Sunday, October 29, 2017

Fuzzy Thoughts Are Happy Thoughts?


photo by Amy Brandon

Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did?  Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal. ~Axl in The Buried Giant

I keep telling myself one of these days (soon, I hope, as I am well out of girlhood), I am going to get old enough to be comfortable telling my truth with no carefully chosen language.  I am amazed at how hard it is for me to offer anything that feels like criticism without feeling guilty and second-guessing myself.  My good-girl, hush-girl, smile-girl, play-dumb-girl, Southern Baptist rearing worked a little too well.  I mean for god’s sake I had to preface this blog post with a mini-psychological analysis just to be able to say that my reaction to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was, well…meh.  How do I dare criticize a Nobel-prize winner?

I don’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy the book, or that I believe the book has no merit.  Not at all.  I have finally, at least, starting abandoning books I do not enjoy at all.  This book I finished in a week, which is a normal time frame for me.  I read a lot of different books at once, so I don’t usually finish a book in less than a week.  Also I think people who pride themselves on  speed-reading are compensating for something.  I don’t even care what. 


I understand  the symbolic lesson of The Buried Giant, and I like it.  If individual memory is a small-time con man, collective memory is an international pyramid scheme.  And the philosophical argument to be had over what’s best:  knowing the truth always versus sometimes maybe fooling yourself or being fooled to assure your own sanity, peace of mind, ability to be happy?  I get it.  I really do.  I suspect there is no constant, dual answer to this question.  The thematic concepts in this novel are great and are well worth the time spent thinking about them.  The presentation didn’t work for me though.  The plot felt disjointed, the dialogue contrived, and the characters just felt confused.  I guess it’s hard to write characters who can’t remember their own past without having them seem addled and confused, but that construct doesn’t do a lot for character development.  Has a character developed just because that character has reclaimed its own memory?  Who are we without our memories?  Ah…but see there we get back into one of the philosophical themes.  So maybe this is a brilliant book.  Maybe I just need to be more enlightened to see it.  Maybe that will come with age.  Oh wait, I’m already old.  So maybe not.   

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Same Snake, Different Scales

 
 
“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none…It’s like a snake that sheds its skin.  The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”  ~Richie in Sing.Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing,Unburied Sing turned me inside out, put another crack in my heart, and turned on another light in my brain.  How can one small book harbor so many of  today’s heart-breaking headlines:  the tragedy of how we treat one another because of something as shallow as skin pigmentation, the epidemic of rural drug addiction and the damage it does to families, the never-ending scourge of poverty and the way it leaves its victims voiceless for generations, and the unjust, ineptly named judicial system in America and the damage it does to us all.  Somehow, Ward shines a light on all of these while telling an engaging story and creating complex, nuanced characters that I expect we will remember for a long time.

Before I was through the first chapter, I loved JoJo as a precocious, wounded, strong, promising 13-year-old young man.  By the time I reached the scene where the sheriff’s deputy pulls the gun on him, I was floored by my own shocked, naïve reaction.  My mind went to “No, you can’t do that.  He’s just a child.  That’s not right.  That couldn’t happen.”  And then I remembered that it happens every day somewhere in America, very often with more tragic results than JoJo’s luck in that scene.  That’s when I realized how sheltered, how unaware on a visceral level  I am of what young  black men in America live and how overwhelmingly frightening it must be to be the parent of a black child.  Even though I try to be compassionate and empathetic, I don’t have the experience, the ability to understand.  It’s truly unfortunate that the people in power in this situation are also the people who have no capacity to understand the nature of its insidious truths.  How will we ever get anywhere? Maybe by beginning to understand that we cannot understand.

Ward’s recognition this week by the MacArthur Foundation encourages me to look forward to more novels from her in the coming years.  I haven’t read her National Book Award winner, Salvage the Bones, but I intend to just as soon as I can handle another emotionally wrenching novel.  I understand it too is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi.  I have a feeling both novels are just two of the stories the lyrical, perceptive Ward eventually will give us, and I know we will be better for receiving them.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Our Shadow Selves


photo by Amy Brandon


“Of course I know what I want, she thought, but when she opened her mouth she found it empty.”
Lydia in Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng


It’s dark and rainy, and I love it.  I’m beginning to prefer days like these, to find comfort and revelation in the dark as well as in the light. My friend, Carrie, said she found Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng a bit dark for her taste.  I remember wondering before I read it if I might feel the same.  I usually don’t like dark books, but for some reason I didn’t have a problem with this one.  Maybe because it is written in such a way that I knew Lydia was dead in the first three words so I never became emotionally attached to her.  I read the book more as an interesting study of the dysfunctional way we interact with each other, especially within our families. 


I liked the structure of the book – the way Ng seems to scatter random pieces of the plot and then slowly pick them up and tie them together. Even though you know the main plot point from sentence one, tension, uncertainty, and suspense still build as Ng reveals the how and why of Lydia’s death.  The reasons we hide our truths from one another are various, but the end result is the same:  dishonesty leads to discord and sometimes to tragedy.  Like Lydia, many of us aren’t even able to admit our truths to ourselves.  It seems all of the characters in Everything I Never Told You are hiding both from themselves and from those closest to them.  Hidden truths become bent in the hiding and what was beautiful becomes disfigured.  There are few things more beautiful than a fully-realized human who has the courage to live her truth, and there are few things more dangerous than its opposite. Why do we feel compelled to hide from each other as if any of us is anything other than fully human? This book is a study in what happens when we repress our truths and don’t learn to express them before it’s too late to prevent tragedy.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Just Mind the Freaking Sheep




"There are larger rhythms than just our human rhythms.  It's when we think our rhythms are the only noise, that's when we get in trouble.  How do we stop jabbering long enough to hear something beyond ourselves?" ~John Hay

"In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger."  ~ Annie Dillard


I’ve had a hard time getting my thoughts together about David Gessner’s The Prophet of Dry Hill:  Lessons from a Life in Nature.   As I understand it, Gessner began the project intending to write a biography of John Hay, the naturalist author who lived and wrote on Cape Cod in the Twentieth Century.  Lived and wrote may be an understatement in Hay’s case, as it seems John Hay embodied all that was best about Cape Cod prior to its being infected with the cultural equivalent of small pox. Eventually, Gessner decides to write mostly a recording of his conversations with Hay instead of a true biography.

So many ideas are presented and in such a tangential, conversational way that it has taken me about a week to begin to get a handle on them. The most important idea I took away from these conversations is that we keep getting it all so wrong.  Generation after generation, we mindlessly misunderstand our role here and in so doing continue to defile the planet.  We keep running after the wrong things:  money, power, prestige, control, domination, chasing the ever-illusive golden fleece when the whole time we simply should be tending the sheep.  John Hay was one of few people who realized this, thus the word prophet in the title, bringing to mind something Enrique Martinez Celaya said when Krista Tippet interviewed him a few months ago:  "The prophet is not a martyr or mystic who seeks transcendence but one who turns humbly and curiously toward the world."  I would ask that we all try to remember that anything that is beautiful even for one moment and touches the soul of just one person has value and purpose and deserves to be treated with respect.












A Kind of Healing

  "...to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing" Several years ago, I discovered May Sarton’s journals. What a b...