New Signposts

There can be something comforting in theories. In science, in literature, theories allow you to sit back and ponder the mysteries that you encounter on a daily basis –Nature, human pyschology–but a preocupation with theory can excuse the dismissal of the practical. While I greatly value contemplation and careful consideration, this settling for the merely theoretical is often far more troubling to me, for it allows a disengagement with the very world we must grasp if we are to live in it.

My recent blog posts have felt a bit too theoretical to me, which is ironic to me, since what I find most troubling about the literature classes that I now take is this reliance on theory. One might ask how literature classes can be anything but theory? After all, it’s an invented world. A professor recently said to our class that we’re safe in this invented world in our heads. I beg to differ and for me, there is only one way out of the theoretical.

Although I appreciate the stylistic elements of the vast volume of literature that precedes realism, there is an important reason why it must be taught to young fiction writers and why writers today must incorporate it somehow into their writing. The fictional world is not the safest of worlds if it does its job properly. The realistic fictional style reflects the experiences of the “real world” where danger, anxiety and trouble reside. And I’ve often found that one’s mind is not the safest of places. Decisions that hurt, actions that maim, and contemplation that hinders all begin in troubled minds. In a society such as ours that pushes ahead at 80 mph, guzzling gas without thought, insufficient attention is given to mental health happiness. But this mental un-health often comes from the need to dis-engage from the real world simply because it can be too much to handle without forms of escape. Is literature–ideally the reflection of the real world–merely a means of escape from it? It would seem that this conclusion is impossible, illogical. Literature should hit you on the side of the head with the real, the practical–all the things you must encounter in the hours of a day.

It turns out that I have more in common with Aristotle than I would have hoped. This entire musing is after praxis. It’s trying to quiet mere theoria. Ideally, its after theoria in praxis, I suppose. I get frustrated with literature classes because they don’t have enough emphasis on the practical. And for me, the practical is the writing itself. What other way is there for me to practically contribute to the effort of literature that is invaluable to me? But journalism and some writing classes are devoid of the theoretical. Where is the time spent thinking, ruminating? A professor once told me that in order to write about my personal experiences, I must completely dis-engage from them. Get to the heart of them, after great thought and feeling. And put them in new clothes. Distill them. I love whiskey, so I understand this thought. The praxis must be driven by something, a force. But that force may no longer be mere theory.

I move towards the political world in my reading and in my writing because its the wide-scale expression of this practical world. It demands engagement with real experience. I will continue to do so, but from here on out, I hope to share with you the thoughts of a beloved professor I have been fortunate enough to spend time with–Sam Green, the Wash. State Poet Laureate.

In one of the classes I took with him, he sent us a daily poetry calender, marking the real events of the poetical world. On Feb, 19, 2008, he sent us a quote from the French poet, Rene Char (1907-1988). Char once said,

“The poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.”

Part of my recent engagement in the political realm included a day spent lobbying in the state capitol, pushing for environmental issues. I was quiet, yes, because it was not a realm about which I had enough words to speak. For me, one of the questions of this movement lies in the difference between traces and proof of passage. So far, we have proof of ourselves on the land, when we need to be leaving traces.

So, as traces of my time, I will be leaving snippets from what Sam Green and other professors have shared with me, in the hope that they can be useful, put into practice, into our lives.

New Air

Children in public schools in cities are often the most impacted by the harmful affects of pollution. Or so someone informed me the other day. It makes logical sense, but the situation brings up issues of negligence and avoidance that run deeper than state education departments and is rooted in common human tendencies.

Do you ever have a moment, when the sun comes out on an afternoon in a city that sees little sunlight and likes to hide itself in fog, when an evening seems much more of an opportunity than a task? Than a problem, to get through? Naturally, most people must have these moments, or many would not move on with vigor in their lives.

Someone pointed out to me that my previous blog post titles have been quite depressing. It’s true, though the sentiment behind them was hardly something I would call depressing. I am listening to a song right now, and the singers asks, “Think of me, think of me, when I am in a foreign land.”

While I was sitting on the bus today, the song reminded me of a time when I was very far from some important aspects of my life and how often I would escape into dreams, into the possibility that an evening could hold. Without any certainty of someone expecting me home, without any expectation of what I was to do certain nights, I discovered a comfortable way of losing myself in these possibilities.

Realizing this tendency of mine also made me realize how much of a person’s actual life is not lived in their office, in their home, in their classroom – in any of the physical spaces in which humans reside. So much of our lives, and of the life that to me, gives me hope and encouragement, comes from a place much more shrouded in mental mist. The sun needs to come out sometimes though: I’ve met people who had done this for me, travelling has done this for me, and jobs have as well.

Someone commented to me the other day that I should write an environmental justice piece on the fact stated above about children suffering from pollution in cities. I have also been asked to write an opinion piece for a small newspaper on the closing of several public elementary and middle schools in the area.

Throughout my life, so often, that new air that I needed was provided by educational means. Obama’s stimulus package may provide a bit of new air for schools across the country, but I do not think that the issue of education is one that we can merely remain hopeful about: we must be vigilance and not get lost in misty thoughts.

In the News

Tonight marks the end of a tiring twenty four hours, marked by more surprises than I expected when I went into work last night and hoped to snatch some time away to read a novel I am reading for a class and encountered some surprises. What has happened is not entirely important here. Rather, what is more important is what I thought when this news was revealed to me, what I soon lost sight of, and of which someone very close to me reminded me recently.

All of these veiled references eventually point to a recognition of how much the media overlooks the quotidian things through which people endure. It is a reality of daily news that feeds on the new, the exciting, the never-ending cycle of varied stories which must be covered, but it is still a reality of which one should not lose sight.

When I got home today, I had an email from a friend living abroad right now. She sent me a poem that she had written, so that we could edit each other’s works as we once used to. Editing and reading like this reminds me of many instances this time last quarter, where I was still engaged in the same job, but where I had this other mental state wherein I realized the smaller bits of a day, the smaller stories, and the importance of such.

Her poem was a glimpse – a sharp, well written glimpse – of a woman whom she saw in the city by a train. It mostly revealed the exteriors that anyone see when they pass another in the city, but ventured a bit more beyond the clothing, the hair, the eye color. Into that realm where daily struggles and daily stories are as someone put it, just something that you have to wake up with, and deal with.

The song that I am listening to ended on a line that I find to be relevant: “I am young and the world is wide.”

The Cheerful Grave

I used to travel with family friends who stopped at the graveyard in every town that we entered. The father, a big, intense and lighthearted man from Cork, always insisted upon it. We visited the old graveyard in Carson City, Neveda on those afternoons of thunderclouds that only seem to be present in my childhood. We went to a graveyard in Cork so that he could find all those relatives we like to blame for the way we turned out. While I’ve been fortunate enough to visit famous graves like Arlington, the site that I remember most lies in a small village near where my father grew up.

I remembered all this when rereading a journal I had kept for a poetry class last spring. Try it – keeping such a journal. It is the most ridiculous piece of a lie that anyone needs to be a poet to do so. The raw materials for poetry, and for quiet reflection, lie in the simplest and sometimes most mundane, most common of experiences.

When I set out one afternoon this summer with my aunt and uncle with a bouquet of flowers, it seemed an ordinary thing. I presumed we were calling on friends. Instead, I soon learned that the village to which we drove has an annual day whereon the locals bring flowers to the graveyard, clean it of weeds, and pay their respects.

We tidied a few graves, in a very stern silence while my aunt and uncle mused that I probably had uncles and maybe even a grandfather buried there. Those lost relations. Before we left, my uncle leaned down to me and told me where the grave of my aunt’s father was. She had tidied it with all the fastidiousness of an observant and carefree mother, seemingly paying little attention to who was beneath.

Yet as we left, I saw her take one glance back. This woman is pr0bably one with whom I will always have a deep connection, though I probably know very little of her other than the struggles I hear second hand. But that silence she seemed to posess was like a hand on the small of my back. Most of the days I spent with her were filled with talk of books, shared smirks at her grandchildren’s precocious ways or nothing at all.

It is interesting to me how one can meet themselves again, in an old notebook, in the memory of an aunt, and find something deeper and more settling than assurance, success, or guarantees.

On Elizabeth Bishop’s grave, it reads, “Awful but cheerful”.

Doubt

The title of this blog in a way does reference the recent movie starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymore Hoffman, which was originally a play by John Patrick Shanley, but it more importantly refers to an idea about which I have been reading, and with which I have been struggling.

I appreciated the movie perhaps most for the way in which the writers refused to make any character – regardless of their guilt – a villain. In fact, the more that characters doubted one another, regardless of proof, the harsher that they treated one another. The utter lack of proof on which the plot rests makes a very powerful statement about belief that leaves me again in awe any anyone committed to living a life of faith. It seems the most courageous way, when chosen properly and rationally. Yet this doubt also made me think how much this idea and the reality can plague and destroy relationships and society as a whole.

Recently, my co-workers were complaining about how the Obama-elation has fallen since his election and how it will supposedly artificially arise again at his inauguration. I instantly thought, They suffer from doubt. Of course, I always keep cynicism and skepticism in my arsenal in case they are necessary, but what is the point in using these when there is nothing to kill but hope?

One of my best friends used to always tell me as we sped down the highway with no plans for the night, high on youth and high on possibility, that hope dies last. I have always loved the Emily Dickinson line, Hope is a thing with feathers / that perches on the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all. Because doubt operates on no evidence, all it kills is that kindling of hope, a precious bird that gets buffeted around in large cities where no one knows you personally, where trees are suffocated by concrete, where I can’t help but think that it took hours of labor, gallons of gas, and sore fingers to make the cup of tea on which I seem to live.

We all suffer from doubt, and sometimes doubt is a good thing. It keeps us in check with reality, it make us ask questions. But it can also lead us to presume things about other people, other creatures and other ideas that do nothing but destroy our old trust in these things.

I have always suffered from an overactive imagination, (I say suffer, though of course it’s not too bad, because sometimes imaginations disconnect you from reality, and lead you to create realities that are far more real than the one in which you exist, and thus, are far more terrifying and constricting) since the time I was a young girl, sitting in mass, tracing the lines of the pews, the stained glass windows, the draped cloth, with my eyes and my fingers, wondering why each person was in mass. Who they were, what difficulties they had. Someone recently told me that airports excite them for that reason – so many people’s lives, before you. Yet airports scare me for that very reason. So many lives, not necessarily choosing to be there. Potentially moving on to something worse. Maybe something better, but there is little constancy in an airport.

I usually love a change of scenery and still do, but there will always remain for me something more pure and more beautiful – perhaps the most beautiful of all – in seeing a full church of people with their heads down, because only then, do I realize that if everyone else in this cold, dim atmosphere, contemplating failure and hoping for redemption, can find a reason to come, why can I not? Everyone in all the churches across the world could be in a mass delusion, I suppose, but what more beautiful delusion is there than believing, hoping, that life can improve? That failures never define us, that doubt need not end relationships and faith.

The Strings That Tie Us

Allison Amend, an upcoming short story writer and the author of Things That Pass for Love, recently mentioned in an interview with me that she believes it necessary that the modern world be a background for a story. She said that writers need not be involved in politics, or necessarily comment directly on modern society, but that it must be there.

I have thought and re-thought her point primarily because it reminded me of a statement made by one of my favorite poets, Eavan Boland. In Object Lessons, Boland discusses the movement that Irish writers had to make in a society that subscribed them as object for literature, rather than participants or creators of it. While the society in which she now writes has changed in some ways, strings always pull from the past. Boland maintains that writers have a public duty to write for others. So in a modern world, where one might accept that we must write for modern readers, must the modern world itself be our subject of writing? What does a contemporary writer do when they write in a style that maybe be deemed out-dated or when they do not engage in modern issues? Are they less important?

I was recently asked to consider the mental landscape of writers. Naturally, that landscape could be natural: the place where one grew up, where one found inspiration, where one found a sense of belonging or peace. It could also be entirely mental: the discovery of a new idea, a new technique. The possibilities go on. I wonder though, is there a mental landscape where we should not go? Is the past one of those? Sharp and deeply psychological writes such as Anne Enright (try, The Gathering, or What Are You Like? ), Michael Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost and Divisadero) and Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace, Surfacing) grapple with the pasts of their respective homelands, in contemporary works.

Must writers choose a mental landscape? It might not be a choice, but rather a natural inclination. But given the works of the writers listed above, choosing one comes with implications. A visiting creative writing professor and published writer once came to a class of mine and said that English Literature degrees today are not what they used to be. Whereas professors and students used to discuss the way in which an author achieved successful writing through technique, characterization, and point of view, universities now push professors and students to discuss the political implications of the work, the historical context, and the social role of the work. While I believe both views to be absolutely indispensable, I wonder what happened to the state of reading that it must necessarily be political in all aspects.

In many respects, I understand that it is. A history of book bannings, censorship, bestseller lists and capitalist society all insure that reading and writing is political in some way. But is there a point at which it becomes too much so? That the modern landscape, the mental landscape, becomes so analyzed that it is torn to shreds? Leaving us with nothing but doubt? Analyzing requires a level of doubt, a questioning. What happens however, when doubt starts to destroy?

Writing in the Silences

Moore Street in Dublin was historically and popularly known as the place to find vegetables and fruits grown from local women, adorned in their washing clothes and an array of scarves – the only things to sit lightly in humid summers where families hoped for a little extra at the end of the week.

Today, however, Moore Street, as seen in the picture above, pulses with tourists, immigrants from Europe, Africa, Asia and locals hoping that vegetables and cheap jewelry can still bring a city together for a few minutes. Only a block away from the recently commercialized and once war-torn O’Connell Street, Moore Street is much more of a path into a history, often silent, that still digs its fingers into the present.

I took the picture above of Moore Street when I was working in Ireland this summer a few blocks away, editing local newspapers. For one assignment, I also traveled to Northern Ireland, a place where many streets also have silent histories that press on the future. As I wandered streets where, only twenty years before, taxis had been turned into barricades  to encase all out massacres, where innocents  dodged bullets and broken glass, where local reporters risked their lives and those of their families when trying to report on this violence, all I could think about was how really unimportant pen and paper was in the face of death, loss, grief, and madness. I visited graves of victims from both sides of The Troubles where flowers were fresh.

Somehow, though, in the face of such stark reality, putting pen to paper still seemed something that I could do, to contribute. Documenting the past and the present allows that it not be pushed under the table. In many countries, it is not hard to see that silence has too often been the medium of oppression.

In a class that I am currently taking on the post-colonial literature of India, the professor began our first day off with a question: What role does memory play in the writing of history? To that I add, What role does politics play in the writing of history? Of journalism? Of literature? Memory can be unreliable, colorful, bitter. Politics even more so. And yet I, as many others, write of instances from memory, within politics of class, gender, and cultural differences. The lines are blurred indeed.

Journalists are often lampooned, and sometimes rightly so, for claiming objectivity while admitting that journalists are individuals with biases, and thus with subjective views. How can objectivity and subjectivity co-exist? This question is no light one when the lack of objective news plagues countries all around the world, including the United States.

When a writer is documenting the past or the present, memory and politics naturally influence the expression of truth. Even accessing information is political in many countries, where free press is still an ideal and not yet realized. How much more then, are politically concerned writers and readers in this country called to take up their pens?

The next few months I will  be writing about local issues that seem pertinent in the city in which I reside, books that I read, and any other musings that I think others might share. Since I haven’t yet written much about the last summer that I had abroad and many experiences that illuminated aspects of life, politics, and the role of a writer in society, I will also pepper the blog with these.

Above all, I believe that writing is not meant to be a private act, but a public one, inspired by others around the writer. So here, I make it public and invite all of you who can make it better.  A professor once told me that the act of writing does not make a writer; rather, it is the act of re-writing. Striving towards achievement. All writing is a striving to me, and it can be a communal one.