This past week I had the pleasure of helping out with and attending my second Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals. (For those of you who don’t know, Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry memorization and recitation competition for high school students. There is scholarship money available at the state and national levels of the competition. Scholarship money! For poetry recitation! Winners also receive money for their school to purchase more poetry books, which is equally as cool.)

Each student recites and performs two poems of their choice from the POL anthology. This year’s selections ranged from Emily Dickinson to Alice Fulton, Percy Shelley to Robert Wrigley. And the performances were very, very good.

After the competition part of the evening, the students had an opportunity to talk about why they chose the poems they did. I was floored by how eloquently they all spoke about emotional connection and personal meaning for them (and mind you, they didn’t know we were going to ask them this question, so they were pretty much put on the spot). I noticed too a theme among their answers: They selected poems about strength, perseverance, and rebellion against the expected. It occurred to me that those were things that we probably all hoped to embody as teenagers (and perhaps still), and here were nine students who had found their own unique ways to embody these traits through the words of famous poets, both old and new.

But they weren’t just the words of the poets anymore. I’ve always believed that when we memorize a poem, it becomes a part of us. Without knowing it, we internalize the cadence and the emotional drive of that poem. We might even replicate it in the way we communicate or even the way we bowl (yes, sometimes I recite poetry in my head while bowling to establish a rhythm). But these students didn’t just know the individual words of the poems they selected, they had to perform them. They had to give voice to them, their own voice, and therefore make them their own. The words of Anne Sexton were spoken with such compassion, the voice of Ozymandias embodied with such raw power, that it was clear that the feelings driving the performances were completely sincere.

I’d like to think that if I had known about an opportunity like this in high school, I would have jumped on it. I mean, I already loved poetry. I fear though that I wouldn’t have had the courage that it takes to get on a stage and truly give yourself over to a poem. I admire those students and I hope they know what a brave and meaningful thing they’ve done. I hope when they’re 70, they can stand up and knock out some silly twenty-something poet with their performance of “Dover Beach.”

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

In which the Little People Drink Sake, Say Ho ho. (Illustration by Rokuro Taniuchi)

I looked it up, ok? Wikipedia says it’s wordplay, that kyu (Q) and kew (9) are homophones. So it’s 1Q84, not 1984. I was compelled to look this up because a friend of mine had been calling it “IQ 84″ and I kept calling 19Q4 for the first five hundred pages.

They were a long first five hundred pages. I didn’t understand why the first book ended where it did, at a point which didn’t seem complete or suspenseful, and did not leave me hungering for the second book. I assume that’s part of the reason the trilogy came out as one book in the U.S. A lot of the information seemed redundant, like filler. I kept telling myself that maybe it had to be when sold separately, that with months between publishing books 1-2-3, the audience would have forgotten everything. I’m a slow reader, and carried the book with me through many airports and different cities. It sat unopened in a hotel room in St. Louis for a week. I learned to skim to survive the repeated passages.

I had been so excited when the book came out. I think it was the first time that I bought a book the day it hit  shelves. I felt smug. I like Murakami. His short stories are fantastic, I empathize with characters who must enter wells to think, and I had a most pleasant time reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World while on a Delaware beach last summer.

I wanted my reading experience of 1Q84 to be untarnished, a sacred interaction of reader and text. I tried not to read any reviews of the novel, lest they give away some pertinent information, some delightful surprise. And the book is filled with some good surprises, like the “Town of Cats” story (which appeared in the New Yorker as a short story), or the idea that small, magical people would enter the world through a dead goat’s mouth.

My hands grew stronger during this process.

I took the book everywhere, like a pet, like I was a walking advertisement for literature. People commented on its volume and asked if it was any good. People seem to think that size matters with books. They felt proud reading Harry Potter. They think that War and Peace is probably “good for them,” like vitamins, but no one really takes vitamins daily. They want to know if this book I have is “fun” or “good for them.” But 1Q84 is the first Murakami book that I can’t recommend to most of the people I know. I think they would feel uncomfortable, because there’s a lot of sex that isn’t sexy and that doesn’t seem to matter. “It was like her pubic hair was part of her thinking process” is one line. Tengo’s penis is rarely called a penis, often called his “thingy.” This could reflect that diminutive cuteness of objects in Japan (Hello Kitty, how big is a square watermelon, anyway?), or I don’t know, a hypercoristic name like how a French lover might call you his little cabbage, or maybe an attempt at winning one of those worst sex scene ever writing awards. And there are a lot of loose ends, which is maybe a meta example of certain rules not applying to the 1Q84 universe.

But it has cults. It references several other awesome books and writers, which is something writers enjoy reading. And if I ended up in last fall again somehow, repeating a season and half, I would buy it again on the first day and slog my way through it, all the while recommending  Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow, because like in 1Q84 there seems be this absence of free will coupled with the necessity to take responsibility for one’s actions all the same.

– Spellcheck is a frenemy

– The post you spent three hours on will have less mass appeal than the post you wrote in 45 minutes, after six pina colada  flavored wine coolers.

– Drink heavily and write. Edit with strong black coffee in the morning.

– You will still miss mistakes. Don’t worry. Sam Ligon will edit them and say they were “minor”.

– Write about what you know.

– Be okay with having what you know completely shitted on.

–If you share a blogging home, read the other bloggers’ posts. Comment, if you have things to say. Compliment them in a loud voice in public and repeat the name of the blog.

–If you can’t stand the silence, phone The Network. Your mother, grandmother, brother, mentor and best friends will gladly comment on your posts.

–The shame of calling The Network diminishes over time.

– Build off better, well-written posts. Link them in your post, to give yourself credibility.

–Take a week off. Take two if you feel like you might whine. If you feel guilty about not writing something, post a Youtube video and write a witty sentence about it. Don’t be pissed when you get more comments on that post.

– It’s okay to envy the people who post consistently solid posts. They will die young.

–Be proud of your progress. It will be undefinable but you will feel something in the shining moment that you write exactly what you want to write and sober too.

–Take your writing seriously but not too seriously.

–Losing sleep on a 500-word post is not uncommon.

–Don’t stop.

–Never surrender.

–When complimented on your writing/perspective/argument, act surprised.

Hello and welcome. Have a nice day.

I have a fantasy—we all have a fantasy—that someday someone will write a dissertation on our body of work—that one day someone will read something we wrote, looking for meaning rather than flaws. In my case, the paper would be titled: “Over Easy: Diners and Dives in Michael Bell’s Early Stories” and would trace the absolute saturation of my little canon with diners as settings and eggs as images.

I didn’t realize that diners were my fallback until graduate school, when three of my first four workshop pieces took place in diners. Instead of rejoicing at how easy it would be to title a collection of such stories (House of Pancakes, Dave’s, Lumberjack Special, etc.) I began to panic. I thumbed back through my earlier stories, found a big diner scene in my undergraduate thesis and, to my horror, the second story I ever wrote was titled “Sunnyside Up.”

So I banished diners for a while.

Then, this last week in my poetry workshop, fellow barker, Leyna Krow, mentioned that the diners were back. I looked down at my poem and there was a scene in which the speaker complains to a waiter about the taste of his eggs. Dammit. The worst part is that, once I thought about it, there were restaurant scenes in my two previous poems as well. Poetry, it seems, has freed me up to get back to my obsessions.

Using diners as a setting for fiction is a bad idea, but it make sense with my aesthetic. I like boring, real-time stories where two people sit and talk, but still have something to do with their hands. I like when there are random interruptions, like the ones provided by the wait staff and the other patrons. And I love it, especially, when nothing happens. So, for me, diners are perfect.

They also remind me of how my life used to be, when my mom and I would meet for breakfast at Millcreek Café on Friday mornings. Or my first year of college, how my friends and I spent the hours between midnight and two at a place called Dee’s eating hot fudge sundaes—Cami brought them out to us before we had a chance to order. Or in high school when we would skip our seminary class and go get scones at Sharon’s. Or the summer in jr. high when I convinced these two girls I went to church with that, for some unknown reason, we should make our parents get out of bed at six in the morning to drive us to IHOP—how we couldn’t afford anything but a la carte pancakes—and we just sat there laughing about nothing until they picked us up at eight.

When I was a kid, my dad would take me to Carl’s Café sometimes before we’d shop the sales on Saturday morning. He said it was the best greasy spoon restaurant in the city. It was this tiny place, only about six tables, and the food really was excellent. My dad lead by example, ordering the #2 with bacon, hash browns, sourdough toast, and his eggs served over-easy. I ordered the same. Still do.

It’s enjoyable to be like my dad sometimes, because usually I’m afraid of it. He’s a hoarder, so I have to second-guess everything I save. I have to watch out for any related impulse control disorders like fingernail biting, verbal ticks, trichotillomania, all of which I wrestle with. It was weird to grow up watching him allow what I considered junk to control him. But now I worry about my own ability to make decisions: I get all claustrophobic when faced with even the simplest choices; I write almost exclusively about people who are similarly paralyzed; and, as a result, plot seems to elude me. I guess I prefer diners as settings, because, I don’t know, sometimes it’s a big move, ordering eggs. Sometimes it’s all a person can manage, one of the better things he can pass down.

I guess that paper they write about me will be Freudian, but it’s even simpler than that, I think. I love diners because they’re safe. I can think in a diner. I can talk in a diner. I don’t have to rely on myself to cook breakfast. Of course, safety doesn’t make good fiction, so if I want a story, I’ve only got two options: take the man out of the diner or let the danger in. But I’d probably do better to put an end to all this writing about diners entirely—keep at least one of the safe places to myself.

in theory, it sounds like a good idea maybe.  it’s got all the things i used to love about the books section: reviews, recommendations, essays, interviews, fun little Q&A’s with book-loving peoples, best-seller lists, a calendar of literary events, all that good shit.  it’s even got a column from rick kogan, the best storyteller/old school newspaperman our town’s got since dear studs passed away.  but here’s the thing: the newspapers had all that before, and got rid of it.  probably because of economic inefficiencies, or economies of scale, or sliding scales, or because the terrorists finally won.  so, obviously, they had to do something different this time.  and what they decided to do was charge for it.

but the book-loving peoples won’t just pay for what they used to get for free, right?  so, obviously, they had to make it BETTER.  that way the book-loving peoples won’t feel like they’re getting screwed by paying for what they used to get for free.  but the book-loving peoples actually did used to pay for it.  they paid for their sunday papers which came with the books section and did not steal any of it off the interwebs, like the good law-abiding citizens they were.  they paid for this stuff because they liked the printed word, and in return for their years of patronage, the book-loving peoples had their favorite section stripped away & now have to pay even more to get it back.

how much more?  about 100% 200%.  right now, i pay about $1/week for a sunday paper subscription.  a subscription to this new printers row is $99/year.  but wait!  there’s more!  for that $99 i also get to be a “member” of the printers row community.  “special access,” and “events,” and “forums,” and such.  there’ll be a series of monthly author discussions, readings, and an online discussion board.  in other words, many of the things i can get for free at our city’s kick ass reading serieses, or about a gajillion websites aimed at the book-loving peoples.

that’s not to say there’s nothing good here.  those author discussions, “printers row live,” seem like they could actually be kinda cool maybe.  and from the free online preview of the first issue, it looks like the editors took a cue from their coverboy eggers’ own attempt at rejuvenating the newspaper business, mcsweeneys 33, and decided to do some bold layout work (just look at pages A12 & A14).  plus, this thing will come with a special pull-out original short story every week, not unlike one story.  but i’ve never actually been to one of those printers row live events, and most of the layout work (while nice) isn’t exactly bold, and i have no idea what to expect from newspaper editors who will essentially be running a lit mag (suffice it to say, i was once the managing editor of a journal, but i would never presume to know how to run a newspaper).

i guess i should be happy they’re at least trying, though, right?  it’s a noble effort, catering to those book-loving peoples.  but whether it’s also a profitable one for newspapers remains to be seen.

Just so you don't get any illusions about where I'm going with this. (Photo Credit: IVAW.org)

“How’s it that the only ones responsible for making this mess, got their sorry asses stapled to a god damned desk?” – Tom Waits,  “Hell Broke Luce”

*          *          *          *

I read an article on Huffington Post the other day, written by a former SEAL, one Chris Kyle, United States Navy (Retired). It recounts his first kill as a sniper out on the Teams, back during the early days of the Iraq war. The premise is one we’ve all read before: young marksman, part of a campaign to win hearts and minds, makes the call to take down an enemy combatant when faced with a threat to the lives of his fellow soldiers. In this case, the target is a woman, berobed, who approaches a squad of Marines then produces a Chinese grenade from the folds of her abaya.

The narration was functional enough. Spare. Utilitarian. I found the recounted dialogue, chewed-up and dumbed-down for a clearly civilian audience, to be stilted and unconvincing. There were clearly ghostwriters involved. The author might have been a crack shot, sure, but he’s certainly no Timothy O’Brien or Anthony Swofford. And that’s okay. A warrior doesn’t need to be particularly well-spoken to do his job; we just lionize the ones who are.

The author talks a lot about his decision to kill a civilian woman in the line of duty; about how his conscience is clean in spite of his actions. “That woman was already dead,” Kyle writes. “I was just making sure she didn’t take any Marines with her.” And you know what, that’s fine with me. With regard to the survival of oneself or one’s battle-buddies, I’ve always felt one should have zero compunction about doing what is required to stay alive and return home. Sad fact is, a lot of the people we deride as war-criminals were once soldiers who tried to do what was necessary at the time to survive, or to cope with the horrors of one’s situation. We don’t think about that very much, but there you go. I think Alan Moore’s take on the Batman mythos, The Killing Joke, had it about right: we are all just one bad day away from turning into monsters.

I pulled my rifle on a woman once while I was deployed. True story. Maybe 75 yards; brought her right up center-mass on my front sight post, sighted down the bore with my thumb ready to flick the safety to 3-round burst. Granted, it turned out she was approaching the guard tower in which I was posted, daughter in hand, to beg for food and water using a succession of hand gestures, but try telling that to a twenty-four year old kid, less than a month into his tour. And just in case you’re wondering: No. I didn’t shoot her. But I also didn’t give her any food or water, either. My buddy and I instead just waved her off, cursed her in English and told her in Arabic Yalla! (Buzz off!) and Imshi! (Go away!) Then her child gave us the finger, and we both lowered our rifles and laughed nervously.

Fact is, we don’t write about those kinds of stories when we write about war. We either write about Modern Warfare-style acts of flag-waving heroism, or Vietnam era horror-stories in the style of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. In this regard, I prefer Anthony Swofford to Tim O’Brien; the cynicism about war he displays in Jarhead, his willingness to catch the boredom and stupidity of young Americans abroad makes for  a much more honest and necessary portrait. There are many stories we don’t tell about war, least of all the ones that lie hidden beneath our prose. So no: I don’t begrudge the author his lackluster writing, any more than I begrudge him the choice to kill someone who endangered the lives of his fellow warriors. What I do begrudge him is the way he wrote about the woman he shot:

My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul. I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job. But I truly, deeply hated the evil that woman possessed. I hate it to this day. Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy “savages.” There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.

To the author, whose combat skills and expertise clearly far outstrip my own, I would respond thus: For all you know, that woman was a victim, coerced by local authorities into approaching those Marines as a suicide weapon. Perhaps they threatened to hurt her, hurt her family, if she didn’t cooperate. Then again, perhaps she was just like you, or like me — a patriot. Perhaps in her situation, we’d have done the very same thing. 

There came a time once when I looked a local national in the eyes, smiling, and realized that man might be partly responsible for the barrage of mortar attacks that pounded our post daily. Saw it all the time from local farmers: moving down the line, tending their crops of cabbage or sunflower or rhubarb, saw them smile and wave at us one day. Maybe the next day, or maybe even that evening, they might stand up a length of PVC tube lying between the rows, drop in an old Saddam-era 155, pull a lanyard and Thump! Lay it back down and keep moving. Sneaky, like the smile of that man whose hand I shook. And yet, even then, I heard that troubling voice in my head: wouldn’t you do it if the situations were reversed? And the thing was, I would have. So if I was right to do what was needed to go home to my wife, and if he was right to do the exact same thing, what else could be said but that our circumstances, not our allegiances, were the problem?

Which is why Mr. Kyle did what he did, and why I chose to leave that life behind — because to do that sort of work for a living, one has to possess an overwhelming sense of moral certitude. And I don’t possess that certitude.

When we write that “war is just,” we write about a limited set of circumstances, a kind of moral abnegation which reduces the highest good down to one basic element: one’s own personal survival. Sometimes, that survival dovetails with a larger political agenda, and sure that makes it easier to do what is necessary. We call it duty, rather than prejudice or self-preservation, and that somehow makes it nobler. Conversely, however, when we write that “war is wrong,” we write of worst-case scenarios — of monstrous acts made necessary by the love we hold for our friends, by our feelings of rage and helplessness, by our thoughts of our families and our own natural fear of dying. Nobody writes, though, about the culture that sits and watches from home, that swallows these misrepresentations of an entire society, that applauds such horrors with parades and free beers for the ones who come home from perpetrating them. We don’t pose these kinds of troubling questions in writing, and I fear that until we do, nobody will pose them of themselves.

Or worse: that even if we do pose them, nobody will care.

It'll Make Sense in Time

It’s beautiful. You wake at 8 A.M. on a Sunday morning. You’re healthy, 24 years old, and you have no other obligation today other than you have to write.

You stay in that meandering, foggy limbo between sleep and dreams for a bit knowing that you should get up and write. You think about your work. How the end goal is to become a super writer. Something like the Six Million Dollar Man, where your writing is the cleanliness of  Hemingway’s prose (without the deeply entrenched misogyny) combined with the energies of Kerouac, the metaphor and dream state of  Murakami, paradox of Kafka, sense of place and lyricism of Dybek. You’re going to write the next great American novel, start a literary movement where even the people you’re loosely associated with become famous. They’re going to coin a new term after your style and you’re going to spearhead the next cannon of American writing, just so long as you wake up. But your bed feels so lovely, almost like it’s made out of cotton swabs and billowy wisps of clouds that drift by on a sunny day. You’re going to accomplish so much, you just need a little more sleep.

12 P.M. You wake up feeling that drugged, heady feeling that comes with having overslept. You certainly can’t write in this state. You put coffee on and take a warm shower during which you wonder why you don’t grind your own beans and really is there much of a benefit to doing so. Doesn’t that decision mark the turning point where you become a coffee snob. The type of hipster we all love, who, when ordering coffee at a cafe winces after their first sip and says, “the stuff I brew is a million times better,” yet they go to the same cafe everyday.

12:30 P.M. You need to relax before writing. You need to calm yourself and just breathe for a moment. You shouldn’t view writing as a job. When you resist the process at every step the work reflects this hesitance and lack of enthusiasm. So you watch episodes of Community on Hulu. You watch the entire first season, in fact. You don’t understand why more people don’t like this show. It’s one of the few examples of something that’s meta and doesn’t feel likes it’s completely up its own ass. It manages to be meta in its disdain for all things meta. On top of that it subverts genre and satirizes popular movies in a way that doesn’t seem cheap. In the first season’s paintball episode cinematography and content from 28 Days Later, Terminator 2 and Die Hard is used.

4:00 P.M. You realize both of your legs have fallen asleep and the only food you’ve eaten all day was warmed in a microwave. Moving past discarded hot pockets boxes and stained coffee mugs you find workout clothing. You haven’t exercised nearly enough this winter and as a cause you’ve gained weight and lost muscle mass. As a red head you don’t want to be Louis CK, maybe something more akin to Sean White but without the fro. You definitely don’t want to be as emaciated as Thom Yorke but as of right now you have the body type of Conan O’ Brian.

4:30 P.M. Instead of running you make a line graph representing the body types of famous red heads and where you fall into this. This makes you realize you need to work out more. And that you need to learn to make visual representation. In the future, that is.

5:00 P.M. More television. This time two British programs, Coupling and Peep Show. You’ve finally given in, even though you’re so fucking sick of people telling you that British sitcoms are so much better. That the writing is witty and true to life, not desperate and meant for the lowest common denominator like American shows. This is bullshit though. You can see the appeal, it’s clever and all, but you don’t really care much for the dry wit. You can appreciate how a chain of misunderstandings lead to catastrophe, but it doesn’t make you laugh. You savor and digest but you don’t enjoy what you see and it doesn’t elicit even a titter. So many of the scenes make you uncomfortable, even cause you to close your eyes. Is new humor just sustained awkwardness, and unsympathetic character types who don’t understand how to function in society?

8:00 P.M. You take a bubble bath and think about the purpose of the 2nd person narrator. So often it distracts from content, making the reader hyper aware of form. It’s meant to unify, to instruct and find universality in observation but more often it just estranges others. They can’t empathize with the way you live and reject it as something too radically different from their own experiences.

9:00 P.M. You read novels. The best way to write is to read other people and in this sense you’ve already finished your writing for the day. You’re finishing up 1Q84, and after a couple of weeks of working away at it you can’t help but feel disappointed. Structure of the piece is cool in the sense that it reflects content, material dealing with parallel worlds is compelling, but overall the novel meanders. By page 500 the author becomes complacent and the narrative stagnates. You can’t help but insert your own imaginary cuts into the work, something that feels like blasphemy when dealing with Murakami.

12:00 A.M. Your cough has come back so you take nyquil. The game becomes how long can you combat the drug before sleep takes you. The ends of your vision blur as you sit in a dark room watching bad zombie movies. Your girlfriend wonders why you’re so fascinated with the end. Don’t you know that if it was the zombie apocalypse she would more than likely be devoured, that you’d be lonely haled up on an island, in a mall, a frozen wasteland waiting for death to come. Masses of undead shuffle across your screen and for some reason their movements, their predictability, the reliability of the form soothes you. You drift off, thinking that it’s best that you get some sleep. You have writing to get done tomorrow.

“What I am particularly interested in exploring is the border zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, between then and now, between self and other and self as other.  The border is not a fixed site but a movable one where exchanges occur, where encounters happen (between people, between imagination and language), where some material doesn’t get through and what does get through flows out in the odd dream logic of condensation and ongoing deferral.”      –Thomas Heise, The Missouri Review (Vol. 34:111).

Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman from Arizona, is thankfully recovering from the point-blank gun-shot wound that she sustained to her head.  Forensic analysis showed how the bullet entered her skull and exited after passing through the area of the brain associated with speech, and if it hadn’t passed through, the energy from the trauma would have been too much.  The victim would not have survived.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As of last week, of course, we see that Giffords has done considerably more than survive and suffer the comatose or vegetative conditions associated with the aftermath of such horrific events.   She has cast votes in Congress.   She has done interviews.   And most recently she has resigned from her post in the House of Representative and will now be devoting herself full-time to recovery, which may involve a trip to the African continent with her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly.   It may also involve a sojourn to the “border zone” that Heise describes above.

I find myself irresistibly drawn to this story for a variety of reasons:  the relationship between Giffords and her spouse is simply beautiful to behold and I can only imagine the way their private conversations also manifest all that’s good about marriage and the way it’s supposed to work.   I also might point out how Giffords actually stood for very controversial things, gun control among them, and that in Arizona, where the wild, wild west is a point of nostalgic pride, that’s a courageous stand to take.   But most of all, what strikes me about this amazing person’s progress involves the tears associated with her overwhelming drive to communicate, and to communicate in ways that may prove instructive for those interested in semiotics and how language becomes tethered to the rawest right-hemisphere processing of the brain.

Giffords weeps and weeps most often as she attempts to retrieve words and form sentences, things that are now much more difficult than they used to be.  Regarding the violent act which precipitated her injuries as well as the death of others — including a federal judge who appeared with her in the Safeway parking lot … including a nine-year-old girl who idolized her — she is now painfully aware.   That is, she grasps the tragic loss of life, and that she miraculously survived.   She comprehends the psycho-path’s premeditated act, perhaps his warped world-view.  But the visual imagery associated with the actual firing of the weapon is blissfully blacked out… cryptically erased… redacted by the powers of the soul (or the hard-wiring of the brain, which may be inextricably intertwined)…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, on that note, I’d like to make a turn and suggest an aspect of creative writing that, I think, is often overlooked.   Does the phenomena have a specific designation?  I can’t be sure.  It has something to do with a writer’s inability to articulate with precision the “event” itself, that the experience of things in and of themselves yield no direct access and that ironically the raw regurgitation of causal relationships will not translate to others as well as the carefully-considered reflections which come well after the supposedly brute fact.  If pressed, however, I might refer to this “border zone” speech as the Sacajewea Affect after the famed translator for the Lewis & Clark expedition [More On This Below].

Giffords, even at her best, at the height of her powers, prior to the incident, would have to capitulate as much.   After rehearsing her speech on immigration policy, for example, she would have to admit that the truest existential moment — the thing that drives her to speak out — cannot be articulated as fully as she might like.  The very sympathy or empathy that she might exude for refugees along the southwest border — that emotional  response might be articulated in words and coherent phrases.   But the actual feeling of the human condition, that tripped breaker in the hard-wiring of her soul, is better left untouched.  Unsaid.  And, of course, if it is said, if such a statement should escape any politician’s lips, we immediately doubt its authenticity.

Moreover, we are justified in our doubting primarily because no one should presume to step out of existence and to imitate an objective view.   All that we are capable of doing is what the slain and now recovering Gabrielle Giffords does for the world to see.   She weeps.  She allows tears to fall from her frail face and with all the strength she has Giffords absorbs anyone who’s willing to hug her quivering frame.

***

I’ve recently had the chance to read through the Journals of Lewis and Clark, in which the auspicious explorers ventured from St. Louis, picked up the trail along the Columbia river and arrived at the Pacific coast, from which they led their corp of 35 men and one woman and one infant back again.   The entire journey took years and upon completion the pair had a compilation of words — subjects, objects and verbs connecting them with events that drenched them like the winter rains that made them miserable at Fort Clatsop.   Anyway, no matter what adjectives, adverbs and prepositions we peruse, clinging like mildew to tarps or moss to trees, it’s obvious that neither Meriwether Lewis nor William Clark can fully express the urgency of the present moment through which they pass.   Lewis is notoriously moody and depressive.  Clark is succinct and even detached.   But when these military ambassadors invite Sacajewea into the mix we have the possibility of a break-through.

To cut to the chase, the sixteen year old indian guide sobs.   She comes to the end of every language at her disposal, her French-trapping husband’s, her American-employers, her Minnetaree captors, her Mandan benefactors and even her own band of Shoshone, to whom she makes this thrilling return:

Sacajewea was sent for; she came into the tent, sat down, and was beginning to interpret, when in the person of Cameahwait she recognized her brother:  She instantly jummped up, and ran and embraced him, throwing over him her blanket and weeping profusely… After some conversation between them she resumed her seat, and attempted to interpret for us, but her new situation seemed to overpower her, and she was frequently interrupted by her tears… (Saturday, August 17, 1805).

You see, the issues which surround the emotional intelligence of the writer are not irrelevant to any genre of literature, whether its a non-fiction chronicle that will rock recorded history, a fantasy-prone trilogy of novels that tap into the mythic consciousness of the western world or a poem which implies that human imagination has been woven into the very fabric of the corporeal world.

The other things I would just touch upon briefly involve the contributions of women and where writing will go in the next few decades and centuries with women asserting themselves and incorporating their gifts for emotivity into their writing.   U2, in one of the rock group’s most recent songs, offers this lyric:  “Women are the future of all the big revelations.”   And, looking around at all the proteges of Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, I have to applaud and affirm every feminine archetype, and more importantly, every female act of courage that I can absorb into my Low-T bloodstream.

As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,
a woman with crooked heels says to another woman
while they step along at a fair pace,
‘You know, I’m telling you, what I love best
is life. I love life! Even if I ever get
to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know?
Limping along?—I’d still … ‘ Out of hearing.

–Denise Levertov, from A February Evening In New York

Click here to view the embedded video.

The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swollenness, a foot, an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.

Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.

You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the mind, the subversion of choice by language…

–Adrienne Rich, from The Will to Change, Section 8

 

Could it be that Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery is the future of politics as we know it?   Or could it be that her story-telling struggles — what to leave in and what to leave out — will help Thomas Heise and others in their explorations of the “border zone”?   Is there a writer out there who will trust the emotional intelligence at work in the random tear?   Yes, I believe there is and will always be!

Peace–

This is what our move will look like, except our building is taller, pinker, and 1960s-er

There’s nothing like signing a binding contract in a language you don’t know. We got a “translation” of our lease in English, but it isn’t really a translation of the document we signed. It’s what is called a “Convenient Translation,” though we don’t know yet for whom it is designed to be most convenient.

The objective of this document is to let foreigners know the basics of what might be found in the German lease being signed, but of course we don’t know what is actually lurking between “Schlüsselversicherung angeraten” and “Grundstückflächen abgestellt.”

What we do know is that the Convenient Translation requires us to air out the rooms of our new apartment every day “by opening them completely (for at least ten minutes, three times a day)” all while maintaining the temperature in the apartment at 17° Celsius.

Also, surface repairs to toilets, walls, radiators, windows, doors, etc. must be carried out on a regulated timeline. Based on how long you live in the apartment, you pay a percentage of the surface repair cost for each item. For instance:

“If the surface repairs in the living room and bedrooms / hallways / vestibules / and toilets during the rental period are more than one year old, the tenant shall pay 1/5, for more than 2 years 2/5, for more than 3 years 3/5,” and so on.

This particular law almost makes you want to live in places for short stints so you don’t ever have to replace the toilet (or the surface of the toilet, anyway). But then there are the steep broker fees you have to pay each time you get a new apartment. The landlord generally does not appear until very late in the process. We haven’t met ours yet, but are supposed to today when we hand him a huge amount of money and he hands us some keys.

In many cases, the broker whittles the rental contestants down to the top three and then the landlord meets them and decides which he or she wants. The landlord seems somewhat like the Wizard of Oz, conducting a grand, mysterious scheme from behind a heavy velvet curtain.

Soon we will move in, once the barge arrives that is carrying our furniture, dishes, bikes, etc. It will dock at a port and our containers will be dragged back onto land and put through customs. And then the moving company will load them through the window of our fourth floor walk-up (which in Germany is the fifth floor since the first floor is the ground floor and the second floor is the first).

And then we’ll move in and eventually I’ll have a work permit and we’ll improve our German and someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to translate documents that will improve the lives of others, things like leases not intended to be signed and maybe also some poems.