Writing and Healing: Year 2

Cathedral: A Book of Stories by Raymond Carver

[the second garden]

In Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer she describes how, as a child, she “loved novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden door; a wardrobe—into an alternate universe.”  Me too.  And there’s a sense in which I’m realizing Ms. Prose’s book has been for me a kind of portal—a series of such—doors opening to books. 

Some of these are books that I read nearly twenty years ago now.  Books that made me want to write:
Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Also Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, a book of eleven stories.

I’m wondering this morning—what kind of books might make a person want to write?  What kind of writing invites writing?  Which books and stories and poems have done so for me?  Which might do so for other people?  And how do they do it?

Which are the stories that beckon?  Not only into the process of reading but also into the process of writing? Could it have something to do with the way a story begins?

Here are three beginnings from Raymond Carver’s Cathedral:

Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center.  After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite.  The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end.  His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet.  The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday.

Carlyle was in a spot.  He’d been in a spot all summer, since early June when his wife had left him.  But up until a little while ago, just a few days before he had to start meeting his classes at the high school, Carlyle hadn’t needed a sitter.  He’d been the sitter.  Every day and every night he attended to the children.  Their mother, he told them, was away on a long trip.

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.  His wife had died.  So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut.  He called my wife from his in-laws’.  Arrangements were made.  He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station.  She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago.  But she and the blind man had kept in touch.  They made tapes and mailed them back and forth.  I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit.  He was no one I knew.  And his being blind bothered me.

(So much could be said about these three stories.  Each, and the first two especially, is a study in loss.  And what can happen in the wake of loss.  Each of the stories culminates in a conversation that changes things, a conversation that makes loss somehow more bearable.  If I were going to find a spot for these stories on my other site—One Year—I’d put them in the Tenth Month—on healing conversation.  And these conversations are unexpected—they occur between people that are strangers at the outset of the stories.  Between Scotty’s mother and the baker.  Between Carlyle and the sitter he finds for his children.  Between the speaker of that third story and the blind man.  Something happens in each of the stories.  We’re being invited in for a reason.  Look.  Look what can happen.) 

(If this book were a garden it would be a garden with benches and chairs in it for sitting—and talking.  But not ornate benches.  The seating would be both ordinary and weathered.  The garden would be a corner of a park in a neighborhood that had seen better days.  There might well be a trash can next to the bench.  But there might also be something unexpected as well—an unexpected patch of green.  Not formal.  Not planned.  Unexpectedly beautiful----)

But back to beginnings.  The doorways to stories.  The beckoning.  I’m reminded of a poem by Robert Frost, a writer who, like Carver, spoke in a kind of plain language that was ordinary at the same time that it was more than ordinary.  A language that seemed ordinary but had something large in it as well.  The poem by Frost is The Pasture.  It begins this way:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

_______________________________________________________________

The first beginning above is from A Small Good Thing.

The second is from Fever.

The third is from the title story, Cathedral.

The Snowman: A Poem by Wallace Stevens

[the first garden]

If this poem by Wallace Stevens were a garden it would be a winter garden.  It begins this way:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

What could it mean to have a mind of winter?

I'm more familiar with another poem by Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  It’s also a poem about looking.  It begins in winter:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

And it ends in winter:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Both poems have the quiet in them of a winter garden.
The quiet of a winter morning.

What might it mean to have a mind of winter?

Last Monday we met at Cancer Services for our writing workshop.  We read three poems aloud before we started.  One was Elaine’s poem about a rose garden in winter.  Sometimes a single word or image comes out of an evening and I’ll remember it.  This time the word was hibernate.  Winter as a time, perhaps, for hibernation.  C. remembered a time when her son was small and it was raining and he was happy—relieved—because, he said, now he wouldn’t have to go outside and play.  The reprieve of a rainy day.  Like the reprieve of a snow day.  Nothing expected.  No place to go.   

A mind of winter?

This past week we had a snow day here in North Carolina on Thursday.  Well, a wintry mix day.  White on the grass and droplets on the tree branches—droplets poised between ice and water.  Nothing expected.

 

Last year we had a snow day in February and I took this picture.  Purple tulips in winter.

Wallace Stevens calls his poem The Snowman but it doesn’t have a snowman in it.
Except maybe for him.
(Does he call it the Snowman because he’s a man looking at the snow?)

This is how The Snowman ends:

. . . the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing
that is.

What might it mean to have a mind of winter?

 

Eight Gardens: A Task for Writing and Healing?

While paging through the book, The Inward Garden, I came across a line that struck me.  The author, Julie Moir Messervy, is a landscape designer.  In the introduction, she describes how she first began to learn design.  She traveled to Japan to work as an apprentice in a traditional Kyoto landscape design firm.  She met her teacher, a master in traditional landscape design.  It’s her description of the task this teacher set her that caught my attention:

My first assignment was to visit eighty gardens and to ‘open my heart to their beauty and spirit.’

Such an appealing assignment.  To learn garden design by opening one’s heart to the beauty and spirit of 80 gardens.

My first thought on reading this is how wonderful that would be—to have that as one’s task—to be boarding the plane to Japan.  My second thought is how it might look to translate such a task here in my own country to writing and healing.

Eighty gardens here?
Eight gardens?
Eight books?

Francine Prose is a novelist in New York City.  I haven’t read any of her novels (yet), but I have very much enjoyed her recent book, Reading Like a Writer, a book which grew out of her own teaching.  After she became a published novelist, she was invited to teach writing and literature as a visiting writer at universities.  One of the first things she noticed was how stressful her students found reading—how much they’d been encouraged (prematurely it seems) to form strong critical opinions of the texts they read and how little they’d been given permission to simply, as she puts it, “read with delight.”

She writes:

I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used.

This comparable, perhaps, to opening one’s heart to a garden—to the placement of rocks and water, individual plants, the curve of paths.

She writes of how she began to organize her classes in a new way:

. . . around the more pedestrian, halting method of beginning at the beginning, lingering over every word, every phrase, every image, considering how it enhanced and contributed to the story as a whole.

I like the notion of lingering over particular words and images in a text as a way to open oneself to them.  It reminds me of the way I was once taught by one of my teachers to read a poem.  He suggested we find a single line in a poem—any line—that spoke to us—that we felt some connection to—and to use that line as a way in—a kind of entrance into a poem.  I have, at different times, found his suggestion helpful not just with poems but with all kinds of texts.  To find a single line or image that resonates for some reason—that jumps off the page a bit—and start there----

So I have this notion now of looking at eight books with an open mind and heart.  Some from my Box of Books, some not.  And then seeing what happens------

A Pause Before Beginning

It's the beginning of January and there's a part of me that wants to rush forward to meet new projects, new garden catalogs, a new stack of books-----

But, first, there's something else----a need to pause----

I was away for the holiday and while I was gone I checked my messages one afternoon to find a message that Elaine, a member of our writing group at Cancer Services, had died.  She died at home on Christmas day.  She had an advanced cancer, but I had not expected her to die so soon.  She was an integral member of our writing group.  She was faithful, coming to every meeting, except for the last one, in December, when I believe she was too ill to come.  She had a quiet, lovely way about her.  She was a poet.  She often brought something to contribute.  We have been making a book in our writing group---a kind of scrapbook of written and found pieces.  At the last meeting Elaine attended, in November, she brought a couple of pieces for the book, pieces that she had written out in her careful calligraphy.  One was an excerpt from Psalms 91.  It included these lines:

Thou shalt not be afraid
For the terror of night, nor for
The arrow that flieth by day,
Nor for pestilence that walketh in darkness,
Nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

For He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all ways.  They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.   

She also brought one of her own poems, about a rose garden in winter.
A poem about roses asleep in the garden beneath a blanket of snow.
About waiting for spring.
For the roses to burst forth.

A poem that contains these last lines:

Until then in my memory
Fragrant roses still grow. . .
In the midst of winter
I gather them from the snow.

This is what I'm picturing now: Elaine, going forth on her own path.  Not afraid.  Or knowing at some level that she didn'€™t need to be afraid.
And something about those last lines---something about gathering roses in the snow.

Elaine, you'll be missed-----
But not forgotten.  Your pieces are in the book------

Writing and Healing Idea #47: A Pause in the Day’s Occupations

My favorite poem with the word pause in it is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a poem called The Children’s Hour that I memorized as a child.

It begins this way:

Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.

This poem can be a kind of springboard for considering (or reconsidering) one’s own pause—
What might a pause in the day’s occupations look like?
(Or a pause in the week’s occupations?  Or the year’s?)
When might it occur?
And for how long?
And where?
And pausing for what?

It’s the kind of thing one could write about------