Mulling Over The Times

Lately I've been mulling over the state of things: my own country (USA, election and all), the world (Israel, Hamas), the universe (poor Pluto, you had a good run) and everything else in between. It can be daunting to take a good, hard look--all that seems to be lacking, all that obviously needs to be done.

The mulling over makes me appreciate every story I've read, for it is in stories, poems, the written word that I see, time and time again, the same inexhaustible truth: good triumphs over evil. It just does.

I love that. I need that--as an artist and as a human being. I am grateful for that truth today. It keeps me going. It keeps me coming back around to my writing (which frightens me just as much as the state of the world does). It makes me realize what a blessing it is to be able to communicate in times like these--when information can be shared so quickly, when a wealth of knowledge is literally at the tips of our fingers.

These are hard, unsettling times, but when has the best art been created? It springs from the hard & unsettling, the mess. So here's to the mess, art's inspiration. Where would I be without you?

On Writing, Art & Loneliness

Art is loneliness. I write because there’s no on near to read. It keeps me calm; it keeps me going.

Sometimes the intellectual in me likes to think otherwise. I reason with myself: Writing is a complex form of artistic expression, and therefore an intricate medium, meant to relay a meaningful message or agenda, a genius thought or idea. But it’s not. Writing (the act of art) is simply the breath between swimming strokes, the necessary overflow of silence from the mind, soul.

Art comes easily to man because loneliness comes easily to him (Adam soon lost his rib; even cavemen drew on walls). Writing has always come easily to me because my nature has always strayed away from human contact: I bristled as a child when a parent coddled me. I recoiled as an adolescent when a peer brushed against me. Even now, as an adult, I keep my hands, eyes and ears to myself. But it doesn’t bother me (anymore): I know that one must let the loneliness be. It is the way of art, the climb. No man can completely bear the burden of his brother. Each artist must carry a weight all his own—because that is the nature of this tree called life. It is the unavoidable, undeniable truth (as Yeats so perfectly put it, the perpetual virginity of the soul). 

Loneliness was made for art (why did God create man?). The more tears an artist keeps to himself, the more someone else will not shed alone. The more blood I bleed here, now (in silence, at home), the more I will have to give—on the page, and in life.

I have always kept my loneliness a secret because I have always known it is the one thing I must keep safe. It is the root of the root and the bud of the bud of this thing called writing—because it (loneliness, art) is the one thing each of we humans shares.

On Annie & Losing Loss

I found Annie the summer I turned fourteen. I was living up in the Rocky mountains, then, in a stucco house amidst a few acres of Ponderosa Pines. My family had moved from a small suburb of Chicago the year before. I was a loner, still--hadn't made any friends yet and kept to myself mostly, wandering the hillsides and reading girlish novels. Finding Annie was a surprising surprise.

It was a typical summer, Friday morning. My mother had gone off on one of her weekly garage sale-ing jaunts and returned with her usual bag of finds, one being a hardcover book she'd found lying in a box of dusty, one-dollar paperbacks. She bought it because it looked pretty: The cover was made of cloth; the text on the binding shimmered with gold, scripted lettering. I was rummaging through her bag of finds, as I always did, when the shimmering caught my eye. My eyes quickly panned over the binding--it was Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Picking up the book, I immediately began fondling the pages, peeking inside the front cover. To my surprising surprise, it was a first edition.

I asked my mother if I could borrow it. She said it wasn't for reading; it was only for looking at and put it on the shelf in her bedroom with the other "pretty" books--old, gilded copies of Dickens and Austen. The next morning I snuck into her bedroom as she was tidying up the kitchen and slipped it stealthily off the shelf. Hiding myself in her closet, I began to read--one, raw sentence at a time. Although I was only fourteen, I got it. Mysticism was mine. I knew the language Annie was speaking. I spoke it even more fluently than she.

Hours passed by quickly, intensely--the bloody cat crawling through the open window, the muskrat and mantis eggs, the eskimo. It was time for dinner. I said I wasn't hungry; I was on Fecundity and sprinted off with Annie tucked beneath my arm, making my way up Old Antler's Trail to Hidden Springs Glen, a small, communal lake that I liked to call my own. I lay on the grass as the sun set and soaked up the hypnotic buzzing in Annie's head. When dusk had finally settled down, I ran back home, crawled into bed and kept reading until the sun made its way back over the mountains.

In the fall of the year I turned twenty, that stucco house amidst a few acres of Ponderosa Pines burned down, burning my first edition of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek along with it. The moment I heard the news is still clear in my mind. My mother called me from the driveway of the house, speaking calmly. I sat on the steps of my small apartment, the phone cradled against my shoulder, looking at concrete parking lot below.

"How about the Annie? Is she gone, too?"

My mother didn't say anything. She didn't have to.

Of all the loss I have experienced in my life thus far, it is the first edition of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that has plagued me the most. Losing that book was worse than losing my first lover. I felt an emptiness in every molecule of my being for what seemed like an eternity afterwards.

But time has passed, and just as the age-old addage says, with its passing, the wound has healed. I have lost that sense of loss. In its place I have found something new: the genuine knowledge of a voice all my own and a shimmering hope for the future. Things like these always seem to come as a surprising surprise.