Definitions of Chaos: Any condition or place of total disorder or confusion. Often capital C. The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed by some religious cosmological views to have existed prior to the ordered universe. And, courtesy of Visual...
read moreIn The Wounded Storyteller, a book I plan to write about soon, the author, Arthur Frank, writes about the possibility of illness being transformed by an image of quest. He writes [p. 115]: Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. Illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest. What is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained through the experience. This is not to say that illness is ordinarily welcome—or that it’s all for the good. Not like that. In my experience, it’s rarely like that. (And I doubt that Arthur Frank is implying that it’s like that.) Rather, he’s pointing to that possibility that illness—or grief—or loss—or difficulties of different sorts—the possibility that any one of these can serve as an occasion that can initiate something that can be called, for lack of a better word, a journey. As Frank himself mentions [p. 117], the use of the word journey for various experiences may have become something of a fad of late, but that doesn’t mean that it has no meaning—or that it can’t be useful. For me, the most useful thing about these words—journey—quest—is that they raise the possibility that illness and suffering might not merely be lost time. One can be moving even when it doesn’t feel as if one is moving. One could begin a journey of this sort and end up somewhere entirely unexpected—or one could come home at the end and begin to realize that one has brought something back—something of value—something of beauty. Which is not to say that most of us don’t resist these kinds of journeys, especially at first—or as long as we think we can get away with...
read moreOne of the first writing workshops I ever took—this at the University of Missouri in Columbia—was taught by Janet Desaulniers, a woman who I’ve written about here before. One evening she began class by reading to us an extended passage from a J.D. Salinger story. The workshop was a fiction-writing workshop. She’d been reading our stories for weeks. And she prefaced these pages by Salinger by telling us that she sometimes felt a lot of responsibility, knowing that, at least for some of us, she was our first reader. She took this seriously—being a reader. It was one of the things that made her a good teacher. The passage she read was from, “Seymour, an Introduction,” this one in a series of stories that Salinger wrote about the Glass family. In this particular story, Buddy Glass, a writer, is telling about his older brother, Seymour, a young man whom he idolized and who is now dead. In the passage she read to us Buddy Glass is telling about a time when he was twenty-one years old and living with his brother, and had the habit of reading his stories aloud to him. And Seymour would then write responses to these stories, lengthy responses, sometimes writing them on shirt cardboards, or on whatever he could find at hand. Here is one particular memo, this written by Seymour on notepaper from the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago and placed on Buddy’s breakfast plate beneath a half a grapefruit. It’s daylight out, and I’ve been sitting here since you went to bed. What bliss it is to be your first reader. It would be straight bliss if I didn’t think you valued my opinion more than your own. It really doesn’t seem right to me that you should rely so heavily on my opinion of your stories. That is, you. . . . You must know yourself that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while that I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvelous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? . . . Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all of your stars are out, and for no other reason. Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. . . . I could write more here. But I’m thinking perhaps that I shouldn’t write anything else. Except perhaps to say that I think this whole notion of a first reader—and how that first reader responds—or how one imagines that this first reader might respond—has something to do with writing and...
read moreIn a letter about his poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens writes that the poem “is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations.” The poem is made of up thirteen stanzas—thirteen sensations—each marked by a Roman numeral. Each stanza has the word blackbird in it. I like the second stanza. Number II: I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. I also like the ninth. Number IX: When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. I like the way that each way of looking at a blackbird is distinct and complete unto itself. I like the sense in the poem of worlds beyond the landscape of the poem itself—a blackbird marking the edge of one of many circles. In his book, Writing With Power, Peter Elbow suggests a writing exercise in which one follows Wallace Stevens’ example and writes a poem “that looks at or talks about the same thing over and over again.” Elbow writes of how he did this himself with a cherry tree—looked at it in different ways and made this discovery: I see now that it is about missing the house on Percival Street where we used to live. . . If I had tried to write a poem about missing that house, it probably would have been terrible. Being stuck with having to write tiny stanzas about that cherry tree did it for me. The cherry tree gave him a way in to writing what he wanted to write—perhaps to what he was longing to write. The thirteen ways gave him a way in. Gave him more than one way in. I tried this exercise once with a writing workshop I was teaching to women with cancer. I told the women they could choose to write thirteen ways about anything at all and they chose to write about cancer. They wrote as a group, taking turns, the stanzas coming fast, one after the other. They actually ended up writing sixteen ways of looking at cancer. Then one of the women who had been absent came the next week and she added two more ways and they ended up with a poem, “Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer.” What I noticed in that workshop when the women were writing those different ways was that knowing they were writing a lot of different ways had a freeing effect. They weren’t writing the only word on cancer—the last word on cancer. They were just writing one way of looking at cancer, and then another, and then another. You could try it if you wanted. You could become one of the ones looking. You could write seven ways or sixteen ways or eighteen ways of looking at . . . what? The full poem can be found here. Elbow’s Writing with Power here. And here is the poem the women wrote at Cancer Services: Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer...
read moreThree times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a radical line. Maybe a radical poem. It goes against the grain of business as usual. The way the mind and the will are so often, for so many of us, yanking the body around to places it doesn’t really want to go—places even, sometimes, that can make the body a tad sick—or sicker. And sometimes maybe this is one of those silver linings of getting sick—or so people will sometimes tell me—the small good part—how a person can begin to learn to quit yanking the body around. The stakes are too high anymore to do all that yanking. Sometimes illness is the beginning, for some people, or so they tell me, of beginning to pay closer attention to what the body loves and needs—and what it doesn’t. I’ve been carrying the poem with me this month, looking at it now and then, and now, today, there’s one particular word that seems to jump off the page: meanwhile. MEANWHILE as the good part? Because after the speaker of the poem tells us we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles, repenting, we only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, after that she invites us, the reader, to tell her of our despair and she will tell us hers— And then there’s this shift—this leap—and she writes: Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. . . It’s as if the camera had been close in—a history of despair—or a history with some despair in it–but then—a shift—the camera pulls back—a shift to a larger landscape—a leap—meanwhile—somewhere—those wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading...
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