Category Archives: Quotes

Why Should We?

Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?

Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?

–Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit

Having Some Respect

Mediocre in its simple signification I do not despise at all. And one certainly does not rise above that mark by despising what is mediocre. In my opinion one must begin by at least having some respect for the mediocre and know that it already means something, and that it is only reached through great difficulty.

–Vincent van Gogh

When In Public

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers. On sighting mathematicians it should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra; it should fall in love with children and woo them with fairytales; it should wait on the landing for 2 years for all its mates to come home then go outside and find them all dead. When the electricity fails it should wear dark glasses and pretend to be blind. It should guide all those who are safe into the middle of busy roads and leave them there. It should scatter woodworm into the bedrooms of all peg-legged men not being afraid to hurt the innocent or make such differences. It should shout EVIL! EVIL! from the roofs of the world’s stock exchanges. It should not pretend to be a clerk or a librarian. It should be kind, it is the eventual sameness of contradictions. It should never weep until it is alone and then only after it has covered the mirrors and sealed up the cracks. Poetry should seek out pale and lyrical couples and wander with them into stables, neglected bedrooms and engineless cars for a final Good Time. It should enter burning factories too late to save anyone. It should pay no attention to its real name. Poetry should be seen lying by the side of road accidents, hissing from unlit gasrings. It should scrawl the nymphomaniac’s secret on her teacher’s blackboard; offer her a worm saying: Inside this is a tiny apple. Poetry should play hopscotch in the 6pm streets and look for jinks in other people’s dustbins. At dawn it should leave the bedroom and catch the first bus home to its wife. At dusk it should chat up a girl nobody wants. It should be seen standing on the ledge of a skyscraper, on a bridge with a brick tied around its heart. It is the monster hiding in a child’s dark room, it is the scar on a beautiful man’s face. It is the last blade of grass being picked from the city park.

—Brian Patten

Its Bitterness Is Sweet

I wonder if the president is getting enough coffee. He seems like he’s just not that into being president. I don’t mean this to be critical in any way, but there is a dimness about the man that suggests a need for caffeine. It is not enough simply to refrain from adultery and tax increases and make the occasional trip to Idaho to announce that we are winning the war in Iraq. It’s the French who take the whole month of August off, Mr. President. That’s not us. Americans are not idlers and layabouts and feather merchants, we’re strivers and pluggers and we welcome adversity, so long as we have coffee. Its bitterness is sweet to us.

–Garrison Keillor, Mitigating Life’s Daily Grind

The media continues to mention how Bush cut his vacation short, but to this I say, “Big whoop.” He cut it short by two days, as he should. Why make a big deal of the president fulfilling duties that his position requires?

Hmm. Usually this blog is not so negatively focused. I am struggling to manage my internal responses to all this. My husband, bless him, does not understand this part of me very well. He suggests that I “feast on” the negativity, that I do it “everytime” there’s a major disaster, such as 9/11 or the Asian tsunami. What is so hard to convey is that I grieve, despite the fact I’m relatively distant from the event. It is not morbidity that drives me. It is a sense of connection with humanity. I know life must go on. People must work, do chores, and need to have a little fun. And I will. Just not right now, not this week. Don’t the refugees and the victims deserve that small amount of my attention, care, and prayer? Grief is part of life. What I don’t understand is how we can give it so little acknowledgment and room in our lives. Like coffee, its bitterness is sweet.

But considering eight of my last ten posts were about this catastrophe, perhaps I ought to take a step back, away from this outlet, and experience my mourning in private.

Intuitive and Instrumental Grieving

It is close to five months since my father-in-law died, and grief continues to visit our lives. This is no surprise; my mother-in-law’s visit was her first to us as a widow, and I keenly felt the absence of my father-in-law. The dynamics among us have altered; the intensity of grief changes us as individuals and as a family, just as iron becomes molten and is transformed by fire, then cools into a new form. We haven’t reached the cooling stage, yet. And with grief, there is no orderly process or recipe to follow, despite the “stages of grief” concept introduced by Elizabeth Kübler Ross. We will just muddle through. People cope with grief differently; the excerpt below is from an article my husband found. While it’s been suggested there are gender differences in the way men and women mourn, the research implies that bereavement is not defined by gender.

Because some individuals choose not to talk about their feelings does not mean they do not feel; but rather they don’t have the words to express their feeling in the face of the tragedy or don’t have the need to do so. For some the event is beyond words or expression and is felt deeply. This must not be misconstrued as cold or unfeeling. The person may not be ready to live with the reality once it is expressed openly. In their recent work Kenneth Doka and Terry Martin talk of “transcending gender stereotypes” and describe two main styles of grieving—the “intuitive griever” and the “instrumental griever.” They present a third, the “blended style griever.” Below represents the two components that comprise the “blended” style:

Intuitive Griever:

  • FEELINGS are intensely experienced.
  • Expressions such as crying and lamenting mirror the inner experience.
  • Successful adaptive strategies facilitate the experience and expression of feelings.
  • There are prolonged periods of confusion, inability to concentrate, disorganization, and disorientation.
  • Physical exhaustion and/or anxiety may result.

Instrumental Griever:

  • THINKING is predominant to feeling as an experience; feelings are less intense.
  • There is a general reluctance to talk specifically about feelings.
  • Mastery of oneself and the environment are most important.
  • Problem-solving as a strategy enables mastery of feelings and control of the environment in creating the new normal.
  • Brief periods of cognitive dysfunction are common—confusion, forgetfulness, obsessiveness.
  • Energy levels are enhanced, but symptoms of general arousal caused by the loss go unnoticed.

Patterns, according to Doka, occur along a continuum. Those grievers/responders near the center who demonstrate a BLENDING of the two styles experience a variety of both patterns. One pattern may be more pronounced than another depending upon the loss and the personal connection to that loss. This pattern suggests a need for even more choices among adaptive strategies than for the griever who is more fixed in either strategy mentioned above.

—Grief Counseling Resource Guide, A Field Manual

The Letter and The Spirit

Religious laws, in all the major traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of a law is all-important, whereas the letter, while useful in conjunction with spirit, becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction, a yearning to worship in wilderness or beside rivers, rather than in churches, could legitimately be called evangelical. Jesus himself began his mission after forty days and nights in wilderness. According to the same letter vs. spirit distinction, the law-heavy literalism of many so-called evangelicals is not evangelical at all: “evangel” means “the gospels”; the essence of the gospels is Jesus; and literalism is not something that Jesus personified or taught.

Nor need one be a Christian for the word “evangelical” to apply: if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce, for instance, wrote, “War is the means by which Americans learn geography,” there was acid dripping almost visibly from his pen. His words, however, are aimed at the same anti-war end as the gospel statements “Love thine enemies” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” And “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Bierce’s wit is in this sense evangelical whether he likes it or not. …

To refer to peregrinating Celtic monks and fundamentalist lobbyists, Origen and Oral Roberts, the Desert Fathers and Tim La Haye, Jerry Falwell and Dante, St. Francis and the TV “prosperity gospel” hucksters, Lady Julian of Norwich and Tammy Faye Baker, or John of the Cross and George W. Bush all as Christian stretches the word so thin its meaning vanishes. The term “carbon-based life-form” is as informative. Though it may shock those who equate fundamentalism and Christianity, ninety years ago the term “fundamentalist” did not exist. The term was coined by an American Protestant splinter-group which, in 1920, proclaimed that adhering to “the literal inerrancy of the Bible” was the true Christian faith. The current size of this group does not change the aberrance of its stance: deification of the mere words of the Bible, in light of every scripture-based wisdom tradition including Christianity’s two-thousand-year-old own, is not just naiveté: it is idolatry.

This, in all sincerity, is why fundamentalists need connections to, and the compassion of, those who are no such thing. How can those lost in literalism save one another? As Max Weber once put it: “We [Christians] are building an iron cage, and we’re inside of it, and we’re closing the door. And the handle is on the outside.”

–David James Duncan

This was excerpted from an essay featured at Bruderhof; a longer version was published in the July/August 2005 issue of Orion. What Duncan wrote resonated deeply. I would like to read more.

As It Wants

Here’s a quote we like from John Steinbeck to a friend who asked him for rudimentary suggestions for the beginner. It may be all you need to get you started with your memoir:

“Don’t start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don’t try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember. You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first but kind of think of it when you aren’t doing it. Don’t think back over what you have done. Don’t think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the matter of detail — cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling.”

[from the Center for Autobiographical Studies]

Posting will be light over the next seven days, as I have company arriving this afternoon.

Blessed Are the Meek

When I was forced in parochial school to learn the Eight Beatitudes, I always stumbled over the third one, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” How absurd. The meek, from my observation, ended up with the chicken neck rather than the breast, the giver rather than receiver of nice birthday gifts, the one at home on New Year’s, the one to care for ancient relatives and disabled pets no one else would keep, forgotten in the will, passed up for promotions, living in later years on Social Security in a trailer. I might buy “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” but inherit the earth? Look around.

I get it now, though; for as I grow older I find that it is the meek I cannot forget. Long after I can no longer remember the ruthless, machinelike ones, I remember the gentlest souls. They are the ones I must celebrate, the ones whose portraits I find myself trying to write again and again, my mother, my dear Aunt Anne, my fifth and sixth grade teacher, Mr. Grekle. When I write the portraits of those who have loved me best, I understand how it is they inherit the earth, for they are the ones who have taken possession of me.

–Tristine Rainer, Your Life as Story: Discovering the New Autobiography” and Writing Memoir as Literature

Anniversary

Three hundred sixty-five action-packed days ago we arrived in Santa Clara. I know my way around a bit, but much of Silicon Valley remains unplotted for me. I’ve met some lovely people and made acquaintances. It was stressful, this transition, since it was accompanied by family problems and big events. My energy was scattered and I had trouble identifying the shape I wanted my life to take. I hope next year brings more clarity and depth. I intend to continue making collages and playing creatively. I commit to my writing more seriously. I will find a way to use my counseling skills.

The key, I think, to achieving the inner bounty I desire is to apply focus and discipline. I reveled in the time involved making that recent collage. To prepare for a photo session for the magazine interview I did, I started another canvas. I’ll an appointment with myself to spend time on the project, and when I finish this one, I’ll set another one in motion and make a date with myself again. Repeat, and repeat again.

With regard to writing, I’ve decided to commit effort to the genres of memoir, personal essay, and poetry. I accept that I have no interest in writing fiction and “real writers” don’t all write for that genre. I do want to learn more about freelance writing, although this may take time to break into. Meanwhile, I have plenty of source material for writing about life. I put a notice on Craigslist to create a memoir-writing group; three people have responded so far.

As for the counseling, I need to contemplate the life coach practice I’d incubated last year. I have contacts, and I could explore this. It appeals as a future source of work because it would be flexible, allowing time to be a mother — another endeavor I hope to undertake. With these aspirations, along with reading and taking care of my physical fitness, my life is rich and meaningful.

On Wednesday my mother-in-law arrives for a week — her first visit here. There will be much to do and see and probably less time spent on the Web. Then a couple of short weeks later will find me winging east to Syracuse, where I’ll visit my parents and one of my sisters. We plan to head to my mother’s hometown to see relatives too.

This is all an auspicious beginning of my second year as a Californian.

It’s the way to educate your eyes. Stare. Pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

–Walker Evans

Ah, The Girl Crush

This is not a new phenomenon. Women, especially young women, have always had such feelings of adoration for each other. Social scientists suspect such emotions are part of women’s nature, feelings that evolution may have favored because they helped women bond with one another and work cooperatively. What’s new is the current generation’s willingness to express their ardor frankly.

–Stephanie Rosenbloom, She’s So Cool, So Smart, So Beautiful: Must Be a Girl Crush

I’ve been fortunate to experience this mutually in several friendships. When I meet a woman who is intelligent, curious, expressive, compassionate, with whom I connect, sometimes there is a synchronicity that sparks a lovely, intense regard. I believe I only learned the term “girl crush” in the past couple of years; it is quite apt.

[link via my brother, Tony, who often happens across cool articles that he knows I’ll enjoy]

Thoughts About the New Autobiography

This is a form of note-taking to bookmark tidbits that particularly spoke to me from the book, Your Life as Story, by Tristine Rainer.

We are no longer a tribal people, but we are entering the age of the global village. We now have a technological campfire, the Internet, that allows us to find other members of our tribe — people who share our general mythology about life. We could use our technology to enrich our collecctive wisdom through autobiographic storytelling — but we have lost the skill.

The lie is not in the new popular forms: factions, docudramas, nonfiction novels, personal journalism, dramatic nonfiction, the literature of fact, creative nonfiction, autobiographical novels, nonfiction narrative, and literary memoir. Mixing of fiction and nonfiction has been enjoyed by other cultures for centuries. The art of the earliest Japanese diaries lay in blending the author’s experience with imagination so the reader could not tell where fact ended and fiction began. The lie in our culture is in not recognizing that we are now sophisticated enough to enjoy this kind of writing and entertainment, and that this is what we are doing.

For the curious who might want to see how I’ve created my mini-course — or who just want to see how obsessive and compulsive I can be — you can peruse it at your leisure. Incidentally, I wrote this post as a means of postponing the first exercise in her book; I’m wrung out from last night. Tomorrow!

All At Once By Remote Control

Roads aren’t real anymore. All roads are now metaphors about the road. Most people would rather stay home. In their homes they feed on lots of clichés about the road so that they won’t feel as if they’ve stopped moving. Only the dead stop moving and most people don’t want to be dead. Every couch potato dreams himself or herself on the road, and they are, thanks to TV, which gives them the illusion that they are somewhere else. Everyone lives on TV now, which is everywhere and nowhere. People are in the Amazon, in the Arctic, on the streets of Detroit, in the Southwest, in San Francisco all at once, by remote control. When TV travelers do travel they go to places they’ve seen on TV, straight into the tourist postcards and never see what they haven’t already seen at home. If they stumble on something that’s never been on TV they shoot it with the video camera and then it’s on TV. They go from postcard to postcard by plane so they never touch the road.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

The Breathing of Poetry

There is a sense in which poetry is not so much the writing of words as it is the movement of breath itself. To write it, you must pay attention to the breathing of poetry, to all speech as breath, to the relationship of our thoughts and emotions and the actual way they fill our bodies.

–Robert Hass, from The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers

Identification, Please

on the road to somewhere

My life would have been much simpler, I think, if I had learned how to drive when I came to America. An American without a car is a sick creature, a snail that has lost its shell. Living without a car is the worst form of destitution, more shameful by far than not having a home. A carless person is a stationary object, a prisoner, not really a grownup. A homeless person, by contrast, may be an adventurer, a vagabond, a lover of the open sky. The only form of identification an American needs is a driver’s license.

Time and time again I stood humiliated before a bank clerk who would not admit to my existence because a passport meant nothing to her. Over and over I’ve had to prove my existence to petty clerks and policemen for whom there is only one valid form of ID. Driven to despair, I wrote my first autobiography, The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, at age twenty-three for the sole reason of having my picture on the cover. Whenever a banker asked to see “some identification,” I pulled the book from my mirrored Peruvian bag and pointed to the cover. More often than not, it was not enough. “What we mean is,” the flustered interpreters of rules and upholders of reality would insist, “we want to see some proper ID!” Books have never been proper to those in charge of upholding the status quo.

–Andrei Codrescu, Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century

Yes, I took this photo while I was driving. Slowly.

Also see: A driver’s license as national ID?