Creative Connections: I and II

I’ve been thinking a lot (I’m always…thinking a lot…it feels like effort, and it’s such a good excuse…) about what I do and don’t enjoy about having a blog. Some of that isn’t resolved, and that’s OK, but I did run into my old nemesis in there– Letting Perfect Be the Enemy of Good Enough. So, take a hike, All or Nothing Thinking. I want to enjoy my life a little more.

Before I get to the fun Connection, though, I want to write about a Serious Connection. One place different types of creative people can connect is on the picket line. I stand in support of the WGA and of SAGAFTRA. Anyone who will speak up about unhinged corporate greed with the clout to be heard, will speak for us all. Creative labor is labor, and creative product has multiple types of value. !!!!!!

The Fun Connection goes along with my Mourning post because it’s another of those moments when things raised their hands from different parts of the room. This was the initial inspiration:

Roxi H, you are fabulous. When I shared this in social media, a friend told me her young adult daughter referred to the c-veg as “sad broccoli.”

So my mind went immediately to poet John Keats. As it does, you know. A sad, pale vegetable is going to lead me to two different stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

       Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

       And no birds sing.

…

I saw pale kings and princes too,

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

 Thee hath in thrall!’

It’s a trippy little poem about being seduced by a faery and left abandoned and possessed on the sad shore there where he is. Keats was SO good at the uncanny/gothic/nature/sex thing. Less into stir-fry veggies, but I hope he would forgive the connection. It was fun for me! I honestly think he would have given a Like to Roxi Horror, anyway.

Mourning, and…

Recently, I was by the window reading, and crying over, and loving, a short story by Elizabeth Graver called “The Mourning Door.” In past times, wealthier folks, who waked the dead at home, would have such a door in the hall or parlor for the coffin to exit. It was used only for that purpose, so the living and dead didn’t share doors. In Graver’s beautiful story, the mourning door is up high on the wall of the narrator’s new old house, so that the coffin could go right down into a waiting cart.

I was reading with coffee, just before dawn, as I like to do. I looked up eventually to see what sunrise was like that day, and saw a bird near my window, sound asleep on a long branch of the maple. You know already, yes? Yes. Mourning Dove. It was rounded down and completely still, just a couple of feathers ruffling in the light wind every little while, against a sort of pale, melony sky.

A story I happened to be reading. A bird common to my neighborhood. That’s all. Except there I was, saying “mourning door, mourning dove.” The Universe is all One, and funny little random things happen all the time. In an important sense, nothing happened. But I loved that the word echoed, and I put the experience in my mental pocket. Beautiful.

Also a little creepy. If I were a character in certain old novels, this would be darkly typical. All you English majors know the tree Rochester proposed to Jane Eyre under was struck by lightning that very night. Inner stuff manifesting in the outer world was a given, back in the Romantic period. And a college professor once called me a “pre-post-Romantic” for a reason.

Buddhist teachers have explained that when we look at a tree, most of us don’t see the tree. We see ourselves looking at the tree. It’s one of those things that, once you experience yourself doing it, you get it. I had refused to accept it before that, cradling wounded pride in my Nature Appreciation. Now I not only know it’s true, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s human, and no one is trying to shame anyone, just trying to open our sense of what is what.

Read up on Buddhist philosophy if you’re curious, but my point here is that the story and the bird exist without me, unconnected by my experience at that particular time, not in reality connected by that word. Obviously. Indeed the bird cares not what our language paints upon it, as one of those old Romantics might have declared, as some buff-colored dove warbled by. And yet. It’s also a fact that two things with “Mourning” in their names showed up exactly together, against a lot of odds.

A tree that falls in the forest when there’s no one to hear it does not actually make a sound, because sound exists inside ears. I was here to see these two things, so…what? And: I was here to see these two things. So what?

As the young Danish man, who may or may not have known his own mind, said, “That is the question.”

Photograph by me

Burn

There are books I read every few years. Do you have such books? I circle slowly back around to them like the orbit of Neptune because I’ve noticed interesting change between the first and second, and subsequent, readings.

Some books, read again, reflected back a new (older) reader with different responses. That helped me know my mind and sense of language better, as well as opening the vista a good piece of Art is.

Sometimes I return to writing of my own with the changed perspective of time. I understand them differently. Even the way I want specific words to communicate has changed

This poem started with a round burn on my hand got not long after noticing a small, dark rose in falling snow; it bloomed late, into a tight knot of petals, ready to face winter. The poem slid around on those two images, sort of a narrative about my own observations.

Buddhism likes to say…well, Buddha said….the world is burning. Our senses are burning. This simple, complex statement has to do with the nature of the world and our attachments to things. It’s a wake-up call about how easily we make ourselves suffer. It’s also now a new layer of the word “burn” for me, and there it is.

So what happens when I go back to this poem? The actual hand burn once got lifted into something higher through the image of the rose. Now my hand provides the poem with the metaphorical Buddhist burning the real rose can’t escape. Once the burn “bloomed” like the rose, and now the rose is burning. (If I’m not careful, I will justify the false impression that exists in the world that Buddhism is a real downer.)

The poem before was imagining connections, and I feel as if now it’s reporting a real connection I finally paid attention to. I have another “thinky” poem that is struggling to go in exactly the opposite direction and soak its reporting in imagination, to revel in imagined connections. My smile at this knowledge of my own tangled Creativity is both wry and satisfied.

 
 Burn
  
 The stove’s sharp blue heat
 invaded the pot handle
 you grasped without attention.
  
 The burn asserts itself
 like the red fist of a rose
 opened late, defying snowfall.
  
 Take note. The earth insists.
 The undulation of your palm
 has always resembled a drift,
  
 snow crept upon by claws
 of sunset, bloody hue under bare branches.
 There have always been things on fire.
  
 The body burns to say it. So
 your same grasping hand sets
 it down, sears white paper darker.
  
  
   

Word Play and Fungus

 

Sometimes, another artist’s work opens up a Creative breathing space in a brimming-over world. Art can be like walking into a wooded place in a city park, or glimpsing the ocean between dunes. I recently read a memoir by poet Maxine Kumin, and one sentence just randomly became that little pool you might come across in a mountain stream, a place to dip your feet and splash. I’m not sure why this sentence, but this sentence about being the mushroom expert at a writers’ retreat:

I know enough to…never pick any mushroom with white gills—the underpart of the cap—for fear of unknowingly gathering the destroying angel…

Her descriptions of fungi and this foraging hike are wonderful, but this sentence woke up great pleasure in ordinary language, and in the complexity of language, as pictures suddenly tumbled around my mind.

Gills. Once I found a plastic bag of fish on the beach. Someone on a boat had let the day’s catch fall into the water and float away. I tore it open to keep the plastic menace away from the gulls and met six pairs of eyes hard as glass and sharp-looking fins. But the gills’ white skin looked vulnerable and helpless in the dry air. That was where death pointed itself out to me, as it did for Kumin, in the gills. Alas. Walk on, though, and let the birds laugh and feast.

Fish have gills, and so do the small fungal shelves and umbrellas on collapsing logs. They appear in the living sea and on decaying parts of the earth, these open fans of gills. It’s only in working through my draft of this post that I remember a poem by Sharon Olds, “The Winter After Your Death.” She uses the image of a closing fan to describe sunset, and a starkly bright fish in a pond to embody many things. I think my own use of “fan” pulled up this poem, the unconscious source of my word choice here. Of course, being obsessed with the 18^th century, I’m likely to throw a fan image in wherever possible, so maybe that was it. I don’t know. My feet are just splashing and enjoying the stream.

The word cap turns the mushroom into a little figure wearing one to shade its eyes, and then the circle of gills becomes an old-fashioned neck ruff. It morphs into a bottle of spores with its cap on. How capital! Oh, that satisfying little pop when you decapitate a mushroom by breaking off the stalk. And the aroma of them, cooking in oil on a chilly winter night. Still playing.

If you’ve faithfully watched any British mystery series with a countryside setting, I bet you’ve seen the Murder by Destroying Angel plot. I can remember two without even putting on my thinking…cap. That basket of foraged mushrooms on the table in the inn kitchen that no one thought to guard from interference. Who would notice a couple of extra ones? Sneaky poison that, eh, Inspector?

Despite its being National Literature and Poetry Month (HUZZAH), I won’t even get into Paradise Lost, which is full of angels as violent warriors attacking and defending Heaven. The would-be Destroying Angel is seemingly destroyed, falling and falling. But later, that whole snake and apple thing.

Kumin just used the Words for Things when she had something to say about these simple lives in the woods. She was also writing about a relationship between the body/mind and nature, about Paying Attention in the world, and about harvesting, both as a forager and as an artist. I enjoyed foraging in these words of hers I came upon and hope I used the harvest well.

My copy of Maxine Kumin’s The Pawnbroker’s Daughter was published by Norton in 2015.