The task before me

Started July 2011

I read a great deal, less now that earlier times, but still regularly, persistently, and eclectically.   I nearly always read the New York Times book review, in spurts, and add some of their reviewed books to my Amazon wish list.  I am not a slave to this or any other list, so the list never seems to decrease as I wander off course and discover a magazine, a book, a subject that is pushed forward by its rhyme or a beckoning from a beyond.

But now I have a task before me, that is to read my own scribblings, piled up on a file cabinet, stuck into folders, loosely folded in a straw square basket that only I know holds the keys to journal entries from the 1980s and 1990s.   Some of the writing is typed, while others are pages torn from their bindings, scratched out in ball point or fountain pen ink, intelligible and random, unintelligible and dark.

Time, the merciful, time the madman, time our destiny demands that I decide to see them go up in flames or be salvaged for an other's eye.

Much of my writing I burned already, letters, whole journals, scattered leaves of parchment, gone but not always forgotten, and not nearly forgiven.  I have a few regrets about how I savaged my memories in a burn barrel in the Berkshire mountains, or at a camp fire, but most often in the floor to ceiling stone fireplace at Sherman.


I'm not certain what is left, or why they still exist.  My limp attempt at novel writing, my own Treblinka rests in a mauve file folder.  All my proprioceptive writings are together laying in wait for an active verb.  And my small short story masterpiece written at the theology group in five drafts is stained with the fingers that both rejected and embraced the pages time and again, always begging me to end its purgatory of indecision. 

I put the task off each day, taking on more mundane duties, or painting and sketching, organising closets, emptying medicine cabinets, and yes burning old invoices and long outdated income tax receipts.

Am I afraid, and if I am what is it I am afraid of that can be revealed by reading my own words?  Or am I just not certain I want to decide now, right now, their destiny when my own destiny is still unwritten.

then I started, 23 December 2011

Then I found my way into the piles, the purple folders, the clipboard plastics, the loose sheets and today, month after writing the above, I am sorting the wheat from the chaff, tossing away diary entries from 24 years ago, and morning pages from 1992.  Gone, very soon they will be ablaze in the burn barrel.  It is just a matter of time, a milder day, stronger footing, or a call to my helpmate to watch the smoke rise out of the metal container.  Soon they will be gone.

The Coal Tattoo

Silas House writes the way some folks drew or paint, with a clarity of images that spark emotion and imagination.  His books also call me back to the sultry long days and the moonlighted sky above the mountains of Kentucky, driving behind a lumbering truck filled with black soot, lumps of coal, one after another tumbling  onto the narrow road that took me somewhere or nowhere at all.

All these years later, nearly 20 to be precise, and a lost inventory of journals, I can't recall the name of the towns, or the road map, but I can remember the feelings that were stirred in me as I stepped into a back road store and encountered Kentucky folks sipping pop, and making sounds that resembled a spluttered greeting to my so obvious strangeness.  Later that same week I came into more direct contact with similar folk outside Chattanooga (Tennessee) where I spent a warm day admiring and then buying two hand woven baskets from a roadside vendor.   I stayed a long time, chatting, drinking coffee, then water, as the man sliced the reeds and wrapped them snugly into shape.  One of the baskets was meant for laundry and it served me well until one day it splintered from the weight of wet towels.  The other basket is with me still, a market basket, long, firm, with a fixed but flexible handle that sits comfortably on your wrist.  The man who made these baskets could be Paul, Clay's uncle, the character who makes Clay's quilt.

Basket at etsy

The Coal Tattoo is the third in a trilogy, and the second book of Mr. House's I've read this holiday.   His first book, Clay's Quilt, came into my reading hands several years ago, but stuck with me as if I had sat on nettles.  The middle book, A Parchment of Leaves moves back in time just as the Coal Tattoo brings the story full circle revealing relationships in the two succeeding books.

Clay captured me, Vine soothes and then shocks, Serena grows on you, and then you meet Easter as a young woman, and Clay's Momma, Anneth, as a wild teenager.

A most terrific trilogy and one I left in Pittsburgh for my daughter to read.

Your little notebook

Charles Simic is still writing in little notebooks, perhaps Moleskines.

I am writing in several these days: my daily notes in an older Rhodia Pure? which is coming into its final run before I blick an eye.

And small dots and dashes in a Cavallini & Co 2011 diary that Bill gave me half way through the year.

The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel

It comes in threes they say, or perhaps it is just Jungian synchronicity, but within days of each other Korea lost its leader, and Czechoslovakia, a country closer to my personal house and home, lost its Velvet Revolution leader, former President and amazing playwright, Vaclav Havel, after the untimely early death of Christopher Hitchens.

All men with voices, beliefs and personal strengths.

I had a friend who was caught up in the battle of Communism before the Velvet Revolution and it is his voice I hear when I listen and see the words in the above video.

Making a Mark

We have many terrific blogs on line, some beautiful, some informative, some intense, many often personal, but few meet the high standards at Making a Mark, a blog written by Katherine Tyrrell.

Plantery Gears

I first encountered Katherine at Wet Canvas at the Coloured Pencil Channel and found her later at her current blogs.

At the moment, Ms. Tyrrell is collecting nominations for best in several areas of blog-land and asking for recommendations.  I haven't found myself able to come up with a worthy nomination, not because they don't exist, but rather because Katherine has such a great handle on what happens on the web.  It always seems that Ms. Tyrrell is capable of circling the entire web and finding its artistic pulse.


If you don't read Making a Mark, today may be the day to begin with her weekly column on "Who's Making a Mark this Week.  It is a post I eagerly await.

Hitch, gone but not forgotten

Robert Scheer, at Truthdig. like many who knew Christopher Hitchens, writes fondly of him as he is laid to rest this week, and recalls his word, deed and energy.  This ditty from "The Internationale" struck me today as worth repeating.

Arise ye workers from your slumbers

Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition

And spurn the dust to win the prize. 

Like many my age and background, we've traveled up and down the political ladder, scattering our thoughts along strange paths with stranger bedfellows.  When I left for Amsterdam, I was a young liberal New York Republican, and when I returned years later I was a staunch independent who leaned as left as I could without fear of falling from the boughs of tarnished ideologies.

Nixon was out, Carter was in and I was committed to the working class.  I lived in the East Village, wore carpenter pants, continued to ride my bicycle and read Trotsky.  Unlike Mr. Hitchens, 31 years later, I never supported the war in Iraq, and always suspected the reasoning behind the invasion was faulty, flawed and opportunistic.  After all no one in Iraq had plundered the very ground I walked on in New York, nor sent its citizens to down an American icon. On other issues I frequently agreed,  and like Hitchens, I remain in doubt about the existence of the Supreme Being.

I always enjoyed Christopher Hitchens talks and robust energy in debating all those who disagreed with him.  Like another debater, one I also didn't always agree with, William Buckley, I knew I was listening to a person who thought, and thought well.

Wherever you are, and whomever you rest with, Christopher Hitchens, rest well and slumber in peace knowing many of us will remember.

 

How to hold a pen

Quiver (website)

Bandolier at Cleverhands (etsy)

Yes, I have many pens, and perhaps more pencils than pens, whether you are talking fountain pens or just a writing instrument.  And Yes, I have several very versatile pencil and pen holders, but still I don't have anything like the Quiver or Cleverhand's Bandolier.

It is holiday time?  Which one of these do I want?  Either? Neither?

Very early morning visitor

Red fox 17 December 2011 view (wiki photo)

It is rare, utterly rare that I see one of these visitors, and nearly as rare that I am up and at the window at half five or six in the morning--but today both occurred.

Do you have a child in your life or the love of nature

Mindy Lighthipe's book, "Mother Monarch" is beautiful and inspired me so much after I found and tried to save the life of my neighbourhood butterfly.   Check out Mindy's website for a short video of several samples of her work in the book if you are as fascinated by the butterfly as I am.

I bought Mindy's book at etsy in the name of Santa for my granddaughter, Anya, who is a true naturalist.