Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows.”

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

 

The random quote of the day will be on vacation until January 3, 2022. Happy holidays everyone!



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Random quote of the day:

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, quoted in The Leader’s Digest by Jim Clemmer

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Orville and Wilbur, Katy Perry, or the Avengers. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

My hands remember
what mind does not: just so my
father planted beans.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve long been fascinated by Green Men. I’ve only figured out recently that this may be because my own father was a Green Man.

It’s funny the things that set you to remembering.

The other day when I was in the cafeteria at work, I had a semi-meaningless conversation about pickles. That conversation sparked a memory so keen I had to write it down immediately.

My father planted a vast vegetable garden every year in the immense back yard of our rental property in Venice. He had no tolerance for flowers and, like as not, he’d pull them up if he needed more space for edibles.

Still, the garden he planted was a work of art: lovingly conditioned soil, weeks in churning and amending, row upon neat little row of carrot, onion, parsnip, red radish, bell pepper. Beyond those rows, beautifully rounded little mounds held cucumber, ringed round with carefully dug irrigation channels. The leaves of the cucumbers were hairy and pointy-edged, the stems thick and fuzzy, bobbing green in the summer breeze, yellow in the fall. The tomato plants on the other side of the cucumbers always started in orderly, well-staked rows, but by fall they danced in an entwined frenzy. Along the back fence, wire with a spiky top, banana squash climbed. Sometimes corn grew beside it.

Between the back fence crops and the tomatoes ran an arbor for string beans—a porous frame of wood and chicken wire during the fallow months, ten feet tall and perhaps twenty feet long. In the summer months, though, it became a green tunnel as the beans climbed up the sides and over the top. The sun shone liquid green through the leaves, and even in the hottest summer the earth beneath—near-black with fecundity and never dried completely during the growing season—felt cool to my bare feet. That soil made all things seem possible. I would wander up and down it daydreaming, getting a buzz from the green smell of the beans.

If ever there was a place my soul felt repose, it was there. I suspect my father felt the same way. He preferred spending time in his garden, in the green bean tunnel, to time with my mother and I. Perhaps that wasn’t so, just my perception, but it felt to me as if he couldn’t find a way to bridge the gap between that shining green light and the warmth of the hearth. After the day’s gardening, he seemed empty and at a loss. The demons that tormented him grew thicker in the air.

He’d nearly reached retirement age by the time I was born. When I was small, I adored helping him in the garden, just being with him. When I hit puberty, our worldviews had grown too divergent. At least two generations separated us, and only in the green space had we any hope of reaching across the decades. Even in puberty, the garden and that cool green tunnel seemed like a magic place. When the churning of my brain and growing body got to be too much, I’d return to it and wander up and down. I had this feeling, way down deep, that if I could just make it to the end of that tunnel, the true end, not the one I saw with my eyes, I’d be changed. Or maybe all my wishes would be granted. I never made it that far.

I’d see Dad in the tunnel, slowly walking up and down, lifting the bean pods tenderly in his hands to check their progress, seeing if they were ready for the ritual of the canning process. Mom and I were not allowed near the kitchen when the canning sacrament was underway. Mornings in late summer and early fall, I’d wake to the smell of green beans cooking, ready for the mason jars; or dill, alum, and vinegar boiling to turn fresh-picked cucumbers into the best pickles in the world. An astringent smell, but to me it held the promise of something delicious in the heart of winter.

I still see my father in that garden, and wonder what he found when he took the final walk to the end of that shining green tunnel. I wonder if his wishes came true?

There’s a quote from Vincent Van Gogh that reminds me of my father: “I am a burning hearth. People see the smoke, but no one comes to warm themselves.”

But there’s another quote from Albert Camus I like much better, and hope applies to Dad equally well: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Last night I drove east on Washington Boulevard near the Culver City-L.A. border and passed a mini-mall on the corner of Washington and Rosabell. Normally, the marquee outside this mini-mall holds a white plastic neon-lit rectangle prominently featuring the name of a cut-rate dental office. Last night, the front and back panels of this rectangle had been removed, leaving only a framework with vertical bars of neon lights spaced like the bars in a cell door. They were lit, pumping out bright white light, a neon prison. Perfectly framed behind this prison of light was the full moon. She looked a sad, weary sister behind that artificial brightness. Once she'd been the brightest light in the night sky, now she'd been overwhelmed by the human need for attention-getting.

I found myself thinking how much I related to that forlorn moon.

I must explain that I was extremely sleep-deprived yesterday. Boyfriend of Ms. 207 upstairs was on an real rip-snortin' tear Thursday night-early Friday morning. The two of them, but mostly him, woke me up every half hour between 11 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. I have to get up at 6 for work, so you can imagine I was a wee bit tired. It was one of those situations where just as I drifted back to sleep, another noise eruption broke out and I'd be awake again. It culminated with them having loud, raucous, bed-thumping, screaming vocalization sex at 1:30. Before that, just before one, Boyfriend had cranked up the stereo and was singing at the top of his lungs (off-key). I guess he was anticipating the loud, raucous sex to come. But one good thing about that loud, raucous sex (from my POV, anyway) is that once it occurred I knew I'd probably get some sleep because, well, the darling young things would most likely be going to sleep themselves soon after. Indeed, that's what happened.

So, there I was exhausted and blue Friday evening, feeling a kinship with the dimmed moon imprisoned by the human need for exhibitionism. It had been an ugly, busy week at work, too, and I'd been ill with some stomach virus early in the week. I'm in the culmination phase of my novel, writing the finale chapters, and although that's going pretty well and I see the dim light at the end of the tunnel, the latest chapter I posted on the writing workshop (27-28 out of 32+epilogue) did not do particularly well. I got only one critique in over a week. I'd been doing well on the workshop before this current posting, had good luck with my posts for the last two years, but natural attrition has caused some critters to drop away, and at a certain point nobody new is going to sign on for critiques of the advanced chapters of a novel. My friend Jon says not to take it personally, and he's absolutely right, but it's hard not to take it personally. Finally, two friends took pity on me and there were two more posted critiques waiting for me Friday morning, but I was already in a massive funk by then. Aided, I'm sure, by only 4-1/2 to 5 hours sleep. I was on the point of pulling everything off the workshop and slinking into a hole somewhere to hide.

But I've learned not to make significant decisions when I'm depressed and sleep-deprived. I'm still in a bit of a funk, but the questions I'm asking myself today are somewhat different. Like: why the hell do I even bother to write?

You know, there are head answers to that question, and there are soul answers to that question. You could probably generate some of the head answers yourself:

o I write because it's a great means of self-expression.
o I write to explore universal truths.
o I write because it's a fun exercise of my imagination.
o I write to see my dreams and fantasies come alive on the page.

Etc., etc., fill in the blanks. All of those head answers--and whatever other ones I or you could come up with—are true, as far as they go. But they are all, essentially, irrelevant—they don't, at least for me, get to the heart of things. Because there's only one true answer, the soul answer: I write because I have no choice.

I would write even if no one was reading (and most times I think no one truly is). I believe there are writers who can say, "Enough," and move on to something else, but I'm not one of them. I've tried, and was utterly miserable each time. It was like having a writhing itch I couldn't reach, and it didn't go away until I started writing again. Once I even stopped writing for four or five years: the longest, most miserable years of my life. I said "Uncle" that time and never went to that place again, because I realized there is something in this particular form of artistic expression that I must do. It's my essence, ingrained in the whorls of my soul.

Trust me, I know how melodramatic that sounds. But it's also true. There's no rule guaranteeing that the truth isn't also melodramatic. Or maybe I've just never learned to express it in better terms. At any rate, if I ask my soul why I write maybe I can try to be honest:

o I write because I want someone to pat me on the head and say, "Good girl."

That's fairly honest, but only partially true. I wrote in a vacuum for years and it still did the trick for me. It's only recently that the need for attention has become part of the equation. And I can easily foresee a time when I might go back into the vacuum because this need to be noticed may never be fulfilled. I'll write anyway. I have to.

o I write because my father was a consummate storyteller. I never pleased him otherwise, and although he's been dead for over twenty years, I'm still trying to please him.

Okay, a bit more honest. That was certainly a strong component in why I originally chose this art form. I do visual art, too, always have, but it's never filled me up like writing—and I'm sure the Freudian answer would be: Daddy. But at a certain point I realized I was no longer writing to please Daddy. I woke up one day and knew I had crossed that Rubicon; moved into a new world, a new way of doing things, left the old rules behind. I do this for me now, and that's a good evolution. I lost my dad when I was fairly young and before I'd had a chance to truly differentiate myself from my parents. I think I've achieved that now—and that's always a healthy thing.

o I write because it's the only thing that patches the holes in my soul.

Yeah, that's a true reason. I've had my dark times, my New Moon phases, I will again, but the work is always the remedy, even if the work is sometimes the cause of the darkness. I always turn back to it—for me, not for anyone else—and it always does the trick, like nothing else can.

So I guess I'm like the full moon after all. I may be trapped sometimes in a prison of artificial light, made weak by the need for attention-getting—but last night in my exhaustion and depression, I forgot the other lesson of the full moon. That once I moved further down the street, the moon was still there, no longer behind those bars. And if I travel out of the city and its wash of artificial light, away from the distractions and visual noise, the moon still shines, alone in a dark sky.