Shanti was rinsing out mugs and stacking them in such a way that they appeared ready to crash-land at any instant. They never fell, of course, for balance was her talent. Jo, who worked the dinner shift with her, only had to breathe wrong and she'd drop a full tray of vegan sandwiches. Shanti was playing up her sadist side tonight, or perhaps just wanted to be Ms. Goody-Goody to the boss. Jo didn't know which and didn't care; she wasn't going to engage in a game she'd lose. She deliberately took one dinner out at a time to the customers. As anyone could have predicted, as she was carrying the last plate to table seven, she tripped on a dust mote and dropped it. Jo sighed and fixed another portobello pocket pita.
There was a commotion at the door of the coffeehouse. Two men were trying to go through it at the same time. Jo knew Cactus but not the other, but since Cactus was bringing him in, knew that would change soon. He seemed to delight in getting strays into the fold.
"Shanti, Jo, meet Blondie. Blondie, what would you like to drink? Tip Jo well when she brings it out to you, right? I'm going to greet the rest of the literary society." Then Cactus was gone, and Blondie--black-haired, dark-eyed--tipped his fedora at Jo and requested some hot chocolate.
The waitress didn't trip on her way to Media Vita's far corner, a spot monopolized by the 'zine writers for the last several months. She had been studying the way Blondie moved--he had a slinking sort of walk, like a cat--and determined this was what she would do, and she would never trip again. Jo set down the hot cocoa, Cactus' cappucino, and the communal loaf of pumpkin bread on the rough wooden table. Cactus was making a pronouncement.
"It is the best movie ever."
Natasha was rolling her eyes. "You say that every week."
"It's true every week. This was the best movie ever for this week. Jo, did you see this movie?"
"Sorry?" She glanced around her, still unused to a customer treating her like an actual person instead of a faceless member of the servant class.
"This movie 'Empire Records," it's incredible. You have to rent it."
"I may have seen the previews..." Shanti was glaring at her. She excused herself to get the rest of the order.
When she returned with Anna's ginger tea, Natasha's chai, and the Fox's pastries sampler, she was surprised to find the conversation still on the movie. Cactus still had the floor--also unusual.
"But, no, I never said the movie made sense. I have said word boo about plot or plausibility. And the dialogue is so full of surreal non sequitors--actually, that was my clue into its genius. The movie is Zen in its purposelessness, it is French existentialist cinema set at a slacker's paradise record store. Go on, watch this movie and tell me it's not a glorious fable, a meditation on the absurdities of the universe! And every second scene, everyone breaks into song or starts dancing for no reason! What more can you ask for from your film viewing experience?"
A crash rang out from the front of the coffeehouse. One of Shanti's mugs had surrendered to the precariousness of its position. Jo smiled. She liked Wednesdays.
Cactus shot a quick glance down the street when he noticed the uniformed men and guys from the neighborhood milling on the corner, all facing north. Oh--a car was on fire. That explained it. He was momentarily impressed by the height of the flames, then he sped through the intersection.
He pulled into CopyCopy's parking lot and walked the rest of the way to Media Vita. If this was going to be a typical Wednesday, he knew what crowd would greet him at the coffeehouse. The Fox would already be there, perhaps even Shy, Retiring Sort (some called her Shy, others called her Sort), and so would Anna and Natasha (who hadn't earned any nicknames yet). Puncshal would wander in around 8 or so, despite the fact that he was guaranteed the worst assignments this way. There were some rare, blazing comets whom everyone loved who might not show up at all, and one or two nasty individuals he rather hoped were gone for good. And then there would be new blood--always there was new blood. A potential acolyte was standing just outside the door, in fact.
"They call you Cactus?" the stranger asked. He was a tall, lean young man, he looked to be about college-aged, and he wore a fedora over black hair.
"They call me Cactus," he confirmed.
The stranger nodded, slouching forward a little and resting his thumbs in the pockets of his black jeans. "So...why?"
Cactus shrugged, wondering why he was bothering to explain. "Because a cactus is prickly and tends to stay in one spot all of its life."
"And that's what you're like," Fedora-Man cut in. Most people did; Cactus talked slowly and there was much impatience in the world.
"No. I'm easygoing and I never stay in town very long."
Fedora-Man blinked. It may have been for the first time. Cactus shrugged again.
"Names are meaningless. Like for you, if you were on the staff of the 'zine, I'd call you Blondie."
The stranger chuckled and stood up straighter. "You looking for any new recruits? A friend of mine works for you; said you might be."
"You're welcome to try out for it. 'Matter of fact, you're just in time for the assignments meeting." Cactus pulled open the door and the two plunged into Media Vita's dark interior.
He said to me,
"Come up the mountain with me."
Said it to Peter, to James,
He said it to me.
We climbed the mountain.
I climbed the mountain.
And he was changed.
I had never seen white.
Wool is grimed with dust,
Snow is mixed with ash.
Beyond the glare of dirty sun
He shone.
His clothes shone.
His face...
Oh.
His.
His face.
Standing with him:
Moses and Elijah,
As I might have stood
With Peter, with James,
If we could stand.
(But we couldn't stand.)
Just men with a man,
Just talking.
You say:
"How did you know?"
Did you know the faces
Of the long, long dead?
How did you know the lawgiver?
How did you know the prophet?"
I say:
I knew.
I knew them as who they were.
Like in a dream,
You know your friends in a dream,
Though you may never see their faces.
So with Moses and Elijah.
So well did I know them
I squeeze it to nothing
If their names are all I say.
But he--
He will say my name
And I hear in it
How well he knows me:
Like I am the dream he dreamt.
A cloud passed over.
He stood alone.
He touched Peter and James.
He touched me.
"John," he said.
"Get up."
I've been reading your story. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm not sure you have either--the bit I've got has a note that says you've written more, but that you're far from done. You may have ended this tale since you wrote that note, I don't know.
In case you haven't, let me just say that the best advice I ever received as a young writer was this: finish your stories. If you start a story, make sure you end it.
Maybe it was the best advice because it was memorable--short, to the point. At the time, too, such a tip was jarring to hear. I had so many intriguing beginnings, so few finished works. Why? I'd lose interest, or I'd get hung up on a plot detail. Endings never seemed as beautiful as beginnings.
Endings aren't beautiful. Beginnings are lovely beyond all telling--they are endless vistas, the place you are when you are gazing out toward a misty horizon. Endings--too many times endings are when you get to what had been a misty horizon and find a concrete industrial park. Endings almost never live up to expectations.
Think about it. Think of a book you love--when you read it the first time, did you enjoy the ending? You probably did on one level--if it was a good book, it had to have a satisfying conclusion. But more immediately, you felt the pain of being cut off from the world you chanced into while absorbed in the story. The best endings can't help but be bittersweet.
So there is that prejudice against ends. There is also the fact that they are really really hard to write. A beginning, now--that's comparatively simple. It's fun to come up with beginnings:
"You're going to have to bury the body sometime, Mr. Jones," the butler said.
All the lights in the basement were on; Sarah curled in the corner as though to hide from the glare.
I've been to many parties but before tonight I'd never found myself at swordpoint at one.
There is hardly any discipline involved in beginning--you're just granting permission to your imagination to reach out to something wild. Ending is intimately connected to the work of the story, the day-in, day-out sitting in front of the blank page and putting something on it. But even more than that--it is deciding nothing more needs to be said, which runs counter to the writer's instinct. We always want to say more. That is why another piece of advice I read somewhere also applies: If you can't decide how to end something, maybe you already have.
End your stories. Even if all you can come up with is a goofy ending, something unsatisfying, something that doesn't make you as completely happy as your beginning made you, end it. That is the only way you'll get practice writing the end.
I'm a lucky girl. I have a voracious appetite for all things U2, and what happens? A U2 tribute band forms and starts playing gigs every Sunday night in my town. Every Sunday night. Imagine.
The band is Elevation, and the regular Sunday night gig is at Patrick's in Westport (they play often in Chicago too--check their website for details). Last night a hot rod show was at Westport as well--that, coupled perhaps with the fine weather and the holiday weekend, meant there was a good size crowd at 8 pm and a capacity crowd by midnight, which always helps. Seeing Elevation perform when there is 7 people in the room is entertaining in its own way, but not ideal. The entertainment is that U2 songs just don't work unless you've got a responsive crowd. When the lead singer is wandering the room, getting in people's faces, calling for a singalong, and everyone is stony-faced, it starts to resemble that old Ben Stiller skit where he plays Bono overemoting at a bar mitzvah. As I said, it's entertaining, but not perhaps the way the band intended.
Unfortunately it's tough to get a St. Louis audience worked up even if there are a lot of people in the room. I don't know if Danno (Elevation's resident Bono) managed to wear down their resistance with his antics or whether the liquor did the trick, but the place finally did get hopping. Around midnight.
Antics, you say? What sort of antics? The band performs with the bar's windows behind them; just outside is a patio and a fountain. When they were doing "Beautiful Day" early in the set, two little girls (9 or 10 years old) were dancing around the fountain. Not just dancing--doing some kind of choreography--a cheerleader routine, perhaps. They kept it up as Elevation launched into "Until the End of the World," which was when Danno finally noticed them. Next thing we knew he had strolled out to the patio toting his cordless mike. We on the inside could only catch occasional glimpses of him boogieing around the fountain. When he came back in he lamented, "They stopped dancing! They were dancing just fine until I went out there!" (Oh, yeah, Danno. You're a nine-year-old girl and a strange man is charging up to you in black leather and sunglasses--you're going to dance?)
The crowd interaction and Danno's tendency to climb things is all very much in keeping with the U2 spirit, but what surprised me about last night's show was how it wasn't in a constant compare-and-contrast with the "real U2" in my head. There are times I've seen Elevation--the St. Patrick's Day show comes to mind--when I would have to blink and try to shake out the notion that it was really Bono up there. Danno does have a strong, uncanny even, resemblance to Bono, but more than that--at St. Patrick's Day he was presenting the illusion this was U2, and the crowd was feeding their belief in the illusion back at the band. All of those people putting their faith in an impossibility made the impossible take hold. That is, until I'd shake my head again to clear it. That's not Bono!
But last night it was an Elevation show, not a fake U2 show. It may have been because Danno's voice was shot from several straight days of performing. When he's just on the verge of losing his voice, it adds a touch of verisimilitude--the "real" Bono sounds hoarse all the time. But Danno's voice was even further gone than that. It made illusion difficult to maintain. One hopes Danno will invest in a good vocal coach if he's going to continue doing concerts as often, and as long, as these are. (Elevation performs several times a week. This show had three sets over five hours.)
It's not such a bad thing to be forced to appreciate Elevation on its own merits, however. In fact, they have a few things over their "parent" band. One is that they play my hometown every weekend and admission is free. Another is that they play way more songs than U2 does at one of their concerts, many of them songs U2 have neglected for years. (I'd never dreamed I'd get to hear "Gloria" and "Electric Co." in concert, much less "Spanish Eyes"!) And they play them well. A lot of credit has to be given to drummer "Larry Lynn Jr," who is most enthusiastic and accomplished at his craft, putting punch and drive on the hard rocking numbers. He also has this advantage over Larry Mullen Jr.: he is every bit as good-looking but he smiles a lot more. "The Gredge," who recently replaced Dave Smith as the resident guitar hero, impresses both at straight evocation of Edge's sound and stretching out using the same sonic palette--in other words, when he doesn't make it sound just like a U2 bootleg, he makes it sound like the concert you didn't get to see. I was particularly taken with a new ending he and Larry Lynn gave "Gone." It had crunchy heavy metal drumming and then the eerie guitar slide U2 used samples of in concert instead of performing live. The Gredge never sounds like he's turned up loud enough, though. Some of the best things he does are obscured in the mix. "Badam" is a very good bass player. He shone on his solo in "Gloria" and in the funky countermelody of the Popmart-styled "Bullet the Blue Sky." I'd like to hear more of those elaborate lines from him. There is, for example, a way more melodic bass line in Popmart's "Where the Streets Have No Name," and since U2 didn't take advantage of it in their last tour, someone should.
The only times Elevation suffered Sunday night were when Danno just couldn't hit the notes. The real U2 can perform a stunning show when Bono's voice is gone, but their crowd is prepared to cut them more slack than the crowd at a bar is going to give a tribute band. Still, Danno proved willing (as he put it at one point) to give his "heart, soul and larynx" to perform full-throttle. All the songs were rendered faithfully, and some have turned into stunners in Elevation's repertoire. "In God's Country," for example. Perhaps this was always a magnificent song, overlooked just because it's had to go up against "Where the Streets Have No Name," "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "With or Without You" on the same disc. Elevation performs it like the smash hit it deserves to be. And in the band's third set, once the dancefloor was finally packed, many in the crowd started baying for a song that had been performed--well, put it this way. Danno mock-grumbled as he honored the request, "You better dance to this one, because this is not the first time we've played it tonight, it's not the second time, but the THIRD TIME." And each rendition of "Mysterious Ways" was magnificent, even as Danno sang the bulk of the last draped across the top of a speaker taller than he was (don't ask me how he got up there).
Here is the setlist, roughly in order of album, since I can't remember order songs were actually played. May I mention at this point, too, in case the band read this--hearing "One Tree Hill" live would make my life complete.
I Will Follow (2X)
Electric Co
Out of Control
Party Girl
11 O'Clock Tick Tock
Gloria
Sunday Bloody Sunday (2X)
Pride
Bad
Where the Streets Have No Name
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
With or Without You
Bullet the Blue Sky
In God's Country
Spanish Eyes
Desire
Angel of Harlem
Zoo Station
One
Until the End of the World
Mysterious Ways (3X)
Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World
Stay
Discotheque (2X)
Gone
Beautiful Day (2X)
Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of
Elevation (2X)
Walk On
In A Little While
That's really all there is to it. You think back over the last 24 hours and list 3 things that were worth falling in love with. I'm not suggesting one should, you know, propose to that scrumptious banana split one had for dessert--"falling in love" is just the metaphor.
3 things I fell in love with today:
1. The way morning sunlight plays over the ferns in the English Woodland section of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
2. Hearing "The Widow at Windsor" set to music (to accordion accompaniment, no less) on a Memorial Day edition of KDHX's "Family Reunion."
3. Eating Sylvia "Queen of Soul Food"'s mustard greens.
[the scene: Ireland has just won the World Cup against Italy, playing in New York. The author is out celebrating with The Edge of U2 at a fine Italian restaurant surrounded by folk in various stages of intoxication.]
One very beautiful, very plastered woman lands next to Edge and begins throwing her arm around him, nuzzling him and flirting.
"What do you play in U2?" she asks him.
"There's no easy answer to that," he mumbles.
"Are you married? Divorced? Married but living apart?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
She proceeds to do her imitation of Edge singing "Numb" and laughs loud at what a bad voice he has! (She's dissin' the Edge--other diners start ducking under the table.)
"What's your real name?" she asks.
"David Evans."
"I'm going to call you Dave."
"Suit yourself."
"Hello, Dave Evans."
I decide to step in. "You know," I tell her as Edge shoots daggers at me from his eyes, "the whole world loves the man called the Edge--but he's been waiting all his life for the gal who'll fall in love with simple Dave."
"Is that true?" she asks, almost crawling into his ear. Is that what you want, Dave?"
"I just want to be loved for who I really am."
"And who are you really, Dave Evans?"
"A BIG FAMOUS MEGA RICH ROCK STAR!"
That pretty much puts the kibosh on that romance.
--Bill Flanagan, U2 at the End of the World
"I don't get you. You're always going on about impossible things."
Ellen knew there was a difference between the "I don't get you" which means "I refuse to even want to" and the one that means "I want to. Help me." She sensed her friend Jeffrey's protest was the latter sort. That meant she'd better keep talking.
"Impossible or not, it happened."
"Are you talking disappearing like invisibility, or disappearing like you engaged in some identity theft and spent the last week in Tahiti?"
She laughed louder than the joke deserved. "Perhaps I better just start at the beginning.
"You know I've got this big honking stereo, right? Picture the other night--I have it cranked, I'm standing there between the speakers with the volume so high the bass was rearranging my internal organs. And I had my eyes closed.
"It's really, really hard to describe, but I just got this feeling like I was looking through the song. The way people say they get lost in music--well, what if the sound landscape where a physical place you could travel in?"
Jeffrey's eyebrows did little flips. Ellen soldiered on, quickening the pace of her words to stave off an objection.
"That was what it was like. And soon my hand was out, out in front of me, like I thought I was was going to touch the notes--isn't that crazy?"
She laughed again, her laugh a little higher pitched than her normal one, and covered her mouth. Jeffrey didn't comment on the sanity or lack thereof in what she'd just said.
But he was still listening, so Ellen continued.
"So my hand is out in front of me. I'm facing the wall. I'm right at the wall, too, because I'm practically pressed against the speakers. And I've just been reading about how maybe we all used to be able to do impossible things, but as we grew up we lost the knack. So then I'm thinking--here I am, nothing's real to me but this song. I should be able to stick my hand right through this wall like it's not even there."
Jeffrey's voice was small. He was looking like he'd bolt at any loud noise. "And...you do...?"
"I reach out and out and out--and I hit that wood panelling every time. It's cold and smooth and solid. But wait. I keep listening, and soom I'm totally in the song again, kinda doing the swaying-around thing like a hippie chick at a Grateful Dead show. And you know what I finally have to do?"
"What?"
"I gotta reach out and brace myself against the wall!"
Ellen leaned back, grinning in triumph. Jeffrey didn't get it, and said so. "If that's your big payoff..."
Ellen scooted in toward him, her chair squealing against the floor. "Think! Think!" she hissed. "It had been so important to me that the wall stop being there, and that was just a few minutes previous. Why all of a sudden did I need it to be solid?"
"'Cause you lost your balance while you were dancing?"
"No! Well, maybe, yeah. A little. But more than that. I think...I lost more than my balance. I lost...me; I needed to grab onto that wall so I'd--I dunno--reconnect to the physical world. Oh, forget it. You don't buy any of this, do you?"
Jeffrey just looked at her. Ellen thought he was trying to see right through.
The hardest thing I've ever tried to do is nothing. I didn't expect this at all. When I decided it, or fell into it, finding myself returning to it out of need or guilt or desire, the form was just fifteen minutes of sitting in the quietest place I could find. I was to sit with eyes closed, the less to be distracted from my task, because the task I had given myself was to think of nothing. To sit, busy at no potential accomplishment, for fifteen minutes--how hard could that really be?
Harder than anything I've ever done, as it turns out. I take any excuse to avoid that daily appointment. And when I am there, 99% of the time I am willing myself elsewhere. I am thinking I am thinking of nothing but the truth is I am really recreating a snatch of conversation from earlier in the day, or I am projecting myself to a dreaded or longed-for future event. Then I must call myself back to the quiet space, the closed eyes, but I must not do so violently. I can't berate myself for getting off track, because then I will be thinking about how easily I get off track. I still won't be thinking of nothing.
So why bother to try? Because with patience and practice the noise does shut off. So much of it is noise, too--my brain babbling nonsense syllables to itself, the tune it picked as the Song of the Day, sudden pangs of emotion from childhood memories--that if I didn't know these could go away if acknowledged and then dismissed calmly, they would drive me insane. Some days they never really go away, other days I am plunged quickly into the silence underneath, the black pool on whose surface they've been floating.
Usually something tries to pull me back out again as soon as I'm in. That something could be the observer-voice--"Oh, look! You've done it! You're not thinking about anything!"--whose presence belies its message. Or it could be the anxiety-voice--"What if you're doing this wrong? What if you're just wasting your time? Don't you have anything more productive to do?". Every writerly instinct in me wants to preserve what's going on in memory, so then I find myself projected to the future again, imagining how I will be relating this to someone else. But sometimes, sometimes, and not ever for very long, a few seconds maybe, what is the dark pool will be so overwhelmingly real that I'll recognize the chattering brain noise for what it is--pale and uninteresting by comparison.
Real. A state of being I've never spent appreciable amounts of time in. Real is incredibly, overwhelmingly big, which is why the constant temptation to wall myself off from it into a vision I've invented, where I've given myself illusory control. It's too big to understand, too big to know--and yet it must be the only thing worth knowing.
Whether Real is what I touch when the little thoughts fade, I can't be sure. There is a strange intensity to it that seems similar to what I've heard is the experience of a serotonin rush. Just why serotonin would kick in is beyond me. I wish someone would study the whole phenomenon, parse it out, but it may not be possible to. Where I go, if I go past the daily triumphs and failures, past the memories of dead feelings, past the record skipping on a random snatch of melody, is where no one else can. If I tell someone else to try it, to wait out his own noise, he'll end up in his own space. And what is there may be beyond being conveyed.
We can talk in the language of senses to each other--sight, sound, touch. I can point to the blue sky and you can say, yes, I see it, blue. And I can take that experience we can share and render it into words, write about dipping my toes down into the sumptious pile of my rug and I can conjure the feeling in you. But what to say about something experienced in darkness, in silence, unmoving? Something not felt, not heard, not seen, but There all the same?
(Author's note: this is a piece I wrote for possible publication that never got picked up. So, it finds its home here.)
2001 was the year I stopped listening to new music.
This is something I recognize now, not a conscious decision made at the time. It surprises me to discover it.
I love music. I love sounds I've never heard before, I love being intrigued by a snatch of melody and I love the thrill of hunting down the source. But in 2001, I disengaged myself from that process. I only rarely turned on the radio, and when I did, I listened to "safe" stations, the ones that play the same song twenty times in one day. I didn't bug anyone to make me mix tapes or to download tunes from Napster clones. I didn't check out CDs from the public library. I bought only three CDs all year, each from established names--Springsteen, Dylan, REM. But that in itself is unremarkable--I almost never buy CDs. No, what was strange about 2001 was not my purchasing, but my listening. I stopped.
Maybe I'm just getting old. Time was when record stores were a chaotic kind of heaven to me. But as I strolled through one recently, I made the unhappy discovery that piles of CDs by bands I don't know no longer excite me as vistas of new possibilities; they just look like piles of CDs which I lack the interest to sift through. I understand this sort of thing happens to old fogies. I'm not yet at the point where I yell, "What's wrong with kids today? They call this garbage 'music'?" but I can feel it coming.
That's the easy answer. The more honest answer is that I was too scared to listen to new music--and by "new" I'm not just talking about recent releases, but anything that would be new to me. Fear kept me from tuning in to the community radio station, the one where the DJs program their own music, our finest local source of what is original, different, thrilling. Fear: because I knew that if I turned to that station, I would hear something that would catch my attention. I'd have to keep listening until the DJ announced the artist's name, or I'd have to call him up and demand that information. Then I would have to track down the CD--likely not an easy task, as the radio station has a reputation for playing obscure tracks and ours is a world of mall record shops. Then I'd have to buy it, because I know way too many starving musicians to justify relying on a Napster-like service for my song fix.
However, a CD purchase represents something like a tenth of my weekly salary. I know me. I know that once I've hooked my interest on a song, I won't rest until I own it. Since I can't afford to be constantly feeding this impulse, I cut myself off from the way the trouble starts. I avoided any situation where I might hear something grand and wonderful.
It's desolate, this new-music-less place I now find myself. I lament because things could be so different. Imagine--what if I could pay a few pennies each time I downloaded a song from the Internet? Then I could own it and be happy, the artist would earn something and be happy, and neither one of us would have to be poor. A solution like this is what I really want. I want to be listening.
Record companies: are you listening?
She has been made shapeless
Lacking human face
And I have walked alone
In a public place
Skipped for no reason
Sung loud enough for men to hear
I have even laughed
But for accidents
Of birth and time
I could be a walking ghost
My shape a sin, treachery my skin
My face deleted from the world
The Samson-hair that keeps me strong
Buried under burlap weight
Defined by them, by my potential to them
My borders closed and patrolled
I may even remember the song. "Sweetness Follows" by REM. A low bellow sounding the intro, sustained organ underneath lines sung in an echo chamber: "Yeah, we were altogether lost in our little lives." Standing with my face against the speaker singing the words back until I was lost in them, learning to become the song. What was that? I couldn't get it to happen every time. It was not that song, or singing, it was simply disappearing in something. For a fragment of minutes every single cell of me was that performance. But why? And how come I could not control when it happened and when it didn't? When it didn't I was self-conscious, alone there in the living room, fretting about what was going wrong. I was thinking too hard, that was why I couldn't relax into it. But how not to think about thinking too hard? Or I was relying on the sound of someone else's voice, not my own. But what was my own voice supposed to sound like if I was singing someone else's song?
I did not see how these moments resembled those in what I am doing now, resting my hands on a computer keyboard and letting letters run off my fingers onto the screen. The words, I can't think about them. If I do, they are gone, and I am left fretting, and the fretting makes things worse and worse. But when I am not thinking about it, or rather when I'm doing the right sort of thinking--because "not thinking" makes it sound like this is idiot time--the words bubble from the spring. But it's so hard to get in that mode, and harder still to stay there.
Singing, writing. Other times, too. Dancing--in my socks in the living room, vaulting up and down to a Led Zeppelin mandolin song like a ballet dancer on speed. Sometimes it takes over--the dancing takes over--and there is more grace in my movements than I really ought to possess. But if I am trying to attain it, it will not come. It is either there or it isn't. I dance to be ready for when it is.
I am searching out words for what is wordless, or beyond words. Because that's when it flies away too--the instant my mind tries to catch what is happening in a description. It is the undescribed. It Is.
But if my efforts get in the way, how can I get to it? Is it possible to get better at reaching the tipping point, the moment before I know nothing but song or words or dance?
It is all I want because it is pure and has no fear and has no failure. Fear of getting caught dancing in my socks in the living room exists outside of it, as does the numbing frustration of the wrong word in the wrong place on the page. It is what I want at every moment, not just in snatched instants that give off heat even in memory.
Yesterday I took in a bit of Chinese culture at the Botanical Gardens, being that it was Chinese Culture Days. First up: opera--not a three-hour affair with a cast of dozens and all the musicians and face paint that takes two hours to put on. This was maybe a half hour long, with two performers, and they only spent 45 minutes on their face paint. The story involved the Monkey King stealing peaches from the Emperor's palace in the sky whilst the Emperor's Warrior tried to thwart him in this pursuit. The detail with the greatest personal resonance was that the Monkey King's weapon was a magic staff that shrank to the size of a needle when not needed. As some of you may know, one of the characters in my fantasy stories has a sword that shares this size-altering trait. This little bit of personal mythology has always posed a problem for me when I write the stories, because it's difficult to describe a sword becoming toothpick-length without it sounding hokey. I would just as soon have dispensed with this detail altogether. But now it has been legitimized by Chinese opera.
It's possible the most incongruous details are the ones you'd better not leave out.
"If the work comes to the artist and says, 'Here I am, serve me,' then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, 'Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.'
"To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. Servant is another unpopular word, a word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you're not fit for anything better or higher.
"I have never served a work as it out to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn't matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work, but for most of us, it is our greatest privilege to be its servant.
"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly, than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.
"When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
"But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work...
"Someone wrote, 'The principal part of faith is patience,' and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we wll not be able to heed it."
--Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water
In order to prevent this site from being too me-centric (and also because I don't have anything handy to post) I'm going to experiment with making weekends the time for games, challenges, and sharing of cool stuff by others.
So, question for everyone who drops by: what "talents," rare gifts, peculiar accomplishments do you have, but have never been able to mention on a standard resume?
Here's some of mine to get us started:
I can eat fire. (Well, lit matches, but they count.)
I've sung onstage at Sheldon Concert Hall. (It was after a choir performance, when the audience was leaving. A friend and I hopped on stage and sang a cappella duets while the sound crew carted away the amps. Nonetheless, it was the Sheldon Concert Hall stage, and I did sing on it.)
I have small roles in a couple of CD-ROMs about mental health. (I'm not going to try to explain this one.)
There are three things he could have said. I think of the first as I sit watching the sunset from my back balcony. The sky is framed by the branches and leaves of the maple in the neighbor's yard. The neighbor's yard is packed dirt and their garage is crumbling to nothing. My view is rose and gold sky, trees, bright buildings in the distance; broken windows and half-demolished structures up close. The marks of poverty, ignorance, anger, fear--but I look at it all and think, "I'm falling for you."
And then I imagine him opening the screen door and joining me on the balcony, scrunching down on his haunches to look at it from my angle. We sit in silence for a while. Then he turns and says, "You want to know the secret?"
"Of course," I answer.
He gets up again to saunter back inside, finishing the thought off-handedly. "The secret is to love it as it is, not the way you want it to be."
But you know, he may not have said that at all. Maybe we sat there together, me looking at the bricks scattered everywhere, him looking at me, and maybe I said, "I am trying to love it as it is."
And maybe he shook his head in soft warning. "No--love it for what it could be."
The third possibility occurs to me that night as I'm trying to sleep. Again the imagined voice is clear; he says "If you love it now, as it is, it will become what it could be."
He could have said any of these things or none of them. Am I to be without a reliable guide?
"It was always water.
Like when in the Navy,
I dreamed every night
Of sneaking out of my bunk,
Of going up on deck,
Of throwing myself in.
Water.
"I never could have jumped in front of a train.
I couldn't have done that to the conductor.
"But jumping in the ocean--
You'd just float off somewhere,
Get eaten by the fish."
Hello.
I am a writer. Who are you?
I have been writing all my life but I have rarely tried to publish anything. Why? Because I can work and work on a story, send it out to magazine after magazine, and never have it accepted, or I can have it accepted and then find out that very few people ever read it. So the effort of publishing does not seem to equal the payback. Also, I am lazy.
At the same time, I recognize that the only way I'll ever improve my writing is if I get my work "out there." I need to know how people besides myself and my friends would react to it. I need some objective opinions.
So this is what I've decided to do. I'll put my work up on this weblog--recent writings, old stories, anything, really. And I'll invite you to tell me what you think. I know many people claim they want honest opinions and then throw screaming fits when they get them, but I am serious. I want to know what you think. Debate is a good thing.
This is all a bit abstract at the moment, but that is because this is mainly a test entry. More to come, I promise.