While cycling up a mountain, a bee flies into the author's mouth, leaving a painful, but not dangerous, sting at the back of her throat. Back in the hotel, she looks forward to an afternoon of leisure, of solitude, but finds herself unable to forget the pain and, then, in tears about a time her heart was broken many years before:

"But what did the effects of bee venom have to do with a long-buried heartache? It seemed that small injuries can open up deeper channels of pain that have been lying in wait. Perhaps pain is like a river, I thought, not only running underground in our own lives, but flowing into us from previous generations as well. Each current unique.

But pain also had its compensations. It made me feel more coherent and whole, anchored inmy body. By midafternoon, all the wispy anxiesties and milling concerns of my day had contracted to one bright point--this little tete-a-tete between me and pain. The sense of being in such intimate, uneasy dialogue with the self began to seem vaguely familiar. Ah,yes, I realized, it was like writing (no wonder so many writers self-medicate)."

Marni Jackson, from Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign


About pain, I want to be Cartesian. I readily separate body and mind, in this category only resisting the idea that my body is me and my mind more complex than we yet can fathom. I'd like to be docile, handing myself over to those who know my anatomy better than I do, reaching my hand out for cure. I definitely don't want to hear, especially from those who easily say it, that pain could be a teacher true as imagination, true as love, opening doors to self and beyond. About pain I want to be silent, knowing others don't want to hear.

I've never written an ode to pain, nor an elegy, sonnet, or even a limerick. Joan Didion wrote a wonderful essay about migraine; I never considered following suit though my pain makes the top-ten list too. No character I've created feels physical pain. This is the first time I can remember writing about it in any form.

It seems to be a year of firsts. This may be the year I open myself to what pain has to say.


"She had developed a strong sense of what she termed "safe spots". . . . 'Sometimes I spend hours here,' she told me, 'Hours? I don't know, maybe whole days. I lose track of time in the safe spots. The world is different inside them."
from John Hansen Mitchell, Ceremonial Time




posted by Sandy at 3:15 PM

Tonight on some wrestling show, two men will pretend to be married, hoopla and hooting, while making it clear that they are really heterosexual.

In New York, firefighters have to hide at the backs of stations to avoid gapers; they compare themselves with tigers in a cage. They refuse to wear shirts with their insignia any more, these having become the equivalent of Gucci or Tommy Hilfiger.

Yesteday, the winning numbers for the NY lotttery were 9-1-1, and, somewhere, people busily calculate the odds.

Sometimes, I despair for us, as yesterday morning when reporters moved from the little girl reading the poem for her father almost immediately to the President's rhetoric of war. I then knew I needed quiet, no more TV. For restoration, I have to get out of the news, and, risky as it is, into the ordinary world, imperfect yet infiinitely redeemable. Yesterday felt like a quiet day everywhere I went, in an appropriate way, yet a good day, too, reminding me of good constantly. People were quiet at the market stand, passing hands over tomatoes and peaches, knowing we are seeing the last of these blessings of summer. A woman had brought chocolate-chip cookies for one of the clerks. Quiet in line at the post office, mailing birthday gifts and contracts for signature. Quiet online--respectful silences.

But it was a day of conversations too. When I saw my friend at lunch, when I learned that cancer cells have invaded the pleura, surrounded her heart, I thought it blasphemous to be choosing what to order at a trendy restaurant. But she didn't; somehow it had become neither decadent nor irrelevant to her. I carried my sorrow the rest of the days but was buoyed by the gift of her smiles. Because that's how she wants it.

With the friends I met yesterday, no talk was trivial. As I had my hair cut, my stylist and I talked of seeing the play, Arcadia, in theaters half a world away from each other, of how each of us had been surprised to find in a blending of mathematics and imagination a confirmation of the patterning and meaning of existence. My women's group talked of how our young men sign up for the draft, but never watch the news, blind to its possible effects on them. We also talked about local peace efforts, and, later, at my book group, we asked whether it is the way we imagine ourselves that may determine what we become. In Bel Canto, Ann Patchett has imagined a group, under the worst possible stresses, evolving not into a Lord of the Flies disaster but into something the opposite, something that implies a natural longing for harmony, play, community, love, for useful roles that individuals can fill , from their individuality, as occasions arise. Especially we wondered if those of influence --artists, leaders, philosophers, commentators--simply looked for this kind of best result rather than the worst, what might result?

I like that question; I'll try to shine its light where it's most needed: on myself.




"I often think that if I'm a Christian, I'll be the last to know."
Kathleen Norris



posted by Sandy at 9:58 AM

I have made a discovery: Football, I have found, is self-regenerating, like one of those worms that filled the girls with disgust and awe in biology class. All the trust that I once endowed in my mother who, with her hoe, could chop any snake into ultimate stillness may have been misplaced. Football has, by stealth, increased its domain: every afternoon, every night of the week--nothing, nada. Now, there's not even the relief of commercials, the only time the remote loosens in a man's hand; with digital cable, there's always a game on the other channel. I hate the announcers' voices. I remember, from hearing them in Australia, how they blared and brayed in contrast with the quiet cultured voices of the cricket commentators on ABC radio. After a while, I hate the very mention of certain players' names. I run for the hills, to my study upstairs; there's no escape. There's a TV up here and, at eleven o'clock, a replay of the Ezell-Harding game on a local station. At midnight, a replay of last week's matches of Aussie Rules-- a game I find exciting in person but refuse to watch on TV, as I would on principle, anyway. Completely ineffectual, I know, but someone should have protested kudzu, long ago, instead of our naming our stories after it.

In the latest issue of Poets and Writers, Gregory Orr notes: "It took me 30 years and a memoir to find out that there are things a prose narrative can do that are beyond the capablities of poetry." Fascinating, and I agree, but of course the reverse is true as well. Orr describes the personal lyric as one of the three essential survival tools devised through the millennia by society to cope with existential crisis (religion and philosophy the others). He says, "Existental crises are those situations in which the individual self has been overwhelmed by disorder, especially extreme emotions. In effect, the personal lyric says to the self: Translate your crisis into language--bring your disorder over to poetry's primal ordering powers (especially story, symbol, and incantation), and we will make a poem." The result, of course, is a reversal of power and something like Frost's "momentary stay against confusion." Orr says that poets often use a safer future moment in order to address a previous "emotion-based" disordering experience.

Once again, I'd say, this time ordering could be reversed. Either way, Orr claims that the process may determine actual individual survival, in a way a life insurance company might plot if they knew to do so.
Perhaps the poetry I'm trying to write, against the rant of sacks and turnovers, will achieve a balance, one adding back the hours to my life that the other seems to steal.:)




"Themes are interventions of providence that make an opening through which life can be born again and again, and the many stories with their many themes keep us aware of the liminality of everyday experience, the threshold where the human and the divine converse, or where closed human understanding is pried open by fate. It is at this very point of convergance that enchantment is born, for our stories grasp and contain the mystery of that wonder of divine incarnation that gives our lives purpose, meaning, and value beyond all personal, human capacity."
Thomas Moore
posted by Sandy at 8:24 AM

I say if you’re going to blow a diet, do it right. So I did, today, at a place over on Nolensville Rd. that we used to call ‘the blue place’ when I lived over that way. It’s a meat’n’three, looks like any café in my home-town, but the food is infinitely better. Not as greasy as many, either, though it will undoubtedly make me ill. Mashed potatoes, fresh green beans, fresh corn—it’s worth it. Places like this are boons for writers, voices all around saying things like: “Wasn’t that Geraldine told about somebody what had a itch all over him, top to tail?”

I was on my way to Grasmere in the heat of the day (the meercats have joined the otters as my favorites. I dressed to defy my darling enemy, the sun, during this summer of remission (she left her strong kisses on my cheeks anyway). I wore a short wraparound skirt and a pale lavender tank top. I know this must have happened before, but it’s been so long I can’t remember. When I came through the door, the hostess literally looked me up and down, and maybe eighty pairs of eyes told me that I was not just underdressed but practically undressed in that setting. I scuttled over to the table to hide my legs, wanting to shout: “Hey, I went to church today, too!”

And I did. I’m grateful to Anne for suggesting St. Augustine’s, and I’m glad I made it there to share my first service in her company.

Annie, beloved of many who hold you back now with our cries of good-bye and how we’ll miss you, I mean instead to say God-speed. I’ve never yet been able to walk the rainbow’s land, but I’ll do it in my thoughts with you, and I’ll trust what you tell me about what lies at journey’s end. Find all there is to find, and write it as only you can, nothing doubting. Your courage keeps mine high. I’ll keep you in my prayers daily, and, when you return, I’ll be a better friend to you than I have sometimes been. By then, I should have found my own place at St. A’s, if today was any precursor. Please don’t hold anything back on our accounts, but send a line by blog or email as soon as you can, remembering that the days will seem longer and emptier on this end of things.

This I will say, in this semi-public way: when I remember Sept. 11, alongside the horror I think with fondness of you, sent to me for such a time, as we stared into the empty skies together, in our shared shock and unbelief. Who can say for whom or what you have been sent across the sea at this time?

“Any turning away from love literally holds back the planet. We are perched on the brink of a miraculous transition from the ways of fear to the ways of love.”
M. Williamson

posted by Sandy at 2:05 PM