Findings

The story of my life as a mother is the peeling back of layer after layer of selfishness. The birth of my children released a new kind of love in me: fiercer, more helpless, more inescapable than any I’d experienced before. But its effect has been to shine a bright light on the paltry, flimsy supporting muscle-tone in my character.

First it was the piano. When my first daughter was not quite 1, my grandmother passed along to me the lovely Mason & Hamlin baby grand that had been cherished by my grandfather. It brought me a rebirth as a musician. Someone had given me an old, 1970’s vintage Fender Rhodes years earlier — the kind that has all 88 keys and weighs a ton, but works for an apartment-dweller. It kept my musical persona breathing. But the acquisition of a piano with dynamic range and with all the responsiveness and body of the acoustic instrument at its finest was a continual temptation. I remember that often, while my daughter was in her playpen, I’d take a basket of laundry down to put in the washer, and the piano would whisper, “Just run through that song one time.” An hour later I’d dash guiltily back upstairs to find her asleep.

Then it was the worship team at church. I’m a classically trained pianist, but as part of a large, contemporary worship ministry I developed improvisational skill, and I was totally infatuated with the wonder of being able to play the same set of chords in a zillion different ways. I played more at home, and more and more frequently at church, maxing out at three services every other Sunday, preceded by a Thursday night practice. There was a seductiveness to belonging to that artistic community, and I rose to leadership. More time went into it. More heart went into it.

Then the experience went sour, and with it, the piano. We left that church, having lost confidence in it as a spiritual community distinct from some other kind of big corporation. The pull of the worship team, and of the piano, evaporated. We’ve searched for, and (dare I say it?) found another church home. But I’m not feeling drawn to music there. Why? Partly scar tissue, but also: I’ve discovered blogging. Blogging is all me, all the time. My life looks orderly here. Now this computer, and this small patch of cyberspace, has a gravitational pull equivalent to a black hole in my universe. Now as a result of blogging I’ve experienced a reading renaissance, which is great – but when my nose is in a book I’m not accessible. Now when I bring a load of laundry downstairs, it’s the computer, not the piano, that sucks me into a place where I don’t notice time passing. (I seem to have a thing for keyboards…) 

Is it any wonder that lately I’ve found myself questioning my convictions about homeschooling? I’m not doing a very good job, I reason; the academics are going fine, but my heart’s not really in it; they know more about young children’s development at the school around the corner; this isn’t my calling.

This is a personal question that each family answers differently, but in my case, the foregoing line of reasoning is me rationalizing my selfishness and fear. I think there are a couple of false lines of thought embedded in it. One is, “I have a need for creative expression.” That’s partly true. I’m a right-brainer, artsy-type, dyed-in-the-wool, down-to-the-bone expressionist. But does it follow that I need to be spending these hours here, at this particular kind of expression, serving (let’s be honest) no real purpose beyond myself? My deepest “need,” right now — speaking for myself and no one else — is to fulfill my role as a mother wholeheartedly. I know this, because I know how many nights I lie awake tweaking my mothering, praying for my children, battling my way toward understanding them. What will it be like in 10 years if I don’t give them my best during my waking hours now, while they’re here and young?

Somewhere in there, too, is the lie that I can’t. I’m not sure if this is true for all mothers, but many times during the day I’m intensely aware of my deficiency of inner resources — of wisdom, of gentleness, of words that go to the spot of heart that needs them, of long-term perspective, of simple physical energy. I’m certain that for me, this computer is a place to hide, a personal “napping room” where I check out of engagement. The reason this is a particularly ironic problem is that one of the main reasons I’m homeschooling is to offer myself to my kids, to not hide from them, to be present to them in all my glorious imperfection and absurdity. That’s love, isn’t it? That’s why I’m doing this.

When we first started homeschooling, it was an idea my husband liked but wasn’t pushy about. I made the decision to go for it myself. But now, he frequently and confidently says that it’s my calling in life. Is it? After a year of it, have my grand ideals held up?

Not sure. Not sure it’s my calling in life. But I am sure it’s what I should be doing now.

I don’t remember Shrek, but I know the movie contains a statement about people being like onions, many-layered. My layers are all pitifully self-involved. But somewhere in there is something non-onion that feels the sorrow, weeps at the peeling, and envisions something better than my selfishness can supply. It’s the part of me that appeared out of nowhere when my children were born. It’s the part of me that’s hoping resolving to bring my blogging back into its rightful place, and my children into theirs, starting today.

I always wrote with the idea that what I put out there is going to stay there. Once I publish something, it has been published. I’ve never deleted more than one or two posts from my site. I don’t think that there are takebacks. I don’t feel right about it. (Alison Headley, Digital Preservation and Blogs, SXSW 2006)

I came across this statement on The Quotations Page, and though I googled it in a couple of ways, I haven’t been able to track down the original source. I’d like to read it in context. (Any suggestions for finding it are welcome.)

Even without any context, it’s an interesting statement. It gets to the question of what a blog is: a personal log, or a publication. Or a hybrid.

I think the issue of trust is relevant. Recently I revised some of my archived posts, shortening whole poems to excerpts and linking to the whole poems elsewhere on the web. The edits haven’t changed the content in such a way as to make comments no longer fit. Once there’s been a dialogue about what you post, changing the content or focus of the original post would be a violation of trust with those who’ve responded. 

I’ve seen the phrase “edited to add” recently, when bloggers make an addition to a past post, and that makes sense to me. I don’t know if there are any rules about other kinds of revising (deleting, rewriting, etc.).

I face a similar revision question with my daughter’s math workbook. When she forms a numeral backwards, should I have her erase it and fix it? Or should I point it out but leave it as is, as a record of her development in that area? At first, I took the former approach, but lately I’ve changed to the latter.

The author I wrote about in my dissertation has a 40+ year canon. He’s revised his earlier writings extensively, so that first versions are very hard to find. The changes have strained some of the life out of the original work, even though the revised books attain to a higher (and more austere) artistic standard in other ways; imposing a mature perspective on youthful exuberance has mixed results. When I asked the writer why he did that, he said that some of what he’d written as a younger man “seemed callow.” He wasn’t comfortable having it speak for him anymore. In a blog, the same thing is possible, but without the same accountability; you can erase the original entirely, leaving no former version in circulation. (There are no used blogstores.) That’s fine in a personal journal, but is it fine in a blog? Now that I consider the question, it seems complex.

Just some random musings. What’s your opinion? 

Yesterday as part of his sermon, the pastor asked, “What script do you live by?”

A provocative question. I have, and have inherited, more than one script. There’s the unrolling scroll of my life’s drama, activities, calling. (This is what the pastor had in mind.)

But then there are my habits of operating and relating. The idea of a script led quickly in my mind to what scripts are made of: words. Lately I’ve been thinking anyway of how I use them in talk and writing, and how much time I spend in the blogosphere, the realm of disembodied words. They’re so double-edged. Worst case scenario, they become a wall. I’m wanting to avoid this:

Words roll
little bumps on a music box cylinder
that never winds down

They fill and clog the air
leaving no room to speak or breathe
or be –

just words
slathered together with a thick layer
of quick-drying, impermeable obliviousness.

The wall protects
controls
ornaments
above all, prohibits –

Words that could be a stream
carrying refreshment
bathing surfaces and relaxing joints
gently uncovering the hidden

become a wall
forbidding
sepulchral

My exploration of copyright and fair use has led me to the realization that despite being somewhat careful, I’ve not been within bounds all the time. I’ve gone back through the archives and cleaned up a lot of my old poetry postings in which I included whole poems. Thankfully this blog isn’t very old!

Next step: images. I need to go back through and weed out some images I’ve posted here, oblivious to whether they’re copyrighted or not. At least when it comes to quoting I’ve had some experience with how to incorporate others’ words in a way that properly acknowledges the source. But when it comes to images, I’ve been totally clueless!

So I had to change my header, and while I was at it I changed my tagline that was excerpted from an e e cummings poem. It didn’t seem to fit with this un-green image. This tagline comes from Eudora Welty; I explain it on my about page. 

Hopefully this is the last time I’ll have to overhaul things for awhile! :-) I’m all for change, but this is enough for now. 

I’m putting some links to helpful info on copyright & fair use in my sidebar, under the heading of Helpful Resources.

Here’s today’s Saturday Review of Books. Participation is always good, but this week’s Review seems exceptional. I’m wondering if it has to do with T.V. Turn-Off Week…?

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio  is a book of short stories that created a stir when it was first published in 1919. My library copy included an introduction by Malcolm Cowley which suggested Anderson’s great strength as a writer was to provide momentary, bright glimpses of character and truth, and this is why 1) this book succeeded, and 2) Anderson never succeeded as a novelist. My Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia mentions its “lyric beauty.” Another source spoke of its logic as song-like. But unlike these critics who seem unanimous on its literary merits, other readers objected to it as “pessimistic or destructive or morbidly sexual” (quoted from Malcolm Cowley’s introduction).

My own reaction to the book is somewhere between these two extremes. I recognize the beauty of its writing. It’s written simply and straightforwardly, capturing characters’ essence over and over with stunning economy. Its narrator functions as a keenly observant eye, never staining the lens with strong personality, moralizing, or emotional heavy-handedness.

Except in the first story, “The Book of the Grotesque.” Here Anderson essentially orients the reader to his purpose by setting forth the book’s organizing myth:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful… And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques… The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

The only character in this collection of stories, many of them only 5 or 6 pages long, who isn’t a “grotesque” in the sense described here is George Willard, a young reporter who becomes the audience — or perhaps more accurately, the hearer of confessions — for other characters. Over and over, those who are struggling to make sense of life, or who have chosen their course and lived to a disfigured old age, buttonhole him and explain their experience. Usually these encounters take place at night and outdoors, which may have helped to give this collection a timeless quality that transcends its very specific locale of smalltown Winesburg in an innocent era.

Willard himself is a quintessential young man of “a great many vague thoughts,” a passive recipient of information. He appears in almost all of the tales, sometimes as a main character, sometimes as a peripheral character in someone else’s story on whom others project some significance. Eventually, he leaves Winesburg to seek his fortune. If I were to read the criticism of this book, I’m sure it wouldn’t take long before I heard an argument for Willard as Anderson’s writerly persona, a portrait of the artist as a young man. He becomes, in the sense described above, a “composite” of the truths others confess to him but doesn’t really develop or change in any significant way himself. He succeeds in not becoming a grotesque, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll develop into anything else.

For some reason, despite its strengths, I struggled through this book. Very possibly, this isn’t so much the fault of the book as the beautiful weather that’s freed me from my house and taken me outdoors. I’d bring the book with me, but let’s just say my reading process was interrupted more frequently than usual.

A second reason is that if someone had taken Thoreau’s statement that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and plotted out a fictional argument for it, this would be the resulting book. I don’t despise such truth as it conveys. I’m grateful for a glimpse into other ways of thinking and experiencing. Why else do we read but for that? I’m just saying it began to weigh me down, taken all in a gulp. Quality? No question. Significance as a literary achievement? No question. Pleasure in reading it? Well, there’s a question there. Surely I delighted in some of the book’s beauty, but I also wasn’t sorry to see it end.

We read Marguerite Henry’s Brighty of the Grand Canyon as a family read-aloud. I read it long ago, probably when I was 11 or 12, but remembered virtually nothing. How can this be? It’s full of excitement and the usual emotional highs and lows of animal stories. This one includes a prospector, a lion hunter, a president, and a murderer along with the noble and unassuming Brighty the burro. It also incorporates Ms. Henry’s now familiar theme of love for wild places, taking place in the Grand Canyon before it was made a national park. What’s wrong with me that my mind permits such good stuff to evaporate, while certain episodes of The Little Rascals are firmly established there till my dying day?

In any case, this book was a success for both mother and 7-year-old daughter. The only thing I disliked was what I always dislike about animal stories: bad people who enter the scene and abuse the animals. Fortunately in all the Marguerite Henry novels I’ve read, the animals triumph in the end. But sometimes they have hard going at the hands of people far more brutish than they are. The villain in this story is truly diabolical, a vicious criminal who’s counterbalanced by the brave, straight-shooting (both literally and figuratively) Uncle Jim Owens. His character is carefully and lovingly drawn, respectful of the real Jim Owens after whom he’s modelled.

I should add too that this worked well as a read-aloud. The narrative is interesting and dramatic, and the dialogue/dialect are fun to bring to life.

Brighty was a real burro, named “Bright Angel” after Bright Angel Creek, and some information is gathered about him here. There’s also a movie about him, in which Marguerite Henry’s own burro Jiggs plays Brighty. Though I did know a Breyer’s horse figurine exists (no longer in production), I didn’t realize it replicates a statue of Brighty that sits at the north rim of the Grand Canyon. All of this testifies to Brighty’s popularity and indicates that my enjoyment of this story treads an already well-established path.  

I’ve been thinking about the piano. It sits there, a Mason & Hamlin baby grand inherited from my grandfather, a treasure with wear-marks from his fingers and a beautiful tone. I played for years, obsessively, but I never play anymore. Not sure why.

The real story of me and the piano starts with my father, who grew up relating to his father from another room. He wished for a dad who played with him, but faced instead the closed door of the office as my grandfather built up his medical practice.

But at night, after Dad was tucked into bed, Grandpa would emerge from his office and head for the piano. Chopin would waft up the stairs, then some Beethoven, then some Debussy, then more Chopin. My dad can still list off—with awe in his voice—the different compositions he would hear as he drifted off to sleep.

Then it was my turn. When my grandparents would come for Sunday dinner, I was the one who would go to bed to the sound of piano duets. The air between Dad and Grandpa crackled with tension most of the time, but at the piano they would sit side by side, looking at the same page, trying to move at the same pace, speaking in a language that found order and beauty for both voices. They would sit down at the piano in the late afternoon and still be at it when I went to bed. Always, they would get cocky and speed up. Always, they would crash and burn. And always, they would laugh—helplessly, till the tears would roll. “This is a real Polish horse-race!” Dad would exclaim, wiping his eyes. (Don’t ask me to explain that… I still don’t get the joke.)

The grate in my floor was designed to let the heat roll upstairs, but it made an excellent window too. The light and heat and sound flowed into my air, and I would train my ears and sometimes my eyes downward through that grid, listening to them harmonize, clash, celebrate, defy.

D.H. Lawrence thought about a piano that was apparently tied in with his history too. He writes,

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

That’s the middle stanza. The rest is here. His poem invokes a whiff of my own feeling, but not exactly. He’s melodramatic; I’m merely morose. (And milking my mahvelous m’s…)

I like this one by George Szirtes better:

It’s a baby grand with unexceptionable teeth
and a butterfly wing caught in the net curtain.
When touched it answers gently as a breath

Of cold wind, a sensualist in a puritan
Country…

(Rest here.)

Neither of them is a perfect fit, but both affirm the power of wordless things like music — and musical instruments. Poetry Friday is at The Miss Rumphius Effect today. Meander on over to see what others are discovering in the world of wondrous words.

Do your reading habits change in the Spring? Do you read gardening books? Even if you don’t have a garden? More light fiction than during the Winter? Less? Travel books? Light paperbacks you can stick in a knapsack?

Or do you pretty much read the same kinds of things in the Spring as you do the rest of the year?

I wouldn’t say my reading tastes change. But my reading quantity sure does. I’ve been laboring through Winesburg, Ohio for about a week now simply because it’s become possible to read it outside, on the swing, and I find myself setting it aside after a few pages to drink in the sights and sounds: color at last; my kids playing; my dog yapping annoyingly because she wants me to throw the frisbee.

I consider this phenomenon to be my way of emerging from hibernation. Winter in the Northeast seems to go on forever, and I escape it by retreating mentally into the wonderfully varied universe of stories. Now I can come out of the confines of my four walls, my imagination, the covers of my books, and breathe deep of the pollen-laden air.

It’s Shakespeare’s birthday (they think), and you can read Garrison Keillor’s recognition either by clicking the Writer’s Almanac link in my sidebar or by using this link, which takes you to the permalink for this week’s programs. (There’s no permalink for individual entries, just for a week’s worth.)

This is National Turn Off Your T.V. Week, I’ve read in a few other blogs. Being a loather of television at all times, I applaud the concept mightily… but confess that I haven’t unplugged ours. The girls watch “Clifford” every morning. I figure a half hour a day won’t kill them, and also I use it as motivation for getting beds made, clothes on, and table cleared in a timely manner. I’d love to think of another effective motivation but so far have drawn a blank… Which is a worse default tactic: “Clifford?” or me, stewing ineffectually and pacing from one bedroom to the next to the bathroom to do my hair and then repeating the cycle? I’m like a shallow, suburban version of Lady Macbeth…

Anyway I’m trying to sit less at the computer too, which has some of the same negatives as the t.v. as a relationship-subtracter, imagination-sapper, and time-eater. How does this screen absorb so many moments of my life?