March 5: Kick Through Hyperspace, Writing Devotions, Deadlines

Arthur Dent, the last surviving inhabitant of the planet Earth, is trying to come to terms with his new status . . .

Arthur let out a low grown.  He was horrified to discover that the kick through hyperspace hadn't killed him.  He was now six light-years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still existed.

The Earth.

Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind.  There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big.  He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone.  No reaction.  He thought of all the people he had been close to.  No reaction.  Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone.  Nelson's Column was gone!  Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry.  From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship.  A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

England no longer existed.  He'd got that--somehow he'd got that.  He tried again.  America, he thought, has gone.  He couldn't grasp it.  He decided to start smaller again.  New York has gone.  No reaction.  He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway.  The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever.  Slight tremor there.  Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock.  McDonald's, he thought,  There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger. 

He passed out.  When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.

Arthur is dealing with profound loss, on a scale none of us has ever experienced.  Not only has he lost his entire family, but he has lost everything he has every known.  Books.  Hamburger's.  Nelson's Column.  (I had to look this one up--it's a monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson in Trafalgar Square in central London.)  Literally, he is profoundly orphaned.

Had I encountered this passage last week, it would have completely set me up for a lengthy meditation on grief and loss.  I mean, Arthur is mourning his mother in the last sentence.  I have been in this space of loss for a couple of weeks now.  My whole world has shifted.  I'm about to embark on some new kind of career, whatever that will be.  I'm on a steel-lined spaceship, unsure of my destination.

But I'm not going to write about loss.  For the past two days, I have been working on a writing project for my wife's church.  In the past, I have organized groups of church members to write devotionals--Advent/Christmas and Lenten/Easter.  Several years ago, I stepped down as worship leader.  I was burned out and feeling slightly unappreciated.  (I know, I know.  Doing God's work isn't about gaining recognition.  It's a long story, and I don't have the energy tonight to delve into that mess.)  Consequently, I stopped organizing these devotionals.

Well, this year, I was asked to put together a Lenten devotional, and I (stupidly) accepted.  For the last month-and-a-half, I've been begging, bribing, and badgering people into writing devotions for me.  If you are counting, I had 47 days to fill.  Well, on Sunday, I knew I had six days that hadn't been claimed, so, on Sunday night, I wrote six devotions.  Yesterday, when I called the church secretary who assembles the devotionals for me, I found out that six people hadn't turned in their promised devotions.  So, last night, I wrote six more devotions.

That is why I haven't posted to this blog for the last two days--writer's burn-out.  I am happy to report, when I called the church secretary this morning, she was busy running off copies of the devotional for the Ash Wednesday service tomorrow evening.  It's done.  In the can.  Hot off the presses.  Insert whatever metaphor you want here.  Not surprisingly, I also am done.  Exhausted.  Used up.  Dried up.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not mad at the people who didn't submit their promised devotions.  Life happens.  I get that.  Deadlines come, and deadlines go.  As Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhiker's, once said, "I love deadlines.  I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."  I learned, over the years of organizing these things, that people promise to write for me with the best of intentions.  Then, as Ash Wednesday or the First Sunday in Advent approaches, those people find many other more important important things that need to be done.  Cleaning out the basement.  Vacuuming the carpet.  Painting the house.  Cutting toenails.

Leaving me with the task of writing a dozen devotions in the space of 48 hours.  That is why I have been absent from blogging.  I was devotionaling instead.  My writing life has pretty much consumed me.

Now, as I come out of this hyperspace of writing, I am struggling for inspiration.  Yesterday, I made another attempt at revising a poem that's been giving me problems, as well.  I think it was my 14th or 15th draft, and, after eight or so hours of working on it, I can say with all certainty that it still pretty much sucks.

That sums up my state of mind at this very moment.

Sometimes, Saint Marty thinks he should have been a plumber. 

April 13: Descartian Vortices, Scanning Documents, Whales and Bigfoot

In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t' gallant crosstrees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a convenience closet of your watch-coat.

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow's-nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow's-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beret. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable sidescreen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors," he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole.

But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how could I- being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude- how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time."

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the corking care of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:-

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient "interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

Thus ends the chapter on the mast-head--that perch high above the decks of the whale ship, where sailors climb to serve lookout for any flukes and spouts on the horizon.  In the end, Melville/Ishmael admonishes any captain not to hire any young person of a poetic/philosophical temperament.  That person, Melville warns, will spend more time lost in thought in that lofty vantage point than searching for sperm whales.  No harpoons will be cast.  No blubber harvested.

I would make a terrible lookout in the mast-head.  My mind has a tendency to flit and cast about when faced with long stretches of empty time or tedious labor.  I just got home from a day of work at a local cardiology office.  Eight hours of scanning.  Nary a whale in sight.  Just pages of medical records and ringing phones.  As I fed paper into the scanner, my mind went on voyages without the company of my body.

I have writing to do this weekend.  One last Christmas essay to revise and polish.  I found myself working through the details of the rewrite as I scanned today.  It helped me pass the time without going crazy.  Made me feel as if I wasn't wasting my entire day mindlessly staring at a computer screen.  I felt like I was at least accomplishing something significant.

Of course, a lot of people don't understand having a mind of poetry, to paraphrase/steal a line from Wallace Stevens.  I suppose some of you might say that I was daydreaming.  Standing at the top of the mast-head, looking for Bigfoot instead of whales.  In my defense, I did scan hundreds of documents.  Therefore, I guess you can say that I spotted quite a few whales in the ocean.  However, I also managed to feed another part of myself--the Bigfoot part, if you will.

My writing life has been like this for decades.  Rarely do I get significant blocks of time to concentrate on my poems or essays.  Instead, I steal time.  Ten minutes here.  A half hour there.  I scribble on scraps of paper and stuff them in my journal for later.  Maybe that's why I mostly write verse instead of prose--it takes less time.

Sometimes, the most creative part of my day is when I sit down with my laptop to compose these blog posts.  This happens after hours of sometimes mind-numbing tasks.  Blogging sort of jump-starts my brain again.  Once I'm done, I'm ready to rejoin the world.  I feel energized and alive.

I imagine that's how full-time writers feel all the time.  Engaged and fulfilled.  In my whole life, I've only had one week where I focused almost solely on my writing.  During those five or six days, I wrote close to fifteen poems.  All day long, I sort of hummed along, seeing poetry everywhere.  At breakfast.  Sprouting through the cracks in the sidewalk.  In the waves of the Pacific Ocean.  The smell of kelp.  Writing was as easy as picking a crab apple off a tree.

However, that is not my day-to-day existence.  I'm not complaining.  I do envy some of my friends and colleagues who have full-time jobs at universities.  While there's committee work and teaching and advising, I think I would be able to feel the hum of poetry a lot more often if I were a full-timer.  Certainly, I would be doing things that fed my soul a little more.

Tonight, I plan to climb to the mast-head for a little while with my journal and pen.  Let my mind wander.  Write some.  Revise some.  Live some.  You know.  Be a writer for an hour or so.

Saint Marty is thankful that the weekend is upon him.

January 21: Working, Weaving, and Praying

I'm watching a documentary on PBS about J. D. Salinger at the moment.  The thing that strikes me about him is that he worked all the dime.  Writing was his life.  It gave him meaning, helped him understand who he was.  Salinger stopped publishing in 1965.  But he kept writing.  Every day.  For over 40 years.

I aspire to write daily.  It's one of the reasons I blog.  Blogging is my excuse.  After I've registered surgical patients, after I've taught at the university, after I've gotten my son to bed, I sit down, open up my laptop, and start to type.  I used to blog in the early morning.  Right now, my habit is to work at night, like Charlotte:

Charlotte tore quite a section out of her web, leaving an open space in the middle.  Then she started weaving something to take the place of the threads she had removed.  When Templeton got back from the dump, around midnight, the spider was still at work.

I don't always write things of worth.  In fact, I rarely accomplish more than laying bare my insecurities and worries.  That doesn't always make for compelling reading.  It makes for whining and angst and melancholy.  You know, writerly preoccupations.

I'm not writing whining tonight.  Tonight, I want to offer a little prayer for the work I do.

Dear Lord of Labor,

Bless these words I'm typing.  Let them do the work they need to do.  I don't know who's reading them.  I don't know what impact they're having, if any at all.  But let the work be good.  Let the words be good.  And give me the gift of words again tomorrow.

Your loving child,

Saint Marty

Salinger worked the words