Grateful

Among the many other gifts of the season, I’m grateful I have been able to finish the first draft of my novel So Are You to My Thoughts. It’s the final book in the series I have been writing for the past ten years. There is a lot of work to do before the novel is published, as it has been written sporadically and needs pulling together. But, there is no getting around it. It’s done.

In this culminating novel, Line’s kids are all thriving. She and Stephen continue to reside in Santa Cruz with Poppa, as the kids move into their own lives. It is easier for Line to communicate with them, however, as technology has improved. In her 60’s, Line begins to feel something is wrong. Eventually she is diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis which at first horrifies her. She gradually becomes used to her new condition, with Stephen stepping in to help.

For Paul, the book begins with the loss of Marie. He finds a place for himself, however, when Ellie and Bruce decide they can rebuild the family’s lake cabin. It will become a year-round home, with Paul in residence as manager. The building process is exciting and Paul is thrilled to find himself deep in northern Minnesota where he always wanted to be. Marie’s daughter and her children remain his family.

Marty’s single life is completely disrupted when she moves in with Doug at the Boulder Creek ranch on the mountain above Santa Cruz. She becomes the household anchor for the family, since Doug works hard and the kids are all in school. As a father, Doug is full of ideas about what he wants for his kids. Marty helps implement them. During some of the kids’ high school years, the family moves in to Santa Cruz to be closer to activities. By the end of the book, the kids have their eyes on college. Marty and Doug are amazed at how quickly they grew up.

Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, says “For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.” I have come to that place, indeed, when we see whether the books are viable enough to survive in the modern world.

This is not to say that I am sure the books qualify as “art.” Art, with a capital A, is a romantic idea, often supported by a lot of hype, to which I don’t subscribe. All of us bring art to our lives, and occasionally try to embody in words or music or the other arts the spirit we cannot contain, that we feel we must share.

I hoped the books would show, in one group of siblings, born into a particular place and time, how one grows into a self and then sets out to share that self with a larger family. It is always an adventure, an odyssey through uncharted waters. But, as with most adventurers, home, and the making of a home, is the goal. I have been blessed every day with ideas and scenes I call up from memory or create from research, often a combination of the two.

The project could not have been brought to this point without the specific help of three people: My sister Naomi has read each chapter as it was written with an eye to its emotional continuity and the awkward word or phrase. My brother David has especially commented on the Paul chapters. And Don Starnes has brought his visual and technical gifts to the production of the covers and the website. For all of this help, and for the web of life reflected in the books, I am deeply grateful.

Tipping My Hand

Readers of this blog will have noticed common themes running through its posts. As I near the end of the first draft of my final book, So Are You to My Thoughts, I think often of the value system embodied in the characters. I haven’t tried to make it explicit, as it is indeed meant to be reflected in their actions and thoughts. Their human natures compel their actions, while their feelings and thoughts make meaning of them.

In our study of tai chi, the Taoist way and its principles, we were taught an exercise between two people in which we first “listened” with our bodies, “surrendered” to the other person, “transformed” their energy as it came toward us, and finally “pushed.” It is a practice of balance within oneself, and harmony between people, which also results in positive accomplishment.

In my work, I’ve tried to show that there are ways of taking the material you grow up with and find in yourself and transforming it. Thus the freedom everyone in my generation fought for (“like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir”) does not have to be freedom from anything. It can be freedom to make homes, families and lives of which we are proud and which honor those we love.

Likewise, the self definition which many of us were so desperate about can be understood in terms not of self expression, but of service. Beyond the idea that only a few are called to become artists, documenting every last impulse, we can recognize that all of us are able to display the cardinal virtues of discernment, courage, temperance and fairness. Cultivation of these virtues enables us to live beside each other in harmony and peace.

A third major preoccupation of my generation was lifestyle, making new ways to live beyond the traditional furniture-ridden, unquestioned round of those who had gone before. Transforming this impulse to trash the past, we can educate ourselves to live with grace and taste, seeing these as elements of everything we do.

Goodness, truth, and beauty have long been the ideals of humanity. Keats saw in the Grecian urn that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” None of this triad exists without the other. I associate freedom with truth, as all paths must be open in order to find it. Beauty has within it the necessity for authenticity, as in nature, where nothing is anything but itself. Goodness too is hollow without the backbone of character. Victimhood has been the subject of art, and of people’s prurient interest, way too long. And people hardly believe they have a right to beauty, that they know what it is. We can turn our gaze back to these ideals.

In his book, The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit [1995], Frederick Turner says: “The greatest arts are, I believe, not those which cause a stir on museum walls or extend some ‘shocking’ modern or post-modern critical theory into yet another posture or attitude, but those arts which intensify ordinary human existence and fill it with meaning, that make a home into a place that recalls all our beautiful and tragic past, and points to futures that are as human as they are strange and adventurous.”

John Bayley pointed out, regarding Czeslaw Milosz, that he was beyond ideology, having lived through so much change and violence during the 20^th century. Milosz was “not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.” The U.S. too is growing up, forging a new culture not seen before from its indigenous peoples, its immigrants and its unique place on the globe. Humans evolve slowly, but culture is quick. We can do better than we have in recent years. Postmodernism, with its identity and power politics, is a dead end. We are over it. Time to look back and pick up the pieces.

Back to the Root

White Pine, Itasca State Park

I recently returned from northern Minnesota, where the root, trunk and many branches of my family tree are located. My parents are second generation Scandinavians from Norway and Denmark, all born in Minnesota. I was born in Thief River Falls, only 70 miles south of the Canadian border. Several of my siblings live in Minnesota and the cabin near Laporte is ground zero for family gatherings.

This year, there was a lot of discussion about trees! All three of my sisters were reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I have it on hold at the Los Angeles Public Library and cannot wait to read it myself. But it isn’t as if I need to. My parents deeply loved trees and planted them everywhere. In the front yard of the home his parents built in Renville, Minnesota, Dad planted a dogwood which grew quite tall. To me it was an exotic. I had never seen one anywhere else, except in Yosemite in the spring, when the dogwood flowers bloomed white and ethereal between the dark trunks of the forest.

At the parsonages I grew up in, Dad often planted apple trees. I remember several across northern Iowa. Planting an apple tree has no downside. When we began to go up to the lake cabin I mentioned above, he would stop at the Badoura Nursery in the spring and collect the seedlings he had ordered (you could not order less than 500 if you wanted a mixed pack of seedlings), planting them on the property. I remember being on at least one of these spring trips, when the air was still quite cold, and I was happy to spade up soil, insert seedlings and tamp them down to keep warm!

I’ve been amazed to learn how few seedlings survive and grow to maturity. Peter Wohlleben describes in The Hidden Life of Trees how prolific tree seedlings must be to get even a few trees to make it. Partly it is a matter of photosynthesis, young trees fighting for light, though they live under their “mothers,” who share nutrients with them. He points out that slow growth is good for a tree. But also it is a matter of animals eating the fresh, tender shoots, the salad of the forest. So I was impressed that my sister had broken up the ancient stone firepit my Dad built at the edge of the lawn. She was afraid using it would damage the two white pines, grown from Dad’s seedlings, which now towered above the cabin at that spot.

White pines are fluffier, my brother pointed out, with five needles to a clump. Red pines, what my parents called Norways, have two needles per clump and look stiffer, not as wispy as a white pine. They are all native, and looking up at the red pine at the edge of the lake, we thought that some of them were certainly over one hundred years old. Perhaps two hundred. When Dad established the dock, more than 50 years ago, he built it in among these favorite “Norways.” Mother loved them. I didn’t count them, but there seemed to be at least ten along the shoreline.

As a group, we went over to Itasca, a Minnesota State Park which was only the second in the country, after Niagara Falls. It was established because logging was ferocious at the time, and Jacob V. Brower got the state legislature to pass, by one vote, a bill establishing the park in 1891. Brower wanted to save some of the stands of red and white pines still thriving at the time. We visited a protected 300-year-old white pine, and noted the loss of the crown of an ancient red pine nearby, along the “wilderness loop” running through the park. I have very early memories of this park, as my aunt, Esther Frost, worked at the lodge during the summers when she was a young woman. She rented cabins for us to vacation in for a few summers also, before the cabin at the lake was established.

Everyone knows, by now, that trees take carbon from the air and process it, helping to cool our over-heated planet. Forest protection, regeneration and cultivation mitigate the inroads our comfort-seeking cultures have made on the earth. Families too thrive in an atmosphere of conservation and care. I was thrilled to visit the roots of my own.

A New Context

Ceramic wall at White Adventist Hospital

This month I have finally gotten back a usable personal computer and my writing materials, packed up since October. During the intervening months, among random reading and lots of physical labor on the townhouse we were renovating, I paid attention to two writers who, in their quest to reboot and renew Western culture, hark back to Nietzsche. Jordan Peterson, holding up Beyond Good and Evil, from which he proposes to read in one of his many Youtube videos, says, “This is a book, but every sentence in it is actually a bomb.” One of Nietzsche’s ideas which Peterson uses is that “there is something about the body that is integral to being. … It’s not really possible to have a disembodied being."

James Hans takes this further. In The Sovereignty of Taste, he writes: “Nietzsche believes that lives are built on an ongoing awareness of the rhythms and patterns of which bodies are a part. Humans become who they are through careful attention to the dynamic interchanges with the world that constitutes their lives, a form of attention that prompts them to note that their lives are always tied to a context.” He goes on to say that human lives are aesthetic engagements with the world long before they become encounters with the social world. Thus, there is a mechanism within people, taste, which they hardly notice, but which constantly reminds them to seek out ways to adapt to the rhythms of the world so as to feel comfortable in it.

I am quite aware of my own physical rhythms, mostly through tai chi study, and I knew that moving 400 miles south would have some effect! Though we are still in California, our new home in Los Angeles is quite different from the Bay Area. Before I can settle down to write (and I am very anxious to do so!), I have found myself orienting to the new. Los Angeles is a vast campus of creativity and it will be quite a while before I feel that I know it at all. But I am making a space for myself in which my body is happy!

First I need to know the cardinal directions, where the sun is going to come up and go down with relation to our apartment, how it is going to lay its late afternoon slanted light on the bed, whether there will be enough to plant a bougainvillea beside our back window. I would like to know the same of the moon, but we have only been here three weeks, and almost every morning and evening have brought light fog, locally known as June gloom. These atmospheric conditions keep the place cool, but I haven’t seen much of the moon.

I get used to the noises, which are city noises. There is plenty of birdsong, but also helicopters, planes, yapping dogs, our neighbors’ music and smoke alarms (as well as our own!), people coming and going, children’s feet running on the floor above, even the occasional domestic brawl. The street sweeper comes through twice a week, as well as civilized garbage trucks. In the afternoon, the ice cream vendor plays its sappy little tune and another man honks a horn as he bicycles by, to see if you want fruit drinks.

I walk the wide, and often empty streets, looking at the houses with their southern plants, succulents, aloes and palms, bougainvillea, hibiscus, datura, jacaranda and brilliant red poinsettias. Most are enclosed in grills and fences, with more stones and concrete than lawns, reflecting a landscape where it rains seldom. The nearby hospital complex has beautiful murals and sculptures as well as a weekly farmers’ market. There is also a well-watered park close by, lush with grass and trees, where I do tai chi near a children’s playground.

I’m timid about transportation so far, given my limitations, but there is plenty of it, both buses and the Gold Line train within a few blocks, which can be used to travel all over the city. The central library downtown is on a direct bus line from our house and the local library is within a 15-minute walk, oriented more to Spanish speakers. My favorite grocery is a Whole Foods smack in the middle of the newly-branded DTLA (downtown LA), but I also like to go to Little Tokyo, only ten minutes away on the train. We’ve found many restaurants nearby, and a few coffeeshops where I can stop in to write or read.

It’s quite a different context than I am used to, just across the Los Angeles River (i.e. trickle) from the city itself in an old part of town. I found bricks under the asphalt on a nearby street. I am trying to be open to everything at the moment, though my own needs and rhythms are strong and emerging. I have never doubted that people are primarily aesthetic creatures. We express it in many ways, in sport, in music, art and dance, but I was also thrilled at James Hans’ statement: “I conceive of the great literature of the world as the ongoing testament to the taste that drives the species.” Very soon now, I will get back to Line, Marty and Paul.

The World As It Is

"The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is, to open a road we can glimpse for a second or two before a new fiction has covered it again," said Karl Ove Knausgaard in an interview with Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker on November 11, 2018. This week I read his novel Spring, which presents a day in his life as told to his youngest daughter, a baby as he writes. I quite loved it, and especially the epiphany he describes in the evening, when he takes his children to a community bonfire on Walpurgis night.

My husband and I are renovating our house over the winter and have shipped our things, including all of my writing materials, to Los Angeles where we plan to move. I didn't know it would take this long. I've been missing my work and my characters, but I am taking a writing hiatus for the duration. It is a chance to step out of this project I have been working on for a long time and open up my thinking. In walks Knausgaard, among others.

Knausgaard is one of the few writers working in what I call "long form." He has completed six volumes of  his book My Struggle, writing of his life in intimate detail. In a process quite counter to the Norwegian norm, he wasn't interested in taking a giant "selfie." Rather, he thought his work would illuminate the world around him. By all accounts, he has been successful.

I have always liked long form. Once one is committed to a set of characters, why not stick with them. Not that it's necessary, but one learns from sustained attention. They may also surprise you. Tolstoy, in response to those who wanted him to write European novels, said, "War and Peace was what the author wanted and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed."

It is what I would say of my own work. It is not what most people want. It is not an entertainment. It is definitely "long form!" But working closely with Don has shown me the limits of my perception! I tend to fly at 10,000 feet and then swoop down to pick out poetic, representative details. He is much more able to work doggedly on the details in front of him. But I think I can say for both of us, we know there is an objective world ripe for depiction and are passionately committed to the world as it is.