ENTERPRISING MORNING GLORY
Tag: Inspiration
SPACE FOR DECOMPRESSION
It’s hard to believe five years have passed since we made the loft of the barn much more usable.
When we moved here, the loft was accessible only via a second-floor catwalk from the master bedroom, and getting there and back could be tricky, especially when snow was piled on the deck.
I’ll save the home renovation project description and photos for another time, and just mention that it involved removing the catwalk, deck, bedroom doorway, and barn loft doorway, installing stairs inside the barn and lighting in the loft.
What it essentially did was give us another 450 square feet of usable work and storage space – especially once we replaced the leaky roof two years ago. (Gee, I think that’s the size of some of those Ikea model apartments.)
Admittedly, it’s not someplace you linger for much of the year. It’s not insulated and there’s no heat, so you do little more than dash in and out in January-February or July-August, but for me it’s been a huge blessing.
As I wrote in August 2009, an “especially humid Tuesday: No Rick yesterday or today.” Our carpenter/master electrician was “off on another project.” We were in no rush, anyway. Still, enough of the project had progressed for me to note, “Having the top of the barn – the Squirrel Piss Studio or Jnana’s Red Barn or the Summer House – finally available as usable space is mind-boggling. At last! Ten years. A time for decompression, unpacking. The difference in scale as a result of the larger space (framed posters, for instance, now appear so much smaller).” I detailed more effusively in my journal. What I noted was “t
he array of items: places I’ve gone off to, to live. Sometimes unwillingly. The skulls – steer, horse, dog. Elk bones. Shells.
“So much to discard, too. My burgundy valet bag, an artifact of the past (after 9/11, nobody travels with one). Burgundy, LAL’s color. Same as the Chevy. The specially designed coat hangers, with their folding hooks – open for the hotel, closed to slide into the bag. Those two years, a ‘backpack for business travelers.’
“A Quaker altar: a candle on a piece of squared birch firewood, the side with bark facing the sitter; incense; in time, flowers or dried arrangement; Bible, Gita, notebook?
“I sit in the space and recall how Roger Pfingston could sit for hours in front of a blank piece of paper without writing a word. Maybe smoke a cigar. Now see it as his way of meditation and self-collection.”
The space also gave me a place to resume hatha yoga exercises after way too long a hiatus.
I love having large surfaces where I can spread out the pages for a poetry collection and rearrange the sequence. I’m not one who works easily with a crowded desk, unlike many of my colleagues. No, it’s Zen order or Quaker/Shaker simplicity I desire.
The loft is far from the year-round office studio I’d envisioned when we moved here. To get there, though, apart from the money, we’d have to cover the wooden underside of the roof I’ve come to enjoy viewing. The feel would become much different than the funky, well, summer cottage I so much enjoy now – even when it’s fall and spring rather than summer when I most use it.
Besides, to be candid, as I’m able to clean out and dispose of more and more, and as I move increasingly to online, paperless writing and submissions, I don’t really need the big office of those earlier dreams. At least that’s what I’m thinking now.
Who knows what’s really ahead.
SABBATICAL LESSONS
As I said at the time …
When I was 38, several developments occurred in a way that allowed me to give myself a year of unemployment, drawing largely on savings. Rather than travel the world or undertake some related activity, I hunkered down in a writing spree [that resulted in the novels now (finally) being published]. The sabbatical meant that for the first time in my life, I had a period of uninterrupted concentration on this work. The writing itself. Three fast novels, now to be revised, and thud! skidding to a crash or whatever. Enough to expand to a dozen, in the hours of revision after I went back to the paying work. Looking back, I know it had to be done. And done then.
Nevertheless, in my struggle between practicality and art, there’s been a longstanding sense of guilt in spending time on myself. To my surprise, a resolution came through a workshop on prayer, when we were divided into smaller groups and then asked to write out a prayer request. Not for what others might need or a social issue, but for something we needed individually. “Ask for something for yourself,” which the others would then pray for.
Of course, each of us works differently. I’m not one for the blank sheet writer’s block syndrome: I’m usually springing from notes jotted down earlier. (Pacing is another matter: just where is this going? And why?)
In contrast, I recall a poet friend who was also a public school teacher; he was quite prolific during the busy school year, yet during the summer, could produce little, though he could never quite figure out why. (He could also stare at a piece of paper for five hours and then turn out a sharply focused gem.) The other friend, having all the leisure in the world, could produce only disconnected flashes. Could it be some juggling or resistance is also essential to the practice?
SOCCER MOM, RUGBY DAD
As I said at the time …
So here we are. Who would have thought we’d be attending kids’ soccer and rugby matches? Not us!
Or dealing with declining parents. Your mother’s dementia must be difficult. You mention that she still remembers people and is in a wheelchair, which makes me wonder if she’s afflicted with Alzheimer’s or something different. My wife and the girls talk fondly of Grandpa Marion and how his Alzheimer’s brought out a sweetness in him, while another, with episodes in the past years, turns mean and paranoid. Parkinson’s is rough, too, with its long decline; I lost a dear Mennonite mentor last January, in Virginia, and one of my best friends here is in the early stages – so far, controlled by medication, when they get it right.
Galapagos? My elder girl will be very envious. At age 11, she went on a big Darwin kick, a passion that has never abated. A few years ago, we went down to the Boston Museum of Science for a special exhibit they had, and it was quite impressive. In all of the historical debate over his insights, I’m surprised we don’t hear more about the religious roots of his work – most of his encouragement and support seemed to come from clergymen. Me, I’m quite fond of his later affection with earthworms. Maybe it has to do with my monster composting.
Now I still want to hear how you distinguish between mystery and magic. I have a few ideas, but I doubt they’re as expansive or insightful as yours.
In the meantime, I’m hoping to get back to poetry by early fall. Why can’t I stick to just one kind of writing? Or be somehow easily identifiable? A good friend’s son, who is a successful serious novelist, seems to have the same problem. He, too, wants every book to be unique, rather than a continuation of or variation on his others.
Gotta run … time to commute, again. And tomorrow, another birthday. How can that be?
FITS MY WORK, TOO
What better medium than collage to express the accumulation of memories?
ROMARE BEARDEN, creator of A Black Odyssey series of paintings
JUST A ROLLING STONE
Lately, thanks in part to a great yard-sale find, I’ve been revisiting a lot of Bob Dylan and realizing how many phrases that pass through my head originate in his lyrics. Or at least the ones that also have a musical line. I came to him in late ’62 or early ’63 and was a loyal fan until he went electrified and left the activist and folk scenes. Count me among the contingent that felt betrayed.
OK, I’ve come to recognize and even admire a lot of significant material he wrote in the years since. The man could turn a phrase, for certain, even when he was drawing heavily from others.
The line, “Like a Rolling Stone,” had me wondering about its relationship to the naming of the band and the rock magazine, all three products of the ’60s. Did the song prompt the other two?
Turns out the band was formed in ’62; the song, ’65; and the magazine, then a tabloid newspaper, November 9, ’67. But, in another twist, the band took its name from Muddy Waters’ 1950 “Rollin’ Stone.”
As for the popular phrase, “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” the line points to John Heywood’s 1546 translation of the Roman-era Pubilius Syrus. So it’s been rolling around for some time.
~*~
Also from the ’60s was my discovery of the common Pennsylvania road sign, “Beware of Rolling Rock,” along with the brew. I suppose looking at the connection between those two would be like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or even why the chicken crossed the road before or after.
PUBLIC MAGAZINE SWAP
One of the most popular services at our local library is a small cart in the hallway where patrons leave magazines they subscribe to. The periodicals become free for the taking.
Considering the cutbacks in the library’s own subscriptions (accompanying the cuts in the hours the building’s staffed and open), it’s a major service.
We feel good leaving our now-read copies, and feel grateful when we pick up others for perusal.
It’s quite an impressive array still coming in the mail. Hip, hip, hooray!
CORNFLOWER EYE
The sky of America’s interior West is a dry eternity – an intense blue I see reflected in the cornflower bloom, or certain other blossoms, such as flax.
Curiously, the flower itself has no direct relationship to the cornstalk or ear. Its naming presents a mystery, to the modern ear, at least.
Now that I dwell under the commonly milky skies of New Hampshire, I find the blooming cornflower celebrates that vibrant blueness in my memory, and locales suddenly overlap in my mind, making me grateful to once again acknowledge that fullness and contrast. By extension, the cornflower blue sky extends to open spaces reaching westward from the Great Plains, with another set of experiences within me.
Gaze, then, into such deep color, undiluted, and its inexplicable essence.
CHANGING STYLE, CHANGING TASTE, CHANGING DIRECTION
Driving any of my back routes to the beach, I pass impressive houses that have views of the water. Often, they’re old estates reflecting established money. Some are infused with history. Some are large, with four or more chimneys. Others are cozy cottages with four-season porches.
For much of my life, I would have dreamed of owning such a place.
Lately, though, there’s been a sea-change in my perspective. Part of it is no doubt my arrival at a point in life called retirement, although for me it’s been more a matter of culminating focus on the Real Work, as the poet Gary Snyder calls it. Another part of it has to do with stripping away all of the competing visions of where I thought my life might have been heading. The two dovetail, actually.
When I was starting out, I held often contradictory goals. As one date once admitted, she couldn’t decide whether I’d been in a corner office in a Manhattan tower or in an artist’s garret 10 years hence, and she wasn’t far off the mark, even before the ashram intervened.
Of course, the corner office and the house overlooking the water both assume a sizable income, and that was never in the offing for a journalist unless I somehow became publisher at a young age. Unlikely from the outset, but all the more so once the hippie movement kicked in.
Even so, as a writer, there was always the dream of the blockbuster novel that became a hot movie, but my work kept veering more and more toward the experimental while the publishing industry kept constricting. You get the picture.
You could add to that the possibility of a wealthy girlfriend or the talented one whose career took off big time, but both of those went up in smoke. Or whatever.
Come to think of it, the dream wasn’t just about houses. You could figure in the shiny cars, too, or a sailboat or global travel.
The vision, as it turned out, included an entire lifestyle. An exteneded family with a handful of my own kids, at the least, running around. Many friends and business acquaintances, along with political connections, all coming to stay in the guestroom or guesthouse. A fully stocked library with an impressive collection. An art collection, too.
What it didn’t include was the life I’ve wound up living. Much smaller scale. As a writer, what I really require is blocks of uninterrupted time and solitude. Let’s be honest. A studio can be not much larger than a closet, for that matter.
As for the big place? It would need household staff, for one thing. And a long list of handymen.
What I have instead is an old house and its barn in a small city, along with a common car with 250k on the speedometer. It’s more than enough to handle, even before adding the family.
On top of it all, I also have a shelf of books with my name as author.
CLASSICS MADE IN THE USA
If classical music’s to find a fuller audience in America, the works of our own composers need to be presented. Especially those I call the Illuminists, after the great painters who finally have found widespread appreciation.
I love the orchestral works of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, MacDowell, Griffes … and no other composer spanned so much change within two decades as Charles Ives.
We know only the surface. Listen closely, and you’ll find none of them sounds truly German, despite the accusations. Even were it true, we need to remember (a) German was the standard for classical music, so much so that even Dvorak suffered, and (b) German was a central component of American culture at the time, anyway – it was even a required language in many major city high schools.
Acknowledging this puts Aaron Copland within a longer tradition, and all of those who follow.
Now, if our major orchestras would only live up to the challenge. Is it really to much to ask that they play a fourth of their repertoire from their home base?
Jnana's Red Barn 