Category Archive

Yesterday was Bloomsday. I remember my first attempt at reading Ulysses, carrying the book like a schoolgirl, close, and trying to hold onto the wildly accumulating words long enough for my brain to grasp some meaning in them. It was a long process for me, one that took place over years, not months. So, I recognized the words with sadness as Garrison Keillor read that passage yesterday on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. He read, just before 9am, my coffee in the cup holder, while I was on my way to work.

No, no: these words are not for busy mornings. The inappropriateness is not so much that they are wonderful, gushing words, but they are the last of them in that novel. Their images, so full and inviting, made me long yesterday. For what? Damn. I had just fixed my face, just got ready. Damn bleary eyes. I hate these endings, knowing that words you read for the first time will never come back again in the same way, knowing that the next book will not be as satisfying, and with a long, difficult book, I hate leaving it after all that. Well…

It is also that time of year, when school ends with a flurry–no, a blizzard–of activity, with too much to do, far too much to do. And everyone else is rushing, too, just to make it to that end.

I always hate the end, hate the goodbyes, hate the disruption, the worries of how to manage time, manage children, how I can work and make things work. I hate not seeing the people who make life work for us, with us, during the rest of the year. I miss them. I miss the familiarity of the year, the schedule, the routine, and the surprises tucked beneath it all. It abruptly stops.

I wonder what this end will mean this year. It has been a year full of change already, and letting go of yet more feels so unwieldy. I wonder what will happen. I wonder…

And yet, this year, I want change.

It became all too apparent during the last week that life as I know it now is not the life I want to lead. I worked hard, which usually feels good. But this time, work seemed more of an escape than an accomplishment; too much to do felt like an excuse. Maybe days were too long, too little time spent with the things and the people that mean the most to me. I came out of it all feeling that the sacrifice was not a means to a better end for all of us. Money in the bank, eventually, perhaps, but at what cost?

The work is good, in theory–in practice, too, for the most part. I believe in it, and wish to do more in my role there, to make a difference. Maybe we all do. We all tend to wonder in frustrating moments where that fulfilling life is. It has long been my stoic family’s way to chastise dreamchasers… and yet, the absence of meaning has nearly destroyed me at times. So, when my coworker suggested that I may need to cut back hours this summer, or figure out ways to work from home more, I was surprised. There is always too much to do in the office. But then there is life, too.

Hearing those words from Ulysses, too, I realize that the sadness came from the overflowing sensuality that I long for, if only just a little. I long not for all of it, not for “the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar”, but I do crave the yes.

Oh, yes, this year has felt like such a year of no. I find myself clinging to endings, but now letting go, releasing the pain and frustrations, at least just a bit. Yes, I maybe do want pink and blue and yellow houses, and gardens, and yes, maybe I do want even more than I let myself wish for. Oh yes! I do crave the yes.

(It seems so long ago now, like a dream, as it perhaps was…)

For you are my crimson love,
your face scorched landscape,
your lips honeyed wine on mine,
your hands precise instruments.
Touch me red heal me
my blood pulses your tempo allegro.
Kiss me.
I intoxicate myself in each ruby breath,
in your voice your resonant song.
I hum.
Set fire to me tonight,
kindle burn crackle
break me to my softness,
to my breath.
Find me.
I recall tomorrow,
anticipating always
you
your blazing skin
your scarlet sweet tick tock.

I want. I wish. Not “I need”—that’s justifiable.

Desire puts it all on the line, makes the moment, opens the door for another to walk in… or walk away.

I regret the words the moment they jump from my mouth, escape onto the page. I want them back in my head where they cannot jinx me, or hurt me, or subject me to the criticisms or objections that I do not want to face. Safe.

But no.. I would say them again.

The thoughts in our heads die without expression. Maybe some of them should do just that. But others… oh, others are life itself. And yes, I do want…

“That night we moved closer to the border, and clear across the prairie, at the very edge of the horizon. We could make out the gas fires of the refinery at Missoula, while to the south we could see the lights of Cheyenne, a city bigger and grander than I’d ever seen.

I felt all kind of things looking at the lights of Cheyenne, but most important, I made up my mind to never again tag around with a hell-bent type, no matter how in love with him I was” (Sissy Spacek as Holly, in the movie Badlands, 1973).

I recently had a moment of fond reminiscence of dangerous days, the thrill and passion of grasping tight while the wind and the world hit me head-on. Then I woke up.

There are all sorts of reasons that taking off in pursuit of adventure may seem like a fine thing to do, but in the end, most of them seem to involve running away from, rather than to something. The vague idea of adventure was a dream I inherited, a place I guarded in the back of my mind as an option whenever I was faced with too much unhappiness in too short a time.

Until I was in my late 20s, I never did much more than ponder that option. A few times, I felt myself drawn to the flame, flittering perilously close to entanglements that would break my heart, and did—but not irretrievably so. I jumped a few times, but felt that elastic pull back, bungeeing me back into a predictable existence to idle on the lookout for my own truth.

I wonder sometimes if it is a part of growing up, or if it is a part of growing up unhappy that leads a person find truth in sublimation. Sometimes I find that truth in words, my own words, a world on a page, or in a heartbeat, a smile, a carefully placed step and a song, a moment of pure grace. This is a sort of joy.

Try as I might, though, I never found joy on the back of a motorcycle, holding on tight while someone else drove through the unknown vistas and back roads. I did venture once, untethered at last, straddled the back seat of an adventure and never went home again. But where I ended up after that, I expected to stay.

I guess I should have known this was not a ride meant for settling, for bonding, or for discovering ourselves. The never-ending voyages tugged, threatening roots that grew ever deeper. “Why leave? Why not stay and see the flowers, the fruits, this life we created?” I wondered. Garden with me.

“Come alongside me,” he said, and I followed, while I still could. The urge to flee returned tirelessly, a malignant tumor, seeking still more—but what?—some indefinable thing that could ravage me in the process. One day, farther from joy that I ever imagined, I stayed behind; he left. But he could come home, to walk among it, to reclaim this life, this beautiful, imperfect life that had grown, with the weeds and thorns to disparage. He could come home, if only to pick the best fruits from among them, to look at love and believe it would always wait.

I wonder, what hidden parts of ourselves only find expression in actions that seem to defy what life passes to us, even what we choose? I wonder what makes us feel more alive when we speed through space, feeling the vibrations through our skin, into our minds, testing the very limits of our physical life, and abandoning in those sublime moments all that has meaning here on Earth.

And then… what makes us feel justified to return, perhaps unscathed, perhaps damaged irreparably, always hoping to be cared for and loved by the ones we left behind…. or at least, not forgotten?

I wonder what the seeker seeks, if he even knows, or is it the search that he lives for, the never-ending journey? What comfort does the road bring? Perhaps it is the moving skylines, the exchangeable faces, the well-polished security of the new and unblemished. Perhaps the road brings an illusion of perfection, and the safety of never truly being known.

I won something!

After the woman read my number, she directed me to an assortment of beautiful glass, blown by the woman’s son. It was all exquisite: pendants and several small vases. But one caught my eye. It has been sitting on the shelf above my writing desk ever since. I look at it often, the way it catches the light.

I wanted to show you, and tried several more normal photos, like this:

and this:

This is a vase.

I do not have flowers in my prize, but find myself more gazing at it, letting my mind wander. Words come more easily to me than images. I pick up my small treasure, and gaze down inside, the smoke and haze and sweetness seducing me into my favorite color.

That’s better. Yes, just like that…

Letters are beautiful. I have no idea what attracted me so much to them—maybe a love for books, and the words on them. But it was more than that. I loved learning to write. The principal of our elementary school, who as I recall was rarely without a cigarette (and a drink, I learned later) did take time out of his day to teach the second graders handwriting.

He had lovely cursive writing, and I imitated his script, elegant as it was. But typefaces seemed so interesting, too. I wondered why we made letters the way we did. I have no idea why, but I experimented with it. Maybe a lot of kids do.

My mom noticed my interest, and in seventh grade, she bought me an Osmiroid fountain pen with exchangeable nibs, and a book on calligraphy. I tried. Not so great. I tried again. Still not great. I was fairly convinced that I could never figure it out, and put the kit away.

Summers as a kid with absolutely nothing to do are some combination of death and living. Boredom and freedom mix in such a way that after the excitement of not having to get up for school gets old, something has to happen or wars begin. For some reason, the summer after seventh grade, I decided not to fight my brother—maybe he had a lot of friends that year. Instead, I started riding my bike to the pool every night and swimming laps for an hour. I did this every night, and came home and had ice cream and wore sweatshirts in the air conditioning. Something about the chlorine and the monotony of going back and forth underwater was so satisfying. It was the perfect time to get the pens out, and I did.

I kept working at it, and finally found some success. My mom’s friend, who displayed her artwork occasionally, started hiring me to make signs. Other people ordered poems, sayings, documents of various sorts. I decided to be an artist. When I got to high school, we were fortunate enough to have eight separate art studios, and a full-year class of rotations to try out everything. I found that every other medium came as slowly to me as the calligraphy, but if it could be studied, I could usually develop some skill. Still, I always went back to the letters, switched pens, tried new methods, read more books, developed it. The papers I find now are glorious, the pens magnificent, the inks gorgeous. What a treat! It makes me want to buy sealing wax.

What made me enjoy calligraphy was not so much the product I made, although I did find great satisfaction in a well-accomplished feat. I loved the practice. I loved the repetition, the concentration that was necessary, but the appreciation for each and every contemplative stroke of the pen. It was something so beautiful, and it calmed me—a nervous preteen, then teenager—as much as the swimming did. I found myself not exactly thinking, mind wandering, when I was doing both these things, but simply present. Indeed, if I let myself think too much, I skipped a line, or a lane. I missed a letter or a word, or ran into a wall or another person. Many occupations have patron saints, but scribes get a demon: Titivillus, there to strike when attention wanders. I have never heard of such a thing for lap swimmers, but maybe it was not considered an occupation when the demons were getting their job assignments.

I tried Chinese calligraphy once, for maybe six classes. I loved it, but was lousy at that first attempt. I bought some brushes, an ink block, rice paper. Sumi-e had its method, bamboo, plum, but was in my twenties and didn’t have time for the requisite state of boredom to learn it well. There is something to be said for not being busy. Still, I enjoyed it, and just recently, I tried t’ai chi. It seemed similar, like drawing characters, moving brush on page, creating, and being.

It had been years since I took out my pens when I finally did. My skills now seem a bit rusty, but retrievable. I had forgotten the place the letters take me, the way things I copied became imprinted on my soul. For years, I pulled books off the shelves to find poems, and there were two I came to love in that time, both by Dylan Thomas. The anthology in the living room had “Fern Hill” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night…” Both poems remain, almost word for word, those words, words that in the latter I scarcely understood as I do now. My favorite to copy of the two was “Fern Hill,” with its varying line lengths, and the language, so beautiful. Then, later, when I learned more French, Apollinaire, “Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine/ Et nos amours…” More things I didn’t understand then, but stuck in my mind, still, as the letters still are and always will be.

When I was twenty years old, I quit school. I was at a large state university, which was nice in many ways, but frustrating to me in others. Frustration won. One day, I was enraged (not an adjective that describes me often) when I flunked an accounting exam. I was hardly a whiz in the class, but had a B+ average up to that point, gained only through a lot of hard work. Somehow, finding out that my dad was going to die really took the energy out of studying. My professor refused to change the grade. I ended up with a B in the class, in spite of the lousy test score, but I swore that I would not stay in a school that only knew me by my student number.

So I went home. Misfit that I was in high school, I had had the job of compiling attendance reports after school for my junior and senior years. I could hardly complain about it: everyone was nice to me, I got to learn something about early 1980s computing, and I always had a job in summer, too, in the summer school. It was a fine job, but when the principal (the same principal that Jonathan Franzen writes about, same high school, and no, I never knew the writer; I am just name-dropping) offered me the chance to stay all year full-time, I told him thank you, but no. I was going to work in translation.

I did not actually have a translating job at that point, and about a month later, after going door to door to hand resumes to nearly every business in the St. Louis area that I could find with the word international in its name, I was beginning to question my decision to turn the principal down. One evening I came home, and there was a message for me.

It turned out that one of the translating companies I had visited (there really were only three) had just gotten a huge RUSH interpreting assignment and needed extra help editing and putting together brochures in four languages for a conference. Could I help temporarily?

Yes, of course I could.

My world was never quite the same after that. I went from my boring life in the suburbs to the cosmopolitan life I had always dreamed of, at least for that week. I know a lot of people identified with the movie Breaking Away because of the bicycle racing, but I had always found so much in common with the whole language and culture theme. My life may not have been Indiana. My dreams may not have been Italian. But I wanted a bigger life, too. I wanted to be French in high school. And now, I was working somewhere where I spoke it, better than I realized I could, on a nearly daily basis.

I also started learning some Spanish. The owner of the company was from Bolivia, and the other full-time translator was from Peru. That first day that I went in, I watched, my heart racing as freelance translators rendered texts into French, Italian, German. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen, and there I was, in the middle of it, not in class, but the real thing.

No one in my family had ever even left the United States, but I was full of ‘satiable curtiosity, maybe from too much whimsical reading, or possibly from being that misfit. In high school, exchange students stayed to our house, for a week if not for a year, and my dad suffered nightly through three full hours of French television that I pretended to understand when cable made the world available in our living room. The exotic lives of my pen pals fascinated me, and writing to them must be how I managed to test out of most French in college.

When I started college, I never considered teaching. The thought of trying to force students like my high school classmates to have some interest in a foreign language was nearly as depressing to me as the idea that I might end up stuck in Missouri for the rest of my life. I wanted more, as in United Nations more, but honestly, anything more. Yeah, I guess I was a snob, or ambitious, depending how you look at it. I was, in fact, determined, and there I was, in a translation agency, doing what I had dreamed of doing, if only temporarily.

The conference I was hired for was a success, after hard work that I personally had never loved so much. A month later, I had a job, a real, full-time job. It was pure luck, I figured out soon after, as I went through the stacks of mail, new resumes every week. I didn’t even have a degree, but I had the job.

I learned a lot about the nature of translation, talked daily to people who were as passionate about language as I was, and found interest in topics (botany, sewing instructions, grocery store displays, camping gear, etc.), searching for the right word and the right person who knew what it was. The world grew around me in so many ways, not just in my eight hours, but after, in classes, in things I noticed, in people I met.

Yes, I loved my job. Sometimes I goofed. Once, a client was in a hurry for a sign he wanted to use for a conference in Belgium. Normally, we insisted on receiving the translation in writing, but in days before email, Roger called in the two-word translation for “Distributorships available.” Somewhere between his phone and mine, a c became an f, and I sent it to the typesetter. We received a call from Brussels. Our client was not amused when he realized why everyone was laughing. It turns out that “Confessions disponibles” has a vastly different meaning than “Concessions disponibles.” I was humbled, embarrassed; I learned a lot that day, most days, in fact. It was grand.

After a while, though, new doors opened, and I looked through them. Something in the Uruguayan poet I had met tempted me into a world I never realized I loved more: literature. I applied, was accepted, did well, ran out of money, went to France, finished school, looked for work, did not find it and went to grad school in Missouri.. I kept going back home. I taught. And there, even there in the Midwest, the world was there, and ever growing.

But unlike Dorothy, one day I let the tornado take me away, not afraid, but riding it for all it was worth, and I never returned, never tried to. The world still expands, albeit not without so much right here to do, too. Munchkins afoot, poppies distracting me from time to time… Oz, I think I am still looking.

Out of the living word
Come flower, serpent and bird.

All things that swim or fly
Or go upon the ground,
All shapes that breath can cry
Into the sinews of sound,
That growth can make abound
In the river of the eye
Till speech is three-ply
And the truth triply wound.

Out of the living word
Come flower, serpent and bird.

–Howard Nemerov,
“Book of Kells”

I was reminded this morning that I should have awakened in Dublin. Yes, I was going to go, but certain circumstances short-circuited my plans for this year. So instead of interviewing public health officials about services for children with mental health issues, this morning I found myself riding my bicycle down 135, west of Wellesley, half regretting on a couple of hills that I hadn’t gone on a shorter ride before I get used to doing this again, but loving the pedals and the wind.

I used to ride everywhere. It was great in Boulder, the one place I was more likely to get hit by another bike than by a car, the one place where police on bikes actually stop speeders. On bikes. So, if Boulder was a great place to ride, my own hometown stank. And yet, I reached a level of obsession about it there on my clunky old bike that was something like the laps I swam, and the verses I copied in calligraphy. It seems odd—I was in high school at the time—but I found great solace in repetitive things. It may have been some early effort to control one thing around the chaos that inevitably seems to track me down. Perhaps.

I was looking forward to seeing Dublin, absorbing the lyrical sounds of the street, but I’ll do it sometime soon. I have to. For one thing, I would like to work on my degree there. For another thing, I remembered that Trinity College holds one of the treasures that I have always wanted to see: The Book of Kells.

I have always loved typefaces, from the time I was very little. It was that love that led me to pen and ink, copying letters, words, creating something from them, from the way they looked. I disliked the original verse given for practice by the writer of the calligraphy instruction book I had gotten for my thirteenth birthday, so I went searching on the shelves at home. My mom, avid reader that she is, had more prose than poetry. A collection of Shakespeare sonnets was fine, but too square for me to make interesting on a page. It was in some sort of anthology of English verse that I searched for something sing-songy, something that sounded sweet and varied to my fourteen-year-old mind. I discovered Dylan Thomas. The lines ring so different to me now; back then I just thought they were pretty, and filled the page nicely. Now, I read “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” and it seems all too relevant. But then, then, I just copied beautiful words, finding the shapes that suited them best.

The style I preferred for the Dylan Thomas poems was a rounded, simple one that still appeals to me. It does look Celtic, suitable for a Welsh poet. It is actually quite similar to the script I would have seen in the Book of Kells. But I left my words simple then.

My peculiar fascination with illuminated manuscripts grew as I learned more about them, and sat copying, cursing the wrong stroke that occasionally ruined a day’s work when my mind wandered. I learned, in Edward Docx’s novel, The Calligrapher, that there is a patron demon—not a saint—of calligraphy. Titivillus apparently waits for inattention to strike the scribe. I can imagine the monks wary of him, in the intricately detailed work they did, half methodical, half fanciful as the initials took on lives of their own through the creatures that came to inhabit them. I admired the illuminations so, tried something like it at times, but not often. I know nothing of goldleafing, can draw only moderately well when I try, and had no sense of when to stop. My letters grew like vines down the page, wrecking the effect. But it was fun to try.

Today, on my bicycle, it was not calligraphy that I was thinking about. It was Howard Nemerov. I remembered the poem about the Book of Kells from years ago, years when I was a transfer student and he was a resident poet, both of us passing one another daily at ungodly hours of the morning. He seemed to enjoy being up then; I had to go to class. I did enjoy walking at that hour, tired though I always seemed to be, but finding time to drink coffee.

One day, I said hello, as I always did before I knew who he was. Someone told me once, and it occurred to me that someone had given me a book of his poems. So, the next day, I asked Howard Nemerov if he would mind signing my book. He told me that he would be honored to do so, and that I should meet him at his office the next day.

The next day arrived, and I took the book in, searching through the English department for the office number he had told me. He was there, as promised, and took the book.

“I don’t know what happened, but the title page is stuck,” he said, easing it open. When he did, we saw that the book had already been signed.

Not only had it been signed, but the previous owner of the book—it was apparent now that there had been one—had altered the title. Instead of “Collected poems,” it read, “Collected shit…”

I may have turned several shades of red to purple—I could never know. I did see the look of surprise and momentary sadness on the poet’s face. ”Well,” he said, “we all have our critics.” He signed the book on another page, and handed it back to me.

I remember nothing of how I got out of his office, although I imagine it was quickly, or what I did at that point, but I do still have the book. When Nemerov died, stories from his students appeared in papers around town. He helped budding writers and English majors, patient, though critical himself, it seems. I never knew. But I do like the images of his “Book of Kells.” It suits the work well. I may have thought of it if I had gone to Dublin this week. But of course, anytime I see Nemerov’s poems now, I always think of the incident. I wonder what he thought. I do know what I like to think. I like to think that maybe that five-minute encounter was good for some story, some laugh at a mortified early-morning undergraduate.