Findings

I listened to this story on NPR while making supper last night. It’s about a Chinese couple waiting while excavators dig out the building where their 2-year-old was staying with his grandparents. I wanted to somehow recognize their story, out there beyond the self-indulgent bubble of my blog with its books and ideas.

Frantic voices in another tongue
break the stillness of my kitchen.

They wait
for what is lost
to be found.

Long days, they wait –
propping one another up –
tossing the unraveling spool of hope back and forth
a gossamer thread
stitching them together.

The lost are found.

The child,
cradled in the arms of a grandfather,
his last vision the face of a grandmother
standing behind
steadying hands resting on Grandfather’s shoulders.

“Mommy is here” she moans into the rubble –
Another language, but an anguish that pierces me
stitching me to them
here in my kitchen half a world away.

Lost.
Found.
Lost.

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.

I got a question in the comment section of my “about me” page about use of quoted material on a blog. Because my answer was too long-winded for a comment, and because I’m by no means an expert, I answered it via email. However, it got me thinking more consciously about the subject.

I’ve been blogging for about 7 months. When I started, I thought of it as a journal that looked better than my plain notebooks. If anyone had referred to it as a “publication,” I’d have just giggled. But now that I’ve been blogging awhile, I see that people do read blogs, mine included, more than I realized. Because of this I decided to do a little digging on the subject of fair use and attribution of quoted material.

Because of my professional experience (as well as my basic nature), attributing intellectual property — words, thoughts, organization of thoughts – to its rightful owner is something I’ve always cared about. Plagiarism — adopting someone else’s ideas or words and passing them off as my own — isn’t something I’d even come close to doing. However the issue of “fair use” as applied to blogging is something I haven’t thought about very directly or thoroughly. “Fair use” is the loosening of restrictions on use of copyrighted material in certain situations where the good of society weighs in against the exclusive rights of the author. Are the rules for blogs any different than for the other, more traditional mediums I’m more experienced with?

My exploration of the subject so far confirms my hunch that the same rules apply. The Poetry Friday link in my sidebar contains a brief discussion of the subject, but I wanted to learn more. I discovered this article by Jonathan Bailey, “The Basics of Fair Use,” to be very helpful. I recommend reading it if you have questions on the subject. In particular, Bailey discusses how fuzzy the concept of fair use really is. The article gives four guidelines (also listed here at the U.S. Copyright Office) for evaluating whether fair use applies in a given writing situation. I thought them through and it confirmed for me that my use of quoted material here constitutes fair use.

The fourth guideline is the most difficult to evaluate. It has to do with whether you are potentially harming the market for the original source. I’m certain I don’t harm the market for novels or books by writing book reviews that contain excerpts, but if I quote a poem in its entirety, do I compete with the original source of that single poem?

The only scenario I can think of is this: someone might google a poem just because they love it. They’d be willing to buy a book of poetry for that one poem, but if they can find it online and print it out, that’s probably one less book for the writer to benefit from. I certainly don’t want to risk doing harm to writers! They bring me so much pleasure and enrichment. So this is an area I’m going to think more consciously about in the future. The rules suggested in the Poetry Friday article are to quote a few lines and then link to the rest of the poem. I’ve tried to do this with living authors, but I’ve made exceptions at times. Bailey’s discussion points out that it’s permissible in some cases to quote an entire work. Still, I think in most cases a good rule of thumb is to stick with either excerpts or breaking the poem up with commentary.

So that’s where I am with the topic so far. There are some links in this article by Susan Thomsen that I’ll be checking out. Meantime feel free to make suggestions for further reading, or offer your thoughts.

Here’s a link, added 4/25/08, to Mitali’s Fire Escape, a very useful discussion on this subject.  

I listened to A Christian and an Atheist yesterday. It was about the existence of hell. I like the concept (of the podcast, not of hell), but I couldn’t listen to the whole thing! (I will. I’ll finish it, then probably I’ll have to come back and unsay some of this in another post…) I felt too uncomfortable for Wonders for Oyarsa, the representative Christian, who was having to pick his way very delicately over a ground littered with hurt and anger. He was doing a good and discerning job of it, but it was… almost like a counseling session in some ways, rather than a strictly cerebral debate. It’s not a bad thing, I just felt anxious. Always do, listening to such debates.

It has me wondering, is there such a thing as a serene atheist? What I heard from the atheist side was anger at God, not unbelief: a sense of “this is too hard,” of grievance. You can’t be angry at Nothingness. But at least in my limited experience I don’t think I’ve ever heard an atheist at peace. 

The thing is, I think I understand this anger, because I harbor it myself, to a degree. All of us, or at least I myself, even though we realize how ludicrous it is, find ourselves saying from time to time, “If I made the world, I’d…” This month, even yesterday morning as I walked through the neighborhood with my dog, it’s pain (again) that’s bothering me. Why so much pain and blood? Why does human life necessitate killing? Even at the center of biblical faith, the Old Testament temple, the air was filled with the braying of animals and the smell of blood; our experience is much less earthy. That’s before we even get into the slaughtering of various people groups, the beheading of all of Ahab’s sons by their tutors (which I read this morning), the sacrifice of Jesus himself.

If it were up to us, perhaps we’d have chosen different terms of existence.

Nevertheless, I believe. Even though I don’t like it all, I believe in such truth as has been revealed to me. I understand that reading scripture is unique, and it won’t be comprehensible unless I approach it with at least the minimal faith that God is. The question isn’t whether or not the biblical story is true, but whether I can read it without clothing myself in a self-protective anger that expresses itself in argumentativeness. 

My problem is that I am beginning (again) to run aground in a kind of numbness, continuing to read my Bible, but without really looking it in the eye. I believe the scriptural view of cause and effect, which teaches that where your heart is, there your treasure will be; treasure follows disposition, rather than vice versa. It’s counter-intuitive. Applied to Bible-reading, it would mean, discard that analytical, argumentative spirit, and the treasures will come into focus — not because God’s truth is irrational, but suprarational.

My disposition toward scripture must still harbor rebellion in reserve, because I find it deadening under my eyes. This is NOT what I want. I want to grow into the kind of reader Dennis Kinlaw describes in this passage from This Day with the Master, which summarizes his advice to his son, a doctor:

You must be careful. The first thing you know, you will wake up and be 50 years old, and the only thing you will have between your ears will be human anatomy and how to cut on it. That is a pretty thin ration on which to live intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. You need to start forcing yourself every day to read something that is not medical so that when you are 50, you will be a human person as well as a surgeon. You ought to read your Bible from beginning to end every year for ten years. If you read three chapters a day and five chapters on Sunday, you can work your way through it in a year, and in ten years you will be a halfway intelligent Christian layman.

Wow. I’m a long, long way from halfway intelligence.

Here’s a “poem” I wrote a few years ago that explores the way a habitually argumentative state of mind preserves autonomy, but also deadness. In the strange discursiveness of living, I find myself located not in the ending lines, as I was when I wrote it, but in the beginning lines. I hope this means not that I’m running in circles, but that God is taking me another layer deeper with him:

I for an i

I AM WHO I AM. This is my name forever, and my memorial name to all generations. (Exodus 3)

I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees Thee. Therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42)

A soul preserved inviolate
A spirit locked in Heavenly embrace
hold forth in endless debate –
To be, or not to be –
I am, or I am not—
Back and forth I go,
tossed between their questions until I am a blur,
a whirring like hummingbird wings
sending their breeze Heavenward:
Are You?
Or are You not?

Are You there?
Are You good?
Are You trustworthy?
Are You aware of all this?

Or are You not?

I remain a seed of possibility
imprisoned—
entombed—
in its armor of doubt—
trapped in being
intended for becoming.

“I AM,” You reply—
“I AM here
I AM good
I AM trustworthy
I AM aware—
I AM to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
and to you—
in all your was,
all your is,
all your yearning to become,
I AM.
Let your being find its root in Mine.”

A soul clenched in a protective fist
clasps hands with I AM
only in the agonized death of “I am not”—

yet apart from I AM,
I am not.

You are I AM.

Planted, I break open
root reaching, clinging
leaves spreading
stem unfurling toward Heaven.

Just started Georges Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest yesterday, and I see that writing itself is going to be a preoccupation. It’s interesting to think of blogging, and other forms of journal-keeping, in light of what he says early on about his experiment of keeping a diary:

When I first sat down before this child’s copy-book I tried to concentrate, to withdraw into myself as though I were examining my conscience before confession. And yet my real conscience was not revealed by that inner light — usually so dispassionate and penetrating, passing over details, showing up the whole. It seemed to skim the surface of another consciousness, previously unknown to me, a cloudy mirror in which I feared that a face might suddenly appear. Whose face? Mine, perhaps. A forgotten, rediscovered face…

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one’s own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears…

Interesting. He’s zeroing in on prayer as a qualitatively different phenomenon than writing; it’s more than the psychological relief of merely “getting things into words,” and governed by a different consciousness.

He returns to the subject here:

I had thought it [the diary] might become a kind of communion between God and myself, an extension of prayer… But why record in black and white matters which should be dismissed as fast as they happen? The worst of it is I find in these outpourings such solace that this alone should suffice to put me on my guard. As I sit here scribbling in the lamplight, pages no one will ever read, I get the feeling of an invisible presence which surely could not be God — rather a friend made in my image, although distinct from me, a separate entity. Last night I became intensely aware of this presence and suddenly caught myself turning my head towards some imaginary listener, with a longing to cry that shamed me.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. (Pablo Picasso)  

My 6-year-old daughter lives in a horsecentric universe. Everything around her is filtered through a grid that asks, “Hmm. I wonder, how would this look with horses?” In honor of Poetry Friday, hosted at Farm School today, here’s ”Horses,” a short poetic meditation on living in the resulting household landscape:

Horses pinned to corkboard,

horses in a heap;

horses made of pom-poms

watch me while I eat.

Horses made of playdough,

horses filling books,

horses lining bookshelves–

They’re everywhere I look!

Does this obsession limit?

Or does it feed the flame

of her imagination–

her artistry–

her Name–

For I can have no doubt

her calling is to be

a seer and a sayer

transforming worlds for me.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. (Rachel Carson)

A crash deafens the hillside

The sound of two dimensions colliding–

            time and eternity

            earth and heaven

A sizzling line traces the intersection between the two planes

And flame explodes along the line–

            blinding bright–

A roaring blast that drives shepherds and sheep

into the earth 

Flame resolves itself into forms–

White-hot beings pouring thickly across the sky in

layers of sound and light–

            Glory to God in the highest

            and on earth–

                        in a stable– 

A thin wail rises into the chorus

The sound of two dimensions colliding–

            time and eternity

            earth and heaven–

Flame resolves itself into form 

I know, because I saw the baby

I am only a shepherd, but I know, because I saw the flame

receding beneath his translucent baby skin–

            blinding bright–

submerged beneath human flesh 

I am only a shepherd, but since then

I have grown quicker to recognize such moments of

collision between two worlds, when I sense

layers of sound and light that feed my longing

feed the flame in me–

            blinding bright

            white-hot tongues of flame licking my soul

            melting my soul

submerged beneath my human flesh 

I live only in such moments

Enduring the time between

Waiting to see his face again 

Just once more

to see that baby’s face