conversation about my future.  We had just bought me several pairs of grey flannel trousers and a sweater and some shoes and some grey flannel shirts and one of those floppy flannel hats that English children have to wear, and now, having emerged from D. H Evans, were riding down Oxford Street on the top of an open bus, right up in the front, where one could see simply everything

"I wonder if Tom has thought at all about his future," Aunt Maud said and looked at me, winking and blinking with both eyes as a sign of encouragement.  I was Tom.  She sometimes addressed you in the third person, like that, perhaps as a sign of some delicate, inward diffidence about bringing the matter up at all.

I admitted that I had though a little about the future, and what I wanted to be.  But I rather hesitated to tell her that I wanted to be a novelist.

"Do you think writing would be a good profession for anyone?" I said tentatively.

"Yes indeed, writing is a very fine profession!  But what kind of writing would you like to do?"

"I have been thinking that I might write stories," I said.

"I imagine you would probably do quite well at that, some day," said Aunt Maud, kindly, but added:  "Of course, you know that writers sometimes find it very difficult to make their way in the world."

"Yes, I realize that," I said reflectively.

"Perhaps if you had some other occupation, as a means of making a living, you might find time to write in your spare moments.  Novelists sometimes get their start that way, you know."

"I might be a journalist," I suggested, "and write for the newspapers."

"Perhaps that is a good idea," she said.  "A knowledge of languages would be very valuable in that field, too.  You could work your way up to the position of foreign correspondent."

"And I could write books in my spare time."

"Yes, I suppose you probably could manage it that way."

I think we rode all the way out to Ealing, talking in this somewhat abstract and utopian strain, and finally we got off, and crossed Haven Green to Castlebar Road where we had to stop in at Durston House for something or other.

It's a simple enough conversation.  An adult asking a child what s/he wants to be when s/he grows up.  Everyone reading this post probably had similar conversations with a parent or teacher or counselor or priest or minister or whomever.  "What do you want to be when you grow up?" asks the visiting police officer.  "A police officer!" says I.  "What do you want to be when you grow up, my son?" says my parish priest.  "A priest!" says I.  "What do you want to be when you grow up?" says my mother.  "A writer?" says I timidly.  My mother clucks her tongue, "Well, you can take English classes, but how about computers?  There's a future in that."  Thus I began my college career, on a full-ride scholarship, as a Computer Science major.

That didn't quite work out the way my mother imagined.  Do I regret the twists and turns my life took on the way to my current situation?  I suppose I would make different choices given the opportunity.  Maybe finish my PhD in literature.  Maybe hole up in a bedroom of the first apartment my wife and I had, banging away on a computer, writing my first novel.  Maybe forgo college entirely and travel, visiting the places I've always dreamed of seeing and now probably never will.  Rome.  London.  Paris.  Florence.  Beijing.

A side effect of this pandemic, for me, is all the time I have now to think about things like this.  My future, at the moment, is pretty hemmed in by financial and parental obligations.  I have bills to figure out how to pay and a family to support on a greatly reduced income.  I won't be planning trips to Greece or Madrid or even Green Bay any time soon.  Instead, I will hammer away on some blog post for an hour or so, publish it, and then move on to grading and making a spinach artichoke bomb.  The blogging keeps my dream alive, and the bomb feeds my kids and wife.  Some things don't change.

So, go ahead.  Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.

Saint Marty's answer will probably still be, "A writer."

June 5: Poet of the Week, Kazim Ali, "Rain"

I am getting a little tired of all of the anti-Muslim rhetoric being thrown around on social media and the Internet.  So much hatred and bigotry.  People just don't seem to get it.  It's not the fault of Islam that those people were killed in London on Saturday.  It's the fault of a broken world.

There have been terrible things done in the name of every religion.  Remember a little thing called the Spanish Inquisition?  The Crusades?  If everyone actually followed the tenets of Christianity and Islam, the world would be a peaceful place.  A place of acceptance and love and forgiveness.

I have chosen Kazim Ali as Poet of the Week.

Saint Marty prays and hopes that a little rain falls on the fires burning in the world today.

Rain

by:  Kazim Ali

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.

Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.

No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written:

“Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.

The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.

If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.

The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

June 24: London, Youthful Passion, Louise Gluck, "The Open Window"

It had been a lovely trip, London everything they had wanted and imagined--for Annie, reading selections from several Dickens novels at the time, it was an enchantment; they took strolls through the Queen's gardens, fed the swans in Regents Park; tried to envision the shantytowns that Dickens had once written about, along the Thames, the city's architecture sometimes suspending their notion of modern time.  In fact, out of their usual context for a glorious period of several weeks, the veil of grief had somehow lifted from their hearts, Ives regaining a sense of childhood wonderment about many things.  Walking about the city with a black-bound sketchbook, Ives drew madly, as he once had as a kid . . . 

Ives' trip to Great Britain does something to him.  As a kid, he used to sit for hours with his sketchbook, drawing cartoons, people, buildings.  He was obsessed with art.  Everything he saw inspired him.  He sent samples of his work to Walt Disney, and Disney himself wrote back, encouraging him to continue drawing.  That's what Ives recaptures in London.  Passion.  Curiosity.  The love of life.

I used to have the same kind of youthful passion that Ives rediscovers in London.  Everything made me want to write.  I'd read a Stephen King novel, and it made me want to write about vampires in a sleepy Upper Peninsula town.  I'd go swimming, and it made me want to write about the moon climbing over Lake Superior.  I saw the original Star Wars (before the episodes and director's cuts), and I wanted to be Isaac Asimov.  I had that much enthusiasm and drive.

I still write every day.  During the course of my 14 or 15 waking hours, I still sometimes find inspiration.  Not as often as when I was a kid, though.  Life gets in the way.  Sick kids.  Broken windows.  Car troubles.  These things tend to stifle my passion.

Right now, I'm sitting in my office at the university.  I rode with my sister to work, and I have a couple hours before I have to punch the time clock.  So, I'm typing my blog post.  I did the same thing last Wednesday.  I find my mind much clearer at this time of the day.  The worries of job and home intrude less on my thoughts.  In the space of a half hour or 45 minutes, I'm done, and I've written something that I'm not ashamed to publish.

It makes me wish I had a life that allowed me to follow this writing practice every day.  I would be able to produce so much more work.  However, rising at four every morning, writing for three hours, and then driving to the medical office to work for eight hours is not a schedule I could maintain forever.  By 8 p.m. today, I know I will be exhausted.  Falling asleep on the couch.  I don't even know how I'm going to answer phones and deal with patients for the next nine hours.

I'm not complaining.  I'm just wishing I could somehow reclaim some of my youthful enthusiasm for writing.  I feel a little too old and too tired at the moment.

Maybe Saint Marty needs to take a trip to London.  It worked for Ives.

The Open Window

by:  Louise Gluck

An elderly writer had formed the habit of writing the words THE END on a piece of paper before he began his stories, after which he would gather a stack of pages, typically thin in winter when the daylight was brief, and comparatively dense in summer when his thought became again loose and associative, expansive like the thought of a young man.  Regardless of their number, he would place these blank pages over the last, thus obscuring it.  Only then would the story come to him, chaste and refined in winter, more free in summer.  By these means, he had become an acknowledged master.

He worked by preference in a room without clocks, trusting the light to tell him when the day was finished.  In summer, he liked the window open.  How then, in summer, did the winter wind enter the room?  You are right, he cried out to the wind, this is what I have lacked, this decisiveness and abruptness, this surprise--O, if I could do this I would be a god!  And he lay on the cold floor of the study watching the wind stirring the pages, mixing the written and unwritten, the end among them.

Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations at this desk

December 15: The City, "The Triggering Town," Richard Hugo, New Cartoon

Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.  It was cold, bleak, biting weather:  foggy withal:  and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them.  The City clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already:  it had not been light all day:  and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.  The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.  To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The scene above is Charles Dickens describing one of his favorite subjects:  London.  Dickens lived the majority of his life in the city, with brief sojourns in Paris and a couple of trips to Italy and the United States.  But, when push came to shove, he always returned to his beloved town.  Much of the stereotypical images we have of Great Britain come straight from the novels of Dickens.  London was Dickens' triggering town.

The poet Richard Hugo first published his book The Triggering Town:  Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing in 1979.  I first encountered Hugo's text in a poetry workshop I took as a grad student.  I expected writing that was dry and academic, a poet expounding on issues of rhythm and meter and prosody.  Hugo's first paragraph proved my expectations wrong:

I often make these remarks to a beginning poetry-writing class.

 never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong.  It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you.  Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me.  But I hope you learn to write like you.  In a sense, I hope I don't teach you how to write but how to teach yourself to write.  At all times keep your crap detector on.  If I say something that helps, good.  If what I say is of no help, let it go.  Don't start arguments.  They are futile and take us away from our purpose.  As Yeats noted, your important arguments are with yourself.  If you don't agree with me, don't listen.  Think about something else.

Richard Hugo and his crap detector were refreshing changes for graduate school.  Hugo gave me the right to listen to his advice and my instructors'  advice, absorb what worked for me and my writing, and dismiss the rest as interesting but useless.  The thing about Hugo's book is that most of his wisdom is right on target, for beginning and experienced poets alike.  I have kept returning to his text through the years, and I continue to learn from it.

The title of his book comes from his second chapter.  In it, Hugo says, "...The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.  The reason for that, I believe, is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you've just seen for the first time...You must take emotional possession of the town and so the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can't understand, you feel is your own."  This "triggering town" is the basis, the launch pad, for a poem or short story or, in Dickens' case, novel.  Whether Dickens was living in England or France or Italy, he kept returning to London in his work.

Hugo gives other practical writing rules to follow (or ignore), as well:

• Use a number of pencils.
• Don't write with a pen.
• Pen or pencil, write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.
• Write in an hard-covered notebook with green lined pages.
• Don't erase.  Cross out rapidly and violently, never with consideration if you can help it.
• Make your first line interesting and immediate.
• Use "love" only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.
• No semicolons.  Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation.  Besides, they are ugly.

You get the idea.  Hugo is opinionated about a lot of things when it comes to writing poetry.  I don't follow all of his rules, but he gives me the freedom to realize that each poet is as unique as a fingerprint; if I want to use a semicolon, I can.  If I agree with Hugo, I can avoid them.  The whole book is one great lesson on how to be yourself as a poet and person.

 Richard Hugo is a great friend to all writers.  His book is a triggering town for me, a place to which I keep returning when I want to live in Hugo's neighborhood and be reminded of the streets he travelled, the verbs and nouns in his backyard.

Saint Marty plans on having a cup of tea with Hugo this afternoon.  Maybe some blueberry muffins, too. 

Confessions of Saint Marty