"It's an airplane," Mom says.
"No." The rumble had gone on too long. It was below my conscious attention for the amount of time it usually takes for a plane to pass overhead; I only really hear it when it keeps on after that. It is a dull, characterless roar, remarkable not for its volume or pitch but its duration and the feeling it gives of being everywhere at once. I begin to think of earthquakes, the low grumblings you hear from no discernible direction that signal shifts, grindings of rock, and the toppling of everything you know.
"Then it's a helicopter circling," Mom says. "I wonder what it's looking for?"
Listening harder, I think, yes, that sound could be from rotary blades. We'd grown used to the police helicopters droning over us some nights, though hearing them and seeing them always made a part of me remember Belfast in the movie "The Boxer." They make me think I am in a besieged city, and yes I know the police are there so the criminals can't hold us captive, but under the thrum of those giant black metal insects, it no longer matters whether the good guys or the bad are the ones laying seige.
I look out the window. It is just after six, we had settled in to a bland dinner when this noise had interrupted us. Dinner had been purposefully bland--pasta shells in mushroom soup--a concession to recent craziness in my digestive system. Bland, at the moment, is all I can take. But here is strange thunder. When I get to the window and look out at night, what I see seems as crazy as my insides have become.
"It's an airplane," Mom had said. There's an opera based on the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood, a very modern and odd opera made up of quotes from the book ringing changes against musical patterns. "It's a nosebleed" is one line whispered in the libretto. "She gets them all the time. Terrible nosebleeds." In context it is clear a murder has just been discovered but is being explained away. The red drips are just a part of the everyday world.
"It's an airplane."
The next line in the opera is "There's too much blood."
There are too many airplanes.
I gawk at the window, making unhelpful sounds that relay no information to Mom. So she gets up and I throw open the back door so we both can see. The roar is much louder now.
We are watching an ugly parody of Santa's reindeer. Cold white and blinking red lights cross the sky. There is one light in the lead and eight following in two neatly spaced columns of four.
They move so slowly. These are F-15 fighters, but other than that I know nothing about them. How high do they fly? They seem like they are either scraping space (so their slowness is only an illusion of distance) or that they are low and lumbering, like aerial tanks, like a slow but resolute armada. They have no need to hurry. They will get to where they need to go.
"They look like geese," I tell Mom as their red lights flash across the column in answering patterns. They look more like the ghost dogs of Herne the Hunter from Celtic legend, spirits torn from mercy baying for blood in the night sky.
They fall out of sight below the western horizon. Mom sighs. "As if we didn't have enough to worry about."
All I'm asking for
Is that soft shower of comfort
That once soaked me through.
If it can't be mine,
I will clutch in my shaking fingers
A slice, a scrap,
A bare memory of courage.
I will grasp it closer to me than darkness
And wish it will suffice--
A tiny hope in the face of annihilation,
A whisper of love in the face of fear.
Let it heal me.
There is a Zen saying: "Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die." Write when you write. Stop battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats.
But after saying all this, I will tell you a few tricks I have done in the past to nudge me along:
1. I haven't written anything in a while. I call a writing friend and make a date with her to meet in a week and go over our work. I have to write something to show her.
2. I teach writing groups and have to do the assignments I give the class. I didn't wait for years of writing before I began to teach writing. I was living in Taos, and there were few writers there ten years ago. I needed writing friends, so I began a women's writing group. In teaching them, I learned to write. Baba Hari Dass, an Indian yogi, says "Teach in order to learn."
3. I'll wake up in the morning and say, "Okay, Natalie, you have until ten A.M. to do whatever you want. At ten you must have your hand on the pen." I give myself some space and an outside limit.
4. I wake up in the morning, and without thinking, washing, talking to anyone, I go right to my desk and begin writing.
5. These past two months I have been teaching all day, five days a week. I come home very tired and resistant to writing. There is a wonderful croissant place three blocks from my house that makes the best homemade chocolate-chip cookies for thirty cents. They also let you sit there and write forever. About an hour after I am home from work I say to myself, "Okay, Natalie, if you go to the Croissant Express and write for an hour, you can have two chocolate-chip cookies." I am usually out the door within fifteen minutes since chocolate is one of my driving forces. One problem: on Friday I had the nerve to have four cookies instead of my quota of two, but anything to get me writing. Usually, once I'm in the midst of actually writing, it's its own greatest reward.
6. I try to fill a notebook a month. There's no quota on quality, just quantity--a full notebook, no matter what garbage I write. If it is the 25th of the month and I have only filled five pages and there are seventy more to fill by the end of the month, I have a lot of writing ahead of me in the next five days.
You can make up all kinds of friendly tricks. Just don't get caught in the endless cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure. When it is your time to write, write.
--Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
On the highway I see them
As for the first time.
Why now, and never before?
All my life lived here
A quarter turn towards a century
Travelling this curve,
Seeing this landscape
Familiar as my own face--
But today
They are new-planted flowers in my mind's soil.
Their numbers startle me, not their presence.
Their numbers, and how frequently
They encroach on vision--
Behind each steeple, another rises
In a vista littered with crosses.
Today, walking in a hospital,
I met Mother Mary guarding a corner
(She of white mantle and bare feet)
And for an instant I could not cling to
I thought I understood--
I thought I saw, I thought I knew.
Stepping out to the street,
I raised my head.
Another church.
In that hallway, had I been unreal,
My t-shirt and tennis shoes cast in plaster,
Standing before barefoot truth?
What if a steeple were not
An arm raised in supplication or
A slender finger pointing upward
But a dagger?
All the city's churches
Press their knifepoints against the sky
And cut through Seen to Unseen.
ìIíve decided to quit writing.î
No remark answered this from the other end of the table.
She tried again. ìIíve wasted my life away sitting in front of that computer screen. Iím ready to start living life instead of just writing about it.î
From the look on his face she knew he didnít believe her. She hardly believed herself.
Writing had, in a way, been her only identity. Whatever her ìactual,î money-making job had been (and these had been many, and appallingly varied), if anyone asked her about herself, sheíd always answered ìIím a writer.î
This had been true her whole life. As a child she heard clearly an author-voice in the back of her headóor sometimes the story was being typed, and she saw the typewriter and the sheet of paper filling with wordsócommenting on how she went about her daily business: ìEllen stood in her room, wondering where to go next. The kitchen was a likely option. She could practically taste the chocolate milk that awaited her there.î So it would go on, paragraphs upon paragraphs in her head (always in third person, occasionally employing synonyms), proceeding too quickly and erratically to write down.
That was Ellenís problem now. She didnít lack material; she was overwhelmed by it. The older she got, the more stuff there was to record. So much demanded her attention that when she was finished devoting attention, she had no desire left to transform what she had just experienced into coherent sentences.
He wore "long locks down to his shoulders, and particolored hose and a colored cap. And...he usually appeared in public in a leather cuirass and breastplate, carrying sword, dagger, musket, and all other sorts and descriptions of weapons." He is also recorded as being of an amorous bent...In other words, he was a typical Spanish gallant of his era and his station.
...It was fighting in battle on a disadvantaged side that altered the course of his aspirations.
Defending the garrison at Pamplona against an overwhelming regiment of French invaders, he was wounded in both legs by a cannon ball. The chivalrous French, recognizing in him an enemy worth of regard, did what they could for his injuries and sent him back to Loyola on a litter. At home again, the young captain found he could expect no rapid recovery. That cherished right leg which had gone so jauntingly stockinged had to be broken again and reset. There began for Ignatius what even he, who despised complaining, later referred to as "that butchery." His Spanish doctors seem to have been no cleverer than the French. The left leg healed but on the right one, bone still protruded below the knee. So the first operation was followed by another, and that was followed by a session with a rack, a sort of primitive traction designed to pull the fracture back into place so both legs might eventually be again the same length. Considering that this was long before the age of aesthetics, the whole process seems to us an ordeal almost beyond human strength. But Ignatius endured it in stoic--and Spanish--silence. If he was to win fame as a soldier, he must walk again no matter what the cost in brutal pain.
...While he waited out the time until he could move about once more, he began to read. Reading is the invalid's diversion....The Loyola household, however, did not own much of a library. The only books at hand, dusty and unread, were the preposterous stories of Amadis de Gaul and a few devotional works such as the Flowers of the Saints.
Well, a book is a book. Ignatius read what the family brought to his bedside and at length found himself particularly enjoying the more pious of the sagas. After all, they were peopled by heroes who endured in the face of danger, who fought battles of the soul and achieved celestial victories. (They were also no doubt heavily embroidered with legend). Ever a romantic, the ruined soldier found his imagination catching fire of a new sort. Perhaps there were higher roles a man might play on earth that that of warrior. Remember, he was weakened and susceptible. Remember also that this was an age when to be a loyal Spanish gentleman meant to be a Christian and a Catholic. For all his cockerel lustiness, he had never been a cynic about religion. He had merely never given it much thought. If he had to go limping all his days, if he was to be thwarted in worldly matters, why not, he wondered, enlist in another sort of regiment?
--Phyllis McGinley, Saint-Watching (from the chapter on Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits)
(I didn't even get to 1400 words on my first day. Oh well. With luck I'll catch up Saturday.)
You are nearly asleep at the wheel. It is midnight; the play was long and the goodbyes reluctant. You drive the slow way home because you like to see things well and you canít see things from the highway. You begin in Maplewood on Manchester Road. You are in the town center of Maplewood, two or three blocks of quaint storefronts and rough-edged corner diners. Then the building facades grow increasingly grim. You jump railroad tracks, you leave behind that warehouse coated in green aluminum siding and painted with a giant ace of hearts.
Itís the same street, but now itís called Chouteau. It was named for Auguste Chouteauóa St. Louis name, not stolen, like the other name, from some English factory town. Chouteau is a genuine name, no pretence of being something it isnít. Auguste was one of the first Europeans to settle in this part of the world. He came with Pierre Laclede down the river at an age when it may have all been boy-adventuring; he was the boy who played explorer and founded a city. He was fifteen years old.
You are on his street, passing the long-since-drained Mill Creek (all railway cars and warehouses now). It is midnight, and you are tired, and you arenít really paying attention to where youíre going. You miss the street where you should have turned.
Further down you see California Avenue, which further south runs quite close to your house. The question is, can you use it to get to your house from here? Youíd know the answer if you were more awakeóyouíve always had to detour from California when traveling this far northóbut you make the experiment.
The night is clouded over so the sky is a dropped ceiling uncomfortably low. You are in a place of serious darknessóabandoned houses and failed streetlights. Ahead of you on the left is an open field, and rising from it, too thin, too high, is a tower. It is capped with a spire, like a steeple, but steeples generally have churches attached. This monument stands alone in the wild field, the unmown vacant lot so otherwise indistinguishable from hundreds of vacant lots dispersed through the city. Here you are at midnight, in a neglected but otherwise unremarkable part of town, and you are abruptly confronted with a tower.
The next morning, you learn. Once there was a Catholic church, St. Henryís, on those grounds. As mostly Baptist blacks moved in and the mostly Catholic whites moved out of the neighborhood, there wasnít enough of a congregation to justify having a church. So St. Henryís came downóbut the bell tower did not. Since itís tucked away on a side street, most probably wouldnít notice it. Theyíd see a steeple peeking above buildings and assume the rest of the structure must also be there.
You go back on a sunny day and photograph the tower in a heroic pose against the blue sky.
I want you to notice it. I want you to see all the windows, mostly broken, and the tan-gold brickwork, all intact. See the scarred silhouette on the towerís side, the impressions of the churchís touch. Think of it as a sign for your homeóa place both battered by neglect and protected by it, a secret still clutching life because those who would kill it are facing the opposite direction.