Narcissus and Goldmund

A while ago I was talking with a friend at work and our conversation turned to topics of philosophy and spirituality. He is a big fan of Hermann Hesse and offered to lend me a book of his when he found out I had never read any of him. Quite a while later he remembered to bring it, along with a bag of plastic glow in the dark jellyfish (he was moving back to New York and getting rid of a lot of possessions. He knew I like jellyfish and brought some that had been hanging in his bathroom). I got his new address so that when I finished it I could send it back.

I admit, I was hesitant to delve into this book, because I knew it would have a spiritual message and maybe a lesson about life in the form of a parable. Lately my book reading and movie watching tastes have been limited to what is entertaining- basically, mindless fluff compared to what I used to expose myself to back in college when I was hell bent on bettering myself through exposure to arty, thought provoking, meaningful media. After I graduated I forgot all about intellectual growth and just got sucked into whatever was juicy. Especially when the book began long ago in a monastery, I inwardly groaned and realized I would have to send the book back to my friend only partly read.

But I persisted and was very glad when it came to the part where Goldmund left the monastery and set off into the world for adventure. For anyone who hasn't read it, the story is based on two friends- Narcissus, the philosophical intellectual monk, and Goldmund, the sensual, wandering artist. Goldmund believes he is meant for a life in the cloister until Narcissus shows him that it is not his path and that he must leave and discover who he really is. For much of his life, Goldmund is a nomad without a goal, content to walk through forests, meet villagers, get into romantic entanglements, and wander as a free man. I could relate to this way of life, this desire for adventure and new experience, taking everything in with appreciation, through an artist's eyes. I liked Goldmund's presence and his acknowledgment of the transient nature of life. I know that I have some of Narcissus in me as well, seeing the value in the mind and a sedentary existence.

For a few years Goldmund lives in a city and learns to sculpt statues with a master sculptor. This man, Master Niklaus, represents industry and the working man I suppose, as Narcissus is the monk and Goldmund the artist. Niklaus is an artist, but that side of himself has been overtaken by the worker who is creating for money. Goldmund sees him as sad and soulless, making useless trinkets. After Goldmund creates his masterpiece, a tribute to Narcissus, he leaves again for many years, hoping to accumulate more experience necessary to tackle his next project.

This story gave me a lot to think about. I've always felt that I am a well rounded and balanced type of person, meaning that I have equal masculine and feminine sides, I am equal parts intellectual and emotional, I have equally strong urges to travel and to stay in one place. Hesse's story makes it sound like people are either one or the other, and that once you discover who you are, you must live your life the way it was meant to be lived, even though it might feel meaningless in the end. For me, because of my many opposing qualities, it's been difficult knowing what is my authentic path. Whenever I'm doing one thing, I'm also simultaneously pulled in the opposite direction. For the last five years I feel like I've been stepping tentatively on many different paths, only to grow doubtful and turn back. More than anything I want to commit to a direction and work steadily towards a goal, like Goldmund's purpose of carving out of wood the images he held inside him.

Mainly, what made this story meaningful to me was Hesse's view of art and how, in his view, it's one of the few things worth creating. It's a way of honoring the world, one's life, and leaving something behind when you're gone. I guess I've always known that art is my purpose, but I've always let it be something lingering on the periphery. I want to bring it to the forefront, and maybe even make a living at it, even if I end up like soulless Master Niklaus.

Diana's House

Sketchbook Project

Recently I found out about an art show called The Sketchbook Project that involves a batch of sketchbooks that travels around the country like a music tour. To be a part of it you just send away for a journal, fill it, and send it back by the due date. I filled it out and decided to scan and publish my favorites on my blog.

eternity in a day

I'm at home on the couch after a long, strange day. I worked at the Mississippi location on a Tuesday, which is unusual. Being there, I always feel like time moves slower. There is less to do, less customers, and the store is so vast and echoey, gray cement and big windows, it's like you're tumbling around a giant corridor with zero gravity. Today was slower than usual and it was stormy and dark outside, which I kind of liked because it felt cozy. But it also added to that feeling of isolation that I get there.

I worked with Brian, a tall strapping fellow who seemed very uneasy today, which I found out was from the side effects of his ADD medication. It made him jittery and nauseous. Also with Emily, who is a quiet, quirky artist from Chicago. She and I had a funny discussion over bad gifts we've received as well as strange packages in the mail. I thought it would be a great collection of stories.

I've never had a job before with so much downtime. When I have time to think about things I start getting ideas about my life and desires to do all kinds of things like make more art and write memoirs and go on bike trips and then I remember where I am and feel sad. I felt like I spent my whole lifetime at work today.

It was still raining as I drove home. Benny was a welcome sight when I walked in the door. He had heated up the lentils I made last night, and we ate and talked.

Lately I've been feeling exhausted. In the morning, during the day, after work, when I'm laying in bed. A deep weariness. I don't like it. I notice myself using the word "energy" a lot.

Love and Lobsters

So, you may have noticed that most of my book reviews have been positive. This is because if I'm reading a book I don't like, I tend to not finish it, or if I finish it, I don't bother to review it. Or as in the case of one recent book, Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno, I finish a book, like it well enough, but am not moved to spend several minutes writing about it. So I guess this book review blog will just be articles of me raving about some book I loved, which is not really a bad thing.

Which brings me to the novel Stern Men, by Elizabeth Gilbert. The very same Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote the well known and well loved memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, about her journeys of self discovery through Italy, India, and Indonesia (soon to be a movie starring Julia Roberts). I admit, I too devoured that book like an Italian cream puff and have been keeping my eye out for more Liz Gilbert ever since. I saw her new memoir on the shelves in bookstores (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage) but... I have a confession to make- I have an odd aversion to buying new books because I know I'm just going to tear through them in a week or two and then they will just be taking up space on my bookshelf. If it's a used book I can usually coerce myself to cough up a couple bucks for it and then pass it on. Hence, the public library is a brilliant thing that appears was invented just for me. However, that means that Committed was checked out but Stern Men was in.

I admit that, no matter how much I loved Gilbert's smart and funny traveling memoir, I had pegged her for a one trick pony, much like David Sedaris. David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, yet when a new one of his books comes out, you can rightly assume that it will be quite similar to the ones before it. Which I have no problem with- if he keeps coming out with more of the same I'll be very happy.

This novel, however, is fiction and was published before she made it on the New York Times Bestseller list. I was surprised to read on the back that it is about a young girl named Ruth living on an island off the coast of Maine in a culture steeped in lobster fishing. Right away the story starts out with the history and geography of the island and its inhabitants. We find out all about Ruth's ancestors before we meet Ruth herself, which to me immediately establishes the author as a bona fide fiction writer. I was convinced for the first few chapters that she must have researched the history of an actual existing island, because the story was so strange and complex yet so believable that it didn't occur to me at first that she was making it up.

I learned quite a bit about lobster fishing from reading this novel. She must have learned quite a bit while writing it. And yet, this book is not about lobster fishing, it's about the people on the island, the way they live, the way they talk. There are some brilliant chunks of dialogue. When I got to the end of the novel, I had the satisfying feeling that Elizabeth Gilbert got a big kick out of writing this book. She really settles in to the characters and their little world and gives them each such color and vitality.

I have to say, I think this one would make a great movie as well. Maybe not a blockbuster starring Julie Roberts though, maybe a little awkward indie film starring someone like that Juno girl but not so tiny.

Tides and Turbulence

A few pages into this book, I thought, "Finally. Here it is. The book I've been waiting for."

After a string of meatless, mindless books (which I read cover to cover because they held my attention in some superficial, daytime TV kind of way) I stumbled upon a jewel. I found it in the library, intrigued by the description on the book jacket: "Sometimes he sees things before they happen- a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; Winkler will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. When David dreams that his infant daughter will drown in a flood as he tries to save her, he comes undone. He travels thousands of miles, fleeing family, home, and the future itself, to deny the dream."

This is the story. A man; a solitary, thoughtful, kind hearted and sometimes gutless man who dreams of the future his whole life and at a pivotal point attempts to alter what he dreams. During his long exodus you are with him in his sea of questions about what he left behind and whether or not his decision made a difference to his fate.

I think we all wonder about destiny- are our lives following a plan, like a streetcar along a track? Is it a rough sketch, with some wiggle room? Is it an open field, one carefully cradling the burden of possibility? Is it true that things happen the way they were meant to? Am I living the life I was intended to live? And to complicate things further, who is doing the intending?

The novel is also beautifully written. Doerr's writing is evocative, sensual, deceptively simple. He doesn't tell you what's happening, he describes it. He doesn't summarize or push a point of view on the reader. It's equally scientific and poetic, stating the details of the events in a way that elevates the mundane to art. The mention of a gesture, a smell, a memory- one or two skillfully worded sentences and you get it. Concise, simple, with worlds of meaning humming underneath.
It's the way I would like to write.

An incredible story, told well. Not often do you get both at once.

A Good Sign

Last night I had a dream about my favorite teacher in college, Professor Terri Elliott. His Social and Political Philosophy class was recommended to me by a friend and it became the first step of falling in love with philosophy and eventually getting a degree in it. Terri had a presence, an intense curiosity and sort of a sparkling gleefulness that was contagious- he was someone who inspired respect and the desire to be as earnest and questioning as he was.

I followed him throughout my college career, eating up all his classes. Metaphysics, Symbolic Logic, and a class he invented called World Making and Revisioning, where we would read inspiring works by Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Alice Walker, and Barbara Kingsolver, and sit in a circle outside on the grass, writing.

He tried to fit timed writings into any class he could, and it entailed 10 or 20 minutes of uninterrupted scribbling on a prompt or even without a prompt. After the time was up, we would each read what we had written aloud, without compliment or critique. Just, "Thank you," and move on.

He would hold writing marathons at his house, a group of friends and students sitting in his living room with green tea, no sounds except for the scratch of pen on paper and steady breathing. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes, and breaks in between to read aloud. It wasn't about the end product, it was about the process, the meditation of it. This is something Natalie Goldberg advocates as well. It was the first time I really succumbed to writing and let it engulf me.

The dream I had last night was vague- I only remember Terri and I, sitting facing each other with blank notebooks in our laps and pens in our hands. I sat poised, filled with intense relief and inspiration, thinking, "Finally. Now I can write."

A Sentence A Day

I had an idea I wanted to try, to take my most recent journal and choose one sentence per entry to record. Here's how it came out:

4.13
It reminds him of days when he would swim in deep cold water with his monkey friends.
4.16
All one’s senses are in the body.
4.20
Today I remembered how to breathe.
5.17
A strange and unfulfilling sandwich.
5.20
The way the steely morning light hits the buildings at odd angles- Market St. in a gray haze, but the tops of skyscrapers blazing.
5.28
After some waiting, an Australian nurse pulled out the rest of the tick with a scalpel, then flushed it out, bandaged it, then gave him a tetanus shot.
5.29
Had a dream that Michael Jackson (while dancing) gave me career advice.
5.30
I felt it when I tuned my banjo and slipped on the finger picks.
6.2
It was crowded in the museum, crowded in the streets, people approaching us for change or to donate to Greenpeace, sun in my eyes, I soon got cranky but felt better in the Mission.
6.6
At the counter she says, “I have eight boxes to pick up,” in a clear, strong, womanly voice.
6.7
Sunburned arms from riding along the Bay Trail with Amy, and to a beach in Alameda where the water was pretty but not quite right for swimming.
6.8
I lingered over In Defense of Food, the Sherlock Holmes series, the biography of Cat Power, the Autobiography of Bigfoot, and a Hemingway novel that was written in his later years, which I shunned because he was living in Key West at the time and I have bad memories of Key West.
6.9
I feel like the more time I work there the less I like it and the more I feel more like an outsider, wooden and strange, zombified, solemn faced.
8.13
But I am quickly losing all the air in my lungs and my vision is narrowing down to a pinpoint, surrounded by black.
8.21
It means you can bear the tiny anguishes of everyday life, but one day wake up and wonder why you’re miserable.
8.23
Don’t worry, Self. We’ll get out of here. Go North!
9.13
I keep picking up mediocre books that are embarassing in their constraint- “Get in touch with your hunger!” I want to yell.
9.27
And moving back to Chico would be like crawling back into bed after breakfast.
10.12
I’m eating “vanana” flavored yogurt out of a coffee mug and I have to go to work soon.
10.13
At Mama’s Royal Café we eat breakfast and draw, watch the gray wet outside rivers rivulets in the gutters; fried green tomatoes, sweet hot coffee, out pants moist, a bucket of umbrellas by the door.
10.15
I learn to do bird calls and develop the richness and diversity of my singing.
10.17
(You got to be careful or your childhood home could just burn down.)
10.28
The wind blows through the world today, slamming doors and tearing leaves from branches.
11.5
“I know that we’ll last,” I thought.
11.7
I feel sparkly, alive, nervous, bewildered…
11.16
The other day I saw a pile of gleaming persimmons in the grocery store and almost fell over with longing for that time in my life, persimmons being a pervasive and ubiquitous thing throughout my years in Chico- not so much their taste as their smooth plasticy skin, their incredible glowing orange color, their exotic strangeness, just the way they looked hanging from huge trees all over town, the leaves long gone but those pointed fiery jewels still hanging heavily on the bare branches, like treasure.
12.2
I get angry now, plenty- sometimes I deal with it, sometimes not.
12.4
It’s funny the way a city can really let you in or shut you out, depending on your attitude and willingness to explore.
12.7
Me: “Wow, those pigeons have big shoulders!”
Benny: “I think those are wings.”
12.16
We ate enormous amounts of sushi at Get-A and drank big beers, then played Rabbids Go Home on the Wii.
1.8
I can already feel my roots starting to spread, and ready to take this on as Home.
1.9
It illuminates each fork in the road and makes me want to just go limp and surrender.
1.10
Benny and I eat victory pie in Random Order.
1.11
On the 15th we’ll head back to Oakland and start the packing process!
1.12
Huge crazy old theater, cavernous, covered with murals and dimly lit by yellow chandaliers, offering beer and pizza along with the usual theater fare- and only $2 for a matinee ticket!
1.14
We were up early this morning, and saw the sunrise as we drove downtown- gleaming misty pink and lavendar, gorgeous with all the lights around, street lights and head lights.
1.17
Sitting on the back of the bike was fun, watching the spidery trees go by with their bare branches and twisting vines, the river full and flowing.
1.21
Onward and upward!

A Writer's Journey

Natalie Goldberg's "Long Quiet Highway" awoke something in me. Her writing generally has this effect on me. I have read a few of her books on writing: "Writing Down the Bones" and "Wild Mind" which somehow make writing seem like the easiest thing in the world. Just put down one word after another. Don't stop to read it over or revise. Let images and senses and memories come to you. Something about her writing relaxes me, makes me stop and look around, and breathe. This book was more like a novel, detailing her journey from childhood to adulthood and struggling with finding her meaning, through writing, love, and through Buddhism and meditation.

Her writing is simple. Why do I like it so much? Because it is simple. Because of all the NOUNS. I love nouns. I love how a noun can evoke so much, and yet bring your mind back to the solid world of things. A white mug of black tea sat on the table by the stack of books. You see it. It brings you back to the moment.

One morning my husband and I had breakfast at a nearby coffee shop, then he drew in his sketchbook while I read "Long Quiet Highway". As we were walking back to our apartment down Piedmont Avenue holding hands, I saw everything around me and and noticed the way the leaves of trees trembled with the wind and how a dog scratched himself and bicyclists speeding past and the way the sunlight hit store front windows. At the corner I stopped and exclaimed, "I'm glad to be alive!" And it was her book that had reminded me.

There was another time I got angry at Natalie. She talks about trying out different jobs, one as a dessert chef at a cafe in Taos, New Mexico, where she was living. After two months there, she was tired of it. "When I returned home, I quit working at The Haven; I quit everything else I was doing. I wrote seven days a week for seven weeks, rarely leaving that little adobe on Don Cubero. I moved through the book. No resistance, no thought; I just kept writing."
As an artist, writer, and musician who has worked stressful food service jobs for almost ten years and wants nothing more than the freedom to pursue my art, you can bet that pissed me off. I threw the book across the room. How does she do it? She teaches workshops and she has published books, I guess that's how. It doesn't seem like it would be enough but it is. After I was finished being angry, I was inspired. I could do that, right?