ON HOUSE / HOME

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It is raining profusely outside. Inside, sheltered, your skin does not feel the wetness of the sky. To see the rain, you can look through the window at the drops pouring from the sky, focusing on their motion, bulbous shape, and intensity. Or, you can concentrate on the window pane, itself home to parasitic rain drops which try desperately not to slide down the pane to their deaths and which, in doing so, obscure the normal transparency of the glass. Although you are looking in a single direction, seemingly at the same point in space, and you are essentially observing the same phenomenon in both viewing cases, you can never see both at once. Your focus must flit back and forth between the two. This constant alteration of focus is similar to the way we approach the house/home dialectic. What is perhaps most interesting, is that without seeing the raindrops falling, it is impossible to empirically explain why the window is wet, and without seeing the wet window, one cannot not understand the viscosity of water, the friction produced by a seemingly smooth glass surface as compared to air.

IT ISN'T THE SUN

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POEM

The minute gears mutely whir. To put your ear
Against it is to put your ear inside it.
It does not tick. It isn’t a heart.
It has no pulse. It isn’t a clock or a wrist.
Scrutiny can coax no secret from it.
There is no hearse with one flat tire
In endless circuit, headlights dispersed
In fog like sunset behind a veil.
A paving stone extends a grave through iron
Gate to a door at home. To knock
Your hand against it puts your hand inside it,
As in a cloud at night the pale moon
Gathers itself outside itself its own light
And glows dimly behind the dust that outshines it.
It has no heat. It isn’t the sun.
It isn’t uncertain. It does not think
About the sun or the distant balls of dirt
And ice that circle closer to the star
With each circuit done. Comet tails
Darkly flowing back as the horse leaps
Forward, straining against the catafalque
All November, predict disaster as grammar
Predicts breath, the need to breathe, or the mind
Must rest. It is its own edgeless disaster.
It is there as if it were not there. Vague
Repetitions haunt the circumference.
To walk out the door is to place your foot
On a stone worn away by another’s foot.
Rumor has it that the sun sends heat in form
Of sight. Watch the ice as it melts
For proof: water pools, darkens on a stone,
Becomes as a shadow on a stone,
A horse’s hoof as it rises off a stone,
Except it rises forever, and the shadow is gone.
Such processes turn the minute gears.
It is not a note in the margin. The margin is
Covered with snow. When the winter fog
Disperses a black horse stands on ice
And cannot move. It is as if a breathless song
Hovered like a veil in the air. The black
Horse’s breath spirals upward like smoke.
Pyre-smoke like a thumbprint as a cloud.
Similes sing mutely in it, likening the unlike.
Mourners name the peace they find and walk
Away. To step into it is to find it missing.
The footprints are before you as you go.

-Dan Beachy-Quick

Yet another of those beautiful seredipitous moments this morning when, having read and loved and re-discovered this poem three times, I read the accompanying interview at How a Poem Happens. Only then did I discover that 'the whole poem arose out of reading Levinas' - Levinas, of course, being the key theoretician guiding my thesis. Moreover, the poem seems intricately related to one of my own entitiled Palms which is long overdue a revision. All that is to say: this poem's really got me. 

TEOTIHUACAN

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The pyramids at Teotihuacán.

via

Month by month, I circled in to frame the story in theoretical terms.  And that was only the beginning. 

A novel is made of details.  Every character, on every page, has to be immersed in a perfectly visualized scene: using transportation, cooking, listening to radio programs, speaking in the particular jargon of an era.  Wearing clothes.  (Unless they aren’t, but that can’t last long.)  Each detail has to be historically exact, and in this case “the era” involved dozens of different locations in two countries, crossing nearly thirty years. 

I traveled to all the settings, on both sides of the border: Washington, D.C., Asheville, North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Parkway, on this side.  On the other, I hiked through Mexican coastal jungles, hung out in villages, went to see a brujo, visited Mexico City’s archaeological and art museums, the preserved homes of Rivera and Kahlo and the Trotskys, and their personal archives. 

I climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacán.

  I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico over the past thirty years, living near the border in Arizona for most of that time, so I drew on the past too, digging out old notebooks from assignments in the Yucatan and elsewhere.  I only set scenes in places where I’ve been myself.  When I create a world for the reader, I want to do it right, using all my senses.  

That was the fun part, the “writer’s life” they show you in the movies.  Here’s what they don’t show:  the writer sitting in a chair in her study, glasses on her nose, coffee cup in hand, reading.  For years and years.  Biographies, court transcripts, political analyses from every angle, catalogues of women’s clothing from the ‘30’s and 40’s, recipe books, you name it.  Everything ever written by or about Trotsky, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, J. Edgar Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, I tried to lay eyes on.  I read literally thousands of newspaper and magazine articles documenting everyday life in the U.S. during World War II, and everything leading up to the post-war political freeze-up.  Autobiographies of blacklisted artists.  The internet was useful, many newspapers now have electronic archives, but mostly it served to lead me toward better things that are not online.  I had to get my nose into a lot of dusty places.  I pored over old letters and photo collections.  I visited an old-car museum.  This is a good example of the importance of primary sources: “Googling” a 1930’s Roadster won’t tell you how it feels to shift its gears, or that the windshield wiper is hand-operated by a lever over your head.  Who would have thought?  I loved the surprises.  I learned that contrary to popular belief, the continental U.S. was attacked during WWII.  The New York Times ran photos of the aftermath.  The Japanese sent a submarine up the Columbia River and deployed a floatplane bomber, with the goal of setting the Oregon forests on fire and creating panic in the land.  But the plan was rained out.  History hinges on things like this, events that get forgotten – this is the soul of the story I wanted to tell.  It was thrilling to immerse myself so deeply in the era.  I dreamt of cooking breakfast for Trotsky, and became a curiosity for elderly men at dinner parties who quizzed me about arcane World War II trivia.  The stacks of research materials grew tall in my office, like a forest of wobbly trees.  I’ve cleared it all out now, making way for the next.

-

Barbara Kingsolver

, on writing

The Lacuna.