. . . .

. . .

. .

Well, what I meant to say about the unicorn (but was sidebashed by the demand of other work) is that it's a postcard in a ziplock bag returned to me from Bangor, ME, postmarked 17 Oct, 1984. I received it 22 years ago. I was fourteen? fifteen? but I'd sent it off, self-addressed and stamped, four years previously when I was ten? eleven? years old, and when unicorns were becoming all the rage. Along with purple. Purple unicorns, especially. On the back, in uneven cursive:

Dear Gina--

Tell your folks that yes, I do have "people" to read & answer my mail--and I'm one of them!

all the best,

Steven King

The eleven year-old who discovered The Stand and who immersed herself in the many other books, subsequently, was canny enough to question the legitimacy of the writer's public persona as personable. I wrote him because no other living writer in my limited experience (my town was small enough to be invisible, is) had ever talked about writing as a vocation and made it possible--visible --as a vocation. I discovered and read my first King book on my first road trip away from Arizona.

I was not savvy enough to know that by this point in my life I would no longer take writing from a Circle K book rack.

We drove to Del Rio, Texas, to visit my mother's family for the first time. I finished Fire Starter just as we pulled up to the overgrown fence and the leaning shack of rooms my grandmother lived in and my mother grew up in. I said to my mother: "it's so pretty," considering the daisies, "and she said, "Gina, it's ugly. Ugly." We would only make that trip once more. When we returned, I wrote King a letter and told him my father said he wouldn't respond, that he has people who read and answer his fan mail.

Until a few days ago, I was not savvy enough to think of running the spell check on the signature. Steven, not Stephen. Well, I hadn't thought of it because it doesn't much matter.

I make the journey from Arizona to Texas every year now. From where I was born to where I began. I'm leaving next Wednesday for Arizona. I'll be in Del Rio for Christmas. I'm taking many books and all this new writing.

Thanks to Steven, who said, despite the obstacles, it can be done. You can write too.


***

winter break, week two

With rest, so much depression. Only with enormous effort am I crawling out from beneath the crash that always throws me at the end of the term into a tailspin where I do nothing but hide from the final overwhelming details that bring closure to the weeks behind us. The final grading, the many letters (because they must be as well written as possible) of recommendation, travel arrangements, packing, laundry, the fourth-year review application for reappointment, and the boxes and boxes of manuscripts I'm reading for a contest I didn't win, and of course email. Because I owe everyone I know an email, including you.

Instead I started dishes and the floors or a notebook post twenty times and forgot what I was up to and lost interest in finishing so that everything around here needs doing but is impossible to get done. That there are always dishes in the sink makes me want to pull my hair out; that I must do them to keep from yanking at my head makes me want to to go back to bed. Which is forbidden. So I wander from room to room. I open a book and another book. I forget what I've read and read it over. I think: better to read in the big blue chair than on the couch. I think better to read in the tub than in the big blue chair. I pour a bath. I am too tired to undress and get into it, and once in, too tired to read or to get back out again. Too tired to dry off, find clothes.

So: enormous the effort to rise, make tea, bathe, dress, comb, and brush, and to mindfully drink the whole pot as a way of beginning to take good care again. This is the time for pulling out the delicate white teas and the pearl jasmine and the red iron pot--the beautiful dear teas I bought in my city after spending an hour in the aisle suspended between wanting to have them and paying so much for them. A twelve dollar canister of tea? Never justifiable. And yet this morning I felt just enough joy while sipping from the cup in my palms the sweet complicated layers in the tea--just enough to get on my feet and go back to work.

***

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

thanks

notes from "Philosophy of Artistic Activity," Wednesday, November 22, 2006, Br. Nathan Cromly

Question: isn't there a distinction between work and art?
Response: though they are not the same, they are not distinctly different.

Work : Art

Work: associated with toil, labor, and utility. It transforms matter towards usefulness, towards means, towards a tool (you dig a ditch: the ditch is a tool. The cheese knife is beautiful in this light, but it was made for cheese).

Art: associated with beauty, aesthetics, is an end in itself. It is contemplative in the sense that it is made for itself. Its transformative action, is expressive.

But both work and art are transformative, both have an acting subject that transforms the material world towards order, unification. Both engage with physicality.

So perhaps another question might be: what's the use of beauty? (i.e. against the building of an ugly church--towards utility, against beauty and therefore costs, and towards a desire to give money to the community's poor instead--the people said, "we need beauty as much as we need bread.")

The purpose of a work of art is to remind us of our humanity--it is contemplative (my aside: note the language--work of art).

(?) Not a question of aesthetics, merely, but a question about who we are in work and art. Almost all work contains something sacred in it, even the mundane reflects practical intelligence, which reflects the human quest for God.

Question: I once heard Father Philippe (?) say: all art is based on relations, subjective or not, and that relationship can be either real or ideal, but art is not creative in being. . . ?

God : Artist

God: from being, substance. God creates, actuates, out of nothing.

Artist: like God in creating but only by way of analogy. The artist in likeness makes, creates, but begins with something, matter that combines certain pre-existing qualities, conditions. She works on relation (my aside: contingencies) to create a unity.

How does the artist work?

inspiration (informed by the artist's successive affectivity, psychology, memory, education) -> ideas

ideas are both ->

1) possible: not yet existing and something that is new. Renovare: renewing. Ideal. Subjective.
2) project: accomplishable, can be done in reality, taking into consideration Consevare: the already given of the past. Real. Objective.

The subjective may not lead to the real towards truth or humanity. (my aside: subjective art might remain too fully invested in the artist's affectivity, psychology, memory, education, etc. and not invest or engage enough in the givens of the past or the determination. Glass houses, i.e., may not be raised up six miles into the sky, much as we want glass houses.)

I.e. a marble pieta speaks in marble: in matter, through the matter: matter itself reveals the vision of the artist. The artist discovers in the medium what is available towards expression. The sculptor looks to the slab's relations for what it might become, reveal. For: how does art reveal truth?

Brother Nathan (they said), "there is no truth. There is no truth."

But the artist (according to Schopenhauer?) is a prophet--and the prophet points out to people what they don't see. So the musician in the subway, i.e., who fills the tunnel's cacophony with music takes away a lot of the sensible qualities to bring about a harmony.

The artist as prophet, allowing the determining factors, also allows the weakening of inspiration, necessarily. But art isn't about inspiration, but about realization. Consevare: genre.

Inspiration is by its very nature the source of possibles (my aside: against genre).

And parsing possibles:

possibilities -> new order (intelligence seizes something new) + affectivity (the will to create) and passion (pleasure or not). "When we get an idea it is always connected to our will."

But inspiration leads to ideas wherein we arrive at choice: from a diversity of options, the one thing to express.

The distinction between inspiration and choice is the difference between the many and the one: how do I pass from the many to the one?

Many -> One

between them:

1) will: in the idea there is imperium, comand of will, a force of seduction, passion, possessing me.
2) intelligence: there is the past, culture, matter to consider also.

--Well but as soon as you have an idea, it imposes itself on you--

So a good question, a good paper, might address the question: how does Grace sanctify that impulse?

Charity.

If I have an idea, it is for you, sister.

The artist needs to become a servant, not a queen or king.

***

from jacob's ladder

the beautiful


***

. . .

Spent the last two days at the priory with morning classes and midday mass and found myself floundering at prayer and contemplation, which surprised me though it shouldn't have given that my resources in store towards a quiet steady internal life are petty or almost nonexistent, and that my inclination towards distraction is nearly perfect. Maybe the work of any writer is distraction; maybe I've made a life it.

***

Sometimes, rarely, you get to see people do their work as they must in the most mundane daily ordinary sense and you are awed by what they do, if only because the task proves impossible for you. Because what you witness you don't understand. Because, in the end, despite however drawn you are to love (and always with an enthusiasm you mistake for love), you lack charity. Sometimes the witness is revealed as nothing more than a location, something less than a lens or a point of view, nothing so determined as an observation, or even an opinion. And the location is this: I watch them from my patch of sun on the chapel floor and I see them close their eyes and kneel prostrate on the flagstone and I hear their silence. They are beautiful.

And the direction? I am turned towards them. But this is not enough.

***

On the first day it was a conversation filled with awkward silence. There were lapses, doubt and self-consciousness. My mind wandered. I felt nothing. I felt silly. I had no words, so my mind listened to itself remember things--words I'd overheard or read--until I was distracted into looking for images full of loveliness and solace. I watched the clouds in the sky from the chapel and thought of the pomegranate we sliced open on Sunday afternoon. Too much trouble to eat, Herman said when I held the whole fruit against my face and felt its coolness and heft before photographing the spill of red seeds. I watched the incense smoke uncurl in the window light. I thought of seeds.

***

Our words, which slip into real garments and reduce them to costumes. But without words, no knowing, either. I keep working on the difference. Word against word.

***

"Intentionality? What do we mean by it? There is something fundamental in the vegetable life; something exists inherently. Something is in waiting within the seed, a thing implicit that will become explicit, intentionally, potentially, virtually. It proceeds by succession. ...Christ speaks of Grace as a seed. " --Brother John-Luke

***

Yesterday--the Feast of Mary's Presentation--after mass during the silence allotted for prayer, I gave up. I saw the futility of my being there and saw the end of my day at the priory, and I wondered if my hope was a hope for the wrong thing, whatever my hope may have been (I don't think I know). Then, without my anticipating it, as if from disappointment or release: tears and trembling. It went on and on, inarticulate, welling up, seizing on astonishment and conviction with a clarity I can't seem to summon now. What did it say? Beauty, it said. Just bend towards beauty.

***

winter break, week one

. . . and none too soon because today is her birthday

. . . and we're going to have a party tonight.

***

she rests

ten hours of oral exams and poetry portfolios ahead...

"However valiant their heart, generous their devotion, their physical capacities have limits and they constantly feel the disproportion between the work incumbent upon them and the strength with which they are endowed." --Pierre-Thomas Dehau, The Living Water

***

honors project committee meeting, campus diversity committee luncheon, oral exam conferences

Many wonderful portfolios of poems coming in. They rose to the challenge. They wrote and wrote well.

Chris Astwood: "I still think of the poem as a rosary for the imagination."

***

thirty-page poetry portfolio final conferences begin today...

nineteen fifteen-minute final conferences with intro to lit kicking off at eight a.m.

In the office where the draft around my legs has me wrapped in a blanket and shawl and where the cold keeps lulling me to sleep to sleep. But the tea is nearly cool enough to sip. Will we get sun today you think? Too dark out yet to tell.

***

last day of class

Was joking when I said please let me get hit by a truck so I don't have to deal with the many things that must be done today. Then somebody hit a red squirrel and left his body smack in the middle of the bricked road by the path leading up to Old Main, and I looked at him a long time because it seems after all I had a better day than he did no matter how you think it.

***

. . . . . . .

. . . . . .

Well, because I'm stuck, that's why. I don't know if I'm working or not sitting here staring at it, tinkering, guessing, feeling dissatisfied. It begs the question, what comes next? Always, that. And what next? And you know what's funny? That's the question that set it in motion, the question of the opening section. Now what:


forward

In an hour somewhere before now, I began the book of annunciations, a canvass of moments that spoke of and conceived of things to come—that would herald a direction ineluctably plain. Set out, walk off, move out, quit. Come. I began this book when, as it seemed to me then, an indeterminate freedom entered my life in the form of an unreceptive drone. Nothing and no one presented themselves, no clear signal of what to do next called attention to itself. No and with its little wagging tale. Once a man who couldn’t be with me wrote: “I tried to call you, you know—and you weren’t at home—and I thought, how invasive of me! And I hung up.” The calling—where are you?—ends in amputation, the line severed as the stem from the tree. But: if you’re credulous enough (I am hiding) every thing’s a contingency marked with imperative: every thing’s invasive (I am naked) and therefore found meaningful.

***

. . . . .

. . . .

November and the thermometer says it's 50 degrees out there and the sun is not quite up yet which means it's going to be warmer than yesterday when the students put on their summer clothes and sat in the grass and sunned. So I don't yet live in the snowy midwest and I don't have to say it feels all wrong. So. I think I will go out for that run again, maybe shake off some of this weariness. But first I will sit with some tea and look at the new work again and try to see something in it I've been missing. Sometimes grading student work reminds me of what I could do better. When you don't know all the rules, you make them up. I've seen some creative ways of making paragraphs this week. That's the spirit.

***

. . .

Woke to the great mystery of trees in fog, so breathtakingly beautiful I felt the need to be out in it, wandering. So I put on shoes and went for a run and thought, now why don't I do this every morning, which what one's head always says while one is running very very slowly, walking actually, or sauntering with a warm cloud for one's breath below the crows who fill the trees with the sounds of their wings and are dark shadows lifing in the mist in a terrible rush.

***

. .

week ten

Nope. No sun today. And no hot water! Drew a bath and found it cold. A lone crow squats on the branch in front of me and weighs it down bobbing a little. Otherwise all is still and hazy. The non-color of a strange soup. I dreamt of playing hooky, of going fishing with big poles. Maybe C's story of the old fishing pole factory. Maybe the poem a Dartmouth student asked me to read. It sounds like a great idea, fishing. Haven't been in more than a decade. How about you? There's a bait and tackle store down the block. Live bait from a vending machine.

***

Meanwhile, I'll go get the suitcase from the car so I can dress this morning and go to school proper. No, I wasn't serious about hooky. Well, I was. But you missed the boat.

***

. . . . . . .

Taken in mid-August the last time I visited C and rested and drank tea at the table in the morning over another book she leads me to. Now in the Minneapolis airport, a flight away from Moline and a fifty mile drive from Galesburg. Seems impossible I ran the dirt road in Vermont today and felt the cold make my eyes tear and my lungs ache in a good way. Seems weeks ago, that quiet slice, returning to the house, greeting King George Jesus the cat, feeling grounded in my legs and feet and in the outside chill smell of my fleece, hair, and skin, the outside inside my nose. In my breath.

***

Thank you, C.

***

Don't forget: Francisco Aragon is BLOGGING at Tertulia.

***

Home now. Mostly sleepless. But very happy. The apartment is quiet and I am alone. The night is unseasonably warm. The priory writes with news of this week's upcoming classes, and I am reading the book C gave me, God: a Biography, which is utterly compelling as literary criticism but which also makes the evangelist in my head scream blasphemy. The critic, the scholar, in me says: if you would rummage up the most disconcerted image of divinity's person and place it into the great canon of tragedy as understood by Early Modern thought--since Miles insists on using Hamlet and readings of the character of Hamlet as his guide--you're bound to draw up a frail unpredictable violent version of God who will murder, let drown, test, devise stages, find vengence. But I think without a God who is omniscient (and Miles' God is not) there is no story. The story of this story is authorhood. Hierachy. Rise and fall. Chronology. Beginning and end. Otherwise it's just violence. Or all things being equal, chaos. Confusion. Ultimate freedom. Anarchy. You can't elide purpose within a methodology of purpose for the sake of having God reveal himself to himself. Well, you can. But then you don't end up with a character much resembling God, do you. He looks suspiciously much like man.

***

. . . . . .

A thin layer of melting snow on the porch roof my windows look over, all but water and glittering ice and a mist rolling off the surface in the sun. So many brilliant reflections from the wet walks and ice lining the trees, I see only silouhuettes against the glare from where I sit with the sun hitting my face throught the high panes of my window.

***

Unplugging now and going to C's house for the rest of the weekend. The cell won't work, the wireless won't work. I won't be here, I'm guessing, until Sunday night or Monday morning when I will have read a book or two. That's the plan. And I'm going for a run as soon as I get there because it's so beautiful. The sky here is like nothing on earth--and we desert people have amazing sky.

***

. . . . .

Sun and big clouds, the kind of clouds that fling light at the hoods of cars and asphalt and wet leaves and grass so that everything gleams and you squint to look at it and you look up at the sky to see where it's coming from. The kind of clouds that make you see things in them, both bright and dark. And now the room darkens considerably as one of the dark ones passes before the sun. It is not the least bit windy, so I guess the cloud will shift slowly, make its various shapes in the light, then burn off some hole in its middle and let the sun back through the blinds.

***

I am still in Vermont/New Hampshire. In this room the wallpaper is all Alice's adventures in Wonderland. All white rabbits and queens and mad hatters and cards in gold and yellow outline. The repetition of the pattern is a little perverse. Fitting. This is the children's room in the two-bedroom suite. Twin beds. As well as the only plug in the suite I could plug into.

***

And oh yes, Francisco Aragon writes to say he is BLOGGING at Tertulia. See links at Emmy's lovely place too. Thank you, Emmy.

***

Norwich, Vermont: it is possible to get fresh sushi next door at the little place where they also sell hardware and firewood. While I looked through the deli case at the fat orange prawns and tortellini salad a voice over the loudspeaker said "I need someone to go upstairs for boots, I need someone to go upstairs for boots."

Someone is buying boots today.

***

. . . .

Norwich Inn, which is in Norwich, Vermont, which is just across the river from Hanover, New Hampshire, which is where I'm heading now in the banana yellow sporty thing they rented to me yesterday at the airport. Moonroof, fin, black leather interior. I feel like a wasp in it. And a little out of place. I'm a '91 Honda Accord all the other days. Rusty and dusty. Which is just fine.

I'm in dire need of tea.

***

. . .

I am still slow with light and color. That ladder was astonishingly beautiful beside the basement window. It took a long time to see it through the lens as it was, to let the film see the window light in the dark. I didn't know how to take it. I held my breath at last, held my hands steady, and leaned into the wall while the shutter opened its eye, made a long pause, and closed again. And yes, that ladder was something like this ladder. I'd have taken you down to the basement to show you, but here we are instead at the desk together, as usual. Well, this is not so bad. It's like sharing a story over breakfast.

***

Unplugging now: off to New Hampshire. If you're nearby and can make the reading, I'd love to meet you.

***