The need of being versed in country things

I’ve just reread Donald Hall’s Here at Eagle Pond. I’ve been reading a series of books lately that have their feet on the ground. My novel has land at its heart — acres and roots and mud puddles — and Hall loves a New England that moves me too, the hay drying in the sun, the people who remember who lived in that 1800’s saltbox when it was built, the people who work with their hands.

It always surprises me how much I disagree with him. I care about so many of the same things. Rereading him now, when I have lived in New Hampshire and left it again, I often felt homesick. His New Hampshire is a stubborn back country — the winter is cold, families work or starve, and the names on the civil war monuments are the same ones on the mail boxes.

Yes, I know these people, and this spirit. I know people who live within a mile of the place where they grew up. I know people who seek out their elders for their stories and memories, play music with them, tell stories of the Shaker sisters who taught them to cook. I know people who live on odd jobs, a man who has walked across frozen lakes with six-inch nails in his pockets, to haul himself out if the ice gave way. When Hall says his community lives where it lives because it wants to, and that it rejects commercialism and migration, he is partly right.

I love the independence and obstinacy that keeps contradance music alive. And Hall recognizes some of its costs, in rusted trailers and a lack of zoning laws. But he does not recognize all of them. And in upholding their strengths, he limits the meaning of country.

He says, simply, that his counry was created by Protestant Americans after the civil war. He brings into his understanding of country life a set of values, what he calls the country of the church dinner — a value for hard work, for family, for place. But many of these values, otherwise applied, have grown industries and cities. A love for land and an ability to live on it takes many shapes. And 18th century farming clearcut the whole state of Massachusetts.

Reading him raises a vital question for me: what does it mean to live in the country, to live with the land. How can a community be rural and vital at the same time? Country matters vitally: country Hall wants to keep hold of. At the heart of these essays, in his return home to his grandparents’ farm, he is trying to preserve a place he loves, in the face of a world he feels does not value it.

And reading him frustrates me because his definitions keep him from answering fully enough to help me. He doesn’t need to persuade me to hold onto the country. I want to know how. He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t want change of any kind. He wants country to be exactly as it is on the one-family dairy farm. He can be disingenuous in its defense — New Hampshire has a wide tolerance for eccentricity, but it is not, as he claims, diverse. It is also not young. A vital past is a fine, rich thing, but without a vital future, it’s a Shaker museum.

I want to live in the country, and I want to feel alive doing it. I want to know how to help other active, intelligent people live where they love. I don’t want to change old milltowns into mid-town Manhattan to do it: I want the country to be country, wild and fertile and animal and uncut. I don’t think intelligence, a desire for useful work I can do well, and a need for earth under my feet are incompatible.

Those of us who love the country and love to think should stick together; I agree with Donald Hall that we need each other, because others who do not love what we love can so easly take it away and not even know they have. If we are going to keep the country alive, I think we need to see it as here and alive already and kindle it slowly and steadily. The only ways I know how to do this are slow, one light at a time.

One thing we will have to do, and he does: we will have to want it. We will have to teach people its value and hold on to others who want it as much as we do.

Hall actually says the opposite, and this I do not understand at all: “It turns out that the fulfilment of desire is to stop desiring” (18). He’s quoting Sam Johnson, whether he knows it or not, and I’ve written a whole thesis proving him wrong. He proves himself wrong, in the same essay. He loves his place achingly.

He desires it ardently in every page: that’s why he’s writing. The fulfilment of a desire increases desire, deepens it and roots it until it takes over — and delights in it, laughs in it. You ask any couple who have grown into love over time, and not out of it. And when you have realized a desire, when you have held it long enough to believe it is yours — then you will fight for it.

I began these thoughts the last time I reread Eagle Pond; here, for anyone who likes circles, is the beginning of the thread.

Early for thunderstorms

This week, Read, Write, Poem prompted weather… and also characters. I haven’t often written from another point of view in poetry, and I remembered friends telling me about a Midsummer Night’s Dream they saw years back at the Folger’s Library, and big, brassy Helena who knew how to laugh at herself. And she started talking. Don’t know whether she’s finished yet.

Helena

I know what I want.
Don’t you know the strength of that?
All their minds blowing around me
like aspen leaves in yellow storm light,
and the air heavy with mischief,
and only I come straight
through the wood.
I sleep in the fern beside the path
and wake and come on.
If you know your longings —
and what would you give to know?
— would you not walk barefoot
over wet pine needles
to meet them? The clouds build.
The woods breathe, waiting for the rush.
Rumble in my throat, static lightening
in my hair — give me the shock
of closing space. Say it with me:
I want you.

True story

Thanks to a prompt from Read, Write, Poem and a half-memory of a story someone told me once, and I’ll swear it’s true… I wrote a poem today at lunch. The final image came to me with brilliant clarity as I sat reformatting the calendar, and I carried it down with me. Our lunch room has good tall windows, mostly full of sky, for writing by.

The British garden club makes a naked calendar

Hail the gentle ladies on a fine May morning
who created a new scheme to raise funds.
Among their arching borders of roses
and roses, Levant, Gloire de Dijon, Bridal Pink,
they sat and stooped and bent over
a watering can. Who raised the first arm
of a neat beige jumper? Who slid
the first wool over her cropped head
and lowered the first hem to the grass?
The earth crumbed over their feet,
and on the cool pine boards of the sun room
they appraised slowly their mature skin.
Did the teapot hold more heat, held
in a bare hand, with the oak chair
cool on bare legs, stuck with sweat
to the small of the back?
They said this was the hardest part.
They had never seen each other so
or any women sweat since birth.
And now, after the years of speeches,
seed catalogs, planned beds in winter,
to drink tea laced with orange, clove,
and lean a bare midriff against
the planed table gave them grace.
Did they speak, unrecorded,
as the water poured from the spout,
or laugh a good, round laughter
as the first woman knelt in silence
in the turned earth, with the sun a dazzle
over a shoulder, and the full-throated roses
open and lifting from her breasts
in the sweet wild air?

Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

I have just fallen for Louise Erdrich. I found The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse at the library, on tape, in a rich, low voice that almost sings the Ojibwe. In honesty, I had seen it before, and snuck quick glances at it as I passed. But only in my mad haring back and forth across the state in November, in need of company in the car, did I work up the courage to take it home.

I had read Erdrich once before and enjoyed her company, but Four Souls is a very different and grimmer book than this one. Four Souls tears a woman out of the woods and watches her disintegrate. Last Report on the Miracles at Little no Horse brings a woman into the woods and watches her blossom and suffer and love and grow old — and draw strength out of the earth.

This is the story of Father Damien Modeste. And — I’m not telling you anything you won’t read by page three — Father Damien is a woman. Through a series of misadventures and tearings up, he comes to the reservation on a spring flood. And falls in love with it. And stays.

I loved this book. It wanders in places, like the memory of an old man, and it is funny and painful at once, like Nanapush towed behind the moose in an open boat and bound to the seat by fishhooks.

The narrative moves along a straight path in the beginning, as Agnes becomes Father Damien. Erdrich gives some of the best description of music I have ever read, and the passion and absorbtion of playing. She writes profoundly erotic scenes in the most unlikely ways and places. A nun fully clothed on a piano bench becomes dangerous and anguished.

Conversely, two priests on either side of a wall of books, who discover that they are man and woman at night, are blessedly normal and safe. Those are her words. Passion can be human and natural and kindly too.

And this is one of the things I most loved: I loved this book for its balance. Conversions are mutual. Father Damien has very little natural arrogance, and what he has he loses. He learns the faith and stories and humor of his people. He gives them comfort and visits the victims of the flu epidemic. He forgives, not out of superiority, but as an act of community. And Erdrich, all the time, is forgiving him for all that his predecessors have destroyed.

And the balance between male and female — the book is founded on that. Agnes becomes Damien because she cannot be what she is called to be as Agnes. She loves the work. She loves men, but she does not submit to them. It is a grief that she cannot openly have both. But it is a warm and just satisfaction that she is free to choose, and that in the most paternalistic of structures, she will not sit still to be patronized.

This is a book of crisp northern pine woods. It feels sometimes less like a novel than like a string of beads, stories woven together. But it is circular . . . and humblingly beautiful.

Armed with poetry

Last weekend, I spent a day with the AWP.

Friday afternoon, I drove through sleet and farm country to a train station smaller than the train —six feet of baking heat behind glass, four wet benches, a patch of parking, and long lines of mountains. And I got on the train and got off in Grand Central.

My sister gave me most of the floor in her dorm room to sleep on, and half a sandwich at her favorite café, and a ticket to Rock and Roll, the new Stoppard play. It’s Czechoslovakia in the 1960’s right after the tanks went through. The narrative feels like a playlist deliberately at times, a series of short, scored scenes. Music tells the story and moves the plot; people betray for it, risk arrest for it, talk with it, learn indifference from it and let it move them to protective kindness and courage and passion.

And the play feels feels — contemporary. The hippies are outgunned and scared. Communism is not always unsympathetic, but it is inefficient and cold. And the narrative follows two stories in two places, among a crowd of people, across two generations. One actress plays a wife in act one and her grown daughter in act two. How many novels can you name that use that structure, a crowd of characters and a hundred years? Middlesex; Little, Big; A Hundred Years of Solitude….

I have a theory about the modern passion for writing novels across generations. Most novels want some kind of hope of continuity or union — most novels have both comic and tragic structure, things falling apart and things coming together. The early novelists had humanism and heaven and clan kinship and the family name, kinds of continuity that America manages to deny a lot of the time. But we do still have children.

I started out to write this post about poetry. A lot of Stoppard qualifies, at that. I’ll never forget the night I saw Indian Ink — Like Radha, most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed for love in an empty house. But I did also, on this Saturday, hear poetry and prose beautifully read. Here’s a sampling.

Returning from limbo

Hello again.

This blog has taken a rest in the last month. At New Year, I funnelled my former apartment into boxes, carted them over the mountains, and began a new job in an almost new city.

It isn’t a large city; from my driveway, I can look clear across the top of it to the opposite ridge. The ridges are blue and unbroken, and the buildings on the main street are barely five stories high. This is a city that stopped growing upward around 1920.

I have lived near here before, a half hour north and four years ago. But it takes time to reroot from a cutting. The move has left me down a desk chair and at least two bookcases, but all my kerosene lamps are unpacked; things even out. And the park next door has an arboretum and a public garden. There may be roses. I have high hopes.

And I walked home from work to clear my head, and I am officially returning to this writing blog again. Now that I have two jobs, it is even more important that I keep up with this one and keep writing.

A bent for history

I have been dabbling in histories these last two weeks: Froissart’s astonishingly courteous Edward II, Daniel C. Matt’s translation of the Zohar, and most recently, Josephine Tey’s A Daughter of Time. In the form of a carefully researched commentary and a mystery, Tey makes a strong argument that Richard III did not murder his nephews — that in fact his family held strongly together, his rivals lived free and well cared for, and he came closer to settling the York/Lancastrian feud than anyone else. Every time I read the book, I wonder what would have happened if he had not died at the battle of Bosworth.

I picked it up this time, inspired by Read Write Poem and its challenge of threes. Here is a draft in his honor, and a toast to his memory.

Richard III Turns 30

On the last day of Christmas, his true love
gave to him six naming trees. She said they were —
one for his father, one for his son,
one each for his brothers, and one
for his wife, the companion of his childhood
— to hold in long needles drawn down with snow.

Speak of them she said. Speak of your loss.
The hemlocks clasped the frozen ground.
Edmund died at seventeen, in his first battle.
I was five. He shook the trunk.
The stiff whorls of the blue spruce
slapped him with blood and ice.

Edward, never seasick or single, came
every night from his new throne
to roar beside our fire while we parsed Latin.
George landed head down in a tankard,
when his coat turned the colors of fall.

My father, with my own name,
nailed above the Micklegate Bar;
my own Edward, too light to break
this crust of snow; and Anne, oh God,
who held me in the unfamiliar south—

What good can come? I grant them bail,
pardon my own murderers,
hold the border against the Thanes,
and in this spot, six months hence
I will fill your mouth with raspberries
one, two, three four for the boys who will outlive me.

Snow shook down on his shoulders
as thick on his cloak as on the branches,
and under its canopy he kissed her.
In the darkening march of firs,
knit with ground pine, the kingship
was worth no more than a rogue horse.

Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour

I’m planning to write a lot of book reviews in this blog — of any kind of book that touches me. This one did. It also had me wired all the way through. And what better subject to mull over, the week after Thanksgiving, than how to make good food… out of pig snouts, calves’ cheeks, steamed cockles and o-toro.

Tony Bourdain travels, often to places hard to reach unless you live there, and eats damn near everything, and writes about it. And gets filmed. One of the many remarkable things about this book is that after the first chapter I am decidedly curious to try pig snout, and pigs’ feet, and all of the parts of the pig most cultures turn into festival dinners while Americans throw them away. He describes them with such uninhibited gusto.

He loves these parts because they taste good. People who make one pig last a winter, and eat the innards as a matter of course, have spent centuries finding out how to get the best use out of them. But more than that, he respects what he eats, and the people who cook it, because they work hard; they pick their ingredients fresh; and they waste next to nothing.

Between Places

My friend Rachel at Velveteen Rabbi has just introduced me to a weekly poetry site, Totally Optional Prompts. They post a prompt every Saturday, and poets respond on Thursdays. The prompt for this week is “Place”. Clearly, it matters to me… and now more than ever, while I don’t belong entirely to the place I live in. So here’s a thought.

In the mountains

I am at home on your limestone,
looking over one blue hill after another.
Falling leaves clear distance,
a blazon of red oak — I am here!
I am too tired to think
past the last of this season’s corn.

I am a guest seeking work,
and I love you,
your weathered wood,
your root stocks.

You call me back from an inlet
where I have written
so many strokes and long held
meetings of eyes.

From here I can see
I always choose clean heights.
Yet must you leave me
exposed and longing
exhilarated alone?

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

I wasn’t in Portugal — but I have seen a freshly dead pig. So has Tony Bourdain, it turns out. I’m reading A Cook’s Tour. When I’m finished, I’ll write a kicked back, going over the whole of it review, but right now, I’m struck with the opening. For the first time, at a family get-together on his boss’s farm, he watches his dinner die.

He slows down for it. If you’ve ever seen or read Tony, you know he delights in innards, butcher’s blocks and adrenaline. Here’s a guy who once tore headlong down a mined jungle road toward a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. He can anatomize a pig as easily as peeling a carrot. And yet a jovial working day on a Portugese farm knocks the sarcasm out of him.

He’s just kicked off the pilgrimage, and he’s in the hazy morningtime, still blinking around at the grass and shingles and beams and mountains that are impossibly not on the same ground he stood on yesterday. Hot soup sets him dreaming. Two locals gear up with a trestle and a knife and some of last season’s homemade wine (probably in an old milk jug). They wrestle with the pig as their wives wrestle with the stove.