Category Archives: writing

Slipping from the tedious plane.

books, quotes, writing, , , , ,

I was telling Mr. Greenjeans about how An American Childhood by Annie Dillard encouraged me in my writing. He comes from the author’s hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is the backdrop for her growing-up adventures told from her vividly revealing point of view. I took the book off the shelf to put aside for him, and turned the pages a while, seeing passages I’d marked long ago.

Hers is a unique point of view, of course, as each of us is an unrepeatable individual looking out on our world. Whether it is her perspective that is unusual as well, or only her ability to convey it in words, I don’t know. I do know that few children today have the liberty of youth that Dillard describes as regularly offering periods of time so deep and distraction-free that you can “lose yourself.” In a chapter on her love of books and reading, she tells how she felt:

The actual world is a kind of tedious plane where dwells, and goes to school, the body, the boring body which houses the eyes to read the books and houses the heart the books enflame. The very boring body seems to require an inordinately big, very boring world to keep it up, a world where you have to spend far too much time, have to do time like a prisoner, always looking for a chance to slip away, to escape back home to books, or to escape back home to any concentration–fanciful, mental, or physical–where you can lose your self at last. Although I was hungry all the time, I could not bear to hold still and eat; it was too dull a thing to do, and had no appeal either to courage or to imagination. The blinding sway of their inner lives makes children immoral. They find things good insofar as they are thrilling, insofar as they render them ever more feverish and breathless, ever more limp and senseless on the bed.

-Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood

Three poets and a desk.

poetry, writing, , ,

It’s National Poetry Month and now that I take notice, we are nearly at the end of it. That prompts me to finally take this bit out of my files to give you in celebration.

I read a post from Malcolm Guite two years ago in which he tells about his visit to the Emily Dickinson home/museum, and seeing her little desk; his musings provoked me to think, too. He wonders if the physical narrowness of her space somehow helped her to turn “restraint to grace,” in this poem which, as always, you can hear him read if you like: Emily Dickinson’s Desk

That’s two poets to honor this month, and here is a poetry from a third, that may have nothing really to do with Malcolm and Emily — but I think it does. If not in any other way, then because Jane (photo above) is in a “room” with the other poets…. where, I suppose, they are all scratching out, or typing their lines… or only composing mentally and invisibly for the moment…. each wishing she could just be alone in a quiet room with a tiny writing table… I better stop or I’ll have to write a poem about my three poets.

AN HOUR IS NOT A HOUSE

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

-Jane Hirshfield

The letter is an act of faith.

quotes, writing, ,

The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return.

The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith; it assumes the presence of humanity; world and self are generated from within; loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room. I alone infuse the silence.

–Vivian Gornick

My mind is like a rickshaw.

travel, writing, , , ,

My first morning in Bombay, the gears of my mind began spinning round and round like so many rickshaw wheels rolling through the neighborhood, picking up one or two passengers, dropping them off, carrying another rider for several miles before she finally exits, waiting on the corner for another customer to climb in….

But — I was unlike that rickshaw because I wanted to get to a particular destination. My goal was to put my thoughts and words together into a sentence or two describing the experience of road traffic in Mumbai. But I’ve given up. The challenge is beyond me, and anyway, we have YouTube ! where I found moving pictures that are far more valuable in this case than my words that never coalesced. After watching an hour or more of “crazy Indian traffic” videos, I offer you my two favorites.

This movie, “Incredible Indian Traffic,” is the best for showing the impressive flow of animal, vegetable and mineral in various places in the city, from a safe perspective. Watch the pedestrians! I have been one just like them, especially in the smaller intersections shown, sharing space with a multitude of motorcycles and with yellow-and-black gas-powered rickshaws that scurry about like silent beetles, often grouping into colonies on the street or waiting at the side.

And the video, “A Walk in Mumbai,” makes you feel a little of what it is like to be walking right there on the street, especially the first part of the video. You can see how just the masses of people make attentiveness to one’s path critical, before you even add in the goat-pulled carts and all manner of vehicles. It’s in a busier part of the city than we navigate on a daily basis, but that sometimes makes it easier as a pedestrian. The rickshaws are banned in South Mumbai in an effort to reduce the clog, and there are more and broader actual sidewalks, as well as some traffic lights and/or traffic-directing police. The traffic jams up more often, which is aggravating for the drivers, but for the pedestrian the slowdown can make the zig-zagging between buses and taxis feel safer…

…a little.