camden town, indostan.

Some days I have to invent reasons to get out of the house, to walk away from my desk and dissertation in the name of sanity or fresh air or just another human's face, if nothing else. This is not a pity party, by the way. Just this moment's reality, self-induced and (thankfully) fleeting.

Last week it was Camden Market. A short walk down the street and one bus ten minutes across Primrose Hill. I went with purpose: there was a shop in the Stables' stalls that sells architectural drafts of stained glass windows and, though I can't justify pounds sterling in the hundreds, I wanted to see them again. I like in museums the unfinished things, preliminary sketches like Patrick Heron's charcoal drawings of T.S. Eliot, or the ghostprints of St Jerome and his lion in Leonardo's Wilderness, or the squares of Manet's Execution of Maximilian stitched back together by Degas. I like seeing decisions made and unmade, all of them recorded, the raw end of a masterpiece — to me it strikes the balance right, the potential and the mess in equal measure. These sketches were like that. In February, when John and I first found the place, there were two ten-foot angels in the front doorway, the final drafts for a chapel in Sleepy Hollow, New York. They were nouveau work; bold solid lines, organic sensibilities. Pieces of them were colored, potential blues in wide stripes down the drapery, touches of rose and gold on their wings, and they held banners at their waist that fell diagonally to the floor — I can't remember what they said, simple truths, straightforward things, like God is Strength or Hope and Light. In February they'd seemed like actual messengers, saying things I needed to hear. I hate that I've forgotten. I only remembered that I loved them, and one in particular. I wanted to see that angel again. I wanted to remember what her banner said. I think I wanted to convince myself I needed to bring her home.

But she wasn't there. The shop wasn't there. I walked the length of the stalls once and then over again, matching my memory to the current setup. Lot 745. I remembered the loft with a notch for a ladder. Before, a daughter in the eaves, playing behind cardboard barrels while her dad rearranged the stock. Now, umbrellas from Myanmar in place of parchment tubes, and the pretty woman selling them didn't know anything about the previous tenant. I went to neighbors. Nothing. I went to security. Nothing. I talked to nine people and none of them even remembered the place's existence. To be fair, I don't know if I was doing a good job explaining. Stained glass sketches, I kept saying. Big boxes of rolled paper, like industrial school maps, but they were drafts for the windows in churches. From here, Europe, from the States. Oh and he sold pins! Thousands of them on felt panels along the walls. The collectible kind, you know, like you put in shadow boxes for a boy's room? No? Nothing.

So I went walking. I'd made the trip over anyhow, and if you know the Camden labyrinth then you know that you can never actually know it all. I could stand to get lost for another half hour. But we all know what happens when you get lost, right? You get a little found.

I walked into the shop because there were stacks of Tibetan singing bowls on a shelf behind buddhas organized by size, metal, and color. I've been looking for brass bowls to have on our reception tables in September, and the place looked promising. If I had looked closer I may have noticed it sooner: the shadow puppets on the walls, the bridal hair pins in the cup by the door. Instead it was the smell that hit me first, musty wood and dirty concrete, a faint floral note overpowered by heavy rain. It struck me like the monsoons it reminded me of — a two-second hint of a beginning, and then the deluge. I grabbed at a lintel carving from the nearest table, flipping it over to find a tag. 1904, it read. Jawa Timur.

A few weeks ago it was sickly humid in the city and coming in to work via tube was a sweaty gross sardine-style affair that made all the black suits extra grumpy and aimless tourists. But a part of me recognized the heat on the air, the thrum of traffic in the wet haze — something in me reveled in it. And you know those moments where some sight or smell or small bar of music smacks you through the soul with a memory not necessarily specific but all-encompassing? London, London, London, INDONESIA. A few weeks ago all it took was the fleeting second between stepping off a curb and into the street. I was turning off Tottenham Court Road but could've sworn it was instead the rubbled crossways in Tebet Dalam, that I was going to walk around the corner to eat rujak on broken benches while Ari chastised me for trying to pet every vagrant cat in the neighborhood. I nursed an empty ache between my rib bones the whole rest of the day, craving condensed milk and an open window on a Metro Mini.

So walking ignorant like that into Indostan (you would think the name might've given it away ...?) nearly knocked the breath out of me. Boat letters! Krepuk tins! I visited each familiar face like I might puppies in a pet store, hungry to memorize them, desperate to make them mine. The end wall was one massive panel carved and painted bright turquoise, pink, red. From the ceiling hung model pinisi, gamelan pieces, bright colored dewi in full flight, arm-wings outstretched. Odd visions accompanied it all: sitting cross-legged on a dirty mattress with a toddler holding a hymnbook; morning light filtered pink through an old sarong across the window; thousands of candy wrappers tied to a tree — an old man's mania. An art piece in homage to beauty in blunt places. I was delighted; I was devastated. It is unsettling to time travel. 

I am still looking for the stained glass shop. I sent an email to the market managers but haven't heard anything. The marrow seems heavier in my bones these days, thick with thinking. There's a rhythm of Cummings beating there, too: time is a tree (this life one leaf).

a letter from London, long overdue.

I am in a plane and I am a prayer. That was my first sentence. Every sinew of self stretched to silent supplication. The beginning of the essay about the time I moved to London, that one time I packed a suitcase, a carry-on, and two ziplocs of trail mix and moved not just across the country but out of it. I was going to be scared and second-guessing, I was going to make evident my insanity but perhaps eventually arrive at some small understanding, conclude with a quiet sentence in favor of strength. It might have been really something.  

Instead, I am in a plane and I am a prayer of irrepressible hallelujah. This is my first sentence. To be fair, round one of the flight was mostly foreboding—from Salt Lake City to Chicago I watched clouds collect like an inverted tundra beneath our wings, mottled, thick, and frozen. At one point I felt compelled to recite The Wasteland, Unreal City,/under the brown fog of a winter dawn. But even I had to admit that was too dramatic. And the woman next to me seemed concerned. Talking to oneself. Generally worrisome. 

But I am in a plane and I am every cell singing impetuous praise, and I can't tell you exactly why or where it is coming from except to explain that sometimes answers arrive only after you have accepted the question, and as my triple seven lifts up over the Windy City it seems to me that this is Heaven's version of a hearty high-five. The sun setting behind us has painted clouds the color of the Renaissance, and the Sistine sky rolls from gilded rose into deep purpled blue. One particularly painterly thunderhead flat-bottoms like a mushroom cloud and it is not sinister but somehow holy and I find myself wanting Wordsworth to write this, remembering that he already has. Trailing clouds of glory. Intimations of immortality. I watch the sun set until I can see only stars. 

There are still things to worry about. I do not know where I am living, I haven't fully finished enrollment at the university, I don't know when I will next talk to John or what exactly to declare as my intended purpose for entry on the customs card the stewardess hands to me with the tonic water I requested. I can't sleep on planes. I can't sleep unless I am lying down and it is dark and it is completely quiet, and on planes I am 0 for 3. I have a lot of time to think about what I've done. There is another hour of asphyxiating anxiety in the early morning, when I choose to focus on the shadows between the stars rather than count out the constellations. But I force myself to close my eyes and fall into fitful half-dreams and when I wake up it is proper morning and below me the sun has tipped over the edge of the world and the river lights up like liquid gold, spinning into the heart of a city that has my whole life spoken to me like home. Have you ever seen A Room with a View? Joy! Beauty! Love! From above, every building, each street, every turn of the Thames declaring the eternal yes.

__________________________________

All of this was six weeks ago. I found a flat. I'm more than a month into my masters program and in the thick of theses and thinking. I talk to John more than most people would assume necessary but is somehow not ever enough for me. And while I still can't tell you that I know exactly my ultimate purpose in being here (on the card I settled with "study;" this might prove the most pertinent way to define my daily walk, though I meant it more innocently then), I can say that this morning I woke up happy, that there are few things more whole and holy than knowing you are in the right place at the right time.

me + mum | BALTIMORE '88

This past Mother's Day I was asked to speak at my church meeting, which I did, somehow, despite a whole lot of panic and procrastination in the weeks leading up to my ten minutes at the podium. Mostly my friends and family did not understand this. "What do you mean, 'what do I speak about?'?!" they'd say. "It's Mother's Day! You talk about mothers! Why is this hard?"

Thing is, it's just not easy. Mothers, motherhood, mothering. I think about this often, mostly confusedly, seeing as it is both my mortal birthright and eternal inheritance, and here I am in the middle of it, very much single and researching travel writing stints in Nepal. It's a whole lot of in-between to fathom.

Which is all just to say that this was my first official time writing about motherhood, but it can't possibly be my last. And if you'd like to read what I'm thinking, you can catch the full essay after the jump or download the PDF here.

This is, by all accounts, a first draft. There are days when I think I will rewrite it entirely. This morning is one of them. 

But here it is anyway, because maybe a nine-page essay can make up for my seventeen-day absence, and also I want to tell you that now, finally, because of these last two weeks, I remember the last time I was brave. I want you to know that I told my whole story, Mas. I told it with my whole heart.

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ELIZABETH RHONDEAU

on being brave[1]

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

    —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Just now, not even fifteen minutes ago, I heard a laugh I knew on the staircase. It was coming up and I was headed down. It's a good laugh, one of the best as far as I've known, open and wide and willing. It belongs to a boy, a friend; a person I should have seen and been happy to see, but instead I turned mid-laugh toe-point on that stair and leapt to catch an elevator before that laugh could catch me.

I can't remember the last brave thing I did.

Which is not to say that happenstance conversation—even in a stairwell—ranks high on the list of Acts of Incomparable Courage, but the fact is that it certainly got me thinking, mostly about lions because since the time of anything they’ve been the harbingers of heroes, the way they watch you all lithe and noble-like, completely self-possessed, confident that the second a summer wind so much as implies a new course they have only to stand and command it be still for the universe to comply. People put lions on princes’ shields and kings’ banners, atop monuments to victory, across library steps, guarding palaces, temples, tombs—and not just in one country and culture, but most. While the Anglosphere took to tacking the feline on every piece of heraldry they could shake a shield at, people in Sri Lanka put it directly to their name, drawing Sinhalese from the Indo-Aryan sinhala, the lion people, people with lion blood, that little country with big heart. Egyptians worshipped Sekhmet, a warrior goddess with a lioness head, breath that created the desert, and nicknames that could kill you before she ever did[2]. In Venice the lion presides over every cathedral and canal, emblem of the water- city’s patron Saint Mark who, incidentally, wrote my favorite account of Christ’s life, a living picture of a living man equal parts energy and humility, a portrait so striking that you begin to understand how the king of beasts is often associated with the King of Kings. I imagine Mark was infused by that same vitality. I imagine Mark would never take the elevator. Neither, for that matter, would a lion.

Samson killed a lion once, which you would think would be some sort of epic brave-on-brave ordeal considering the reputation of both parties but turns out the Man of the Sun more or less walked right up to the beast and ripped him in two. As far as Bible bravery goes, this is pretty typical. David’s got his slingshot, Joshua takes trumpets to march around Jericho, Moses keeps a staff at his side for anything from snake charming to splitting a sea in two. I am relating all this to my Thursday scripture group, increasingly panicked about my own inability to actually do anything whatsoever at all, comparatively, when I reach the real clincher: “And then,” I announce, “there’s Judith.”

If you do not know the story of Judith, here’s the quicklist: the Israelites are surrounded on every side by Assyrians who, daunted by their opponent’s hilly refuge, forgo the instant attack and decide to cut off the city’s water supply instead. This was pretty smart, seeing as forty years in the wilderness proved that Israelites certainly have a way with whining, and it’s only a matter of days before this lot is doing just that. Fed up with their people—and not immune to dehydration, themselves—the city council declares they’ll give the Lord five more days to work a miracle or call it quits.

Judith, a wealthy young widow both beautiful and righteous, sees the problem with that proclamation pretty much immediately, and tells them so, plus some. “Give the Lord five more days?!” she rallies (and I’m paraphrasing), “Give?! Who do you think you are, putting God to the test as if you are gods yourselves? Who are you kidding, waiting around and threatening highest Heaven? What kind of faith is that? Good goats, people! Get up and go!”[3] At which point Judith does exactly that, marching right past those city walls and into the enemy camp with nothing but one handmaid, the entirety of her jewelry collection, and an absolute confidence in God.

Within three days Judith has head honcho Holofernes believing that the siege has caused the Jews to turn away from their God, a disobedience to merit their destruction, and that she’s there to help any way she can, starting with prayer. By the fourth day this deal is working out nicely enough that Judith’s invited to a banquet at Holofernes’ tent, where the ensuing revelry causes Holofernes to drink (and this one’s verbatim) “much more than he had ever drunk in any one day since he was born.” His servants, calculating the sum of a pretty woman plus their merry major general, leave the two alone. Judith, recognizing the miracle because she herself ensured it, takes a sword and then takes Holofernes’ head with two strokes to his dead-drunk neck. She and her handmaid carry their prize home in a grain bag and the next morning the Assyrians awake to an Israelite army at their door with Holofernes’ head on a stick.

Never mind that the story is likely untrue; most people call it apocryphal though the Catholics deem it deuterocanonical, and there’s enough anachronism within the first verse of the first chapter to say it’s steampunk. Still, you can’t beat that kind of brave, and with my own barley basket dependably devoid of the beheaded, I begin to wonder at what point I could ever identify with it. Lucas Cranach the Elder painted Judith like a varsity softball player, eyebrows raised and smirking, her sword over one shoulder like nothing doing. If ever I were to sit for a Bavarian portraitist, I imagine it would be just that. Sitting.

_________________________

Of course, there is a line between self-deprecating and downright obnoxious, and before I cross it I mean to say that I recognize my irrational tendency toward despair when it comes to bravery. Or perhaps it is a certain perception of bravery, this perception of bravery—the one with blood and swords and loud speeches to large crowds. This is, simply put, not my style; and while I try to reconcile the quiet confidence I feel at my core, the noise from the Judith camp is overwhelming.

I find refuge in Esther. At first, this is only because I am too distracted by her King Ahasuerus’ palace, the glitter and grace of the arabesques I imagine linking lines from floor to ceiling in a mosaic of marbles that catch the light of a desert sun but keep the heat at bay. I am enamored of the garden parties in gilded courtyards, the promise of provinces from India to Ethiopia. But it is not long before the fickle king falls fool to his advisors, Vashti’s out the door, and I watch Esther arrive to vie for her place.

She is so small and still so sparkling. Some say she could only have been barely fourteen when she entered the pageant at the citadel, but even swallowed up in the splendor of Shushan she stands out. Assigned to the care of head eunuch Hegai, she learns quickly and steps carefully, proving a personality beyond her arresting beauty that wins the favor of her fellow beauty contestants almost instantaneously; she walks with friends throughout the day and every afternoon meets Mordecai at the gate to reassure him all is well. In the morning she begins again, learning perfumes and cosmetics, fastening bracelets at her wrist and linen around her waist, preparing for the possibility of a crown upon her head.

Bravery, before it became a term indicative of the splendid and valiant from the Middle French or the brave and bold from the Italian, was a word of adornment, the collective noun for fine clothing[4]. It was something you owned to keep at the ready. It was something you put on, what you wore to face your finest moment.

_________________________

I have taken to wondering how Esther ever got into this situation to begin with. At what point did uncle Mordecai come home weary-eyed and reticent to tell his orphaned cousin that he had answered the king's quest for a queen, that he had offered her up to a task that would require she be stripped of everything she'd known and become before, that to succeed he must forbid her mention any family, any heritage in their God? When did the dark-eyed Hadassah understand that she would lose even her name, that from this moment on she was to assume every appearance of a Persian princess? She is sitting at the table, her shoulders straight. He is telling her quietly, eyes on the grain of the wood under his trembling hand. They are not eating, only listening, each waiting for the other to find the right words for the wrong situation. Was Mordecai the one to suggest Esther? He says it as a prayer, hoping it is a promise of what she will become. Or did she choose her new name, offering it in peace, assuring her uncle that she has what it will take to triumph. Esther, she says. Star.

Hadassah. Hebrew for myrtle, the white flower sacred to dreams and weddings, a five-petaled bud that opens quietly into a small floret before maturing into blossoms like supernovae[5]. In Jewish Liturgy myrtle is one of the four sacred plants of Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles celebrating the harvest. Alongside willow branches, a palm frond, and the fruit of a citron tree, the myrtle flower aids in allusion to the human body—by binding all four together, the mitzvah implies an entire being dedicated to the service of God. The long lean palm stands in as the spine, with the willow forming words for a mouth and the sweet-sour citron symbolizing the heart. Hadass is the eye. Vision.

Many artists paint Esther in full swoon at Ahasuerus’ feet, a tableau specific to the Septuagint[6]. It is gratifying to note the itch that flames into indignation when I see Esther in this setting. Regardless of the edition's veracity, I am bothered that they would choose this of all moments to capture the story’s spirit; it is not fair, it is not my Queen Esther. What about her calm acceptance of Mordecai’s proposition? What about the careful diplomacy of her speech before the king? I prefer the Esther painted by Edwin Long. In the portrait, she is sitting. Two servants work about her, holding fine linen and jewels to her gilded gown. The palace is painted just as you imagine it should be; intricate, ornate, unparalleled luxury—but what eclipses this all is her eyes. Esther watches you, unmoved, and in her unblinking stare you sense not only a deep sadness and pervading fear but a resoluteness that defies them both. You know that Esther will tell the king. She will tell him everything.

To be concise, encyclopedias redirect inquiries for bravery to courage, where under etymology there follows a long list of its original French. In earliest incarnations the word stayed true to its Latin root and denoted the heart or innermost feelings as a source of fortitude. Jumping the Channel, the Middle English movement used the word to replace their original ellen, meaning strength, and become a more all-encompassing term for “what is in one’s mind or thoughts.” A friend suggests that perhaps today the word is a combination of the two, that to have courage is to tell your whole story with your whole heart.

_________________________

It is time we talk about fear, as if we haven't been tiptoeing around it all along, afraid to mention we're afraid. Because that's the trick, isn't it? We are all scared of something or other and it's going to catch up with us eventually. When it does, we have two choices. The first is to fall, incapacitated, i.e. take the elevator and leave things be. This is fine; in most situations—barring birth, death, love, and taxes—the impact is negligible. You’ll do it tomorrow; they’ll want a different style anyway; he never even knew I was on the stairs in the first place. You alone will hurt.

But you could also stand and face it. You could calculate every weakness and what if and still choose to fight, and you would learn something. You would learn that it takes recognition of your vulnerability in order to be strong, that in admitting every possible failure you make room for immeasurable growth and an inevitable joy.

It makes sense. The boy sprinting into the street to save the child toddling into traffic isn’t at that moment brimming with any sense of bravery. He’s compelled by a total terror, a fear of loss, death. It’s only after the fact that he’d call it courageous, and even then there’s a certain humility inherent to the kind of ordeal that would make him refrain. There is a sacredness to those moments where you recognize you are whole only because you are broken.

Once, at a safari reserve in the mountain climes of Java, I sat with a mama leopard over my lap. A crowd had gathered even before I walked into the cage and their whispers crescendoed as the giant cat first rubbed her jaw into my shoulder blade and then took one long, leathery lick of her tongue up my forearm. “So brave!” they whispered. “So brave! So brave!” they echoed—but instead of bravery I felt only beauty, my heart hammering not heroically so much as happily. I sat with the warm weight of the animal’s stomach against mine, watching the way she watched through one eye half-open her two toddlers stumble toward us. She batted lazily at my bangle bracelets and I scratched the hollow behind her ear and a while later I walked out past the reverenced crowd to find my friends. “You are crazy!” they said. “You are so brave!” they said. “But I wasn’t scared,” I explained, confused.

It’s right there in the straight-up right-now dictionary definition: Brave. Verb. To encounter with courage and fortitude, to defy; to overcome one’s initial fear(s). There is no bravery without a little trembling.

_________________________

We all know how Esther ends because it has become her beginning: Queen Esther, Preserver of Her People. Haman’s hanged, Mordecai’s promoted, and Esther stands at Ahasuerus’ right hand in all her bravery, in and out.

Secretly, I want to say that Esther wins this battle hands down. That compared to Judith's parlor tricks she is the true paragon of intrepidity, that her reserve is the real role model for heroine how-to. But there are merits to both ends of their bravery, and I suppose the point is that they did what they could—and, maybe more importantly, they did what the other could not. It is not hard to imagine the consequences of a Judith running rampant in Ahasuerus' court, or an Esther faced with Holoferne's sword. In the end, it is all a matter of action; to see, to fear, to defy, to do. And even then it’s not how you do it, but that you did.

_________________________

A few months after the leopard, while living on the opposite side of that same Indonesian island, I stopped by a friend’s house for the afternoon. She was a week home from the hospital with a new baby girl and the entire family met me at the door in a clamoring chorus of questions, the most immediate of which rang out above the rest: “Are you brave?” they asked. “Are you brave? Are you brave?” And I didn’t even have the half-second to wonder “Brave what?” before suddenly yes, I guess I am brave because there I was sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor with a six-day-old life in my arms.

I am not brave. It just happened so fast and so it happened, you know, and around me the conversation continued, and I suppose I must have contributed, laughed along; but to this day I remember only the weight of this sleeping child swaddled around my stomach, her belly swelling against mine, and the sublime race of my blood as it contemplated the myriad implications of this miniature human. I am thinking about what am I doing here and who trusted me or anyone with a breathing body and think about if this were a real life from my own and what happens when that does happen, and how does anybody get anything done for fear of failing and am I brave? And this, this life, a real little life, are you brave? Are you brave, Novidewi? I whispered. She blinked at the sound of her name. New Goddess. Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

---

[1] See also: bold, fearless, intrepid; courage, fortitude, mettle, and fear.

[2] From the Ancient Egyptian sekhem, meaning “powerful one,” Sekhmet wielded alternate titles such as Mistress of Dread, Lady of Slaughter, One Before Whom Evil Trembles, and (probably) Do Not Mess With Me (I Mean It).

[3] Book of Judith 8:11-27.

[4] Shakespeare’s Petruchio greets Katherina “With scarfs and fans and double change of bravery,” while Milton in his Samson Agonistes describes our lion hero undone by a Delilah who “ Comes this way sailing/Like a stately ship . . . with all her bravery on.”

[5] Myrtle is also known as a tree whose leaves only release their fragrance—their inner strength—when crushed.

[6] And being splendidly arrayed, and having called upon God the Overseer and Preserver of all things, she took her two maids, and she leaned upon one, as a delicate female, and the other followed bearing her train. And she was blooming in the perfection of her beauty; and her face was cheerful, and it were benevolent, but her heart was straitened for fear. And having passed through all the doors, she stood before the king: and . . . having raised his face resplendent with glory, he looked with intense anger: and the queen fell, and changed her color as she fainted; and she bowed herself upon the head of the maid that went before her. (Esther 5:1, Septuagint)

daily.

In my backpack, besides the necessary textbooks and occasional laptop, extant of the obligative pencil case and always wallet, I carry with me:

+  two Pilot P-500 pens, extra-fine, back-up in case my other three Pilot P-500s fail me or in the event Staples decides to discontinue (again) stocking the Only True Pen in the Known Universe, a fact that I know because you don't just spend half of your high school life testing ink fluidities and line variations for nothing.

+  a pack of post-its, the small half-size sort, orange--which is unfortunate because I prefer the classic yellow or neon pink if absolutely imperative, but these were given as a gift and so I have to use them but mostly they look worn and warped and weary of two months travel in the front pocket without much play (yes, people gift me post-its).

+  four bobby pins, the usual black but actually quite miraculous seeing as with four bobby pins you can twist any amount of hair up into the perfect party bun, which is not only the latest Parisian trick but the answer to every bad hair day you've ever had.

+  two safety pins, the genesis of which I question but imagine will be a smart thing to have eventually.

+  a red pocket-size Moleskine, college-ruled, in which I write ideas when they strike (occasionally this actually happens) or notes on gathering the universe, like "Ernesto Miranda was killed in a knife fight. Police used a Miranda card from Miranda's own pocket to read his killer's rights." And "The first typewriter was called a 'literary piano.'" Or "What if you had a dramaturgue for your own life?" Which is a good question, because who doesn't want someone exploring and researching and understanding all the ins and outs and throughs of what makes something work and succeed and shine?

+  my Oyster card for the London Underground. In case of emergency.

+  Burt's Bees beeswax lip balm, classic Vitamin E + Peppermint because nothing else is ever so minty-fresh and moisturizing (do you hate that word as much as I do?), and also kissable because you just never know (really, you don't).

like a lake night.

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A TEST of TRUE GENIUS:

do you wish you'd thought of it first?

does it inspire you to create?

HOW to WRITE a CRAZY LOVE LETTER:

yes and yes.

this last week my walk up to campus has been punctuated by these pretty pointers from a girl in salt lake city. and if there's anything I like more than letters and love with a hint of crazy, it is the crazy love letter. what could I do but follow through?

these posts are my response to each poster's prompt, as per criteria two in the test above. some of this is fiction. all of it is true.

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Dear  ________ ,

One summer before middle school we spent a week at the lake and maybe you remember. It's a strange space, bleached and broken. Not like the lush lakeshores you'd promised me, nothing like the pictures in my books about Alaska or Michigan or Maine. But it was beautiful.

Your brothers laughing left me on the porch and you followed because you were young and determined to grow old, and I was young and forgiving. I found the floating dock and claimed it as my own; I lived there, I haunted the place, I swam to and around and under it until I stopped to sun-sleep on top of it, and that was a sort of swimming, too. Your dad said there was every possibility I was the changeling child of a water nymph. He quizzed me just in case. Where were you born? Indianapolis. How do you spell your favorite word? H-Y-P-O-A-L-L-E-R-G-E-N-I-C. What is your best friend's name? You were wearing only your stupid jean shorts and that feather headdress from the penny store, dressed to rob the dying dinner fire, smearing charcoal in lines across your cheeks like creamy cat whiskers. 

It must have been very late that last night because only turquoise lit the hillline and you carried your flashlight poised like a tomahawk above the skinny slope of your right shoulder as I followed you across the beach. I followed you because you'd asked me to and because I wanted to and because you can't really love a thing without giving it away. We reached the dock and I helped you up and we lay there, quiet.

I'd never been on the lake so late. The sky burned more bright than black and it was as if you lay one drop in the bottom of a bowl or could at the same time cup the entire dome of the earth in your open hands. I felt glorious just to breathe there, immortal, until I started thinking about it, about that star and that one, about this and me and the relative radius of a black hole, about the nights I have missed, am missing, will miss, and does that matter or will it? and what if each star were a story and they are each as complicated and thrilling and injured as your own, and if that is true then how does the universe contain such a mad mess, and then who is there to fix it? And how do I help or when does it stop and why did it begin? and my breath slowed and swelled until I might not have been breathing at all. You, flat on your back and eyes wide to the stars, said are you there and I, not knowing if I had heard right or if that was a question or even that it was meant for me, touched your wrist. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that you are like a lake night, which is to say that you are staggering and impossible and too much and exactly right and also that I love you. I am here.

exhale.

lugano lakeside | 2008

It is Sunday and I can breathe again. Laying across the floor of the nook, both arms at crane's angles over my head. It's snowing outside. I blink and breathe. Open and close and open. In and out and in.

Not that I haven't been breathing all along; I generally try to make a habit of it. Granted, there was that moment when my brother's basketball game was down to two points and 2.8 seconds and I don't think I was breathing then, not until Blake hit the three and March had nothing on that madness. Then driving home over point of the mountain the wind was doing double-time in the whiteout so I held my breath in some sort of counterploy, like maybe if there were a little less air in the world it wouldn't be trying so hard to rip me off the road. And okay, when Cumberbatch took a dive off St. Bart's the impact fair knocked the wind right out of me. Other than that, I breathe.

I guess what I mean is that this is different. There is something about Sunday breathing.

Poe wrote some seriously crazy stuff, and not just occasionally but always. One story's about a guy who literally loses his breath and, instead of dropping dead, heads out to hunt it down. In the ensuing adventure, Mr. Lacko'breath (really) breaks both his arms under a carriage, fractures his skull against an errant trunk, has his ears cut off by a curious surgeon, is condemned to death by hanging, finds himself dead and buried, and therewith carries on a conversation with the neighbor corpse before effecting their escape. The protagonist remains nonchalant, however, absolutely ambivalent, running commentary like any vaguely interesting afternoon story, punctuated by the occasional philosophy. At one point the guy's mentally repeating passages from the "Omnipresence of the Deity" the way some might count sheep. Like I said. Crazy.

It's all for the fun of it, the farce of it, the blatant burlesque, but I was thinking as I was breathing that maybe actually there's something to it. Maybe sometimes we really do lose our breath and simply keep on living, numb. On the one hand, you can't hurt anymore. On the other . . . well. You can't feel at all.

Breath. Bate it, catch it, hold it, gasp for it, save it, waste it. Out of it, under it, all in one. Deep. Of fresh air.  Of life. Take it away. 

These are the kinds of things you think about while Sunday breathing, sometimes, alongside inquiries into the function of sight and the way girls walk across ice and Pablo Neruda (because love cannot always fly without resting) and the possibility of victory and do we have enough eggs to make cookies? And when I say Sunday, I don't necessarily mean the seventh day of the week, though this happens to be my present predicament. It doesn't have to be really any particular day at all. Sometimes it's the seventh hour after six, figuratively speaking, or the seventh minute, or second. It's that quiet moment of lull and life where you connect the constellations and make sense of the mess. When you stop and breathe fully aware of that breath, that glorious inhale-exhale that remind you that you are, scientifically speaking, very much alive. Which, if you think about it, is a spectacular fact of the first order. You. Are. Alive.

on the up.

Sometimes on stairs or in elevators I think about the concept of up and also down, seeing as those are the choices, and how often I take the latter or occasionally neither, not moving any which way at all. Because down is easy and standing easier still, especially when it's cold outside and getting darker every day, winter on a tight winch lowering the sky and lengthening shadows, winter with her weakening wiles.

But then I think of the boy that once, he told me, encountered a staircase with a sign UP ONLY it said, UP ONLY, there underground in the deepest dark honeycombed echo of a parking garage, rock bottom as it were, and what if we chose that to be our only choice? What if we decided to go UP, he said, if we decided to always go UP? And he illustrated this interrogative with his hands in the air, reaching, pushing not only higher but more widely, clouds crumbling open above him. I just think we'd all be happier, he said. You know?

on writing.

I should be writing an essay right now. Oh well. | via 

BRIAN DOYLE is in his own words a hirsute shambling shuffling mumbling grumbling muttering muddled maundering meandering male being who edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon – the best university magazine in America, according to Newsweek, and “the best spiritual magazine in the country,” according to author Annie Dillard, clearly a woman of surpassing taste and discernment. His greatest accomplishments are that a riveting woman said yup when he mumbled a marriage proposal, that the Coherent Mercy then sent them three lanky snotty sneery testy sweet brilliant nutty muttering children in skin boats from the sea of the stars, and that he once made the all-star team in a Boston men’s basketball league that was a really tough league, guys drove the lane in that league they lost fingers, man, one time a guy drove to the basket and got hit so hard his right arm fell off but he was lefty and hit both free throws, so there you go. 

He is also my very favorite. For writing essay after essay that sing to the deepest parts of me. So last week when he came to campus and then to the cathedral, I followed him like the fangirl I am and took maniacal notes at all four possible readings of his smashing soaring wondrous words. Here are just a few pages of those notes, just because.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Thank you for your witness, gift of witness.

Great joy of writing is surprising yourself.

Type fast. It's the eleventh commandment.

The greatest thing I've learned to do as a writer is what not to write, what to leave out.

Take disparate things and stitch them together. Easiest way to connect is by telling a story and leave it shivering.

Explaining too much is a sin. Beware of commenting, sermonizing, expounding.

Look for repetition. Cutting is your best friend. Slay your darlings.

Look for boring verbs. One or two verb-changes can totally jazz up a piece.

Be totally naked between reader and writer, slip into each other.

Clarity. Ease of delivery. Read aloud to catch the muck and the guttering.

Stories have big shoulders. One story contains a million stories. Let the story be itself. Trust it. Essay is a voice unspooling a story.

Listen listen listen listen. Take maniacal notes.

Don't think. Turn your brain off. Just sit down and begin.

When you laugh you are much more yourself. Sometimes a funny story allows you to slip in the dagger.

People will tell you stories if you allow them to, and they will be extraordinary.

A great personal essay is in the end about everyone.

On dark days I think I am a thief. I am a story thief. I mill them for my own purposes and make money for it.

The more attention I pay to everyone else, the better writer I become.

Essays are arrows you send out in the world and sometimes they hit a heart.

There is a shard of holiness in everyone, like a great roaring splinter.

Slam language into ninth gear. Listen to the music of your sentences. Find rhythm in structure.

Write in one great crazy burst of insane creativity, and then go back over it as an engineer.

Libraries are holy, extraordinary things, they are not nouns but verbs, a beating heart at the center of community.

Witness is the story, to see day after day a person's grace under duress.

(on Gilead) It's a book that when the book ends the story is still shimmering somehow. It's about attentiveness, reverence, love in its biggest sense. A holy act.

No one talks about the people that nothing happens to but then something happens to them and there's no one to talk about it.

Insist on wonder and witness despite every evidence against it. 

Whether they're fiction or not, I like stories that are true, you know? That have bones.

The greatest tool for a writer is not your fingers but your ears. Your ears go straight to your heart.

(on his wife) She's such an extraordinary supernova of a human being.

When you're young the story is who am I? Who will I love? Or more importantly, more incessantly, who will love me? But as you grow older the story becomes witness, watching. Seeing each other for who you really are, can be, and will be.

things that just happen.

I am stealing words from my sister today, words she posted elsewhere and words that I want to post here. For the record. 

Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are.

jonathan safran foer | a convergence of birds

I like this for just about a million different reasons but mostly because it feels extremely loud and incredibly close to something somewhat murky that I've been recently feeling and so that was helpful, having words. And lately my universe is just a tablespoon of ground cloves and sudden snowstorms and flat tires and tea and essays and vague but persistent migraines and campus and home and listening and hair twisted up into a high bun and post-it notes and micron pens and night skies and the development of the Avant Garde and possible karma and editorials and sandwiches and the green light blinking across the lake, which I think about ironically as I sit on the dock with one bare foot over the side and into the water like one small boat against the current. My sister said we are living our lives and sometimes we forget that.

I want to be better at remembering.

I want to write words tonight but I cannot seem to catch them, they are twisting all around me formed and unformed, absurd. I do not know where this is going. 

Write a haiku to contain the universe, he says, and it feels especially genius because he is the one saying it and also there is much to say about passion, how it can stir you like unsuspecting sand under a winter breaker, physically up-ended from your apathy into pure movement, suddenly gold and glittering on the surface against the sun. It is an exercise in the small and simple, he insists. Haiku are so informed by their littleness, they are saying who we are and how we are and where we are is sufficient, even amongst the vast and eternal. Write a haiku to contain the universe. For a short spell I am caught up in the current, but in the undertow of afterthought I settle again to more shallow shores; his words are pretty but impossible.

Haiku haunt me. It is a personal prejudice, a hatred happenstance of the very first round of my second spelling bee in my fifth grade year. For days afterward and even when I ran into him, once, on an elevator in a city twice removed and unexpected years later, Ben Bertch breaks it down to me by way of greeting, H-A-I-K-U, he says, and I feel just as useless in that moment as I did in the one where I stood absolutely letter-less, the expected champion outdone by Japanese verse before ever even getting around to spelling denouement or entelechies, both of which I knew but maybe did not yet understand, not beyond dictionary definitions anyway, because this was back when things were less complicated, when real heartbreak did not yet exist and I felt betrayed only by my first love, my wildfire ardor for words and the shaping of them; haiku made me useless, so useless, therefore, was the haiku. There it is, I have decreed it, it is so, and such stands the ego limping even eleven years after the fact. Universes? Hardly. There are never even so many seventeen syllables enough to contain today.

 

At home tonight my best friend tells me about her day. "I talked to so many useful people," she says, and I find this inherently hilarious, unable to breathe, because how many useless minutes are there, anyway? I remember that part of the morning where I suddenly sat incapable on the couch for the space of a hollow heartbeat, or the time when I took the stairs only to find the bookshelf empty of the novel needed and so I just turned right back around, back to where I came from, nothing gained, not even any new thought.

But I also remember the text first thing that said isn't it beautiful today? and the way the mountains moved especially lush and lovely in the morning light and how the air against my skin was barely below the heat of my blood in a fusion that feels a lot like floating, one of my favorite functions of fall. I think about reading Sartre with my glasses on, when he sees her with her face towards the sky and I wondered if I were not going to love humanity. I remember the girl who daydreaming came so close to walking right through a lamp-post, another girl who said your sweater sparkles! as if goshdarnit life depended on exclamation marks, the boy who ate lunch alone in an empty courtyard of the library, carefully folding his chip bag across the string cheese wrapper like a boyscout boondoggle. I think of the kid in my film class who I am secretly in love with writing REDEMPTION REDEMPTION REDEMPTION across the top of his notes for Le Corbeau, I think of the trumpeted symphony spilling from the abandoned car in the Smith's parking lot, the trunk oddly slightly open, like a toddler's mouth while dreaming.

The world is a thrumming throbbing fluttering aflame thrill of a place.

Have you ever at the beach been waylaid by a wave? You turn your back to the sea for only a second, your mom wants to know if you put extra sunscreen on your shoulder, your sister is wailing at you to wait, the Amtrak pounds past and you are wondering about its passengers but the breaker rumbles suddenly too close in your seashell ear and takes. you. out. You are all arms and legs and unprepared lungs, you are going to die, you know it, you know it especially because you can see it, strangely, as if from above: the vision is murky like the water thrashing all around you and the sound is submerged, but it is there. I have read about Near Death Experiences (NDE) exactly like this, this angelic perspective and the choice to return--which you do, spitting and shaking on the sand--but what is amazing to me is the duality of the drama. You are here, you are there. It is at once absurd and absolutely plausible, you are testimony to it, you saw your own wild eyelids flickering blind.

 

When I was little I assumed this was a peculiarity of the sea only, but since then and hundreds of miles from any such coastline I have been metaphorically mauled by the surging surf enough times to count far past my fingers. I have watched myself say sentences like I woke up this morning and felt like it's over or listen to an entire lecture unaffected or hear heartache and accept it raw, without question. Sometimes I seem to have been drowning for days. I thrash against the words and images all around me--excavating dinosaur bones in my front lawn before kindergarten, holding hands in the Smithsonian, building cairns for my family to follow to Nine Mile Lagoon, falling asleep across three chairs in the EastTV studio, watching a cast-off cat tip into the gutter while I learn the flavor of sop buah on my new tongue and across the broken road a veiled woman lights a candle from her open window. Grasping for ground long since swept away.

 

The apostle asked us what we wanted from all this, our purpose in coming so far to often only be able to say so little. He had a very specific answer in mind, one printed out in a small, neat sentence within the first few pages of a book we all owned, but I liked Elder Lopis' answer best. To be useful, he said. I would like to become a useful person.

(A haiku humbly/to fall and to resurface/sufficient to save.)

photo | words

still he glittered + hummed.

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song.

zora neale hurston | their eyes were watching god

suddenly I see.

In my dream it was beautiful, the way Indonesia is beautiful in that green has never been so green and sometimes broken is the only beauty. But in my dream I am not in Indonesia, or at least not entirely because while I am walking barefoot across the dusty grid of a swamped sawah I can see ahead of me the bulbous rounds of Otago's Moeraki shore and my kiwi comrades are walking arms linked across my sisters' shoulders at the far spit where the land turns up into rugged Cornish cliffside, the top of which spirals into the pony-proportioned perfection of an Austrian castle. My brother is knee-deep in surf like T-Street at sunset and none of it makes any sense, not really, but I guess that's what to dream means, anyway. Everything you love, everyone you love, all in one place.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In my folklore class we talk about worldviews, which Dr. Eliason writes in blue on the board in his big-block boy handwriting and defines as the complete set of assumptions, attitudes, beliefs you possess about the world, the cosmos, and everything else. We all have them, and not just religiously; worldviews can be about stuff like political campaigns or travel itineraries or the particular advantages of a good high-heeled shoe. Like how a Maori might tell you the Moeraki boulders are the remains of eel baskets, calabashes and kumara, washed ashore from the wreckage of Arai-te-uru, just like geologists would say the strange stones are merely concretions created by the cementation of the Paleocene mudstone of the Moeraki formation, from which they were exhumed by coastal erosion. Both of which, incidentally, I assume to be true, depending on the day you ask.

I also believe that dreams can mean something.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I am walking alone, but towards together, and it is not like any dream I have ever had until I reach for the camera slung to swinging just above my right hip and before I have even so much as framed that laughing light of the new-spring sun against Iraani's wild wind-crazy hair it has become my most familiar nightmare of nearly three years now, which goes something like this: my camera does not work.

At least not really. Kind of. Almost. Functionally absolutely nothing seems to be wrong with it, but in my every attempt to capture the wide-wonderful world around me the thing becomes impossible. The shutter slows, the lens cracks, the aperture acts out, the film won't advance and meanwhile I am missing the world, the cosmos, and everything else that is in sudden sparkling sublimity all around me, unattainable. One time I am in Jordan and my dad is young, younger even than he looks now at forty-nine, and there is Petra and there are petroglyphs and I am putting all my weight into picture-taking the past to every effect but success.  Another dream I am closer to home and in my own lifetime, the cold mountain stream at Sugarhouse running rivulets around my bare ankles as I crouch low to capture my baby sisters playing Pocahontas just around the river bend. It is childhood and I cannot get it right, sunflare obstructing the pure light of Olivia's crooked smile and an abnormal aperture destroying the line of Naomi's golden bob against the baby curve of her jaw. This time I give up entirely, dropping the camera into the water to watch  it pushed and pulled up and over the pebbled creek bed and out into open current. Useless.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The thing about worldviews, though, is that they're never wrong or right, they just are, which sounds apathetic but actually you have to be very careful. Because worldviews are dangerous, as in often very fragile, and Dr. Eliason warns us about this, about the especially perilous pitfalls of ethnocentrism and ego.

All day I am unsettled because I have had this dream and it follows me, but it is nearly lunchtime before it catches up with my conscious, at which point my worldview does exactly what Dr. Eliason told it not to: shatters. Because very suddenly I see, I understand completely, because in those dreams I am myself and that camera is what I see; it is the lens with which I view the world, and something has happened to obscure it. In this instance the deduction doesn't take much--I know exactly the state I went to sleep in and see where my shutter would have stuck--but I begin to remember those other dreams, those various disasters, and begin to see a conveniently consistent thread between them all. Before those topsy-turvy trips to Nod I have exactly and always just had my worldview upset, experiences where I laid my thoughts on the table and seen them not only challenged, but effectively annihilated. I have never broken a bone, but I imagine belief can snap just as painfully. And afterward, the shock. Denial. Anger. Bargaining.

The good thing, though, he says about worldviews, is that they are elastic. Maybe they don't perhaps so much as shatter, but simply expand, and in the limbo between sudden new space and new thoughts needing proper organization, sometimes that feels a little empty. You'll need to review and rewrite, do some cut-and-paste---maybe even a little more cutting---before your world settles back into orbit. 

........................................................................................................

I wrote this exactly five months ago today, after two successively disastrous conversations, one good long curhat, and an hour's drive with Basket Case on repeat, which is why I think my high school English teacher always said you never know what you think until you write it down. I'm posting it now because a] it would just rot away in my draftbox anyhow and b] nearly half a year later, hindsight is a really good way to look at things.

embley and yewbert were hitting one another with croquet mallets

augustine ash via

I have this problem where I go to the library for something very, very specific and then leave with The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux. Well, this time anyway. Plus Kramer's The Sacred Art of Dying and a thin paperback on Manuals for Living. Last week it was a quarto on lettering and Emily Brontë. Basically I am easily side-tracked and should probably consider picking up a pair of blinders before I chance the stacks, you know, like Black Beauty wears during his stint as a cab horse and Ginger dies? And I'd cry and cry because Ginger was a full sixteen hands of her namesake's biting spice and all sorts of traumatic analysis? Anyway. Besides all the Shakespeare and constitutional literature that is my life right now, I've been reading this little biography for the past few days, between Lear and Locke. And by reading I mean keeping it on my kitchen table so I can justify a few pages while eating breakfast before the day starts, but I've long loved what Theroux calls Gorey's  "little pen-and-ink cartoon marplots of delicate fright" and am now somewhat enamored of the man himself.

But I was reading my nine pages this morning and came across a small paragraph on his abecedarian Gashlycrumb Tinies that ended with this: "Bad behavior, to my mind, always confirmed for Gorey an essential and unavoidable fact of life, proving to his amusement . . . not only that this is the way we are, but also in a sense we all live closer to our deficiencies than to our dreams."

I've thought about that all day. Because it is sad and true, at least and especially in the case of my own productivity in the last twenty-four hours. Before class this morning I wrote out a rather strict study and work schedule for the day, consisting of a good thirteen absolutely essential things to do--get done--and have effectively ticked off exactly only one and three-fourths of that baker's dozen. I'm not very good at maths or even numbers in general, but that's like only barely above a ten percent success rate, and that is bad. Dreams. Deficiencies.

One thing about the world ending tomorrow is that my American Heritage midterm is on Monday and it might be nice to avoid that potential disaster by way of armageddon. But Kim's true love is in Beijing so I won't cross any fingers just yet. Plus I'm pretty sure I'll actually live through the testing center but fail the Rapture.

And on an entirely other end note: The Epileptic Bicycle is one of my Gorey favorites, and I've always thought Embley would be a good name for a cat.

grey, quiet and tired and mean.

[ image my own : wales 2008 ]

One of those days, you know? Where it's not really like anything bad's happened--it's just nothing's happened. When you just wake up, and go to school, and do your homework, and come home, and do the dishes, and take out the trash, and do your homework, and make some dinner, and do your homework. Where you get emails every forty minutes or so, except they're emails from University Communications or InStyle or Jody Wilkinson Acura (why?). Or your phone rings and it's telemarketers. Spanish. Three times in one hour.

Sigh.

In Tolstoy today we got to the very heart of Anna Karenina, Part Four, you know, the really messy bit where you write dramadramadrama in the margins and discuss the mechanics of Vronsky's attempted suicide with the military boy who sits one desk ahead of you and to the right (because if we're talking guns, we should really talk to him). But once Mark wrote a few salient and numbered points on the board and our thoughts could follow with a bit more focus, the capital event was the spiritual revolution among the three main characters (and okay, I know, I know. Tolstoy doesn't do main characters. But for the sake of the story . . .). Most everyone was so super inspired by this meridian moment of forgiveness--I mean, you even like Karenin, for goodness' sake--but the thing about this incredible inner change is that it begins and ends in Part Four. In chapter seventeen we've got Karenin and Vronsky in tears on either side of Anna's deathbed. Twenty-four pages later Karenin's filed for divorce Anna's off to Italy.

And actually this is something Tolstoy does a lot, something I think is called reality? People were very upset by it. How do you feel the fire of forgiveness, the light of love, and then remain the same? Why would you make yourself miserable when you've seen the way to joy? Um. I raised my hand. Aren't we all this stupid? Isn't that part of the reason we find this so tragically beautiful? How many times have you done exactly this same thing? As in, like, for example: today I turned in a paper that was due 56 hours ago. It was miserable, the worst. Never again, I said. Which is why I am at this moment blogging when I have yet another paper to be turned in 42 hours from now? Right.

We fall down. And we get up.