Writing an Elevenie

In May I took an online writing class from Christine Valters Paintner, online Abbess of Abbey of the Arts and author of The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom. She led those of us on the Zoom call through a series of writing exercises, and I want to share one with you because it was surprisingly easy and the yield satisfying. Paintner showed us how to write a 5-line, 11-word poem called an Elevenie (also called an Elfchen) by giving the prompt for each line followed by about 20 to 30 seconds to write that line.

Line 1 is one word that identifies an object, a thing. Line 2 is two words that answer the question, What does the word from Line 1 do? Line 3 is three words that answer the question, Where or how is the word from Line 1? Line 4 is four words that answer the question, What do you mean? Line 5 is one word that answers the question, What is the outcome? Of course, you can interpret these prompts fairly loosely.

Here's what I came up with:

Green
Joy tapped
Deep deep down
Life spirals up out
Dance

Maybe you will try it?

Covid and Camus' The Plague

Given the success of the vaccine in reducing the rate of new Covid cases, life has opened up substantially where I live, and I hope it has where you are as well. The relief has reminded me of the last handful of pages of Albert Camus' The Plague, which you probably remember is a sobering and frightening novel about a mid-twentieth century plague in a town in Algeria. Finally, the plague did lift, however, and the roads and the railroad tracks into the town again reopened, and the people returned to moving about the streets. In the days just before the gates allowed entrance, for Dr. Bernard Rieux, the story's narrator, "the prospect of imminent release had obliterated his fatigue."

"Hope had returned and with it a new zest for life. No man can live on the stretch all the time, with his energy and will-power strained to the breaking-point, and it is a joy to be able to relax at last and loosen nerves and muscles that were braced for the struggle.... Indeed, he had a feeling that everyone in those days was making a fresh start."

If you've read the book, you know it's not a fairy tale and not everyone lives happily ever after, even with the plague lifting, but still, joy returned.

"[T]he moment they saw the smoke of the approaching engine, the feeling of exile vanished before an uprush of overpowering, bewildering joy. And when the train stopped, all those interminable-seeming separations which often had begun on this same platform came to an end in one ecstatic moment, when arms closed with hungry possessiveness on bodies whose living shape they had forgotten."

Tiers of Attention

Another book I've been reading is RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher (2009). Gallagher writes to turn our attention toward things that matter, because the things that matter most may not be what gets our attention first. She gives the example of going bird watching and becoming so enamored with the brilliant cardinals that quickly come into view that you tend to not see the more elusive or less colorful birds. This is exactly the scenario in my backyard. I look out the window, and, Oh look, there's a beautiful cardinal! And there's another! The cardinals tie a tether around my attention, and I never look for most of the other species of birds that are circling my yard just beyond the cardinals. Seeing the cardinals is an example of what Gallagher calls “bottom-up” attention, in which you go for the lowest hanging fruit and stop there. The problem with that approach is that there is so much more to see and learn and think about. Let’s aim instead for the “top-down” approach, urges Gallagher, and choose our focus with intention.

I’ve been watching my yard more carefully the last few days. What of the small birds that rustle the lilac bushes or that seem to shoot straight up through the blue spruce? What birds go with what song? I hear a multitude of melodies. Blue jays are another bird easy to see although they aren’t as common as cardinals. Yesterday, a blue joy slammed into my living room window, right in front of me, and bounced off as if to jealously warn me not to get too carried away aiming for sightings of birds of a more subtle variety.

Of course Gallagher’s goal is not to warn us about thinking too narrowly about birds but rather to consider carefully the thoughts that we too easily allow to capture and predominate our thinking. Given all that's gone on this past year, in the world, our nation, our cities, our personal lives, it's definitely been a year in which our attention has been grabbed and often by the bottom-up news, messages, and fears. The cardinal flits, the blue jay slams, the statistics flash, the sound byte lands and our attention is no longer our own. Pull it back, own it, I tell myself.

Gallagher writes, “Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depend on how you handle it.”

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[Photo: Tulips seen on a morning walk. A house further down the block had much flashier tulips set in a large garden. I almost took a picture of those tulips. But then I saw these, tulips of a more humble variety, hugging the street.]

Leslie Jamison on Grace

The most recent issue of The Mockingbird ("The Surprise Issue") includes an interview with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn. The topic here is grace, the grace we share with each other:

We can offer things—do offer things—to other people without any kind of pure heart: grudgingly, resentfully, with white knuckles or clenched guts, and it can still be deeply meaningful. It can still "count." Even that notion of "counting" is a delusion I've long subscribed to and am sort of interested in pushing back against, or playing tag with, or sitting down and having a cup of tea and a long chat with.... I'm trying to get away from frameworks of grace that rely on sufficiency, and to lean into notions of pleasant ambush, desire, and care—the primal ways we are moved to want, and to give, the ways that our not knowing or controlling our destinies ultimately gives those destinies more spacious horizons.

The Trajectory of a Subtle Pivot

I’ve been reading The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson (2021). My father gave it to me, and he and I have been talking about it in the evenings on the phone as we go through the book. One small scene towards the beginning of the book has continued to hum in my brain, although it has nothing to do with the work of mapping the structure of RNA, the theme of the book. In reality, however, this small scene has everything to do with that work, which means it has everything to do with the fact that we now have a Covid vaccine.

Jennifer Doudna, PhD, the subject of the book, and her colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their invention of an RNA-guided gene-editing tool, which played a key role in the development of the Covid vaccine. The scene I’m thinking of was when Doudna was in sixth grade, and her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix by James Watson, a book that detailed the discovery of the structure of DNA. Reading that book was a pivot point for Doudna. While it didn’t give an immediate 180-degree shift in whatever her sixth-grade self was doing or aiming at, the shift carried her somewhere.

The trajectory of any subtle pivot, carried over many years, changes everything. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot on the left side of the paper and another dot on the right side. Now draw a line between the dots. Next, draw a third dot just a tiny bit above the dot on the right side. Finally, draw a line between the original left dot and the new right dot. Imagine that the lines go on and on beyond the page, and think about how those two lines would travel out across time with the distance between them growing. It makes for an interesting assignment: think back to childhood, or later, and consider what was the toy, the book, the conversation, the game, the film, the scene that nudged you ever so slightly or is nudging you even now.

How Not to be Afraid: On Fear and Loving Our Neighbors and the World

When I opened How Not to be Afraid: Seven Ways to Live When Everything Seems Terrifying, by Gareth Higgins, founder and editor of The Porch (“a slow conversation about beautiful and difficult things”) I expected to discover ways to not be afraid of tornadoes or flagged biopsy findings or pink slips or out-of-control worldwide pandemics. I thought the book would deliver ways to circumvent the pounding heart or racing mind on sleepless nights. But that wasn’t exactly the book Higgins wrote.

Higgins didn’t write to describe ways to combat fear but rather to describe living in a way that is bigger than fear, a way so full of love and care for this often oh-so-scary but rich and beautiful world, that fear is dwarfed. Here’s how to take your eyes off the fear that holds you and instead open them outward, Higgins is saying on these pages.

Early in the book I was attracted to what Higgins wrote about the stories we tell ourselves:

“Stories of connection, courage, creativity, and the common good are more true but less frequently told. Given that the brain more easily recalls shocks than wisdom and notices spectacular more easily than gradual change, these better stories need to be spoken more often with more imagination. That doesn’t always mean they need to be longer. Love your neighbor as yourself is a very short story indeed, but it may contain the secret of how all life can experience its own abundance.”

As I kept turning the pages, I realized more and more that Higgins is calling his readers to attend not only to the stories we tell ourselves but to the stories each of us are helping to write for our neighbors and the world.

~~~

Related posts:

• Practicing Walking With A Broken Arm

• On Hope and Fear in Birthing Hope

• What To Think About Today

Intellectual Hospitality: A Way to Rebuild Trust

The theme of the current issue of Comment magazine (Winter 2021) is rebuilding trust in each other and within communities given all that has happened in recent months and years to break down that trust. I encourage you to read the piece by Cherie Harder, president of the The Trinity Forum, titled, “Reviving Intellectual Hospitality.” The essay discusses ways to “disrupt this vicious cycle” we have gotten ourselves in of attending only to what we already think is true and only to those who agree with us. The practice of intellectual hospitality is about being open to each other again, to discussing with and learning from each other. It’s a path of humility and camaraderie.

"How to disrupt this vicious cycle? A society of diminishing public trust in both institutions and each other—riven by difference we seem unable to bridge, and marked by malice and misinformation—calls for creative means of rebuilding a shared sense of the common good. Vital to such renewal will be the reinvigoration of what might seem a modest practice: the extension of intellectual hospitality."

Harder outlines multiple ways to practice such hospitality, including: read widely, particularly to learn other perspectives; pursue friendships with those who think differently; cultivate curiosity; ask questions; and many others. I hope you’ll read the article for all her suggestions. In fact, read the entire issue. During this time of Covid, the publisher of Comment (tagline: "Public Theology for the Common Good") has been generous in opening up many of their issues to online reading without a subscription.

Harder also points out that a key corrosive to trust is over-reliance on social media. (For more on the need to reduce the over-reliance on social media, not just for reasons of intellectual hospitality but also to free up leisure time for many other pursuits, let me also recommend Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport.)

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[Photo: Beauty beneath the Ford Parkway Bridge, which connects Minneapolis and St. Paul.]