Words from the Edge

“How do you feel about propaganda?” an activist friend asked me over lunch. The question left me torn. As my friend and I discussed her Democracy Bandwagon project, we agreed that radical street theater is more than called for, in a country where issues like women’s rights are at stake (what century are we living in??) and many of us feel stuck or overwhelmed. Over lunch I found myself beating the irregular rhythms of Hanns Eisler’s 1931″Solidarity Song” on the table, making our plates jump. Eisler refused to write an actual march, a four-four stomp that would entrain the singers into a collective trance; where the meter breaks, the body does, too, a reflective “gap.” This reminds me of Oskar Matzerath in Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum, beating anarchic rhythm at a Nazi rally to disrupt the martial music’s narcotic effect. The writing I love most has to do with breaking the spell of socio-political comfort zones. For years I’ve felt that only agitprop-art that can do this keeps from being “propaganda” in the brainwashing sense. This leads me to the problem of Günter Grass’ recent poem against Israel. It’s upset my own equilibrium, as a student working with German political poetry, as a Quaker committed to peace, and as a writer trained in the poetry-as-witness tradition.

Last month’s controversy was hardly a first for Grass. Could his “breaking silence” have been more than a wake-up call, perhaps also an act of breaking inner censorship, as he did in 2006 about his youthful service in a Waffen-SS unit? In both cases, the international reaction has been intense; Grass’ earlier revelation, and its years in coming, make this one even more problematic. I do understand his anger over Israeli policies, whether toward Iran or Palestine. Even many of my liberal American Jewish friends distance themselves from the occupation Jimmy Carter has gone so far as to call “apartheid.” But opposition to militant Zionism demands even more sensitivity to history, not less. The openly anti-Semitic comments I’ve heard in recent years make me wary of Grass’ defensiveness on what he feels is a knee-jerk reaction toward criticism of Israel. It pains the poet in me, too, to find his piece (often referred to as a “poem,” quotation marks intended, in Germany) veering from a palpable sense of history’s burdens into abstract political bluster. It unsettles but doesn’t move me like the best political poetry of Whitman, Brecht, Akhmatova, Celan, Neruda, Rich, or Jordan. It does lead me to ask where my own difficult edges are.

I know the private pressure behind “writing out.” In light of Terry Tempest Williams’ new book on women and silence, I recall my grandmother’s words shortly before her death, “I want to rewrite my diaries, and this time I’ll tell the truth.” I know the cost of hushing up the voice of inner life to follow given social scripts. I also know the cost of writing out the story underneath the script. I’ve been called names, called on the ecclesiastical carpet, and had my sanity called into question for voicing what I’d kept underground for decades — a high price for congruence that I hope my sons won’t have to pay, if they can learn sooner than I did to risk living from their depth. The age-old confusion of virtue with conformity can send me into a fury. But Grass’ poem warns me not to fester or attack. Instead, here, I acknowledge how the edge of comfort zones can cut, how I miss loved ones I’ve lost there, how much support we humans need to live with courage and imagination. I applaud the gay and lesbian students at BYU who have come out in the recent “It Gets Better” video; it moves me not because of what they prove but what they grieve, and how they can be allies, even at a distance, for those who may be losing soul by saving face.

All of this said, silence can be wise — when words would cheapen experience, or when they don’t come from experience but from the need to make a point. Do I wish Grass had chosen this, or kept his political convictions out of poetry, a form fraught with its own post-Auschwitz hesitations? My work has dealt with topics like Iraq, but only through what I’ve witnessed in peace vigils and during a Washington, D.C. bomb threat. I write about Brecht’s 1939 “To Those Who Come After” because it comes out of exile under Nazism, because it works as a poem in its traces of lament, even in its irregularly metered “anti-poetic” form, and because it asks for forbearance with those who lived through such “dark times.” It reminds me to keep this in mind when writing about Grass. I feel the pressure in his first line, “Why am I silent, stifling too long …” I wish the rest had undergone the deep revision that shows the poet where the work resists, and asks what’s under it — sorrow, or a sense of not truly having been heard, even after years of labor on the page? The question of “what makes a poem a poem” I’ll take on in a longer essay, but for the moment I hope thoughtful writers will keep trying to address the world with lived-through, hard-won words.

Hegel and Other Consolations

can these dry pieces join? Again go bright? Speak to you then?

 Muriel Rukeyser, “Artifact”

Last fall I wrote a piece on tearing up paper for a collage, a poem whose meaning I didn’t fully get until just recently. I did make the collage, which now looms on a shelf in my guest bathroom. It reminds me of what is salvageable in life. As I look back over my several lives so far — as wife, mother in a busy household, singer, poet — I see “identities” that have dropped away, some at great cost, some manifesting in new ways. Supporting my own mother long-distance as she plans cancer treatment adds to this sense of how tenuous our hold on the world, let alone reputation or occupation, really is. I know too well how short life is, how easy not to risk its richness. Why didn’t I drive my mother deep into the Blue Ridge in the fall? I hope we’ll have another chance. My sons and I will take this hope there soon. I’m grateful for my mother’s support network when I can’t be with her, and for soulful friends near and far. I find help, too, in a strangely intimate companion, philo-sophia, love of wisdom — both words equally important in my view.

My father photocopied Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy for the melancholic teen I once was, and I actually read the whole thing. Now I don’t have to look further than coursework or conversation, as I negotiate distance, illness, and the residues of my own losses. Some consolations are colder than others … Schopenhauer’s tragedy-in-spite-of-our-best-efforts gloom reminds me how much I can’t control. Mark Johnston’s recent Saving God helps me see spirituality phenomenologically, apprehending “life’s fundamental defects” and at the same time grace that comes through other human beings, here and now. Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind gives me the image of Odysseus weeping as he hears his story told: “the meaning of what actually happens … is revealed when it has disappeared.” Heidegger and Derrida give me two sides of the “trace,” as what’s still legible after it has been erased, or as a lack behind origins, an open furrow. Even as my usual word-work fails me, I turn to my favorite German word, Aufhebung, which in the Hegelian dialectic can mean negation, dissolution, and transformation, the lifting-up or subsuming of life’s traces into a new state. (I suspect philosophy might be the other side of poetry.)

Over the past month, a kind of Aufhebung has worked in dreams. This started with nightmares of airplane crashes and earthquakes, after I had lost a longtime anchor in my life. Then came dreams of German words from no philosopher I know: “Liebe verändert das Gespräch,” floating on a torn-off piece of paper: “Love alters the conversation.” Does love change the subject (in both senses, “it” and “I”) when it reaches us at depth, brings us up against our limits of courage or endurance, leaves us bereft? Does it change the form that subject takes? (Theodor Adorno on Mahler: “The soul thrown back on itself no longer feels at home in its traditional idiom.” I think of Nabokov, who never wrote another poem after his short story “Silence,” and Ingeborg Bachmann, who reached the limits of her language and turned to prose as well). Another dream brought me the word “Gewicht,” or “weight,” perhaps love (of human beings or of wisdom!) as “weight in the soul” — an idea I just learned goes back to Augustine; I woke up thinking how similar that noun is to the word for poetry, “Gedichte.” And yet how different. The poetic “I” is a fragile messenger. It can be exhausted, or fulfill its purpose at the limit of what it can’t change or heal.

What can language do? A friend and I recently fell in love with the same word: prosopopoeia, giving voice to what is absent or inanimate. My current consolation is to ask how many different forms this ancient rhetorical practice might take. The past month’s reckoning has brought me closer to my research focus: the elegy, not only as a container for grief but also as a political act, speaking the unspoken, naming harm done to what’s most alive in us. On the creative side, others do this far more meaningfully than I can. Editing a manuscript grown out of the poet’s experience in Sudan has been an honor for me. One person’s gifts aufgehoben into another’s, as I find when my voice students sing the music I love. What needs to manifest in the world may move through several bodies. As I commit more fully to academic writing, my touchstone image is the “Angel of History”: Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” which inspired Walter Benjamin’s essay on history as anything but progress, its angel storm-blown backwards from the ruined past into the future, which in turn inspired Anselm Kiefer’s sculpture that literally weighs a ton, a battered angel made of lead, dried poppies, books, and wings …

Anselm Kiefer, Angel of History National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Is “effable” a word?

“I am always suspicious of claims to ineffability, because people who invoke the unspeakable may use it to justify unspeakable things.”

Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History

As a child, I wanted to cover my ears when someone described a moving piece of music. It seemed almost like a desecration. I had the same impulse when, as a far-too-impressionable ten-year-old living in then-West Germany, I overheard stories of wartime atrocities. Thirty years later, my academic work focuses on “the ineffable” and “the unspeakable,” music in the context of the last century’s violence. How did this happen? Did I feel some kind of urge to get the language “right,” at least to come close, or is it just a way to try to understand what has confounded me? I know my words fall short most of the time. I see this in other writers’ work, too; in a recent paper, I was surprised to find faltering language in postwar essays by the extra-articulate Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. Instead of illuminating why the swerves and contradictions in their own work mirrored the silences and euphemistic avoidances they observed in Germany, I hit a limit myself, stopped short at Adorno’s use of the saying, “Don’t speak of the noose in the executioner’s house.” Still, I found myself pushed up against the “why” in class discussion and in emails to those close to me. How much was the problem of two Jewish-German writers attempting objectivity when they were still so painfully a part of the story? How much was what Arendt described as a collective sense of human, not just German, shame?  My father’s response to my paper, an effort to write what he remembers from Dortmund in the 1960s — rubble left even in a time of “economic miracle,” avoidant pauses and stories of suffering — helped me hear Arendt’s essay in particular as the all-over-the-place language of grief.

Years ago I heard novelist Barbara Kingsolver say, “I write about what breaks my heart.” Maybe this answers my question about what I’m doing in my work. In our feel-good culture, with dissociative tendencies quite different from those in Germany post-1945 (e.g. the advice to “go shopping” after 9/11), heartbreak can easily be bypassed by the bright side, a shortcut I take unthinkingly myself sometimes, and is as vulnerable as music to vague language and cliché. “You can’t help but say powerful things in particular language,” a poetry teacher of mine said years ago; I am still trying, accepting that every narrative is provisional, every metaphor slant, and that some language-work, no matter how much care I give it, fails to hold weight in a world that values staying comfortable over being moved, what Walter Benjamin called “shock” or (in a vibratory German word) “Erschütterung.” What to do with this work — delete it, as I’ve just done with a whole series of poems, the lyric impulse spent, or let it surface in another, more protected, form? I hear traces of Baroque or Schubertian beauty in Hanns Eisler’s bristling settings of Brecht’s elegies from 1939, as if the music’s difficulty kept these residues from being heard cheaply, in their former innocence, when so many canonical works were being misappropriated. Even today, mainstream society values the subtle inner life so little, that life needs protection, if not from violent misuse, from being treated as expendable. Maybe it needs a wall of thorns. “The ineffable” can all too easily become a catchphrase, just like “the unspeakable,” without harder-won language — and yet there are real limits we reach, like Dickinson’s white space, a dash at a line’s edge. Last night I dreamed that the one symbol I needed to communicate to a loved one did not exist on my computer keyboard. That one necessary word will go unsaid.

from an exhibit of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters,

Poets House, 2011

Metaphor/Metamorphosis

In the winter woods, I find myself noticing more growth-traces than signs of dormancy. Rings in a cut trunk. Bark splitting open, the tree’s old fit outgrown. Reading Goethe’s botanical writings for a course on music, literature, and philosophy (with reference to “organic form” in Beethoven), I come across his words on the “creative webwork” of life under the protective surface that envelops it. Slow, winter work … the words that form back-of-the-brain and leak out later, in a necessary conversation; my hours at a well-worn Steinway in a practice room, laboring with Brahms until the scherzo starts to pulse under my fingers, in preparation for a piano-violin collaboration; the healing growth that I’ve seen happen in communities, so slowly it seems imperceptible, year after year, as people just keep showing up in the same room. Growth can look like falling apart (as it sometimes does in Beethoven!), and maybe that’s exactly what needs to happen in order for a new harmonic field to open up.

This winter, plant metaphors seem to be sprouting in every classroom I enter.  The “family tree” of Indo-European languages fills up the screen in our linguistics classroom, one version linking Italo-Celtic languages, another splitting them apart. Development, variation, ambiguity. There’s something to Aristotle’s idea of entelechy, a fancy word for acorns growing into oak trees because they can’t help it, but what a twisted process this is in the human world!  Language splits and morphs, one sound-shift after another; what seems to be the faintest chord-sketch, opening a Beethoven piano sonata, might turn out to be the theme itself; what looks like going in circles in one’s life could turn out to be something like a spiral, leading somewhere after all. In a less happy, more sociological light, add history, add poverty, add crazy-making politics, and who knows what scars and stunted growth may well result. How we talk about change may participate in it; this is why I ask my writing students to use metaphor with care, and to notice how it works in life — dead metaphors (i.e. clichés) or hidden history (“All language is fossil poetry,” Emerson famously wrote) or poetry not as description but as actual experience?

Living on the edge of a research forest, I walk past signs — some human-made — of change each day, strange conversation between word and world. There’s a section of Duke Forest that comes as a shock, wide-open space except for a few looming pine trunks, with burnt stalks beneath. Written words trace natural occurrences and human interventions over the past century. As I walk, I turn the phrase “Salvage Harvest” in my mind. Certainly a human forester can gather seeds after a fire or flood; at the same time, the forest does its own, slow, renovating work. Oyster mushrooms sprout on fallen logs … The other day I heard the first spring frogs, not in the denser forest, but here, in the burnt-out clearing. Some reciprocity of life was going on that I did not quite understand. Or maybe it was not so different from what happens in Beethoven when an older musical convention, broken down into a gap between keys, a strange silence, draws the listener in, just as I stopped, held my breath, to hear the winter-quiet woods start to wake up. Change and response. Which changes us in turn. “To touch the skin of a tree,” writes David Abrams in The Spell of the Sensuous, “is … to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree.”

Notes on Light for a New Year

A while ago I had a dream in which, to kill an “inconvenient” animal, all you had to do was shut its eyes. I won’t go into the horrifying (for me, as an animal person) details, but I woke up shaken. To take the dream world metaphorically, how might inflicting or allowing blindness, in society or in oneself or others, kill? What in us might seem to be expendable, and so fragile that a pressure on the eyelids could extinguish it? I could say “the life of the soul” or “the life of the mind,” to use terms that sound a bit too lofty for a time of all-too-real economic and political nightmares.

A recent conversation with a friend led to a familiar topic in our field, “the crisis in the humanities.” In a financially broken world, in a country where more money goes toward war than education and where politicians speak for inequality of wealth, where celebrity culture still rules on TV while most people are just trying to get a job, pay medical bills, or keep up with their children’s needs, what’s the point of our devotion to the word, to critical thinking, to history?  True, there’s memory we need to keep alive (“what was the Cold War?”!!) and skills to teach that can help undergrads grow into thoughtful citizens, but on a deeper level, I’m here because I could not do otherwise, or something in me would not be alive. A double negative that makes a Yes. I’ve followed my social-justice instincts down activist roads before, but part of my own journey has been to accept what my gifts are and what they’re not. And to ask what they might answer in the world, even in small ways, behind the scenes.

My friend once used the word “foreclosure” to note what happens to the inner life when it’s not answered. When this has happened to me, I haven’t been the only one to lose. If the inner eye is open, and not just toward the navel, it can reach what’s most alive in other people, which in turn can shed light on the shadowed places in the larger world. The retired professor who gave me my first Shakespeare lessons at the precarious age of thirteen saved a light in me that might have gone out otherwise. I found myself caring about history and love and ambition and failure, and what makes two or three words, in conjunction, sing. Over the years my own students have answered this care with their own. Back in school myself now, I do feel the danger of teasing texts apart just for the pleasure of it, or making an argument that may sound good but matters … why?  I’m lucky to be in an academic community that keeps me asking hard questions about how people can be “othered” or commodified, and the many ways of justifying “rightness” in the act of doing harm. A touchstone moment in this past semester was when a fellow student passed along an article by Cynthia Ozick that reminded me beautiful thoughts are NOT enough.

Last night I came across a line from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, “Passion means to forget oneself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves.” Earlier in the day, my son had surprised me in the car by putting on my favorite recording of the Bach St. Matthew Passion, which immersed me in human experience far larger than myself. “Passion” also means suffering; I felt this in the double-chorus sway in triple rhythm, in chromatic dissonance that Bach makes sound inevitable; and yet there was purely personal joy in hearing what I love as well. I can take heart in knowing my son carries this joy in the music with him as he grows into a world that may appreciate it less and less. But I need to be sure I don’t stop asking where to cast that light, what it takes to nurture the ability to innovate or Occupy, and how to dialogue with those who disagree. The humanities don’t necessarily make better humans, but without that moment in the classroom or a conversation when a light goes on, the world may look too dim to merit the intensive care it needs.

Anima Musica

The “spirit of music” is a term I have to use with care, knowing art can’t save the world, and knowing how much work it takes to do it well!  At the same time, music’s mystery is real. I catch it when my son, charged with the care and feeding of my piano for the moment, plays a Bach prelude for me over the phone, or when his brother plays by ear a lullaby I used to sing him as I’m drifting off to sleep, all of us camped at Grandma’s house for a long weekend. It catches me completely unprepared sometimes: one day in the grad students’ office, I came across a report from a freezing Munich concert hall in October 1945. It was the first performance in the barely-postwar Musica Viva series, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, music that “had not been allowed to press into listeners’ ears for the past twelve years.” I had an embarrassing attack of tears, hearing in my mind the bars that open the first movement: sleigh bells, then dance-fragments passed from strings to winds and back again …

Lately I’ve been awash in instrumental music, a fish in water after a long dry spell! The first orchestral concert I’d attended in several years, with the vibrant Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, hit me with a shock — I can only imagine what listeners in 1945 must have experienced, after a far more traumatic separation from music they loved, not to mention the horrors carried out alongside music in the concentration camps. Even including my experience in that sentence makes me uncomfortable. But in that discomfort is the rub: the music is still here. For years now I’ve shuddered at beauty’s closeness to barbarity in the last century; but I still catch my breath when I hear a bit of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte in Schumann’s F major string quartet, in a Lincoln Center performance by the Escher Quartet, or when, in a campus concert, Sir Eliot Gardiner’s orchestra of period instruments plays the all-too-appropriated Fifth Symphony, revealing all its structure in the raw. Not one to give easy ovations, I find myself jumping to my feet in the applause, with joy.

Poet Ingeborg Bachmann wrote several essays in the late 1950s that express her faith in the materiality of music, for all her own ambivalence toward making meaningful sound after the Nazi-era aestheticization of violence.  ”We need music. The phantom is the soundless world”: Bachmann’s words rang in my mind last month as my sons and I walked through Salt Lake’s new Natural History Museum, taking in, amid happy public chatter, the silence of mastodon bones, of a gray wolf’s taxodermic sheen, of crows and scrub jays’ bodies hardened in balletic arcs. For all my love of silence, contemplative or — in John Cage’s sense — available for random sound-traces to pass through, I’m haunted by what can’t sound anymore.  This is why I choose not to give up the piano’s hammers, or the rub of horsehair in the concert hall, the friction of speech, static, and the blues in new experimental music, or the grain of a long-loved voice. If I spend months telling myself I can do without what moves me, I’m probably wrong. Viva la musica!  Even my sons’ very-much-live animals agree.

with thanks to all those who share music in my life, and who keep me asking the hard questions!

Night Vision

“So this is why animals are smarter than people in some ways,” my son-who-runs-with-the-wolves said one night during his recent visit, as we tried to find our way home through the forest in the dark. “They trust their instincts.” I tried to trust mine on this trail I know by daylight, as mist collected in the beech trees near the creek that mirrored what was left of evening, blackly. I remembered what a friend had said over the phone the week before, when I was facing difficulty: “Trust your gut.” Of course the gut is not always reliable, and the Germanist in me can’t help but feel a shudder running back through Nietzsche when I hear a word like “instinct,” but there is wisdom in looking in the dark, into sorrow or surrender that my very human over-thinking, all my earnestness, can easily obscure.  As my son and I picked our way through the trees, hoping we were still at least close to the trail, I took in his fourteen-year-old wisdom word by word:

If you see a light, don’t look directly at it or you’ll lose your night vision.

Trust your feet. They know this trail.

Your peripheral vision is better at night. Take in the whole scene. You’ll see a pattern where the trail goes.

If it gets darker than this, we’ll need a flashlight. Humans are only so nocturnal.

My words, re-entering the warm and well-lit house at last: “That was the best adventure ever!” I hauled my seventeen-year-old outside into the dark, this time with the flashlight. He turned it off sometimes to try out his own night-sight, pretended to trip on a log (“Ack! I’m covered with blood! What will we do?!”), and stopped to listen to two barn owls shriek, call-and-response, across the forest full of hardwood sounding boards. A swarm of stars over the treetops. Frogs in chorus in the creek. I thought of my stacks of books back at the house, the swarming words I’d soon need to find my way through, writing three long papers in the next six weeks. Murmuring and whistling in two films about Berlin … women’s silence in a monologue-ballet treatment of Dostoevsky … taboos at the (yes, musical) breaking point in Thomas Mann … My usual theme: complexity!  My usual temptation: overthink!

“Trust the text,” is my new motto, following my son’s. Instead of trying to fit life or literature into a compelling argument, I’m learning to pay attention to what’s there, however hard to see. Sometimes this can make the project more complex at first (hmmm, two novelists of the same period who draw on music from the same opera actually aren’t that easy to compare), but in the end more nuanced and — I’ll risk this — true. A paper that takes on its own unexpected life as it responds to a close reading is the most exciting critical adventure, as a poem is on the creative side, when it starts to light up in the twentieth revision, or a story when its characters begin to speak. Even in my correspondence, when I step back enough to see my tightrope-walking “and … but” rhetoric leap into metaphor, I can see what’s changed in me. Somehow the path is there, even if I can’t exactly map it or predict what’s next.

“Rod or cone cells, that’s what changes in night vision, but I’ll have to look that up,” my fourteen-year-old said after our nocturnal walk. My older son leaned over my shoulder as I made notes for this post. “But there were two different calls,” he said. “Are you sure they were both barn owls?” How lucky I am to have science-minded kids — who are also brave enough to wonder, “What if we went in the woods at night?” Until that night I didn’t know my own capacity for seeing in the dark. I didn’t know how well my feet can find their way along a well-loved trail. I didn’t know how vision opens when the way appears impossible. I do know that, if this were a fairy tale (of the grimmer-than-Disney variety), night vision wouldn’t necessarily save the girl lost in the forest from a sad end or a less-than-happy compromise. Still, what’s life without the danger of that first step down the path?

A Crack in the Voice

A friend has suggested that I write a post about preparing my memoir for publication. That project seems like a lifetime ago! In lieu of searching my less-than-reliable memory for details about writerly avoidance strategies, copyright permissions, last-minute changes, and social/ecclesiastical fallout, I’ll focus on something that feels more pressing at the moment: the book’s original title. Yes, it’s true, Passaggio wouldn’t have made sense to readers, much less sold more than three copies of the book. After weeks of editorial brainstorming and discussion, Grace Notes won the day. But my former title speaks even more strongly now to the challenges I face as I grow older. Passaggio is a singer’s term for voice transitions — from chest to head resonance, for example. I ask my students to get to know these in-between zones intimately, so that they can smooth or cultivate the breaks by choice, depending on the style or meaning of the song. The point is to communicate. Passaggio is about vulnerability, also because the singer’s instrument is her own body, which reveals itself both through and despite her technique.

At the moment I’m thinking about voice-passages more in terms of speech than song. Reading Sergei Eisenstein for a film class, I came across his note that even in speech, “sap, vitality, and dynamism” grow out of “irregularity.” Breaks, tension, intervals. That same day my son sent a video of police violence against Wall Street protesters, whose outrage-broken voices shook me; I came across similar sounds in a 19th-century play about a weavers’ uprising (“links! — oben nuf! — pscht! — langsam!“); and my own voice caught during an outdoor meal, on the subject of gay marriage — how to speak support for dear friends working for equality, and at the same time pain over our culture’s enshrinement of marriage with so little critique? In the less politically charged classroom, I’m reminded, too, how hard it is to think aloud, even in one’s native language (my efforts to move brain and mouth in rusty German make me wonder if I’m all passaggio!). Some class discussions crackle with “Maybe …” “it’s a sort of …” “in a way …” and “could it be that …” as we try to voice insight and nuance. How to get to the multi-faceted point? Or is the pause the point, as one professor put it when I hesitated, describing a not-so-interesting character in a novel? Our coursework demands frequent, concise essays in addition to our long and thoughtful papers; sometimes we have ten minutes to report on recent secondary literature (after hours of research!) or distill ideas for an “elevator speech.” Learning to voice complexity with clarity and ease is a fine goal, but I love hearing thought as process, voiced more or less brokenly, as well.

To catch a spark from last month’s post, what I love most in the process is community, as a friendly testing ground. What would I have done eight years ago, without an editor who asked me to unpack what I had been avoiding in my book? What would I do now without my friends who help me find just the right word, or the one who gets me to consider what it might mean to choose words too carefully? For all this outside help, I have to trust my own voice, too. My greatest regrets have come from failing in this trust, collapsing into silence instead of choosing it for privacy, or telling people what I think I should instead of speaking what comes from my solar plexus, “Wait!” or “No!” or “I don’t understand.” Why is this easier for me in singing than in life?  Well, a lot more is at stake. And there’s no score I can practice for a year until I voice each phrase exactly how I want it heard. I have to improvise in real time, taking time to think and speaking when it counts, or not. In lieu of resorting to my favorite Leonard Cohen song here (look up “Anthem” for fun!), I’ll end with words from my own “lyric lab,” the bridge from what started as an intentionally cheesy voice-harp ballad: “I say take what you can carry in the wineskin of the body/ I say spill what can’t stay in the heart’s cracked bowl.”

The Trees for the Forest

Most evenings, I head out the back door and into the not-just-proverbial woods. I tell my sons it’s a bit like a Lord of the Rings adventure, nothing like our dusty Rocky Mountain hikes or strolls in the stony Connecticut woods! This mistier, gummier world requires swinging a stick in front of me, slicing at webs, and watching for creatures around every tree. A squeak, a splash: there goes another muddy frog. Three deer freeze and then, in one breath, bolt. A barn owl screeches. I have yet to meet the pileated woodpecker I’ve been told makes you feel like Alice in Wonderland post-shrinking-potion, or the dreaded copperhead snake, but I’ve met a giant orb spider, three blue-tailed skinks, a beetle Kafka would have found all too familiar, and a tick invading my very personal space. How easily I’m overwhelmed, failing to see the trees for the dense, buzzing forest! How essential it is to read both context and detail, teasing sticky strands apart, focusing on what is essential and giving the rest peripheral attention. I hesitate to use an obvious nature analogy, when I could call this post How to Navigate Complexity When Going Back to School After Long Absence, but it helps.

Twenty years ago, as an undergrad with my first research fellowship, I’d take notes on a whole book until I’d nearly scribbled one myself. Now my tendency is to zoom out into the Big Picture, digest and summarize (have sixteen years of parenting changed me so much?).  I want to learn to see not just which details matter, but how they might disturb, expand, or clarify my own worldview. A challenge: where’s that telling tone-break in the poem, the fault-line in an argument?  I don’t watch with judgment but with curiosity. I move between (analogy embodied!) the forest and my stacks of books, eyeing clues, missed cues — my own included — in rich ecosystems holding secrets and illuminations all at once. Is that a turtle or a lidded rock wedged in the creek?  What might I misread between the lines? A slippery world. Just when I’m free-writing about Bettina von Arnim’s fictionalized letters from a real-life poet friend, I come across her freely revised Goethe correspondence in a novel by Kundera; here she is again, in Sigrid Weigel’s 1983 examination of the “cross-eyed gaze” in women’s writing. (I can’t avoid the question of how cultural conditioning has led to my own strategically [?] split or sidelong gaze, but that’s a topic for another day!). The light between the trees looks red here, white-blue where a fungus grows. Even when I dive into a systematic research project, the light changes, too, depending on the source and where it falls. How to take in the maze around me and see into the gaps, where I might find new territory to explore?

What helps me most, after years as a relatively isolated writer, is daily, live community in my field. Whether in the classroom or out on a shady bench, in English or in German, I can test ideas, hear a counter-argument or “Have you thought of this?” Going back to school feels like the breaking of a spell: the hothouse growth of my own prose. What a relief! The outdoor woods are noisier, but they’re a system of relatedness I need. And strangely, as I yield to the demands of scholarship, which has tugged at my nonfiction work for years, my work as a poet is more free. The night before Irene hit land, I slept out on the screened porch; words I’d overheard that day whirled with the beech leaves, brushing against new words in my semi-conscious mind. After the storm’s edge passed, I worked some of those words into the first draft of a poem, and then went outside and gathered fallen branches, feathers, seedpods, swaths of spiderweb, and remembered that the word “text” comes from Latin, textus, “web” or “woven cloth.” Writing, whether critical or creative, is its own form of community, a warp and weft of influence and response. Sometimes I wonder what I have to add! I trust the texts themselves will give me hints.  What I know at this beginning stage is that I’m drawn to edges, where the trail gets overgrown or syntax breaks down, where familiar stories fray, where light falls on debris and possibility …

(Re)learning to See

Thirty years ago, while living with my parents in then-West Germany, I counted the days to every trip to Paris, where my francophile mother came to life and I learned to map the city with my feet. Every night, in our usual hotel in the suburbs, I’d lie on my back and watch the patterns in the plaster ceiling seem to move. Dancers changing partners, birds in flight, images that floated from our long day in the Louvre — usually Rubens, I noted with dismay, though still even more fun than watching French TV!  The Paris of my childhood was not nearly as exciting as the world of Stein, Picasso, and Hemingway depicted in the latest Woody Allen movie, but it was the place I first glimpsed artist-sight, strange life in a sweep of marble or in folds of painted fabric, or, at night in our hotel room, in the shadow of a rough, white edge.

I’m practicing the art of seeing, partly because I’ve been on the road and open to astonishment, and partly because, after finding my experience called into question amid major life changes, it’s time to learn to trust my senses again.  I’m fully aware that the “I”/eye is as wobbly as postmodern thought would have it, but I also believe, in the spirit of Simone Weil, that intense attention is akin to prayer. This can mean photographing sexy plants or walking out into the dark at night, learning, as a Quaker friend’s shared from her own childhood experience, to let my eyes adjust and see things I might miss in daylight. Recently it’s also meant working with my artist friend Tori, moving images and textures around on a table in my mother’s basement — a retina that opens like the mouth of a volcano, the outline of a dress reminiscent of finger-bones, and words cut in strips, coated with matte medium, soaked in water, and rubbed until only a slippery text-membrane is left. All this helps me re-experience my childhood joy in finding fluid images in plaster, what Theodor Adorno called “exact imagination,” the equally shifting point where the artist’s eye meets the world.

I’m lucky to have empirically-minded sons who burst out with “Science pop quiz! Define velocity!” as we’re swinging at the park, or take me hunting for wild valerian root (“If it smells like stinky feet, that’s it”). And yet, the night my 14-year-old swung his whole body in circles to show the constellations’ scene-changes, I wondered just how much of what we see — and not just literally — depends on where we stand. In the last few years, however used my eyes were to the bright-lit span of the Great Basin, I often failed to see past my own history. In my new home, it will take time to learn to see through kudzu to the trees, and yet already my perspective’s opened into a lacework of intersecting lives, human and otherwise, with gentler thresholds than I once imagined, and at the same time more complexity. What doesn’t grow here?? I can’t even map this yet; I need time to take the world in for a while. Watching Il postino with dear friends the other night, I smiled to hear Neruda give advice on how to be a poet: “go down to the beach and walk.”