HOW TO GET LOST WHILE DRIVING
Drive at night.
Squint up at the street names
and say each one out loud: Daisy, Marigold, Lotus.
Continue in one direction
until the series changes: Elm, Birch, Willow.
Drive without a map.
Prefer to look up and down a street
until the houses speak to you.
The trees will sometimes be aligned
in a way that reminds you
of somewhere you’ve been before.
Go where the street light casts a glow
you recognize from childhood.
Drive away from where it’s busiest.
Follow the quiet and the dark.
A glance at the sky will tell you where
the stars are clearest.
Drive without fear.
Remember that the heart beats fastest
at the unfamiliar
and the most familiar.
Drive without a destination.
Drive knowing full well that the place
you want to go to can’t be reached by driving.
I descended on the local bookstores armed with gift cards again and am now settling into the new year with lots of new reading type things:
- A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
- Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
- The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? by Elizabeth McCracken
- City of God by E.L. Doctorow
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
- The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Now it can snow all it wants; I shall be parked by the fire, happy.
STALKING THE POEM
1
Only one word will do. It isn’t on the tip of your tongue, but you know it’s not far. It’s the one fish that won’t swim into your net, a figure that hides in a crowd of similar figures, a domino stone in the face-down pool. Your need to find it becomes an obsession, single-minded and relentless as lust. It’s a long time before you can free yourself, let it go. “Forget it,” you say, and think that you do. When the word is sure you have forgotten it, it comes out of hiding. But it isn’t taking any chances even now and has prepared its appearance with care. It surrounds itself with new and inconspicuous friends and faces you in a showup line in which everyone looks equally innocent. Of course you know it instantly, the way Joan of Arc knew the Dauphin and Augustine knew God. You haven’t been so happy in weeks. You rush the word to your poem, which had died for lack of it, and it arises pink-cheeked as Lazarus. The two of you share the wine.
2
You’ve got the poem cornered. It gives up, lies down, plays dead. No more resistance. How easily you could take it into your teeth and walk off with it! But you are afraid of the sound they will make crunching the bones. You are afraid of the taste of blood, of the poem’s dark, unknown insides. So you stand above it, sniffing its fur, poking and pushing it, turning it over. Suddenly you see that its eyes are open and that they stare at you with contempt. You walk away with your tail between your legs. When you return, the poem has disappeared.
3
The poem is complete in your head, its long, lovely shape black against the white space in your mind. Each line is there, secure, recallable, pulled forth by the line before it and the one before that, like a melody whose second part you can sing once you have sung the first, but not before. All there, all perfectly linked. But when you pick up the pen, the shape dissolves, pales, spreads into slovenliness. You feel the poem escaping; you can’t write fast enough. By some miracle you recover all the bits and pieces, and you manage to put them in proper order. You have been saved, you think. But the poem is not the beautiful figure you held in your mind. It is gawky and gap-toothed, its arms are too long for its body, its clothes don’t fit. It looks up at you from the page accusingly. Look at the mess you’ve made, it says. See what you can do with me: last chance, don’t blow it. Filled with gratitude, you roll up your sleeves and go to work.
*from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996) which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997
Like a dream of a dream,
the landscape changes
and remains the same.
The bare trees belong
underwater with coral,
drowned into muteness.
Like a poem of a poem,
the clarity that comes
with cold is a clarity
of constellations.
The night sky re-written
star by lucid star.
Because once again the cold has arrived,
muffled, stealthy, and pale.
Because when glass catches light just so,
the word “mellow” ceases to describe the wine.
Because as a child, forever seemed a distinct
possibility, like learning to fly.
Because driving is best at night in the winter,
when it has just started to get completely dark.
Because from the road, the still windows are like
yellow pictures, warm with lamplight.
Because I left the city at its most beautiful,
gray with rain and sad slick roads.
Because there was a lost red glove adorning a
shrub this morning and its pair will be discarded.
Because there are no more rhymes.
Because when I sing that song you fall asleep.
Because it is always what you don’t say
that speaks volumes, that is important.
Because when I wrote this poem it was cold outside
and I was alone in the house. Now it is cold again.
It’s not a surprise that Tom Stoppard co-wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love.
Phenomenal dialogue:
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
—-
Viola De Lesseps: [to her Nurse] I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all. No… not the artful postures of love, not playful and poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening, but love that… over-throws life. Unbiddable, ungovernable – like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love – like there has never been in a play.
—-
Viola de Lesseps: [as Thomas Kent] Tell me how you love her, Will.
William Shakespeare: Like a sickness and its cure together.
—-
[last lines]
William Shakespeare: My story starts at sea… a perilous voyage to an unknown land… a shipwreck… the wild waters roar and heave… the brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned… all save one… a lady… whose soul is greater than the ocean… and her spirit stronger than the sea’s embrace… not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story… for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name will be Viola.
—-
I think the play Arcadia is still his best work ever, but that 1999 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay was definitely well-deserved.
So here’s what happened.
I had every intention of escorting the kids to their annual candy foraging expedition dressed as a Parent Vampire- you know, that half-arsed effort of a costume wherein you’re in regular clothes (usually whatever you wore to work that day) but with a vampire cape and plastic fangs on- when BAM! the meek little cold the kids caught at school the week before exploded into a monstrous flu that had the entire household bedridden overnight.
This flu was exactly like every gooey, movie creature from another planet: gross, innocuous at first, possessed of incredible growth spurt powers, and hell-bent on decimating everything in its path… usually in some forlorn town in Middle America.
Means by which it reduced us all to sobbing children / The symptoms:
- Nausea
- Phlegmy cough
- Runny nose
- Muscle pains (I didn’t even think I had muscles)
- Headaches similar in sensation to a cacophony of giant hands thumping on giant tom-toms inside your head
- Fever fluctuating between low and high-grade seemingly on the basis of yard leaf swirling patterns
- Inability to enjoy even the tiniest morsel of hard-earned Halloween candy
- Sudden hankering to stay perfectly still on your bed while buried under all the blankets you own
- Loss of will to live
To top it all off, Nana and Papa were out of town, and none of us had the wherewithal to drive to the hospital. The most we could muster was a dazed consultation with the local pharmacist who suggested an over-the-counter cough/cold/fever concoction.
And then, one by one, we started getting better beginning with the first to get sick- David. No need to send the carriage for Sherlock to find the culprit on this one; we know which child isn’t too diligent with the hand-washing.
What a waste of time away from work! An entire week gone forever, with nothing to show for it but empty boxes of Kleenex, and a house that now has to be thoroughly disinfected.
Since it was practically impossible to read while a prisoner of this flu, we watched gobs of movies based on books:
- The Old Man and the Sea (1958 John Sturges adaptation of Ernest Hemingway novel)
- Hamlet (1948 Sir Laurence Olivier adaptation of William Shakespeare play)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 Elia Kazan adaptation of Tennessee Williams play)
- To Kill a Mockingbird (1962 Robert Mulligan adaptation of Harper Lee novel)
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966 Mike Nichols adaptation of Edward Albee play)
- Gone with the Wind (1939 Victor Fleming adaptation of Margaret Mitchell novel)
- Wuthering Heights (2009 BBC/ITV adaptation of Emily Bronte novel) (Best.Version.Ever)
Yes, dear readers, we were sick for a very long time as I didn’t even include the movies we slept through.
In the haze of it all, I managed to come upon a brilliant writing idea/career move: I could write books based on movies! No one’s done it before, and the material’s all there for the taking.
*sways a little* Delirious? I think not.
On second thought, I probably shouldn’t tempt fate by stringing sentences together so soon after my recovery. The tom-toms are still faintly pounding in the background.
Crushed, but still addicted to Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens.
Michael Cunningham, on reading Virginia Woolf for the first time at 15:
“I was ready, however– or maybe I should say I was ready to be ready– for Woolf’s sentences. I had not only never seen language like that; nothing I’d read had prepared me for the fact that a human being could do what she had done, line by line, using the same ink and paper available to anybody. I had neither read nor conceived of sentences that complex and muscular and precise and beautiful.
It may, perversely, have helped that I didn’t quite understand what the sentences actually meant. It may have helped free me to better appreciate their tones and variations, the sheer virtuosity of their structures and sounds.
I remember thinking, Hey, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. Riffing, that is, as only a genius can; finding over and over again an exquisite balance between recklessness and control, between chaos and pattern.”
-From Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, (Free Press) edited by Elizabeth Benedict.
I like to imagine that when the end comes and enough time elapses for a new civilization to build a new world, archaeologists will unearth an enormous tin box of letters when they chance to dig in the spot where my house used to be.
Yes, aside from being a brilliant exercise escape artist, I am a hoarder of letters.
One might sing lofty praises about today’s high-tech correspondence, but there is something timeless and infinitely personal about a hand-written note one can read over and over, and touch, knowing that the writer took pen to paper and held that very same sheet in his or her own hands. A letter capturing a sentiment in a fixed time and place is a thing of surpassing beauty.
“More than kisses, letters mingle souls.” – John Donne
Love letters are especially good at this.
Here is one I wrote on the day the IAU passed a resolution to redefine its criteria of planets, thereby excluding Pluto from the list.
August 24, 2006
My Love,
It seems by some learned decree
we recently lost a planet.
In this way I hope to someday
think of you and no longer ache;
suddenly, unthinkably, finally.
Done before the heart’s persuasion sets
and the mind’s incredulous gasp escapes.
Leaving only my body
and its reluctant continuing
in a reconfigured cosmos.
—-
I won’t go into the circumstances around the letter, but will say that it was never sent and leave it at that.
Every time I read it I am immediately right where I was when I wrote it. It makes for a wonderful means of realistic time travel.
But since I feel obligated to give you something useful on this topic, and I want to shoot down any rising suspicion that I’ve just rambled on and caused you to lose precious minutes as usual, here is a fantastic website on letters and such:
- Letters of Note : Correspondence deserving of a wider audience
- Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.
You should check it out, it’s a veritable treasure trove of correspondence from all over.
This is my favorite so far:
Mark Twain’s lovely letter to 9-year-old Enid Jocelyn Agnew in 1907.
Enjoy. And for goodness’ sake, keep writing letters.
This is so brilliant, I can’t comprehend why no one’s thought of it before.
From Dylan Meconis’ Temple of Commerce:
The Grammar Nerd Corrective Label Pack
“Does seeing a sign that reads TRY THEY’RE “SANDWICH’S” send you into a fit of apoplectic rage?
Grammar Nerd Corrective Label Pack to the rescue! Simply select the appropriate corrective label from this affordable, laser-printed collection and prepare to dole out frontier-style grammar justice.
The labels come pre-cut by me (or my hapless intern) from a single letter-sized label sheet. This reduces postage and ensures that you can carry your favorites around in your checkbook or wallet for application on the go!
Order a single sheet, or prove your dedication with a 3-pack (and save a dollar).”
Sold!!!
No more burying my face in my hands to sob when confronted with grammar sacrilege. I can slap a sticker on the offending article (or person) and feel my vexation immediately dissolve.
My happiness will be complete when they include the following important (life-saving) additions:
- Your = possessive / You’re = you are
- Ask = to inquire / Axe = a tool for chopping wood
- This is misspelled
- It’s I before E except after C
- Consult a dictionary before using a big word
- Don’t be afraid of the Thesaurus, it’s not a mutant dinosaur
- “Irregardless” is not a proper word
- You have your homophones confused
- To = for expressing directions or objectives / Too = for indicating an excessive quantity, or another word for “also” / Two = a number
- Lay = requires a direct object / Lie = does not require a direct object
- Lose = verb, to suffer loss / Loose = adjective, opposite of tight or contained
- Use “an” before a vowel sound, “a” before a consonant sound
- Stop this instant and enroll in the nearest Remedial English class!
*sigh* I’m going to lie down now.
