Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Blog & Nano Ready
Today I make the blog public. I've spent some time selecting recent autowrites that best reflect where I stand with my writing. The autowrite, or automatic writing, is something I have been practicing for a couple of years, now, usually in the wee hours before the various alarms of the house begin waking my wife and kids. I pour some coffee, sit down either at my desk or in the big recliner and start tapping whatever the hell comes to my dream-infused brain. Since my focus these days has mainly been on getting stories out, especially the novel, Drum, this will be the primary aim in my blog entries.
The purpose of the blog frankly is to keep me honest, keep me on track. I have a tendency to stray into destructive behavior and inaction. Brackish Currents will at least be a way to let the world know that I'm still working, still finding a way.
The name. Why Brackish Currents? I have always been in love with the idea of blurry edges, one reality merging with another. There are sea creatures and river creatures; and there are the plants and animals that thrive in the middle somewhere. I'm one of those.
I will say, that since Nano is beginning tomorrow, those will be the waters in which I will be swimming for the next month. I will try to keep the blog alive with a few gulps of air now and then, primarily in the "Flotsam" area, where I will be posting my Nano wordcount periodically.
Join me on Nano! If you are doing Nano this year, please "buddy" me. My user name is Bucket, which is the title of the novel I was going to work on before my bait and switch.
This blog and the directions I want to take it.
I intend in this blog to chronicle my path not only towards becoming a writer of substance. I’m writing the blog to push myself into the world more, be less reclusive, less self-absorbed, less alienating of my friends and family. But these are criticisms, which to speak of pragmatically, serve little more purpose than to grind myself down even further. For I’m not one to believe in total self transformation, not to the extent that one lives to reflect upon it. Life is process; the change is not complete until the very last breath. But I do subscribe to the transcendentalist view that total transformation exists quite literally inside every breath, step, word, blink. Real transformation is not an act of volition, I propose. It comes instead from contemplation, letting go, and making the self open to the infinitesimal changes occurring in the molecular environment we call existence. And no, I am not talking about a “Dave moment” (2001 A Space Odyssey) in which space and time conflate, merging the subject with the universe. I’m alluding more to the mundane transformations that occur within every moment, whether we choose to be aware of them or not: the extraordinary shifts shaping our every instance.
Sometimes, I am more aware. This last week or so has presented me with some rather clear signals for the way forward. It’s as if I’ve been driving a curvy road in a valley fog all this time and rounding a bluff at a certain elevation, I’m emerging from the top of the cloud. The first decision was to take Nanowrimo seriously this year, and in a classic display of caution (timidity), my focus would be a “fun” novel on the painting crew, an idea I’ve been mulling since the last Nano: a distraction, I rationalized, to “relight the pilot” of my writing routine. Then, I got together with my old friend Dave Anderson, now a gifted counselor, who after a long conversation over coffee commanded me to “write the book.” “Okay,” I said, a simple reply to a simple exhortation. The next very strong signal was a combination of dreams (perhaps inspired by the Paranormal Activity series, though not scarily so) in which several individuals in my life are telling me not to waste another moment. Finally, Kim Stafford’s reading the other night struck me profoundly right in the center of my forehead. Although his approach to telling the story of his brother is the memoir, the method is very much the manner, or should I say the line of inquiry followed by my character, Jade.
Kim alluded to the idea that it takes twice the effort to suppress taking the most important step towards a goal than actually taking the step. He mentioned that publishing his book on his brother took 25 years of not publishing it, 25 years of carrying a progressively burdensome load. He finished his talk with an invitation to release our own loads through writing. I’ve decided to use this Nano to write Jade’s story, the parallel story in Drum, and perhaps the most important aspect of the novel.
This is the story that needs to be at the heart of the novel, for it is not, as it turns out, about M&C and their disappearance; it’s about Jade and how she survives. A Goddard advisor whose insights I deeply respect and appreciate, let me know in in no uncertain terms that this book is about Michael and Cordelia, not Jade. I do now declare my intent to fly in the face of this comment. Although the fiction of Drum encompasses “what might have been” (Kim Stafford citing his father) the truth with M&C, the book is ultimately about Jade and her own journey towards wholeness.
So, tomorrow, November 1st, I’ll be telling Jade’s story.
New Nano focus 10-29-12
I’ve been away from writing for the last few days. Work and energy spent packing out of the Red Feather has been distracting. I feel a surge, though, as I get ready for the month ahead of Nanowrimo.
I’ve decided to use this year’s endeavor to breathe some much needed life into Drum. There has been too much downtime on this project, and frankly there is too much riding on it to suppress it any longer. More on this later.
I went to Kim Stafford’s book release last night at Powell’s for his new memoir, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do. In his usual humble manner, Kim talked about arriving at the subject of his book, his brother Brett’s suicide, and how the book came to be titled. It’s a work of great, open-hearted stories that speak of Brett and Kim’s brotherhood and deep companionship, of their childhood and of their growing distance, and of the path Brett chose. It is a work, as Kim puts it, that was a release, a catharsis. He had been carrying Brett’s memory around for so many years that he felt it was something he no longer could keep buried: the book is an act of inevitable writing, a principle maintained by his own father, the great William Stafford. It strikes me that while Kim never mentioned this last night, it was at the very heat of his talk, the heart of his book.
When I decided to write about Michael, it was less from pain or grief than from the sense that here was a story worthy of inspection, fertile territory. More than this, though, I chose to write it out of a sense of entitlement. Michael has become as much my story as it is his, and it is this that returns me to the moments that stand like beacons, the moments I had with Michael that my mind has maintained in their Truest form. I capitalize the word because I am speaking here of honoring memory, raising it high for the benefit of all that was, is, will be.
So what is it that I would like to raise high. I suppose it has to do with my answer to my buddy Dave, who asked me recently if I wanted to tell the world about Michael, introduce him, give the reader something to carry away. “Of course,” I said. Of course. how long it’s been since I realized this simple fact. There is in Michael something that encapsulates the essence of post-sixties afterglow; the idea that anything is possible with the right attitude, and not only that, it is necessary to exercise the freedom entitled. Entitlement. That is what M&C claim: ts the journey away and the journey within is theirs alone.
If it were left to him alone, Michael would have brought them both home. But it wasn’t up to him and their entitlement had worn out. Whether Drum fell prey to hijacking, and accident at sea, or something more mysterious, the truth is the same: their time had come. It is Jade who must arrive at this notion in tandem with her own revelation. The longer she waits to pull the story out of the sea, the longer it festers and eats away at her life.
Now I am thinking of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. The fish is at once his prize catch and his undoing. Mike loved this novel and read it several times in his high school days. The premise of the book, that nothing we do can save us from our doom, that everything we try is mere folly in the face of the universe, is very near to where Jade lives emotionally. She has conversations to this effect with her brother, friend, lover, all of whom leave her in a darker place than before.
Jade’s story must take hold. This will be the push for Nanowrimo this year.
More on Stakes 10/11/12
Something else: Jade needs to clear the path for the rest of her life. She has other things to do, sail around the world, have a family, get her PhD. She finds planning for these things, let alone planning for her next classes, an insurmountable task. It is as if there could be no other possibility in her life but to push this grief out of her way.
Pushing the grief out of her way involves dealing with the loss, but more than that, dealing with the facts of the disappearance. It is the lack of knowledge that has plagued her these many years, and now the Sleuth comes along offering a possible avenue. She knows he is wrong about M&C finding their way to SC without contacting their families. She knows the photos are all off and the facts of the case he is pursuing. But she is intrigued, wanting more on the Jaques & Jill case. She begins to see a parallel: two people murdered and no families; two families looking for their vanished children. This parallel is at the center of the Jade/Sleuth story.
She also begins to see the reasons that the Sleuth is drawing the connection, but her suspicion that he is ignoring some basic inconsistencies in the two cases is as strong as her feeling that he has another motive, which itself becomes a new mystery. She feels she has entered into a kind of hall of mirrors. It isn’t without a conscious desire to know the truth that she continues her interaction with the Sleuth. In fact, she feels that he offers a certain usefulness to her own pursuit, putting her into contact, for example, with the FBI files he has procured on the M&C investigation.
All of the above is true. All of the above is conjecture. What needs to be provided is what’s in it for the Sleuth. He mentions that his own life is in danger because others who have investigated the Sumter murders have been killed. So what motivates the Sleuth? Answer this and I have a key to one of the locks of this story.
One thing that occurs to me right now is the very nature of the Sleuth’s investigation, starting as he is from a known angle, an established set of facts. The Sumter case has various clues about it that make it somewhat more approachable than a case of disappearance with no trace. The clues available lead somewhere externally; while the lack of clues lead somewhere internally. This is a basic realization that the reader needs to understand through the story. Jade is essentially on a journey inward, and the fact that she on some level resists the external journey only demonstrates how attached she is to this pursuit.
But what of the external pursuit? What if the Sumter case actually enhanced her discovery? This also can be a small motivator towards the larger picture, the point of release that Jade is seeking. It may be that the point of convergence of these two currents is the riptide of the story. In the choppy middle is Drum, her occupants and their own wishes and dreams. Some how these three items converge to allow Drum to proceed in our imaginations, and for slain pair in Sumter, a parallel in their own right, to spark new questions. Somewhere there is a family who is looking for these two people, and somewhere they have a home.
Cornered 10-4-12
I’m in one of those corners again. The one I paint myself into after taking on too much or deciding what IS the corner. What am I talking about? Back to the old issue of inspiration. I’m waiting for a sustainable rush of inspired ideas to pick me up and float me away. But of course I know that “waiting” is half the problem, so here I am, writing from the corner again. On more than one occasion over the last week or so I went so far as to call myself a writer. Where do I get off telling people that when I know that I haven’t really been writing much for months, now.
I shouldn’t say that. Actually, I’ve been working on a couple different stories as well as rewriting the beginning of Drum, an effort that is more and more presenting itself as a requirement for a moving ahead as a writer. The story was handed to me, and I feel strongly that it is mine alone. What I see in it is still a little featureless, though, as if more work still needs to be accomplished towards discovering what it is that I must deal with in the story.
My life seems to be going in several different directions at once, and it makes me tired just thinking about trying to hold it all together. I’m off to work in 30 minutes to try to teach some basic language skills to foreign students. Is that me? Nope, it’s just the survival part, the part that has been taking the path of least resistance for too long.
Nanowrimo idea 10-27-12
Autowrite 10/27/12
Off to NaNoWriMo for the month of November. Planning on being much more serious this time about putting forward a compelling story--oh forget the compelling--just put a story out there. I’ve got the the general premise:
House painter Shirkie Stevens finds himself in precarious positions both on and off a ladder as he works with a crew of miscreant painters who, despite themselves, manage to do good. Shirkie is learning the ropes but gradually becomes the crew's "top rung reacher," a distinction that often results in death defying feats of "git 'er done" heroism. Although the crew smokes copious amounts of pot at every turn of the day, it has a reputation for finishing houses as promised and on time, while Lester the boss is content to stay aloof. It isn't until Myrtle and Sherman, a homeless couple, come into their picture that each of the crew begins to realize the trajectory of his own life, and Shirkie for the first time begins to grasp the meaning of gravity.
This was written in the spirit of the NaNo project: no reflection. I wonder if what I can get out there will be of any value? I did make use of the opportunity before to write the skeleton of a story that can very well fit in with the story of the above premise. It’s been several years since my house painting days, but I feel I have plenty of material for a novella or novel. I’m excited about getting started with this, especially as a means for kicking myself in the rear to write more.
On the note of writing more: I’m close to putting the blog on line, but hesitant. Uploading the autowrites I choose to make public, I realize that so much of my focus is on my own attempt at doing more with my writing. All rather pathetic, really. I have to question why it is I’m motivated to make all this available to the public. I think it has a lot to do with the confessional. That I feel it necessary to keep exposing the parts of my life which are most vulnerable to critique is telling. I guess at some level I feel that if I don’t put myself on the line, I’ll never get anything done.
And I am getting stuff done. I have a growing body of short stories under revision; I have a novel under my belt (almost); and I have a bucket load of new ideas for stories and novels. Stuff is happening. It’s just all happening far slower than I prefer.
I need to find space in my daily life that will enable me to write with the energy that I have in the morning. I often feel very rushed in the morning, a pressure to get something down in the hour that I have before work. After work, I have very little brain left for writing, so an hour per day isn’t nearly enough. Hoping that NaNo this year will help me discover a reserve of writerly energy that has been illusive and inaccessible for large potions of my typical week day.
Finally, I received a response from the Sleuth. He is working on procuring FBI records of the M&C case. My communiques with him have cooled somewhat, due I think from my own slow responses.
Slo-mo robbery 10-15-12
A notion that has been coming to me in small waves over the last couple of days has been to look carefully at my own emotional development. A personal matter? Yep. It is nevertheless very tied in with the reason I have been so attached to the M&C story, and as I now am realizing, the reason for so much more in the way my personal outlook has has been shaped.
Really, I think the addictive behavior began in me as a middle school student and built upon itself through adolescence all the way through high school and college. I had no channels, really, to talk over this new absence in our family, and my parents did almost nothing to help us through the struggle of the loss, for the loss was such a gradual thing, as I will explain. Through college then into professional life, I admired those people who seemed to have the sense to acknowledge the loss in their lives, give it a name, honor it for what it represents. I used the fact that Michael simply “disappeared” as a crutch sometimes, a sort of rationale for the despair that stretched over my being like gossamer, encasing me in a long, thin grief; a grief not to be undone by the days or nights, by trauma or catastrophe, by self abuse or neglect. The disappearance is a living and breathing thing, a symbiont whose existence depends entirely on the life of the host, and to take it a step further, it resides in and is nourished by fear. This particular fear I want to discuss later.
I did not heed this fact, was not aware of it until perhaps the day that I told my MFA advisor that my life depended on writing this book. That was the beginning of the journey for me. It was then that I commenced the hard look back into the person I had become and the reasons. My substance abuse--from alcohol to pot and psychedelics--reflects my need to fill the void, satisfy the craving to feel past my filmy envelope of grief to the real thing, the raw ecstasy of living. The passing of Michael and Cordelia constituted a decades-slow robbery of the psyche, something taking place with no other outcome than the pain of separation, something over which there is no control except for that which can be altered within. And so that is what I sought, perhaps continue to seek, the alteration: a form of control that is purely artifice. Growing up with the day-to-day question of whether or not I should be mourning the loss of my brother or whether I should move on.
There was never any sort of memorial for Michael. I know from a letter she sent, that Dorothy had performed her own ritual of good-bye, but nothing in our family was ever organized. Looking back, I can now say that this was a neglect based on denial borne not as much of the fear of saying good-bye to Michael, but of the need keep him alive: to keep hope alive.
Lancaster and M&C 8/27/12
In my last AW I discussed “killing the snurk.” I feel this is getting more to the heart of the matter with what seems to be blocking me from continuing with my my writing projects. I have real proof that my projects not only are worthwhile but also viable. The fact, for example, that [omitted] decided to “investigate” M&C is a true message from the cosmos that I am on the right track. He is a ready made character in the novel, Drum. And the fact that the Cranes contacted me regarding their Lancaster-designed cabin is also an amazing bite of freshness in the story I would like to tell. It is worth noting here, too, that nothing is particularly “out of the blue” with either of these developments. I had planted my name and interest years before in both cases in the hopes that someone would be interested. It is the timing of these two developments that is fascinating to me. How interesting that both of these parties contacted me just as I begin to write earnestly on these two stories.
The thought again dawns on me how similar the M&C and Lancaster stories are in respect to the unknown layers of context around the subjects. They are obviously very different stories, but I wonder how the methods used in one might unlock those for the other. I feel I have much more information on M&C, and so Drum seems the obvious step forward. Uncovering clues invariably leads back to the story teller, the life that finds the story a necessary one. The Lancaster story is far more remote in terms of who the man was and what his motives were; yet in some way, I feel I have a firmer grasp of his personal struggle and the trajectory of his life through alternating negative and positive views of Michael.
Lancaster might be seen as someone who struggled not only with his physical deficiency, but with his spiritual identity as well. In fact, regaining the ability to walk as a teenager purely through self determination and ingenuity is a strong symbol of his “walk” through life. He is in my mind a giant, a hero; Michael, too is a hero to me, but for very different reasons. It occurred to me yesterday that because I only knew Mike for 12 of my 49 years (almost a quarter of my life, to date) my memory of him is diminishing at every turn, images stagnating and distorting like creatures in a tide-pool. Michael also is a giant, but a sort of missing giant, someone I have missed and mourned for a very long time. By contrast, Lancaster does not hold this place in my psyche. I do not grieve his loss, as calous as that sounds, and I do not feel the same pressure to finally say good-bye, as I do to Michael (the book, Drum is this good-bye). The Lancaster story is quite different in nature, much more of a dabble in historical fiction than plumbing the depths of absence. However, both stories hinge on the main characters and the manner in which they lead their lives, both taking very active, bold steps into the unknown.
And this fact of these two people I think is at the heart of my fascination with them. What ultimately defines both characters is that they took action when they realized the thing they needed to do. This, as opposed to their endings, is the central journey they share. Michael is one who believes in his heart that by breaking away from the mainland with his Cordelia he will find the freedom he is after. Lancaster, by turn, is one whose agonizing wish it is to share what he sees as a paradise on earth with the vision of protecting it. Two very different sides of the same coin: one the song of the self, both hedonistic and generous of heart; the other, evangelic about his mission and sense of God within nature, but inwardly (perhaps) frustrated or perturbed at his inability to be present with family or perhaps even with himself.
I wonder if I am stumbling across a formula for working with these characters, respectively. I need to develop their dark sides. Michael’s experimentation with drugs needs to be seen more clearly, and perhaps his feuds with Cordelia need to be more intense. Mike did indeed have a dark side. I think I was attracted to the Doors once so much because I recognized in the music--especially in Morrison’s persona--something of Mike’s rejection of religion and his embrace of the pagan, the raggedly sublime, the incalculably precise wildness of the natural world. I need to include the poem he wrote in high school on Death.
Michael’s dark side to me was not all that apparent as a child. I think I was shielded from it by my mother and by Mike himself. But I do recall Mom crying at times in the kitchen in the old Boones Ferry house, and I can only suspect it was her oldest son who caused her so much grief, even before he had made his plans to build Drum and depart. There was always tension around Mike at home around my parents. They wanted too much from him, they wanted devotion and a committed future. They cared about him intensely, but they were also learning as they went, praying for guidance and for Mike to embrace Christianity, which of course he did not. It wasn’t until a few years later, after Mike and Cordelia had gone missing, when Mom had the dream of her son sinking into deep green sea water, down into darker depths, that she saw him face her there underwater and sinking, heard him say or signify to her that everything was ok. I may have this wrong, but she saw that he had in his hand the Bible she had given him and Cordelia during the visit in March of 1975. This scene, both the gift of the bible and the dream need to be in the book. There is also the chilling recollection of Mom waking up one evening, shortly after Drum was to have departed from Kauai, of Michael calling out to her: “Mom, Mom,” the voice loudly said in her mind’s ear. This, too needs to go in the book.
I am thinking also of seeing an empath, intuit, psychic with the aim of getting closer to Mike. For some reason, I am being pulled into this story and the hairs on my neck stand even as I write this. Call it a psychosis, obsession maybe, but I sincerely believe that Mike and Cordelia both are calling me to figure this thing out.
Setting the Stakes 9/14-18/12
So where from here. I’ve started in on the rewrite of Chapter One but slow going. Thinking I need to instill more mystery, more suspense about what the stakes are for Jade. The stakes. This is the question. What’s in it for her? What’s in it for her is what's in it for me. Why am I writing Drum anyway, Why is it an obsession? I think I hit it on the head when I wrote that she had somehow associated herself with this thing and therefore is in need of letting git go--permanently. And yet is that possible? I guess it comes down to the reasons I feel a book like this may of use. I don’t know. It’s a meditation on loss, but also of allowing a full release, even though that may never actually happen. So many hurting in the world right now, so many seeking deliverance, and I sit in this comfortable house in this comfortable chair with the knowledge that life may go on like this indefinitely. And what the hell do I care? A moment ago I answered that question with my harmonica: a bluesy, angry bit that started to breathe for itself. This bluesy angry bit may in fact be my life and I need to tap into it if in fact I intend to make a difference. What difference? I dunno. Something. I won’t do religion anymore, no more alcohol, drugs. What do I have left to hurt myself with? Why do I need to? Because I’m afraid, that’s why. Afraid of telling the truth, afraid of exposing myself to the white light of my own despicable nature, afraid that if I turn over too many rocks, I will discover the darkest part of myself. Yes, this is middle age talking. The fear and angst of a man still unfulfilled and living as if he is. I play my harmonica when I need to get get this blackness out into the air where I can see, smell, taste and hear it. Where I can feel it. So why am I writing Drum? What’s the f’n point? So that I can feel it? I already feel it. Or do I? Why am I writing Drum? Because I need to get it out of the way? Possibly. Out of the way of what? The rest of my life? Possibly. Why am I writing Drum? So that I can feel it. Feel what? Feel the pain again, the center of that pain, what it feels like. But you know that pain. It is the pain of loss. You know that pain, the pain of losing Dad. But the M&C pain is a different thing. I was a child. Oh! Yes a child who looked up to these people almost as if they were gods. They left something indelible, indestructible. What? What was it? It was the feeling of sailing on Drum, the smell of sunbathing oil on Cordelia, Michael’s hand-rolled cigarettes. It was the Zippo, the anchor, the conch, the scent of marine paint and epoxy inside Drum’s cabin. But it was more. What? What THE HELL are the stakes? The stakes are Jade’s stakes. Jade’s stakes are my stakes. Why Jade? What the hell is this Jade business? Jade is a construct, an extension of myself who is able to live the experience vicariously, fictionally, and therefore able to put things together with more intelligence and more coherently than I can. I am a scatter brain. Jade is not. But isn’t Jade just another way to hide, another way to lie about my own fears? What can she do that I can’t--or won’t? Well again, Jade as a fictional persona allows me to push the truth of this experience out into the open without me getting in the way. Without getting in the way. Without getting in the way. I write this three times because this is the reason I am using Jade. She is me, to be certain, but she is more than me. She is the uber-me, the person who can get things done, who can show her fear and anger and distrust; who can reveal her grief. Oh, that is all well. But what is her grief? Certainly she is no longer in mourning; that would be a stretch indeed. No. Jade’s grief stems from her inability to move foreword as a person. She is stuck. I need to show that she is stuck. How are you going to show me that she is stuck? Are you stuck? Yes, I am stuck. I unstick myself through working with my hands, music, writing. But these all are momentary and distractive. No they are not, for when I use my hands, make music and write I recreate myself. So, writing Drum is a recreation? Yes. A recreation with a singular function: to be free. Free of what? Where are we going here? What are the stakes? What is this all about? The stakes. I was getting to that. the stakes are my stakes. Can Jade ever function socially? Will she learn to be someone? Trust someone? That’s it? That’s all the stakes are? The stakes are plain The stakes are weak! Jade needs something truly threatening. Her very identity needs to be challenged, her soul. Jade needs to protect herself from something more than a psychological broken down. She needs to create again. Ok but that’s not it. C’mon, what are the stakes? Depression. Ok that’s closer. Her ability to place trust in anyone. Meh. Her life. Go on... She is dying, she has five years, tops. So? She needs to uncover as much as she can to enable the truth to be revealed. Yeah? In her zeal, she stretches, she breaks stuff, she burns bridges, she get’s lost. She get’s lost--like I get lost. She get’s lost often. In fact, she is directionally challenged, a diagnosed condition. This will never leave her. She will always get lost without the aid of the GPS she carries everywhere. But this has nothing to do with stakes. No. Then why bring it up? Good character trait. Because she is often lost. Jades stakes are my stakes. What are my stakes?
9/16/12
My stakes are keeping the memory of M&C alive in a family and social environment that would rather sweep it under and forget. I have always been one to treasure the past. The story of Drum has always struck me as slightly unnerving. First, the initial loss was a hit that was completely surprising. I was 13 and suddenly there was this vacuum in the family, a void sucking all of the air out of my youth. It shaped me, drove me further away. I had already idealized Michael, but his departure and eventual disappearance became a factor for considering him a sort of martyr for the footloose freedom he was after. I learned to appreciate that mentality, idealize it. Hitchhiking and traveling alone, keeping to my self and not becoming too involved in social life became my MO. I adopted the whole “Me generation” of the ‘60s and ‘70s as my own. And I now spend considerable time and energy trying to recover from it. Jade recognizes this idealization in herself and needs to let go. But it isn’t compelling enough simply for Jade to struggle with some amorphous idealization that has gripped her life. She needs a clear and present danger, that is forcing her into this search. It could be that the Sleuth has become very insistent, threatening her sense of “ownership” of the Drum story. The story is her own and she is not going to allow anyone to appropriate it to their own ends.
What’s at stake: Losing the story. she must write the story before anyone else gets their hands on it.
Drum is an insistent image. She has been haunted by it since the disappearance, and now, more than ever. I mentioned before that my own identity is wrapped up in this story, perhaps to an obsessive degree, and the Drum story is perhaps all of our story. How so? We are all lost, trying to find our way home, trying to define home--a theme in my own life.
What’s at stake: losing her own future. Jade is trying to find “home.” She feels psychically lost and associates this state of being with Drum, with Michael, Cordelia and to the entire disappearance. By idealizing this packaged past and in effect living in it, she unconsciously idealizes detachment, reclusion, disassociation: Jade has projected Drum on herself. She needs to come to this awareness, or at least hint at it, early in the story. Early early. This need to escape the hold of Drum is big. it is perhaps the most compelling factor for her journey in this book.
Jade’s stakes are my stakes, but this is also fiction. I can alter Jade’s stakes to be more universal, to appeal to the readers, to uncover something yearned, something previously rough and intangible. Of course we all lose. Of course we are all lost from time to time; some of us permanently. But what Jade is seeking is something we all seek: peace. Peace and the permission to move forward in life, past grief and mourning, past the ugliness of unknowing, past the self-destruction and denial. What Jade needs is what I need, but what we all need, which is to get on with it.
What’s at stake: What is the clear and present danger? This is where the fiction must come in. While Jade’s stakes are my my stakes, there is no real threat to my existence, or to my family. I live a relatively secure life. That said, the question of whether I can “move on” is real and shared: a universal. Without the break through, we have no story (which is what is lacking in Drum at present). Ryan Bodinot’s point about no real danger being presented to the protagonist has been riding alongside most of my thoughts as I begin to revise. The danger needs to be defined. What is the danger? The danger for Jade is the loss of her future, the loss of her own potential, the extinction of her own self due to this early and long-lasting grief, a wound that refuses to heal. The more I think about this, the more i think about all the vets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who will not be returning alive, and specifically, those who will never be found. I’m thinking of them but more, I’m thinking of their families. The long road ahead for them. So what’s at stake? Human resilience, the ability to heal, to look to the future and smile at the good things to come. Hope. Hope is at stake?
A clear and present danger. We can be lost or we can know where we stand. Jade, like me has the dastardly predilection for disorientation, perhaps more so. Here’s a thought: Jade suffers from Developmental Topographical Disorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_topographical_disorientation and http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/) which she has learned to deal with using certain mnemonic strategies. This could be just the quirk of personality that Jade needs, and may also present a clear and present danger. For example, she may be placed in certain situations that can at once disorient her and give her certain clues that she would not otherwise “see” by recognizing them and therefore categorizing them without proper analysis. Her disability then can be her way out.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
To blog 10/9/12
Why blog? I feel that I need to have the idea behind my writing that I’m writing for the world. 90% of my writing is naval gazing, analyzing my self, my background, where I stand; not nearly enough of my writing goes toward the world. I’m naturally quite shy about showing work, and a blog will be the outlet, perhaps, to put forward some ideas that typically stay festering in me until they become stale and gutless. What I need to include in a blog is an organized approach to what I want to put out there. Categories might help. One heading might be essays; another, writing process; another, daily observations. The idea again would be simply to get my word out there, get into the practice of being in the public with my ideas, honing them for others to read.
I keep telling my students that writing is thinking. I tell them this with great sincerity and enthusiasm, but how much of it do I practice? Hoping this blog will enable me to put my thinking out there and start walking the talk.
I am hesitent to post stories for fear of someone lifting them, but one idea is to have a category that shows a story underway and invites commentary in the process. Areas where an audiance might want more information on charater, setting, plot. This excites me because I can be engaging people with my writing, while also pushing myself to complete the story, which would take place off-line.
One aspect I would like to expore is how I can elicit reaction to my writing. An element of honest exploration will be necessary, I think, to encourage feedback. It will be a narrow walk between giving and receiving, but this will also be the interesting aspect of the blog. I think I can use the blog as a springboard for what makes my own creative spirit soar, and perhaps in the doing, inspire others to find their own creative path.
Whatever the words, 9/24/11
Did you circle all of them? she asked in her sleep. My daughter often dreams aloud as if in some way the stories swimming and flowing through her skull were always aimed at the verbal, the spoken. In their pronouncement they find freedom from the heavy tapestries cloaking the inner mind from the outer world: two wildernesses brought together by unconscious speech, the speech act itself a righteous act. A declaration, no matter what the words, that the mind can deliver.
Did you circle all of them? she asked, her voice raised as if talking to a group of friends or an audience. She was deep asleep but there was the hint of a giggle after the last word: delight. Perhaps a survey was going around and she along with her classmates had been instructed to “circle one best answer.” Perhaps she looked over at a friend’s paper and noticed all of the answers circled and in surprise, she asks her question, incredulous that anyone could break the rules.
Breaking the rules. Now for some reason I am thinking of years ago, riding the ferry after one of our trips to Lopez Island. I had walked through one of the passage doors and two youngish guys were occupying the booth next to the door. “Keep the door open, bitch” he said. I’d never been called bitch before and found the insult to be intoxicating, fresh in its simplicity and intent. Who was this guy? What had I done for him to assault me this way? I decided it didn’t really matter, but these many years I’ve often wondered what happened to those guys, and what, after I did not comply to the command, they may have thought of me then.
There are times that I remember that drift in and out of my own tapestries like shades or half formed identities. They slip into the room when I am not thinking of anything else, as if welcomed by absence. These are the memories that I need to hold onto, keep in touch with because it is these memories that have something to say. A memory is like a character in a story or an image in a poem, something that has to be expressed; it can’t not be. When I recall, for instance, riding on the weather amma of Drum, watching the rush of seawater below me, and feeling a sense of freedom I had never known, I know that sense is what I continued to crave later in my life: the rush of freedom, the one true thing. It is an image that won’t leave me.
And other images from other memories, my father moaning in the room next to mine, lying beside my mother in his own low place of cancer induced agony. There I see him in my mind, even in that moment as I lay in my own low place, I hear his struggle moving out of him with his breath, a guttural utterance of dismay and dread at the impending end drawing near. I lay in my bed and hear the groaning become louder and more insistent and I know it is time to get up and give him my shoulder to the bathroom, sit with him as he squeezes my hand though the excruciating bowel movement, wipe the shit from his ass like his own mother. I sat with him through those movements; it was a sadness too large for the room, the house. The sadness was something we breathed. It was a nourishment, the sadness. To feel it like a fresh cut or the impression of a sharp stone under the sole, to feel the sadness was to be human and to be human was to be doing this.
Doing this is why I got up this morning. I am going to try to write at least a page every morning, whether it is automatic writing like this or whether it is something with more direction, a story or poem, I need to do this. Writing is like wiping the shit from my own father’s ass, like climbing the tallest tree and feeling lost up there but somehow much more aware, like dreaming I can dive like a fish or fly, finding the light smile of my wife in something she is reading, like the sound my son makes when he’s eating ice cream. Whatever it is, whatever the words, it will be something.
Yaquina, 2/6/12
Tomorrow’s my birthday and thinking now of what I’ve done to earn it. Cruel? Yes. I tend to be so toward myself and this is not a little fact. This in fact is my first autowrite in several months. I have been journaling, but somehow stories are not happening. I did write one poem a couple of months ago, Irrelevance, which began as a sort of a self immolation and ended a celebration. I suppose this is also a tendency. What I cannot seem to figure out is why I my stories are not finding the page. Perhaps it is that they are not yet stories.
I’ve been consumed by teaching lately at [omitted] and [omitted] and [omitted]. This is a journal entry. Autowrites are not journal entries. Autowrites need to crack the case that has formed around my creative self. I must find a way to continue this fracture. The recent story, should I say, the pressing story at hand is the Yaquina Bridge story. All of the elements are there, everything I need to build it into something that speaks for itself. It is based on the non-fictional, but lurches toward fiction at every moment. The story needs to go inward. It needs to be about the narrator, an “I” who is somewhat lost, a little split and torn against himself. This needs to be evident in the first lines.
The girl he’s with is not a bimbo. She is not a love interest, but she is forward and makes her intentions of the narrator understood. She is the “woman” she speaks of when the boat goes aground. The thing that is building between them is the boat with the full spinnaker flying up the bay. It is the boat digging its keel into the muddy shoal. It is the boat left at anchor to ride the tide all the way down while the narrator and the girl and the friend who keeps things grounded find a room in the town.
The boat rests in the mud in the dark bay while the boy and the girl sleep without touching in the hotel bed. The friend who keeps things grounded sleeps in his bag on the floor. They sleep away the rocking of the boat, and they rise in the morning to get pastries and coffee. They drive in the narrator’s truck to find the boat. This is where the real story begins, for this is where the magic is.
They drive across the bridge and peer through the suspension cables at the water, trying to spot the boat, see whether she has sunk or floated. There is no sign but they know where to go and they turn left fast off the bridge, head up the coast of the bay. They know they will be coming to the lot they saw with the outbuildings and the assortment of carnival gear. A skeleton of a Ferris wheel tower is visible above the low trees. They drive toward the tower like pilgrims. An there, there is an opening, a driveway. They drive though a broken gate and on into an expansive lot, beyond which they spot their boat bobbing lightly some 200 hundred yard off shore, at anchor.
They are elated. They have found the boat but now the problem: how get to the boat without swimming and risking hypothermia. “That would be dumb,” says the girl. They walk around the building and spot a truck parked near the door at the far end. It is a long cinderblock structure with high slotted windows. They walk to the door and see that it is open. The interior is dark and smells of rank, stale food. There is a sound issuing from deep inside, a buzzing grating sound both mechanical and oddly contrived. The three decide to walk down the hallway to locate the sound for that is where they may find the owner of the truck and a way back to the boat. This passage is the story.
Yaquina, 2/7/12
Got up a little after 5:00 this morning to write, and ended up working on my 098 course instead. Bleh. That’s journal stuff. What I need to focus on is the Yaquina story. It involves two young people who share a certain immediate destiny. They are moving toward a point of no return, but this place is ambiguous. It offers both freedom and futility, a way forward and a way backward. The story is about this progress they need to make toward this place. They are drawn necessarily to it as if their being depended upon it. Yes, their boat is floating out in the bay, just beyond reach. Yes, they realize they must confront some necessary evil together. I have in mind a boyman, a character both repugnant and beautiful in his slacker-likeness. This is the fiction.
They enter the cinderblock building to find the boyman at the end of a long and dark hallway. They follow the sound of buzzing, a sound of static, loud and abrasive. As they reach the end of the hall, it is so loud they cannot hear themselves think. It is so loud they begin to forget why they have come. Every step forward brings them closer to oblivion. The girl begins to turn away, but the narrator hold her fast. They embrace there in the dark buzzing hallway for the first time. It is a fearful and timid embrace. The narrator and the girl advance, arm in arm, toward the sound that is now around the corner at the end of the hall. The narrator see that the only light is coming from the high rectangular windows and this is not enough to illuminate the interior. They are intruding. He understands this, but this sound, the truck outside, adds up to the single person who may be able to help them reach their boat.
When then they turn the corner, the room from which the buzzing is pulsating the air so that they feel it now on the tiny hairs of their skin, the door to this room is open, and they see it is a television set, widescreen, set to a non-channel. The whiteness of the screen and the teaming particles of light in it make the room appear nightmarish. The narrator spots off to the side, upon entering the room, a recliner that is directed away from the tv, partially. He sees over one arm of the recliner bare skin showing through a hole in the knee of Levis. He cleared his throat and asked of the recliner: hello?
He said it again, louder: Hallo? The chair jerked and rocked for a few seconds and a hand raised a remote to the tv. The narrator thinks the fingers on the remote will turn the tv off; instead the volume increases. The channel does not change. The recliner becomes still again.
“Excuse me, we don’t mean to bother you but we need some help.” The narrator is shouting over the electronic barrage of noise.
The chair jerks again and the boyman leaps from it, leaving it rocking violently. He is shirtless and his flesh appears dead blue in the light of the tv. The three people stand in the noisy room and for a few seconds do not move. He is a boyman. His chest is concave and his jawline sharp and jutting. There is a look of fear in the sockets of his eyes but this quickly recedes. He is a boyman, and the bigger nature in him begins to take stock. What the fuck? he says. But he does not say it in a threatening manner.
There is an overriding innocence in the expression, as if he’d only now been giving the script and was only now trying the words out. “What the fuck?” he said, again. The inflection was more convincing this time, and it occurred to the narrator that boyman was waking up from some world made of pixels and white noise; they had brought him away from a place in which he existed timelessly, and now he must deal with these strange faces in his room. The confusion in his eyebrows was unmistakeable.
Dreaming 9/25/11
Dreaming is an act of truth. There are reasons for dreaming. One I the processing of the unconscious, unresolved meridians of the immediate past. Another, I believe, is instructional. By looking back at dreams and trying to interpret them, this very act is a journey. It is the same as transiting between two languages, trying to find the locus of meaning of the second language (the dream) but anchored in myriad ways to the fist language (consciousness). Bu there are time in which that anchor can shift, drag a bit, letting your boat find a new place where the tides prefer you to be (perspective).
It is this intermediate shifting that I have always been interested, the transitory state. As I begin working at [omitted] in a couple of days, I will be embarking upon a long-held goal of teaching writing in a community college. This was one of the first transitional experiences some 30 years ago that truly felt was a step in the right direction. A first, distinctly true step. I would like to move toward what it means for me to be teaching this entry level course.
Gene Whitney was in my opinion a fantastic teacher. He was s skinny guy in his mid-to late fifties when took my first class with him in 1987 at Portland Community College. He had a bit of a goatee and ears that winged away from the side of his head as if he had canine control over them. The most prominent feature of his face was his large, crooked nose. He remarked once that he would never have lived very long in medieval times because he looked like the devil incarnate. He spoke in a smoky baritone that commanded your attention in sharp bursts, and he regularly surprised a student with profane language or a shocking turn of phrase. His rep at the college was of a fearsome, opinionated professor whose occasional tirades against conventional thinking got him into trouble with students and college alike. However, the enduring aspect of his character for me is the duel force of ferocious energy with which he delivered his philosophy of writing and the great compassion he exhibited toward any student trying their best to achieve the goals set for him. Gene smoked like a demon and drank. He lived on his 28 foot sailboat at McCuddy’s Marina on the Columbia (also impressing me) after separating from his wife. I assume his smoking and alcoholic ways finally got the best of him.
But I remember his classes, I do. They were somewhat electrifying at best and at worst terrifying. When he found that half of the class was not turning in their papers on time, he let us have it. He would vent his frustration by shouting and threatening us, which for some did not sit right. He lost students when that happened, but he also gained respect among those who did do the work and were making progress. I took Writing 122 and Writing 123 with Gene. During those terms, I felt as if I was moving toward an understanding with myself that writing was calling me. Writing was like a distant land, a dreamy place. A dream.
So now I peek out of the cabin of my boat and I see that the anchor has shifted over the night. I’m seeing the trees and rocks on shore in a different way and in a different light. Of course, as a mariner, that my anchor has dragged concerns me. But there is nothing about it that I cannot deal with. I am, in fact, always vulnerable to these circumstances and there is a certain dependency upon them that I cannot explain even to myself. The anchor has shifted , but I know—just as the dreamer knows—that the new life of the next day present a set of entirely new challenges and excursions.
Ambition 9/26/11
Ambition. This is what is giving me nerves today, why I woke up at 5:30 this morning. I’m nervous about this term of teaching as I’ll be teaching more hours than I’ve ever taken on. Fifteen at PIA, three at MU, and three more at Clark. It’s these last two classes that matter the most to me as I look forward into what I want to accomplish. One of my goals has always been to become a full-time teacher of writing at the college level. Because I have achieved other such goals to surprising results, I know that I can also achieve this dream of mine. I feel that I’m moving in the right direction, and this will fuel my energy in these classes.
I’ve always felt that ambition was a dirty word. Somehow, I got it into my head that an ambitious person was hell bent on squashing people and exploiting whomever and whatever was within reach in order to attain the object of his greed. Greed has been my synonym for ambition for a very long time. I wonder now where this equation began. Certainly not from my father, as he definitely was an ambitious person who understood when and how to achieve goals. He also know which goals to set. Getting there was a little bumpy sometimes but he always looked out for his own: this was not greed; it was ambition. Perhaps I can trace my mistaken understanding back to some notion of “Success” and my abhorrence of those who flaunt their wealth in society, often to the great shame of the lesser privileged. This notion, which I think is a deeply rooted value in me, probably sprang from some idea that I was not good enough, that I would always be of the lesser privileged and therefore will ever be struggling to reach unattainable heights and status.
And yet. And yet as I look back in my life, I see progress has occurred when I attune myself to the task at hand. Being aware of what needs to be accomplished now and how it will benefit not only myself but others can be of great solace when I feel that I am working for nothing, to no end. It is now that matters. Yes, I have had a self-defeatist history. Yes, many of my pursuits have been selfish and misguided. And yet. And yet, I find that I am back on track, ready to take on a new challenge that I know will bring me closer to who I am.
So, my friend and advisor, poet Matthew Shenoda gave a keynote talk on ambition, that for writers ambition is required. A necessity. When Matthew aired these words it was as if something was finally released in me. Someone I deeply admire had spoken it: that ambition was a trait of self-respect that must be nurtured in order for the creative self to become confident and willing to lay down the unique vision of the soul. A snow crystal must be frozen in its state for thousands of plummeting feet before anyone on the ground can appreciate its own peculiar wonders. This is determination!
So as I begin my first classes of Winter 2011 today at [omitted] it will be with a new sense that I am stepping out onto a new plane. Teaching Grammar and Reading in ESL I now will regard as polishing the material I need for teaching the LIT 200 and ENGL 097 classes before me. I will be teaching now with a force behind me—ambition—which will grow and fuel me as I move forward. No more second guessing, no more self criticism. When I can name my destination, I will reach it.
Threshold 9/27/11
What I teach is often what I learn. Modified: what I know I must learn I teach. Perhaps this is why I have pursued writing in such a way. Funny that I am beginning a class today, English 097, one step above developmental ed. This in some ways reflects my view of my own writing, developmental. I have been teaching for many years, all ESL. It's been an interesting and engaging ride. Yet, it has yielded little for me in terms of my own development. Yes I have become more confident in the classroom, more cognizant of curriculum and outcomes, and more attentive to planning and assessment; and all of these skills have led to me being a better teacher. I feel very prepared to take on this writing class at Clark because it will draw from all of my abilities as teacher. What ESL has not prepared me for, that is, what I have missed in the field, is a sense that who I am as a creative person has not been addressed.
I have found that over the years there are many ways to approach grammar, the construction of a paragraph or essay, the pronunciation of “p” versus “f”, and how to recognize a topic and an argument when you read it. I understand the various pitfalls that ESL students fall into and I try to help students avoid them by being aware, using the tools I teach them, be in control of the language instead of the other way around. I have learned to be discerning among the language groups I have taught, recognize the set of pronunciation challenges their language presents in English, notice the student who is skilled not at being a student but at avoiding the student’s responsibilities. I know how to teach language. But I need to learn how to teach people to use it.
The biggest challenge I face right now with writing is my own fear of failure, or perhaps it is fear of success; don’t know how to distinguish between the two. I have ideas, I write them down. But when I begin developing those ideas, either I become too easily distracted or I find myself writing along less interesting lines. Sometimes, but far too rarely, I find myself in surprising territory, and that is when I start to feel the heat around a subject. It's the heat that I fear because I crave it so. It is the heat that warms me, but it only warms me if I work at it. In so many words, just what I tell my students.
The heat that generates around a character, for example, might actually derive from the very resistance I give it. If there is too much resistance, too much friction, I tend to be a wimp and back off. I need to be less of a wimp. I need to be stronger and more self reliant in order to take on the subjects that I know I need to write about. These are the doors I need to open, unlock, or kick down. Perhaps they are not doors at all but walls, mountains. I need to view these barriers as thresholds, exactly as I was telling my Reading students yesterday (had to teach “threshold” first). I said something like “it’s your job to cross the threshold but you won’t know you’ve crossed it until you’ve reached the other side and are suddenly looking back into the room where you once were.” I was talking to myself there.
I do that a lot, I think, talk to myself in my classes. I don’t think it is rare in teaching. We teach what we want to learn and perfect in our own lives. Or perhaps there is a point at which we shift from teaching what we want to learn to teaching what we have learned. Indeed I have learned that bit about crossing thresholds. Again and again I learn it. Today is a threshold day.
Yaquina 11/13/11
Threadbare and shambling like an addict on the street, I come back. I come back to the pages I’ve been neglecting, and while my student essays scream from their file folder for attention, I must write. There are things abrew in me that must be out. I’ve been wanting to write now for a few years those couple of days in Newport back in what was it—1990? Boat stuck in the water with the tide running out like sand through an hour glass. Kim, college girl that was flirting with me, suddenly confounded with the situation but also somewhat amused. Eric, I’ll call him that since I’ve forgotten his name, waiting at the lift, watching our progress and then our lack of progress; he called the Coast Guard, bless his heart.
And me. It was a blunder, allowing myself to be lured into flirtations, ignoring the channel markers, plowing the Duck deep into the muck of the bay, her keel wedged deeper by the force of the spinnaker now fuller than ever, driving us deeper. By the time we had the sail down, and I was able to look over the gunwale, the mud bottom was clearly visible with seaweed flying around and small fish swimming against the current with open mouths, catching whatever was brought to them before exiting the stage for deeper waters. Because the boat would not turn, fast as she was in the mud, the ebbing water splashed and cackled against the hull, sending little whirling eddies off with the tide. The bottom became more clearly magnified through the surface, and I could see the teaming minutia cling and fin against the powerful draw. I watched this, yes, with a sinking feeling.
We rocked the Duck furiously. Back and forth with Kim on one side and me ant the other. We rocked the Duck but she would rock until she would rock no more that day. Kim and I shrugged. What could we do? Tide running out. We might spend the night and now I really wonder what would have happened to my life if we had? We could see that we were only around two hundred yards from shore. We might be able, once the water had completely receded from the shoal, to make it somehow to the shore. It would be a mucky trudge and time consuming, but what else could we do? Stay on Duck?
The thought had dawned on the two of us perhaps at the same time, just after we realized how stuck we were. We had been slowly drawing nearer to each other, Kim and I, over the last few days. When we volunteered to participate in the Yaquina Bay Regatta, representing what was then a rag-tag UO sailing team, we understood that we would be spending more time together. And Eric, poor Eric, also grasped this fact. Perhaps this is the reason he decided not to sail the boat with me back to the lift. Maybe it was a gut-level feeling that if he went instead of Kim, we would resent him for keeping us apart for what was to be a lovely half-mile spinnaker ride from the marina to the lift. Whatever the reason, he decided to drive the truck and trailer to the lift and let us go.
I was really agitated at our predicament. I felt like a complete fool, which of course was completely justified. Kim to her credit seemed ready to laugh it off, which to this day I am in admiration of. I keep wondering what would have happened if we had taken any of the several chances we had to make love. The first night, we stayed in the boat and Eric stayed in the truck. The second night I stayed in the boat alone, and the third night we stayed in a hotel that the Police secured for us. But somehow, it was the chance afforded by the Duck stuck in the muck that had us both pondering the possibilities of the moment.
And moments cascade into others. Only a few minutes after we had realized how truly screwed was our situation. Kim spotted a motorized inflatable approaching at high speed. As they neared, we saw they were Coast Guard: two guys in wetsuits and life jackets who had responded to a call we later learned was from Eric. He no doubt had gone into a fit of giggling when he saw the Duck suddenly stop and drop the spinnaker. He made the right move, but I can’t help wondering if he thought perhaps that I had intentionally run the Duck aground. Maybe not. Eric and I had sailed in smaller craft under spinnaker, and he knew my proclivity to let that great sail take over. Nevertheless, he may have also understood the certain alignment of the stars when this grounding occurred.
How to tell this story? From whose narration? I think this could be quite funny if told straight, without any hint of literal irony. This story needs to go all the way. It needs to bring the characters to the policeman who found them a hotel, to the abandoned amusement park, the mail boat, and the drive back to Eugene with Duck sitting in the side yard of a soldier of fortune.
And me. It was a blunder, allowing myself to be lured into flirtations, ignoring the channel markers, plowing the Duck deep into the muck of the bay, her keel wedged deeper by the force of the spinnaker now fuller than ever, driving us deeper. By the time we had the sail down, and I was able to look over the gunwale, the mud bottom was clearly visible with seaweed flying around and small fish swimming against the current with open mouths, catching whatever was brought to them before exiting the stage for deeper waters. Because the boat would not turn, fast as she was in the mud, the ebbing water splashed and cackled against the hull, sending little whirling eddies off with the tide. The bottom became more clearly magnified through the surface, and I could see the teaming minutia cling and fin against the powerful draw. I watched this, yes, with a sinking feeling.
We rocked the Duck furiously. Back and forth with Kim on one side and me ant the other. We rocked the Duck but she would rock until she would rock no more that day. Kim and I shrugged. What could we do? Tide running out. We might spend the night and now I really wonder what would have happened to my life if we had? We could see that we were only around two hundred yards from shore. We might be able, once the water had completely receded from the shoal, to make it somehow to the shore. It would be a mucky trudge and time consuming, but what else could we do? Stay on Duck?
The thought had dawned on the two of us perhaps at the same time, just after we realized how stuck we were. We had been slowly drawing nearer to each other, Kim and I, over the last few days. When we volunteered to participate in the Yaquina Bay Regatta, representing what was then a rag-tag UO sailing team, we understood that we would be spending more time together. And Eric, poor Eric, also grasped this fact. Perhaps this is the reason he decided not to sail the boat with me back to the lift. Maybe it was a gut-level feeling that if he went instead of Kim, we would resent him for keeping us apart for what was to be a lovely half-mile spinnaker ride from the marina to the lift. Whatever the reason, he decided to drive the truck and trailer to the lift and let us go.
I was really agitated at our predicament. I felt like a complete fool, which of course was completely justified. Kim to her credit seemed ready to laugh it off, which to this day I am in admiration of. I keep wondering what would have happened if we had taken any of the several chances we had to make love. The first night, we stayed in the boat and Eric stayed in the truck. The second night I stayed in the boat alone, and the third night we stayed in a hotel that the Police secured for us. But somehow, it was the chance afforded by the Duck stuck in the muck that had us both pondering the possibilities of the moment.
And moments cascade into others. Only a few minutes after we had realized how truly screwed was our situation. Kim spotted a motorized inflatable approaching at high speed. As they neared, we saw they were Coast Guard: two guys in wetsuits and life jackets who had responded to a call we later learned was from Eric. He no doubt had gone into a fit of giggling when he saw the Duck suddenly stop and drop the spinnaker. He made the right move, but I can’t help wondering if he thought perhaps that I had intentionally run the Duck aground. Maybe not. Eric and I had sailed in smaller craft under spinnaker, and he knew my proclivity to let that great sail take over. Nevertheless, he may have also understood the certain alignment of the stars when this grounding occurred.
How to tell this story? From whose narration? I think this could be quite funny if told straight, without any hint of literal irony. This story needs to go all the way. It needs to bring the characters to the policeman who found them a hotel, to the abandoned amusement park, the mail boat, and the drive back to Eugene with Duck sitting in the side yard of a soldier of fortune.
Time to write 4/19/12
This is what I need, of course. I’m hoping--praying, really--that I’ll be motivated now to get up and write for at least an hour every morning. This absolutely must be a practice. There are no excuses. Stopped drinking, so no more hung over mornings; not using the crappy laptop any more, so I’m tech-ready; and I have at least three different writing projects that I’m working on, so that means I’ll have plenty to write about.
Plenty to write about. Lancaster is the current “need” and I certainly know that this story needs to come out. Yet I feel that there’s something missing in my motivation. Something I need to better define. What is it exactly that the old man holds for me? How do I go about approaching his life? Perhaps the most compelling approach for me is through the personal yearning to overcome my own obstacles, while seeking my own path toward “the promised land.”
The promised land. When I think of these words, my brain cringes. They imply a divine “promise” which is directed specifically at the “chosen ones,” those who believe from what their forebears tell them that they are to be the heirs of the universe, that the green side of the valley, the land of plenty is what they alone deserve. Knowing what I do, this providential exclusivity, the inherent inequity, arrogance, and general small mindedness of this way of thinking has always bugged me.
Knowing what I do. It really comes down to this, and I don’t know that much. I know a little about Lancaster, and this will need to be a different document, but what I know of him is shadowed by somewhat tedious family lore (“his mother told him never to upset a single flower”) and mundane historical commentary (“he built the first paved highway of it’s length in the country....a poem in stone”).
A poem in stone. I need to crack that one. Such a trite statement it seems, yet behind it I think is Lancaster’s drive to bring the beauty of the Columbia Gorge to the people Let it flourish in the imaginations of those who travel the highway so that nothing quite so wonderful will supersede these images for at least as long as a fine poem might occupy the mind. This was Lancaster’s occupation with the road; what is mine with Lancaster?
What is mine with Lancaster? This is the real question that cuts much closer to the core of why I feel I need to write the story. Perhaps it is the knowledge that he started so humbly and followed a classic road of destiny himself, one we all take, which led him to create an homage to the environment he loved so dearly, but in so doing perhaps understood the flaw all along. He was a visionary. What did he envision?
Ambition 4/19/12
When I began to think I was a writer I thought I would someday simply make the leap into the writing of essays, novels, poetry, any form really, as I didn’t know then what I needed to write. I still don’t. Or maybe I do. I only know that I have the need and this is what I need to be doing. There is inside of me a person steaming to get out, steaming to find a way to express himself. But what I also know to be true is that this person is locked away behind layer upon layer of self reproach, self doubt, self analysis and self denial. All of this amounts to self-abuse, the kind that creates a sense of loss or anxiety that I am not producing anything of lasting value.
Even though I know my family is already it’s own thriving unit that speaks to the future more than anything I can do personally, I still cling to the idea that this creative wildman inside my being is capable of enormous accomplishments. How do I know it? I notice in my halfsleep the ideas and notions I know belong in poems and stories rising into the nebulous bodies I call story clouds, a mass of ethereal fragments constantly seeking a unifying idea. I search in these moments this idea, this thread that will guide me into a story. It is what keeps me grounded, this search. I have trusted my instinct in the past to follow the idea as it evolves into the mysterious form it will eventually take.
And yet, lately, the idea has been amorphous, detached from the bigger picture I have come to expect. I feel at sea with no wind, no oars, the strakes of my hull leaking. I am vulnerable now. My guard is down, and I feel that I may never write again or I may turn around and spin out 30 pages. I feel that anything can happen, right now. But the rising sense of urgency to produce something is undeniable. There is too much left undone, too much to do, too much I haven't begun. The wildman inside me howls at me, pounds his walls as I limp through my days wandering from job to home to job, never quite completing anything, never finding the peace that comes with closure.
Oh, I do struggle with that word. There is no closure. Not in this world, anyway. I guess I am plagued with the thought that whatever I begin on a particular day is subject to endless revision; whatever the idea I pursue, the further out of reach it becomes. Will I finish anything, I ask. Will there ever be anything I produce which will be brought to the finishing line. Even now, I watch my son come downstairs, getting ready for school, and I wonder how much of this neurosis will become his, how much has he already adopted simply by observing me.
And yet, I still know there is a way. I will write. It will be a daily routine. The wildman inside my being will be freed and he will know that he is free and he will run in gray of the early morning joyously without restraint. He will be me and I shall be him. We will be united, my wildness and me.
This gets closer to what I would like to explore in Lancaster. Perhaps I should start calling him Christopher, Chris, maybe. I need to see where this man’s wildness lives. How is it that he came to be an early symbol of pragmatic conservatism? What drives this man to create these bridges, this road? How is his own wildman released? These are questions I need to explore because these are the questions I am after in myself. How did he go about completing projects and was his own sense of the world stabilized in the process?
I think I have a need to see this man through the lens of his worldview. He comes from a n evangelical Christian background. I know something of this outlook. Out of this, there is a deep conviction that he is in some way building God’s road for the people, an acute sense of providence and manifest destiny. Just four years after SCL dies Woody Guthrie pens:
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
I wonder what Guthrie thought of SCL’s evangelic zeal to bring the glory of the Gorge to the consciousness of the people. Worth looking into, especially in light of the building of Bonneville Dam at about the same time as the Grand Coulee, to which Guthrie is ever linked.
Dream 4/21/12
Had a dream just before waking up that Carmie and I were trying to get out of a house in which we didn’t belong. We were in the basement inside the house and Cedar was with us. Looking out the back window, we could see the backyard ranged away from the home and merged with the yards of the surrounding homes. I saw that one neighbor was outside relaxing in a lawn chair. We needed to find a way to get off the property as soon as possible and undetected. There were also two dogs tied to a stake in the grass, who I knew would sound off as soon as we emerged, especially with Cedar, who gets the attention of every dog everywhere. We slid open the door and began to walk with Cedar on a leash towards the dogs. Of course, they began to bark, but we managed to walk past the dogs with out any engagement. I think I began waking up at this point, but I do remember the idea flashing at me that this was not an entirely different situation from the one we are now in with the [omitted].
So there it is, another dream that reveals itself only in the telling. So much of what I think I think is unwritten and therefore never revealed. Faulkner supposedly said “I don’t know what I think until I write it.” This is certainly the case with me. I try to impress on my students the need to write as an expression of thought, as thinking itself. I tell them writing is thinking. We are often imprisoned by our own ideas and opinions when we do not give them the light of day. By letting our creatures of the mind out onto the paper, or into another medium, such as painting or music, we find not only the relief of expression but we gain something else in this release; we gain the upper hand on the vague negarities that threaten to void our imagination, to veto our creativity, to null our sense of individual being. So here I am, once again struggling to place my ideas into some form of expression, something that makes sense and is relevant to the world I see.
The world I see. It is at its core a tragic world. Comic, but tragic. Violence and deceit and grief lurk in every shadow. The world is heating up with this tragedy, even though we know that the rate of violence is dramatically low when looking at the history of mankind. What we see is that violence is of course much increased due to the available sources and modes of delivery. What we see are such acts of amorality, lechery and greed that we stop in our tracks to gawk, like traffic nearing an accident scene. We can’t help ourselves. The spectacle is the story of ourselves. There but for the grace go I, we say, clutching what’s ours and hurrying away into our respective mirages.
It’s only when disaster strikes our lives personally that we begin to grasp our vulnerability. A father dying slow, a brother gone missing, the creep of middle age toward the realization that at the world’s core, there is tragedy, there is death, and there is the undeniable happiness that arises from cheating it.
The Gorge 4/23/12
Went for a beautiful hike yesterday in the Gorge: Wahkeena Falls. I haven’t been up there in a few years, and yesterday was the perfect time to visit as the temps got up to around 80 degrees and the falls were full blast with all the snowmelt. Carmie, Gavin, Rachel and I got there about noon and hiked around five miles up to the springs and back. It was glorious.
One thing that struck me hard during this hike was the keen sense of Lancaster and Hill’s presence every step of the path. Their vision of the future is one that acknowledges growing interest in experiencing the Gorge and the inevitable damage to the terrain that comes without a coherent plan allowing such visits. This is indeed a progressive view, one usually associated with liberal tree huggers today, but Lancaster was no liberal in the current sense of the word, or pejorative, as it may be. He has evangelical Christian roots, which intrigues me. How hIs world view embraces a John Muir conservationism alongside a religiosity that includes a very literal apocalypse intrigues me. How is he able to reconcile the two perspectives; one of a sustainable future, the other of a not only inevitable but welcome cataclysm?
A mentoring 4/25/12
L was a magnetic character in my UO days. I was an undergrad English major, soaking up post modernism and protest art like a drunk in a doughnut shop. My aspirations to write in those days were mainly in the realm of poetry, but the essay was a form dear to my heart and I also longed to write fiction. The grads in the department were something akin to demigods, firing off witty cants against the HW Bush admin and generally embracing the ability of language to decimate fascism at any degree. Lidia, then a graduate student working with Ken Kesey in his novel class, (OU Levon), was among those of us at the Eugene Federal building protesting the Gulf War who made her beliefs well known. She articulated herself loudly and well and something about her made me look up.
L had told me she liked a poem I’d published in the UO literary mag, then entitled “Soldier Unknown.” That poem has undergone several revisions since then, but her comment had encouraged me. I was on my way, I thought. And yet, I wasn’t. As it turned out, I had so much more to deal with before actually settling into writing, but L’s comment has stuck with me these years.
I recall one evening at the the Fed building in which the level of protest was flaring and abrasive. Counter demonstrators who had stationed themselves symbolically on the opposite side of the street were beginning to “cross over” into the body of protesters who occupied the Fed building courtyard nightly. These were ruffians, mainly, drunks. But a few were more than adamant about breaking the back of the protest. These were vets who had no fear of moving into a group of liberal peaceniks to cause some mayhem. One of these guys met his match in L.
They stood face to face screaming at each other about how idiotic the other was being. The crowd pushed and swelled and most of us recognized the rising tension. However, many of us, including myself, had gone through Peacekeeper training, which was effective at thwarting the aim of the counter demonstration, which was to incite the peaceniks into violence, which in turn would overturn our right to protest.
I stepped in. Saliva was shooting like tracers between L and the vet who was, ironically, not unlike the subject of the poem L had liked so much. The language between them was venomous and becoming more so. I stepped into the storm between their reddening faces and looked at both of them. I told them they needed to back off, give it some air. I did not shout, but instead drew attention to the argument (which L was clearly winning, but would probably have suffered some physical abuse as a result). Faces turned and regarded the vet. He stopped shouting and seeing that he’d lost his bid for mayhem, marched off across the street pushing people aside as he strode.
I learned that night that I can act, and that others will pay attention when I do. I learned that even though certain people attract me for certain frivolous reasons, I have the ability to stand up. This is what I need to do with my writing: stand up.
Failure & shadow 5/19/12
Mothers Day. Didn’t get the card in the mail soon enough. Custom photo mug in the mail, though. Trite. I have been failing my mom for years, and this year has been a travesty. She’s gone through some horrific pain and medical issues which demand time and energy from all of her kids. Bro Joel has especially stepped up to the plate, and I know that Craig and fam visited her a couple of weekends ago. Guilt. I feel it welling around me today, and I must do something. But first there is this tricky matter of writing down what I feel lurking in me in very ghostly way.
I wrote in my journal yesterday, that the strange call I received from someone claiming to “know” what happened to M&C has been weighing on me like a creeping cloud.
Teachers Lounge 5/27/12
One of the challenges our protagonist in Teachers Lounge must face is the threat to her self-respect that becoming a full-time temp for SubForce represents. She has been seeking a teaching job for nearly a decade, since Measure 33 when voters approved the corporate takeover of public schools in her state. K-12 teaching positions had not been easy to find prior to that legislation, and afterward, the promise of steady work had diminished even further. The traditional Home Room position that she had experienced as a child was long gone, and because only administrators and a few “elite instructional staff” were allowed to remain fully employed under the new management, many teachers like herself had joined the “grassroots teachers” as the new chancellor often referred to his teaching force.
Cheryl remembers flinching at the use of the term which she wasn’t sure Delgado had meant to use in his acceptance speech. She’d been watching the speech on her iPad while pairing socks at the laundromat. Delgado was a thin, tall man, she observed, but not without muscular stature. She liked the way he gripped the podium with one hand as he spoke, and he had a pleasing baritone. “It is in our civic interest to promote the highest teaching standards in our schools without imperiling the integrity of our grassroots teaching force.” She liked those words, Cheryl did, even though she felt ever slightly the object of condescension, she loved the attention. She inserted the toe of one sock into another and turned them inside out in her automatic way. Delgado seemed to be speaking directly to her and she paused at the counter with the next load humming in the dryer next to her. She set the podcast back, replayed the sentence: “Civic interest...imperiling integrity...grassroots teaching.” That is when she flinched, a spasm that would become a nervous tick on her upper right cheek near her eye. The tick would develop into a wink later in her teaching career, a confusing facial gesture among her students and peers alike.
As a grassroots teacher, Cheryl is a naive one, this lass. But there is a survivor in her, too. She observes the ways in which her fellow teachers fail or succeed in their jobs, the choices they make and the obsessions that lead them in one direction or another. She is a student of her field, a reader of her own tea leaves as well as those of her peers. She is both non-judgmental and pragmatic, aggressively pragmatic, like a mother of 5 with shopping bag full of coupons. She is driven, this lass. Driven to keep this job, she is; and so she will. So she will.
She will understand. She will fly into this field, this necessary field of young budding minds, and it is her personal drive to water them and shade them and be present when they bloom. But above all, she will defend her right to work. As a member of SubForce, she is compelled to fight against the almighty Teachers Union, which has become a force for evil, as she is told. It is Pepsi Corps that will and must win in the end. This is the benign organization that is pulling public education out of the ashes and giving it, finally, the direction it always needed: the programming of society toward innovative entrepreneurialism and consumerism. It is through the education that children will learn to appreciate plastic again, and to once again understand that sugar consumption, not exercise, is a child’s natural inclination.
The point 5/18/12
What's the point of putting myself through the constant pressure to write? I don’t have the time. I often don’t have the energy, and definitely don’t have the money to live the writer’s life. But what the hell is the writer’s life? That’s not really even worth answering.
What I do know is that I have things to write. I’ve been haunted lately, more and more by the question of M&C. It’s pushing me everyday toward some sort of cliff edge. I wonder what will happen when I get there. I wonder if this edge will involve me discovering something about myself, or if it will simply result in one more frustrated realization that nothing can be truly known. Nothing in what we call reality goes without the caveat that uncertainty is always in the mix, always a factor determining an outcome. This I think is one of the reasons I am the way I am. That we do not know, will never know all there is to understand is actually a source of encouragement. That people and nature are endlessly quirky and full of unpredictability is what I rely on.
On to what I’m currently writing. The piece, Teacher’s Lounge, is encouraging but also case in point about my own struggle with procrastination. I think this is what I need to focus on: get a story finished. Move on to the next one. Period. There are several stories I need to revise that seem to be promising, but still need quite a lot of revision. I will be reading at an event next month something that will be one of these revisions. Teacher’s Lounge will not be ready by then, I’m afraid....I have several to choose from. I just need to comb through and resume the revision. But what the hell is keeping me from it?
It’s Friday, today, and I think I’ve taken advantage of the time to escape from the house to write at Starbucks for a while. It’s okay, but I have to buy a drink to be here. Now that I don’t waste money on alcohol anymore, it could very well be worth it to me to take advantage of this place. Stopped at Village Coffee a little while ago, too, and although I want to support the indie biz, it just isn’t conducive to melting into a corner to write for a while. Great place to meet a friend though. Also, because I have a cell phone now, it may well be a good place for me to hang out and still be accessible to the fam. There are reasons I need to be aloof from the house. Not sure what these are. Perhaps being away gives me the sense of mobility or maybe a sense of independence (albeit fleeting) that I need to be creative. At any rate, I do like the ideas that are coming to me here.
It’s a rare day that I can do this, but I may just make it more of a routine. One of the aspects of my life that I began to write about earlier is that I need to be alone to swim in the unknown; I need to have this space, wherever I am. What I think may be happening--finally--is that I am carving out this space, digging in, digging out of wherever it was that was keeping me down.
So. Onward. Teachers Lounge is a satirical piece about a teacher struggling to make her way in a school system that neither values her as a teacher nor gives her any incentives to innovate or develop. It’s about a dystopic educational system that is at once a provider of specialized knowledge and a killer of the critical intellect. Our heroine is naive in the beginning as she is given the temporary full-full time job as a scab teacher (hired by a union for substitute teachers) and commences upon her temporary career as a full-time teacher of the third grade.
Excited at first, she's ecstatic about her new room and students, enchanted by the many electronic aids supplied by Pepsi Corps, the school’s owner and operator. She is married with one child just entering kindergarten. Her husband is some sort of seasonal worker (house painter/landscaper/bicycle repairman?) so she is elated at having the “windfall” of this temporary fulltime work.
The year is around 2020. The schools have recently been renovated and refurbished using allocated tax money. All of the “old” teachers, those hold-outs of the previous failed public school system, have either quit or retired with sizable PURS packages. Our heroine is of the new teaching force, one trained for the coming age of neo-capitalist doctrine and armed with all the current theories of intellectual development as it pertains to the civic-consumerist ideals established by the neo-cons in the re-aligned Department of Education. It is a brave new world.
Reading Brave New World.
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