Word After Word

Cycling is great. Running is great. Writing poetry, fiction, nonfiction–we don’t need to pick or choose.  We don’t need to narrow. Ever. Even though the Registrar will tell us we must put down one answer.

Cycling is a like long relationship. Its pleasures are subtle and steady, sometimes dramatic but most often just gently going-along glorious. Cycling takes up time and room in the day. And there is the bike part of biking: this entity that has needs and desires of its own, and requires care and knowledge and affection. I feel married to cycling. The joy and the shackles.

Running is a hot date. I love running. It’s so low maintnance. It’s selfish thing, a fling: I just run out the door.  See ya! No one even needs to know I am doing it. Running doesn’t need anything from me. It’s intense and overt and quick. It’s slower than cycling, but it feels faster, because the whole system is involved. There’s no intermediary, no bike. A great feature to running: you don’t have to understand tools. My dog runs alongside me, grinning and breaking into song. He knows it’s more than just good to run. It’s necessary: neurosis is completely erased (sometimes for days).  I am completely uncommitted to running. I squeeze it in. But I can’t think of anything that makes me more happy.  Last night, after running, I was overjoyed for hours and this continued, even though I went to Meijer.  Like a great date, running makes my jokes funnier and I can sleep. Running doesn’t need me like cycling does. Running says now is fun.

I don’t want to choose.

It’s like writing in this way. I was asked in an interview recently if I was really more of a poet or a fiction writer. (Running, or cycling?) In each case, I think the thing we love is quite a ways behind the front of the thing. (The initial urge to move.) The initial urge to utter, to notice, to say Look, this is like this.  I am not a fiction writer or a poet, really.  Like all artists, I make things, mostly out of words. The energy used to make these things comes from the same sense. (And is absolutely refreshed by physical activity.)

So I’m thinking today about my students, stressed over choosing majors. And how choosing feels wrong when it narrows us. But not when it expands us, our ability to go deeper.  And how there are so many ways we can keep alive our love for all our subjects, all our passions.

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[Here’s a note from my friend Adrian, responding to the earlier post about the duende:]

H,

I just read yr post on Lorca’s duende. I must say it’s a fascinating literary concept. I first heard about it on a cd lecture The Art of the Love song by Australian singer Nick Cave. One of my favorites. My girlfriend took me to his show here at the Hollywood Bowl and he’s amazing.

Here’s an excerpt from Cave’s lecture:

“In his brilliant lecture entitled “The Theory and Function of Duende” Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. “All that has dark sound has duende”, he says, “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain.” In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualised are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.

All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.”

and you can find the complete lecture and maybe reference it in yr class next semester here

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=800055

take care,

A

[Thank you, A — you always give me good things.]

“I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. That is why I number them. It’s an experiment in time.”

*

“To know what you want to draw, you have to begin drawing it. If it turns out to be a man, I draw a man. If it’s a woman, I draw a woman. There’s an old Spanish proverb: if it has a beard, it’s a man; if it doesn’t have a beard, it’s a woman.

*

“I have a little blank sheet of paper in front of me, it runs through my head all the time. Despite any will I have in the matter, what I express interests me more than my ideas.”

I am giving a reading of new work at Literary Life Bookstore and More! Inc, 758 Wealthy (at Eastern) SE

Grand Rapids MI on NOVEMBER 6, Thursday, at 7 pm.  Cider. Fireplace. Gorgeous new independent bookstore.

“Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. Blogging is writing out loud.”  Andrew Sullivan says, and he says you can’t have “blogger’s block.”

I love Andrew Sullivan’s article on writing in general and blogging in particular in The Atlantic Monthly this month and I love the phrase “Blogging is writing out loud.”

But I think blogging is more like walking than power athletics. When I ride my bike, hard, in the cold wind and the sun is setting so fast and the farmers are grinding up the soybean plants, hunkered down in thick coats in dusky fields (Jim will say it was not very hard, and he will point out I stopped three times–three times!) that is more like writing an essay. I am working. Blogging is easy and slow and you can talk to a friend while you are doing it–you ARE talking to a friend. Writing a sonnet is an extreme sport. Writing a novel is an extreme sport.

Blogging is seeing your thoughts. Blogging is a conversation. Blogging is no sweat.

I heard a great quote at the gym last week: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Blogging keeps my writing muscles moving but it isn’t really making them stronger, I don’t think. It’s low impact, it’s for fun. Maybe every writing assignment should initially present itself that way.

So we come home from work in the early evening and there are annoying phone calls, little bits of business, the car problem, the father problem, the brokerage accounts, the Obama volunteer, the issue, the issue, the return, the future, and the day, the whole day, with its lint. The end of the day is a scritchy time. It’s really easy to get knocked out of alignment between the hours of 5 pm and 6:30 pm.

This is when, if I am brilliant, I put on my Nikes and run in the cemetery. In thirty minutes, I’m a new person. I run fast across the grass and think about the nearby dead people. I feel like an animal and I am  newly aware of what alive is all about. I notice all the headstones with two names, but only one death date; so many of the men here waiting for their wives to join them.

My day seems so small in the context of death and life long love and connection, both so large. Finally, finally at last, I stop thinking. I run three miles as fast as I can and it’s about halfway through that I feel myself running into myself. I am hot and sweaty even though it’s cold out and the moon is asserting itself, and I am smiling all over my body. My throat burns in an effective juicy way, and I’m flung back into the present moment and anchored here. The day is done. The evening can open, and I can join it.

Yoga would work well too. But running is very overt and loud and I like it a lot. I like pretending I have wings.

It all reminds me so much of Etch a Sketch.  All our running around all day is like the line we are drawing on the screen, busily dialing those little white wheels, trying to get everywhere, be everything to everybody, do it all right. We hustle about, make all these little designs, forward backward lines, a whole busy little line going every which way—that’s like the monkey mind of the day,all the running around everywhere and nowhere really. The track of the day, the trail of our rushing.

At the end of the day, we can shake the Etch a Sketch, and get all the filings to settle back down. We can clear the screen.  For me, the quick hard fast run is the shaking clear. I take the Etch of Sketch of me and run; the run shakes off all the lines and business and mistakes and switchbacks of the day. And I am ready to begin, to be written on.

I need, for evening to be good, a clear screen and open space so I can be present for my friends and beloved ones, so I can see their lines and paths, and listen. During that shift from day to evening, I need to reset the counter zero.

“Procrastination is a way for us to be satisfied with second-rate results; we can always tell ourselves we’d have done a better job if only we’d had more time…if you’re good rationalizing, you can keep yourself feeling rather satisfied this way, but it’s a cheap happy. You’re whittling your expectations of yourself down lower and lower.”

Richard O’Connor

Not Knowing

I was at a pub on Friday, for dinner (pork belly, malbec, baby eggplants, so so so good) and the musicians, two women, were setting up on stage. Everyone in the pub was eating and talking and it was noisy and fun.

At some point, one of the musicians leaned to her mike and began singing an Irish song, a capella, for the sound check. The whole place hushed in the presence of this beautiful voice, completely private moment. Instantly, every one was quiet and still—no silverware clattering, people set down their pints and wine glasses.

She kept singing for a moment while the roadie jiggled dials. She was so completely into singing—she had become completely one with her voice—she didn’t notice at first that she had brought the pub to a standstill. Then she smiled and paused and said, “This isn’t the show, go back to your dinners.” But we were all so moved. We couldn’t jump right back in. She sang a little more, but it wasn’t the same; she was self-conscious now, and so were we. The pure thing had shifted. It was a sound check now.

She hadn’t intended that singing to be public: it was open and spontaneous and real, the real human thing. It was an incredibly intimate moment. When humans began singing, this is how they sang. Though the women were wonderful, blending their voices into one sound, the a capella not-really-doing-it song was the best performance of the evening.

Two of my writing clients this week have written some of their best pages of all. The work is completely fresh and vigorous and pitch-perfect. I called each of them in the middle of the day, mid-reading, to say: “What are you doing! How are you doing this? This is amazing.” Both clients said the same exact thing to me. “Great but I’m not aware. I’m not aware of when it’s good.” They said this as though something was wrong—with them, with the work, with the process, with me. They said this as though they were failing, as though awareness would improve things even more. They said this as a lament: if we don’t know when it’s good, how is this ever really going to be fun or rewarding?

It will not be fun or rewarding (go to pubs with your cutest friends for fun and rewarding). I have been writing for twenty-five years, seriously writing, and I do not know when my work is really good. Sometimes I know crap when I see it but mostly I really don’t know.

It’s just like the woman singing, not-really-singing. Great art is not “the show” –it’s human action perfected in silence. Chuck and Kay wrote this week without the critic, without an audience, without the judges, without me in the room. They each were “just” doing a kind of sound check, not really doing it for real but pouring their soul into it. Not in order for it to be good. Their purpose was practice. Sound check. Part of the reason the new pages were so brilliant was because they weren’t being written in order to be judged. Chuck and Kay and the pub musician were all in touch with the initial urge to utter. The source of beauty.

Because I have face blindness, this profound inability to know for certain if a person is someone I have seen before or not, I’ve had practice, lots of practice, getting comfortable with not knowing.  The not-knowing state is key for making art. Most of the great work gets done when in some key way you are not really paying close attention to the product. You are actually attending to something else: your word count, your mother’s way of phrasing her complaint, how happy you were when he showed you those little dance steps. You’re writing, but your mind is elsewhere. There’s a spacey-ness layered onto a profound focus. The most important lesson for the beginning writer to learn is this: notice when you are in that state.

Noticing will ruin it of course, but it’s the only way you can steer yourself back to your creating mind.  When you are working well, you never know you are doing it. You don’t know when the work is good. When you are making something beautiful, you are the thing.

Yesterday was an off day—too much distraction, too much talking, not enough working. Silliness, impatience, interruption, forgetting, a little loss, a little self-absorption, a long unwanted letter received, all ingredients for an Off Day. No good writing done. Maybe no good writing. No good feeling about writing. No fifteen hundred words.

But then. Tuesday Night Ride!

On the bike ride last night, I got my groove back. The bike ride is the perfect resets the counter to zero experience. I would be lost without the bike. Without the group rides. 

Ingredients for the perfect ride:

The kids lining the sidewalk on

. The kids with sticks, waving from their dirt yard down by the lake.

The smell of cold water in the little river along 66^th, and the sound of the water, and the birds, evening-loud.

The liver-grey turkeys, with that bizarre look in their eye, like fish in the bushes, fish on weird fish feet.

The amazingly fast deer—faster than we were, running along the treeline in the cornfield by Pat’s house in the last sheets of gold light. Racing us and winning.

Riding the perfect strong east tailwind, three abreast, and coming up fast on the three deer that didn’t move on Island Road, they just stood in the middle of the street and Mike said, “Has a bike ever hit a deer?” and we were approaching so fast. Could smell them fast. Could name them.

The friendship of J., and the post ride chat. And writing down the recipes for two more perfect rides. J. knows the miles to everywhere, how far it is, and what it will be like when you get there.

The general generosity of doing something pointless with people and graceful and perfectly shaped. It’s just like church but with crazy shirts and wind and speed.

Some of my friends criticize cycling, bikes, the group rides, the bright crazy t-shirts, the wild colors, the gear, all of it. We’re in their way, the whole thing is annoying somehow. I’m always surprised when my own friends are cranky about something so clearly beautiful and pleasurable and healthy and exciting. People are outside, on bikes! We want to live in towns where the citizenry is out cycling in the evening, having fun. It’s only good. I’ve been looking for a handy way to respond to my friends who fear cycling, who fear, perhaps, they don’t know how to engage this part of self any more. Last night, on the Night Ride, I found it!

When we blow out of town, we’re still all together, in a tight pack, some thirty cyclists, bike lights and shirts flashing, all tucked tight up against each other, wheel to wheel. And as we wind our way through town, to the outskirts, two by two, kids line up on the sidewalks, always. They line up one deep, in straight lines, so every body has a front seat view. And we when we go by, they wave and yell riotous and pro joy things like “HEY! HEY! HEY!” or intelligible parade-esque chants—I don’t know exactly, it’s a little hard to hear. But they wave and they have amazed looks on their faces and they are purely for this behavior, this spectacle, it’s everything they are for, hoping for, moving towards!

The long ribbon of us is dramatic and beautiful and colorful. We are like a land kite or a beautiful piece of living string. We’re under-supervised—there’s not a leader or a boss. We’re bikes! They know bikes are how you leave your parents. We are fast and we are heading out town—this is essentially the definition of joy.

People who complain about cyclists: is it that you are a little hungry for pure unadulterated joy? Are you doing enough things that cause children (that spirit in you) to  pause in their play and stand on the sidewalk, and pay homage, pay witness?

Some Adults holler rude things at cyclists and feel we are interfering with their passage.

Some Kids yell Go go go! and know there is always a way to escape!

Which camp would you want to be in?