The Past Is Not Another Country ~ It’s Us and It’s Now

I’ve been doing an informal survey of historical American fiction (~ 1850 to 1910) set in the American West.  Lots of interesting books. A lot I’ve read and a lot more need to go into my pile.

But I’ve noticed something while reading through reviews on Amazon about fiction set in rural America in the 1960s, or even set in rural America in presentday.  (This rural America tends to be the South, the Midwest, and the West.)

This is what I’ve noticed:  the blurbs about these contemporary novels read about the same as the ones for historical fiction, even to the extent that I have to do more reading to make sure they aren’t historical fiction.

(Yes, 1960 is in the past, but it’s not 1920 or 1890, for heaven’s sake.)

Why is that, do you suppose?  It immediately struck me that the past lies heavy over these parts of the country.  For whatever reason, it occupies the inhabitants more, and it seems to have a much firmer hold on current occupants.  For example, here in Wyoming, we hold firmly to our cowboy roots, even if trailer parks and roughnecks may be more representative of current inhabitants.  The Code of the West video is a prime example.

I can think of two reasons.  1) People want something to be proud of, and sometimes those things are ideals that are embodied in a (mostly fictional) past. 2) Somehow we are not able escape our past as easily.  We aren’t as distracted by the present, the technology and the fast-paced life of the city.

Am I wrong?  Does the past weigh just heavily over urban areas? Am I just more sensitive to the writing about places similar to where I grew up?  Or is it that the default subjectivity is the urban present, and all else feels strange in some way?  Or is there another reason?

Maybe there’s a personal component as well.  Our familial pasts affect us more than our shared overarching past. We seem to forget the overarching past very quickly, but throughout our lives our families continually remind us of ourselves and our families’ pasts.  We tell old stories and talk about who we are as a family, yet as a state or a nation the rhetoric doesn’t refer to the past much.

Hmmm.  I don’t know.  I’m going to be thinking about this for a while.

Emotional Dishonesty, or Augusten Burrough’s This is How

I just started reading Augusten Burrough’s new book This is How.  It is subtitled Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.   I really like Augusten and his work and gobbled up Running with Scissors and Dry as soon as I could. 

A little background.  If you know me, you know I’m one of those cheerful optimistic people.  I always have a smile for everyone, and I don’t like imposing my bad mood on anybody else.

So then I read the first chapter of this book, entitled “How to Ride an Elevator.”  It tells a story about how Augusten was in a really bad patch in his life.  He was feeling really rotten.  He stepped into an elevator and at another floor a woman stepped in.  She saw the down look on his face and told him to cheer up, and then stepped off at the next floor.  His reaction was anger, of course. 

Then he talks at length about how shallow and false morning affirmations are.  You know morning affirmations, right?  Standing in front of your mirror every morning telling yourself you’re smart and pretty and all that.

My first reaction to reading that ~ that he discounted morning affirmations and that he stood there with a growly look on his face ~ made me angry.  My first thought was:  How dare he impose his bad mood on other people and then have the audacity to defend it.  How dare he dis morning affirmations.  (Not that I actually do them but I agree with them in principle.)

But then I began to wonder why I got so angry.

He goes on to say that his point is this:  It’s all emotional dishonesty.  When you smile and say banal things to people when you really feel horrible, you’re being dishonest with them ~ sure ~ but more importantly you’re being dishonest with yourself, and when you do a morning affirmation, you’re lying to yourself, the one person you need to be the most truthful with, if you’re ever going to get to the bottom of all the damage that’s been done.

So I began to think about it.  Why was I so angry?  I was angry because I felt hurt.  Why did I feel hurt?  First, I always bought into the idea of morning affirmations.  One thing that has always gotten me through the worst times was my sometimes-unreasonable optimism.  If I haven’t had had that, I think I would have committed suicide. 

Second, I realized that there have been people in my life who did not try to hold back their feelings and hence those emotions became my responsibility.  I was the one who had to smooth things over and make them feel better.  They imposed their bad feelings on me, and that’s why I was angry for Augusten thinking it was perfectly okay to walk around glowering.  Not that it was right for this woman to be so forward and impose her good mood on him.

Let me just say:  I’ve always had a problem with anger.  Not anger exactly ~ the lack of anger.  When I was young, it seemed as if I did not have a self to claim.  I thought of my body as other people’s property and I spent so much time trying to figure out what others wanted me to be that it took me a very long time to figure out what I really wanted or was. I did not own my own feelings.  So, anger? Not me.  You've got to feel like you own your self and only then do you have the right to defend it.  I’ve only just recently tried to deal with anger.

So, the ironic thing is, what Augusten is saying accomplished exactly what he is trying to do.  It was the epitome of what he’s talking about.  Emotional honesty.  You have to be honest with yourself about your emotions ~ not hide under platitudes, whether they are spoken or expressed ~ in order to heal old wounds.  By being honest with myself first about the emotion and then exploring why I responded that way, I realized some things about myself.

It was not a comfortable cogitation, let me tell you, but thank you, Augusten.

Go out and buy this book, people.  I can’t wait for the rest of the ride.

Julia Sweeney Gives the Talk

We have not come to this crossroads, yet, of course, but it’s coming.  Enjoy the lovely Julia!

Art Saves Lives

Alice Herz-Sommer and son Raphael

The great violinist Roman Totenberg has died, as has the great storyteller and artist Maurice Sendak. An immeasurable loss to their legions of fans and to the world.

Why is it that for some people art is everything, and for other people, nothing?  Or this form of art ~ be it music or painting or writing or whatever ~ doesn’t move me but I can’t live without that form of art?  And why are some people “tone-deaf” when it comes to art, and they think people who do are crazy?

What is it that gives art its power?  Does it begin in the basic human drive to connect, to create, to feel transcendence and beauty, to be elevated by the spiritual?  Is it intellectual or emotional or both?

I suspect it’s very complicated and includes all of the above.

Art literally has the power to save lives.  Don’t believe me?  Here is a video about Alice Herz-Sommer (interviewed by Tony Robbins), who is 108.  She is a fabulous Czech pianist who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt.  The reason why the Nazis kept her around was because of her playing, which saved her life.  And she kept her six-year-old son Raphael alive with her. Her art saved her life and that of her son ~ that and her fabulous optimism ~ and I suspect it continues to save her life, in that she still plays every day and it gives her a reason to live. Alice has said just that: "Music saved my life and music saves me still."

(I am also fascinated by the psychology of the Nazis.  Here are people who are able to so totally dehumanize people as to exterminate them, yet they value art so highly?  Art is supposed to connect, yet in this instance maybe it helped dehumanize.  What's up with that?)

I am reminded of the movie Dead Poets Society ~ art saves lives, and the lack of it, or what it represents, can cause death.

People die for their passions and principals all the time.  You’ve got to think that they are saved by them as well.

A Tale of Three Black Cats

When my husband and I first got together, I decided we needed a cat, and my future husband readily agreed.  We looked in the paper and found an advertisement for kittens for sale.  As it turned out, they were teenagers, rather than kittens, but we chose a charming and lithe female from the bunch.

We named her Molly.  She was such a character.  We lived in an old house with a nice backyard, and in the summer when we would leave the windows open, she would jump out and stalk and catch worms and bring them in and give them to us as presents on the bare wood floor. Which was quite a surprise first thing in the morning on the bare feet.  Our friend Kathy stopped by and slept on the couch one time, and as Kathy sat there, Molly calmly climbed onto the back of the couch and onto Kathy’s head.

As it turned out, our landlord was selling the house and so we decided to get married and find a house of our own, but we needed to be out by June 1 so we temporarily moved to a trailer park.  The day we moved in, our neighbors' teenage boys sat out front of their trailer smoking cigarettes and listening to loud music, and there always seemed to be people coming and going.  They were good neighbors though ~ except for one thing. Within a week of moving in, Molly disappeared.  We started asking around, and as it turned out, those neighbors thought it was some cousin’s cat, for whatever reason, and just picked her up and put her in the car to drop her off.  When they got to the cousin’s way across town in a rural subdivision and opened the door, of course Molly bolted, never to be seen nor heard from again.  And let me tell you ~ we looked and looked and asked and asked.  No hide nor hair, of course.

As I was looking for Molly and asking around, I came across a woman who said, “Well, don’t know about that cat but I’ve got this one here.”  She told me with a tsk-tsk that this little female had had the audacity to have kittens in her area and was busy stealing food from her fluffy white Persian male.  This momma cat was the spitting image of Molly, except her head was slightly less streamlined and she was in poor condition.  Well, the kittens were old enough, and I said I’d like to take the momma, if that was all right with the woman.  It was.

We brought her back to the trailer and she was so dehydrated at first she couldn’t even meow.  We named her Celie after the main character in The Color Purple because she’d had a hard life.  We got married and found a house that year, moving in on Thanksgiving Day, and Celie came with us.  It wasn’t long before she was much better.  She turned out to be much less a tomboy and much more a princess.  She always finds the warmest place in the house to sleep, and she takes very good care of herself.  She’s pretty strictly an indoor cat.  She’s lived a long and happy life, and now she’s about 20.  She’s always been this little bit of a thing ~ most people mistake her for a teenage cat ~ but now that she’s hyperthyroid it’s all we can do to keep any meat on her bones.  And she’s totally deaf, and so she walks around the house at night and yells at the top of her lungs: MMMMEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOWWWWWW MRRRRRRRKKKRGGGNAAAOOOOO.  And she likes to throw up on things, and her bladder stopper leaks, which does not endear her to my husband.  But when you’re 103, you get a little slack.

And then one day, this big black tomcat showed up on our yard.  He was solid and round ~ not fat ~ with lush black fur, and when he walked, he’s swing his right front leg way out and around, like it had been broken and healed badly.  We called him The Neighbor’s Cat.  There are a lot of cats in the neighborhood, and so we didn’t think anything of it.  He was friendly and so we’d pet him.  But he just kept hanging around and hanging around, and we started to worry whether he was eating anything.  So we put some food and water out for him in the metal building/garage.  Then winter came along and it was dang cold, so we put a bed and a heat lamp there too.  Somewhere along the line, we figured out that we were his ~ he’d adopted us ~ and in fact he was not any of the neighbors’.  Which was great, actually, because my husband has a fondness for outdoor cats, being raised partly on a farm, and we’ve had a number of outdoor cats in the past.  So we renamed him Jose and he was here to stay. 

He’s a sturdy and loveable guy but also commands respect.  He and this gray male had a running battle for years, and we’d hear yowling in the night and then Jose would show up with a ragged ear or a cut.  We’d take him to the doctor every once in a while.  He loves to be petted, but as my kids found out the hard way, you got to give him space too.  They were being particularly loving, squeezing him and everything, and he gave them the warning signs (I wasn’t there), but they didn’t know that, and so he gave them a stronger warning ~ he scratched my son on the shoulder.  A very valuable lesson for the kids, I think.  He wasn’t being mean or aggressive, just telling them to back off.

I think the cats teach the kids lessons in a lot of ways.  They know that Jose likes attention but that you need to be respectful or face the consequences.  They know that Celie is a very old lady and you have to treat her gently.  I have to say: we’re not a family whose lives revolve around our pets, but they teach invaluable lessons.  I learned those lessons growing up on a ranch, and I sometimes think that they’re missing out by not being closer to all that.

The Artist Nancy Marlatt

Do you remember, on that old show Northern Exposure, how everyone was an expert at something?  How they were making films and created world-class cuisine and so on?  How worldly they were?  Well, I feel like I’m surrounded by that as well.

My friend Nancy Marlatt is an artist.  Not for her day job, but as an avocation.  (Well, her day job requires lots of creativity.) She, like many of us, got derailed from a degree in what we love but then came back to it later in life.  She’s originally from Colorado and now works in public relations here at UW. She creates these amazing watercolors. 

We were talking about how different media require different mindsets, and watercolor is one that you don’t lay on the white but rather paint around it.  It’s quite a different approach than to, say, oils.  You can’t just paint a background and then paint white in places on top. No, you have to have an awareness from the very beginning about where the white is, therefore where the light is, and paint around it.  It creates this unusual awareness of light in general that is peculiar to watercolorists.  And the paint itself is so vibrant and light, it’s as if you’re applying liquid light to the paper.

It's like poetry, really.

So, enough of me blathering on.  The real treat, and what you’ve been waiting for, is her art.  You rock, Nancy!

The Mindful Writer, by Dinty Moore

Writers are like prospectors or trappers or pioneers.  They spend their time in the wilds of the mind panning for gold, trapping beaver, or plowing the soil in order to transmute this raw material into something useful, intellectual bounty.

As such, we’re out here in the boondocks.  Sure, our families are with us and we have day jobs, but when it comes to our driving force, our raison d’etre, we are alone in the howling wilderness.

That’s why it’s so important to have touchstones of some sort.  We need somehow to be able to commune with others of our kind.  We need inspiration and support, someone telling us that we’re not crazy and what we do is not only valuable but invaluable.

What better touchstone, then, than this lovely little book ~ The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, by the fabulous Dinty W.Moore.  I read through it in one evening and will be rereading it again and again. In it, Dinty brings together his Buddhist practice of mindfulness with the art of writing.  It fits so very well, too. 

He takes the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and transposes them for writers.  Here they are:

• The writing life is difficult, full of disappointment and dissatisfaction.
• Much of this dissatisfaction comes from the ego, from our insistence on controlling both the process of writing and how the world reacts to what we have written.
• There is a way to lessen the disappointment and dissatisfaction and to live a more fruitful writing life.
• The way to accomplish this is to make both the practice of writing and the work itself less about ourselves. To thrive, we must be mindful of our motives and our attachment to desired outcomes.

The rest of this small but powerful book takes quotes from writers and expounds on them as they pertain to mindfulness.  It is in four parts ~ the writer’s mind, the writer’s desk, the writer’s vision, and the writer’s life. 

Such great quotes and such insightful commentary! Some of my favorites concretize writing with lovely little metaphors or similes:

“What crazies we writers are, our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock.”  ~ Hayden Carruth

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ~ Anton Chekhov

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.” ~ William Saroyan

But they’re all good, and oh I am in love with Dinty’s soft voice, with its ever-encouraging words. 

How many ways can I say it?  This is an inspirational book ~ what it lacks in size, it makes up for in metaphorical weight.