the writing life

Writers, it seems, sometimes like to read about the act of writing as much as we enjoy the alchemy itself. The image of a young Hemingway in Paris is part of my consciousness; many, many years ago, A Moveable Feast became my standard of how a writer should work and live.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write…

We know now that the mere act of sharpening pencils was part of Hemingway’s process for writing, a means to put himself in the right frame of mind for creating stories from memory and imagination. We each…procrastinate…a little before losing ourselves in the solitary and frequently frustrating act of writing. What writers don’t ordinarily admit, however, is that part of the delay is based on fear: fear that the writing won’t go well, that the feelings and stories we wish to express will evaporate before our eyes, that we lack the talent or vision to express what we secretly feel. Writing is a brave act, much more than what Fitzgerald wrote about “swimming underwater and holding your breath.” It’s an act of faith and hope and dreams, of laying your soul bare before the world. It’s a tightrope act, walking a wire without a net and never knowing if you’ll keep your balance or fall (and fail) in the attempt. It requires more than a little courage, not to mention the unshakable belief that the writer’s vision and belief is truly worth exploring. It’s not self-aggrandizement or justification;  it’s the eternal hope to make the reader feel, to touch someone’s heart and inspire that little glimmer of self-recognition in the stories we tell.

Annie Dillard, also, wrote eloquently of the process in her book The Writing Life:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

So, hold nothing back, then.  Something else, Dillard writes, will occur to you later. It always does, in one form or another. To be able to write it well, though, requires a form of concentration, talent, and a sense of hope and wonder that most persons do not possess. I make no claims to the talent part. But I have never, ever, given up this thing we refer to as hope.

“straight into darkness”

For one summer–one lovely, all too brief summer–I truly loved her. She was eighteen then, and I…I was only a few years older. For those few months she was the woman I thought she could be, while I was the person I was and am still becoming.

There was nothing but joy then when she called, or visited, or we hung out, or when we made love. There was a creek we swam in that summer; I remember holding her in the part where the water began to run deep, her bathing suit off, her body wrapped around mine. I remember the kiss of sunlight on my face; I remember her lips on mine. It was the kind of summer Fitzgerald might have written about, the one with “blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.”*

And then there was the day she told me she was pregnant. I was, to be that young, ecstatic. I had never thought much about becoming a father, but none of that mattered now. If she could have stayed that young and happy forever, and I was going to have all that and be a father also, then that was all right with me. The rest of my college would take care of itself; it was almost over, anyway. I wanted her. I wanted the baby. I wanted to be married.

But she, who so often talked of marriage and of becoming a mother, became truculent and withdrawn. I quickly realized what she planned to do, even before she told me, and the day after it was over the feeling just died.

we went straight into darkness
out over the line
straight into darkness
straight into night**

Every January or thereabouts I wonder about the child who never was. Some years–though by no means all–I’ve also cried. And I can’t help but wonder if things would have different between us, if in the realm of alternate possibilities I would love her still today. Impossible questions, impossible to answer. But I still grieve for our child; I still grieve over what might have been.

I’ve never written of this before, not even in a journal. I’ve never even talked about it, to anyone. Anyone at all. We all live with our silent grief, one way or another. I can’t say with certainty that this is what led to all to the vehemence and hatred later. But one day she told me that I never treated her better than during that summer when she was first pregnant. I hope, someday, that’s the way she’ll remember me. And I will leave the darkness for good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Absolution”
Tom Petty, “Straight Into Darkness (copyright 1982, Gone Gator Music)

lectio divina

The first time I saw a hummingbird, I was in church. Not in the sanctuary, actually, but upstairs in the annex at Sunday School. The morning was bright, lovely, and warm, and the hummingbird flitted just outside the open window. I was too young then to think of it as some kind of sign, but something stirred in my heart that I had never felt before. I learned something about beauty, then, and fragility, and the importance of keeping your eyes, mind, and heart open to all possibilities.

Those qualities are important, too, in the lifelong discipline of learning that we all share. I try very hard to keep my heart open whenever I learn by reading, which is why I’m not ashamed to admit that I often hurry to my computer, intent on notating a section of lovely prose or a lesson I’ve just learned. I’m not ashamed to admit that reading makes me feel excited and alive. Sometimes I read aloud just to hear the beauty of the words or to understand what I’ve just experienced; sometimes I laugh, and sometimes I even cry.

There’s a name for this sort of intense, fully immersed reading: lectio divina (spiritual reading). All reading is spiritual to me, because a book–if it’s any good–enters directly into the human heart. And there it remains, if you’re fortunate enough, to form the essence of the person you are continually becoming: the person you are destined to be.

Sometimes friends ask me how many books I’ve actually read. Truly, I’m not really sure: seven thousand? Ten thousand? I do know that at it’s peak, my library contained over 1,500 books. Many, far too many, are now gone in the chaos of the last two years. I probably have only a hundred or so with me now in Pennsylvania, but the good news is that I’m once again acquiring these treasures at a rate commensurate with my usual pace. Which means, of course, that I’m investing again: not only in books, but in my lifelong education. Little wonder, then, that I often refer to myself as an autodidact…self-taught. I’ve read less than some, more than some. But what I’ve read stays with me, affects me, shapes me. I feel every book I’ve ever read, no matter how long ago it was (some, of course, more than others). And these books, as Wendell Berry wrote, converse with each other as much as they converse with me. There’s an alchemy going on here inside my heart, filled with Robert Jordan and Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley and Daisy Buchanan and more characters than I possibly have space to name. They whisper to one another; they whisper to me. Soon others will join them, and the conversation will take on even more dimensions. In the meantime, I will keep reading. In the meantime, I will keep learning. I will never, ever, stop learning…

“borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

Not sleeping, except for an occasional and all-too-brief nap after work, has taught me a lot about endurance and perseverance.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve come to believe that reliability…answering the bell every day…is the most fundamental key to success (however you wish to define it).

Sleep deprivation, of course, is cumulative. Going for months (or in my case, years) on a couple hours sleep per day isn’t compensated by even a twelve-hour sleep fest. My body just…crashes…sometimes. I readily admit that. But day after day after day I’m in the office early, sometimes even after having worked in the middle of the night only a few hours before. Do my colleagues know that? Nah…but I know, and through determination and the sense of having to prove myself all over again, somehow the work gets done. I have something of a laser focus these days, and for that reason I’m doing my best work in years.

Somehow I just keep…going. Part of that is my love for what I do and the opportunity I now have; part of that is the resurgence of the ambition I once was known for. I am, as a friend recently said to me, somewhat of a victim of early success. In a small way, I look to my role models for precedents. Like Scott Fitzgerald publishing This Side Of Paradise at age 21, or John Lennon finishing with the Beatles at age 30, I enjoyed my own (admittedly minor) successes at a very young age. But life has a way of  bringing you back down to earth, and by now I’ve been humbled, hospitalized, forgotten, even ridiculed. But now I awake (well, when I do actually sleep) with a renewed sense of determination and purpose. I enjoy a wisdom that I’ve never known before, and I’m somewhat hellbent on not letting my family, my colleagues, or even myself down. Yes, I admit it: especially myself.

I remember a boy sitting at a glass-topped kitchen table in an apartment late one  night in Lexington, struggling to write a draft of a novel and listening to the rain through the open patio door. He was in love with someone with a musical, lilting, Appalachian-tinged voice; he was in love with books and writing and possibilities and especially life itself. Perhaps he was even a little in love with himself; it wouldn’t be the first time a young person had made that mistake.

Tonight the setting has changed and the boy has long since grown into a man (and hopefully a kind, thoughtful one at that). But the window is open again to the rain and “words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.”* I’m a little older now, and hopefully a little wiser. But inside me still is the boy who wants to write, to teach, to leave something of a legacy behind. “I’m looking back and I can’t see the past anymore,” Pete Townshend once wrote. For me, however, the past is ever-present…and I’m trying in my writing to make what sense of it that I can. As Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

*The Beatles, “Across The Universe,” copyright Maclen Music/ATV Songs

“but I need someone to help me sleep…”

Admittedly, I’ve written of it before: but when I do sleep, the dreams which come to me are all fractal and distorted, which often means that I awake not knowing exactly when I am. Last night (this morning?) I dreamed of Aaron as a little boy, the one who would come repeatedly to my bedroom door until I finally gave in and let him sleep with me (which, of course, I intended all along). It’s rather…disconcerting…to awake and discover that you’ve just been ripped from an apparent reality which no longer exists…one in which the little boy you love with all your heart may not even remember. Existential philosophers would ask: did it really happen, then, at all? And the parent in you answers, “Yes, it did. Yes, it most certainly did.”

I can bleed as well as anyone
but I need someone to help me asleep*

Obviously, I had some fairly odd benadryl dreams last night. I should be grateful, I know, that I slept at all. The irony, of course, is that in my former life I absolutely loved to stay awake all night.  I would read, write, listen to music…and study. It was the time I reserved exclusively for myself…but now, it seems, time is all that I have.

…and time is long, and time goes on
and time adds up, and time is like
a relapse after a lengthy illness…**

Sometimes now when I am alone, time hardly seems to pass at all. The hours between one and six  A.M. can seem like an eternity, one which frequently I’m not prepared to face. In fact, sometimes it seems that I would do anything not to have to live with myself through Fitzgeralds “dark night of the soul,” the one in which it is always three A.M. Loneliness will do that to you, I suppose. Everything is fine during the daytime, but late at night when you know that lovers are melding and all is quiet and solitary in your own life, time slows to an interminable crawl. And that, I’m afraid, is something I find harder and harder to live with.

There’s only one choice, of course: to live, to keep living, and enjoy what you can. This morning I awoke to a breathtaking Indian summer morning, the type of morning when you smell the leaves and the sunlight warms your face. I have no way of knowing, of course, what this day will bring. But I intend to drink it up…and remember that like “fallen leaves in the night…who can say which way we’re blowing?”

*Counting Crows, “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”
**Rilke, Requiem For A Friend

“raining in baltimore”

Then there was the late afternoon after work when I leaned out my third floor apartment window and watched Renee Zellwegger (who truly is beautiful up close) film scenes from her upcoming movie, My One And Only: otherwise, Baltimore scared the freakin’ shit out of me.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way; having spent considerable time in New York (where I felt very safe, even as a visitor), I assumed that the nation’s 18th largest metro area would have its own considerable charm and bustle (after all, they do call Baltimore, perhaps sarcastically, “Charm City”). I imagined crowded sidewalks day and night, well-dressed and beautiful people, the coolest clubs and best restaurants, and more cultural opportunities than I could possibly fit into my schedule. Instead, I found mentally ill and homeless folks talking to ghosts on West Baltimore Street, clouds of stinking steam on Fayette Street, and a city that turned into a ghost town once the commuters lit out for the ‘burbs at five o’clock sharp. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things to like about Baltimore (architecture, some good people making a life in the city proper, a sense of tolerance, some great restaurants and pubs).  But the fact remains that you can live in a good neighborhood and walk a single block away and find yourself in a war zone, dodging heroin and crack dealers who ask, unsolicited, “You ready?” (ready somehow being slang for crack cocaine).

Yeah, I did a little wandering (and biking) around–even late at night. I thought I would get to know Baltimore, both good and bad, and write about it as writers have always written about the city in which they live (see Hemingway, A Moveable Feast). I had waited a long time to live in a city, and I intended to make the most of my time. After all, Scott Fitzgerald once lived there. He didn’t write about being scared of Baltimore.

I was lucky. I had a great (and rather expensive) apartment only four blocks or so from Camden Yards (I could see the ballpark if I leaned out my west-facing windows and looked south). I could walk or bike the eight blocks or so to work on Calvert Street. The Inner Harbor was only a few moments away. Federal Hill, across the harbor, was an easy bike ride away and worth it for the view of the city. It should have been, by all rights, wonderful.

But for starters, I was lonely. Very lonely. And aside from the opportunists and wrong sort of people (who, you know, the ones who wanted to sell me something…and I wasn‘t buying), there didn’t seem to be anyone to talk with.  Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been more lonely in my life. I was so very naïve: I imagined that I would first fall in love with the city, and then meet someone and really fall in love. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be anyone to fall in love with–and if so, they lived in the ‘burbs and I lived in the city without a car (having totaled my leased Eclipse convertible falling asleep at the wheel in Lexington a few months before I moved).

So, the great Baltimore experiment ended too soon, and ended badly. I became seriously ill, and with my last bit of strength booked a flight to Lex, hauled myself and a single suitcase to the train, and somehow made it to the airport. Even now, I’m not really sure how I managed to change planes in Charlotte, but I’ll always remember the final descent into Lexington, the tears upon seeing the familiar horse farms and knowing that my boys were now only a few miles away. I knew that I had a lot of work to do…but I also knew, for a while at least, that I was coming home.

Then there was the late afternoon after work when I leaned out my third floor apartment window and watched Renee Zellwegger (who truly is beautiful up close) film scenes from her upcoming movie, My One And Only: otherwise, Baltimore scared the freakin’ shit out of me.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way; having spent considerable time in New York (where I felt very safe, even as a visitor), I assumed that the nation’s 18th largest metro area would have its own considerable charm and bustle (after all, they do call Baltimore, perhaps sarcastically, “Charm City”). I imagined crowded sidewalks day and night, well-dressed and beautiful people, the coolest clubs and best restaurants, and more cultural opportunities than I could possibly fit into my schedule. Instead, I found mentally ill and homeless folks talking to ghosts on West Baltimore Street, clouds of stinking steam on Fayette Street, and a city that turned into a ghost town once the commuters lit out for the ‘burbs at five o’clock sharp. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things to like about Baltimore (architecture, some good people making a life in the city proper, a sense of tolerance, diversity, some great restaurants and pubs).  But the fact remains that you can live in a good neighborhood and walk a single block away and find yourself in a war zone, dodging heroin and crack dealers who ask, unsolicited, “You ready?” (ready somehow being slang for crack cocaine).

Yeah, I did a little wandering (and biking) around–even late at night. After all, I never sleep. I thought I would get to know Baltimore, both good and bad, and write about it as writers have always written about the city in which they live (see Hemingway, A Moveable Feast). I had waited a long time to live in a city, and I intended to make the most of my time. After all, Scott Fitzgerald once lived there, and not that far from my apartment. He didn’t write about being scared of Baltimore.

This circus is falling down on its knees
The big top is crumbling down
Its raining in Baltimore fifty miles east
Where you should be, no ones around

I was lucky. I had a great (and rather expensive) apartment only four blocks or so from Camden Yards (I could see the ballpark if I leaned out my west-facing windows and looked south). I could walk or bike the eight blocks or so to work on Calvert Street. The Inner Harbor was only a few moments away. Federal Hill, across the harbor, was an easy bike ride away and worth it for the view of the city. It should have been, by all rights, wonderful.

But for starters, I was lonely. Very lonely. And aside from the opportunists and wrong sort of people (who, you know, only wanted to sell me something…and I wasn‘t buying), there didn’t seem to be anyone to talk with.  Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been more lonely in my life. I was so very naïve: I imagined that I would first fall in love with the city, and then meet someone and really fall in love. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be anyone to fall in love with–and if so, they lived in the ‘burbs and I lived in the city without a car (having totaled my leased Eclipse convertible by falling asleep at the wheel in Lexington a few months before I moved).

There’s things I remember and things I forget
I miss you; I guess that I should
Three thousand five hundred miles away
But what would you change if you could?

So, the great Baltimore experiment ended too soon, and ended badly. I became seriously ill, and with my last bit of strength booked a flight to Lex, hauled myself and a single suitcase to the train, and somehow made it to the airport. Even now, I’m not really sure how I managed to change planes in Charlotte, but I’ll always remember the final descent into Lexington, the tears upon seeing the familiar horse farms and knowing that my boys were now only a few miles away. I knew that I had a lot of work to do…but I also knew, for a little while at least, that I was coming home.

“Of Time And The River”

For someone who truly enjoys the company of other people, I’m beginning to face the fact that in some ways, I’ve always been sort of a loner. I believe it has something to do with the state of exquisite melancholia sometimes necessary to fuel or express great creativity; I like people too much to consciously avoid the company of others.

When I still worked in state government, I would often take lunch alone and just sit in my car somewhere relaxing for a bit and often listening to NPR (back when I still listened to the radio). I remember one winter in particular when I would park in the Frankfort cemetery, near the bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, the bridge, and the Capitol, and just sit there thinking how lucky I was to have an office looking out on the building’s front lawn (fourth window from the left, if you ever see a picture). I felt pretty important then, to be honest about it; I felt very young. But life has a way of leveling things out, and although I didn’t know it then, my day would come soon enough. I was headed for a reckoning I could never have anticipated, and to this day one I’m not sure I truly deserved.

“April is over,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “April is over.” I’m not sure what month it is now (although the calendar says almost September).  But I know that’s life’s transient joys are worthless without someone to share them with, and that even for a writer, even the best solitary memories are fated to end up as mere words on a page. Without friends, even the best moments of happiness are little more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

For someone who truly enjoys the company of other people, I’m beginning to face the fact that in some ways, I’ve always been sort of a loner. I believe it has something to do with the state of exquisite melancholia sometimes necessary to fuel or express great creativity; I like people too much to consciously avoid the company of others.

When I still worked in state government, I would often take lunch alone and just sit in my car somewhere relaxing for a bit and often listening to NPR (back when I still listened to the radio). I remember one winter in particular when I would park in the Frankfort cemetery, near the bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, the bridge, and the Capitol, and just sit there thinking how lucky I was to have an office looking out on the building’s front lawn (fourth window from the left, if you ever see a picture). I felt pretty important then, to be honest about it; I felt very young. But life has a way of leveling things out, and although I didn’t know it then, my day would come soon enough. I was headed for a reckoning I could never have anticipated, and to this day one I’m not sure I truly deserved.

“April is over,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “April is over.” I’m not sure what month it is now (although the calendar says almost September).  But I know that’s life’s transient joys are worthless without someone to share them with, and that even for a writer, even the best solitary memories are fated to end up as mere words on a page. Without friends, without someone close to your heart, even the best moments of happiness are little more than “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

On Second Chances: In the Manner of Montaigne

After publishing his late-in-life, uber-successful memoir Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt took issue with Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second

acts in American lives.” After five years of purgatory, setbacks, false starts, wasted chances, and heartache, I’ve finally come around to taking issue with

it, too. It’s only true if you believe it to be true, I think. And perhaps once in the depth of my melancholy I did believe it, did believe that I was out of chances, out of love, out of time. But I’m beginning to believe that maybe, just maybe, that I was wrong.

I had too much success too early in life. I know that; I admit it. Everything was so easy then; my facility with words and whatever intelligence I possess opened doors closed to talented people with much more experience than me. But I had passion, purpose, youth, and more than a little ambition. I enjoyed being the youngest person in the room, and fooling myself into thinking that I was also the smartest. But I had…secrets…basically a marriage which looked good at the ballfield and out in the neighborhood but behind closed doors was a endless nightmare. So all the strength I had went toward maintaining the illusion. But strength is finite, no matter what your motivation might be. And after the divorce, after the post-divorce party, suddenly I had no strength left.

I don’t usually write this way, this direct. Allusion and hints and a bit of mystery is more my thing. But although I’ve had a wonderful time today, at the end of the day I’m sitting here alone in a temporary apartment in a new city, with nothing but music and memories for company. Oh, sure, I know that I’ll love it here in State College. I already do; this is where I’ll enjoy my second act, whatever that may be. It is entirely possible that I will spend the remainder of my life here, however long that may be. And if that’s not a sobering thought, then nothing is.

“The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway said, “and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

Well, okay, I’ve been broken. More than once. But perhaps now I’m stronger at the broken places. And the things I’ve endured haven’t killed me yet. What’s more, I now believe they never will…

After publishing his late-in-life, uber-successful memoir Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt took issue with Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that “there are no second acts in American lives.” After five years of purgatory, setbacks, false starts, wasted chances, and heartache, I’ve finally come around to taking issue with it, too. It’s only true if you believe it to be true, I think. And perhaps once in the depth of my melancholy I did believe it, did believe that I was out of chances, out of love, out of time. But I’m beginning to believe that maybe, just maybe, that I was wrong.

I had too much success too early in life. I know that; I admit it. Everything was so easy then; my facility with words and whatever intelligence I possess opened doors closed to talented people with much more experience than me. But I had passion, purpose, youth, and more than a little ambition. I enjoyed being the youngest person in the room, and fooling myself into thinking that I was also the smartest. But I had…secrets…basically a marriage which looked good at the ballfield and out in the neighborhood but behind closed doors was a endless nightmare. So all the strength I had went toward maintaining the illusion. But strength is finite, no matter what your motivation might be. And after the divorce, after the post-divorce party, suddenly I had no strength left.

I don’t usually write this way, this direct. Allusion and hints and games and a bit of mystery is more my thing. But although I’ve had a wonderful time today, at the end of the day I’m sitting here alone in a temporary apartment in a new city, with nothing but music and memories for company. Oh, sure, I know that I’ll love it here in State College. I already do; this is where I’ll enjoy my second act, whatever that may be. It is entirely possible that I will spend the remainder of my life here, however long that may be. And if that’s not a sobering thought, then nothing is.

“The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway said, “and afterward many are stronger at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”

Well, okay, I’ve been broken. More than once. But perhaps now I’m stronger at the broken places. And the things I’ve endured haven’t killed me yet. What’s more, I now believe they never will…

“when the train left the station…”

“I’m nobody,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “Are you–nobody–too?” I like to quote that brief phrase sometimes when I’m lonely, frightened, or otherwise confused. I’ve learned enough by now to know that we all ask ourselves that question, even if only in the darkest hours of our nights. When you realize that, sometimes you don’t feel so all alone.

My darkest hours seem to arrive between midnight and four A.M., the time I used to look forward to when my kids were young because then the house was quiet and I could write, play music and guitar, and refresh my muse, as Hemingway said, “from the springs that fed it.” The nights and years have been so lonely since those times, so very lonely, like the times in the middle of the night when the bedroom door would open and a little boy (or two) would crawl into bed with me while his mother worked. “This bed is empty,” goes the Stones song; I’m not sure it’s something you ever get used to.

Love in vain, love in vain; and all is vanity, even the person I believed I once was.

Well, its hard to tell, its hard to tell, but all your love’s in vain
Well, I felt so sad and lonesome that I could not help but cry

It’s okay. No matter what I once believed when I was young and arrogant, I knew I couldn’t live a charmed life forever. It was always so…precarious…even then. And now the worst times are over, finally, and once again I live a life of seeing and possibility. I sometimes joke about the Fitzgerald line that “there are no second acts in American lives.” It wasn’t so long ago that I believed it completely. But I no longer believe it anymore.