[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]
My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.
A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.
Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.
But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.
You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:
It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”
My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.
Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.
[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]
Cats tend to push people to the outer limits of response; very few people I know can simply take ’em or leave ’em.
The Missus and I are squarely in the cat-loving circle. Except that she developed severe respiratory allergies to cat fur and dander in recent years, we’d probably still be hosting nine or ten of the little beasts instead of letting the supply, well, dwindle. (We’re down to two now.)
The current issue of a local magazine, though, has a story (not yet online) about someone who really cares about cats. His name is Craig Grant, and he’s the proprietor of something called Caboodle Ranch: a 30-acre chunk of the North Florida woods functioning as a sanctuary for feral or otherwise unwanted cats.
[If you’re a regular reader here, you may recall this post from a couple weeks ago, co-written with my co-blogger. In which case, you may be wondering, What about Part 2? Patience, patience. Gargoyles celebrate Xmas for — guess what? — twelve of our days.* Part 2 of “A Gargoyle Looks at Xmas” will probably be up this Thursday.]
Yeah, “Comes the dawn. Also “A light bulb went on over my head”; “Eureka!”; “Now I get it…!” The slap-in-the-forehead moment that we literary types sometimes call… epiphany.
Writerly-advice gurus, agents, and editors will often tell you — rightly — that forms of the word “sudden” are overused, because most often things just happen at their normal rate. A “sudden” occurrence is more likely one which has been taking place all along; it just took someone a long time to notice.
But epiphanies and suddenness go hand-in-hand. There’s a slow but steady accretion of evidence which eventually reaches critical mass and explodes like a fireball in a character’s head: the flashpoint is the epiphany.
(The word’s roots are Greek, literally translating as “a showing forth.”)
I see Moonrat is dipping one of those little furry paws into the deep sparkling waters of Yiddish. Reminds me of one of my own forays into non-Englishdom…
When we first became acquainted, online, in 1991,The Missus and I decided for reasons that probably made sense at the time that we wouldn’t exchange photos until (and of course unless) we’d actually met already.
At the time, The Missus had written a short story whose protagonist, a woman named Alice, was taking French lessons and liked to try out new words and phrases by dropping them at random into conversation. As I recall, The Missus herself either was taking a course in French at the time, or had already taken one and was renewing her interest in the language.
I had never taken French (my high-school and college “foreign language” was Latin). But in my travels somewhere, I think at a bookstore on Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, I’d once picked up a reference book called Harrap’s Slang Dictionary: Anglais-Français/Français-Anglais.
Why that book?
Exhibit A: On the front cover, people at a cartoon cocktail party were saying, in English, things like “One for the road,” “Go jump in the lake,” “It’s my shout,” and “Up yours.”
Exhibit B: On the back cover appeared a mini-quiz, labeled “Test your English slang.” For each of the five English phrases, it offered three possible French phrases — from among which, one was supposed to choose the correct translation. But my eye was caught by the nature of the English phrases:
In short: How could I have resisted it?
Need to do a fairly simple post today — too much going on for a real thought-y one:
So I’m pulling out the cheapest stunt in the lazy blogger’s bag-o’-tricks: wondering about the site’s cumulative statistics — page visits and such, and what it all “means” (to the extent it can be determined to mean anything).
From whiskey river:
It’s true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.
(Charles Wright, The World of the Ten Thousand Things)
Those without stories are preordained to repeat them,
I saw once in the stars.
Unclear who underwrote that,
But since then I’ve seen it everywhere
I’ve looked, staggering
Noon light and night’s meridian wandering wide and the single sky.
And here it is in the meadow grass, a brutish script.We tend to repeat what we don’t know
Instead of the other way around —
thus mojo, thus misericordia,
Old cross-work and signature, the catechism in the wind.
We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things,
The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth.
We tend to repeat ourselves.
(Charles Wright, A Short History of the Shadow)
…and:
We are called to wake our hearts from the dark dreariness of never being good enough — a pretty startling call for anyone not suffering terminal arrogance. Since most of us suffer an oddly modern mix of anxiety and arrogance, there are few among us who make it through our lives without some hours (years, decades…) in that dark, self-doubting territory where anxiety defines the very air itself. That we are whole, and home, and needed by all of life is where Buddhism begins, in a sense. Most of us, though, have to take quite a journey to arrive where we’ve always been. Like the love that has no opposite or end, suchness is unconditional, in that it reaches absolutely every condition of experience. We intrinsically have the countenance of the person of suchness — nothing we can do or have ever done places us outside that embrace.
(Bonnie Myotai Treace)
Not from whiskey river:
“You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well — eh, stupid?”
“But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.
“Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; ” — well in.”
This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it.
“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things — everything that begins with an M — ”
“Why with an M?” said Alice.
“Why not?” said the March Hare.
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “– that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness — you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’ — did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”
(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Finally, Andrew Bird discusses the thin border between suchness and muchness, at the Bonnaroo Festival in 2006 [lyrics]:
Author Sara Lewis Holmes tells us, at her Read Write Believe blog, of a worthy New-Year’s-resolution of a cause:
Flying Horse Farms is a magical, transforming and fun camp for children with serious illnesses and their families. It’s an Ohio based 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and working to become a member of Hole in the Wall Camps, the world’s largest family of camps for children with serious illnesses.
I talked with the director, and he said that rather than one central library, he would love to have books available at several spots around the camp—the stables, the craft room, the main activity hall, the cabins, maybe even the dining hall.
The books would be…
For kids to read while they wait for their turn on a horse.
For kids who suddenly discover they love pottery or archery or fishing and want to know everything about it.
For kids to share and discuss a cool quote or an inspirational person during nightly reflection times.
For kids who need a fast idea for a drama skit, or a nature craft, or a easy recipe.
For kids who need to rest.
For kids who love to read.
For kids who are kids and want to be kids and must be kids even if a serious illness complicates their lives.
Sara offers several suggestions for supporting Flying Horse’s “horse and camp books for kids” project, including making purchases from her Amazon Wish List, blogging about one’s own experiences with horses and/or camps, and so on.
Now, I was convinced I wanted to help somehow, but none of those suggestions were really options for me, for one reason or another. What to do, what to do…?
I’d heard about the Flying Horse project via the Seven Impossible Things… blog, so there I posted my characteristically muddled questions: what if I can’t, for now, make a purchase or donation? what if I can’t blog about horses because I don’t know jack about them?
An answer came from Sara Lewis Holmes herself:
If it helps, I know nothing about horses either, except that I’m rather scared of them. :) I imagine it’s the same for some of the kids who will come to camp too.
Heck, blog about what you DON’T know if you want. Any little bit that spreads the word helps. I’m thrilled by all the ideas so far, and I’ve updated my original post with the links.
And that provided the (ha ha, hehe, I crack myself up) spur I needed for the rest of this post — with a twist.
