Standing in the Wake

I remember something which I read many years ago by the critic Harold Bloom – he strongly advocated that teachers and students go back to the forced memorization of poems and other pithy fragments -- he said the lines will come back to you in trying moments, perhaps decades later, after you have memorized them.

A passage that comes to mind – as I stand folding clothes in this onslaught of perpetual holiday ruin that will not abate until college classes resume for my children after Martin Luther King Day – is this fragment by Tennyson from his poem, “Ulysses” – I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I have many ideas for writing these days, and I would write if only I had a few quiet hours; if only I could think the words through long enough to add a period, or even a comma. If only I could see and be seen beyond this other guise . . .

I also think of a short bit of advice from mythologist and writer, Joseph Campbell: Follow your bliss. Some days I find encouragement in that phrase; other days I feel cynical anger. Having been unable to write sufficiently for almost a month now, this is a day of cynical anger.

Campbell was said to read/write/study for nine hours per day. So many writers are that way – holing up for hours, days, weeks at a time – perhaps in glorious solitude – until they finish the thing they were meant to do. I, on the other hand, have spent 24 years angling to steal 10- or 20-minute slivers of time for my daily bliss – and not every day. Now I’ve reached a footing in life where I might enjoy two or three hours per day – barring holidays, weekends, summers, and emergencies.

I often hear such bits of advice – just do it – take the time, don’t ask for it – let others do the work – that sort of thing. And yet, on days such as this with the dryer whirring, the washer spinning, and the days blurring, I can’t help but think of the shadowy figure behind those great writers/artists who washed the clothes and dishes, fixed the meals, cleaned, and tended children through to adulthood and beyond. I become angry, not just for myself, but for all those people who go back to their ordinary jobs today, taking the less blissful route in order to contribute to the mainstays of human existence. I’m sure my family would have fallen apart if I had followed my bliss to the core – and I often wonder if the responsible, moderate person can ever succeed at an art.

Dostoevski said, There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings. I’ve spent decades thinking, how do we become worthy of our sufferings, our experience – and with so little time to do it? I’ve concluded that creative expression is one way to make us worthy – otherwise, it’s just suffering. And, it doesn’t have to be in nine-hour blocks per day – perhaps for today our most worthwhile expression is in the way we fold clothes, place food on a plate or arrange fruit in a bowl.

I have this memory of my own mother who would spend days canning my father’s fall harvest of vegetables – it was not her bliss – she loved oil painting and she always wanted to write – but she would can the vegetables from the garden because someone had to. Once the green beans were nestled in their jars for a season, she would go out to pick a few thin red peppers to place in the jars – a splash of color, she would say – and she’d stand back to assess the placement of one pepper in each jar – she’d rearrange, stand back again, finally screw on the lids and put jars in the canner to boil – and in the evening or the next day she’d arrange the jars on a shelf in the fruit cellar so that bits of red were visible – here and there -- among throngs of green. She had a habit of satisfactorily saying, There! – once something looked good enough to paint.

This blog is a hodge-podge of leftovers from half-baked, month-long ruminations – the words or images of others that stuck with me and came up for review. I limp through my writing today; I can hardly imagine streaming through the real writing of my intended book ever again . . . and I have weeks to go before I wake . . . or something like that.