Invisibility

I’ve always liked Ralph Ellison’s ideas about invisibility in Invisible Man. Here’s a sample from the opening pages:

I am an invisible man… I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, anything and everything except me… I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

He goes on to describe the anger that boils up out of the “doubt that you really exist” as a result of being unseen. So being invisible is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s an advantage, but ultimately we’re meant for visibility, and his book explores this rich metaphor on many levels.

Here’s Eudora Welty’s comment on the subject:

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible — actually a powerful position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision — these set a distance. (One Writer’s Beginnings 87)

It’s invisibility (boy do I have a hard time typing that word!) in a different context than Ellison’s, but similarly double-edged; on the one hand it’s “powerful,” but on the backside is the potential of tipping into “effacement.”

At a level much less significant than either of these writers, I can affirm the psychological truth of what they’re saying. It brings back the memory of experiences as a child with an older boy down the street from us. Jimmy was really a sweetheart of a boy, but he was about 3 years older than I and when he would come over to play with my brother, he was convinced that he had to talk baby-talk to me. It used to infuriate me. So what did I do?

I pretended I couldn’t talk.

I remember that complex inner awareness of frustration at being regarded as less than I was, mixed with a sense of superiority that I knew more than Jimmy did, mixed with the knowledge that I could make him feel silly any time I wanted to by revealing that I could speak quite well. But I chose not to, I suppose because it felt powerful. I think the danger lies in the chance that you might play the role for too long, and forget the hidden truth of who you are.

 

The blindness of perfectionism

Sometimes our mistakes can be revealing. The way we read books can be instructive about the way we read others, ourselves, life in general. My thoughts returned to my mistaken reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s dedication of A Child’s Garden of Verses often yesterday. It seems so obvious, looking at the poem now, that it couldn’t have referred to his mother. Here’s the poem in entirety, with boldface on the parts that plainly indicate that he’s speaking not of a mother, but a nurse:

To Alison Cunningham
From Her Boy

For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:—
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!

There’s more on Alison Cunningham here. 

The interesting question is, how did I reconcile these clues in the poem to my notion that Stevenson was describing his mother? And perhaps more interesting, why did I assume it was his mother, and wrench the text to fit my preconceived notion?

The answer I come to is the longstanding perfectionism of my inner world. Along with his reference to himself as “her boy,” I assumed this was Stevenson talking about his mother because:

• She meets a standard of selflessness that’s part of my ideal of motherhood;
• She’s kind, forbearing, pitying, enduring;
• She’s a healing presence, a “nurse”;
• She’s (simply put, and Stevenson says it himself) an “angel.”

If these are my criteria of motherhood, is it conscious? Well, no; my conscious criteria have more to do with being honest and real and loving and human, not a celestial being. But at the deeper level where I really live, yes; this must be what I’m aiming for, or why would I have interpreted the poem in the way I did rather than scratching my head and asking, “Who’s he talking about?”

Because I assumed this to be a description of motherhood, I was willing to work pretty hard to twist the text. I never questioned that “nurse” was always a synonym for “mother”; the reference to a “second mother” I wondered about but assumed it had some private meaning to Stevenson; the reference to “first wife” I assumed was an Oedipal thing; the blatant fact that she had a different last name I assumed meant his father had died and she had remarried — all of this without any investigation of the facts.

Good grief!

All of this matters to me as a reader not just of poems, but of life. How often to I perform mental gymnastics rather than realize my assumptions need questioning and revising? How often do I settle for confusion without even thinking about it? How often do I aim for an ideal, and let perfectionism blind me?

By the way, Stevenson’s poem for his actual mother is here — and strikingly devoid of the rhapsodic devotion of the lines to Alison Cunningham.

 

Summer Pony

Summer Pony by Jean Slaughter Doty is the latest in my read-aloud syllabus for my horse-loving 7-year-old. It’s a story about Ginny, a middle-school aged girl whose family rents a pony for the summer. Though she has dreams of a sleek and beautiful pony, the one she ends up with is an underfed, shaggy, unimpressive pinto with unmatching eyes, rented from a pony farm that badly neglects its animals.

The story has lots of great ingredients: rescue and restoration of an animal in poor condition, a heroine who’s learning the ropes of pony care along with the reader, and the overcoming of first impressions to form a friendship (as Ginny does with her neighbor). Best of all for the young horse fan is the winning combination of understanding parents, and the conversion of a garage into a pony stall. What pony-lover hasn’t entertained that dream? I know I did.

Ginny, the story’s heroine, is plausible. She has her issues with negative attitude and self-doubt, but she grows a lot over the course of the story and gains confidence in the process. The reading level of this book is probably 3rd-6th grade, but my first-grader was able to work through the text herself. I read it aloud, but often she’d get the jump on me by taking it to bed with her and reading before lights out. (So far she hasn’t discovered reading under the covers with a flashlight…)

The question now is where to go from here. I found this list of 30 best horse books, of which we’ve read four: Summer Pony, Old Bones the Wonder Horse, Misty of Chincoteague, and Black Beauty. What next? I notice Ruffian is on this list, and it’s out of the question… I’m still wrenched every time I think of Eight Belles put down after her second place finish at the Derby last week. I dimly remember a book called A Pony for the Winter; maybe that would be the next logical choice. I’m open to suggestions. Meantime it’s back to watching my daughter pore over her well-worn Breyer’s horses catalogue, checking the boxes of… well, pretty much every model ever made and making plans for saving her money.

 

 

Better late than never

Yesterday we were busy with the annual suburban swap: the neighborhood yard sale, in which many of the folks in my subdivision spill the contents of attic and closet out onto the front yard and put a price on it. It’s kind of like musical chairs, but “musical belongings” would probably be more like it, as people sell their stuff and buy others’. And of course it’s so well publicized we get lots of traffic from outside the neighborhood. Our family did well, including my two young entrepreneurs who had no problem at all mastering suggestive selling (”Would you like to buy this nice toy for your baby?” “Like this pretty dress?” “This ‘Bob the Builder’ video is really good!’). And we didn’t leave our own yard, so the attic is pleasantly spacious now.

All of this to say I didn’t get a chance to read much of The Saturday Review of Books, but here it is anyway — better late than never.

 

Poetry Friday: Listening

Welcome to Poetry Friday! This week’s collection of poetic findings is hosted here today. To participate, leave a link to your post in the comments, and I’ll be rounding up the old fashioned way throughout the day.

One of the treasures my mother gave me is a love of reading. In honor of Mother’s Day weekend, here’s one of the best-known examples of a poet similarly blessed: Robert Louis Stevenson, who dedicates A Child’s Garden of Verses to *his mother (see note below poem) in the hope that

                          …all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!

The rest of Stevenson’s glowing tribute is here.

[*Edited to add: So went my initial post, but I'm grateful to Kelly Fineman for cluing me in to the fact that Alison Cunningham, to whom this verse is addressed, wasn't Stevenson's biological mother. She was his nurse, which helps to explain his reference to her as a "second mother" and "first wife."  After reading Kelly's thoughts, I went on to discover Alison Cunningham's death announcement, which describes her as "an ideal nurse for an ailing child, who required the undivided attention which his devoted, but delicate mother could not give."

So whereas my original thoughts in this post were about the influence of mothers, they've taken a turn into the influence of mother-figures, which I find in some ways even more interesting to think about. It's possible that like Stevenson, we all have "second mothers" as well as first ones.]

In any case, I like the way his nurse’s voice is inseparable from his early experience of poetry. There are certain childhood poems and stories I hear in my mother’s voice, and some in my father’s. But in our lives as readers, we break free of their voices, in the same way we have to do in the rest of life. I like Eudora Welty’s description of this process in One Writer’s Beginnings:

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.

What ”voices” are you listening to this week? Bring them on… 

Stacey at Two Writing Teachers has a heartfelt original poem trying to come to terms with some unwelcome news about a great aunt in An e-mail I didn’t want to see at 4:15 A.M.

John Mutford has an original as well from his Writer’s Diary over at The Book Mine Set: To Melanchol.

Mary Lee is “picking her chin up off the floor” with her original poem “Flabbergasted.” It’ll make you wish you were back in 4th grade and in her class.

Cloudscome has Countee Cullen’s dialogue with an earlier artist, ”To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time,” along with one of her gorgeous photos.

Ruth is envying the grass with Emily Dickinson  as she labors through a huge stack of student papers to grade.

Laura Salas has some 15 Words or Less poems on a nautical theme, as well as the wonderful news of a contract for a new poetry collection. Don’t miss the great story of this book’s creation.

TadMack is trying to cope with Urban Law without losing all hope of creative thought. Stop by for “No poetry, just tea and sympathy” at Finding Wonderland.

Jama Rattigan offers a dish of substance, but not comfort, with Marilyn Chin’s poem “Gruel” over at Alphabet Soup.

Jenny has a thought-provoking post on savoring the moment with Naomi Shihab Nye’s “To One Now Grown” over at Read. Imagine. Talk.

Fuse #8 has a book review of Helen Frost’s Diamond Willow, a novel in verse, along with some info and links.

Tricia gives us a glimpse of the flowers she’s been enjoying with Florence Taber Holt’s “Flowers” over at The Miss Rumphius Effect. 

Sara gives us Ode to the DiaspoRican by Mariposa, along with a performance by the poet, at Archimedes Forgets.

Little Willow has a thoughtful poetic invitation to listen by Yves Bonnefoy: “Passer-by, these are words…”.

Linda Kulp at WriteTime has an original Mother’s Day Triplet, along with an invitation to write your own.

In Need of Chocolate relates “Uphill” by Christina Rossetti, one of her favorite poets, to motherhood.

Jone shares some of the results of a poetry exercise with her 4th graders in A Ring, A Drum, and A Blanket Poem over at Check It Out. Amazing!

Karen Edmisten is mourning the loss of a beloved Pontiac in her original ode to Putty. Stop by and pay your respects!

Sylvia at Poetry for Children is taking a look at “Blue Ribbon Poetry” with a list of award-winning poetry books and novels in verse.

Anastasia at Picture Book of the Day offers Ooh! Matisse, a book authored by Mil Niepold, with art direction by Jeanyves Verdu.

Christine at The Simple and the Ordinary offers A.A. Milne’s “Daffodowndilly” in celebration of the undisputed arrival of spring.

Tiel Aisha Ansari at Knocking From Inside presents Numbers, a powerful original poem.

Michelle at Scholar’s Blog offers “Diary of a Church Mouse” by John Betjeman.

Sheila at Greenridge Chronicles posts Christina Rossetti’s poem “Caterpillar,” along with a fun variation on the original by her 6-year-old.

Becky posts Strickland Gillilan’s “The Reading Mother” at Becky’s Book Reviews.

Wes at The Well-Read Child is in with an original aubade and a challenge to try writing one of your own.

Liz Garton Scanlon’s “Sonnets and Shakespeare” post at Liz in Ink provides a link to Back and Forth Project, which features the Crown Sonnet of a few weeks back. Congratulations, Poetry Princesses! Liz also describes the effect of seeing children (including one of her own) perform Shakespeare.

Miss Erin is thinking of Shakespeare too, specifically “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”

Sarah Reinhard is contemplating (and practicing) motherhood at Just Another Day of Catholic Pondering. She offers “Nourisher of God and Man,” from Heidi Hess Saxton’s Behold Your Mother.

Kelly Fineman provides insight into a collection of epigrams at Writing and Ruminating.

Charlotte is celebrating her tenth wedding anniversary with Robert Burns’ “Westlin Winds,” and a link to a version set to music, over at Charlotte’s Library.

Lisa, as part of her new resolve to study a poet at a time, offers Margaret Atwood’s “In the Secular Night” at A Little of This, A Little of That.

Becky at Farm School is offering Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” as the weather coaxes some out of the ground where she lives.

 

Mother’s Day Reflections

I have Mother’s Day, and mothering in general, on my mind this week. I’ve been very aware lately of how many things pollute the nobler aspects of my maternal instinct:

• personal selfishness
• desire for control
• loss of the long view
• fear of what others may be thinking
• overprotectiveness

My ideal of motherhood involves some of these things, but in healthier proportions than they often show up in my own life. Of course I want to protect my children, for instance, but that’s not the impulse that should be directing all decisions, or I’ll create very fragile little people. I should be conscious of others’ impressions, because I’m training my children to live in a world of people. I want them to be able to function there with courtesy, confidence, compassion. (All the c’s, by the way, are a coincidence.) But I don’t want them to let fear of what others think shape who they become. So my ignoble impulses as a mother aren’t usually an issue of kind, but of degree.

There are two poems that capture the essence of mothering to me with economy and beauty. One is Wendell Berry’s “To My Mother:”

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong…

The rest of the poem is here, and develops, to me, an idealized picture of how any mother would love to be seen by her children. It details the kind of maternal selflessness that I want to practice, but feel like it’ll never happen. Then again, I’m surprised again and again by how little it takes to delight children. One brief wrestling match with Daddy. One half hour of undivided attention from Mommy doing whatever the child chooses. Those moments, not the ones I carefully plan and orchestrate, or that seem to cost me, are the ones they talk about with starry eyes.

Berry’s remembrance of his mother is a real contrast to this poem by Fleur Adcock, called “For a Five-Year-Old,” written from a mother’s perspective. It confronts honestly the awareness of personal imperfection and inconsistency, a sobering burden when we think of how our children look up to us:

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another… 

The rest of this one is here. I wonder if Wendell Berry’s mother had these moments. I suspect she did. I hope I’m not guilty of pulling the noble and good things of the world down to my level when I say that I think part of motherhood is the continual awareness of imperfection, sometimes failure, faced with resolve to stay in the game. That resolve is what I hope my children will remember about me.

Just as they hope I’ll remember that they’re people in formation, learning to live within their personalities and bodies and environments. They need the same freedom to fail I desperately need myself.

 

Celebrate the Author: Arnold Lobel

I just think Arnold Lobel is a dear man. That’s a mushier evaluation than I usually give, but I can’t help it. His birthday is this month, and I chose him for the Celebrate the Author Challenge. He’s an author I enjoyed as a child myself, and now again with my children.

If you’ve ever read the Frog and Toad stories, maybe you know what I mean. What a pair these two old bachelors are! So complementary in their personalities. So physically unattractive (unless you have a thing for amphibians, as I admittedly did in first grade). So… human.

In our house, “I’m having a Toad kind of a day” has become part of our specialized family discourse. When you wake up feeling a bit grumpy, stodgy, easily panicked, and inflexible, you’re having a Toad day. Toad somehow stays lovable in the stories despite this. Perhaps it’s because Lobel has balanced him so perfectly with his tall green friend Frog, who’s almost always cheerful, fun-loving, loyal, and encouraging.

My favorite stories come from Frog and Toad Together. I love “Cookies,” for instance, because it’s so darn true. Fresh-baked cookies have always been my Waterloo, the demands of willpower notwithstanding, so I can relate to these guys when they can’t resist some cookies Toad has baked, and resort to all kind of foolish attempts to trick themselves into not eating any more. And then there’s “Dragons and Giants,” where they read a story together and then go looking for adventure to prove their mettle. The story ends with them back home, safe, but hiding. Are they brave? What makes a person (or a small squishy animal) brave?

I could talk about every single story in the book. I like them all. But the most complex is “The Dream.” Toad dreams that he’s onstage, with Frog his only audience, and a booming voice announcing his many accomplishments. The applause is deafening, but with each succeeding performance, Frog shrinks until Toad can no longer find him. It’s a story about the costs of competetiveness, told feelingly, compellingly, and memorably. It’s a wonderful find for children.

This audiobook is one we own, and I recommend it. Arnold Lobel himself is the reader, and he has the most warm, friendly voice. It’s perfect for these stories, all of which convey a gentle wisdom fleshed out in true-to-life relationships and situations. My only regret is that my daughters have listened to it so much, they have the stories memorized and can no longer benefit from these books as readers. But no matter. I’ll take them on any terms.

 

 

One Writer’s Beginnings: Nothing Lost

This book has been on my shelf for years, but though I’ve read pieces of it (my tagline comes from it), never before this week have I sat down and read it all the way through. It’s an autobiography of Eudora Welty’s writerly persona, but this doesn’t mean it’s a dry, theoretical treatise. Far from it. She explores her family history, complete with photographs and early childhood memories recounted with wonderful clarity of detail. It’s a short book, organized simply into three sections: “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.”

I’ve only read one of Welty’s novels, The Optimist’s Daughter, and both my great liking for it and its alleged autobiographical nature compelled me to pick up One Writer’s Beginnings. The two books truly do bear a close resemblance to each other. I find it interesting that Welty quotes a passage from Optimist in the concluding pages of this book. Apparently she wrote Optimist first, and in One Writer’s Beginnings she’s following in the footsteps of the heroine of that story, Laurel Hand. I love the idea of a writer who’s inspired by her characters, rather than always implanting her own already-lived experience into them.

The commonalities between the two books are many and substantial. The characters, the locales, the events, and even the central, organizing situation of a woman returning to explore her family’s past are identical. I was glad that along with other aspects of writing and the genesis of stories, Welty touches on character creation, a discussion that’s invariably provocative and discerning. On the subject of her own autobiographical explorations she has this to say:

Through learning at my later date things I hadn’t known, or had escaped or possibly feared realizing, about my parents — and myself — I glimpse our whole family life as if it were freed of that clock time which spaces us apart so inhibitingly, divides young and old, keeps our living through the same experiences at separate distances.

It is our inward journey that leads us through time — forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

These fascinations with time, different kinds of time, overlapping experience, and the function of memory, run through both this story and Optimist. Welty’s ideas about a transcending ”confluence” of experience are what give her exploration of the past meaning, and resolve the story. Through memory, we can reach into the past and access the truths of our own “beginnings.” What Welty wasn’t aware of as a child, she can uncover in this book, writing in her seventies, through memory. Her perspective reminds me very much of Wendell Berry’s, which surfaces over and over in his stories and poems, and includes like Welty’s not just the importance of memory, but the equally important tempering influences of faith and love.

This all sounds very abstract, so I’ll conclude by handing the microphone back to Welty herself as she links art and life and memory far more succinctly than I seem able to do:

It seems to me, writing of my parents now in my seventies, that I see continuities in their lives that weren’t visible to me when they were living… Could it be that I can better see their lives — or any lives I know — today because I’m a fiction writer? See them not as fiction, certainly — see them, perhaps, as even greater mysteries than I knew. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.

 

Books and motherhood, Welty-style

I’ve struggled with guilt feelings that I read too much, because when I’m reading I’m not as accessible to my children. Turns out I’m not the only one. Another mother also tried to balance her passion for reading with her mothering, and her daughter ended up a writer to be reckoned with: Eudora Welty. Here’s one of Welty’s memories of her mother from One Writer’s Beginnings:

Now, I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else. In my mind’s eye The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour — my mother was a bread maker; she’d pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven. I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol, Mary Pickford. A generation later, when my brother Walter was away in the Navy and his two little girls often spent the day in our house, I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of “Little Red Riding Hood” with the children. She’d just look up at the right time, long enough to answer — in character — “The better to eat you with, my dear,” and go back to her place in the war news.

Welty doesn’t detail her own feelings about this, but I know one thing: when I read this description, I feel an instinctive liking for her mother! Looks like I need to get better at multi-tasking…

 

Running from the roses

I’ve never been much into horse racing, but I usually watch the Kentucky Derby, largely out of nostalgia. (I used to live in Kentucky.) Saturday’s was my last. Eight Belles’ death was just too heartbreaking.

This article by Mike Lopresti asks some good questions about Saturday’s race:

• “In public perception, horse racing sometimes finds itself on a thin line between competition and exploitation. Look at the track and what do you see – the sport of kings, or the arrogance of humans?”
• “Words such as courage and determination and heart are used to describe the animals. It is as if they become human athletes, as if they become family. OK. But if that is the case, is this the way we treat athletes – breeding them for maximum speed, even if it kills a few of them? If they are family, how can an enterprise watch so many of them die?”
• “‘They put their life on the damn line,’ Jones said to the media Saturday evening. ‘She was glad to do it.’ How would he know?”

Lopresti’s conclusion is, “The sport need not be condemned. It is not going away. But some soul searching is in order.” I think that’s probably an accurate description of what will happen, but it’s not the desirable outcome. The desirable outcome would be radical change on a number of fronts.

I resist the label of “animal rights,” because I think sometimes that debate goes off in a wrong direction, making value judgments I don’t agree with. But I am a “living things rights” advocate. I still believe in the vision suggested to me by God’s imperative in Genesis that humankind should “steward the earth.” Stewarding isn’t a self-serving or exploitive discipline.

It’s true that things in the racing industry probably won’t change. But the small change within my power to make – leaving the television off — I gladly make.