You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Though certainly for the revision. As well as compression and redistillation. And more revision.
His estimate, to me, seems quite optimistic.
I’m thinking it can be applied to many more examples of where human creative action is involved, too.
Go ahead, name one where you wish you had more time for the project.
His sympathy was much appreciated while I worked with one around the garden.
So here’s why I hate using a weed whacker.
Would herbicides, which we don’t use, do the job better? (Satan, get thee behind me.)
The governmental seat for sprawling Washington County is the town of Machias, or “bad little falls” in the river where it meets an arm of the Atlantic. Well, others have suggested the Passamaquoddy term would be more accurately rendered as “nasty” or something I suspect is much worse. From what I’ve seen, going over the cataract at the tidal line in a canoe or any other kind of boat would have been fatal. Not that I want to tempt anyone to prove me wrong, like those who have actually gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
That said, let’s look at some more facts about the town and its neighboring East Machias, Machiasport, and related neighborhoods.
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Or should I say “bay”? My weekend at the Common Ground Fair was followed by the better part of the week cruising Penobscot Bay in a historic schooner. My first time overnight in a ship, at that.
I’m just beginning to digest the experience, but it was my second digital detox within a month – a healthy opportunity, to my mind. I’m sure you’ll be reading a full report sometime in the future here.
At least my body’s home now.
It’s a favorite in our home from late spring on. We use charcoal well into autumn.
Using the same words
meaning mean different things
When I first became active in Dover Friends Meeting in the late 1980s, a group of members and attenders seriously explored the possibilities of creating a cohousing project. Their minutes filed in the meetinghouse could provide the foundation for a fascinating master’s degree exposition, but the wide range of differences in the participants’ needs and dreams proved to be too diverse to accommodate into joint action. Perhaps economic resource differences also came into play. On my end, I was single but had to consider what might happen if I met the ultimate partner and she had six kids. Ahem.
As it was, when I finally met and wed the almost perfect woman, she came with two marvelous daughters and a German mother-in-law, plus she needed or at least dreamed of and deeply desired space for a large garden. My ultimate party obviously would have required much more than a single bedroom with kitchen privileges.
Still, when I looked at what was then the Stringfellow house next to the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, I mused about how it might have evolved as the Friends shared housing project.
Maybe, as I’ve later learned, I wasn’t that far off target.
Better known as the Osborne-Cartland house, this was built by one prominent Dover Quaker and later owned by others with Friends’ connections.
In fact, it’s one more place the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier likely stayed in his many visits to Dover, thanks to his Cartland cousins.
And it had carved off a slice of the original meetinghouse property.
Yes, it plays into my new book, Quaking Dover.
By the way, I should note that it suggests a Quaker neighborhood around the meetinghouse.
Between it and the Isaac Wendell home I recently posted about across Central Avenue was the Stephen Hanson house where Saint Joseph Roman Catholic edifice now stands. Hanson was somehow prominent in introducing manufacturing to Dover and built the house with his wife, Lydia Brown, after razing two smaller dwellings.
Wish I could show you what they, too, built.
“Gimmicks” is, of course, a loaded word, pejorative, “cheap tricks,” say in contrast to “devices” or structural support or a Greek chorus or some such. In Vonnegut’s day, his repeated quips made him hip, sassy, cool, droll, fun to read, on the same shelf as supercharged Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. They were never dull, archly serious, overtly pedantic. Oh, maybe strike the last item, in retrospect. But somehow we always wanted another hit. I don’t mean that in the best-seller sense. No, that would be a sell-out. (Maybe that’s the crux of the issue you’re raising.)
As much as I loved Vonnegut’s work, especially Rosewater, I’m surprised how little I remember all these years later, apart from the asterisk, just don’t ask me which novel that punctuated.
By the way, I am taken with the ideal of a short novel, though obtaining that can be elusive.
One facet to consider is the way Vonnegut spoke from the Midwest, a region largely ignored or overlooked in American literature, in contrast to New York City mostly Manhattan but rarely Queens or the Bronx. That in itself was a major accomplishment, even if it was from his firehouse on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So it goes.
Well, his father did run a hardware store and had to sell, uh, useful gimmicks. Drain stoppers, screws, nuts, hammers. (Bang, bang, expletive.)
It is amazing how much “bad writing” fills “great literature,” or even the New York Times Magazine, as one of my ambitious writing teachers led us to see. (He, too, had his own addiction to cool as in gimmicks.)
One question you stir up is how much a piece works for the time when it’s published and how much will still work (function) in later eras? And why?
What did your daughter think of the book, anyway?
The realm of religion can certainly express our highest aspirations as well as manifest some of our darkest fears, as I feel I’ve examined in my new book Quaking Dover.
In my research of early New England, for instance, I see too clearly how often the differences between the Calvinist Protestants known as Puritans led to violent clashes with the French Roman Catholics to the north, as well as the other way around. (Not that I’d expect it to have differed if the Anglicans/Episcopalians had been in charge rather than the Puritans.)
Through their mindsets, the English, in their negotiations with the Indigenous tribes, crudely failed to acknowledge intricacies of decorum or ceremony that included food and dancing. Not so the French, whose missionaries to the Natives established bridges between the Native and Christian faiths. The priests even lived in tribal villages.
More critically, the English failed to impose the moral standards of their faith in their transactions with the Natives. Fair trade rather than widespread cheating would have been a start.
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Where I’m now living, reciting the rosary is an important ritual among the local Passamaquoddy, especially at wakes and funerals. One late tribal leader was also a deacon and has left notes of his efforts to his blend Native religion and his Roman Catholic teachings. I’m hoping that some of this will find publication.
What’s the hold?
Are there comforting commonalities of rosary with chanting or even drumming? Or, from my end, might something connect to the long-lost art of Quakers who preached in “tones,” otherwise called sing-song?
Considering a young cousin’s ability to mimic one minister’s exhorting preaching style I encountered among Ohio’s remaining Wilburite Friends, I’m left wondering how much of the Quaker’s messages was formulaic and how much original, either way an emotional outburst not found in academic sermons and homilies delivered from a pulpit.
I suspect there’s a lot to be learned through what Quaker Douglas Steere called “mutual irradiation” when we do what’s sometimes called “listening in tongues” here.
It doesn’t always have to be about religion, either, though it may underpin much of the historical thinking.
One fascinating new voice from the Indigenous view is Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Her websites – lbrooks.people(dot)amherst.edu/thecommonpot/ and ourbelovedkin(dot)com/awikhigan/index – continue her presentation.
I believe we can all be enriched by participating in such sharing.
Heaven forbid I give anyone a false impression of the place I’m now residing. With all of its isolation from much of the rest of the nation, Eastport can be way too small for many people, though for a few others that adds to the appeal, even in the depths of a very long winter, which for some of us has a charm all its own.
For a sense of our life, find and then stream the Northern Exposure television series, and throw in a demographic that skewers heavily toward retirees and too many summer people, many of whom we’d love to have year-round. We’re not even as faraway as Cicely’s Alaska, either.
One of the unanticipated dramas is at the local government level. While Eastport is organized as a city, our ruling council has had more than its share of friction going, well, far back, as reflected in the ongoing turnover of our city managers and police chiefs. Last I heard, the assessor/building code inspector was also open.
Pay scale is only part of the problem.
Council meetings are often reported, in print and by word of mouth, as contentious, so much so that one member was forced off the council altogether after obscenity-laced outbursts, another fine councilor resigned in utter exhaustion, and one resident once again started recall petitions after being cut off in public discussion.
There are good reasons a popular bumper sticker does say “Don’t New York My Eastport.” However you want to interpret it. I hope it doesn’t include poetry in our monthly open mic sessions.
Not only is there a tension between the born-and-raised here locals and those of us who are from away (PFAs), or those who pinch pennies and those who see investing in the future, the tension can be seen between paying the bills now versus long-term vision.
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One bit of contention that came up since my moving here has been the painting of a downtown crosswalk by a volunteer group. Their color scheme was a rainbow, emblematic of their identity. I thought it was great, in part because drivers wouldn’t be able to overlook it. Safety first, right?
But then the blowback came, and the council backtracked.
I can understand the opposition, which saw the colors as a partisan statement, something I would resent if someone were in turn to paint a crosswalk in some kind of Trump support. Perhaps, more neutrally, a sexual abstinence outside of marriage stance? These were, in other words, gut-level issues that led to a slippery slope or the proverbial can of worms.
Not that there are easy solutions.
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I’m not about to run for city council or the school board – we need younger blood than I’d offer, and someone more focused on detail than I’d muster these days.
But I’ll certainly back others who are willing to embrace the challenges openly.
Jnana's Red Barn 