Theodora Goss's Blog, page 24

II. The Queen

This is the second section of my story “The Rose in Twelve Petals.” If you would like to see the first section, “The Witch,” look below!

Petals fall from the roses that hang over the stream, Empress Josephine and Gloire de Dijon, which dislike growing so close to the water. This corner of the garden has been planted to resemble a country landscape in miniature: artificial stream with ornamental fish, a pear tree that has never yet bloomed, bluebells that the gardener plants out every spring. This is the Queen’s favorite part of the garden, although the roses dislike her as well, with her romantically diaphanous gowns, her lisping voice, her poetry.

Here she comes, reciting Tennyson.

She holds her arms out, allowing her sleeves to drift on the slight breeze, imagining she is Elaine the lovable, floating on a river down to Camelot. Hard, being a lily maid now her belly is swelling.

She remembers her belly reluctantly, not wanting to touch it, unwilling to acknowledge that it exists. Elaine the lily maid had no belly, surely, she thinks, forgetting that Galahad must have been born somehow. (Perhaps he rose out of the lake?) She imagines her belly as a sort of cavern, where something is growing in the darkness, something that is not hers, alien and unwelcome.

Only twelve months ago (fourteen, actually, but she is bad at numbers), she was Princess Elizabeth of Hibernia, dressed in pink satin, gossiping about the riding master with her friends, dancing with her brothers through the ruined arches of Westminster Cathedral, and eating too much cake at her seventeenth birthday party. Now, and she does not want to think about this so it remains at the edges of her mind, where unpleasant things, frogs and slugs, reside, she is a cavern with something growing inside her, something repugnant, something that is not hers, not the lily maid of Astolat’s.

She reaches for a rose, an overblown Gloire de Dijon that, in a fit of temper, pierces her finger with its thorns. She cries out, sucks the blood from her finger, and flops down on the bank like a miserable child. The hem of her diaphanous dress begins to absorb the mud at the edge of the water.

(Illustration by Margaret Tarrant.)

I. The Witch

So, I decided to do something this holiday season? Which is: I decided to post my story “The Rose in Twelve Petals,” which was my first published story, and doesn’t appear anywhere online. It’s my holiday gift to anyone who happens to want a story this season. It’s based on “Sleeping Beauty,” so it’s a fairy tale of sorts. The story was written in twelve sections, one for each of the characters. Here is the first one, “The Witch.” The other characters will be appearing day by day, so if you’re interested in reading more, check back here daily . . .

This rose has twelve petals. Let the first one fall: Madeleine taps the glass bottle, and out tumbles a bit of pink silk that clinks on the table—a chip of tinted glass—no, look closer, a crystallized rose petal. She lifts it into a saucer and crushes it with the back of a spoon until it is reduced to lumpy powder and a puff of fragrance.

She looks at the book again. “Petal of one rose crushed, dung of small bat soaked in vinegar.” Not enough light comes through the cottage’s small-paned windows, and besides she is growing nearsighted, although she is only thirty-two. She leans closer to the page. He should have given her spectacles rather than pearls. She wrinkles her forehead to focus her eyes, which makes her look prematurely old, as in a few years she no doubt will be. Bat dung has a dank, uncomfortable smell, like earth in caves that has never seen sunlight.

Can she trust it, this book? Two pounds ten shillings it cost her, including postage. She remembers the notice in The Gentlewoman’s Companion: “Every lady her own magician. Confound your enemies, astonish your friends! As simple as a cookery manual.” It looks magical enough, with Compendium Magicarum stamped on its spine and gilt pentagrams on its red leather cover. But the back pages advertise “a most miraculous lotion, that will make any lady’s skin as smooth as an infant’s bottom” and the collected works of Scott.

Not easy to spare ten shillings, not to mention two pounds, now that the King has cut off her income. Rather lucky, this cottage coming so cheap, although it has no proper plumbing, just a privy out back among the honeysuckle.

Madeleine crumbles a pair of dragonfly wings into the bowl, which is already half full: orris root; cat’s bones found on the village dust heap; oak gall from a branch fallen into a fairy ring; madder, presumably for its color; crushed rose petal; bat dung.

And the magical words, are they quite correct? She knows a little Latin, learned from her brother. After her mother’s death, when her father began spending days in his bedroom with a bottle of beer, she tended the shop, selling flour and printed cloth to the village women, scythes and tobacco to the men, sweets to children on their way to school. When her brother came home, he would sit at the counter beside her, saying his amo, amas. The silver cross he earned by taking a Hibernian bayonet in the throat is the only necklace she now wears.

She binds the mixture with water from a hollow stone and her own saliva. Not pleasant this, she was brought up not to spit, but she imagines she is spitting into the King’s face, that first time when he came into the shop, and leaned on the counter, and smiled through his golden beard. “If I had known there was such a pretty shopkeeper in this village, I would have done my own shopping long ago.”

She remembers: buttocks covered with golden hair among folds of white linen, like twin halves of a peach on a napkin. “Come here, Madeleine.” The sounds of the palace, horses clopping, pageboys shouting to one another in the early morning air. “You’ll never want for anything, haven’t I told you that?” A string of pearls, each as large as her smallest fingernail, with a clasp of gold filigree. “Like it? That’s Hibernian work, taken in the siege of London.” Only later does she notice that between two pearls, the knotted silk is stained with blood.

She leaves the mixture under cheesecloth, to dry overnight.

Madeleine walks into the other room, the only other room of the cottage, and sits at the table that serves as her writing desk. She picks up a tin of throat lozenges. How it rattles. She knows, without opening it, that there are five pearls left, and that after next month’s rent there will only be four.

Confound your enemies, she thinks, peering through the inadequate light, and the wrinkles on her forehead make her look prematurely old, as in a few years she certainly will be.

(The painting is Sleeping Beauty by Sir Edward Burne Jones.)

The Witch

So, I decided to do something this holiday season? Which is: I decided to post my story “The Rose in Twelve Petals,” which was my first published story, and doesn’t appear anywhere online. It’s my holiday gift to anyone who happens to want a story this season. It’s based on “Sleeping Beauty,” so it’s a fairy tale of sorts. The story was written in twelve sections, one for each of the characters. Here is the first one, “The Witch.” The other characters will be appearing day by day, so if you’re interested in reading more, check back here daily . . .

This rose has twelve petals. Let the first one fall: Madeleine taps the glass bottle, and out tumbles a bit of pink silk that clinks on the table—a chip of tinted glass—no, look closer, a crystallized rose petal. She lifts it into a saucer and crushes it with the back of a spoon until it is reduced to lumpy powder and a puff of fragrance.

She looks at the book again. “Petal of one rose crushed, dung of small bat soaked in vinegar.” Not enough light comes through the cottage’s small-paned windows, and besides she is growing nearsighted, although she is only thirty-two. She leans closer to the page. He should have given her spectacles rather than pearls. She wrinkles her forehead to focus her eyes, which makes her look prematurely old, as in a few years she no doubt will be. Bat dung has a dank, uncomfortable smell, like earth in caves that has never seen sunlight.

Can she trust it, this book? Two pounds ten shillings it cost her, including postage. She remembers the notice in The Gentlewoman’s Companion: “Every lady her own magician. Confound your enemies, astonish your friends! As simple as a cookery manual.” It looks magical enough, with Compendium Magicarum stamped on its spine and gilt pentagrams on its red leather cover. But the back pages advertise “a most miraculous lotion, that will make any lady’s skin as smooth as an infant’s bottom” and the collected works of Scott.

Not easy to spare ten shillings, not to mention two pounds, now that the King has cut off her income. Rather lucky, this cottage coming so cheap, although it has no proper plumbing, just a privy out back among the honeysuckle.

Madeleine crumbles a pair of dragonfly wings into the bowl, which is already half full: orris root; cat’s bones found on the village dust heap; oak gall from a branch fallen into a fairy ring; madder, presumably for its color; crushed rose petal; bat dung.

And the magical words, are they quite correct? She knows a little Latin, learned from her brother. After her mother’s death, when her father began spending days in his bedroom with a bottle of beer, she tended the shop, selling flour and printed cloth to the village women, scythes and tobacco to the men, sweets to children on their way to school. When her brother came home, he would sit at the counter beside her, saying his amo, amas. The silver cross he earned by taking a Hibernian bayonet in the throat is the only necklace she now wears.

She binds the mixture with water from a hollow stone and her own saliva. Not pleasant this, she was brought up not to spit, but she imagines she is spitting into the King’s face, that first time when he came into the shop, and leaned on the counter, and smiled through his golden beard. “If I had known there was such a pretty shopkeeper in this village, I would have done my own shopping long ago.”

She remembers: buttocks covered with golden hair among folds of white linen, like twin halves of a peach on a napkin. “Come here, Madeleine.” The sounds of the palace, horses clopping, pageboys shouting to one another in the early morning air. “You’ll never want for anything, haven’t I told you that?” A string of pearls, each as large as her smallest fingernail, with a clasp of gold filigree. “Like it? That’s Hibernian work, taken in the siege of London.” Only later does she notice that between two pearls, the knotted silk is stained with blood.

She leaves the mixture under cheesecloth, to dry overnight.

Madeleine walks into the other room, the only other room of the cottage, and sits at the table that serves as her writing desk. She picks up a tin of throat lozenges. How it rattles. She knows, without opening it, that there are five pearls left, and that after next month’s rent there will only be four.

Confound your enemies, she thinks, peering through the inadequate light, and the wrinkles on her forehead make her look prematurely old, as in a few years she certainly will be.

(The painting is Sleeping Beauty by Sir Edward Burne Jones.)

Making Happy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about happiness, because I’ve been happy. Oh, I’ve also been tired, and sometimes frustrated, and sometimes cranky. But underneath, I’ve been happy, and that’s important because as you may remember, I went through a period of depression about two years ago. Serious, going-to-therapy-every-week depression. Of course, it was while I was finishing my PhD dissertation, which made me feel trapped and miserable, so that makes sense. But my point is that I know unhappy. I remember unhappy quite well . . .

There’s a message I see quite often, particularly on blogs and posted on Facebook: it’s that we alone are responsible for our happiness, and that our happiness depends on how we perceive the world. Not on our material circumstances. And I think that is exactly . . . wrong. Anyone who’s had a bug bite that itches and itches, or can’t set the thermostat so it produces the right temperature, and is always either too hot or too cold, knows it’s wrong. There are a lot of things in our lives that depend primarily on our perception, on the way we process our material circumstances. Success comes to mind: whether or not we are successful really does depend, I think, on how we see our circumstances rather than the circumstances themselves. We can define our own success. Perhaps even contentment, that sense of overall comfort, is primarily mental. Perhaps even joy.

But I believe that happiness is different: it’s a day to day, minute by minute thing. Whether I am happy at any give moment can depend quite a lot on whether or not I am eating a cupcake. If I am eating a cupcake, I am happy. (Depending on the cupcake, of course. I mean, I’m picky.) Happiness does in fact depend on things outside ourselves, so to make ourselves happy, we need to change things outside ourselves. (At least, that’s a lot easier than just trying to be happy, which I think is a very hard thing to do. Make yourself be happy, try to produce an internal state of happiness without changing anything external . . . Much easier to buy a cupcake.)

Here are the things I do to make myself happy, and notice what small things they are, how little it takes:

1. Take a bubble bath! This is my #1 go-to making happy thing, and it’s much more cost-effective than therapy.

2. Do the dishes. No, doing dishes does not make me happy. But having done them does! And this goes for all the other cleaning, straightening, organizing things as well. Making beds, vacuuming carpets, even cleaning the bathroom. Among other things, these get rid of that vaguely guilty feeling that comes from not having cleaned. But they also provide a feeling of accomplishment. You may not have finished your PhD dissertation, but hey, the dishes are done!

3. Buying and arranging fresh flowers. I know these are expensive: I’m lucky to have a neighborhood Trader Joe’s, where I can buy flowers each week. Just looking at them, on the table, the dresser, the windowsill, makes me happy.

4. Eating chocolate. Of course, it has to be the right chocolate: brownie cupcakes from Sweet, chocolate orange hazelnut torte from Burdick, even a Toblerone. But chocolate is a happy thing.

5. Painting toenails. Gold, dark burgundy, iridescent purple. Particularly fun when you know you’re going to be taking off your shoes for airport security. It’s a small sign of defiance: you want me to take off my shoes, security person? I have gold toenails!

6. Reading books. I know, I know, this one is obvious. But I also deliberately choose books that will make me happy. There are a lot of books out there that will make me unhappy, not because they’re sad, I’m fine with sad, but because they are boring or badly written. Good books are happy books.

7. Browsing thrift stores. Also antiques stores, when they’re the sorts of antiques stores in which you can actually afford things, old silver plate and transferware. I believe in retail therapy, as long as you’re doing it in a place where you’re not going to be anxious about the prices. If I can buy myself two sweaters in a thrift store for $10? I’m golden.

8. Waking by the river. I love to walk by my river and check on how it’s doing. Are the leaves turning yet? Have they fallen? What are the geese and squirrels doing? Walking in a natural space is necessary for mental health anyway: you need the sunlight, you need the wind in the treetops. But there is something particularly magical about water. If you can, walk near water. It will make you happy.

9. Listening to music. Another obvious one, but sometimes I forget how powerful music can be. And again, I’m picky. Loreena McKennit, I’ve found, is particularly happy-making.

I’m trying to think of a tenth thing I do to make myself happy, and if I think of it, I’ll mention it later. But these are the ones I could think of, off the top of my head. What I’m looking for is something easy, something you can do at a moment’s notice. For example, spending time with friends makes me happy, but that’s something I usually need to plan for. These are things I can do immediately, when I need to, by myself.

And they work even when there is something important making you unhappy, because external circumstances can do that, in a powerful way. If you feel trapped, if you feel as though you can’t do what you want — that, more than anything, will make you unhappy. Even in that circumstance, bubble baths will get you a long way. They got me through a PhD dissertation (well, and therapy).

This is me, on a rainy day, walking around the city. Being very happy just to see the city in the rain!

Having a Purpose

When I walk through the bookstore nowadays (the university Barnes and Noble, where these books are on a front table, by the coffee shop), I see so many books on finding your purpose in life. The other day, I stopped and flipped through them, out of curiosity. I didn’t buy one, because I’ve always had a sense of purpose, as long as I can remember. I don’t need to find one, thanks. But it’s not just in books: there are videos out there, programs on the internet, all on finding a sense of purpose.

I’m not going to write about finding your purpose in life.

The strangest, for me, was a video on living purposefully. If you don’t have a sense of purpose, said the man in the video, you can still live purposefully, mindfully. Which seems like a good idea anyway, but is not at all the same thing. It struck me as strange because living that way was offered as a substitute for having a sense of purpose, as though we all need a sense of purpose. These books and videos and programs all imply that it’s important to have a purpose in life, that without it you’re missing something.

As someone who’s always had a strong sense of purpose, my response is that it’s not, and that having a purpose can actually be — painful, troublesome, disorienting. Keep in mind that this is based on my experience, so someone else who has a strong sense of purpose could describe it quite differently. But here’s what it looks like in my life.

I’ve always known that I was a writer. Not just that I wanted to write, but that I was, at my core, a writer. As a child, I read and told stories. As a teenager, I read and published poetry in the high school literary magazine. As a college student, I read and published poetry in the college literary magazine. I was an English major because I couldn’t imagine studying anything other than literature. As a law school student, I read when I was supposed to be studying for exams, and I wrote a novel. I started publishing poetry in literary journals. As a corporate lawyer, I kept novels in my office desk and read them during lunch. I plotted my escape, when I could return to graduate school to study English literature. In graduate school, I read and read and read, and I went to two summer writing workshops, using my stipend to pay for them. I wrote short stories and started publishing them in magazines and anthologies. After graduate school, I made the decision to teach writing rather than literature, because I was a writer, to my core.

I experience writing not as something I’ve chosen, but as something that has chosen me. I have work I need to do, and that work is writing, and my life is in that work. My purpose in life is that work. If I’m not writing, I start to feel sick, anxious. I start to feel as though I have failed.

I wrote down some of the ways that having a sense of purpose affects one’s life, or at least my life. When you have a purpose,

1. You prioritize that purpose above other activities. Like sleep.

This is not necessarily a good thing, since sleep is important. Eating is important. Having an actual life, other than the fulfillment of your purpose, is important. But all of that can seem unimportant when I haven’t written for a week, and it’s midnight, and I tell myself that instead of going to sleep, I’m just going to look at that story or part of that story, just that one paragraph. I’m not going to revise anything. But as soon as I open the document, I’m gone, into another country — and the next time I look up, it’s three a.m.

2. You make decisions based on your purpose that can make other people wonder what you’re thinking.

Like, for example, giving up a career as a corporate lawyer because I knew I could never be a corporate lawyer and write.

3. You strive for perfection in your art, which is not in fact achievable.

You try to write perfect sentences, perfect stories, even perfect novels. (Trying to write a perfect novel with perfect sentences is a good way to drive yourself mad.) There is no such thing as perfection in prose. There is perfection in poetry, but the only perfect poem was written by John Keats, and you are probably not John Keats, and your poem is probably not “Ode to Autumn,” so you’re probably out of luck. But you’re going to try anyway.

4. You have both overweening confidence in your abilities, and abject self-doubt.

You are smart enough to know your own talent, but also smart enough to feel your limitations and shortcomings. After all, if you have a sense of purpose, you’ve probably been practicing your art in one way or another since you were a child. And you compare yourself to the best that has come before you. So there are days when you say to yourself, I’m not Virginia Woolf, therefore I am a gnat. You are perpetually disappointed in yourself, and yet perpetually working harder to get better at what you do, because you don’t want to be a gnat.

(Are you surprised that writers have breakdowns, after what I’ve written?)

5. Your purpose can, potentially, fill all of your life. All of it, with meaning and striving and fulfillment.

Which is wonderful, except when you realize that there are other things in life as well, like sleep. And eating. And maybe taking a class in Japanese, but not so you can write about Japan in a story. Because it’s so easy to do things only so you can write about them in a story . . . Having a purpose can fill your entire life, which is why I think there are so many books about having a purpose. Because we all want meaning, fulfillment.  But it can also substitute for having a life.  It can also lead to overwork, depression, breakdown.

So I wonder if having a purpose is rather like having an illness or addiction, and people who don’t have one, or aren’t sure they have one, should instead simply live their lives, and enjoy them? I mean, look at the lives of the great writers, the great artists. Do you really want lives like those? Unless you can’t help it . . .

This is Virginia Woolf. Whom, as I may have pointed out, I am not:

What I’ve Learned

I had a birthday recently. And I thought about the things I’ve learned so far in life. There are a great many of them — after all, I have two graduate degrees, so I must have learned something. But I mean those fundamental lessons that you hold on to, that you use every day or week. And since it seems to be the fashion to make lists, I thought I would make a list of some things I’ve learned so far. This is, obviously, in no particular order — except the order in which I wrote them down.

1. You can tell the people who are strong, because they are also kind.

I’ve found this to be generally true, that people who are strong, who are confident and sure of themselves, certain about who they are and where they’re going, are also kind. They have no need to hurt others. The people who have hurt me have inevitably done so out of weakness, because they were uncertain about where they were going, unsure about who they were in the first place. Knowing that makes it easier to forgive people who hurt you. It’s also useful to know that when you are unkind, it’s usually because of some weakness in yourself.

2. It’s possible to live an extraordinary life, but it takes an enormous amount of work.

I know people who live extraordinary lives, who are creating great works of art, traveling all over the world. And they work very, very hard. Their example shows me that I, too, can have an extraordinary life. And to get working . . .

3. Almost all of your clothes can be washed in a machine or by hand. Except ballgowns: always get ballgowns professionally cleaned.

I suppose I should add business suits to that list, but I don’t have any business suits. That was one reason I left the law: I never wanted to wear a business suit again. And almost all of your clothes can be washed in hotel sinks, which is useful to know when you’re traveling all over the world, living that extraordinary life. (But jeans and socks take a very long time to dry.)

4. There will come a day when you realize that you’ve gotten everything you wanted, and then you will need to decide whether you wanted it after all, or were simply fulfilling the dreams that others or society had for you.

The earlier this day comes, the better, because it often involves a course correction. You may well decide that after all, the house in the suburbs and what was supposed to be a secure career make you feel like jumping in a lake. That you feel as though your soul is turning brown like one of your houseplants. It is better to change your life than jumping into a lake — harder, but better.

5. You must take care of your skin.

Cleanse, exfoliate, moisturize, apply sunscreen. As though you belonged to some obscure church of the skin, in which this ritual was considered necessary for the salvation of your immortal soul.

6. Clothing sizes bear absolutely no relation to the size of clothing.

The numbers on clothing bear no relation to anything on the material plane. They are a secret code used to communicate with spiritual beings in other dimensions, and are beyond our primitive understanding. Ignore them.

7. Everything you want to accomplish takes longer than you want it to take.

I’ve found that everything I’ve ever wanted, whether it’s going to graduate school, finishing my PhD, moving into the city, has taken me a year longer than I wanted it to take. When I desperately want to do something, and it isn’t getting done, I think — oh yes, the one year rule.

8. Learn how to be alone, or you will end up staying in relationships long past the time when you should have left.

I’ve seen so many people stay in relationships because they were afraid to be alone. Or get into relationships for that reason. It is much worse to be in a relationship that makes you feel alone than to actually be alone.

9. Your habits create who you are.

I hate to admit this, but it’s so true: what you do every day creates the person who are. At some point, I started exercising every day, and I started looking different. Like a person who exercises every day . . . When I write every day, I feel like a writer, I publish like a writer. When I don’t write every day, I feel lost. The small habits, the sleeping and eating and exercising and working, even what you wear every day, create who you are as a person. We like to think that we are who we are, and our habits come out of that — but we create who we are incrementally, out of all our habits. Day by day by day. (Which means we can also change ourselves, incrementally.)

10. You can buy happiness, but it’s called something else.

You can’t actually buy happiness, but you can in fact buy something that makes you happy. The trick is, that thing has to make you more the person you want to be. That’s what makes you happy, not the thing itself. Some time ago, I bought an adorable pair of pixie boots at Goodwill. They were $10 (the price is still on the bottom of the boot, in silver marker). They would not have made me happy if they had been too expensive, because that would have gone against my idea of myself — as someone who does not spend a great deal of money on clothes, but is nevertheless more chic than many people who do. Every time I wear those boots, I feel as though I’m dancing along the streets, as though I’m some sort of urban princess. They make me happy, because they allow me to be the person I want to be. Another thing that makes me happy? Buying plane tickets. So you can in fact buy happiness, but it’s called “pixie boots” or “plane tickets” or “dark chocolate.” If you’re unhappy, buying a little bit of happiness is not such as bad idea.

Here, by the way, are those boots, with a gray lace skirt and black jacket I wore to the theater this week. “Theater tickets”: that’s another way to buy happiness.

I’m sure there are things I could add to that list? I have, after all, learned more than ten things so far . . . But I’ll have to think about what they are. I thought I would end this blog post with a picture of me by the river, being pensive. And perhaps a little wiser than last year.

Alone Time

I’m so tired!

I’ve been meaning to keep up with this blog, to write three times a week, but there’s so much else to keep up with. So much taking energy . . .

It’s not the work, although I have a lot of that. But it’s manageable. What tires me out is the people — don’t get me wrong, I love people. And I have the good fortune to work with absolutely wonderful people — smart, dedicated students and supportive colleagues who are continually innovating in their work. I love everything I do . . .

My problem is that I’m an introvert, and hypersensitive (meaning that I over-respond to stimuli, like bright lights or medicine), and even a bit sensory defensive. So although I love people, I need alone time, when I can sit in a room, with the light dimmed, and do something like listen to soft music. All by myself.

I know I’m not the only one. Since I have so many friends who are writers and artists, many of my friends need alone time as well. They tend to be introverts, people who want to go deeply in life rather than broadly. And deeply often means deeply into themselves, which you can only do when you’re alone. The challenge of being an introvert, of drawing your energy from alone time and expending it during time with other people, is that you can go too much into yourself, spend too much time alone. I have to make sure I get out and socialize, not just see people during work.

(I have sixty students. So almost every day of the week, I’m with people. And I live in a large city, where when I step out the door I see people. Although sometimes being in a large city, where you don’t actually know the people you see on the street, can be refreshing, and not so different from alone time. There’s something lovely about anonymous time as well . . .)

In addition to spending this week with people, I’ve been sick, with always lowers my threshold for sensory stimuli. Some days, all I wanted to do was stay in bed . . .

So the trick is, trying to figure out how to get enough alone time in my days so that I can function well, because if I don’t get that alone time, I find that I’m tired and cranky. And you can’t really be cranky when you’re teaching. One thing that helps is going down to the river, who is a very restful sort of neighbor. (The river is almost out my back door, separated from me by a bridge. When I walk over the bridge, I’m right there, on the riverbank.)

I thought with this post I would include some photos of my favorite willow tree, whom I like to visit when I walk by the river. Here it is!

And here is me trying to be a willow spirit. Sometimes I just go and sit by the willow. I look at the river — I think looking at water is a good way to still and refresh the mind. We live metaphorically, although we often don’t realize it. Water is a metaphor for the unconscious, for the depths of the mind itself, and so looking at water can help you get there, to that still, deep part. And it can be cleansing, as water is. This was me after a long day of teaching, down by the willow . . .

(I feel as though I should write about this? Life as metaphor. When I have a little more time . . .)

The Little Things

I would make a terrible Buddhist.

I’m no good at non-attachment, and I’m not sure I would want to be. I get attached to all sorts of things, places and people and even teacups, and I get very sad when I have to leave, or I lose a friendship, or a teacup breaks. I should, of course, be philosophical and tell myself that all things pass away, but I can’t. I would rather feel the pain of loss and disappointment than be safe from it, in my own sensible, philosophical calm.

I’m too in love with the physical world, with the texture and experience of it: city streets, and tree bark, and oatmeal in the mornings with orange juice and a chai latte, and a vase of flowers to greet me, and twilight. Oscar Wilde once gave some very good advice, through the mouth of Lord Henry Wotton I think: “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” I look on this as accurate medical advice, at least for problems of the soul. (I haven’t had problems of the senses — they have all been problems of the soul, soul aches. Some of us are prone to them, I think.) So when I have an ache of the soul, I go on a walk and look at the river, or have a bowl of brownies and ice cream (together), or take a bubble bath. I go to the senses.

The little things can save you. Flowers in a vase, a doily on a wooden table, a painting on a wall. A book of fairy tales. Walking by a garden, or beneath a tree.

I can’t become unattached from the world, because the world is so splendid, heart-breakingly so. And that means my heart will indeed break, probably over and over again, but the cure for heartbreak, for aching of the soul, is the world itself in all its splendor. Particularly the little things: they tend to heal more than they hurt. A vase of flowers will probably not break your heart, but it will help ease heartbreak. They are the cures for the big things, the heart-breaking things. I don’t think you can have the healing without the heartbreak, the flowers without the hurt. Non-attachment means giving up desire, and therefore also escaping from suffering. But I don’t want to give up desire, even for a skirt that swirls around my ankles as I walk. Even for a soft blanket to curl up in, or a teacup with pink roses on it. Which means that I will suffer when the teacup breaks, or the skirt wears out. All things break, all things wear out eventually. We all die.

But I don’t think you get the splendor without the suffering. And I know that you can’t make art without the suffering. There is no necessary connection between art and suffering — but I think that to make art, you have to accept the ordinary conditions of being human. Saints, who have renounced the world, are the subjects of art rather than artists.

But my main point here isn’t about art or suffering. It’s about the little things, like flowers in a vase. Make sure you pay attention to the little things, for they will save you.

True Partnership

I’ve been thinking about relationships lately, partly because I have an idea for a book. Not the one I’m currently working on, which doesn’t focus on relationships — it focuses on friendships between women. But I mean romantic relationships, not friendships. We’ve had this idea, for the last hundred years or so, that we’re all supposed to be looking for True Love.

I say the last hundred years, because the idea of falling in love and then spending the rest of your life with the person you fell in love with is a fairly recent one. We trace romance back to the chivalric ideal, the Romances of the medieval period. But that was a very different ideal — there, your True Love was not the person you spent the rest of your life with. Romantic love happened outside the marital bond, and was destructive to it. Tristan and Isolde does not end with the marriage of Tristan and Isolde. It’s not until the eighteenth century, but even more so the nineteenth century, that we get people falling in love, getting married, and presumably living happily ever after — in a sense, the novel takes the plot of the fairy tale and moves it into the domestic sphere.

So we get the fairy tale idea of True Love, which we are all supposed to wish for, to try and find. I’m afraid I’ve gotten cynical about that lately. When you’re a writer, and interested in people, and good at listening, people tell you things — as though you were Hercules Poirot. And sometimes the relationships that look so lovely on the outside aren’t so lovely after all, when you hear about what happens on the inside. The thing is, someone can love you and still treat you horribly. Or at least, that’s what I’ve seen in some relationships. Tristan and Isolde weren’t so good to each other either.

So I have a different ideal than the cultural one, which is True Partnership. I see this too, and not infrequently. I suppose True Partnership includes True Love, but I think of it as a relationship in which love is not simply an emotion that the partners feel for one anther: it is instead a constant basis for action. Love is a verb, not just a noun. The people I know who seem to be True Partners (seem to be because of course we can never get inside a relationship) are each wholly themselves — they each have their own lives. But in addition, they also have a life together. That life allows them to develop as themselves, to keep their own identities. It does not operate as a constraint on who they are, and indeed it helps in their self-development. Each partner becomes more himself or herself in the relationship. Separated, they would each still be whole — but together, they are more than the sum of their parts. True Partnership involves both freedom and togetherness, both independence and trust.

I read an article recently about a couple who had done everything together, all their lives. At the end of their lives, they died within a week of one another. A lot of people though that was sweet — I thought it sounded like a play by Jean Paul Sartre. It would be claustrophobic, not to have one’s own life and identity, to be only a couple. And I’ve met people who hesitated to do what they wanted because the other partner would disapprove. Who quite literally needed to ask permission — whether to attend a social event or pursue their professional goals. I’ve never understood living like that.

The picture I’m going to include at the end of this blog post is of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. They seem, to me (and again, one can never get inside a relationship), an example of what True Partnership might look like. They weren’t interested in destroying each other, and would make for lousy opera. But they seem to have had a marriage that was truly good for them both.

(I suppose I’ve seen too many relationships in which people love each other, but at some level don’t actually like each other? They would love each other more if the other person could change, just a little . . . could become more of what they want in a mate. That’s a deadly sort of relationship. At least, I think it is, although I see it plenty.)

So, that’s my ideal: a True Partnership. Because I’m not sure that True Love is enough. I love opera, but who wants to end up in one?

Women and Trees

Recently, as I was scrolling down my Facebook newsfeed, I saw this picture:

It’s called “The Tree Spirit,” and it’s by an artist named Sean Andrew Murphy. It’s available as a print in his Etsy shop.

It made me think about women and trees. I’ve always loved trees, I think because they’re so solid. Trees are dependable: they may lose their leaves, but they’re still going to be there. The core of who they are will not change. When you are troubled, you could do much worse than going out and talking to a tree . . .

I’ve written several poems about women who fall in love with trees, and I think that’s because trees have qualities that we want in a partner. That solidity and dependability, the ability to keep growing, despite injuries. To grow around old hurts, to thrive despite them. A kind of perpetual renewal, yet also a permanence.

It makes sense that cultures other than our own have thought of trees as conscious, have painted or sung about men and women stepping out of trees. (When we aren’t looking, of course.) The Greeks had their dryads and hamadryads. When I was a child, I used to wonder what the man or woman of each tree would look like. I would try to imagine them, inspired I suppose by C.S. Lewis’ descriptions of the tree spirits in the Narnia books. For me, the most magical moment in the entire series is when Aslan brings the trees back to life, in Prince Caspian. The land has been asleep, under the rule of the Telmarines (who are early versions of muggles stuck in a land whose magic they disbelieve in on principle and reject out of fear). But when Aslan returns, it wakes up again — the magic is reborn. Looking at the world around me, I thought, we live in a land asleep. That must be why I can’t see the spirits of the trees and waters. That must be why magic doesn’t work. We’ve lost something, but if Aslan came . . .

Murphy says that his picture was inspired by Arthur Rackham, and sure enough Rackham has painted a woman and tree as well:

Now that I’m an adult, I keep reading news stories that reveal the strangeness of the world: elephants communicating at frequencies we don’t understand, trees creating communities underground with their roots. The world we see, the world we experience with our limited senses, is such a small part of the world that actually exists. It’s not as though we’ve lost the magic. It’s as though we willfully ignore it. We are the ones asleep — the rest of the world is still as awake as it ever was. This is where science and magic meet, and we find out that truth is more fantastical than our fantasies. Mother Nature is, after all, the greatest fantasy writer.

Before I thought of writing this blog post, I took a picture of me and posted it. I joked that I had decided to become a tree spirit.

It’s a bit of wishful thinking on my part — as though I could become a tree, become part of the natural world in a way I am not. Take on some of the qualities I admire in trees. I would like that . . .

The thing about this world is, Aslan isn’t coming. It’s up to all of us to wake up, and wake each other up.

The pictures by Murphy and Rackham both do that, because while they are literally false, they are figuratively and symbolically true. They express the deep truth of trees . . .