The Creative Act

In the heat of the sun I was pacing around, searching for something to dullen the sound of the one who had kept me the one who I am and who I’ll always call on when patience runs thin in the dark, dwindling hours of the grass where I stand with an outlook of karma to fall on the land; and though I am the keeper of that which I hide, there’s little to come of these words that I write.

The divisions and pressence of spirt and flesh are at ease in the comfort of my shallowness as espoused by the way that I hollowly stare through the faces around me surrounded by fair and wholehearted dimples to warm one’s cold stone of a heart in the body of one who has died, so often, so often upon this long ride; and the key to the way that he’s come to survive is his willing acceptance of all of the lies bestowed upon him when he longed to undo the injustice around him, escaped by so few of the strong and resilient who still soldier on in pursuit of the gods whom they call their own.

And the challenge of finding the way to return to the truths, now forgotten, by one who has earned so little of that which he’s stumbled upon, is the premise that he has become so far gone that the altar upon which he longed to be placed has risen above the constraints of his taste; and the timing of running from where he once lay is but only a function of his will to say that the things that he said were not born out of harm, but of pain he was feeling within his slim arm; and the virtues of seeing the fog in the air are the answers inside his dispasionate stare.

Rebecca Solnit. A paradise Built in Hell.

This is a compelling book about the ways communities react to natural disasters. Solnit got the idea for the book while interviewing survivors of the  hurricane that hit Halifax in 2005. Many got a particular look in their eyes in discussing the events. Their was a fondness in the memories of what transpired in the wake of the disaster. Solnit decided to study this fondness, because she herself had experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake and her memories were similar.

Personally I remember the Ice Storm of 98, and the blackout of 2003. I look back on them as having been exciting times, and good ones as well (bbqs, cards with grandparents, quie and stillness) . This book compares the accounts of people in such situations with media reports and finds the media to be serving us very poorly. It also studies the effects of government on the situations and tends to find them negative. This is a book that reminds us of the power of spirit and community, even if it lays dormant most of the time. (An ad-hoc soup kitchen in in the wake of the 1904 S.F. Quake had a sign proclaiming “Eat, Drink, And be Merry because tomorrow they might make us move to Oakland,” and with that we know the meaning of perseverance.

While the argument may at times become a little too straight forward and simple, a little too anti-government for my tastes, it is compelling in its admiration of the human soul. It counters tales of mass raping and pilaging with stories of people giving away food, shelter and services, like the plumbers of San Fran that offered their service free around the clock for two weeks trying to fix the city’s broken piping system. It leaves you wondering how generous you would be in such a moment, and knowing how good you would like to be.

This book would make an excellent christmas gift for many readers, especially because you can read it before wrapping.

The Fix is in.
I’ve not a chance.
I’ll rot away before I dance.
The Sphinx, she’s there
Upon the hill,
On top of which resides my Will.

I’ll make my way
Much further on,
Until I fail
To greet the gun.

And then I’ll know
That what I said
Was what I’d meant
When all was Bent.

And Bent I am,
Though straight she goes—
Depart from me,
Thy troubled woes.

And speaking now, inside myself
I’ve stifled what had held my wealth
Within the tongs
Upon the hearth,
Where Burning was
My frail Earth.

Adalbert Stifter. Rock Crystal. NYRB

This is a 76 page book that reflects upon events familiar to just about everyone. Two children set out on Christmas eve from their grandparents to their home. The path is over a small mountain, one they have traversed many times. The boy is young, the girl younger (perhaps 4 or 5).

A very short while after they leave it starts to snow.

Local communities form several valleys set up search parties when they realize what has happened. The children hideout in a cave for the night and see something akin to the northern lights, which they associate with the Christ child they had expected to arrive that night in their village. This is a tear jerking story for those who have been lost or lost someone.  It is about a community coming together, being defined by a moment that will go down in their village history an change the way they see the mountains around them.

I highly suggest you read this book, assuming you have encountered either, estrangement from a community or loss in your life. You want regret it.

July 2009 – Stanley Park

Fuji Finepix

July 2009 – Stanley Park

Fuji Finepix

July 2009

Fuji Finepix

My Sumi-e holiday card  &  haiku – with best wishes.  May the New Year bring health, happiness and continued creativity to all.  Sincerely, Heather

J.M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg.

J. M. Coetzee has won all the prizes and, in a style Thomas Bernhard would approve of, rarely bothers to pick them up himself. The man is known to never smile, to attend parties without uttering a word all night. Despite this seemingly cliché persona, he writes damn good books. He is one of the few living authors in my personal library, I now have four of his books, placing him in an even smaller category.

The Master of Petersburg was recently brought to my attention by a customer at the store. We were discussing Dostoevsky because he was buying a Coetzee book and I told him I find the Coetzee feels a lot like Old Dusty and Kafka. The customer, knowing more than I, laughed because those two are well-known as his influences. More to the point, Coetzee had written a book featuring Dostoevsky as the main character.

The book takes place in the late 1860s, fame but not fortune have already come to the protagonist. His stepson has died mysteriously and so Dusty has to go get his papers and see to the final details of his son’s life. The narrative itself is quite interesting, involving Nacheav a young revolutionary out to use Dostoevsky, an old one. There is love, hate and plenty of inside jokes for Dostoevsky lovers.

The book is really about the cost of writing. The torture a “real” writer must go through in order to put his/her soul on the page. The fact that they must use their every action and those of their family and friends in order to have a product. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky sees himself as selling his soul to pay his gambling debts. Importantly it is not just his soul but also the dead boy’s soul, and the poor people he encounters and everyone else’s souls that are to be sold. I suspect Dostoevsky thought along these lines more then once as he returned home from some event or other and tried to figure out how to make it into a novel or how to use so-and-so’s character in a book. This would feel dirty. I have felt this in my attempts to write poetry, inevitably other people’s stories are told, against their will. The personal internal conflict caused by this would grow with fame and fortune, at least I suspect that to be true.

I wonder if Coetzee feels this way too. Is the book really about a man living in South Africa? Is it really an explanation for his refusal to pick up those awards or to even smile? This book is a lot of fun, moves well and is a great read for those unfamiliar with Coetzee. For those familiar with both authos, mthis is a masterpiece not to be missed.

Raymond Carver. What we talk about when we talk about love.

Raymond Carver is an author I have long heard about an never read. He comes up in discussions and in book reviews regularly but never in a way that made me rush out to read him. Then I read a review of the Library Of America volume of his work and became interested enough to finally pick up a book by him. I choose his shortest book because somehow I was skeptical of him and very uncertain I would enjoy his work.

This little book of short stories takes less then a day to finish but at least a week to sink in. These are hard-nosed stories about a twisted kind of love. Some people are inclined to read very deeply into these stories and offer hopeful readings of them, “he is showing us what he doesn’t have, what he is missing by not writing about it”,  ”reading between the lines we can understand that he knows what he is missing” etc. No matter how compelling such essays may be they fall flat in the face of the work itself, like when the loved ones of a person on life support are told the person is but to the loved ones in the room it is clear that life is still present.

Carver is man that may never have really been in a healthy loving relationship in his life. These stories suggest that his father, mother, uncles, aunts, girlfriends etc. had poor relationships with Carver. The variegated types of relationships that we expect to find love within are all explored and the result is a vision of love that focuses on all the wrong aspects of love. Carver sees jealousy, possession, humiliation and pain in all these relationships.

There are beautiful moments in the stories, like the young couple dancing in a driveway during a garage sale, but they are ruined, always ruined. Like the one with he dancing, where drunkenness rears it head leaving a feeling of discomfort and uncertainty. We keep reading though because the writing is very sound, it affects the reader and holds a mood throughout, but not the mood you might expect from a book about love.

While I understand that some people view love as hooky, as impossible and if happy then not a topic worthy of serious authors, but I am convinced that this work should be called something else. Not “hate” because that is not Carvers point, but rather; “the ways love can fail” or “the twists love can take” or “in relationships humans require love and these  examples  demonstrate that necessity” or ”only those oblivious about love dare to talk about it and they don’t know anything.” Or some such title. I was not looking for a sappy romance when I picked the book up, but I at least expected to read about a type of love I could call familiar, or at least love. But this work is nothing like that.

It may be a book that offers a lot of insight for those who have read some of Carver’s other works, but as an introduction to him, I suspect it is all wrong. This book does not make me want to read more by him because I see him as failing to understand true love. If he at least had a single story in here that suggested he knew how tortured and tormented the forms of love in the other stories were (though of course he knows this or wouldn’t have written them with such a tone) that would help. But to have the negative without an example of the positive is to have the ying but not yang; and that is a serious failure.

I am not sure which type of reader I would recommend this book to other then someone that loves his other work. I am sure there is a type, he is popular after many years and sells, but I am curious to see who I find myself handing this book over to despite the masterly writing.

Next Up: J.M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg.