I went to the grocery store Sunday. I took a deep breath and popped on some gloves before exiting my car. At the entrance, the produce was made to look, and was, plentiful, though they were out of some “basics” on my usual list, such as yellow onions and potatoes. Still, there was a lot. Then in the bread aisle, maybe a couple dozen loaves of bread where normally thousands are stacked; in the pasta aisle, a few boxes of the gluten-free stuff, otherwise empty. No toilet paper, disinfectant, paper towels. Women wearing masks and stockpiling beans, clerks insisting they vape when a cough creeps out. I bought way more than normal, enough for two weeks, even as I put extra milk and sundries back on the shelves. “I believe there will be plenty of milk next week, too,” I said aloud to myself, like a totally sane person.
There was still ice cream.
As I saw the final price blurt itself across the screen, I felt my stomach tense. I felt grateful I could afford it and also embarrassed and worried I’d spent so much. I don’t think I fully hoarded, but the impulse was there, and I did buy batteries and lightbulbs and matches and dishwasher detergent and things I usually would wait to get until we were out at home. I’ll be honest: I felt scared, on edge, judgmental. My body felt tense.
I like to think of myself as brave. Lately, I’ve been feeling scared. But without fear, there is no courage. I think, in a time when great emphasis is on scarcity, courage may look a lot like generosity.
In that spirit, I’d like to share (or re-share) my favorite mantra a yoga teacher shared a few years ago:
I am enough.
I have enough.
I do enough.
I’d also like to share a gratitude journal prompt you can use. I shared this last week with the writers and artists who are taking part in this year’s Artist’s Devotional, but thought it might be helpful. I’m journaling for a couple minutes daily and finding it helpful.
Gratitude is the antidote to so much of life’s negativity, including foreboding and anxiety. I don’t mean this in a woo-woo or religious way (though those people would likely back me up). There’s a plethora of data to support it. And, as my friend Jeanette recently reminded me—you don’t even have to feel particularly grateful, you just have to write or say it.
Gratitude Journaling Prompt
Right now I am grateful for …
Right now, I can give myself …
Right now, I can give others …
Relationships—with each other, with our health, with our work, with our Earth, and yes, with our writing and ourselves—are among the most valuable things we have but don’t own. Not all the things that sustain us can be thrown in metal carts, then U-Hauls, hoarded, and price gouged. It’s like all the Christmas movies say: we already have, and are, what we need, if we take the time to notice.
For more free resources to get through sheltering in place, social distancing, and this weird time, click here.
“A good cook is consistently good—not just a little flair here and there—she can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough experience to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn’t moose [sic*]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice and patience.”
*I love this typo.
Julia Child, one of the most renowned cooks of the last century, doesn’t define “a good cook” as someone who’s well-known, who cooks every day or has a cooking regimen, who cooks for many people or just for herself, who can make anything well every time. To Child, a good cook is someone who:
Is consistently good (which we don’t start out as being—Child herself was a flop in the kitchen into her thirties).
Isn’t necessarily showy (“not just a little flair here and there”).
Creates simple dishes.
Creates complicated dishes.
Adapts.
Can turn something around—“has enough experience to change a failure into a success.” (Sounds a lot like revision, don’t it?)
To me, these qualifications can be chalked up to experience (“practice”) and attitude (“patience”).
She emphasizes experience, firstly—a good cook isn’t a one-hit wonder or a wunderkind. No baby geniuses for Child. A good cook needs a track record; to me, this implies a good cook likely has a history of failure so that she knows when something’s not right. It also means that she has enough dishes in her repertoire—she’s tried a variety of meals—that she can turn one thing into another. Her experience cooking is transformational; experience transforms her into this good cook, and a good cook then can transform one plan into another, one dish into another.
This is a fairly democratic view: Anyone can gain experience. Experience is simply a matter of repeated effort.
But in points 5 and 6, she seems to land on a specific kind of experience—not merely the repetition of going through the motions or following a recipe, but repetition with play, what a musician or actor might call improvisation.
Masters and amateurs
So what’s the difference (besides product) between a good cook and all other cooks? Between a master and an amateur?
A master starts with an idea, some ingredients but lets the creation become what it becomes. Masters play. Amateurs force; they serve liquified fish and call it “moose” [sic] and feel disappointment and make others eat their disappointment and complain about how hard writing is (woops) and how much they hate doing it.
This reminds me what poet Mary Szybist has referred to as avoiding “willfulness” in writing, not forcing an ending (or a middle or anything else) before we start. She meant this in the context of a poem (e.g., if I want to write a poem about my mom but it instead jumps to the garbage man and a dog, let the garbage man and the dog in—don’t shoehorn an ending about my mother in). It can be applied to genre, too, though. If it starts out as an essay but I realize it’s better as a poem, it’s a poem now. If I sing a wrong note, I start singing the harmony rather than overcorrecting and drawing attention to what was once a mistake. I use my senses and feel my way through. And finally, the concept can be expanded to process: Some days are hot, some are cold, some days I mangle words (words? what are words?), some days I sing them, but no matter the situation or my skill level on a given day, I can show up and play.
When I’m playful, I’m a good cook. I can serve a disgusting mousse because the menu says mousse or a delicious soup because that’s what the meal became.
The special attention of play
Play requires much more attention, besides just laughs. It demands that I listen, observe what’s there—what’s really there—on the page or in the pan, not just what I want to be there, not just following a recipe with abandon. Play lacks a formula. So while play might sound childish, like a lack of diligence or responsibility, in fact it requires a different, if not deeper, attention than a workaday mentality.
Of course, I don’t believe in good cooks and bad cooks, good artists and bad artists. I believe in behavior. Some days I’m a good cook, some days, not so much. It has a lot to do with my sense of humor. The best days on the page (and in life) I am myself without apology but with humor.
Most of my materials are salvageable (ideas, images, music) or easily replaceable (paper, ink). Even if the work’s subpar, if I play, I learn from it. Or at least I have a good time. When I hammer it into something it’s clearly not meant to be, all I’ve learned is disappointment without the benefit of experiment. The next time I’ll be no better off.
The most electric performances, the best players, are those who’ve practiced enough, failed enough, to improvise and improvise well, which is a more positively connoted word for salvage. It’s Charlie Parker. It’s Julia Child.
And so in life: that balance between perseverance and the primrose path. Having a direction but remaining adept and open. Not forced—lived. “It’s a matter of practice and patience.”
Me? I’m gaining the former and working on the latter.
In holiday celebrations and in art, may you be creative enough and summon the humor to soup your moose.
In 2020, I’ll be sending an Artist’s Devotional entry once a week to your inbox to help you explore your relationship to your writing. Like a religious devotional, we’ll consider the parables, lives, paths, and vows of those who have come before and consider how to construct our own; unlike a religious devotional, we’ll be faithful to our art, writing.
If you’d like to join in, simply email “Yes” and your name to Lindsey@LDAlexander.com, and I’ll put you on the email list.
“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
— “What to Remember When Waking,” David Whyte
Inspired by Susannah Conway, I now choose a word for the year, or a handful of words, instead of making a list of resolutions. For 2018, I chose “Connect.” I chose it because I craved connection; I wanted connection to guide my decisions. I sought connection, searched for connection, hunted for friends, for happiness, for purpose. I picked the word connect because it was scary and because I felt disconnected.
Truth be told, 2018 kicked my hind-end into outerspace and back again a couple times. A long-term friendship ended; my grandmother died the same week; six months of freelance work evaporated unceremoniously; I had two asthma attacks a day for 20-some-odd days. I couldn’t even stick with my breath. That was the spring. As I pulled into therapy one day, The Mountain Goats’ “I Am Going to Make It Through This Year (If It Kills Me)” popped up on Spotify. Uproarious laughter. I never lost my sense of humor, and yet, for a while, I was calling this year “my unwanted lesson in impermanence.”
I went on fabulous vacations and smiled and laughed and danced and ate oysters on the half-shell and learned and promptly forgot all the facts I could learn and forget about the Colosseum and drank wine under the stars and stared into dozens of famous stony faces and had my first book come out and loved my life and grieved and got angry for reasons I couldn’t explain and woke up in the middle of a few nights wracked with panic.
But some time, somewhere, with connect, something happened. I didn’t notice when it began, but later, driving long hours through the South, listening to the radio, singing so loud in the middles of so many nowheres I thought were just beautiful. I realized—twice—that as a song came on that touched me, I was holding my hand to my heart. ((It was this song.) Which, honestly, what?!)
Rather than seeking to connect, I saw all the connections I’d been unable to see before.
People who were already my friends, the richness of those friendships, the place I could call home, the interests I’d been too shy to claim, how writing connects me to the world, how all of it both roots and frees me.
For years, I thought my writing was part of what kept me lonely or maybe that I kept myself lonely to devote myself to my writing. But through others reading my writing, my small but intelligent, generous audience, I’ve found, especially through my book tour, that writing is what connects me to others, to kindred spirits—not what separates me from them. Writing brought me to New York, where I spent a whole afternoon talking with my cousin on a patio and a whole day walking with another cousin sharing our deepest selves; it brought me to Mary Corse’s work, to Central Park, to meeting a man who has kept a picture of his wife in his wallet for 40 years—since they told each other they couldn’t remember why they’d gotten married, so now he always remembers; it brought me to nachos and sushi with an old friend; a porcelain duck named Spinoza; to a dog that could dance; to my great-aunt’s property and finally meeting her llama; to recognizing my friends in East Tennessee, some of whom even braved a torrential downpour to support me. Writing has brought me close friendship with a baker-writer and weekly walks with her. It’s brought me to the mountains in the cabin of a country civil rights activist, watching squirrels shake leaves from the trees.
Without writing, I would’ve forgotten the details; without writing, I would’ve lived different details. Writing, in connecting me more with the world, has brought me back to myself, to my senses. I’m not one to say art can save you (or me). It can’t. But art can remind us who we are, and we can save ourselves and each other. Thank you for being here with me, for connecting with me and continuing to read. Thanks for being patient with me. I see you now.
Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.
—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8
I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.
—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou
Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.
The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.
But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.
Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)
You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”
The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.
A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).
But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.
In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.
They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.
I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.
Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.
Once the prosecco wore off, I dove into revisions. I reworked, rewrote, and tinkered with poems, based on the suggestions of my editor, Leslie Sainz, who is brilliant and who should also be sainted. (Follow her so you can read her poems first.) The biggest suggestion was to change the title. Leslie sent 10 new potential titles, and then explained several that piqued my interest.
After much fretting, I sent back the manuscript revised, retaining the original title, which included the word “impostor,” and sounded like it belonged in a different genre. I hit send with a smug, comfortable satisfaction.
My publisher responded to (kindly) explain its reasoning for the change, in the way one might try to talk down a hissing cat from a tree, and at that moment I knew I had to kiss it goodbye. I emailed them that I understood and was ready to “come to Jesus.” And then I sent an immediate follow-up email to clarify, the hallmark of true confidence and sanity.
Meanwhile, instead of acknowledging to myself that I’d been wrong in trying to keep the title, I worked at convincing myself I’d been right. (As Kathryn Schulz writes, being wrong feels a lot like being right.) It took a while (and this in the Bible Belt) to find Jesus. I went for a long walk, fuming, certain my dog, who is a food mercenary, was the only one I could trust. It did not initially occur to me that (duh) my publisher wanted my book to sell well (likely sales matter more to them than to me). It did not initially occur to me that a team of smart people who were dedicating hours of their lives to sharing my work and who had read my book could understand its context, especially in the market, better than I did. No. I had selected the hill I was going to die on: Having the word “impostor” by my name on a cover. This is how overidentified I was with seeing myself as a phony. (I swear I must’ve read Catcher in the Rye too early in life.)
After an afternoon sulking, I was assuaged by a well-reasoned email from a friend, pointing out some of these fallacies. Oh, right, I had been granted a wonderful team, publication with a press I admired, and a big opportunity, and I wasn’t letting myself feel the glory of that gift.
I created word lists and theme lists and began creating titles I’m sure a bot could’ve come up with based on keywords from the manuscript. I conducted straw polls. Finally, a friend (fantastic writer Natalie van Hoose) with fresh eyes landed on Rodeo in Reverse. There it was: it had been between the manuscript and the word list and Leslie’s suggestions the whole time. I loved it. My publisher did too.
*
The only editorial work left was responding to a few new comments on the manuscript in a final round of revisions. A couple weeks later and I was receiving emails—you know the ones: polite, asking how a project was going, the kind from a kind person after you’ve missed or pushed a deadline.
Thing is: I was pretty much finished with revisions on the manuscript and had been for several days. At this point, I had a couple (just two) lingering small edits (whether to cut or retain a line, whether to add or leave out a short stanza), and in both cases I knew what I’d end up doing. I was creating false dilemmas for myself.
Chief among: searching phrases from my book to be sure they weren’t plagiarized. Taking small phrases and whole sentences and running them through Google, with quotes. If it didn’t return results, I’d look it up without quotes. If it did return a result—even a coincidental match on a random blog, I’d spin out, having proven to myself I was a fraud, not a real writer, much less a poet.
Which phrases was I searching? Any phrase I thought was good.
Why did I do this?
I felt uncomfortable. I mistook that discomfort for guilt, for having done something wrong, one of the grave sins of writing being plagiarism.
*
After some consideration, I recognized it for what it was: impostor syndrome.
I couldn’t be convinced I came up with anything good; therefore, if I like part of the book, it must be from somewhere, and someone, else.
I had insisted (gritting my teeth) on holding onto a title that my publisher felt it would be best to change. It had the word “impostor” in it.
Luckily, I’ve spent the last few months reading all the Brené Brown. (I don’t mean that as Internet speak. I mean I read all of it.) So I knew that “shame thrives in secret.” I needed to name it (impostor syndrome: done) and tell someone.
Being a good Millennial, I chose to share on Instagram Stories (which is private and only my really good friends and the occasional bored scroller would see), then after 24 hours it would disappear. Oddly, this medium mirrored the anxiety I was feeling: once named and shared, my shame (in this instance) no longer made sense.
Many friends reached out with an encouraging word—one even to say she’d had the same issue when she had a story accepted for publication at a Fancy Magazine.
Reading a section from Rising Strong helped me understand why I battle impostor syndrome in the first place: I have trouble accepting gifts—from others, from the universe. Like many women, it’s hard for me to accept even a compliment without reversing it thoughtlessly or mentioning where I got my dress for how cheap. A gift that’s a talent, unearned, an inkling honed into something bigger than the self—which I believe each one of us has—well, that’s nearly impossible to accept.
The thing about gratitude is, it isn’t hard to feel grateful once you allow yourself to feel joy, to accept goodness (including your own). But that means actually that gratitude is tough to access until it isn’t. Denying gifts isn’t a higher plane of maturity or understanding—it’s the road to ruin. Being kind to myself is oddly brave for me.
I wake every morning trying to lean into and learn from joy, to feel my gratitude. This means I am working on things like “being a hugger” and doing things like tearing up when I see my husband reading or thinking of how good my friends are. I say “I love you” to friends and acquaintances who are used to me not saying anything at all, or maybe “yeah, man.” I go to parks and sing with strangers at jams. (Okay, I did this once.) I thank the roof above my head for holding steady. I thank my stars for bringing me here. It’s the hardest and most embarrassing work I’ve done, and I don’t know where it will lead, but I trust it.
*
Have you ever experienced impostor syndrome? When? How were you able to turn the corner?
*
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After working on my own manuscript in what seemed like in total solitude the past several years, I realize I need to get back to reading more poems. Now that my book’s getting published, the whir of excitement was quickly followed by the clunk of recognition: It’s time to return to reading new poetry. I miss it. I don’t recognize it (in a nice way). I’m starting this monthly post in an effort to read more and think more deeply about new poems, and also to share ones that I find especially resonant.
Selection from Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System
I’ve enjoyed collecting the bits and pieces of this longer work as I’ve seen it spin out and out over the past year or so (more?) in journals. This piece features a spider dream that the speaker interprets to being about her mother and her mother’s health. As the mother’s health deteriorates, doesn’t some part of the speaker?
… the idea of a spider the brain holds
like a lit match, a little request
for venom, a little
like my mother: her blue arm, her self
which held my self, an idea
of me, until I was real.
Facticity holds this poem (and its speaker) together: spider facts, Google-able dream interpretation facts, dog agility facts. It moves between a tender honesty, a searching frankness, a speaker who wants to be told how it really is while maybe avoiding how it really is if how it really is is too bad. I love this poem, in all its pieces, especially this one. (Also, I cannot get the lineation right on this (Coding!), so please do read the whole poem as it’s written.)
*Rosi is a friend, but isn’t it great when you can admire a friend’s work?
Allison C. Rollins’ “Word of Mouth”
This floored me. I read it in the print issue on a Friday night after seeing someone on Twitter hyping it. (See? Twitter is not a total waste.) It tells the history of America and a life through teeth, beginning with George Washington’s (the facts about his false teeth are incredible), and takes us (where else?) but to memory and to the library, where the speaker tracks changes and thinks of faces as abacuses, of her mother and grandmother, of the future through the past. This poem sews together beauty and ugliness or rather, just refuses to separate them, which is one of the best (truest) things maybe an artist can do. “The darkening of fractures is rather curious,” the speaker says, and I’m still thinking about the fractures in my understanding of history and the fractures in this poem—the two places where it stops to begin a new section.
… The forgetting makes the
present tense possible. Memory is the gravity
of the mind. All the icebergs have started to
melt, milky objects left hanging by a
string, the doorknobs means to an end.
For my own learning purposes, I’m especially interested (though haven’t yet parsed out) how this poem builds and moves. This sensual stunner begins in ordinary (if synesthetic) moments in “the republic of flowers”—rain sounds, hanging clothes—and ends with this marvel of language and texture and image:
… sealed honey never spoils
won’t crystallize I saw myself snapping
a swan’s neck I needed to air out
my eyes the droplets on a spiderweb
and the grace they held who gave me
permission to be this person to drag
my misfortune on this leash made of gold
Katie Condon’s “On the Seventh Day God Says: What You’ve Got Is Virgin Charm & a Knife in Your Pocket.”
When I read this poem I laughed, gasped, and sighed. It was a really weird noise. Appropriate, as this is a poem of great weirdness. The speaker has the kind of intimacy with God that allows for irreverence, but still, at the end of the day, if only half-heartedly, haphazardly, but maybe with a little wishing, still telling God what you want—maybe just in case. Haphazardly because, well, God never gets it right. Or God does but a little too. This poem, maybe also like “Saudade,” and maybe not, is about the nostalgia for something that never was or at least that won’t be again. How nostalgia (both looking forward and back, as Rollins’ poem reminds me “Memory is about the future, not the past“) is inherently sensual, corporeal, and a little lonely.
God says, Thou shalt not kill. & I’m like, But what about with my eyes.
I never asked for the capacity to love
ugly things, but here I am.
…
I say, I like my men smooth & far away, reticent as a bookshelf.
*Katie is also a friend. Here, too, grateful to be in the position of admiring a friend’s work.
Selection from Wendell Berry’s “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer”
Here’s one of my great-aunt’s favorite poems and now one of mine. The last year has been a bit rough, and this is one that I might as well get tattooed on the back of my eyelids, except it’s small enough to learn by heart quickly and big enough to fill it.
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.
When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.
Angela Lansbury: Goddess. The real deal. Entertainer extraordinaire.
Beauty and the Beast, the Disney animated feature now celebrating its 25th anniversary, was my first favorite movie and (perhaps not coincidentally) the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater. I was three. Stained glass and a glittering rose bigger than my eyes could take in, a young woman zooming through shelves of books on a rickety ladder, her animal friends gnawing at the pages: This cartoon might have shaped my whims and desires.
“Beauty prompts a copy of itself,” so Elaine Scarry says in “On Beauty and Being Just,” and this explains art, sure, but more importantly maybe: gawking: “Although very great cultural outcomes such as the Iliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution arise out of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate, the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring.”
To the movies! Yes, to the movies. Yes, and.
A child stares until he sees the doll’s nose twitch.
A child knows the world around them is alive, the inanimate world is animate, which is why a candlestick, a stuffy clock, a teacup, and swimming spoons are creatures worthy of empathy, celebration, and song.
The movie Beauty and the Beast is not without its terrors for a toddler: torches of furious townsfolk, the dark corners of a home, a well-meaning but incompetent parent, the growls and furies of love. Yet, I made it through nearly the entire 110 minutes.
Until the Beast turned into a man.
“Beast! Beast!”
I howled. I screamed. I wouldn’t and couldn’t stop.
My parents had to take me out of the theater. I believe the crying continued in the car. (What can I say? I was moved.)
The change from Beast to man was truly terrifying. The point of the fable as represented—the transformative power of love, inner beauty as outer beauty—was horrific and sad. Beast’s grotesque body was not as grotesque as his new one, one Belle didn’t know, one I didn’t know. This was not the creature I fell in love with. The crazed mob breaking down the door of the castle chanted “Kill the Beast!”
Beauty resurrects someone with her tears, but it doesn’t look or sound like the Beast.
Had the townspeople, in some regard, won?
When you are loved, does the you who you were before disappear? Do you lose your hirsute, outsized, toothy self? Do you fit better into clothes? Do you lose the power of make-believe, the stories calcifying into the bright stills of stained glass?
As a toddler, the holy terror terrified, I knew something about wildness and ugliness; I didn’t believe love could or should strip you of them. But as with most things, what we want others to want is what we see in ourselves.
My wailing reaction, an outburst, seems to speak to the nature of desire (or at least of mine): it can be loud, unseemly, excessive, claw-equipped, unkempt. We have to peel desire from its red velvet theater seat, rock it abye in crowds and parking lots, and stuff it into the sedan. It’s embarrassing.
This versus what the moral of the story, that what we desire becomes loveable because we love it, that in loving a wild soul we tame it—that this tamed love is equally (or more) desirable. That what we sense metaphysically should equal what we see or what we see we should see as beautiful, beautiful defined in the eyes of the same world that can hear a teapot sing, mistakenly thinks it’s only whistling.
I don’t want my gaze to change the object of my desire, but the object of my desire to change me.*
Metaphor is dangerous. Everything it says includes everything it doesn’t say.
I had stared at the Beast, only glimpsed the man. Beast as man, Cogsworth as man, Mrs. Potts as woman—were they any less real before I stared? Before they turned human?
The danger of looking. The danger of beauty.
(“And indeed there will be time / To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’”)
Later, I received the Beast Barbie doll, which was a male doll in the blue tails with hair for what we’d now call a man-bun with a furry mask that went over his head. This seemed wrong to me: The man face should be the mask—not the Beast. The Beast was the true self! The Beast was the Beloved. Given time, the prince’s hair became more wolfish, more Heathcliff; the Beast mask lost at the bottom of some tin or shelf. Eventually, as with all the other dolls, I gave them up, the alive world beckoning.
The magic mirror can “show you anything, anything you wish to see.”
No wonder then, the first section of Scarry’s “On Beauty and Being Just” is “On Beauty and Being Wrong.”
How did the teapot put it? “Bittersweet and strange / finding you can change,” though I can’t admit to having been wrong.
*The woman, not the Beast is protagonist; she does not change in this dramatic way. Another can of worms. Also worth noting that Princess Fiona in Shrek does not change back to a human in a parody of this kind of story arc.
*Also worth noting: The idea Scarry mentions (as I understand it), using Proust as an example, of moving around the beautiful object/person so that they remain unchanged from our purview (though both subject and object could be constantly changing, just keeping equal distance between them). Geometry!
Friends, I am back from (clears throat) a yoga retreat in Nicaragua. Yes, yoga. More specifically, the Find What Feels Good/Yoga With Adriene retreat. The essay below is what I took there and took from it.
Welcome! This is the view looking out of a domicile in Maderas Village, Nicaragua.
Friends, I could tell you about the monkeys that played in the trees above me, howling hilarious (or rapacious?) noises at each other; I could tell you about being overwhelmed my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean—how hard the waves break (no, really I couldn’t); I could tell you about that ocean’s throaty, sultry rhythm and blues, and how, as in Matthew Lippman’s poem “From God’s Notebook” one can hear it and say “It is my fault, it’s not my fault”; I could show you pictures worthy of (if I had the right hashtags!) capturing the Instagram hearts of thousands of scrolling strangers worldwide, one photo in particular of boats without docks, anchored right beyond shoreline, bobbing like fishing tackle and lures, and beyond these boats a succession of blue oblivions; how conflicted I felt about traveling somewhere and meeting very few residents besides staff; how conflicted I felt about how much I have, how I need to work harder to share it. Then, there were the flowers, like bright mid-century atomic clocks, like the skirts of can-can dancers, big and flashy and a little peek at something sexy; American flowers, I’m afraid, will never do now.
Sometimes I’m convinced the Earth was the mold for the curvature of the question mark. The only thing forged in iron the questions.
Who am I and what am I made of?
Do I want to make my mark on the world or leave no trace?
What is home? Where is it? Can’t some well-intentioned child set me on the front of his bicycle and pedal me past the moon and there already? When will I be beamed up to where I am supposed to be?
In my real life, my career is not thrilling, and sometimes can feel like it lacks purpose or meaning. My hobbies interest me more than my 9 to 5. My spouse and I recently moved to a beautiful area but I have yet to make lady friends (essential to any Jane Austen novel and also to the good life!). I struggle to acknowledge that I take issue with these things because I live such a charmed existence of choices (dog! loving spouse! instruments and books strewn across a house! a garden! family and friends who if not near are dear to me!); but of course (only me?) repression always seems to transform into wallowing. I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m . . . lying in bed all day and if you question it I am hissing at you like a cat trapped under a laundry basket.
If I sketched this life out, it would look so plain, Lindsey, this hissing voice starts up. Maybe you don’t have friends because you’re a weirdo, Lindsey. (Fair enough.) You’re a traitor to feminism because you are young-ish and married and are not leaning in, Lindsey. What about your obligation to the planet? To your family and your mentors? To yourself?
And that move to that beautiful place.
Home is a slippery word. It seems everywhere you go, someone is telling you about home and what it is and that there’s no place like it. Home is where the heart is; home is where the light is; home is wherever I’m with you; change your place and there you are!
Click my heels three times.
Woops.
Enter another night spent on the Youtubez (I’m gonna say with wine, but if wine wasn’t present, it was in spirit). Enter watching yoga video on said Youtubez or Googling for one and finding YWA at the start of a new year, a year, I promised myself, that I would work to “embrace routine,” that I would work to be content. There was pre-recorded Adriene saying it was time to be responsible for my own happiness.
It’s own your shit o’clock!
It was a bigger decision for me to get on the mat the first time, to get on it every day since, than it was to pony up for a YWA-style trip to Nicaragua, which I did.
The first night there, we were supposed to say what brought us; for me, I talked about having been more brain than body before yoga. It’s true. A mind can float anywhere, a body can only be one place at one time.
But what kind of home is a body?
But what kind of home is a body? | Photo courtesy of Oscar Lopez—Check out more of his work as he travels the globe here: https://www.instagram.com/oscarlopez/
The mostly inescapable kind. An untakebackable gift.
It’s hard enough to be comfortable in my own brain, much less my own body. How to build anything outside of either? Instead, for years, I went invisible. It’s easier than it sounds. After all, isn’t there a whole song about hiding light under a bushel?
The only answers I’ve found: Burn the bushel. Not either but both. Less or more and. (To make that or mean more than it did before—Sondheim fans unite!)
In a foreign country in a jungle on a mountain in a hut under a ceiling of dried palm fronds, I laid down. In a guided meditation after a particularly steamy practice, Adriene asked us to imagine a walk in a jungle, at some point landing on a warm rock on a beach, making ourselves comfortable.
“What do you see?”
“What do you see?” This is the roof of the yoga building at Maderas Village.
The top of my vision: a(n extremely fashionable) straw sunhat, ocean in periphery, and front and center, there on the sand, my husband in the cap he always wears and our dog, walking toward me.
Imagine that—a desire fulfilled, and yet. What I want is what I have and I just want more of it.
Soon before heading to Nicaragua, I read an article about how Emily Dickinson—that poet long rumored (despite any attempts toward right-ing) to have lived a lonely spinster life (can spinsters have un-lonely lives? nay!) crying into her rejection letters, locked in an attic in Amherst—had a garden full of rare flowers, that she spent days and seasons at this hobby, that when she was alive she was better known as a botanist than as a failed poet.
To think, a life thought tragic (and sexless! and progeny-less! but thank goodness we kept the only thing worth salvaging—the art, right fellas?) was full (and created life after life after life!) and maybe (who knows?) full of happiness on the daily. One way to draw it is dreary; another full of color and light. (The truth maybe an overhead projector on which we can layer slides.)
Like those poses where I’m pretty sure it looks like I’m doing nothing but I’m working up a sweat, from the outside it’s hard to know how much work is going on inside. Looking from the outside in—I don’t have to do that with myself; why not grant myself the gift of not doing that? The world is full of harsh eyes; I can give soft eyes. (I give really good eye—sue me!) The world is full of bustle; I can give stillness. The world is full of noise; I can give it a listen, I can give it quiet, but that doesn’t mean being invisible.
Me, rocking the same hat that Sissy Spacek wears in one episode of Bloodline Season 2, I am pretty sure | Photo credit Jennifer “Woodsy” Woods—see her photos daily here: https://www.instagram.com/woodsygolightly/
I misunderstood the dictum to, in times of trouble, turn inward. I thought it meant going it alone. I mistook my shell for my insides and wasn’t careful and almost, or did for a moment, turned to stone. But then, during those years, all that darn laughter, all those dreadful singing people on porches and on couches, all the bad dance moves one can’t help but dust off. I’m thankful for all the people who weren’t afraid of my being afraid, who aren’t afraid of extremes of volume or feeling, or of fumbling. People who will just sit with you are the best people. (Many people who took the FWFG Nicaragua trip are the best people.)
Two beautiful women, Andrea and Jude, avec moi, all drinking delicious juice. Another photo from Oscar Lopez, taken at a party that will go down in infamy. Check out his website at http://www.be-lost.com/about/
In line to board the plane from Managua back to the States, an older woman—dressed in bright blue—in front of me was speaking to the flight attendants in Spanish, trying to work something out. Double-checking that I had out the right tickets, that I hadn’t dropped my passport, I didn’t pay it much mind. And continued to read More about the author my friend had told me about, as the author had written a fantastic article regarding the conditions during which one should avoid air travel. When we reached the nexus between plane door and hall, I realized she was trying to transport a piñata, several feet tall, of a blonde girl onto the plane.
I like that stupid-looking, needs-a-comb blonde piñata girl—full of nothing or full of sweets—waiting for the delight of being busted open. I like the lady in blue insisting—checked or no—she make it on the plane. I’m grateful she asked (or, that I think she did), and that we sat rows apart on a machine in the sky headed toward a place we both chose to go.
One of my favorite online magazines is The Mondegreen, named for “a kind of misunderstanding: you mishear a word or phrase in a way that gives it a different meaning.” Their content is lively, fun, weird. Yes!
It’s nice to have the chance to have some of my favorite writing–a series of poems about the adventures of Good Me and Bad Me–up at one of my favorite sites. They also interviewed* me.
In this same issue the featured fictioneer, W. Todd Kaneko, writes about Rockgod and Metalhead, who form a kind of rad Midwestern Good Me–Bad Me duo.
*If one is interviewed on record, one most certainly confesses her dying love of the Louisville Cardinals. That information will surely be disseminated weeks later during the height of the team’s prostitution-ring imbroglio. Who can tell when one will earn the designation super fan?
I often find the best rules of thumb for life go hand-in-hand with the best rules for writing and editing. In this case, a parenting tactic is one of the strategies that has wide-reaching applications at the end of an interview.
“Do you have anything else you want to tell me?”
While this may have been used as a shame tactic on teens forming lies of omission (not saying it was used on me, not saying it wasn’t), in an interview with a source I use it as a catchall. Usually the answer amounts to not much–“No, I think we’ve pretty much covered it”–or a PR pitch that I didn’t need. But the few times it’s come in handy it doesn’t just serve as a CYA policy, but given the story the most important facets and details. When a longer interview goes well, a source warms up and might be willing to share something they hadn’t thought of or been willing to at the beginning of the conversation, particularly for cold calls.
For Pearl Harbor survivor Will Lehner’s story, the most important piece of the puzzle didn’t appear until I asked that question, thinking the conversation was wrapping up–not only starting. His ship sank a Japanese submarine about an hour before the attack, and for years, it wasn’t on record. Few would believe him or his fellow sailors. It wasn’t until 2000 he went with a team led by Bob Ballard (the guy who found the Titanic) to search for the sub, and not until 2002 with another research team that it was uncovered and his story “checked out,” gumshoes. Little old me? I didn’t know any of that until after we had talked about Indiana, driving (the next time he’ll need to renew his license he’ll be 103) and his post-military career.
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Your information will *never* be shared or sold to a third party.
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Your information will *never* be shared or sold to a third party.
