some pictures of my life

butternut squash for a pre-thanksgiving thanksgiving party

 mmmm

but a surprising amount of work (ow, my sore hands)

recent-ish pictures of the trees near my apartment (they are a bit more fall-colored now)

I need to figure out what this kind is, it's my favorite. well, favorite after silver maples and willows and american sycamores and whatever the tree is on discipleship hill that I used to write in. and maybe dogwoods in spring.

the Halloween event in D.C. that The Housemate and I went to on Tuesday. (we observed the festivities from on top of a dumpster).

little shards of narrative glass

He turned the corner.

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them.



"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning."

He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.

"And if you look" - she nodded at the sky - "there's a man in the moon."

He hadn't looked for a long time.



She laughed at this. "Good night!" She started up her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. "Are you happy?" she said.

"Am I what?" he cried.

But she was gone - running in the moonlight. Her front door shut gently.



What a strange meeting on a strange night... He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.



"Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"

"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you. And because we know each other."

-Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury


This has been my bus reading for the past few days. I can't believe I never read Fahrenheit 451 before... good stuff. I would like to live in such a way that someone might describe me like this, like Guy Montag thinking about Clarisse McClellan. 

what a weird day

Thia: It's still funny to me that you like hockey now.

Me: I learned something about the Stanley Cup the other night. When it gets full of names, they can just - it's on rings, the names are, I mean, and they can just slide the top one off and put a new blank one on the bottom.

Thia: [blank look]

Me: So each name is on it for like - 13 years.

Thia: So the names aren't on it forever?

Me: No. But they have a vault to put them in!

Thia: What - [helpless giggling] - How did you even -

Me: I saw this picture online and it looked like it was getting full of names, so I wondered what happened. When it got full of names. So I googled it -

Thia: [more laughing] Classic.

Me: - and there were all these threads on Yahoo Ask about the same thing, and they were all answered pretty much the same way, so I figured it was probably true.

Thia: ... It's like David Foster Wallace, setting the novel-about-everything in a Tennis Academy. Maybe this will be important to your writing, someday.

Me: ... maybe.

--

I almost missed the bus today coming out of work - there's construction or something going on in front of the bus stop and the lane was closed and my bus almost drove past without stopping. I ran out into the closed lane and waved at the bus and the driver pulled over half a block down the street, and I ran and got on. It kind of felt like I had suddenly turned into one of those city-slicker New Yorkers from the movies, or something. Like when people very confidently hail a taxi in a crowded street. 

--

Conversations with the Boss always makes me feel vaguely panicky. I could feel myself flushing today when he was asking me about my results/experiments... "Hey, no pressure," he said, "just as long as you're having fun."

Right. Let me just stop sweating nervously and then we can talk.

--

I thought for about half an hour today that my identity got stolen, thanks to a charge I didn't recognize on my bank statement. Then, after I had already called the bank in a panic, I realized it was actually legitimate. 

It was one of those moments that made me feel 'incompetent at life.' One of these days, I keep thinking, I will actually have everything under control. I won't make any more embarrassing mistakes. EVER.

That probably isn't true, huh. : )

"Help," I said, "I feel like I'm on the verge of very messy."

But The Housemate rescued her own cake from the jaws of disaster (or splattering over the stove top, whichever), and here's the finished product:

A brief silence for eating cake, and then: "I think I like other people's birthdays almost as much as mine," I said.

The Housemate laughed. "Emily, you love your birthday."

I remembered how I was imagining my own birthday while I was making this cake tonight. "...Yeah, that's true."

Also true: I don't think I will ever get too old to ask for help scraping batter out of the bowl and into the pan. 

if you aren't into poetry, you can just move along now

because this blog post is dedicated to my new favorite poet.


[It's such a beautiful night I feel like I can't sleep. The rain is falling on the skylights, soft and unpredictable, a funny sort of conversation. The quiet-seeming yellow lights strung across my window, Anais Mitchell's "Child Ballads" playing... ah, life just burns at me sometimes, how wonderful it is.]


okay, so, you know how i just wrote "meet Christian Wiman. This will never happen, but a girl can dream" as part of my '20 things to do' list?

Yeah, yesterday I listened to this On Being podcast, an hour-long interview with this lovely human being. I felt like I had met him. I was listening to it at work and I had to keep pausing because my eyes kept burning like I was going to cry. It was kind of weird, actually, but I'm chalking it down to one of those odd 'kindred spirits' moments and leaving it at that.

So now I'm just going to quote a bunch of stuff he said on the show/in essays archived on the poetry foundation website because I think he's awesome & I want all these thoughts in one place.

__

Krista Tippett to Christian Wiman: You know, you've written "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world, a movement towards the world."
Me: Yesss.
__

Ms. Tippett: So one thing I really like in your poetry and I think it connects also to your faith is this real tie to reality, which also gets intellectualized, the notion of reality. Do you know what I mean [laugh]? I don't know. When I was reading through you, I also found a lot of reference to reality from Simone Weil, "It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering" or even in this essay you wrote, "Hive of Nerves." You talked about Christ using metaphors, speaking the language of reality in terms of the physical world. So tell me about how you think poetry works with reality uniquely.

Mr. Wiman: Well, you know, I've been sick lately and I actually had a bone marrow transplant and was in the hospital for quite a long time. And one of the things, poetry died for me for a while. I found that it just wasn't speaking to me. I think I had certain expectations that took me a while to realize were false expectations. I think we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world and taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. I have to say, when I was, you know, faced with the actual ineffable, I didn't want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.

I wanted the world, you know, in front of my eyes, and the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete, sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again. There's a great quote from the mid-20th-century literary critic R.P. Blackmur. He's talking about John Berryman. He said that his work "adds to the stock of available reality." It added to the stock of available reality, and that's a good way to think about what a real poem can do. It suddenly makes the amount of reality that you have in your life greater. You're able to apprehend more of it.


...Mr. Wiman: Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.

__

From The Poetry Foundation...


All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.

***

Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

***

You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.

***

Most poets I know read almost unconsciously at first, feeling the poem’s formal and linguistic dynamics as much as its “meaning” (in the end, there is no way to separate meaning from a poem’s form and sound). Meaning matters, of course, and most poems do have some bedrock denotative sense upon which the mind can rest. But still, some mystery usually remains. Poetry, like life, has its patches of pure black, its furthest interiors where meaning gleams darkly, and must remain in that darkness if it is to mean at all. You know a good poem by whether or not those irreducible dark spots are integral to your experience of the whole. “Our only obscurities...should be those we are driven into,” Ruth Pitter once wrote, “then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.”

***

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise.

***

For all the canons and anthologies, for every rock-solid reputation and critical consensus, poetry is personal or it is nothing. That is, until a poem has been tested on your own pulse, to paraphrase John Keats, until you have made up your own mind and heart about where you stand in relation to it, and it to you—until this happens, all poetry is merely literature, all reading rote. It’s true that some people are better readers of poetry than others; that some people’s judgment matters (for the culture as a whole) more than others; that, just as with music or art, there are elements of craft and historical perspective essential to being able to formulate a meaningful response. But still: poetry is made up of poems, and poems repulse and entice in unpredictable ways, and anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eccentric canon around in his head. This is half the fun of it all.

Special bonus feature: this recitation of Robert Bringhurst's "These Poems, She Said."

So, believe me yet? He's the best. The best.

200th post

I thought about doing some kind of epic "200" list for my 200th post, but that seemed like a lot of work for a small payoff. But then I thought, 20 is kind of like 200, except... pleasingly small.

So, I bring to you:

20 things I want to do (in no particular order) before I write 100 more blog posts

1. read Infinite Jest again, this time in chronological order.
2. submit a poem to a literary journal, just for fun.
3. gain greater guitar skills. this is actually going to happen, unless I somehow manage to write 100 blog posts in the next 3 weeks.
4. go to an NHL game, try not to feel guilty about the violence of the game, etc.
5. read The Brothers Karamazov; attempt to build a friendlier relationship with russian literature.
6. go on a date. ...one recent trip from harrisonburg to bethesda included a conversation between 4 women on the merits of online dating. which was hilarious, I tell you what, but a less creepy option might be to find a guy from hyattesville to go with me to a poetry reading at busboys and poets.
7. make pumpkin soup in a pumpkin. this also will happen, thanks to The Housemate.
8. memorize another Eliot poem. 
9. meet Christian Wiman. this will never happen, but a girl can dream.
10. go to a political protest. surely something interesting will happen near me before I reach 300 posts.
11. sleep a lot. this will definitely happen.
12. make something edible with The Housemate using the foraged acorns. hopefully be pleasantly surprised.
13. get a pet. a turtle? give said creature a name relating to particle physics (charm? lepton? yes.)
14. send more mail. this is not altruistic. I would like to get more mail.
15. go to an art museum. maybe after the government un-shuts itself.
16. visit baltimore & hopefully run into the crazy americorps people again. oh, and hopefully NOT get lost.
17. gain public transit skills. DC Metro, I'm looking at you.
18. start a fiction-writing group? this probably will not happen, given my neuroses about my writing + how busy all my writing friends/acquaintances are. 
19. re-henna my hair. or something.
20. grow an avocado tree. seedling. whatever. it's in the works.

on elephant ears & gregory orr

How badly the world needs words.

Don't be fooled

By how green it is,

How it seems to be thriving.

"Willow" rescues that tree 

From its radiant perishing.

How much more so then 

When you name the beloved.

-Gregory Orr

A year later, the Elephant Ear plant is still growing.

Thia and I named her Ellie when we got her last year at the Relief Sale.

 

She had quite the personality.

This weekend I got to re-pot the baby plant growing out of the roots. 

So! My fifth year in a row of attending the Harrisonburg Relief Sale. :) Gosh, it's nice to feel the sense of belonging that comes from running into seven of your old professors, from mad-dash hugs from 8-year-olds, from seeing familiar faces scattered throughout a crowd. 

I don't have enough words to explain how it feels to hear people start to clap as the bidding for quilts pushes above $1000. How it feels to imagine the money going to help relief efforts in Syria, or to support my friends working for MCC in Colombia and Nigeria. 

I'll just say that it feels good.

--

I'll also say that  planting the baby elephant ear made me think of potential; all that space in the pot for growth.

I'm thinking that maybe I'll just call the baby plant L. Like "Ellie," and also - like a reminder, maybe; like a prayer for L who is working, still, in Colombia.


did the beloved die?
yes and no.
only really ceasing
when we cease to care.

...which is to say:
helping the beloved
to be reborn
by writing and reading
poems.

which is to say:
we have an urgent purpose.

which is to say.

-gregory orr

the view from Thia's front porch

yes, it's true; the world is beautiful

a handful of change

"I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But...who gets excited by a mere penny?

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

It is that simple. What you see is what you get."

-Annie Dillard


Some pennies from the last 24 hours:

*my brother texting me about hockey
*seeing the praying mantis perched on the truck at the end of my street
*signing up for a CSA with The Housemate and picking out a week's worth of fruit & fall veggies
*listening to anais mitchell in the car; the setting sun lighting the beltway all orange and gold while the shenandoah song was playing
*facebook conversations with friends in florida and mississippi and pittsburgh
*listening to This American Life as I'm working (yes, I am still working...)
*listening to all the international scientists discussing my country's government. (ha. hahahaha. ...ugh)
*acorn squash for supper


well! I feel much more cheerful about my life after making that list. feel free to add pennies to the comments below...