Seventy Years of Diphthongs and Buttery Long Vowels

Donald Hall’s new collection of essays, Essays After Eighty, came out a couple weeks ago. “Oh frabjous day!” Let’s be honest, we had given the man up for dead more than twenty years past when his colon cancer metastasized to his liver. He survived that to endure the horrendous loss of Jane Kenyon. Then, in his words, poetry abandoned him (Poetry is sex, according to the Donald Hall Lost Muse Theorem; sex requires testosterone; testosterone decreases with age). So he was left to write prose in his celebrated blue chair by the window; then, with one of his stupid cigarettes, he accidentally set fire to the blue chair, which was hauled outside and put to death by axe-wielding firemen. Old age, as he writes, is “a ceremony of losses.”

I admit to a weakness for Hall’s prose, partly because of what he did to mine years ago. He pared and whittled my essays and helped me understand the delights of revision. But he turned me into such a slavish disciple that he finally said, “Don’t let me turn your prose into a telegram.” I think most writers write — whether anything from essay to e-mail — with a couple people looking over their shoulders. I’m no exception, and Don Hall is almost always there. (And I suspect as I get more prolix with age, he gets unhappier with me.) (And he doesn’t like all these parentheses either).

Mostly, my admiration for his work begins in the voice, hence my pleasure at hearing/reading that voice again. I can yoke “hearing” and “reading” because some of the same qualities come through both. These are undefinable, but unmistakable, qualities that define the essence of the man. They emerge from the round tones of the podium — as he likes to say, “We rise to assonance.” They riff off the ground rhythm of the language — he once told me that he and Donald Justice would carry on conversations in iambs. They grow directly from his tone — the Harvard bite of clever, the sly New Hampshire wit, the genuine and naked laugh.

But I should get out of the way and let the words speak for themselves. Here’s a paragraph that talks about the lost muse.

            “Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels. As I grew older — collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five — poetry abandoned me. How could I complain after seventy years of diphthongs? The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual. The shadow mind pours out metaphors — at first poets may not understand what they say — that lead to emotional revelation. For a male poet, imagination and tongue-sweetness require a blast of hormones. When testosterone diminishes . . .” [Hall’s ellipsis]

I read this paragraph slowly and carefully, and I think it’s maybe only the line break, not the poetry, that has abandoned him. But the metaphors don’t “pour out” anymore; now he writes what he sees, and he tells stories. And if you’re 86 and still writing, the truth is never far away.

“Old age sits in a chair, writing a little and diminishing. Exhaustion limits energy. Yesterday my first nap was at nine-thirty a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.”

“[A]mbition no longer has plans for the future—except these essays. My goal in life is making it to the bathroom. In the past I was often advised to live in the moment. Now what else can I do?”

“In the morning [my companion] stirs quantities of sweet onion and five-year-old cheddar into a four-egg omelet, which is outstanding. She leaves to teach French 4. I pick up my pen.”

Pick it up, again.

But then the guy watching over my shoulder tells me, “Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell . . . . [I]f the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they may be, the essay fails.” Okay.

At eighty, Hall surrendered his license after two minor accidents, giving up what was left of his physical independence. Soon after, he dreamed he was in a frightening house, wanting to escape, searching for a door he couldn’t find. He was in a house without doors. Then, in real life, he unwittingly left a cigarette ember in his blue chair. During the night, he was startled awake by a smoke alarm and saw smoke pouring into his bedroom through the door. The Life Alert he wore around his neck saved him.

Imagine a smoldering and shredded blue chair standing alone in the snow, a chair that hosted decades of writing. Or just imagine being 86 years old. Is that contrary enough?

********

All quotations are from Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

What Are People For?

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:28

“Monks, we who look at the whole and not just the part, know that we too are systems of interdependence, of feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness all interconnected. Investigating in this way, we come to realize that there is no me or mine in any one part, just as a sound does not belong to any one part of the lute.” Samyutta Nikaya, from Buddha Speaks

       

            This is a moral tale about me and an infection: giardiasis, beaver fever.  Giardia lamblia trophozoites live in the small intestine of the host—in this case, me on my third straight day of a hosting that was ruining a visit with my sister in Hampton, Virginia.

           A trophozoite is a parasitic protozoan.  Giardia lamblia is slightly elongated with two nuclei, cartoon-faced, victim of caricature.  When the Giardia protozoa attach themselves in numbers to the small intestine, they promote what any kind of intestinal irritation promotes—but on a scale that seems, at the time, epic.  I think I carried my protozoa to Virginia from a spring pool in the Adirondack State Park.

            Not to put too fine a point on it, but giardiasis leaves a lot of time for sitting around and contemplating, generally about giardiasis. Questions arise: what are humans for anyway? The answers are humbling.

            On that third day of my sitting in, the air temperature had reached 100 degrees, with the heat index over 115.  The local paper explained that the heat index measures apparent temperatures, the combined effects of air temperature and humidity.  At 115 we were to watch out for likely sunstroke, heat cramps, and heat exhaustion—and for possible heat stroke.

            The same paper sent a guy around to take the temperature of various points of human-sun contact:  a parking lot surface was 118, beach sand 120, and leather car seats 131.  A Slurpee was 23 degrees.

            This helped a lot.  We seem to enjoy trying to express natural phenomena as they relate to humans in numbers—the Enhanced Fujita Scale for tornadoes, the Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes.  But the newspaper story went even further, translating numbers into observable truths as well. I itched to try it for myself, and a day later when G. lamblia took a break I did a dumb thing.

~

            My sister and her husband live in a stunning house with an even more stunning view.  Looking east from their second floor balcony you first see White Marsh, a wetland area whose edges are made up mostly of groundsel trees, phragmites, miscellaneous scrub, and some young loblolly pines.  Only an occasional storm tide washes this area.  Through this high marsh runs a tidal creek called Long Creek, with its accompanying mud flats and spartina grass.  Then farther east is White Marsh Beach, a sparsely wooded barrier beach.  Then the Chesapeake Bay.  But from the first floor, the view of the flats was being obscured.  The vegetation in the drier part of the marsh, normally about six feet high, was slowly returning to woods. More and taller trees were growing in, especially one loblolly pine that stood about 100 yards into the marsh: my goal. I got permission, gathered loppers, pruning shears, and a buck saw. I bundled up in gloves, jeans, and an old shirt.  Having decided that alternating between 100-degree natural air and air conditioning at half-hour intervals would satisfy those in the media who said not to go outside no matter what, I began to cut a trail. My work, it turned out, became a drama in three acts.

~

            Act one was mostly expository.  I learned about smilax rotundifolia, commonly known as greenbrier, a member of the lily family that made me rethink all those precious lily images.  My field guide mentioned heart-shaped leaves, stout thorns, and putrid-smelling flowers.  The flowers smell bad in order to attract carrion flies, greenbrier’s chief pollinators.  Whether carrion flies or some other appalling flies, I learned of flies too.  Usually they land on you, begin to bite, and you flick them away.  But in a marsh dominated by “stout thorns,” one more sting goes unnoticed—until it intensifies to a point at which you look down and see a black, triangular fly attached to a spreading blood stain.  And you’ll wonder what species of road kill your fly laid her eggs on that morning.

            I also learned that shedding blood is not an exigency in White Marsh; it’s a way of life.  This is because the other dominant plant beside greenbrier is from the rose family, genus rubus.  These are brambles—no need to get more specific.  They, as everyone knows, have stalks that hurt like hell if you touch them and that eventually bend over to take root a second time, forming a grounded arch of pain waiting to slash at your shins, arms, or face. In White Marsh, greenbrier vines wind themselves around brambles and then tie the prickly bundles to groundsel trees and phragmites.  I had to cut my path one tendril at a time. 

            So I did that because I was too stubborn to quit and because it really wasn’t all that bad.  My clothes were soaked through with sweat; blood was everywhere, bright red and fresh then drying black in the sun.  But I knew I was safe from heat stroke; air conditioning was only a few minutes away.  And then there were all those millions of parasitic protozoa depending on me for their existence.  The truth here, as often happens, was relative.  Compared to giardiasis, this was downright festive.

            Toward the end of act one, I began to notice bird sounds: crows and gulls over Long Creek and purple martins feeding overhead.  I worked on, paying them little notice except to wonder if birds sweat.  And then I remembered that, stretching the term “sweat,” they do—in the sense that they cool themselves by increasing their respiratory rate and, thereby, the amount of moisture evaporated from their respiratory tracts.  It’s called thermal polypnea.  I recalled seeing robins sitting with their mouths open, panting, which is what I went inside and did as well.

~

            I changed my shirt, drank a couple bottles of water, watched the Weather Channel briefly (air temperature—90, heat index—119), then began the second act, which turned out to be more introspective.  I had settled into my environment and my work.  I found that by moving slowly I could keep my panting to a minimum and also reduce the number of the worst and deepest cuts.  Two episodes penetrated my mindless haze and brought me back to my true purpose.

            First, I came upon a deer trail.  One minute I was hacking through a green and brown tangle that limited my visibility to a couple feet, and then I was looking down a clear path of easy, graceful curves that led eastward at least thirty feet before it disappeared.  My first thought was that my job had suddenly become easier.  Then I thought about the poet Gary Snyder because I think of him whenever I see deer trails.  In his poem “Long Hair,” he writes about a world taken over by deer:  deer trails everywhere, deer everywhere.  I said the last line out loud:  “Deer bound through my hair,” and I enjoyed the image as I pruned away the few briers that the deer had stooped under.  But the feeling faded.  Snyder’s peaceable kingdom of hair and grasses and deer and men wasn’t working in the face of all that truth about intestinal parasites and heat indexes and pricker-bushes.  My presence was an intrusion, and a contrived one at that.  If I had come upon a deer sleeping the day away under the cover of phragmites, it would have snorted and crashed away to safety.  I would have yelped and tried not to fall over backward.  The truth was that the deer path was a poem, and when it veered suddenly to the north, I had to leave it to cut my way into the brush again.

            I had penetrated five feet or so when I spotted something white another five feet away.  As I hacked closer, it became a wonderful flower; then a single blossom, trumpet-shaped and the size of my fist; then white petals with a hint of yellow, brilliant yellow stamens, and all set against a background of stippled sunlight and leaves of the deepest green.  I stood, covered with bugs and blood and itches and laughed at such a beautiful thing.  And the purple martins called overhead, insects hummed, and deer slept.  It was time to go inside again.

            I checked the Weather Channel (holding at 98 and 119) and my field guide.  The flower was jimsonweed, named for the nearby, early-Virginia colony of Jamestown.  It is a totally poisonous plant:  touching the leaves and flowers can cause dermatitis; cattle and sheep are killed when they graze on it; children have died after eating the fruit.

~

            Act three, the reversal and denouement, were without incident.  I came first upon a small grove of loblollies: ten of them, ten feet high and about two inches in diameter.  They were spindly things, bare trunk to about five feet where the branches and long, graceful needles appeared.   With the buck saw, I flattened the grove easily and made a brush pile for winter storm tides to pull eventually into Long Creek.

            I reached my target tree in another fifteen minutes.  It was fourteen feet tall and six inches in diameter.  Sawing this one was harder work.  Bending over made me woozy, and the undergrowth made it almost impossible to keep the buck saw from binding. So I decided to cut it at four feet then take the stump separately.  Without remorse, I felled the pine and counted the rings—twelve years.  Bending to finish the job, I felt the first chills of heat exhaustion.  My stomach flipped around a bit like the start of seasickness.  I quickly turned my back to the marsh. A/C, cold shower, curtain.

~

            It had been a good day.  I had learned a little about how I fit in—to White Marsh, Hampton, Virginia, North America, Earth. G. lamblia feasts off my gut; I’m compelled to chop down whatever symbolic tree gets in my symbolic way: how are those two different?  Powerless to resist, I had naively tried to re-establish my dominion. But my good day turned into a long night.  Those Giardia parasites, as they tend to do, had called in reinforcements, and I was awake yet again.  A hint of earliest light over the Atlantic drew me first to the sliding doors, then to the dark outside.  The sounds of cicadas and other night bugs gnawed away at thick and sticky air.  In the marsh, clapper rails yapped at each other like neighborhood dogs.  And far away the surf pulled at White Marsh Beach.  I was imagining the hiding places of rails and thinking about deer making new paths through the marsh when the itching started from the first no-see-um bite.  No-see-ums.  Midges.  Genus culicoides.  Nearly invisible, the females break the skin with small cutting teeth and, at the same time, inject a chemical from their saliva that prevents clotting.  Then, without remorse, they suck up the tiny pools of blood.

********

The image of Giardia lamblia is from paleovegan.blogspot.com

Portions of this piece were published in Ascent

Stumbly, but Not Half-Assed

Writing is my livelihood, I dabble in bonsai, and I recognize a strong kinship between those two things. But the whole vocation v. avocation, work v. dabble, duality doesn't quite convey the way I think about it. I'll circle back.

~

I've noticed some confusion in the gradual and natural winnowing effect of experiences over the decades; to extend the image, what was apparently wheat has turned to chaff or often the other way around. For example, a long time ago I watched my friend Bill, who had been my only real male friend growing up, play the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's Zoo Story. Thinking back on the experience, three impressions return.

Remember the play? Jerry confronts Peter in Central Park and imposes an increasingly disjointed conversation on him that culminates in Jerry's telling THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!, the ongoing struggle between Jerry and his landlady's mongrel. Things get less rational, more physical; Jerry forces a fight and impales himself on a knife Peter is holding. So the first impact on me was the distress of watching your best friend from your high school days turn into a crazy guy in front of you. In public.

Then, with a little distance, I remember Zoo Story's familiar themes. The play is about all those mid-twentieth-century concerns that have faded from favor over the years: the distance between people, the triumph of materialism, the absurd arbitrariness of experience.

I can conjure these when I remember watching the play back then. But what came to mind just recently — spontaneously — was the phrase Jerry uses to describe the dog dedicated to tearing him apart. "He was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn't half-assed, either. It was a good, stumbly run, but I always got away."  Stumbly, but not half-assed. T-shirt, if not actual epitaph material. I guess if one of Albee's themes was about the dislocation of experience, it took.

The phrase came to me when I was thinking about a cotoneaster plant I was pruning. So to be more precise, then, my work with bonsai is stumbly, but not half-assed. I don't dabble, I commit. And it's not always easy.

~

I feel the weight of a history that runs from the Tang Dynasty Chinese practice of what came to be called penjing (or pen ching) through Japanese bonsai and down the centuries to my workbench. I know about how early penjing specimens were oddly shaped trees thought to have magical powers. These were followed by re-created landscapes in trays — plantings of rocks or more complex arrangements of rocks, plants, and decorations — creations that, if not religious, were at least mysterious enough in their ability to miniaturize nature to contain their own sort of power. When the practice of tray planting (pen tsai in Chinese) emerged in Japan as bonsai, its aesthetic was simplified to correspond to Zen beliefs. A bonsai composition came to comprise a single tree, and I try to see each tree as an embodiment of the entire universe.

But I'm defeated. Often it's simple fear at the moment of pruning a branch — gone forever, the harmony destroyed. Or it's the cold reality that true bonsai take many years to become convincing; I might not live to see any project through to completion. And I'm defeated also by my own confusion. I'm not comfortable with the control element of bonsai, which seems to appropriate the Judeo-Christian idea of nature existing in service to humans. In theory, the practice honors the natural world by trying to understand it, but recreating it and controlling it using techniques such as wiring, defoliating, and trunk-chopping feels hubristic.

What I settle for is the Zen truth from that famous Buddhist aphorism: Better to travel well than to arrive. At no point are the plants under my control; they're in charge, and the best I can do is cooperate and sometimes collaborate. And I can just enjoy the process, stumbly as it is, and what the process teaches.

~

Since most dictionaries, if they acknowledge “stumbly” at all, assign a prosaic definition — "given to stumbling" — I feel free to offer my own:  Stumbly adj. 1 something lacking in polish that is produced by an engaged maker;  2 a condition required to produce such a result. To be stumbly is to be enthused, unguarded, honest. It insists on mindful attention to each moment at a task. It cares little for "outcomes," avoids the cheap, the hurried, the vain. And now the topic is shifting here — from bonsai to writing to a way of living. It turns out that stumbly and "not half-assed" are the same thing; work and play can be likewise joined by a dedication to mindful living.

Paul Valery gets translated repeatedly in workshops and writer interviews as saying a poem is never finished, just abandoned. I think closer to what he really said was "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death." Same thing, just more specific: the point is that you can choose to be satisfied or you can die; you may be finished but your work isn't. And note that Valery's list doesn't  include a frantic need to publish as many works as possible that leads to dashing off a poem in one sitting and submitting it, simultaneously, to two dozen journals.

Also in Zoo Story, Albee has Jerry observe “sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” That may be gibberish, or it may be useful — the two are sometimes so close together I have trouble telling them apart. In the context here, though — of bonsai, writing, and editing — Jerry seems to have been given a moment of clarity. At any time on the way to the zoo, you can’t be anywhere else except where you are. Might as well give each stumbly moment its due.

*********

I'm obviously ignoring my own counsel by writing a blog; however, I will take my own advice and not publish a photograph of my own bonsai. The one that precedes this piece was taken in the North Carolina Arboretum's bonsai exhibition garden in Asheville, North Carolina.

Return to Georgia: Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Raymond Andrews (1934-1991)

For most of the twentieth century, the South was not a happy place for the arts. One appraisal came from H. L. Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozart," an overstated, but trenchant, assessment of southern culture that he prefaced with the immortal J. Gordon Coogler's immortal couplet: "Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer— / She never was much given to literature." Mencken’s examples are dated, but they haven’t lost their sting. "Georgia," he asserted, "is at once the home of the cotton-mill sweater, of the Methodist parson turned Savonarola and of the lynching bee." (Savonarola — as Mencken was certain none of his southern readers would know — was a fifteenth-century friar and preacher most famous for his "bonfire of the vanities," a comprehensive book, manuscript, objet d'art, and all-around-cultural conflagration). White male academics spoke to what Mencken called “Baptist and Methodist barbarism” through discussions of cultural identity, poetry theory, and ideology. Black artists first dealt with the cotton mills and the lynching bees. Then they made their art.

When Benny Andrews was five he started picking cotton to earn money to buy winter clothes. Raymond Andrews did the same when he turned five. And in cruel symmetry, five dollars was what their father took home weekly from his WPA job. Their mother worked in the fields and bore ten kids. Both parents loved the land; they wanted to be farmers. Raymond records the inevitable result of this combination of a natural desire and his family’s privation in his memoir The Last Radio Baby. "This automatically sent us to the only type of farming available to us 'po' folk' kind. Sharecropping. Thus in 1943, on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves, we moved across the hill from Mister Jim's place to the old Barnett Farm to become sharecroppers." Few escaped sharecropping's downward financial spiral. The landowner took half the farmer's crops; with the other half, the farmer bought supplies (on credit from the landowner). The meager leftovers, if any remained, comprised the family budget. Mere survival. Benny would echo Raymond's slavery reference in his own autobiography:** "Ever present in the sharecropper's mind is that he is only whatever his labor is worth, not a hair more. He belongs to his master, and can never have a word of disagreement with him." One such point of disagreement that wasn't allowed, for example, was the understanding that males from age 11 and up would work in the fields. Benny was 13 in 1943, Raymond was 9. Only through their mother's courageous intervention were they allowed to attend school . . . and only on days when it rained.

During these years, Benny practiced his drawing in Georgia dirt, with a nail. He also copied images from magazines and newspapers on whatever was available and drew stories on pieces of "clean on one side" paper or on brown paper sacks. He and Raymond experimented with making paints from blackberry juice, fingernail polish, even chocolate candy — paints that he would apply with straw, weeds, rags tied to sticks, and finally homemade hog bristle brushes. Meanwhile, Raymond read everything he could buy with his monthly dime-to-spend, borrow, or sometimes filch; boxes under the bed he shared with his brother held his reading stash: newspapers (especially the comics and sports pages), magazines (radio, movies, and more sports), and paperback books (westerns, mysteries, detective stories). "By age nine,” he wrote later, “I had no interest in toys, only the printed word, film, and radio."

In the late 1940s, Benny and Raymond left a town and the region that had offered them a paltry foundation for their careers: training for black painters that was negligible at best and a library for black readers that was sparse and seldom open. After separate military stints, they ended up at the Chicago Art Institute and Michigan State University respectively, and it's hard to imagine two individuals more ill-prepared for their eventual fields of endeavor. Benny, at age 23, had never been in an art museum; essentially he had never seen an original work of art. Raymond, at age 24, listed among his favorite authors Luke Short, Zane Grey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Ben Traven, and Harold Robbins (whose Dream Merchants he pronounced a classic).

Yet against the odds and obstacles, they succeeded in leaving behind a true and vivid picture of southern country life, especially the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Benny Andrews never stopped painting his home places and people. As he said in a 1975 interview, "I left Georgia when I was nineteen. . . . My interpretation of things — how I saw things — and my ideas about things had already been formed." His work has been in dozens of solo and group exhibitions and is represented in major museums throughout the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Philadelphia Academy of Art. From 1982 to 1984, he was visual arts director at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, he launched the Benny Andrews Foundation to assist young minority artists and institutions dedicated to African American art.

Likewise, Raymond Andrews' monumental Muskhogean County trilogy, originally published by Dial (1978-1983) and reissued by the University of Georgia Press (1987-1988), reveals life in the rural, Jim Crow south. Three other books continue his program, which he laid out in his preface to the reprint of Appalachee Red, the award-winning first book in the trilogy: "My American roots (like those of most Afro-Americans) are southern rural. This particular land and the individuals who have lived and died on it are what my books are about."

The Andrews brothers’ stories of escape from indigence and rise to success are at once inspiring and impressive. But perhaps more significant is their return, both artistically and physically, to the region that treated them so shabbily. Much of Benny's work deals with things southern; all of Raymond's does. And Benny built a studio outside Athens, Georgia, fewer than thirty miles from the old sharecropper's shack where they grew up. He and Raymond would trade off: one working in Athens while the other worked in New York. The art they made there is a testament to their character — never vindictive or angry (as well it might have been), often funny, always engaging, compassionate, and wise.

*Photograph: Appalachee Red's haint lording it over some bronze guy in Athens, Georgia. Based on a Benny Andrews illustration for his brother's book, the foam-core cutout was made by the University Press of Georgia marketing department for the launch of Appalachee Red.

**Benny Andrews' unpublished memoir "Mine, or Forty Years of Being Here" is quoted in J. Richard Gruber's American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997.

This Ain't No Party. This Ain't No Disco. (This Ain't No Lake Wobegon)

You can't say he didn't warn us. Paul Gruchow laid out his program clearly in the prose fragment that introduces Letters to a Young Madman, his recently and posthumously published memoir. He writes that a book of this sort cannot be "both amusing and truthful." You want amusing? Read about a place where all the men are good looking, all the women are strong, and so on. "There," he writes,” you could be amused forever and ever, and you need never know the heights and depths to which human beings are ordinarily called." Here, on the other hand, is a serious book.

For a loyal and affectionate readership, Gruchow was at once a great comfort and a great instigator. He wrote ecstatically, but precisely, about the natural world—especially about hiking in what he called the "empty" places from the Minnesota Northwoods to the Rockies and the Big Horns. Back home on the Minnesota prairie, he enthused about the potential of humans to work toward sustainable lifestyles and to return human culture to agriculture. At odds with these two passions were the depredation of the natural world and the ascendancy of a food-production system that, as he often said, "made the countryside safe for machines." And these pernicious forces, according Gruchow, share a provenance. As he wrote in a 1999 preface to a reprint of his 1988 essay collection, The Necessity of Empty Places, "In paying tribute to places counted worthless, I . . . hoped to offer homage to people treated as expendable. The same forces that ravage the land, I came to believe in the writing of this book, are the ones that destroy human communities." In Letters to a Young Madman, these same evil forces rise up to enable the dehumanizing, infantilizing, and humiliating treatment that he received and witnessed during his struggle with borderline personality disorder, the disease that that ultimately led him to suicide.

The range of Gruchow's writing is impressive; his popularity and success was enviable. As a nature writer, he attracted such a devoted readership that when he mentioned that he enjoyed a relaxing smoke after a day's hike, his fans flooded him with cigars. His natural history knowledge was extensive, and what he didn't already know he researched voraciously and grasped immediately. However, in the essays and talks collected in 1995 in Grass Roots, he turned advocate, fighting and arguing in his own unique and engaging version of agitprop. Through it all a love of land and place radiated that might be described as devotion. The natural world transported him. Again from the Empty Places preface: "If there is any cure [for sorrow] on this side of the grave, I am certain it lies in the balm of nature." In this, Paul was fatally disappointed.

However deep his depression, Gruchow never stopped being an activist and an advocate. He fumed against the institutional treatment of the mentally ill, and he longed to write again after being blocked for years. According to Louis Martinelli, who prepared Letters to a Young Madman for its publication, Paul had been working during 2003 on a disjointed manuscript made up of short pieces of memoir, research, and narrative. Martinelli suggested a structure patterned after that of Eduardo Galeano, an elliptical pastiche that eschewed transitions and other traditional devices. This freedom enabled Gruchow to finish a remarkable collection of prose fragments —few of more than one page—that are courageously brutal in their honest portrayals of depression and desperation. These combine with research, analysis, and description of treatments to expose the pathetic shortcomings of the mental health system. He recounts the chilling moments before and after electroconvulsive therapy, a night of struggling against suicide, the frustrating absurdity of occupational group sessions. He analyzes the utter loss and grief of clinical depression and uses his own case to represent the suffering of his fellow patients, the failure of his treatment to embody the failure of the entire establishment.

Paul died in February of 2004, but it wasn't until 2013 that Letters finally appeared. The book is, as he promised, a truthful and difficult read—with one heartbreaking exception: a 775-word mini-essay three pages from the book's end that describes a walk onto the escarpment above Duluth, Minnesota, where he was living at the time. It's like hiking with the old Paul, the ecstatic naturalist who had, in better times, experienced "the great power of healthy land to render consolation" and who believed that the "one absolutely irreplaceable and indispensable service that so-called empty places provide is keeping us sane."

The walk begins haltingly, but soon the former enticements of nature take hold:  "I was met face-to-face with a burst of wind. I felt its delicious coolness on my check. There was another sensation. It took me a moment to place it. Pines! It was the scent of pines! I could smell again!" Awakened, he begins to remember boyhood adventures and the names of the plants he walked alongside. "I ran their names over my tongue as if they were draughts of cool water." Earlier in the book he had said that the only two deterrents to his suicide were not wanting his children to have that legacy and not wanting to influence some of his friends by example—not a word anywhere in the book about watching a sunset over a lake in the boundary waters or a storm rolling in over the mountains. But after this last walk, even though "the darkness, as it does, closed in again," he was able to reassure himself, "if I could just get there, I knew where to go to find the light."

Sadly, in the same preface to The Necessity of Empty Places in which Gruchow invokes the balm of nature, he mentions another truth he discovered: "the futility of running away." Letters to a Young Madman tells the story of the mentally ill: "They take their meds, they see their doctors, they go to the hospital from time to time, and they continue to struggle and suffer. The name of the story is not triumph or redemption, but survival." And his story is no different. "It ends," he says, "with me alive. . . . That has to be enough, because it's all there is." And that moment, unhappily, was far too brief.

************

Visit the Paul Gruchow Foundation at www.paulgruchow.org

Folding My Google Map

That slight tremor on August 15, 2013—which passed without much notice in the rest of the world—was the earth shifting at The Georgia Review. On that day we began accepting electronic submissions. On August 18 an essay came in online that caught my eye. But after I read it a couple times, I found myself making a few lukewarm notes in preparation for moving it along to the next reader: “strong start, good closing, fuzzy in the middle—an ambitious essay that lost its focus.” For some reason that I don’t recall now, I decided to print the essay out and give it another try. You know where this is going: I immediately understood what the author was up to and loved the piece. It has been accepted for publication, and the whole incident has given me pause to realize that I don’t think that I read as well—that is, with the same level of perception—from a screen as I do from paper. Nothing against my iPad, which I dearly love, or even the big old Dell on my desk, but when I read at my job I’m evaluating the efforts of working writers, most of whom care and grind and hope. I owe them the courtesy of my complete attention and comprehension.

                                                                        ~

If you hold an opinion and look hard enough, you can find a study to back it up. Sure enough, the International Journal of Educational Research* reports a carefully constructed study of seventy-two Norwegian tenth graders in which two comparable groups were tested after reading either PDF or paper versions of texts running 1400-1600 words. Eight pages of education-speak and statistics boil down to this: “The results of this study indicate that reading linear narrative and expository text on a computer screen leads to poorer reading comprehension than reading the same texts on paper. . . . If texts are longer than a page, scrolling and the lack of spatiotemporal markers of the digital texts to aid memory and reading comprehension might impede reading performance.”

The study’s author, Anne Mangen, and her co-authors point to navigation issues as the main contributor to their results. First, scrolling “imposes a spatial instability which may negatively affect the reader’s mental representation of the text”; second, on-screen reading restricts a reader’s access to an entire text. “We know from empirical and theoretical research that having a good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text supports reading comprehension.” In summary, the authors quote a 2006 Canadian study: “Difficulties in reading from computers may be due to disrupted mental maps of the text, which may be reflected in poorer understanding and ultimately poorer recall of presented material.”**

The more we learn about how our minds work, the more we come to realize that separating the mind and body is an epistemological dead end. As Nicholas Carr writes in the preview issue of Nautilus.***  “What we’re learning now is that reading is a bodily activity. We take information the way we experience the world—as much with our sense of touch as with our sense of sight. Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols.” By holding that now-accepted essay submission in my hands, I had become completely engaged. I could quickly flip back and forth among the pages to pick up images and threads of the argument. My “mind’s eye” helped me to recall and reconstruct the “mental map” to the extent that even after I passed the essay along I could tell you what was being discussed and where in the text the discussion occurred. Instead of being left with a screen gone dark, I retained a vital piece of writing.

                                                                        ~

This sudden immersion into reading and evaluating manuscripts online has reinforced for me the importance of a framework—a mental map—in shaping nonfiction into an essay. However, I don’t mean to imply here that merely committing a piece of writing to paper rather than a computer screen will automatically provide that necessary map; it has to be inherent in the thought that precedes writing and as a constant presence throughout the writing. Without an author’s help, a reader is left hiking a random path. The details are still present—and they may be profound, dramatic, or beautiful—but lacking context and commentary, they lack sense and purpose.

Keeping a reader on track might call for simply providing ongoing and specific references to time and place; it will certainly involve transitions. However, the most-often overlooked, and perhaps the most important, addition to a writer’s map is a little more telling and a little less showing. Not every aphorism is misleading. Some—Warren Zevon's "Enjoy every sandwich" comes to mind—can be quite useful, even important. But believing something just because it's repeated endlessly is a mistake. “Show, don't tell" is one of those tidy saws that, although filled with good intention, has replaced thought, and it has put authors in mortal fear of straying, even briefly, from the concrete. But in an essay, a writer should be pursuing an idea, as well as relating a story. It’s okay, even necessary, to “tell”: to take some time to ruminate—generalize, synthesize, analyze—get abstract for a moment, then return to the details.

Alfred Korszybski warned against confusing reality with the definition of reality when he coined the often-used phrase, “the map is not the territory.” But I would suggest that the structure and direction a map provides are the tools that inform effective nonfiction: work that enables true insight into reality rather than trying and failing at the task of “writing” the reality itself. An essay’s mental map is not the territory, nor should it attempt to be. Consider Borges’s brief story “On Exactitude in Science,” which describes a country in which cartography had reached such perfection that “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” That map, of course, proved useless because it wasn’t a map at all. The nonfiction equivalent, without forethought and design, without an internal structure, will leave readers feeling that they’re scrolling down an endless page, looking in vain for a cairn, a blaze on a tree.

           

* Mangen, Anne, et al. “Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension.” International Journal of Educational Research. 58 (2013): 61– 68. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

** Kerr, M.A. and S.E. Symons. “Computerized presentation of text: Effects on children's reading of informational material.” Reading and Writing. 19.1 (2006): 1-19. Web. 17 Oct. 2013.

*** Carr, Nicholas. “Paper Versus Pixel. natil.us. 1 Aug. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2013.

****A previous version of this piece appeared in Brevity, 18 January 2014 and yet another on The Georgia Review website.

*****Map image from simpleicon.com

                                                           

           

Bitter the Uses of Adversity

Cyclophosphamide, Hydroxydaunorubicin, Oncovin, and Prednisone altogether equal CHOP—Joel Oppenheimer's chemotherapy and the subject of one of his last and best poems, “The Uses of Adversity.” It is a poem of nearly 700 (Oppenheimer-short) lines and was published by Zelot Press: staple-bound; Oppenheimer-thin—3.5 by 8.5 inches; cover lettering in lower case of course. Joel inscribed my copy “News from the front,” a heavily ironic sideways look at one of his favorite William Carlos Williams quotations:

                          It is difficult

to get the news from poems

             yet men die miserably every day

                          for lack

of what is found there.

The inscription is dated 2/18/87; Joel died in October the following fall. Lung cancer had spread to his brain. He was 58.

Joel believed that poetry, like myth, was a way of understanding the universe; he saw myth as “quintessential fact.” And as his work moved from the discursive assertions of The Woman Poems (published in 1975) to a shorter, calmer line and the compressed diction that he had learned years earlier from Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, his own perceptions of his immediate surroundings increasingly took on the importance of myth.

This sea change in style and approach took place during the early 1970s after what he called “the last shout of the old [poetic] line.” He saw himself as a poet of middle-age, a single father with two sons at home, starting a new life having satisfied himself that he'd dealt in The Women Poems with the various Jungian “mothers” of Robert Bly and Erich Neumann—and with his own. Also, and of considerable significance, was the fact that his mind was clearing up. Joel had been an earnest and dedicated drunk until he took his final drink in 1970. A new focus and an ability to concentrate, which gradually returned to him over the next few years, balanced in some ways the nightmare of early sobriety, which he accomplished, for the most part, alone. The disease of alcoholism stayed with him until it was overtaken by one more immediately, but no less, deadly. In “The Uses of Adversity,” writing about mixing prednisone and booze, he admits, “of course i want / to take a drink // i've wanted to / take a drink since / that August day in 1970 / i took my last one.” But he never did, and in the next stanza he gives himself a pass on the 1.4% alcohol in his cough syrup.

The cough syrup detail deserves mention because it indicates the tone that drives the poem: witty, ironic, and bitter. Further, there is something wickedly funny about the premise: elevating to myth status a government pamphlet describing the side effects (he rightly calls them head-on effects) of the four “poisons” that comprise CHOP. But what might in other hands remain merely an annotated compilation—albeit with great care paid to line breaks—becomes a poem about language, suffering, myth, and, of course, death. He tips his hand in an introductory section after dismantling the prefixes “mal-,” “mis-,” “and dys-“ as they apply to “functioning”:

all words break down

into their parts

even as you and i

even as you and i

The reader is put on notice that we're dealing with basics here. His doctors warns of cankers, and even though “there is / a more precise / latinization / available to him / for obfuscation”:

. . . this is not

necessary

                  canker

cancer  chancre cancel

are all the same

Most of the rest of the poem follows a call-and-response pattern. A listing of side effects will elicit a response in the form of a trenchant wisecrack, each time revealing the simultaneous hopelessness and importance of the new information being relayed. For example, after listing “unusual bleeding or bruising,” he writes,

but what is usual

bruising and bleeding

i question

after “blood in urine”:

as if going to pee

and peeing blood

would not prompt

some concern

after “shortness of breath”:

                  hell

it's my damned lungs

at the seat of this

so of course i have

shortness of breath

and after another ridiculous collection that includes agitation, confusion, dizziness, lightheadedness, and loss of appetite, he embraces the irony:

doesn't this all

begin to sound

like being in love

And for evidence he offers a half-dozen lines of Lord Byron parading love “symptoms” in rhyming iambs from a translation of Catullus, then translations of Sappho by Sir Phillip Sydney and Mary Barnard. Before returning to real-life symptoms, he asks, but doesn't answer, a question toxic with sardonic wit:

so is it not love

these racing chemicals

and poisons chasing

down the cankers

to cancel all

Although the naming of side effects is repetitious, sometimes absurd, and, in the final analysis, beside the point, we can be sure that Joel knew them all. They were the monsters lurking under the sick room bed; each had the power to become momentous. One in particular turns the tone of the poem: “wounds that don't heal”:

for which i read

stigmata or

emotionally

as feuds

And he wonders about his enemies, if they have “these medicines / these cancers / growing in them.” “The Uses of Adversity” is a decidedly self-referential poem, as is much of Joel's poetry. But he has the gift of welcoming us in, even into the horror of chemotherapy, because he knew that we are, all of us, connected by the curse we share:

i take CHOP

every three weeks

a time span

called a course

combining thus

the words curse     

and corse:  the body

****************

During a lifetime of teaching, Joel was the first director of the St. Marks Poetry Project in Manhattan, visiting professor of poetry at CCNY, and associate professor of communications at New England College in New Hampshire. In the mid-1980s he held a Gannet Distinguished Professorship at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

His poetry booklist is an impressive one: eleven collections, as well as a number of broadsides and single-poem chapbooks as was common during the 1960s and 1970s. His short fiction was collected in Pan's Eyes, and he wrote three plays and two popular nonfiction books: one about Marilyn Monroe and the other about the New York Mets. He was a regular columnist for the Village Voice from 1969-1984, and a selection of those pieces has been gathered in Drawing from Life. Of particular note is a 1983 White Pine Press project Poetry the Ecology of the Soul, which collected transcriptions of three Oppenheimer master classes as well as a generous group of selected poems. “The Uses of Adversity” was reprinted in New Directions 52: An International Anthology of Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin.

Books about Joel Oppenheimer and his work include Robert Bertholf's Remembering Joel Oppenheimer, Lyman Gilmore's Don't Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer, and David Thibodaux' Joel Oppenheimer: An Introduction.

This Is Your Brain on Goldbarth

I confess to being a serious Albert Goldbarth fan. His poetry is like no other, and it engages me both at the first crackle of brilliance and after repeated delving. So I ask myself a good question: What’s up with that?

What follows here makes no claims to truth; it merely offers some idle personal speculation that wanders off in search of clues to why I find Goldbarth’s offerings so consistently enticing. In short, it is a near-scientific answer to a non-scientific question.

In ceremonies before the first Boston Bruins’ hockey game following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the Boston Garden crowd famously and loudly commandeered the singing of the national anthem. The singer, Rene Rancourt, surrendered the microphone and his performance, simply joining the crowd to create an instant YouTube favorite. This went beyond patriotism — although there was a fair amount of jingoism involved in the bombings’ aftermath. They just wanted to sing together. They needed the comfort of something familiar, in this case some familiar music. Later in the week, Neil Diamond proved that any well-worn tune would do by uniting the Fenway Park crowd with, of course, “Sweet Caroline.”

The Boston Garden episode prompted an article in Smithsonian (24 April 2013), in which Randy Rieland laid out some new theories about how we react to the music we hold dear. Based on MRI scans, McGill University researchers Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre concluded that “when people listened to music they liked, the limbic and paralimbic regions of the brain became more active. They’re the areas linked to euphoric reward responses, the same ones that bring the dopamine rush associated with food, sex, and drugs.”

Since the Rieland article brought up sex and drugs, consider Axl Rose bumping aside Neil Diamond. For no other reason than the near rhyme involved, replace “Sweet Caroline” with “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Different audience but same result, because since any music familiar enough to enable us to predict what will come next will reward us when we’re proven correct. Rieland points out that “Some have suggested this has its roots in primitive times when guessing wrong about animal sounds was a matter of life or death. What was needed was a quick emotional response to save our skin, rather than taking time to think things through. And so, the theory goes, our response to sound became a gut reaction.”

However, a second theory draws us closer to Albert Goldbarth’s poetry and takes things beyond gut reactions, a familiar song, and the raw emotion of the Boston Garden event. What about unfamiliar music to which we have no emotional attachment? Valorie Salimpoor of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto played thirty-second snippets of songs that were new to a group of volunteers, and then asked them to place bids to buy each track. MRI scans of the subjects’ brains revealed that when the nucleus accumbens region — that part of the brain associated with pleasant surprises, or what neuroscientists call “positive prediction errors” — became active, the volunteers bid higher. In other words, we enter into the experience of listening to music with expectations; Salimpoor calls them “templates.” We create different templates for different types of music. When a piece fits the pattern (“Sweet Caroline”), our limbic (reptile) brain sends out dopamine and we are satisfied. When it exceeds our expectations by adding something original and new (which “Sweet Caroline” does not), the nucleus accumbens, a.k.a. the “pleasure center,” fires off.

Goldbarth’s poetry comforts me; in his apparent need to preserve all that is immanently precious in all his universes and multiverses, he makes poems that I find caring, often gentle. But that response is probably sited in yet another part of my brain. I’m writing here about a presumed outcome and comfort’s near allies — satisfaction, gratification, pleasure — in the patterns of a familiar poetic voice. If we’re going to allow Guns N’ Roses, why not the comfort of recognizing the zigzag rhythms, breathtaking language, and expansive riffs of a Goldbarth poem? We expect these, and he never disappoints. And somehow he manages to reach beyond the predictable, leaving Neil Diamond and Axl Rose far behind. We never know exactly where Goldbarth is going, but we know it will be a good ride. There he goes again.

I don’t propose that “euphoric reward responses” or “positive prediction errors” become critical terms for discussing tastes in poetry, but they seem to be working in this case. Here’s what I get when I combine these theories and offer a speculative answer to that question I posed in the lede. We read a fresh Goldbarth poem (start readers’ MRI brain scans now), we recognize the template, and our limbic and paralimbic regions shoot us a dopamine rush (is it sex, drugs, or a good poem; dopamine alone can’t be trusted). Then a whole host of surprises tickles our nucleus accumbens region — and we are in the best of both worlds.

The question of whether the relatively new science of neuroaesthetics will have any impact on literary rejection slips is one for another time — and one that ponders the growing belief that the solution to every problem can be found in a well-funded laboratory. I have to admit, though, that the image of editors sliding in and out of MRI scanners while electronically submitted manuscripts flash before them is nearly as practical as it is funny: “We’re sorry to report that the poems you sent several seconds ago did not activate the proper regions of our brains. The blood flow just wasn’t there.” Then comes a Goldbarth poem; the technician runs out from behind the little window, whooping, “Pulitzer! Pulitzer!”

. . . based on a piece first posted on The Georgia Review website.

Starting a Project: An Introduction

As I've been ruminating about beginning this blog, I've been thinking off and on about Donald Hall and a phrase he used in a letter to me at least twenty years ago. I still recall the phrase because it was a little more odd than felicitous, not exactly his style. He was going on about "new ones," about the joy of starting "new ones" and how exhilarated "new ones" made him feel. I don't recall whether the new ones were poems or essays or books or what, but I remember thinking at the time that I'd like successfully to complete an old one. Or two.

Now I understand: I can think of few things better after a week's work than a list of new work projects for the weekend. And so it was toward the idea of work that my memory was directing me via Don's phrase. I pulled his Life Work from the shelf and browsed the sections until I landed on my theme. Henry Hall, grandfather to Donald Hall, owner of the Brock-Hall Dairy had the secret of life down to a single, Connecticut-accented sentence: "keep your health — and woik, woik, woik."

“Wuhk, wuhk, wuhk.”  That would be my octogenarian neighbor, my resource for things southern. I knew his name before I knew him because I saw it emblazoned on the hundreds of portable toilets that are deployed around town and campus on football game days. Yankee-like, he saw a need, made it a niche, and founded a company that has provided him with a retirement that features grueling, daily yard work no matter the heat and humidity. His property is magnificent, and his work habits are as relentless as they are (as I discovered early on) joyous.

I've lived in Athens, Georgia, for seven winters. On three occasions we've had snow events worth mentioning. Two were duds, but one storm — while nowhere near the ridiculous volume of my former western New York snowstorms that lumbered in off Lake Erie, and far from the fury of the storms that rushed out of the North Dakota plains and into my Minnesota backyard — my first Georgia snowstorm, was bona fide. Nine inches or so of heavy, sloppy snow were covered by an inch of ice. It was beautiful. But when I lived in the northern plains, I learned that one's character could be judged in part by how clean he kept his driveway in the winter, so with this southern snow I felt a familiar pressure and I relished the task ahead. I needed to shovel at once, but like everyone else in my new city, I didn't own a snow shovel. So I set to work with the only tool I had: a round-pointed garden shovel, at best a foolish implement for the job.

In a very short time I was tired and frustrated. My driveway was on its way to becoming an embarrassment. I was cursing this brave new world of mine when I saw my neighbor, grinning, chuckling, and carrying two square-point digging shovels. And talking. These were the best he could do, he told me, then launched into a history of Athens snowstorms that morphed into a treatise on southern weather that somehow slid over into the economy, into politics, into whatever he had heard on talk radio that day. We were poles apart culturally and politically, but we were right there together, in that place, working. I could have used a little more silence, a better chance to give myself over to the job, but it was clear that part of his pleasure at work involved talking. My responses were circumspect; I didn't want to confront or perhaps insult my new and good hearted neighbor. Then finally we hit on common ground. One of us, I don't remember who, said something like "It just feels so good to work, doesn't it?" We talked about work: work projects, heavy work, work injuries. Of course he had to add some bits about welfare cheats or the evils of unions, but mostly the talk returned: work mistakes, dirty work, work jokes, satisfying work. And come to think about it, I had a lot of trouble with his accent, and I'm sure my speech perplexed him as well. Besides, we're both getting deaf, so there's a better than fair chance that little of conversational importance happened that day. But I remember that we cleared the driveway together, and I hope he does too.

Returning to Don Hall briefly, I'm reminded of his poem (and later a children's book) "Ox Cart Man." Each year the ox cart man loads his ox cart with that year's produce. He drives the cart to the Portsmouth Market and sells all the goods, after which he sells the cart and the ox. Then he walks home — with money "for salt and taxes" —  to begin the process once more. Contented man or frustrated man? It depends not only on one's attitude toward work but also on the nature of the work.

If work is approached mindfully it can open up into all the traditional desiderata: compassion, love, understanding, peace. But mindfulness is more easily practiced when the work is meaningful: building cupboards for a rich couple not selling them a BMW, preparing coq au vin in your own restaurant not scaling leg quarters at a Pilgrim's Pride plant. The difference between the ox cart man and Sisyphus lies in the tasks each performs.

Those of us lacking the life skills of a Buddhist monk have to search out work that enables mindfulness. Washing the dishes, clearing the driveway, all the quotidian tasks offer such moments for anyone willing to make the effort. But for work that truly absorbs, I'll choose writing; its labors — researching, thinking, synthesizing, ordering, composing, revising — are also its pleasures.