Prayer

BY JORIE GRAHAM

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl

themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the

way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-

                                                                      infolding,

entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a

visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by

minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the

dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where

they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into

itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly

invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing

                                    motion that forces change—

this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets

what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing

is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by

each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,

also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something

at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through

in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is

what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen

now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only

something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.

I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.

It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Too often, I think, I am tempted to let things speak for themselves without adding my own input. I know that this statement is questionable: after all, this seems to be the antidote to the problems of our age: simply letting the thing be. We talk too much, and we say too little while doing it. 

My problem, my own personal issue, is that I often and almost always hesitate to share opinions and thoughts for fear of encroaching on other's lives. I have friends, relatives, acquaintances, and to a great degree I distance myself from all of them because I am fearful of imposing, of changing. My gift in life -- at least, that's what it could be -- is to sense with great clarity the edges and shapes of the lives, thoughts, and ideals of those around me. When emotions change, when feelings are hurt, when offense is taken, I am the first to sense it. The problem is that I sense these things with such accuracy that I tend to stray to the far side of approaching them in others. I walk on the edge of people's hearts, so to speak, tiptoeing so as not to offend, not to breach the delicate shape of someone else's central core. There are many reasons for this, and most of them are either too personal or too boring to share here. Suffice to say that I find it much easier to suppress and contain the effects of my own self than to bear the idea of infringing on someone else's hard earned confidence, pride, or thoughts. 

Lately, however, I have begun to realize how damaging my fear of conflict and inflicting pain is, both to myself and to those around me. I see, or at least think I see, that I have alienated myself from much of what friendship and love could mean if I were willing to open myself up. All along I've defended my restraint on the basis of not wanting to cause pain. In reality, however, I see that much of what I accomplished was simple self-protection. I was refusing to engage with other people because I knew that at some point I would have to return truth for truth, ideal for ideal, and I was too proud and too selfish to believe that other people would either honor or respect my thoughts. For years now, I've stood and listened to thoughtful conversations, to others baring parts of themselves: their thought processes, their emotions, their desires--whether these be in relation to personal, communal, or political issues--and I have offered little but the neutral nod or question. At times, I think that I am protecting others. But I am also betraying their relationship to me by refusing to engage with them in conversation about the worlds in which they and I exist.

A friend of mine, who is now applying to transfer to a group of colleges on the East coast, allowed me to read one of his application essays recently. I was struck by his assessment of his own stance in relation to other people: he explained, much more eloquently than I can transcribe, that he believes in what is beautiful. What is important to others, he argued, is just so because of the beauty certain ideas and beliefs have for certain people. His essay was short, but to the point: the central idea governing his desire for education was a need to discover and understand as much about beauty as possible. In order to do this, he will have to step outside of himself and engage with others. What I learned from reading his essay was that my leading questions are not enough; I cannot fall back on them as a replacement for the beauty that would ensue were I to actually engage with others by sharing my own thoughts with them. 

I don't want this post to seem like an excuse for me to talk more. I realize that I too fall under the category of those who speak often and say very little; and I am determined to change this. I also, however, fall under the category of those who listen a great deal and underestimate the importance of whatever real, whatever beautiful thing they may have to contribute. Perhaps if I were to stop underestimating the value of my real thoughts I would not find it so easy to say so many worthless things. Perhaps what is necessary is for me to engage with other people under my own assumption that what they believe is, at its core, something worthwhile to them, something lovely, and that likewise, what I believe and think is significant not by accident, but because it means a great deal to me: that it too is beautiful.

I wanted to put this poem by Jorie Graham up because I think that, at this point in my life, it says much of my relationship to God. I don't know what I think about God any more: raised in a conventionally Christian home, I find these days that my beliefs are torn between the past and the present, and the two are difficult for me to reconcile. I find Miss Graham's lines to be especially true in light of this: "The longing/is to be pure. What you get is to be changed." Prayer, and the life of the spirit, are indeed "the aftershocks of something/at sea." I do not know what changes, but I know that the water is deep, and that there are many spaces I have never visited. Through conversation, through the closing gaps, I hope that one day I will understand with greater compassion and hope the beauty of the waters by which we are carried. 

Halfway, or Almost

Annual Report from Halfway, Oregon

Ice, wind & snow & snow & floods & sleet,
as if earth's not for human habitation.
The house chitters and bumps under your feet
sending letters of congratulations
or condolence: "Dear Earth, I'm glad to hear . . . "
"Please tell me if I can do anything
to help." But next morning you're all still here;
the world takes its own sweet time about dying.

When you entered Halfway, signs greeted you:
FOOD. AMBULANCE. You worry about the food.
The Rail Motel lies on the tracks, and lies
too about free coffee. Yet sometimes, when
Halfway is where you are, the sun rises;
the clouds back off. All seems possible then.
--Lisa Steinman

Almost winter, almost Christmas. Almost ready to ring in another year. The leaves are still yellowing on the trees, but the jagged branches are showing themselves. I find myself at the junction of student-adult-child-sinkorswim of which I have been frightened all of my life; it remains just as foreboding as it has ever been. Once more in the library late at night, though those long hours are (shortly) coming to an end (for a while). One more for love, my love. One more for academia, one more for poetry. And still, though the end is closer now than either the beginning or the middle, we count ourselves halfway, staggering bluntly through our long hours of completion, staving off the celebration, but not for too much longer. I feel years now, and I begin to recognize that what has kept me here is not the need for a degree or the guilt I felt for taking out so many loans, but a love of study and an aptitude for understanding. These things are good, and they are mine, but the ownership I now feel is still new born. So, halfway there, we say, praying that the end will bring a new direction for us. In the late/early hours of the night and morning, the others I encounter in these halls are friends and comrades. We lean into each other in the drizzle of cigarette smoke made slow by the cold. We bitch about the loves of our lives, the anthropology, the literature, the effort of writing. It is this, however, that draws us together more than anything--the unspoken acknowledgement that we complain only because this is what matters to use, and though I have not known many students at Reed and I am annoyed with the college more than not, I appreciate the sincerity expressed by the students even though it is rarely acknowledged. Our exhaustion, our dumbness, comes at this point from countless hours of study, long days and nights of thought. Our cynicism, too, comes from this. From the fact that even though most of us never say it, we all know that at some point we will exit this place and begin once more to live in a world where good books and thoughtful arguments are little appreciated, a world where our vocabularies will mark us as outsiders. This is difficult. This may be the 'almost' that marks our lives: the fact that we complain of our passions and are lost in the everyday.
Sadly, it has only been in the last week that I've fallen in love with Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Actually, maybe it's appropriate. I think poems, and appreciation for certain poems, is usually a matter of closeness. Sometimes you find yourself crying over Elizabeth Bishop, and sometimes over John Donne. After the appreciation of style and form, emotional connection is coincidental. We love who and what we love.
I love the word almost. And I love this stanza:

"For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?"
From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

Mizrach

Literal meaning: "east", from the Hebraic.
A mizrach is a plaque hung on the eastern wall of a Jewish home to indicate the direction in which one should face while praying, which is, traditionally, to the east, facing Jerusalem.
A word.
I am not Jewish, nor would I dare call myself overly familiar with Jewish religious traditions, but I am passingly familiar with the Jewish testament, and I have to say that what I find appealing about Judaism is the mysticism that pervades even the most rigorous of ritual and law. Add to that my penchant for the ephemeral attractions of language and you get posts such as this one, the results of my latest quest to find the perfect word.
So we face east: the source of dawn, light, hope. It's strange (and, I think, sad) how rituals such as this have lost much of their place in Western civilization. I have a feeling that the love we lost for ritual spiritual structures probably accompanied other structures such as the confines of class, race, and gender out the door. (Note: I have no information with which to support this idea. I just think it might be partly true). However, it seems that something greater was lost in the ensuing confusion: a significance attached to place or motion, as well as the respect and awe with which certain historical epochs or locations were treated. I mourn this precisely because I have no attachment to place, or very little--all of my fondest and most revered ideas are memories to which I pay no homage. Of course, I had a childhood home, and unlike many of my generation, I grew up literally running through fields and forests, and wading in streams. (Nice, huh?). But these places are gone to me, and being the rational person that I am, I have admitted to myself that my nostalgia is only reflex, that I just want to be a child again, but can't, and therefore I should put it all out of my mind. Think forward; don't get wrapped up in your past.
My only experience that comes close to the longing for Jerusalem embodied in the word mizrach is my family's attachment to our own heritage: the great Emerald Isle. And I confess: I feel it. I really do. Somewhere in between the coffee-table picture books in my grandmother's living room and my grandfather's stories of his parent's nostalgia, I began to nurse a kind of homesickness of my own. I went to Ireland once, and it was wonderful. I felt attached. But not as though I belonged. And not as though I was finally among my own people.
I say the last highly conscious of what the word "people" has come to signify (at times): the other. Who would have thought, and isn't it kind of ridiculous, that in our day and age, the word that designates our definitive similarity has come, in certain situations, to be used as an epithet that shows our separation. Not much more can be said except that it is evidence of how hyperaware we all still are of the visible differences which stand between us. I am not sure what we are progressing toward; for, while I want to live in a world where nothing stands between myself and my neighbor except for our own physicality, it seems like we are now advancing towards homogeneity instead of towards acceptance. Do we really all want to be the same? Has the notion of celebrating our uniqueness gone the way of all sappy Hallmark card sayings? Can it be realized?
I know people who are, I believe, realizing this dream. At this point, none of them are me; I've become so wrapped up in books and words that I barely acknowledge the other people in my life, let alone acknowledge the significance of our differences. But in truth, I hold out hope only because of the ones I know who actively embrace those around them; whose worldview is not a system of categories--or, if it is, who are working against that instead of letting it direct their lives. I hope that I can become one of them as I learn more about my world, and that my appreciation for words--their consonance and dissonance, their rhythm and sound--becomes over time an appreciation of people.
The strangeness of language is dear to my heart; I like the way that we can speak simply and mean much more than we say, and I like the way that, no matter where you come from, there are words in your history that literally mean everything. Then there are pieces of language, like the word titling this post, that may be of little to no actual significance to you, but that hold a meaningful, even central place in someone else's world.

And we look east, always, to the dawn. Blessings.

(The photo above I stole from Flickr; you can find it here.)

Against Travel

These days are best when one goes nowhere,
The house a reservoir of quiet change,
The creak of furniture, the window panes
Brushed by the half-rhymes of activities
That do not quite declare what thing it was
Gave rise to them outside. The colours, even,
Accord with the tenor of the day—yes, ‘grey’
You will hear reported of the weather,
But what a grey, in which the tinges hover,
About to catch, although they still hold back
The blaze that's in them should the sun appear,
And yet it does not. Then the window pane
With a tremor of glass acknowledges
The distant boom of a departing plane.
--Charles Tomlinson (You can find the original here)

Today the hanging grey of the last week finally caught fire in the sun. I like this poem because of the title, and because it acknowledges in its very denial the importance of leaving, the need to be on that departing plane.
I feel it often.
This is short. I'm working on a paper for Russian class regarding the importance of a sense of place, and what place signifies when we look to the past. It's been a nice break from my thesis, and a good introspective look at what place means to me. Usually, I think, I conceptualize "place" as a destination rather than an origin; I think much more fondly of the places that I haven't been to yet than I do of the ones that I come from.
More later. I hope, as always, that if anyone is reading this it finds you well.
Peace.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--Elizabeth Bishop

I don't think that one can necessarily add to poetry; dissection is the way to go. Once something is written, and especially in a voice this strong, there's nothing more to say. Losing is an art that I think I will be learning soon. And it's terrifying, it's tragic. It looks like disaster.

Autumn is here in full force: my lawn and car are carpeted with yellow leaves, I fall asleep listening to the rain, and I feel the cold down to my bones. And it's peaceful, in a good way. I feel like the low drifting clouds make room in my head for thoughts, for unasked questions, for musing on the future and the present. Where I've come from and which direction I'd like to follow. The questions aren't easy and, lately, honest answers have involved a lot of humility on my part. Can I be humble? Can I put others first in my life, and who do I look to for my joy?
I've been writing on "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which is an amazing book, from the astonishing surface down to its literary depths, and I realized this morning that magical realism is not, as I thought before, a replacement for reality, or an assertion of a better reality. It is, rather, a more complex reality: magic and realism together, a new level of the possible, a revised scope for the imagination. It addresses our tendencies to use language that oversimplifies the complex nature of our existence; of things that we experience but can never completely explain, like God, and the passage of time, and the way that family bonds seem to remain so tight even over lifetimes of growing up and away from "home", wherever that is. It was a blessed realization, one that fits in so amazingly with things I've been attempting to wrestle through on my own. I struggle with giving other people room to be themselves, but I struggle more with simply moving over and allowing those people who I count as friends have their moments of glory, joy, and pain, in which my role should be that of a comrade, someone who is capable of rejoicing or crying with someone because of the bond of kinship, a camaraderie that goes far deeper than common interest.
I also, lately, have been struggling with acknowledging my own imperfections and - sometimes - hypocrisy, in the face of trends/attitudes/groups of people that I dislike or disapprove of. It seems (and this is, of course, made all the more obvious by the election) that we are so insecure in our selves that, in order to assert ourselves as the capable and well-meaning people that we may be, we need to find a villain against whose faults our own shortcomings seem much smaller. In order to assert our own good (without being seen as egotistical) we have to demonize someone else; and this is hurtful, and harmful, and causes rifts that are difficult to heal. Maybe the "villian" is, actually a bad guy. But more often than not, I've noticed, we choose someone and project our fears on them, all the while attempting to maintain a stranglehold on the beauty and goodness that we feel we possess. It's such a vicious cycle, and yet it is a cycle that speaks to me, primarily, of a deep pain within ourselves, a resistance to self-examination, a refusal to admit our own shortcomings because we think they are so large. It hurts me to see this in so many people, because I think that we're all, in many ways, inadequate, but at the same time, we are all so powerful, and we have such a great capacity for good. We have to learn how to balance our lives, and it's not an easy process, but it requires standing on one's own feet first of all, and second, choosing to step away from the dark villains that make us look like heroes. We're not heroes, not yet. And we will not be heroes until we can learn to make room for other people, other individuals, to exist without our disapproval. The very least we can do, if we want to see goodness come from our lives, is to learn to love without first announcing our condemnations, to learn to let light shine from us without first talking about how dark the darkness of others may be.
In all of this, the lines that keep coming back to me belong to one of the most brilliant men of this last century, Nelson Mandela: "Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us."
I've seen this before, in blogs and Oprah magazines and on Hallmark encouragement cards. I'm glad that Mandela said it, because I think it points to an essential truth about human beings: we are afraid of so much of ourselves, because we know so little about who we really are. The problem is that, everywhere I see this, it seems like the people I know who read it only leave having learned one half of the lesson. It's one thing to think gratefully, "That was uplifting. I AM powerful. I AM full of light and beauty." It's a completely different and completely difficult thing to admit to ourselves that, in fact, my neighbor across the street might ALSO be powerful and not in a frightening dangerous way; simply that she is powerful in the same way I am: in an unrealized, mysterious, and frightening way. And if I use her merely as a foil against which I think I shine, then I ignore her personhood, I ignore her light, and I deprive myself of the chance to expand my horizons that much further.
I know that people often don't care about expanding horizons. That makes me sad too, but I can't really figure out how to change minds on that front. If you don't care, you don't care, and you've effectively isolated yourself from any relationships but those that are self-involved. But there are so many people, so many well-intentioned citizens, who care but refuse to acknowledge the other; who try hard but just don't see it yet. I hope that it's coming to them, and I hope that it's coming to me, too.

Blessings, all. I feel like sailing away into a black and white nostalgia.

I only have one thing to do now: one thing, and that is: write my thesis. I should say "work on my thesis" because it's coming in such small pieces. One word at a time. As I labor to fill in letter after letter and then sentence after sentence, my mind drifts. A friend recently told me that this is because the brain only focuses in 60 second increments. I think that sounds about right for my current attention span. But it's not helping me crank this baby out. Not at all.
My topic is: "A Spiritual Manifestation: The Epiphanic Model in the Work of James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez". I'm getting a little tired of people making epiphany jokes, but I guess I should have known it would happen. Regardless of my slowing ability to write, however, my feeling of appreciation for the topic and its treatment by these two brilliant men is growing steadily. Which adds another problem: how do I do them justice? Especially on a steady diet of coffee, cigarettes, and rockstars supplemented with some herbs to heal my common cold.
Joyce's novel ends with a moment of stasis, of clarity, and I guess that's the way I'm hoping to leave this behind. I am often way too far ahead of myself, and the thesis plans are no exception. I am already revising my dedications page, and I don't even know who has helped me. Except for Old Taylor and Jim Beam. Anyway, to return: in my fantasy world, it's a good two hours before noon on December 5th and I've taken a moment to breathe in the glory of my accomplishments and to feel good about it all. I'm sitting, not in the dank dungeon of the library basement but in the cold clear air of the wet Portland winter and I'm not reading, I'm not re-editing, I'm just enjoying it. Enjoying the fact that I've actually accomplished something that I thought was impossible. Enjoying the proud realization that I didn't just "finish", I finished well. And above all, enjoying the threshold of adulthood that greets me from beyond thesis hell. That moment is what I want to carry away from my college experience. Since it's not going to come easy, if you're reading this and you're around in the next two months, forgive my rudeness and please buy me some coffee.

"Away! Away!...The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth." Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man