There’s Something About Harry

Before I had heard that this dog had been lost, before I’d heard that his owner was lost without him, I felt a pang myself. That’s the power of an image—or more accurately, the power of an emotion. My sister had sent me this photo, telling me that it was a picture of Harry, her friend’s dog that had gone missing that morning. But I didn’t even get to that point in Harry’s sad story before I felt my own loss.

What looking at the picture did was take me immediately to a memory, one I hadn’t thought of in years, of a German Shepherd that my family had brought home from the pound when I was eight or nine. I think my brother and I were supposed to share responsibility for the dog, but I do remember that I was in the lead in begging to have a dog. Our dog, Champ, was a beautiful shepherd like Harry, and he was friendly and fun, but he had a “flaw”: he could easily jump over the five-foot fence that bound our yard, and he did it regularly. We had to hunt him down, all in a frenzy, over and over.

I don’t recall how deep the discussion and if many other solutions were offered, but my dad decided, perhaps only after a month or so, to return Champ to the pound. I was crushed. I remember driving to the pound with the dog in the back of the station wagon, hating my dad at the wheel, my face burning. It’s strange to still have the salt active in a wound from so long ago, and stranger still the mix of emotions, because it makes me miss my dad, who died a couple of years back.

Emotions Jump Without a Net

But this post isn’t exactly about dogs, nor about losses, as an adult or a child. More so that some emotional grounds, though they might be covered, are never actually buried. People’s emotions can jump from their bodies without any chance for their cerebral side to intervene. And that’s where we as writers, whether of business or essay or tale, should open a gate. Not as manipulators of emotion, but encouragers of it. Post the pictures in readers’ minds of lost dogs, stern parents, the gleam of future dreams.

No matter if you are writing about email marketing programs or the electricity of your first kiss, try to open the gate so the emotion comes through. (Now you might grant me the kiss part, but email marketing? Believe it, there’s a charge and a current in everything—you just have to plug it in.) So yes, the Internet has changed the game—at least on this side of the digital divide—but before the first packet, before the first link, before the first tweet, there was the human heart. It leaps.

Oh, by the way: Harry? Harry made it home. Good dog!

Flesh and Blood Are We

I had a post at Firepole Marketing a short while back that runs its fingers through a few of the things discussed here. Check it out: Flesh and Blood, Meet Flesh and Blood.

I’ve been rereading Annie Dillard’s fine Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for the third or fourth time. It’s a marvelous work, almost like drinking in the molten stuff of imagination itself, for the language of the book is a series of fireworks, pinwheels of whirling thought, cascades of explosive insight, and then soft candles of introspection.

Dillard gets her nose right into nature, flopping face down on the ground and opening her eyes wide, and—with her alchemy of observation forged into words—tells us what she sees and how to see it, in a way that makes pages breathe. Among the many things that struck me in this reading was a passage about how cicadas go about their business:

“In the South, the periodical cicada has a breeding cycle of thirteen years, instead of seventeen years in the North. That a live creature spends thirteen consecutive years scrabbling around in the root systems of trees in the dark and damp – thirteen years! – is amply boggling for me. Four more years – or four less – wouldn’t alter the picture a jot. In the dark of an April night the nymphs emerge, all at once, as many as eighty-four of them digging into the air from every square foot of ground. They inch up trees and bushes, shed their skin, and begin that hollow, shrill grind that lasts all summer.”

Now, that passage is much less poetic than countless others in the book, but the thought of those burly insects biding their time, working the years, establishing and refining all things cicada threw me into considering how long as writers we might be buried, mere potential, waiting for wings to harden. It’s always amusing when there’s a new writing sensation, some breakout author who’s touted as the newly crowned best and brightest, and you learn that they also have three other novels that never made a stir, and four that they abandoned or are still gestating. Loud (and potentially annoying) as those cicadas might be, they earned their shrill grind. The long seasons of work are often invisible to outside eyes, buried to all except the worker.

Words Have Sound, as Well as Shape and Sense

Sometimes writing work is a shrill grind. Yesterday I started reading my newly completed novel aloud, in order to hear the rhythm of the words, to see if the sentences made music. I’d already edited it on screen, but putting voice to the page let me hear the places where the saxophone squawked rather than soared. In the space of twenty-five pages, I made at least seventy-five corrections, sometimes just transposing two words, sometimes shifting a phrase from sentence middle to end. It reminded me of when I’ve been given something to edit by a writer who thinks it’s near done, and I return it to them dripping the blood of the red pen—the horror!

So, more than 200 more pages to go—a bit tedious, but it’s cicada work: something buried will burst forth. I’ll be happy if the damn thing crawls, much less takes wing. Let’s end this with another passage from Dillard’s work, this time from another book I highly recommend, The Writing Life:

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. …Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

Open your safes, writers. Whether you let the silver lie thirteen years or seventeen, you must let it go. Otherwise, it will tarnish. (Besides, you might be able to make the latest sale on quill pens at Walmart.)

Stone Sleight-of-Hand, Big Sur Style

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand.  I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
—e.e. cummings

Another in a succession of mornings of deep fog; the sun does struggle forward as the day turns, but effort is fitful, the results tenuous. The change from summer to fall always provokes melancholy in me. It’s a host of things: the winds pick up a bit, and their whispers are cooler; they curl under my collar, with cold intent. Leaves dry and curl, lose vitality and color, and fall brittle to the ground. The light itself, its weak slant, its ebbing warmth, seems a conspiracy. Or even a taunting: time rolls on, what have you done? I have a touch of SAD, that aptly named Seasonal Affective Disorder, where the shorter days and the dimming light seem to drain my batteries.

But whatever the physical component of that, whatever the tangible indicators of time’s timeless march, there’s a kind of surrender to the conspiracy that’s purely psychological. After all, it’s not winter that’s here, but fall, a time of harvest, often one of fruition. (And of course, I live in California, where folks of the Eastern flavor would make a scornful roll of the eyes at whimperings from a body that’s never touched a snow shovel.) And yet, and yet, there’s always the feeling for me at fall’s outset that the movement is toward winter, and that spring won’t come again. I’ve looked at fall as an ending, rather than a beginning.

There’s Really Not An Effing Thing to Whinge About

But I’m making the effort to be more conscious of my moods, and look at them with a sort of dispassionate affection: “Oh, a bit on the whiny side today, are we? Maybe it’s just a nap after lunch that’s needed, or a quick go-round with a neighbor’s cow and the trebuchet.” Partially because I’ve been trying to put one of the tenets of the book I’ve been reading, Buddha’s Brain, into practice. One of its many salubrious offerings is to recognize that there is the situation, and then there is your reaction to the situation. I know, old porridge that, but the book offers a number of approaches to recognize that when the elements of your nervous system light their alarms and dispense their flight/fight/brain-blight chemicals, you can consciously pour on a cerebral cocktail of your own making to soften the assault.

Thus we have fall. Instead of thinking of the next Ice Age, I can think of my coming birthday, the sympathetic shape of pumpkins, the writing conference I’m soon to attend, and good soup. I can try to take to heart Samuel Butler, who said, “Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes.  Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”

Oh, about that fog this morning: it broke early. My girlfriend and I drove down to Big Sur, one of God’s palaces on earth, with the top down on the Miata, hiked around a winding hillside overlook with waves crashing on rocks below, went to the sweetly eccentric Henry Miller Library, where I fondled the Ginsberg and the Kerouac, flipped through old vinyl records from decades past, envied the giant coon cat sleeping on the warm deck, ate a scrumptious lunch high on the hill at Ventana, and came home dizzy with sun.

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
—William Cullen Bryant

Fall, there are worse seasons.

For the last six or seven years, I’ve thought the plum tree in our yard was a goner. The tree would produce another season’s worth of sweet, juicy fruit, and in the picking, I’d see the deep, dry cracks in the boughs. And the trunk: if you give it a good thump you hear a resonant return like a bass drum. It’s at least half-hollow, rotted out—that its core is half-empty seems the loudest beat of the old tree’s death knell.

How could it keep producing when its heart seems cracked? It’s an old tree, at least 30, maybe even 40 years old. It suffered a deep indignity last year when I stapled a rubber mat over the biggest of the trunk holes, where a big bough was lopped off before our time here, developing into a decaying maw that winter rains only worsened. Yet, for all that, for all its wear, its visible weight of age, its craggy twisted lines, we have the crown of blossoms seen in a photo from this spring, we have the thrill of seeing the green plums beginning to ripen, we have the bright explosions of pleasure from biting into their red ripeness.

Tree Twisted Into a Metaphor for Writing

I’ll go out on one of those cracked limbs and twist this into a writing metaphor: When I picked the very last four plums from the tree yesterday, it made me think of how many times I’ve felt deficient, deformed or hollow as a writer, how I’ve felt that the trunk was cracked, the flowers few. But lately, even though there are more cracks than ever, I’m producing more, and the production is better, sweeter. I’m trying not to hold back any more, because I’m not sure how many plums there are to come.

So, I look at that old tree: It sings of its past, its plums to come, its plums now. Makes me think of Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, though I don’t think I could get much in the way of a boat out of its sere limbs. But in the sense of the tree saying, “This is what I have. It’s yours. Take it.”

I want to do that with writing as well.

What better way to round out a post about plums than with two of my favorite William Carlos Williams poems, both plummy:

This is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

And this:

To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

So, bite the plums, write the words.

Damn, who's he looking at now?

Long ago, a hundred bad haircuts into my Jurassic past, I regularly attended Grateful Dead concerts. I went to a lot of them, because for me and a zillion other fervid fans, the Dead could get us off, riding a mass-mind and bouncing-body electric-rhythm rocket, unlike any other band. When the the Dead were crackling, they had the audience bonded in an escalating excitement of communal glee. Sure, it might have been the acid, but I actually was courageous enough to occasionally attend Dead concerts where I didn’t take acid, and that you-had-to-be-there effect was still pronounced: a shared sense of good times and collective conviviality that seems completely corny when I try to describe it now.

One of the amusing side notes of being among the ragged clowns that tagged after the Dead train was that during one of Jerry Garcia’s piquant, extended guitar noodlings, there would invariably be among the crowd of bliss kittens a guy who would turn, a Saul at Damascus look in his eyes, and gush to whomever was listening, “Jerry, looked right at me! We connected, man! Did you see it?” And for the rest of the concert, the fellow touched by the divine was just a little higher than anyone else, if that was possible. I directly heard variants of that statement many times, and read the same long years later in concert reviews online, when one of the faithful described the moment that lifted him. (And note: this was always a man that staked this claim—the women seemed content to merely twirl in the tantalizing twists of sound.)

Though I always played on the periphery of the true believers, and was caught up many times in the glow of the groove, I never could climb to the top of that ladder, where Garcia’s gown glimmered—my articles of faith always needed editing. I’ve always marveled at the faith that people have, in a God described to them from pages written lifetimes ago, faith in the depth of their abilities, however limited or constrained by evidence, faith in the certainty that Garcia looked right at them, man. As far as I can remember, I’ve been uncomfortable, or perhaps jealous of, deep expressions of faith and certainty in people and in movements, because there seems so much contingency and randomness in life. And because faith seemed so exclusionary of fact. But that’s the nature of faith, isn’t it?

Keeping the Faith (or Trying to Locate It)
This is a long-winded way of saying that I’ve been particularly lacking in conviction lately, about my writing, and about my place among the faithful and faithless, which is one reason why I haven’t been posting. I’ve become accustomed to the stints of mild depression I’ve experienced for many years, watching them and waiting them out, because they do always lift, though some phases last longer than others. It’s easy to get indulgent with our pains—”No, I couldn’t possibly write that essay today, I’m in a bad mood.” Bad moods can be useful delaying tactics.

Sometimes, when you are deep in your own head, that sense of “what’s the use of writing” can seem like all you’ve got. But the pain of writing disappointment is nothing compared to real emotional pain. A few days ago I was listening to a radio broadcast of interviews with wounded vets who were learning how to ride bicycles after their limbs had been blown off. All of them were expressing such an eagerness to move forward with the difficult therapy and complex equipment that would bring them back to the simple pleasure of riding a bike. Suffering does unite us, but hearing of suffering that seems leagues beyond your own serves as a good reality check. Those soldiers had faith they’d ride the bikes again; they were committed to doing the work to make it happen. It’s a different kind of faith than the intangible one I struggled with as an altar boy, trying to discern just when and how a little bit of flour could be transformed into the body of Christ by a priest’s declaration. I was always more interested in trying some of the sacramental wine.

Sharing the Feeling (the Stains Are Extra)
I said earlier that suffering unites us, but as Tolstoy says in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” My own way has been to be stuck, faithless in my head, but it’s time to get on the bike, get the kinks out, try and write without too much judgment.

But before the ride, one more concert story: I was at a Hot Tuna concert in L.A. back in my salad days. There was a break between sets where people were milling about in that hive-like concert way. I was sitting down on the floor, a ways from the stage. For some reason, my eyes lit on a fellow who was a fair distance away, wobbling and lurching about like he was very drunk. I idly watched him making a circuitous route through the crowd, probably keeping my eyes on him for several minutes. His wanderings finally took him to a spot directly in front of me, whereupon he unloaded a rich stream of vomit on the floor, with a fair amount landing on my pants. It wasn’t pleasant at the time, but the memory always makes me laugh, because I contrast it with the other concert experience of “Jerry looked at me!”

At least Jerry didn’t vomit on me. Keep the faith.