For All the History of Grief

 

I saw this doorway and couldn't help but think of Arcihbald MacLeish's poem, Ars Poetica:

http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english25/materials/macleish.html

 

It's Maggie Daley's funeral today. She passed away on Thanksgiving day, here in Chicago. She was much loved and deeply admired; she fought a valiant fight against breast cancer and showed us how to live with grace and dignity. She loved the arts and she loved children; she started After School Matters, as a place to foster the talents of the young, in communion with the artists in Chicago. She leaves us richer with the beauty she has created here, her smile forever etched in our hearts. May she rest in peace.

Marilynne Robinson's, Absence of Mind

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays, Absence of Mind. It is taking me some time to finish them, because she is saying so much. In these four essays, she concentrates on the presumptions made, through the filter of science, that diminish us by too often truncating, or dismissing altogether, individual experience and consciousness in favor of the systemic, quantifiable models that science offers. These models are given added weight as threshold events; as such, all prior thinking is re-calibrated, or jettisoned, in favor of the new idea. She makes a persuasive argument that we are impoverished by this type of thinking.

Robinson understands just what's at stake in this divide between the language of science and the language of religion, and how that's played out in our lives. Science claims the ground of the rational, and the logic that naturally flows from the rational. There's a certain blindness to the claim. 

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Some quotes:

Each of us lives intensely within herself or himself, continuously assimilating past and present experience to a narrative and vision that are unique in every case yet profoundly communicable, whence the arts. And we all live in a great reef of collective experience, past and present, that we receive and preserve and modify.

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It is a strategy of parascientific argument to strip away culture-making, as if it were a ruse and a concealment within which lurked the imagined primitive who is for them our true nature.

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Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series) by Marilynne Robinson

 

 

 

Books on my nightstand

I always have a stack of books that I'm reading. I have a Kindle Fire on the way, so I will have a different kind of stack going! Here's what I'm looking at now:

 

Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

The Death of Adam - Marilynne Robinson

Imagination in Place - Wendell Berry

Nine Gates - Essays - Jane Hirshfield

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

The Creation of Feminist Consciousness - Gerda Lerner

 

On writing a novel...

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I've finished writing the novel, American Gothic Chicago, and I'm well into another, Under the Picasso. I write everyday. My writing is usually image driven -- I see the scene play out and I try to capture it with language. It's not always images, though; I listened to Michael Silverblatt interviewing Michael Ondaatje about Ondaatje's book, Divisadero. Ondaatje talked about the influence a movie sound director had had in his writing. Ondaatje took pains to incorporate sound as an specific element in his work. After hearing that podcast, I spent days infusing sound into scenes, just thinking about how to arrange it. It's subtle, but it makes a difference in the writing.

What I'm reading...

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I start out my day with poetry. Wallace Stevens is always on hand. There is a richness there that constantly informs.  I return, again and again, to his poem, The Idea of Order at Key West:

  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172206

 

I also love The Man with the Blue Guitar. Stevens helped me understand the way an artist sees the visible world and gives it a mixture of voice and silence in witnessing it.

 

 

I first encountered Stevens' poetry in an anthology that included three of his poems: The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Emperor of Ice Cream,  and  Anecdote of the Jar. I didn't know what to make of them, but I was intrigued. Several lines stayed with me, which is the way poetry works with me. So I read more of his poems and I continue to read and reread them and understand them in different ways. Just as rereading a novel at different times of your life brings forth a whole new book, poems keep renewing themselves, or I come to them new. Over the years, in some strange alchemy, the lines feel grafted to my bones. I like to read his poems out loud. The experience is something like listening to music you love with headphones on; by giving it voice the work becomes embodied. It's a different sort of concentration and it allows more of the poem to sink in.

Chicago Blizzard of 2011 - Thunder Snow - Strike

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