Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Going; Gone.

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From whiskey river:

There will come soft rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

(Sara Teasdale)

…and:

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

(Mary Oliver)

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A Half-Dozen Words to Bend Your Writing Mind

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[Last in a series of posts involving six words. Part 1 asked you to define your life in a half-dozen words; Part 2, your life’s work. This one is much narrower in scope.]

Hex Presse specimen jar poetry puzzle (click for more info)This isn’t normally the way I’d start a post — with poetry. (That typically happens only in my regular Friday whiskey river-triggered ruminations.) But I wanted to open with something useful to non-writing site visitors, as well as the writers who stop by.

So let’s begin simply. And if you’re a writer looking for a challenge, keep reading!

Sestina
by Elizabeth Bishop

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Pretty great, huh? Yet a certain type of writer regards this with apprehension (if not outright terror).

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A Half-Dozen Words Which Say “Your Work”

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Continuing in yesterday’s six-words-about-you vein…

A good number of years ago, now, I started a journal — handwritten, in a plain old spiral-bound notebook. I no longer have it, as far as I know, not even in any of the old, yet-unopened boxes in the garage or our offices which often whisper to me tantalizing hints of their contents.

But I still remember the first entry, which was an attempt to calculate my “lucky number.” The attempt was based on some certainly bogus description I’d read someplace — it even sounded bogus. All you had to do, according to this faux-numerological “plan,” was take all the explicit numbers you knew from your life, and add them up until you rendered them down to a single digit. So you’d take your Social Security Number, your date of birth, your phone number, any street addresses and postal codes you’d ever lived at, your shoe size, and so on, turn each multi-digit number into a string of single digits, and keep adding up the digits. E.g.:

SSN: 123-45-56789
becomes:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 45
and then:
4 + 5 = 9

In which case 9 (so went the theory) would be the lucky number based on SSN alone. Of course you had all those other numbers to add in, but the general process was the same.

So anyway, I ran all the numbers I could think of through the wringer. I never stopped to consider the thoroughly arbitrary bogosity of the exercise: Why add them all up — why not (say) multiply them? What about the street addresses you couldn’t remember? If you lived on Third Street, should you add in a “3”? If you were (as I am) the first of four siblings, should you add in 1, and then 3 (for the others), or 1, and then 4 (for all of you as a group), or just 1, or just 4? But I was also the third-born in a family of six — so then…? How about the number of stairs on the way up from the first floor to my childhood bedroom?

It’s easy to get lost in this sort of thinking, obviously, unless one is simple-minded in direct proportion to the Bogosity Index of whatever it is one is trying to achieve. Which, back then, I pretty much was.

The bottom line: my lucky number is/was 6.

To this day, even knowing as I know that the result would’ve been different if I’d just remembered (or forgotten), say, just one more phone number — even knowing that, I’m never surprised to see the number 6 cropping up in my life. Which is why the premise of yesterday’s post (that a life could be summarized in a half-dozen words) didn’t completely catch me by surprise. (I mean, come on, really — why not 7 words? or 5?) (Or, looked at another way: why 6, considering all the other people with different lucky numbers?)

So I’ve continued thinking in this six-words vein. Which leads me to a second, related (but not identical) challenge:

How would you summarize your life’s work in just six words? A few examples:

“Not as good as I wanted.”
“Show time, folks. Day after day.”
Or go the enigmatic route: “Objects in mirror not so big.”

What would you say?

Now, coming at this from a writer’s point of view, my inclination is to think of my “life’s work” in terms of my written works, published or not. But there’s no reason why you need to use the same yardstick. Maybe you’ve got a grander vision, and prefer to consider the question in terms of something like, “Why am I here?” Maybe you’re thinking of work in the everyday sense — what you “do for a living.” Or maybe it’s got nothing at all to do with an objective, material product per se; maybe you think of your life’s work as how your kids or your family in general grow up and thrive.

Whatever criteria you want to use, go for it. (Also whatever timeframe: consider it as of now, if you will; when your life’s work is “done,” if you’d prefer; or just considering what you have left to do — perhaps have always wanted to do, but just couldn’t bring yourself to try. Yet.)

I think mine, by pretty much any standard, could be:

He never stopped chasing his hat.

As with yesterday’s post, give it a try yourself in the comments or just in your head. We don’t stand on ceremony here and we certainly don’t stand on candor, either. :)

[Tomorrow: one more post involving six words. That one is almost guaranteed to drive writers crazy, although the rest of you may enjoy watching the spectacle.]

A Half-Dozen Words Which Say “You”

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In the spirit of many mothers, my own wishes that I were more of a committed churchgoer, less a dilettante of formless spirituality. She doesn’t bother me about this at all, let alone nag me, but every now and then there’s a little tap on the shoulder just to let me know it’s on her mind.

Over the last week, she gave or sent to my sisters, brother, and me one of those little daily-devotional booklets, spanning the part of the Christian calendar called Lent.

I (and my sibs) thought that today’s item was especially interesting, and I (and maybe my sibs) think so especially for writerly and word-nerd reasons. Shorn of its theological trappings, it says:

How would you summarize your life in just six words? The online magazine Smith asked readers to do just that. [JES: link] It was based on Ernest Hemingway’s response to the same question: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The result is a book called Not Quite What I Had Planned, a collection of six-word memoirs from folks famous and unknown. A few examples:

“Well, I thought it was funny.”
“I still make coffee for two.”
“Seventy years, few tears, hairy ears.”

[…]

So if you were to try to summarize your life in six words, what would you say?

Any takers? (I’m thinking on mine.)

4:50 pm/edit to add: No one noticed (so he thought).*

________________________

* The man does like ambiguity.

Glan Rhondda*

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In 1990, having finished the first (the blitz) draft of Crossed Wires — during whose composition I read mysteries almost exclusively — I stopped at a bookstore in South Jersey, hungry for something to read. My appetite of the moment was for a book, any book, which I’d been curious about for years but had never read. I wanted something substantial, preferably not overpowering (no Finnegan’s Wake, please). A classic, but one which I could carry in a hip pocket.

I departed the store with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

Many have had a similar chance encounter with the tales of King Arthur, and like me have said to themselves, “Hmm…,” and then gone on to investigate something more of the story, which leads them to more, and then even further to other related back alleys of myth and literature. The hobby seems so innocent at first, just a pleasant diversion — deluded (as such hapless folk are) into thinking it’s all “just” the story of Knights of Old, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot…

Finally they emerge at the far end (if they ever do) blinking, as though they’ve just spent a week spelunking and emerged at high noon in the desert. (High noon, right. It wouldn’t much surprise us to be greeted by Gary Cooper, wielding a broadsword instead of a revolver: that’s how surrealistic the experience can feel.)

Suddenly they know more than they ever imagined knowing about odd stuff like metallurgy, pre-Roman Britain, the odd and quite mysterious turnings and mergings of one legend into another, medieval French Romances, ecclesiastical rumor and history, and… Wales.

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Pay No Attention to the People in Front of the Curtain

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Dear Turner Classic Movies (TCM):

I fell in love with you years ago. Who wouldn’t love a cable channel that broadcasts (and re-broadcasts (and, all right, re-re-broadcasts)) timeless movies, often in black-and-white, that otherwise would have faded into obscurity years ago?

True, I had moments of doubt (they happen in the best of relationships).

Mostly, you didn’t seem to care that I had to change the channel. Not because I didn’t want to see the feature (I did! I did!), no. Rather, I had to change the channel because I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, or could hear only sporadically. I could often read lips in the closeups but eventually I’d tire. I’m no spring chicken anymore, you know. So I’d sigh melodramatically — you never noticed, did you? — and switch over to something ghastly like SPIKE or SciFi or even the Hallmark Channel… at least until they, too, turned a cold shoulder to me.

But you kept winning me back. More and more films would be close-captioned — even the oldest ones from early in the sound era. And I know, I know — the studios and distributors probably paid for the captioning. So maybe it was out of your hands, not your decision anyway.

Still, I think maybe you were just toying with my affections.

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Morning Instructions

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From whiskey river:

On Angels

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draws near
another one
do what you can.

(Czeslaw Milosz)

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Bowery Bums and Bag Ladies… But Writers, by God

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Ah, the writing life. We know it’s a stereotype, (almost?) never true, but the image remains skulking around our collective unconscious:

The disheveled hair. The soulful eyes, staring out the window of an upper-floor barely-furnished apartment in which the heat has been turned off, a “scarf” — fabric torn from the edge of a bedsheet — collaring the neck, the fingers poised above they keys of a typewriter into which one has not yet bothered to insert paper because nothing is coming, dammit, nothing even resembling the first word, let alone sentence, and accomplishing an entire paragraph feels like something only gods can pull off. Meanwhile, the landlord is banging on the door demanding at least token attention to seven months’ back rent; food molders in the lukewarm fridge; and yet the Muse — the Siren — still sings to one from nearby rooftops and trees…

Glamorous, eh? No wonder so many (as it seems) want some of it.

This blog post was inspired by and involves, but is not actually about, the author A.L. Kennedy. On the off-chance she’s new to you, you may want to know something of her before we proceed. Says Wikipedia, she:

…is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work as well as a passion for the art of yodeling. Alison Kennedy lives in Glasgow with her pet Luwak.

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