The Pastor's Kids

The Pastor's Kids

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Women

Anyone would think, and I am sure you are no exception, Gentle Reader, that the writer of this blog was only interested in men! It certainly appears that most of the people I cite are men. And among living writers, I have long located myself squarely between Gary Snyder and James Salter, two extremely diverse men whose writing enthralls me.

In fact, thought is androgynous. Shirley Chang, a gifted architect [http://changbenedesign.com/], and I once discussed our determination to be androgynous in our thinking, dedicated to great thought whoever might express it. We were even happy that our first names were, very occasionally, used by men! As in everything, there is a yin and yang to thought, the yang aspects those that catch the eye.

My interest, however, is in women. If a book doesn’t have female characters, I’m not going to read it. And when Don picks out a movie said to be good but more of a “guy flick,” I ask plaintively, “Are there any women in it?” I’ve been threatening for some time to start a blog about the women characters I have loved, who have been my teachers over the years. These characters were created by both men and women, running from Aksinia, in Sholokhov’s series Quiet Flows the Don, to Abalone in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, to Antonia in Will Cather’s book My Antonia, and Komako in Snow Country by Kawabata.

I’ve toyed with the idea of calling it Women and Mountains, because of the associations between mountains and thought, especially aspiration. Also because of the Tibetan Tara’s vow. As Gary Snyder translates it in Mountains and Rivers Without End, Tara says, “Those who wish to attain supreme enlightenment in a man’s body are many … therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, serve the needs of beings with my body of a woman.”

As a thinker, I’m interested in women, and I take Tara’s vow very willingly. The yin position is often in the background, dedicated to service, but in our fractured, corporate, robotic, arbitrary world, what catches the eye is yang energy. Many women have given themselves over to yang pretension. Service is often seen as martyrdom. It is precisely the ageless problem of understanding the less visible yin power which I wish to address in Women and Mountains.

Now, Gentle Reader, I am not promising to begin this blog just yet. I only tell you this because I am afraid you will think I give my attention solely to men. It’s not true.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Turning Over the Compost

Gary Snyder writes that sifting memories should be seen as turning over the compost. “When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like a mature ecosystem. Turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation and thrill; and reviewing memory … blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, perception, sensation and memory for the whole society.” [from “Poetry, Community and Climax,” in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979, p. 173]

I like this metaphor for working with memory. Getting in there with your pitchfork, turning, aerating and sifting through the past to see what comes to light. I use a lot of plant metaphors for mental flowering. The drive to bloom is universal and the uniqueness and variety of our blooms is constantly surprising. Snyder’s way of looking at things has been an inspiration for me for many years. In the same essay, he says, “All of evolution may have been as much shaped by the pull toward climax as it has by simple competition between individuals or species.” Introducing the notion of ecological climax (the height of one’s blooming) holds implications for how to look at one’s maturity.

In sifting through my generally very sharp memories for the sake of Line, Marty and Paul, I’ve several times been surprised by the new understanding that comes up. Brought into the light, perceptions change, connections are made and ordinary things take on new shapes and meanings. Such as realizing that a relationship upon which I lavished a couple of years of attention, was probably more a mental construct of one of my friends than mine! That my mother was probably less calm and powerful than I generally found her to be. That, after 50 years, the high school girls basketball state championship I was so excited about has lost nothing of its poignancy and heroism. That the come-uppance the character most like me often got was totally deserved!

Nonetheless, memory doesn’t really work to write from. One must be wholly in the moment, the numinous, everyday present, in order to make story. As noted here in a previous blog post, Gertrude Stein states, “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present." The present might be seen as “vertical time” as opposed to “horizontal time.” In the present, or in vertical time, the bloom we might become is wholly present as possibility, if not yet visible. But loosening the soil around those memories, giving them some compost, giving the rootlets nourishment, is bound to allow fuller bloom!