Stranger on the earth

Last year my pastor had us read a stanza a day of Psalm 119 as an advent devotional. I liked the novelty of this, so I’m doing it again, and suggesting it on the blog in case you think it sounds good too. You don’t even have to go out and buy anything! You have to start the first day on December 4 to end on Christmas, so we’re on Gimel:

Deal bountifully with your servant,
that I may live and keep your word.
Open my eyes, that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law.
I am a sojourner on the earth;
hide not your commandments from me!
My soul is consumed with longing
for your rules at all times.
You rebuke the insolent, accursed ones,
who wander from your commandments.
Take away from me scorn and contempt,
for I have kept your testimonies.
Even though princes sit plotting against me,
your servant will meditate on your statutes.
Your testimonies are my delight;
they are my counselors.

Maybe this is perversely appealing for me because I always found this one of the most boring psalms alive. Laws, rules, commandments—how could they possibly have the attraction the writer claims? Is he lying? Why does he repeat himself so much? Is he trying to convince himself? If you faithfully read your part every day, though, you almost start convincing yourself you love the word. There are some cool lines in there every now and then.

I forget the seminary lingo for this, but there’s one way to read the Bible where Jesus lurks behind every statement and description in the Old Testament. It’s not that far-fetched. The people who wrote the New Testament have some pretty creative interpretations of the Old Testament, and they’re in the Bible, so it must be OK.

What if you read it as if Jesus is speaking? He has been known to pass off Psalm quotes as his own words.

While I’m sharing clever tips, I have discovered a very handy approach that defangs two of life’s poisonous tasks. I am a firm believer in abdominal exercise, ever since Foundations of Wellness in college. Apparently a strong stomach also keeps your back strong and pain-free. However, I have a hard time bringing myself to do sit-ups. There’s always something more fun or interesting going on.

Another unpleasant task, during the winter, is taking off your nightshirt and exposing your poor bare skin to the chilly air so you can put on your clothing for the day. I find myself wasting countless minutes thinking about it and not doing it.

Guess what? I have found a way to combine the two unpleasant activities so that neither is unpleasant any more! Just a few sit-ups makes you warm enough to want to take off your shirt even on the chilliest morning! It is absolutely fabulous. I can’t believe I’ve lived nearly 30 years before discovering this efficient and health-promoting practice.

Another brief appellation

Which is a better name, Donut or Kozy? I can see points in each one’s favor. Donut is 25% longer than Kozy. However, Donut has the advantage of being a noun and, what’s more, indicating what the business sells. Neither one would be considered the traditional spelling of the word in the dictionary, but Donut may actually be in the dictionary. Kozy’s hand-sprayed look is more charming.

What’s your vote?

Where the fish are

They adorn a women’s restroom (now closed for the winter) at White Rock Lake. The men’s bathroom has similar embellishments.

There’s a steep hill on the south end of the lake where pedaling doesn’t really do any good, so I like to stand up on the pedals and pretend I am a human sail, slowing the descent of my bike. The sidewalk is narrow along this stretch and curves onto a narrow bridge at the bottom, so I only do this if there isn’t much traffic. It’s breathtaking and fun.

Today, though, as I was unfurling myself and swooping down the hill, something went wrong and I almost lost control of my bike. I hunched down against the handlebars and the seat, braked, and swerved a few times to regain my balance. I wanted to avoid two things: plunging headlong onto the asphalt and hitting an oncoming cyclist. Amazingly, I regained control by the time we passed. What a wonderful vehicle a bicycle is. It’s so much more stable than you think. And I always love finding out that my body knows what to do in these situations.

The oncoming cyclist smiled in a concerned way as he passed me and asked if I was OK. I laughed and said something about how it had been a close call, and I continued on, seated. This was a better scenario (for his sake) than if I had died and the poor guy had had to witness that, but it was a worse scenario (for my sake) than if there had been no one to witness the whole sailing disaster at all.

I had another scene of public humiliation last week as I was walking home from work at dusk and singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in full voice. Not just the normal melody part, but the dramatic cadenzas at the end of my high school choir’s arrangement of this song, where you repeat “It’s the most wonderful time” three times, and one of the times the syllable “der” is a step higher than usual, adding a fascinating touch of variety and excitement. I thought I had hit the pitches pretty accurately and was feeling pleased with myself when I heard a shuffling noise to my left, just a bit behind me, and realized a person was standing in their front yard with their dog. I suppose I could have said, “Oh, hi!” but instead I continued singing, a little more quietly, making up more words, until I got out of earshot. This seemed to be the most nonchalant course of action.

I think these humbling occasions are very good for us. I think that not taking oneself too seriously serves one well in life. And it is also good for society in general when we admit our foolishness to each other. It helps us all feel better.

The Secret Agent

Conrad appears to have gotten some criticism for the “sordid surroundings” and “moral squalor” of this tale. Yet when I discussed it with some friends, we all admitted that we had an impression of comedy and even absurdity, not horror. Sure, the plot is scary and tragic, but he treats it in such a way that you are never really scared, just kind of incredulous, and scornful of all the characters.

I know I have read at least one article or review of this book that said it was an illuminating read in connection with September 11. But the mood of the book seemed incompatible with that type of terror.

The book is quite different from Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim. I read those a long time ago, but I don’t remember much humor in those books. I loved Heart of Darkness as an angst-ridden adolescent. I sought out Lord Jim as an angst-ridden college student. The Secret Agent, however, is laugh-out-loud funny at some points, and impossible to ever really take seriously.

However strange this book was, Conrad is a consummate artist, and we were all impressed by his brilliant decisions about when to disclose what, what to disclose at all, and what to have take place offstage. The book was finely crafted.

I am generally more gullible than suspicious as a reader, and I grew in compassion for the characters, who were initially presented with quite a bit of irony and amusement. My friends who read the book did not seem so moved. I found things to admire about most of the characters. Seeing Conrad deal so thoughtfully with a domestic relationship was interesting for me, since I was only previously familiar with his nautical settings. There was a melodramatic scene with gas lamps and a grotesque cabdriver that I enjoyed very much and everyone else seemed to think was dumb.

Mystery fish

Here’s a place I’ve never had the chance to show anyone before. I pass by it fairly often myself.

Bald cypress

It was a lovely day for a bike ride, 60 and sunny. This picture’s a little blurry, but I like it because it captures the interesting colors of the day.

Sometimes, usually at the darker times of the day, the lake is a fascinating iridescent color than I can only describe as the color of magnetic tape or shiny black garbage bags. It is so lovely that I feel bad not having a different way to describe it. It’s mostly a dark, dark blue, but it shows off different brilliant hues with light and movement.

Today the wind was strong, displaying a muddy brown in the shadows of the waves and a slate blue elsewhere. Also you can see that the bald cypresses, White Rock Lake’s signature trees (you can see their attractive cone shape across the lake, where they’re planted at regular intervals from each other, give or take a tree here and there) are turning color. They don’t really lose their leaves, but they start looking like they’ve been scorched in a forest fire. I am very fond of them.

It was a beautiful day, but I think I like the weird times better, the times just around dawn, or on a foggy morning, or in the evening at sunset.

The Fellowship of the Ring

This is at least the fourth time I’ve read this book. It’s nice to go back after a few years and still be charmed and delighted. A lot of people think of strange creatures and battles when they think of Tolkien, but what I was impressed by this time was the human subtlety among the characters.

He turned to Strider. “Where have you been, my friend? Why weren’t you at the feast? The Lady Arwen was there.”
Strider looked down at Bilbo gravely. “I know,” he said. “But often I must put mirth aside. Elladan and Elrohir have returned out of the Wild unlooked-for, and they had tidings that I wished to hear at once.”
“Well, my dear fellow,” said Bilbo, “now you’ve heard the news, can’t you spare me a moment? I want your help in something urgent. Elrond says this song of mine is to be finished before the end of the evening, and I am stuck. Let’s go off into a corner and polish it up!”
Strider smiled. “Come then!” he said. “Let me hear it!”

“I want your help in something urgent” seems incongruous at first look. One might judge Bilbo for being insensitive or completely out of touch. This happens often with the hobbits’ speech.

“Strider looked down at Bilbo gravely.”

Much has already been made of the unacknowledged work of Strider and the Rangers to protect an obscure country full of ignorant people. This is a huge, beautiful theme of the books. But there’s more going on here than just Strider graciously overlooking the errors of a bumbling, sheltered, homely hobbit who has been thrust into the world-changing activities of ancient and noble people.

With Tolkien, not all that is being thought is not being spoken. The hobbits know more than they let on, and they have virtues of their own. Here Bilbo is being funny, lightening Strider’s load, and Strider gets the joke. There’s a deeper understanding between people who have learned to trust each other’s character over time.

I think playing with all kinds of levels of seriousness like this, all at once, is great writing.

Herbsttag

Keatsmas is coming fast, and I’ve been meaning to build up to it with at least one other poem. Here it is:

Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
Und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.

Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
Gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
Dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
Die letzte Süsse in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is my very unscholarly translation. (Feel free to improve it, Scharnhorst!)

Lord: It is time. The summer was enormous.
Lay your shadows along the sundial,
And let the winds loose across the acres.

Tell the last fruits to reach full size;
Give them yet two southerly days,
Bring them to perfection, and chase
The last sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house will not build now.
Whoever is alone will stay that way for a long time,
Will wake up, read, write long letters,
And wander up and down the avenues,
Restless, when the leaves follow.

I found an interesting walk-through translation of this poem, in case you’re leery of mine. Of course you lose everything in translation. A particularly problematic line is the first one of the last stanza, which is unforgettable in the German and impossibly awkward in English.

I have no end of admiration for Rilke’s rhythm and beauty of language. I wonder if this poem is something to the Germans like “To Autumn” is to us. It seems likely, and I was delighted to see it on my friend’s German mom’s blog, along with—what joy!—an excellent picture of stubble plains.

Arthur & George

Never read a book if you can discern the reason you’re reading it. Was I unfairly enticed by the idea of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, taking on a real-life mystery? I like a good plot as much as the next woman, and I enjoyed Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, so I thought, here we have an author I like, a situation that intrigues me (I own, and have read, The Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is a delightful example of people taking fiction way too seriously, and yet, what’s wrong with that? There are a lot of worse things to take seriously), and a setting I want to read about (I mistakenly thought the book would take place in Edinburgh).

Well, I was disappointed. Even if one had no expectations from the author and no misapprehensions about the setting, I can’t imagine how the ending could fail to disappoint. And maybe my taste is not subtle enough, but I found hardly any of those extremely interesting ideas that fill Flaubert’s Parrot.

I blame the literary craft. Was Barnes trying to follow a novelistic scheme taught in a writing class or a how-to-sell-your-book workshop? I kind of doubt it, because it wasn’t all that gripping, but it seemed much more conventional than Flaubert’s Parrot. Let’s forget Arthur and George and revisit the book I actually liked.

Flaubert’s Parrot seemed imperfect to me. It didn’t seem like a very cohesive book. I think it took on way too many ideas and didn’t fully develop them. But, in the end, I think I like that better. You read the stuff he says and you think, “Hey, I love what he said. I want to hear more.” Whereas if an author has fully developed his themes, you don’t really want to hear more.

I loved the way Barnes expressed Flaubert’s philosophies in Flaubert’s words and in his own. There were many captivating ideas about writing, which was a well-developed theme of the book. This is great:

Do the books that writers don’t write matter? The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

There are entries I’ve planned for this blog that are right now puckering and sprouting snowflakes. It’s weird how something completely irrelevant to this world (are any of the posts I do actually post relevant to contemporary existence?) can still have an expiration date.

And even though I was frustrated by the woefully inadequate development of the narrator’s own history, I think it was vividly described in mentions here and there:

And you do come out of it [mourning a death], that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

The reader knows next to nothing about this death. But sometimes it’s best just to say a little bit. It has more impact. You get an idea of what’s happened, but not too much. You never really get to the bottom of it. Life is like that too. I won't even get started on what he says about love. I want to include one last quote about reading. I’ve had conversations like this that raise similar questions about the pointlessness of writing. I have what I think are good motivational answers, but I just want to share the beautifully expressed question for now.

Some people, as they grow older, seem to become more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is there any point to me? Isn’t my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by someone else’s slightly less ordinary life? I’m not saying it’s our duty to negate ourselves in the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

How about Donut?

Nothing pretentious about this establishment.

On the bus today

I stumbled across the most fabulous blog with Blogger’s “next blog” feature. Someone is faithfully writing about their experiences riding the bus every day.

I love riding buses. There was a year in high school when I had to ride the bus through its entire first route around the other end of town after school (there weren’t enough buses, so many of them did two routes) and then the bus would pick up its second load of people and head for my neighborhood. It took a long time to get home. But I really liked it. In the days of wires and cords, you weren’t really expected to be doing six other things to maximize your time on the bus, and it was a very peaceful ride. I just like looking out the window.

This blogger chronicling the daily bus rides has a good sense of humor and detachment. I think it’s a grand idea. I thought about having a category of posts on this blog talking about our daily commutes, but that seems like it might be dangerous, since we are all so eminently stalkable.

Countdown to Keatsmas

As October 31 approaches, I recommend that all aesthetes memorize “To Autumn.” It’s a life-strengthening task, a sense-thickening feat, a time-enriching devotion. I can still remember how it felt to exist the morning I began to memorize it. I spent an hour or two in the periodicals section of Buswell Library, not the most picturesque location in the world, but the one that consistently won the Record’s award for “best chairs to sleep in” on campus. There are windows in that part of Buswell, and the light elated me as I half-drowsed and drank in the words of that great, ambitious, lively poet of indolence.

Every year I have found a willing or quasi-willing audience for a recitation of this poem. More often than not this weird birthday celebration is disappointing and humiliating for me. But I still recommend the memorization experience for everyone, whether anyone ever cares to listen to you or not. There is no doubt that you will be the happier for learning this poem.

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,*
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

* The picture above is the closest thing I have to a picture of barred clouds. Usually the venue for a Keatsmas recitation is selected for the presence of stubble plains, or at least an open sky upon which to observe said clouds. In the absence of stubble plains, a lake makes a very pleasant setting.

Back in time

I want to share some experiences from a trip I took a month ago. These scenes may seem weird, but for me they were refreshing and encouraging. I think I’ve lived in the city too long.

It’s an overcast Labor Day in Quanah, where the panhandle meets northeast Texas. Nothing is moving in all of historic downtown except me and a kid on a bicycle. Nowhere here looks like anywhere anyone would want to go, even on a business day. The department store has closed down. The bookstore has two empty shelves straddling the floor at odd angles. I finish my sandwich and drive back towards the highway, past the courthouse square. As I pass the courthouse on my left, I see three men come out of the police station on my right. The first one is a tall sheriff in a ten-gallon hat and long dark brown pants. I don’t remember anything about the second one. The third is a prisoner, without handcuffs, in a baggy black-and-white-striped suit, glaring at me.

It’s late afternoon and it’s raining now, 100 miles from Dallas. I pull off for gas but the pumps are all taken. I park and wait in a long line for a sticky blue bathroom while flies and small kids circulate around me. When I get to my car again I see that the gas station next door is completely free. I guess it’s because the three gas pumps, one for diesel, one for super unleaded, one for regular unleaded, are exposed to the sky. So I drive over. The lower half of an inscription (“after 9 p.m.”) is taped to the pump, written on a lined piece of paper in blurred magic marker. It’s not raining too hard. When my tank is full I remember the amount and go inside, where the clerk puts her cigarette down in the ashtray and smiles at me. There are a couple of families waiting for their food in the next room over, a warm, ugly old diner. “$18.93,” I say, handing her a $20, since the sign in here says they don’t accept credit cards. There is a jar full of black plastic combs on the counter by the register, 49 cents each.

Legolas, Galadriel, and God

Legolas used to annoy me a lot, with his superior Elf ego, and Galadriel too, while we’re at it. I didn’t like how they seemed to have such an advantage over everyone else. Everyone just naturally adored them without questioning anything. If I hear someone uniformly raved about, I am automatically suspicious.

But if you get to know the history of the whole thing better, you realize that Legolas is pretty low on the ladder of elvishness. He is a low Elf, an Elf of Mirkwood, of all places. He has never visited the Blessed Realm. He has never seen Telperion or Laurelin, the trees of Valinor that seem to bestow so much significance to all those weird Elves.

Having Legolas represent the Elves on the Fellowship of the Ring is kind of like having an American teach English literature in China. Maybe people who don’t know any better will respect her, and she certainly has some advantages over a Chinese person, but chances are she feels sort of like an imposter when explicating Shakespeare and Keats. So when you know that Legolas isn’t really on the inner ring of elvishness, you can deal with his smarmy singing and keen vision and everything and start to admire his positive attitude.

So back to Galadriel. She seems like the noblest, purest, loveliest character ever (and thus seems completely bland to me) unless you know her history and know that she is a major historical rebel, actually forbidden to go back to the Blessed Realm because she scorned authority. Once you know that, you can reread all that nauseating stuff about her singing from the boat and actually sort of feel some sympathy for her.

This seems to distantly resemble the problem lots of people, including me, have with God. Since no one is allowed to say anything against him, it sounds a little bit like party-line propaganda all the time. We wonder deep down if people aren’t being completely straight with us when they talk about him (and of course lots of times they aren’t).

But what is cool about God, if you know him better, is that he is kind of the anti-god (if I’m allowed to say that). If you really pay attention, you notice that he survived some humiliating and embarrassing things and continues to do things we don’t really expect from God, like giving other people credit they don’t deserve and like forgiving everything, which is the metaphysical equivalent of cleaning the bathrooms. Is there anything more humiliating than giving up ever mentioning the bad things people have done to you?

Tolkien chooses not to mention Legolas and Galadriel’s history in the entire Lord of the Rings. He’s content with the possibility that you don’t entirely understand them. But if you care enough, you can go to the other writings and find all that stuff out. I think that God might be like that with himself. He lets us be oblivious if we want, and it’s all OK, because he’s gracious. But I’ve heard people talk about our own pain as a gift from God, and maybe the gift part of it is getting to understand him better. We forgive because we are forgiven, but we also learn how much it means to be forgiven when we forgive. I don’t really know any of this from experience. These are just guesses.

I can’t really compare my experience to God’s in any meaningful way, or Galadriel’s or Legolas’s for that matter, but what I’m trying to express is that they all seem to have interesting and unexpected character depths, and there’s a good chance we misunderstand them if we don’t know their history. That’s all.

Feels like spring

During the past weary months, Shelley’s lines changed seasons in my head:

If summer comes, can fall be far behind?

We Texans are coming out of our caves to breathe the fresh air and sunlight after weeks and weeks of over-100-degree temperatures. So, even though fall is what we expect to happen next, can you blame this poor mole for sniffing spring?