In Which Wild Wakes Up the Wilderness in Me

 

 

photo by Anna Reavis

 

                     “I couldn’t let myself believe it...and also go on breathing...”          

When I first heard of Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I  wanted to read it:  walking alone on the Pacific Coast Trail to try to outwalk the ghosts of your past and the pain inside you sounds  like something I would do or would have done, had I been childless at anytime in the past 20 years.   So last week, when I found it at my small local library, I grabbed it up and put Les Miserable on hold.

I had no idea how hard just getting through the first chapter would be for me.  That’s where I got to last Friday before I had to stop and regroup and decide if I was strong enough at this point in my life to read this woman’s words.  I thought I was getting a hiking memoir.  What I got in the first chapter instead was a reliving of my own mother’s death.  Strayed lost her mother in the same way that I lost mine (except that I was pregnant with my first child at the time) and at exactly the same time in her life.  She had the same kind of intertwined, how could I live without this woman, relationship with her mother that I had with mine.  I even remember struggling to stay awake with her nights, which is almost impossible in pregnancy, because I was afraid she would die while I slept, and then feeling guilty that I fell asleep.  The biggest difference is that I was with her, holding her hand,  when she died, a type of fullness and completion denied to Strayed, and for which I have been infinitely grateful because being present at the moment of death had been denied me when my brother had died a few years before, so already I knew how important it was.  It brought  to mind Sally Field’s speech in Steel Magnolias about being present when she brought her daughter into the world and being present when she went out of it.  This was the one person I knew who had been present when I came into the world.  I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to be there when she left it, no matter what was going on with my body at the time.    

The one big other difference is that I have never tended, nor even been to her grave.  I suppose that is a kind of denial:  denial through ignoring;  close your eyes,  and it isn’t there.  So because I have lived 20 years now in my self-inflicted forgetting,  being surreptitiously overwhelmed with this issue in a hiking memoir completely took me aback.   Here are some of the last words of the first chapter:  “Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone…It broke me up.  It cut me off.  It tumbled me end over end…I would want things to be different than they were.  The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods.”   What motherless child can read words like these and still breathe?  I think I am going to have to make myself finish this book.  Twenty years is long enough to live in forgetting.

Breaking the Cloud Atlas Blog Jam

photo by Amy Brandon

“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul.  Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow?  Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’clouds.”  Zachry in Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I’ve spent a month being paralyzed by the thought of trying to write about Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  How do you write about one book that is actually six novellas intertwined?  A book that’s not about any one thing, but about everything and nothing, the grand and the minute.   It slices life in fractals across time and space with six different genres and settings, with at least as many themes and plot lines, and with characters too numerable to track without notes. 

I enjoyed Cloud Atlas because reading it felt like working a jigsaw puzzle.  I had to keep notes to keep up with the whos and whats of the stories, and I had to get past a certain page, I think around page 25, before I liked it at all.  Am I a better person for having read it?  Did I learn anything?  Any great revelations for me? Maybe not, but it was entertaining in several different ways, well written, often funny, and kept my mind engaged throughout.  I call that a book worth reading.

“’He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him!  & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’

            Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

What We All Want

photo by Anna Reavis

 

“We all just want to be heard.”   Maggie O’Connell

I watched what may be the best Northern Exposure I’ve ever  seen on my lunch hour.  It’s in season six entitled “Dinner at Seven Thirty.”    The quote above  is Maggie’s take on the theme,  and that completely resonates with me,  but I’ll take it one step further and add,  “And we all just want to be loved and understood.”

I guess that about sums it up.

Someone To Watch Over Me

 

photo by Anna Reavis

 

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”  Ada in The Snow Child

 

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey is a charming adult fairy tale about wanting and waiting for something that seems to remain just beyond your grasp until you stop waiting for it, and suddenly it appears.  Part of the lesson is that while you may not get exactly what you want, what you get may be more lovely than you imagined it could be.  The story speaks to the yearning we all have to belong to someone, to be part of a family, to be loved and to love.  Even the wildness that seems bred into the snow child herself doesn’t preclude this desire in her.

I chose to read the book with some misgiving because I assumed it was going to be just magical realism, and I don’t always love magical realism, but the story isn’t what it seems to be at all.  You have to read it to see what I mean.  I didn’t love the ending, but I still recommend it for a sweet, entertaining read.



Some Days You Win, Some Days You Lose, Some Days You Just Get Pee on Your Shoes

I’m not sure why, but I am a person who gets lost. I’m very organized and careful, but almost every time I try to drive to a place I’ve never been, I get lost. I think it’s a combination of over-thinking and not trusting myself. During the month of September, almost every week-end day has involved my trying to find some random soccer field hours away from my home for my daughter’s travel soccer games. Last Saturday was no exception. We left 15 minutes late, and then, of course, I got lost. I spent the entire hour and a half ride about to pee on myself but unable to stop because we were already late, and I knew we would get lost, making us even later. After going the wrong way a couple of times and then driving past the field with NO SIGN (who does that? No sign at a soccer complex?), we pulled down a rutted dirt road into what looked like a grass field to find a few ratty looking soccer fields. I begin to panic as I look around for bathrooms and see NO BUILDINGS. My daughter jumps out and runs. I see another parent, who is a teacher at my daughter’s school and who I don’t really know all that well, (at least not well enough for what I end up saying in front of her later), sitting in a chair reading beside her car. I ask her about bathrooms; she doesn’t know. I sigh and begin to traipse across the field to the edge of the woods.


“Woods” is a loose term for what this briar-laced, poison-oak infested bog was. I lowered my head and charged through briars scrapping at my face and hair for a few feet. Have you ever noticed how thick trees and shrubs look from the outside looking in and then how thin they look from the inside looking out? I lowered my head and charged through more briars until I felt like people couldn’t see me. By this time, if some squatting didn’t occur very quickly, I was going to be sitting in stinky, wet pants for a very long time. So, in a rush and without looking, I squat in poison oak and pee on a mound of dirt from which everything that comes out of me runs directly onto my new tennis shoes. I am a college-educated, 45 year old mother of two teenagers squatting in a bog, peeing on my shoes. It does make you wonder where you’ve gone so wrong. I do the only thing I know to do. I hike up my poison-oak dusted panties and march my pee-soaked shoes through briars and mud and emerge from the "woods" looking like Swamp Thing with briars and leaves clinging to every part of me and with pee and mud on my shoes.  I get back to the parking lot, where I see a port-a-potty right beside my car. I look at the teacher/parent and sputter, “Mother Fucker. There’s a port-a-potty right here.”

Some days you win. Some days you lose, and some days you just get pee on your shoes.

Wherein An English Major Explains Quantum Physics (Ok, That May Be Hyperbolic)

 

 

photo by Anna Reavis

 

“Gentlemen…you are arguing about words, not reality.”  Richard Dawkins

Over the course of the last month, I’ve read two works of science nonfiction both of which, unfortunately, have had a common theme.  The first was Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, and the second, which I am still in the middle of is The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins.  What I have found to be the unfortunate common theme is that both authors have had to explain why people should accept several fairly well-established scientific theories, one of which is evolution. The purpose of the entire Dawkins novel, in fact, is to attempt to convince people of the truth of evolution.  The Hawking novel deals with quantum physics and the birth of the universe, but even here Hawking has to address the issue of people who refuse to “believe” in carbon dating, among other scientific techniques.

 

I find it beyond disheartening that human beings still work to refute any new idea that falls outside of their established mental comfort zone. (See Galileo, circa 1633, among other issues.)  The way the world works doesn’t change just because we choose fuzzy math.  A  scientific theory describes a predictable, stable process by which, in our experience and based on our understanding of the world, something happens.  Even chemistry on some levels can be considered theoretical because not every reaction can be mathematically expressed and solved, but that doesn’t mean the reaction didn’t happen.  (Hawking)  Acceptance of scientific theories, then, is not properly termed “belief in.”  Acceptance of scientific theories simply means to acknowledge that the observable results validate the hypothesized process.   People have no problem flipping on a light switch and accepting that the resulting light is the product of a process called electricity, even though they don’t fully understand that process.  

Humans, by nature, want to see, understand, and intuit things.  In the case of quantum physics and in fact, in the case of many of the processes by which things came to be, this just is not possible.  We must accept the limitations of our brains, without lazily falling back on faith and religion.  There is no question that the easiest route is to throw up our collective hands and say, “God did it.  We can’t figure it out.”  But that is not the path to truth, even for intelligent believers.   Ask your own questions.  Do your own research.  Become a fully developed human being.  Don’t believe the propaganda.  Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.  Find out for yourself.



We Are All Outlanders

photo by Anna Reavis

“Trust me, we are comrades in ruin.”  --The Reverend

The problem with reading a book like The Outlander by Gil Adamson is that I have to finish it, and then there is no direction  for my reading pleasure to go but down.  There is no way the next book will be as entertaining or as emotionally fulfilling as a book I’ve loved almost every word of.  At the same time, I feel lucky to have discovered such books in my life.  It isn’t a matter of literary worth, although I do think this book has literary worth.  It’s a matter of its worth to me at this certain time and in this certain place of my life.

There is poetry on almost every page.   And how I love a strong, triumphant woman, especially one who is in the process of sewing  her own widows weeds when her disastrous, ruinous, neglectful, cold-hearted  husband comes home.  She  sets down her needle to pick up his rifle and shoot him with it.  She then embarks on a journey that would kill most of us and discovers that for her  there is no such thing as unbearable.

The journey is both a journey of the soul and a journey of the body and is mythological in the proportions of its occurrences.  As she runs for her life, the widow discovers truths about and strengths in herself that were previously unknown to her.   She wants to punish herself for not anticipating what she could not have known, for  life raging out of control around her, as if she somehow could  have checked that.  She fears more than anything the darkness in herself.  Her dreams  scare her because she senses in them unforeseen dangerous truths, things she feels she should see coming but can’t.  She wants to lie down and quit, wants to be too broken to be fixed, but she keeps getting back up.  The widow is only 19 years old, and she already knows what so many of us never understand:    that we give  value to our own lives and that it is up to us to take from life what we can.

This book, for me, is fiction at its best.  It helped me discover and understand truths about myself.  The novels that speak to us do so because they teach us to name the unnamed in ourselves.  We are all outlanders.

Is Tess a Masochistic Neurotic? Am I?

Photo by Anna Reavis

I've been stressing myself out for a month about writing a post on my beach reading of  Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.  I know it's one of the backbones of British Literature, and I know I'm supposed to love it, but honestly, Tess gets on my nerves. 

When I read the novel in high school, I wrote a paper on "Fatalism in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles."  And when I was in high school, I probably saw the entire plot as fatalistic.   As an adult, however, I am more able to recognize how much a part we play in our own happiness.  Tess says early on in the novel that we live on a blighted star, but in truth, is it not more correct to believe along the lines of this Tess quote:   "A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away."  (Gender doesn't matter here; this quote just happens to refer to a woman.)

We bear responsibility for our own choices, regardless of the curves life throws at us.  Hardy never seems to decide which matters more:  our fate or our choices.  I think our choices are what matter more.   A person always contributes to his (or in this case, her) own downfall.   The more you expect of yourself,  the more you can expect to be hurt because you will always assume others see things as you do, which is not true at all.    Tess acts out of her sense of personal responsibility and concern for the people she loves, and her over-developed sense of duty costs her dearly.   She expects better of Alec, of her parents, and of Angel, because she would have behaved better toward them.   What destroys her in the end is her naive expectation of love, coupled with her sense of moral duty.  The lesson here is not an uplifting one.

Wherein The Swerve Makes Me Swerve

Photo by Anna Reavis

“The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger.  And that should not make us shrink in fear.  Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe.”  

from The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

My normal reading pattern has been in disarray of late.  The divergence began when I read a work of nonfiction entitled The Swerve:  How the World Became Modern  by Stephen Greenblatt.  While I enjoyed the work and found it interesting, it was hardly escapist summer reading.   Then I looked for escape in Serena by Ron Rash and ended up in a place and time and with people I didn’t want to be.  This week, I’ve started and dropped five different books, looking for something to “take.”  No luck.  Sometimes, my stress and irritation level eradicate my focus, which just makes me more stressed and irritable.  When I need escape the most, it flees from me.

The most important lesson I took from The Swerve was a reminder of humanity’s bent to let fear and ignorance overpower enlightenment.  We see this in all ages and places among all people.  We want to hunker down in a shell of what we “know” and reject without thought anything new and challenging.  And of course, there are always opportunistic demagogues feeding these fears because that is their only way to power and recognition.   It seems our default is, as Greenblatt terms it, “superstitious fears,” because they are easy to embrace and require no effort of logic on our part.  Curiosity, thought, logic, these things are not dangerous.  It is their opposites that keep us in the dark, that keep us from fully embracing our potential as a species.   It seems a lesson we will never learn.

A Land More Kind Than Home

Photo by Anna Reavis

“It’s a good thing to see that people can heal after they’ve been broken, that they can change and become something different from what they were before.”
Adelaide Lyle in A Land More Kind Than Home

My goodness these last couple books have made me miss my dead people.  And now A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash has made me remember things about my brother and his death that I thought I had lost from my memory.  I used to try to avoid anything that would make me remember those years of my life, but lately it seems I am finding some comfort in remembering them.  I hope that’s because I am finally finding healing and peace, and I hope it’s healthy and positive, even if the memories aren’t.


Cash’s descriptive language is so real and evocative of places and times I’ve inhabited that I often felt as if I were there with the characters, especially in the chapter about Jess being with Stump’s body right after the accident.  Being physically confronted with death in a person you’ve known only as very much alive is the most bizarre, incredible experience.  You just keep watching and waiting for the suspension of breath to end and the chest to rise and fall again and the breath to flow in and out again.  And then you begin to believe that you are in some weird time stall where everything is paused.  After the initial shock, you want to hold on to the grief and on to it and on to it because that keeps you closer to the time when that person was alive.  Something about the immediacy of the grief, something about being near it, makes you halfway believe you can reverse what has happened.  Because I know these things, I found the sheriff’s story, as well as Jess’s story,  to be valid and exact.  There is some comfort in being known and in knowing that others have felt as you have.


Given my normal penchant for happy books, I guess it seems strange that I loved this one.  I think it was because it was so real and so true and spoke to and of things I have known first hand.  It is beautifully written, and I am excited to see where Wiley Cash goes from here.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.” Ma in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress


The older I get, the more rebellious I become. Even when I try to plan my own reading, I sabotage myself. I have countless books lined up at home and on my Kindle that I am supposed to be reading. I am in the middle of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.  And yet, last Friday, I felt a library trip was in order. So, out of pure rebellion (and because non-fiction starves my poet soul), this past week-end, instead of finishing The Swerve or reading any of the other 500 books piled up at my house, I read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.

At least I chose a book that would feed the poet soul. I won’t say I loved the book or even that I found the translation fantastic. I wish my French were such that I could read the original. But, a small volume about the importance of literature, romance, art, and beauty in the midst of the soul-starving Chinese communist regime was just what I needed in my reading life right now.

One concept I found especially interesting was the narrator’s compulsion to collect the words of Balzac, so much so that he wrote them on the inside of his sheep-skin jacket when he couldn’t find any paper. I have often wondered if the compulsion to collect words and passages of beauty was just an oddity of mine and my own way of “writing” when I feel so inept and lacking with my own words. Something about being surrounded by beauty, whether reading it or just copying it, provides comfort.

And, of course, instead of going back to my “assigned” reading, I have now gone to the library and checked out two works by Balzac.  "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon)