Coincidences

Where to start the timeline? Several weeks ago I finished reading Lia Purpura's beautiful On Looking. In one section of one of the essays she writes about coincidences without ever using the word. She is cutting strawberries, thinking of her father, and so calls him. He is cutting strawberries, thinking of her, hand on the phone to call. She learns a new word in the morning and that afternoon in the dentist's office opens a magazine to a review of a book with this word for its title. She thinks of someone from long ago and that night reads her obituary in the newspaper. She suggests that a friend read the book The Gift and on the way home from meeting with that friend pulls up behind a car with the license plate "HYDE". (Lewis Hyde is the author of The Gift.)

When I read this I had just finished reading The Gift. I bought it in April, but it was first recommended to me last August. I bought it when I saw it on the shelf of a small indie bookstore I had taken a book-loving friend visiting from Oregon. The day I read this particular section, that friend posted a quote from The Gift on Facebook. Only a day or two before, I had told my sister about this book and how it might relate to my niece's experience in her semester in Egypt earlier this year. And I saw a car with a bumper sticker, "The Gift."

Weeks have passed, but just this morning I took out my pen to write this all down. I opened Purpura's book to find the described section. Where was it? I had been tired when I read this book and let myself just read and enjoy without making my characteristic notes and underlining, so now there was no guide to lead me to the spot. Only a single card was placed in page to mark an unrelated comment I wanted to retrieve. I thumbed through the book back to front. Front to back. I couldn't find it. You can guess what's coming. I finally opened to the page marked by the card to read again the unrelated comment I was saving. There at toward the bottom of that page, "I am cutting strawberries and thinking of my father…" and the stream of coincidences continue.

"Gifts--given or received--stand witness to meaning beyond the known, and gift exchange is therefore a transcendent commerce, the economy of re-creation, conversion, or renaissance. It brings us worlds we have not seen before." (Lewis Hyde, The Gift)

In honor of my neighbor

On Memorial Day eve, a dear neighbor died. He was a World War II vet, the anchor of this neighborhood, and a consummate gardener. In his honor, I'm posting a short piece I wrote several years ago during Holy Week.

Grace

The man next door to where I live is kneeling on the ground from which hostas will emerge alongside his house, clearing out the clutter that the melted snow revealed. A retired electrician, Bob wears jeans and a gray t-shirt as he works. He is tan and fit. His appearance has changed little in the fourteen years we’ve been neighbors. Handful by handful he removes the dead leaves and debris and places it in a plastic bag; its top ripples in the breeze. Bob is 84 years old, yet he rises and kneels again before a spirea bush, repeating the cleansing ritual, like a man half his age.

Now Bob stands alongside his row of weigela bushes. Their fuchsia flowers are still weeks from bursting; the green buds new last week. He fertilized them on schedule and so their springtime resurrection proceeds. With shovel in hand, he aims at the ground around each base, places a foot and steps down. The roots need space and fresh air. The blade pierces the ground. He pushes on the shovel’s handle to lift the dirt and turn it over. He repeats down the row, topping with mulch.

When Bob wants a break, he sits in his lawn chair of white and brown woven webbing on a foldable aluminum frame. He sits in the shade in his driveway or next to the bush or plant he is tending. Sometimes his wife, Leatrice, joins him and they sit together in matching lawn chairs. I’ve seen him bring the chair out for her, unfold it, and set it on the ground with an extra jiggle and push to make sure it’s grounded before she sits. Once, sitting with them at their kitchen table, she told me that they are as happy together now—even happier—than on their wedding day over fifty years ago.

Bob’s attention will soon turn to his roses and day lilies. The two trellises of violet clementis. The hyacinth and lilacs. The peonies. When the maple tree launches its whirlybird seeds later this season, he will patiently pluck them up one by one, again on his knees. Sometimes he sits on the lawn chair and reaches down to remove them with a vacuum. The whirlybirds that cross our yard line get no such special treatment but take their chances with the breeze, the thatch, and the lawn mower. The lawn he sees across from his own—ours—has bare spots, residual effects of a dog and two boys. “Don’t worry,” he once told my husband, “the kids are more important.” He has no view here of trellises wrapped in violet bouquets, and our uncultivated ground offers no hope of return on the tomatoes and cucumbers he grows and leaves at our back door.

One day several summers ago, along the fence at the back of my yard, a yellow day lily bloomed where there had been no bloom before. It caught my eye through the window. In secret, Bob had knelt on his grass, dug into his soil, and lifted the lily by its roots. He rose and crossed the yard line. In secret, he knelt on our grass, dug into our soil, and laid the roots back down. Springtime is only three weeks old and the perennial blossoms are not yet splashed across the back fence. The green base waits, however, ready and full. When the yellow blooms come, they will be new every morning.

Writing sans bullet points

The other day I was trying to write something about rest, something experiential and organic. The words weren’t flowing well, which was the first frustration. But then I opened a magazine, which as coincidence would have it, was dedicated cover to cover to the topic of rest. Page after page of self-help and how-to’s. A reader need never be unclear about the value of rest or how to attain it ever again. What else was needed? In an easy defeat I didn’t return to my own words in progress.

Several hours later my eyes fell on Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, perhaps the most helpful book ever on rest and solitude, but without a single bullet point, and I took it as a sign to keep going. When I wrote Just Think for the most part I resisted advice to include "take-home messages" in bullet points with instructions for the reader. Of course it didn’t exactly climb the charts so perhaps I should have heeded that advice, but still I err on the side of internal change, of the transforming power of words and ideas rather than their overt prescriptive power. I’m grateful for books and articles that have given me instruction and advice when I’ve needed it, and there have been many, and I've written the occasional instructive piece myself (how to…), but 10-step lists are not the only change-agents.

In the 2009 edition of Best American Essays, edited by Mary Oliver, there is a 2-page piece by Brian Doyle titled "The Greatest Nature Essay Ever." In it he describes an essay that includes not a single imperative sentence or bullet point. In place of "alpine Conclusions, some Advice, some Stern Instructions & Directions" about wasting water, conserving energy, or using one's political power wisely, "there's only the quiet murmur of the writer tiptoeing back to the story", and the reader ends up not armed with imported resolve, but changed.

Mystery at the table: Rublev, Sayers, and the writer

Last weekend I went with a friend to a bookstore in St. Paul that was closing. A bookstore closing is always a sad affair, yet the owner seemed in good spirits and prices were slashed so joy was still to be had. I bought a few books and an icon wall hanging. Since hearing Dr. Roy Robson from the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia speak at The Museum of Russian Art a couple years ago, I've had my eye out for a copy of the Holy Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev, which reflects the story of Abraham's hospitality from Genesis 18. He showed a slide of this icon, with three figures seated at a round table. Two of the three figures were robed in brilliant blue. It was so beautiful I could hardly stop looking. The figures represent the Trinity, as its name suggests, and they are seated at the nine, twelve, and three o'clock positions. Left open is the 6 o'clock position. As Robson said, it invites you to "contemplate sitting at the table with the Trinity." I like that sense of invitation and so for that reason I'll hang it near my workspace where I can see it.

I want it where I can see it for another reason as well, particularly while I write. In Mind of the Maker, written in 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers examines in great detail the analogic association between the Divine Creator and the human creative process through the doctrine of the Trinity. The ideal literary artist composes his or her works in the image of the three-fold mind comprised of the co-equal and co-substantial Idea, Energy, and Power. The Idea—or the Father—is the “Book-as-Thought” in the writer’s mind irrespective of any words actually written. The thought precedes the actual activity or material production of the work, but continues on eternally after the work is written and read. The work “is known to the writer as …a complete and timeless whole." The Energy—or the Son—which “brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea,” is the “Book-as-Written." It is the creation that the writer or a reader can witness either as the material form of the work or as the passion and toil of the writer. The Power—or the Spirit—emerges from the Idea and the Energy. This is the “Book-as-Read” and is the “means by which the [Energy] is communicated to other readers and which produces a corresponding response in them.” To the writer, the Idea, the Energy, and the Power “are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation…they exist in—they are—the  creative mind itself." To ignore this co-equal and co-substantial pattern of the ideal creative mind, Sayers argued, is to invite failure to a literary work.

Much to think about and be reminded of for 50% off.

Hopkins vis-à-vis Salinger

In light of J. D. Salinger's recent death and the talk of his avoidance of publication over the years ("There is a marvellous peace in not publishing"), the career of Gerard Manley Hopkins offers an interesting comparison. I'm fascinated by the fact that none of Hopkins' works were published until after his death. He kept at it over the years, made sure his friend Bridges gathered them together in an album, and in 1883 wrote a prayer that God would dispense of it all according to his will, "that he would have them as his own and employ or not employ them as he would see fit." Two years prior, he had written in a letter to Bridges about the need to live by faith even in regards to the disposal of his work, "Now if you value what I write, if I do myself, much more does our Lord. And if he chooses to avail himself of what I leave at his disposal he  can do so with a felicity and with a success which I could never command. And if he does not, then two things follow; one that the reward I shall nevertheless receive from him will be all the greater; the other that then I shall know how much a thing contrary to his will and even to my own best interests I should have done if I had taken things into my own hands and forced on publication." In a letter to Bridges in 1886, Hopkins seemed more certain that his work should be distributed when he expressed his belief that works of art are meant to be shared in order to do its good, "We must then try be known, aim at it, take means to it." Yet, the only active effort he made toward publication was to send an occasional piece to the Jesuit newsletter.

(Above info and quotes from Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works. Ed. Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.)

Making beautiful things even if they don't make money

I like this. It's from an UTNE piece titled "Making Beautiful Things, Even if Nobody Cares."

Nightmares and lullabies

A child cries out in the middle of the night. He's had a bad dream. His mother jumps from bed and hurries to his room. She cradles him; shhh, shhh. She will probably sing quietly. Perhaps turn on a soft light.

Invariably she will say: Everything is all right; everything's fine.

Yesterday I finished reading Peter Berger's A Rumor of Angels, in which he offers the scene of a mother's response to a child's nightmare as an example of what he calls a "signal of transcendence." By this term he means something in prototypical everyday human behavior or experience that points to another reality that can be truly explained "only if there is some truth in the religious interpretation of human existence."

Given the danger and death lurking in life, he posits that the only reason the mother's words are not a lie (albeit a lie told in love) is because the "reassurance…implies a statement about reality" and this "trust in being" is essential to becoming a functional human being. Any ordering gesture points to a core human belief that there is a reality that transcends the empirical sphere.

So many reassurances--given and received--of order in the universe we daily substitute for the mother's whisper: things always work out for the best; it was meant to be; what goes around, comes around; it will be all right.