Radiator Heat and Other Musings

Tonight I decided to do whatever I wanted, and so I did.

That seems like such a simple idea, but it's one I rarely follow. When was the last time you spent a night wandering around based on instinct, instead of under the limits of a prior plan? For me, this is such a rare concept that it's essentially extinct.

I left work at five, though I should have worked late. I recently got a promotion at work, which is awesome of course. It's kicking my ass though, which is less than great. I should most definitely have worked late tonight, been a good little paper-pusher, but I decided I didn't want to, so I didn't.

I went to the gym instead, because I wanted to feel better and that's what the gym does for me. When I got there, I intended to run for a little while, my usual one mile warm-up on the treadmill before my hour of strength training. Because that is what I do on Tuesdays. But once I hit the mile mark, I realized I wanted to keep running, so I did. I ran until my heart was exploding and my side was cramping and I was drenched in sweat, relishing the fact that my body is healthy enough to produce this kind of movement and motion and energy.

I remembered being 21, on my first outing a few days after my first spinal surgery, so weak and so tired that I could barely make it across the Kohl's parking lot with my mom. I cried in exhaustion when I made it back to the comfort of her car. Ten years and yet another unpleasant back surgery later, I ran three miles just because I wanted to, because I feel more alive when my heart is about to crack open from exertion than I do at any other time.

I left the gym intending to walk around before my choir rehearsal, but then I passed my favorite local diner and boomeranged inside instead. I didn't have a book or a magazine to occupy me, and when I sat down I ordered the same thing I'd had there for lunch the day before. And so I ate a huge chicken gyro for no reason, comfortable in a booth in the quiet. Because I wanted to. It started to rain, and so I stared out the window at the dark shining streets and the brightly bouncing umbrellas, listening to old school No Doubt and Whitney Houston and Myriah Carey on the old reliable diner radio. It was steamy and calming and when I left, I was happy and warm.

I headed again for choir rehearsal, held in an old church about a ten minute walk across the village. As I walked down the wet streets, umbrella-less as per my usual style, I passed a favorite jewelry store and paused. I knew that going in would make me even more late for choir than I already was. I really, really wanted to go in anyway, so I went ahead and decided to drop out of choir for the season. Because I have been feeling overwhelmed and overworked for weeks, and I'm tired. Because singing is supposed to be a joy, and not another reason for exhaustion. Because I can and I should.

And so, I looked at jewelry instead. Beautiful, hand-crafted, nature-inspired, artistic jewelry. I thought about my mom, how she wanted to buy me a necklace for my birthday last year to celebrate my recent weight loss. She told me to pick one out that I loved, one that would help me remember, but I never did it. I thought about her while I looked at the necklaces. Then I thought about a friend I haven't seen in awhile, one who would love this small, dusty, lovely store to pieces, and fingered a pair of blue beaded earrings on her behalf. I bought nothing.

I kept walking aimlessly in the rain as my hair poofed around me in a high drama. I stopped at a puppy store and rested my forehead against the glass that separated them from me. I hate puppy stores, but my heart bursts with love for those tiny, clumsy beasts romping through the hay in their small storefront window home. So I just stood there and watched them for a little while, even though it was raining on me and I hate puppy stores.

Next I went to a small independent bookstore and spent a half hour dazed with words and rain and solitude. I saw a book I knew a new friend would enjoy, so I bought it. I found a book my husband would love, so I bought that too. I didn't buy anything for myself. But for myself, I stood for a long time in the poetry section. The steam heat was rising up through the radiator, and the only sounds were that comforting warm rush and the murmuring of the shopkeepers to each other from behind the counter.

I remembered being 26, living in a crumbling 5th floor walk-up in Soho. My apartment was so small that in order to get to the toilet, you had to squeeze in sideways past the sink while holding your breath. My window looked out onto Mulberry Street, from where I could hear church bells rolling from time to time. An independent bookstore was directly across from my building's front door, and so from that very first moment I knew that I was home. From that apartment I could walk to work on quiet city streets every morning, grabbing an overpriced coffee from Dean and Deluca's like a real New Yorker, like a regular, crossing the wide avenues with care while I listened to music and watched the steam from the underground drift into the morning light.

My mother came to visit one afternoon and told me that my great-grandmother had lived there, in that exact neighborhood on the border of Little Italy and Soho, when she first immigrated over from Italy in 1918. Maybe even on the same block, she said with a squint from my doorstep, looking down the narrow street as she tried to remember.

My great-grandmother went by Great Nanny to us little ones. She has no teeth left by the time I met her, and made great smacking noises when she kissed my little girl cheeks, and it hurt a little, and her hands felt like claws on my back as I tried to wriggle out of her arms. She always had a stash of Milky Ways in her sock drawer, and used to hit our beagle Frisky with a wooden spoon, shrieking at him in Italian when he got in her way. She refused to call my cousin Mindy by name, referring to her dismissively as "baby girl" instead, because she wasn't named after a Catholic saint and therefore didn't really exist. She raised my mother, along with her own ten birth children, in the bowels of old Brooklyn. One of her sons was special, they said, a teenage hearthrob-type with the singing voice of a matinee idol, of an angel, who coulda been someone. But he had some real problems, they also said, and he drowned one bright, drunk summer day at the beach in Coney Island, while she was at home making dinner like it was any other night.

Her name was Anna. She got on an old boat one summer day in Italy when she was just 18, just a baby, all alone, and sailed all the way to New York. And maybe she lived just like me when she was young, for a year or two, on a beautiful street in a beautiful city in a crumbling old apartment where you had to hold your breath and squeeze to reach the toilet.

My apartment had steam heat that came up through radiators. That first cold November night I went to bed in my room that was so small that the bed was wedged against the wall, and the closet was hung with a sheet instead of a door, because the door would've slammed into the bed, and the heat came up while I was sleeping. The sound of the rising radiator heat, that popping, bubbling rush of air so new to me, slid into my dreams. My mind painted miniature humans rising one by one from the bars of the radiator, floating upwards clutching the strings of bright balloons, laughing and calling to each other gaily as they drifted skyward, drinking from tiny flutes of champagne. I woke up with a laugh bubbling out of me.

I stood in the bookstore tonight, thinking of tiny people sipping tiny flutes of champagne, of what it felt like to be 26 and to wake up laughing, safe in a dollhouse-sized room high above a big city. I touched book after book of poetry in a shop that has no business still existing in this world of e-books and high New York rents, and I felt the kind of happiness that is also sadness, because it is so finite and fleeting that even when you try to grip it with all your might it persists, stubbornly, in leaking away from you.

Tonight I ran for miles. I ate a meal by myself with nothing to read as protection from my own thoughts. I walked in the rain. I touched beautiful jewelry and thought of people I love. I dropped out of something that should make me happy, with the promise to return when happiness is what it means again. I stood in a bookstore and thought of more people I love, including my younger, laughing self.

When you're small, you give up sometimes when you don't feel well or when life starts to feel too big and too hard. You crawl into bed moaning for your mother, for some soup, a glass of water. Someone holds your hand, strokes your hot forehead, reads you a favorite story as you drift off to sleep.

How often do we take the same level of care and love towards ourselves? Tonight I did only things that I wanted to do, things that made me feel cared for. Gentle, soft things. Small things that felt correct and calming and good.

It was a nice night. Maybe I'll decide to do it again soon.

"I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I've never been to a party and not felt precisely this way. Ever. Both within and without.

It's so cheesy to be madly in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald, isn't it? Cheeseballs. Big ones. But who cares? There is a reason the beloved are beloved, and I'm happy to be a part of this particular club. Imagine a life without having read The Great Gatsby? What a small, but significant, type of sadness that would be.

If that's your life, correct it. Before the (new) movie comes out, preferably. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby! Dear lord it's perfect!

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."

- Lemony Snicket

"Release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime."

- Cheryl Strayed

Terry Fan

Down in the Valley

Down in the valley, valley so low,
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
             Hear the wind blow, love, hear the wind blow,
             Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.

If you don't love me, love whom you please,
But throw your arms round me, give my heart ease.
             Give my heart ease, dear, give my heart ease,
             Throw your arms round me, give my heart ease.

Down in the valley, walking between,
Telling our stories, here's what it sings:
             Here's what it sings, dear, here's what it sings,
             Telling our story, here's what it sings.

Roses of sunshine, vi'lets of dew;
Angels in heaven know I love you,
             Know I love you, dear, know I love you,
             Angels in heaven know I love you.

Build me a castle forty feet high,
So I can see her as she goes by,
            As she goes by, dear, as she goes by,
             So I can see her as she goes by.

Bird in a cage, love, bird in a cage,
Dying for freedom, ever a slave,
             Ever a slave, dear, ever a slave,
             Dying for freedom, ever a slave.

Write me a letter, send it by mail,
Send it in care of the Birmingham jail.
             Birmingham jail, love, Birmingham jail,
             Send it in care of the Birmingham jail.

-Anonymous

Does anyone remember an old TV show called Christy from the mid 90's? Kellie Martin played Christy, a fancy city girl who moves to a remote Appalachian village in Tennessee to be a teacher in the early 1900's. The village, Cutter Gap, is one of deep poverty, and the locals are near totally uneducated. The story focuses on her adjustments to living in this wild place: how the locals learned from her, their shiny-beautiful new teacher, and how she learned from them, in turn, about life and love and brutal suffering. Subjects which she had been too young and privileged to understand before.

It was highly dramatic and silly but, at 13 years old, I adored it. It was based on a book I read probably 20 times that year. In my eyes, what it was really about was moving away from home and doing something scary and adventurous, no matter what that thing was. To me, that was what being a brand new grown up meant. By April-ish definition, the plot lines of a well-lived life meant you finished college, collected your diploma, and immediately did something terrifying and bold. Otherwise growing up just didn't count. School was just a pole vault for the moment of departure into the bright world.

Christy found her adventure by moving to a village of toothless miners in the hills of Tennessee and teaching them how to read, and other basic things like that using soap is helpful, and to brush their teeth. As for me, I had no idea what my adventure would look like. I just wanted to be similarly big and bold and unafraid when I grew up. I loved that cheesy book in the way that only a little girl of a bookish disposition would - aggressively, obsessively. Dreamy-like. (Ms. Kristen Weber if you are reading this I KNOW you know what I am saying here!)

The book opened with the lines of this old folk song, and somehow they always stayed with me. To me, these words exemplify deep loneliness, what it feels like to stand outside alone on a stark, blustery day and look out at a winter-blue sky.

Well, Alright Then, Entire World

"The half-life of love is forever."

I already ranted a bit about Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her on this here blog, but now I have finished it, and then I immediately reread (some of) it, and now I'm about to reread (more of) it, again, so it's imperative that I communicate to absolutely no one that this book is wildly, stupidly, just-go-ahead-and-punch-yourself-in-the-face important.

IMPORTANT.

It's filthy and raw and disrespectful and emphatically real. I appreciate nothing more than brutal truth, so this was a marvel to read. And though I tend towards being effusive and dramatic, I don't use words like "marvel" lightly.

I can imagine tons of people not liking this book. It's crude, overtly sexual, racist, and plain depressing. And though I suppose we must give people the right to their own opinions (eh) I would have to counter that it's the very foulness of it, up against language so perfect it feels like fire in your hands, that makes it so special. It combusts.

Light and dark. High and low. It's the mix of the two where art is found.

"Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might pick up a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her."

People. Read it. Love it or hate it, but I promise that you won't be bored.

Blue Nights

"In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blazing of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming - in fact not at all a warming - yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.

The French call this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes - the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour - carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

This book is called "Blue Nights" because at the time I began it I found my mind wandering increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."

- Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Speeches and Things

Writer and poet Nick Flynn, who wrote the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, gave the commencement speech at the Bennington College MFA graduation in 2010. Part of his speech is wonderful, and part of it is ridiculous, and part of it is this part:

"Here’s a true story: for the last three summers we (my wife and child and I) have lived in a 150 year old barn in upstate New York. I renovated it two years ago, putting in just enough work so we could spend the warm months sleeping in it. One night, when the baby was one and a half, our second summer in the barn, an hour or so after she’d finally drifted off into sleep, the light in her room suddenly switched on (her door is made up of glass panes covered with a thin fabric)–then it switched off. Then on. Then off. On. Off. For the next half hour this continued–we crept to the window–she was standing in her crib, reaching out to the switch, then looking around the room as it snapped into light, aware that she was the one controlling it.

She’d only learned to walk a few months earlier.

Her room, from a distance, pulsed like a huge firefly.

What’s interesting about this, beyond the image itself, which I find remarkable, is why I remember it, why I am choosing to tell you about it now. Remarkable. But then, nearly everything she does is, I believe, remarkable.

I am her father, after all.

“Pulsing like a huge firefly”–the word “pulse” is also remarkable. Unlike the electrician, who simply makes the lights go on, our job (as artists) is not simply to enter into the darkness, but to pulse in and out of it (there is a real danger when we pack our bags and move into the darkness permanently).

The pulse is what gives it life. It’s what makes our writing (or any art) a living thing. It’s one of the things that makes reading an active, rather than a passive, experience."

Then he said more stuff, some of it lovely, some of it just silly to me. And yet, he concluded with this:

"What I can safely say is that it’s not the worst way to spend one’s time, standing before works of art that bring you catharsis. Just don’t expect it from your own work. Don’t expect to get anything from your own work. The carrot is an illusion at best, but more than likely it is a cage. Feel what you feel as you make it, whatever that feeling is. Track it. Trust that you might bring some small cathartic moment to another human being. It might only be one other human being, or it might be a handful. And it might not be now, it might not be for a hundred years. Or ever. Even this has to be enough.

The good news is the same as the bad news. There is no carrot in the sky.

Just this eternal pulse.

This is what we need to do–pay close attention to the world, and track what we notice, for whatever we notice is a glimmer of the blueprint of our glorious subconscious realm. And this is the only reason to write–to get and give a glimpse of this hidden realm.

Just don’t expect anything more from it. Don’t expect to be healed. Try to be grateful for the glimpse that is offered."

To not approach writing, or any art, as a way to find catharsis. To never expect to heal from your own work, but to do it anyway and just be grateful for the simple act of it. I love it when someone tells you the truth, even when (particularly when) it's depressing as hell. You might work and work, and dig and dig, and yet find nothing but darkness at the bottom of the well. But maybe the act of digging is enough. Maybe smaller things like momentum, appreciation, and the simplicity of paying true attention to the world, will have to be enough. 

Tricky, tricky. 

Sunday Morning Realizations/I'm An Enormous Idiot

Scene: Girl with laptop, on couch. Wearing sweatpants and an old Disney t-shirt. Surrounded by one coffee cup, three books in various stages of disarray, one magazine, one newspaper. Under a blanket, which is under a laptop. Emotional resonance? Self-loathing and a creeping, sweaty sense of despair.

Change this scene simply, to the following:

Scene: Girl with laptop, at desk in home office. Wearing sweatpants and an old Disney t-shirt. Surrounded by one coffee cup, roughly 356 books in various stages of disarray, plus an ironing board with a missing iron and twelve or so boxes of disorganized photos. No blanket. Emotional resonance? Queen of the written word, and of life itself. Slashing a sword through the thickets of gunk flooding her brain.

Blankets and couches are bad for you - at least when the sun is out. Get UP.  Move yourself ten feet to the west and the whole world changes shape and color. (Lesson for all of life, actually.)

Slay this day.

(P.S. - It's official; I give zero shits about the quality of this blog anymore.)

Lullaby

Oh Mama, the monkeys never did come down the street,
I tried, but they never did come. There was nothing
in the back woods but woods.

The trees never moved an inch when we weren't looking.
All that thumping we heard must have been rabbits rabbits.
No angels in the bushes.

No Indians underfoot. Just the boys hanging from their
home-made houses, waiting for us to come close enough
to catch.

That old beech I used to curl into never did know it.
When I carved my name there, it never winced.
It would have dropped me

like an apple for somebody else to bite, if it had apples.
You were right. You can tell me all you want to now.
That white sky

is just a lot of clouds moving together fast, not
an edge of paper that somebody might fold, and if
I'm having trouble with my breathing,

it's that I'm still trying to make room for myself
in an envelope that's not even there. I never did
learn the birds' names, did I

but they weren't singing to me, and the lilac blooming
in the far corner of the back yard, never bloomed,
I know it now, for anyone.

- Marie Howe

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."

- Barbara Kingsolver

This Is How You Lose Her

Okay, we didn't work, and all
memories to tell you the truth aren't good.
But sometimes there were good times.
Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep
beside me and never dreamed afraid.

There should be stars for great wars
like ours.

- Sandra Cisneros

I'm currently reading This Is How You Lose Her, a collection of short stories by Junot Diaz, which opens with the poem above. This might be the only time in my life I've been compelled to pay the full hardcover price of $26.95 for a not-long book of short stories, which are not normally my bag. But something about this book kept screaming at me when I wandered in and out of bookstores, which I do a lot. There are enough tiny, perfect, dusty bookstores throughout the hazy streets of the West Village to keep me occupied for probably another seven years of work lunch breaks before I get bored of that neighborhood.

I've only read two of the stories, and so far it's safe to say I'm both enchanted and appalled - which is absolutely correct. The stories all feature the point of view of one man, serial cheating and somewhat hapless Yunior, an immigrant who grows up in a working class Dominican neighborhood in central New Jersey. It's odd to read a book in which someone loiters around Woodbridge Mall, but hey, it's also sort of grounding.

There is a lot to learn from the sparseness of this author's style. To achieve moments of wonder, you don't need to overwrite. You can be short, abrupt. You can tell the stories of a boy, later a man, growing up in a rough neighborhood with a rough family, with the spectre of a rough future pounding down on him, and still find a way to weave in beauty and insight. Without forcing it down the reader's throat. In fact, the beauty is that much more outstanding because of the contrast between the characters, who are ugly and real and full of hard edges, and the rare, fluid moments of clarity they still find. Just like real people do.

Write a paragraph like this and I'm yours forever.

"That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads. Girls were starting to take notice of me; I wasn't good-looking but I listened and had boxing muscles in my arms. In another universe I probably came out ok, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead."

Also, this:

"Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known. 

Remember the day we met? she asks.
I nod.
You wanted to play baseball.
It was summer, I say. You were wearing a tank top. 
You made me put on a shirt before you'd let me be on your team. Do you remember?
I remember, I say. 

We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don't know where the fuck she went."

...oof. Also, yes. Absolutely, totally yes.

"My own kind. I'm not sure there's a name for us. I suspect we're born this way: our hearts screwed in tight, already a little broken. We hate sentimentality and yet we're deeply sentimental. Low-grade romantics. Tough but susceptible. Afflicted by parking lots, empty courtyards, nostalgic pop music. When we cried for no reason as babies, just hauled off and wailed, our parents seemed to know, instinctively, that it wasn't diaper rash or colic. It was something deeper that they couldn't find a comfort for."

- Steve Almond

Things, etc.

In an effort to be appreciative of the little things, which are the only things, here is a short list of happy pieces of today:

1. To the person who went to the coffee shop I frequent every morning, pen in hand, and took the jug labeled "whole milk" and changed it to "whale milk" - thank you. Thank you sincerely for the ridiculous image of a girl with pigtailed red braids, sitting on an overturned tin pail, milking a whale at the bottom of the sea.

2. To the ice cream shop at the corner of Grove and 7th in the West Village - thank you for existing. The life-sized, violently pastel unicorn painted on your glass storefront and the rainbow bubbled words BIG GAY ICE CREAM underneath made me stop and actually guffaw in the middle of the street. The taxis almost creamed me, but a happier end of life moment simply could not be a real thing. The "salty pimp" ice cream cone does, indeed, sound delicious, so I'm glad to still be alive to experience that, at least.

3. Would like to formally thank The Hummus Place, my fav lunch spot, for being so delicious. Particularly the hot sauce! I'd further like to extend my thanks to Gina Golba for being the perfect lunch partner, and always going splitsies when it comes to couscous and falafel. Hummus will never be the same without you. So don't go anywhere. This is an order. And I'm your boss.

4. My couch is awesomely soft, and my dog snores on my feet in a way that is comforting, and for this I am thankful on a regular basis. For every moment she isn't trying to attack someone, or giving me the stink eye while I waste time online, I'm thankful for her from the tip of her tail, up her wire-hair back-mohawky thing, to her strangely red-bearded chin. You're a piece of work, dog of mine. You really are. I dig it.

5. To the person setting off fireworks that sounded like gunshots at 3 a.m., compelling me to shriek "Get down!" when I was already laying flat on my back in bed - fuck you. I am not thankful for you, but I am thankful they weren't really gunshots. I'd like to wheel a canon directly under your window so you can have the pleasure of waking up thinking you're in a civil war battlefield. Let's see how you like that shit, shall we?

That's it. Goodnight, internets.

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have it's way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic - decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink mold will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

- Louise Erdich

If I'm reading a poem, or watching a movie or listening to a song or just taking in any sort of art, really, I like to pay particular attention to the gut check moment. The one moment, or line, or note, that reaches out through the clutter and the beauty of the rest and brands you right on the heart with its intensity.

I always note that moment for me. In this poem, it's the line: Don't answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. It might as well be written in bold, or highlighted in bright yellow, it leaps out at me with that much strength and weight. It shines. It's something to do with the rhythm of the word "ever," the sudden intensity within the whole line. The poet is remembering something particular. Something that made her want to weep, but she refused to fold into her own instincts. I makes me think of all the times I have refused myself the same moment of weakness, how many kitchens or bedrooms or backyards I might have stood in and disallowed myself to fall apart. And the ways in which that refusal to give in can mean strength, but can just as easily be a weakness. It takes strength to feel something - anything - deeply enough to cry. I don't know if I agree with this line or disagree, but either way it catches my heart, and flickers like that are always, always worth noticing.

I enjoy noting these moments to myself, and wondering about them - why that line? What is it about me that responds to that piece more than anything else? But what I really like noticing is what jumps out at other people.

Lots of people don't pay attention to the little things; they just absorb the larger whole and then move on. Neither way is right or wrong, of course. But I relate best to the type of people who chew things over, who are both attentive enough, and self-aware enough, to feel those moments, that punch in the face sensation, and to note it properly. People that wonder. People that absorb. Even if what shines for them is different than what shines for me - actually, especially then. Then I'm so fascinated by their little brains, what makes them tick and hum and spark and what doesn't, that I'm fully, fully in. I'm so in for those kind of talks.

My (current) favorite, perfect pile of strung together words on earth: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with  your one wild and precious life? Poet Mary Oliver, who lives on Cape Cod, writes about nature with a kind of cool, nearly stiff and academic regard that slips into near-religious beauty in moments that surprise you in her work. I love her.

I'm reading a lot of writer Cheryl Strayed these days (another oh-so-passionate-and-certainly-obsessive post to come), whose memoir Wild is just an assault in heartbreak and raw beauty. She quotes poetry a lot in her book, begins chapters with lines of it that meant something to her, acknowledges regularly that she chants some lines in her head every day like a mantra. Like I do. Helplessly and without purpose or plan. She quotes that same perfect line in her book, and I felt the zing of OH MY GOD YES SHE GETS IT, WE BOTH GET IT. I am so in.

My writing instructor Kerry Cohen wrote a memoir called Loose Girls. I've known Kerry for almost a year now, and finally (ugh I hate myself) read her damn book a few weeks ago. Nearing the end, she quotes the same line. And there it was, of course. That moment. That punch.

Out of all the poets, all the novels, all of the arrangements of words in all of the world that might mean something to any human, we three picked the same line. That line is a big deal, it means something to lots of people, of course. But still, loving it makes me feel like I'm a part of a circle of beauty. It makes me believe in the connectivity of art. It makes everything shine.

Carl Pope