MindSpinner

In Barnes and Noble over the weekend, I passed the time among books while dark-haired daughter and a friend shopped in nearby stores for black skinny pants. In the poetry section, I thought I would buy Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing as summer’s last treat, but it was Stanley Kunitz’s last book I carried to the counter instead: The Wild Braid.

I wanted it for the photograph of the poet’s pale, aged hands folded behind him, his fingertips still black with garden dirt.

I who have never seen a wild owl up close wanted it for the story of five owls so at ease with an ever-patient Kunitz that they perched on his arm.

I wanted it for wisdom:

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature’s tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

It must be said that my garden is not in danger of being tamed into landscaping. My neighbors probably think it in more danger of tending toward minimally ordered wildness of the sort not often seen in subdivisions. It moves from garden to meadow to forest. I want to be a part of the living world when I walk there.

I wanted it for all the poems and especially for six lines of “The Testing Tree”:

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Kunitz’s wife, artist Elise Asher, died in 2004, at 92.

Kunitz writes movingly of feeling her presence in dreams; he would sometimes dream that she still held his hand. I wanted it for this, too, and for the pages I haven’t yet read.

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

From Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue:

In the end, it’s only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

I have coveted an iPod for years - as many years as there have been iPods. Of course, I have coveted the 30 GB model with video (though I hardly turn on the TV) and, more recently, I have coveted the iPhone, without expectation and simply as a matter of technological aesthetic appreciation for a thing beautifully designed and realized.

But this past week, fate landed a $50 Best Buy store credit in my hands, such that buying a clip-style 1 GB iPod Shuffle suddenly became a matter of $30 additional spending, not $80. I couldn’t think of a good enough reason not to buy an iPod for $30. I walked around the store twice and looked at everything else Best Buy had to offer. There was nothing I wanted or needed besides that tiny iPod. And so it has come to pass that I actually have one for my own at last, and I have done this week what I always longed to do - load an audiobook (American Theocracy, at the moment) and listen while I pick up clutter or cook a meal or drive here and there.

The only drawback I can see is that my literary choices do not alway coincide with selections offered at Audible.com, where I have fifteen legacy book credits. Indeed, of the eight or ten books that have languished in my Amazon cart for a year under “Save for Later,” only The Omnivore’s Dilemma can be found on Audible. Now it can also be found on my hard drive, waiting in line for its turn on the iPod. However, for every title that isn’t available at Audible, there is another that interests me. I do not anticipate running out of delectable possibilities.

Nothing could be easier than clipping the little Shuffle to my pocket or my shirt and listening as long as I’d like. Less iPod turns out to be all the iPod I need or want and ever so much more than no iPod at all.

Dr. HGuy tagged me among five others to take on a bookish meme. I’ve been thinking about this meme off and on all week, and when I woke early morning, it seemed a grand time to begin.

1. One book that changed your life
One book? Reading shapes a mind, I counter. What means this meme to say I have to choose one book in a given category - especially this one? These directions make me feel quite cross and subversive. So I won’t surmount the hurdle. The rules will be rubble.

A continuum of books has shaped my life in ways profound and subtle, and these are hardly limited to the books I’ll mention. I’ve always been determined and persistent about accomplishing anything I set out to do. Did this trait find its beginning with The Little Engine that Could, or did that children’s picture book with the cheery little engine puffing “I think I can, I think I can” merely reinforce and give words to a tendency writ deep in my nature?

A mantra of a text in adulthood has been not a book but a Dickinson poem:

I dwell in Possibility–
A fairer House than Prose–
More numerous of Windows–
Superior–for Doors–

Of Chambers as the Cedars–
Impregnable of Eye–
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky–

Of Visitors–the fairest–
For Occupation–This–
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise–

I could cheat and say The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson, but that’s not useful cheating. I cheat only for a cause. And for that cause I will also name Beowulf. I spent my senior year in college communing with that poem (and every relevant secondary text), working out my understanding of the ending of the poem. Was Beowulf to be condemned for his pride in taking on the dragon alone? Was he to be admired for his courage? Should he be judged by a “Christian” measuring stick or that of the Germanic heroic tradition? What of his people who were left without their brave, but ultimately mortal cyning (king - but you knew that). When Beowulf steps into battle with the dragon, his men are to come to his aid if the situation calls for it. He says so. Only one does, Wiglaf, whose name means, “Remnant of Valor.” Wiglaf helps Beowulf to slay the dragon, but the aged king is mortally wounded. The people are left bereft and vulnerable partly because there has been a thief in their midst (the man who stole the dragon’s cup, rousing its ire) and because there remained only a remnant of valor left among them. The fate of a people is inextricably intertwined both with the courage, vision, and capacity of its leaders and with the courage, vision, and capacity of the people themselves. The one will not compensate for the absence of the other.

Life is finally about the integrity with which we live and the valor with which we meet the dragon. In one form or another, the dragon always comes, for we are mortal. That truth, too, settled into my bonelocks.

Another book that set to work in my thinking was a text on the theory of comedy from a drama class I took at William and Mary. (I don’t remember the title.) It set out the premise of comedy, the spirit of rebirth that celebrates human resilience. I’ve never stopped building on those twin notions of rebirth and resilience - both have proven useful in a life that has required a knack for starting over again.

When I look back over this list, there is a foundational text missing, and that is the Bible. I sloughed off long since the eye-for-an-eye business in the Old Testament, but however my faith has evolved (or devolved, depending upon who’s judging the matter), I am shaped by the gospels. There are blazes of light I depend on there.

On another and some would say disparate note, there’s Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Milton’s notion of marriage as a “meet and happy conversation” that satisfies a “rational burning” helped me to define what I wanted a commited relationship to be - onging intellectual companionship and play, not just Family, Inc., or Hubby’s Career, LLC, or perfunctory sex between two people who do not take the time to know each other any more. And when I saw that my marriage could never be the very thing I needed most but would ever render me almost invisible instead, I set a course that was indeed life-changing, and for the better, even if I sail ever after alone, for it’s my course now, not one mapped for me by others. I know the stars I navigate by and that makes all the difference.

2. One book you have read more than once
As a girl growing up, I probably read Jane Eyre at least four times. Any text I ever studied and wrote about I read more than once.

3. One book you would want on a desert island
The Complete Works of Shakespeare - that’s the one (or the many in one). Of course, I’d like to trade in the one hefty volume for individual Arden editions. And could I have a batch of highlighters, my laptop, and a solar charger please, so that I could write?

4. One book that made you laugh
Of modern motherhood - I Don’t Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson (courtesy of DrHGuy)

Of gardening - The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost his Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden by William Alexander. For a gardener, this account of gardening gone awry is a hoot - and a tale of caution.

5. One book that made you cry
Without, by Donald Hall. Recommended it to DrHGuy. (Doesn’t seem a fair trade, does it - tears for laughter?) Hall’s poems capture the intensity of Hall’s grief in the wake of Jane Kenyon’s death and plumbs the intensity of their love. The poems are heart-rending, raw and true. See also Hall’s later volume, The Painted Bed and Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise.

The Rector’s Wife, by Joanna Trollope. I don’t think this book would make just anybody cry - likely you have to have been married to a minister for a couple of decades. Books can be suddenly cathartic.

6. One book you wish you had written
I don’t wish I could have written somebody else’s work or possessed someone else’s gifts. In a life better designed and executed, I’d do more justice to my own. That I could wish for.

I’ll change the category a little: having thoroughly enjoyed Second Nature, I admire Michael Pollan for making me think about matters that had not occurred to me before, and artfully, too. I’ll move on before I think of 99 other examples.

7. One book you wish had never been written
Machiavelli’s The Prince - but I suppose the world would still wag the same way, and the same types would still be running it.

8. One book you are currently reading
The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd - our school has a faculty book group, and this is the book for September. I haven’t attended this book group before, and I’m wondering what the conversation will be like and whether our group of good orthodox souls will catch any glimmers of what Sue Monk Kidd goes after in her work.

(I’ll keep mum about the others. See, I am trying to be intermittently compliant. Also, I’m running out of time.)

9. One book you have been meaning to read (AKA The Omnivore’s Dilemma)
My reading has changed this past year. I’m reading voraciously for information now and have bookmarks lingering here and there in several novels.There are a half dozen book on my shelf lined up in waiting and a bevy in my Amazon cart, deferred until later. Having been intrigued by Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief, I’m now looking forward to reading Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd. Gazzaniga’s The Ethical Brain still sits on the shelf unfinished, and I aim to get back to it. I’d like to read Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey (on shelf), supplemented by Louise Gluck’s poems inspired by The Odyssey (several volumes on wishlist). This meme has carried me off into longings I cannot soon satisfy, because there are many more: Girl in Hyacinth Blue, The Wild Braid, Things My Mother Never Told Me, Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Botany of Desire, Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist, and, yes, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

10. Now tag five people.

(I’m going to define “tag” as an invitation to participate, with no implication of obligation. Play if you like. Remember, you inherited the mutated, extra bendy version of this meme, designed to circumvent the nonsensical stress created by the word “one” and any other sort of nonsensical stress otherwise generated.)

Squirrely Jedi and Migs - because you are two book-loving, articulate, and introspective young adults a half a world apart, and you make me feel better about the world.

Searchie - because you are wise and beautiful and I love your posts, no matter that my closet is shoe-challenged while yours is shoe-inspired. (Your email address was lost with the demise of my last computer, by the way - my heartfelt condolences regarding the loss of your friend.)

Outer Life - because you are even less memishly¹ inclined than I am (0 for 1) and ever so perceptive. This is a Puckish bit of mischief to dare you to take it on. You could mine one category with better result than all nine of my hit-and-run attempts.

Of course, I’d also love to read what RJ Keefe (at Daily Blague), Badger, and Dorcasina (at Et al) would have have to say, and that puts me over my limit, again. Come one, come all :->.

1. Memishly is not in your dictionary because it was not a word until I made it up this morning.

In Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, my favorite passage is the one in which Maggie Jones tells the two old McPherson brothers, batchelor farmers, that they need to take in and take care of a pregnant teenager who is no relation at all:

But that girl needs somebody and I’m ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you - she smiled at them - you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It’s too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.

In Plainsong, the McPherson brothers come to love Victoria Roubideaux. They opt for the right kind of trouble, and, frankly, they get it. Nonetheless, in Haruf’s novels, taking on the right kind of trouble is ultimately redemptive for all concerned.

It doesn’t matter what sort of love we can talk about, love for a child, love for a partner, love for a parent, love between friends, even love for a pet - love has ever meant taking on the right kind of trouble, letting it into our lives. Love has two faces - one is life’s deepest joy, the marrow of its meaning; the other is trouble, trouble in any shape or size we can imagine. Insofar as we love, we opt to risk suffering and loss, pain that plumbs us to depths that mirror precisely the heights to which love can reach. That’s the deal. We learn love by loving; we learn love by losing. A mother doesn’t think of this, holding her baby to her breast. Lovers do not think of this when they find infinity together in embrace.

But it’s still the right kind of trouble, and in the end, worth whatever comes. It is love that redeems us from the diminished selves we would otherwise be, and by love’s means we redeem each other. It is what we know of God (as opposed, in some cases, to what we think we know). It’s a risk brave souls will forever take.

Reading this again, I am impressed by how such notions can seem like platitudes - until they don’t.