So much beauty in the world…and nothing to fear.

Copyright 2009, DreamWorks Studios

That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember… I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.
– Ricky Fitts, American Beauty

Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), enlightened-misfit artist who lives next door to not-yet-enlightened Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), in Sam Mendes’ and Alan Ball’s brilliant film, American Beauty, videotapes the “sacred…in the ordinary:”* his parents at home, a plastic grocery bag “dancing” in the wind, a dead bird.

He captures the beauty to remember.

Last night, we attended an art show by a famous musician, S (for Short for…). He spoke, and 200 people listened. He did what I suspect many artists do: rambled through the mundane en route to the meaningful, circled around to hilarity. (His story about playing onstage with Willie Nelson makes me smile now.) S punctuated his talk with a few fly-by’s at what cannot be spoken, making what T.S. Eliot called “raid[s] on the inarticulate.”

One story, in particular, I will remember when I hear his band’s music or see his art or  read his name:

Leaving his home in rural North Carolina, S passed a horse in a field that passed in the night. He had to be somewhere but felt compelled to return to his house and retrieve his camera. S walked into the field and photographed the horse. S told the audience that perhaps this was morbid, photographing a dead horse.

But I don’t believe he thought it was. I didn’t think it was.

Standing before us, S looked down, as he must have when standing above the horse. Perhaps he was remembering that moment, reliving it, maybe forgetting that 200 people were listening.

In the field, he said, he was thinking how this body in the grass was on its journey toward becoming dirt.

As S spoke of the horse, I remembered American Beauty. I remembered that artists cannot look away. (I don’t remember who said that.)

When artist Tom Schulz introduced S, he said great artists make him want to paint. I’m grateful to S and to Ricky Fitts (created by Alan Ball, brought to life by Sam Mendes and Wes Bentley) and to Tom and Sheila Ennis and Lisa Rubenson and Lauren and to the entire “Team A” that put together the event. They make me want to write.

Why?

Because there’s so much beauty in the world, and I want to remember that. I want to remember that it’s okay for my heart to feel so much that sometimes it hurts. And I want to remember that there is nothing to fear.

 

*From Deng Ming-Dao’s unnamed poem in 365 Tao (HarperOne):

Umbrella, light, landscape, sky.
There is no language of the holy.
The sacred lies in the ordinary.

Paterno passes the puck with passive voice

Joe Paterno ( AP Photo/Pat Litlle, 2009)

I just read read a piece online (link to article in quote), and I’m peeved. There’s a more powerful phrase that alliterates with today’s P’s: I’m pi**ed off.

Allow me my soap pox for the moment:

“Paterno ‘knew inappropriate action was taken by Jerry Sandusky with a youngster’ in 2002.”

“...knew inappropriate action was taken by…” WTP?

In this context, passive voice reduces the impact of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged criminal acts of pedophilia. Plus it pushes Paterno one step further from complicity. Preferable: “Paterno knew Jerry Sandusky took inappropriate action with youngster in 2002.”

And “youngster?” Please. Spare us that word choice, which subtly connotes playfulness, boys being boys, easy-going participation.  How about the truth? “Child.”

In a perfect world of words, paid spinmeisters protecting the powerful would be prohibited from “speaking” on behalf of their clients. Parterno would have to speak for himself. Perhaps, he’d stumble upon what ought to be put before the public:

“I knew Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile, that he abused a child in my facilities in 2002. I chose not to go to the police over the weekend.” 

Paterno is not the criminal in this case. But make no mistake: he’s complicit, and his posse is using the passive voice to propose Paterno’s complicity is, well, less complicit.

There. I’ve said my peace. I’m going outside now to play soccer, or ride bikes, or simply be present while my children enjoy a sunny day. I need to unplug and let my pessimism lessen amidst the innocent shouts and joys of childhood.

Farming and Feeding

This, on “Talk of the Nation,” driving up to work this afternoon:

We’ve got to produce as much food by 2050 as we have in the last 8,000 years in order to feed our planet’s population.

Earth seen from Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972. Credit: NASA

I’d cite the source — the gentleman’s name and credentials — but interstates and tight traffic and note taking do not a good mix make. The fact fixed, though, and sticks with me…

We’ve got some planning and farming and feeding to do.

The Process Leading to a Fine Benediction

Moses: In some faith traditions, he's believed to be the author of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), including Numbers, mentioned in the text.

Students in each of my writing classes keep a blog for the semester, and my practice beginning this semester is to join them. (I’ve used a blog in the past to communicate with students but only last year began asking students to do the same.)

Before, I never modeled what I want students to do: compose something, not just anything, but something meaningful once a week, either an original composition or a link to something with brief (or not) personal commentary about the connection.

I’m so pleased with their work, and I hope that they are, too. They deserve to be.

We talk about how writing material percolates, composts, simmers, slow-roasts (insert your preferred verb) — often for long periods of time before the writer is ready to begin shaping the idea(s). They use their daybooks (a less double-X-chromosome-threatening term for “journal”) to get ideas down quickly, and then come back, add more, and so forward. (For my students: I’ve forgotten to share that I use the “drafts” feature in WordPress to build upon ideas that are percolating. Right now, I have 7 drafts in various stages of necessary, messy incoherence.)

William Sloane Coffin

Each week, I get an understandable question: “What do I blog about?”

I cannot tell writers what to compose; that would deny them the essential, uncomfortable, and liberating period of uncertainty we pass through. The best I can do, now, is model a post that is not “original:”

H. Stephen Shoemaker

My friend — author and liberal pastor-theologian Steve Shoemaker — adapted a benediction from William Sloane Coffin, the late author and liberal pastor-theologian. Steve asked Coffin for permission to make some changes, and last week, I asked Steve for his permission to make a (small) change.

Both men’s benedictions build upon the “Priestly Blessing,” a verse found in the Old Testament, specifically in Numbers. (I’m fairly sure neither Dr. Coffin nor Dr. Shoemaker asked permission of the original scribe(s) — maybe Moses? — but I haven’t asked.) You’ll know some of the language, perhaps: the Priestly Blessing infuses the first stanza, and is recited in many faith traditions (Judaic, Christian and more), plus it’s been popularized in films, books, television shows and onward.

I offer this because, well…because I like it:

Benediction

May the Great Spirit bless you
and keep you.
May the Great Spirit’s face
shine upon you and
be gracious unto you.

May the Great Spirit give you the grace
never to sell yourself short;
grace to risk something big
for something good;
grace to remember that the
world is too dangerous
for anything but truth and
too small for anything but love.

So, may the Great Spirit take your minds
and think through them;
may the Great Spirit take your lips
and speak through them;
may the Great Spirit take your hearts
and set them on fire.

William Sloane Coffin
Adapted by H. Stephen Shoemaker
Adapted, ever so minutely, by Malcolm Campbell

The Sun Also Rises

We rise at 4:30 and move with few words through our individual departure routines. For me: a shower (I never look so lovely as my wife in the morning), a cup of coffee, a quick breakfast. We meet at the door, carry-on backpacks zipped; confirm that we have photo ID’s and pre-printed boarding passes; then lock the house to join our duffel bags tossed into the car the night before.

It is dark, driving to the airport. Early, early morning has such promise, and all the more so when you’re departing for another place. I love it as much in the middle of my life as I did in my early 20s. Perhaps more so.

At the airport, Lauren waits with the bags while I maneuver back into traffic for weekly parking. Gray light now suffuses the scenery, giving shape to the cars and concrete structures not lit by towering, scatter-shot street lights. I find a parking space between two cars, an SUV and an SUV. It’s a tight fit. Aren’t all the choice parking spaces at airports? Takes me three back-and-forths to angle in, and I’m sad that I no longer possess the grace of a young driver, one who could nail the space’s angle in an even, one-handed turn.

Even at this hour, the air heaves with humid, late-summer heat. Sweat dampens my back and shirt where my carry-on backpack rests. I trudge toward the shuttle stop, eyes down, when reddish-orange light begins to enliven the gray. I stop, look east toward the source. The sun rises as a slit above the distant treeline. It climbs fast enough that I have time to watch its ascent until the star inflates to a full circle, huge on the horizon.

“Damn.” As in, “Well, I’ll be.” As in, “This is the center of our galaxy rising and I don’t see this often.”

=====

I remember a morning in San Sebastian, Spain, in July, 1989.

I was 22 and backpacking through Europe with money I’d saved working through college. This morning, I would board a train, make some connections, and meet two friends — Chuck and Katharine — in Paris. We did not form a complicated triangle; we were a platonic trio, ideal traveling companions.

I awoke early, gulped a cafe au lait and wrapped two bread rolls in a paper bag and thanked my hostess and walked into the dawn streets of the city’s historic district for the train station. I arrived early and sat on a bench. I smoked then and lit a cigarette and the smoke did not move in the air. I also remember thoughts of going somewhere else. No harm would be done. (We made plans in Madrid a week before to rendezvous at three outside a Paris train station. We would wait one hour. No shows meant plans had changed.)

But I felt like company. I broke bread, found water and boarded the train. I could stay in Paris for a couple days, or less.

=====

That summer, I bought and carried used books with me, read them, gave them away and bought more. But I could not part with a battered paperback edition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. (It is in my library today, a Greek ferry ticket inserted as a bookmark.) Hemingway is not my favorite writer today, but he was one of them in 1989, and the parallels are obvious: American expats — friends and paramours — traveling Europe, meeting up (or not) in train stations, exhausting our share of food and drink and the sights of towns, and then parting (or not) for other places. I fancied myself a writer then. I spent time with other writers and drank too much and held court at sidewalk cafe tables and kept moving, always, hangovers be damned.

=====

The train was empty, and there were no people on it. The windows in my car were open and the air was still and when the train lurched, right on schedule, and pulled from the station and picked up speed entering the countryside, warm wind blew rural scents through the car: brush-fire smoke, manure, earth. The sun rose, and I watched it, my head bouncing gently against the window. The moment was sublime. I was happy.

=====

I’ve held many jobs as a writer, most work-for-hire. I was happiest as a travel writer, something I did for many years. Bruce Chatwin writes in The Songlines of his years of “fantastic homelessness.” I understood. When Lauren and I married and settled in our hometown, I would ask her, again and again, to promise that we would leave one day.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked each time.

And always: “I don’t know.”

=====

Hemingway with Lady Duff Twysden, wife Hadley Hemingway, and others in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925. Lady Duff was the model for Lady Brett Ashley in the Sun Also Rises.

Jake, the protagonist in Hemingway’s novel, loves Lady Brett Ashley but cannot make love to her because of a war wound. An English professor at Chapel Hill suggested that Hemingway named his protagonist after Jacob, a patriarch of the Hebrew people, who wrestled an angel and, in doing so, received grace. Lady Brett Ashley loved Jake but could not be faithful to an impotent man. The final lines of the novel:

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so:” Jake’s acceptance. Jake’s grace.

=====

There are many excellent travel blogs, a million too many to read. This summer I followed a blog, Red Dirt Lattes. Sabrina, the author and photographer, chronicles her family’s summer travels, but her posts reach back in time to other places she’s lived. Her husband works for the U.N., so they move often. Sabrina links to other expat’s blogs, and the links form mazes like the back alleyways of Venice, Cairo, London, and other foreign villages in which I’ve become pleasantly lost. It’s not the same as traveling, of course, but it’s a nice way to pass some time.

=====

What if, when I asked Lauren to promise we would leave Charlotte, she said, “Let’s go now!”? We could have had a such a damned good time together.

But we have had such a damned good time together.

We are in our mid-40s. We have three sons. They are growing up, fast. We have a mortgage, jobs, decent health insurance, grandparents in town, soccer and baseball and basketball and football and wrestling teams, responsible babysitters, friends, a good school, two dogs, two geckos, one frog. We get to travel, often with the boys and sometimes the two of us, and then we come home. I am happy.

I cannot remember the last time I asked Lauren to promise we would leave Charlotte.

=====

The shuttle bus moves through the parking lot, picks up a few early travelers (mostly businessmen) and passes through a gate onto the roadway for the terminal. My head bounces gently against the large window facing east to the sun, still rising.

Earlier this day, the sun rose over San Sebastian. Would it be nice to be there? Yes, it’s pretty to think so.

But on this day, as on every other day, the sun also rises in Charlotte.

Fill an Ocean

Once, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, a therapist who was paying me well to help her sort through the general anxiety of life — okay, perhaps I was paying her — said, “What you don’t know about motives could fill an ocean.”

She was gentle with her observation, spoke it in a manner meant to soothe me, as if over time I might begin to remove one cup of ocean water at a time and move closer toward understanding why I behave the ways I do.

(I believe in global warming: melting glaciers, ice shelves, and…rising sea levels. I’m not pessimistic by nature, but this metaphor is becoming more and more Sisyphean. Whatever progress I make, the sea continues to rise. Time for a new metaphor.)

I think about her comment often, and even more during the past week having just returned from the beach. Gazing to the horizon promotes contemplation, yes?

(By the way, I was disappointed to learn that — depending upon a few mathematical variables — the horizon is generally three miles or so away. I prefer the infinite. Of course, when I run three miles, three miles feels infinite. It’s all relative. I think that’s what Einstein meant.)

Back to motives.

In my intimate relationships — with family, primarily, and especially my wife — I sometimes cut with words that fly so fast into the space between us that I’m not aware of how sharp they are, or where they came from. And when she reacts, I’ll brush away what I said as meaningless, accuse her of being overly sensitive. Or, if something she says or doesn’t say (or does or doesn’t do) hurts my feelings, I’ll retreat to my cave to sulk. In other situations, I might have a flash of anger or irritability that’s caused by…hell if I know. These are just three of at least three miles’ worth of examples.

So yes, what I don’t know about motives could fill an ocean.

Writing fiction is about conflict — “the human heart in conflict with itself” (Faulkner) — and when rendering truthful lies on paper, I’m more adept at working with motives. I can endow a character with a surface desire, beneath which deeper currents flow. I wish it were so easy with me.

A friend of mine (another writer) and I went for a bike ride a few weeks back. We talked about access to emotions. “Well, there’s anger…and that’s it,” he said. “Plenty of retrospection afterward, but that never goes anywhere.” I understood. We laughed, and I tossed  up a rhetorical question: “Maybe it’s a gender thing?”

We rode most of the way back in silence. What was I thinking? Something about motives?

Hell if I know.

Between the Covers

This post title may mislead. Apologies or rest assured, whichever suits.

A few comments from friends expressed amazement from my last post that (a) I’ve kept journals for so long; and that (b) the writing must be profound.

With the exception of the very first journal entry, inked in the undergraduate library at UNC-Chapel Hill, I’ve not gone through my journals to read entries. I keep them because I think that one day I might.

Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. “Maybe:” I like this word.

(An aside: one summer, living in a rental house in a tourist destination with a band of waiters eager for meager tips, the landlord hired a painter to slap down two layers on the interior walls. After a couple weeks of inhaling the sweet-noxious smell of wet paint, we began to ask if the painter would be done “soon.” His answer, always the same: “Yes, maybe no.”* So far as I know, that man is still painting the house.)

Without re-reading my journals, I know what flows between the covers: pledges to write more, exercise more, eat and drink less, take a positive outlook on the day. In other words, entries designed to soothe my restless self (selves). Plus, there’s proof that whatever talent I may possess does not include writing poetry or song lyrics.

Say those entries equal 80-plus percent of the output. What makes up the other 20 percent?

Ideas for essays or short stories or characters, anecdotes, conversations overhead, events that struck me as serendipitous or synchronicity at work. For ease of reference, when I sensed I was moving beyond self-soothing drivel, I would circle a letter beside the entry — “I” for idea, “F” for fiction, “TD” for to do, etc. — thinking I would come back soon to follow the threads.

“Soon” has passed, unless the concept is measured against tectonic plate movement or the date(s) of the Rapture, as predicted by evangelical preachers in Texas.

My point? Those stacks of 25+ years of journals aren’t full of writing with a capital ‘W.’ They’re just full of writing. Should there be a bus barreling toward me today with my name on the grille, will all that writing be worthwhile?

Yes. Maybe no.

So, to my incoming students: write anyway, just in case the answer is “Yes.”

*I later learned the painter’s phrase originated from a movie, the name of which I’ve forgotten. Maybe it’s recorded somewhere in one of my journals. Or not.