For the last few weeks, my household has been on a medical goose chase that ended with teams of highly paid doctors shrugging profoundly. The medical perplexity factor is apparently another way of estimating your out of pocket expense.

At the start of this scan-happy conga line, my husband, who has cardiac issues, was concerned that he was having some manner of heart episode. We went to the emergency room, and after many hours and tests were told that he did not have a problem with his heart, but that they had discovered that he had liver cancer. Right away, it sounded wrong, but once that button is pushed, well, it jams just a little.

When tested, re-tested, and re-retested again, it turned out to be something that can’t be figured out but probably isn’t anything at all, but it will need to be watched, because…well…because definitive all-clears are a huge liability. But he’s fine.

In the meantime, our little girl contracted a terrible virus and ended up in and out of the emergency room over several days that were already doomed to be doctor-filled.

All of this stress has taken its toll in various ways, but, other than that first week when we thought my husband had heart-attack-cancer and our little girl had a virus that resulted in vomiting, fevers, hives, and that helpless feeling that drains the light from your very soul, I’ve tried to keep working, moving forward, at times at the end of a spear (jab, write a line, jab, write a line, jab…), but moving. For one thing, my grad school due dates were neither moveable nor optional and on the chance that we were all going to survive our little season of doom, I did not want to have inadvertently defaulted on my degree plan.

This was not the first time that my husband and I have been in a situation of high medical anxiety. In 1999, he called me from his classroom to say that he didn’t feel well. Several hours, phone calls, and ambulances later, I met him in the ICCU of a downtown hospital as a doctor I had never seen before was performing an echocardiogram and yelling, almost gleefully, “My god, man! Look at that, your heart is as big as a ladies handbag! Oh, surgery, surgery immediately!” The doctor looked up at me as I stood in the doorway, struck motionless, and he turned contrite, sheepish: “You must be the wife…well, ah, just having a bit of a chat with your fella.”

The chat led to an eleven hour open heart surgery to correct adult complications related to a congenital heart defect and the latent ill-effects of earlier attempts at surgical therapies. It was a long winter followed by a perfect spring.

We hadn’t really been married all that long, four years at that time. We’d had a bubbly, romantic beginning though somewhat bogged down in graduating college, finding jobs, getting started, and after four years we were just beginning to feel like we might be adults after all. But the stress of that surgery made our permanence as a family real to us. His recuperation was our second courtship.

Every afternoon, I would pick him up for his prescribed exercise after my workday was done to take him to a park down the street from our apartment. It was just a little sidewalky, koi pondy, feed the birdies kind of spot behind some office buildings. I’ve always loved koi, and circling that pond, probably a third of a mile around, was his way back to strength and my path back to a personal center.

The big fish would rise, turn languidly to see what of any color or interest the other side of their watery window could show them, then they would turn as though in a dreamy sleep and sink again into the mulm.

I started trying to paint them. I tried oil paint and copal resin, Liquin, artists’ varnish, acrylic paint, and ready-mixed glazing emulsion. Finally, I settled on acrylic paint and a glazing formula I worked through myself. I still love these paintings—for me, they hold the undulating feeling of the sleeper’s darkness, but folding and mottled with vivid moments of light and aliveness that was that whole healing experience both for my husband and for me.

Latching onto a symbol helps me. Finding a way to translate a rough energy into something visual or worded is the way I process and come through both the good and the not so good of life. Right now, my symbol for these last weeks is just a color. An ear to ear, eye to eye blue-green ocean color that rides in my mind just before sleep and just as I wake. I need to paint it out, or perhaps, to go find a beach where the water rolls that color toward me and my open eyes and there lie down in the sand for awhile. And then get up again and start painting.

_________________________________________________________

“‘Art must claw at the neck of the bourgeois as the lion does at the horse,’ says the German artist Dieter Hacker, reprising an old, old tune. Absolutely. Absolutely absolutely absolutely.”

In 2009, Donald Barthelme was described as “[...] a dead, twisted branch on the evolutionary tree of American letters” (Lev Grossman for TIME, 2009).  That can’t be right. I will grant that his absurdism, his surreal and un-referenced realities can rewrite the level at which a reader is forced to connect to the word, but I almost always see that as a reader’s problem, rather than the writer’s. He wields an ability to poke fun at the weirdness of art while also skewering the blank minded system that supposes to educate students but which does not itself understand the purpose or content of art. In his world, everyday was a hilariously cruel April 1st. Though he found humor in the impossible burdens of artists and teachers, he never apologized for thinking about art, for teaching it, writing about it. He found art essential to a vital culture and believed that teaching students to think about art was the obligation of all teachers everywhere.

Himself a beloved and respected teacher as well as a prolific and celebrated author, Donald Barthelme, whose major works appeared between 1968 and 1990, has been credited with enlarging the contemporary conception of short fiction. Known for innovation in convention and cross-genre works, Barthelme draws disparate ideas together in mosaic to create dimensionally rich stories that comment on personal relationships, politics, economy, art, and existing and theoretical social and psychological constructs. Though Barthelme treats the complex and abstract as subject and form, the detailed imagery of his writing eases even the most complex arrangement of elements into a natural tone, a palpable realism.

In “Sinbad”, one of several stories in the Forty Stories collection that features a pirate motif, the reflections of a self-effacing teacher who is experiencing a professional assignment outside of his usual, comfortable schema are accompanied by the story of a great and grizzled pirate. While the pirate’s story is far-flung in terms of its immediate impact on plot, Sinbad is nonetheless rendered with solid physicality, as when he first appears, shipwrecked and washed ashore half-drowned: “His right hand, marvelous upon the pianoforte, opens and closes. His hide is roasted red, his beard white with crusted salt” (Barthelme 18). While Barthelme is not necessarily writing a story about a pirate—but rather using the pirate as a fulcrum around which the larger story is geared—Sinbad is not cheated of his reality; he is a bedraggled ruffian with an artist’s touch upon the piano, a man of more than fiction and some depth of history. The teacher, in turn sharing his observations concerning the various forces and façades of academic life, is voiced with the same level of descriptive roundness, as when he describes the feeling of addressing a particularly difficult student dynamic: “[…]they turned in their seats and began talking to each other, the air grew loud, it is rather like a cocktail party except that everybody was sitting down […] a waiter came in with drinks on a tray followed by another waiter with water chestnuts wrapped in bacon […]” (21). Though the business of the moment might be drolly ironic, the vividness of the imagery stages itself so that it wins a bit of literalness; such care goes into crafting the scene that it produces meaning that transcends both irony and absolute reality to deliver an emotional merger of the two principle characters experientially—based upon exacting proofs of their shared tenacity in the face of grittily unfavorable conditions, the teacher and the pirate voyage on.

            The narrator of “Bluebeard”, another story with a pirate motif, is related from the point of view of the old pirate’s seventh wife. Here, a series of surreal circumstances and details are related with the faithful fullness of a competent and observant narrator; the young wife depicts her piratical husband, his secretive demands, and her dalliances with equal exactitude—her meeting with Pancho Villa reads with the certainty of a deposition: “[…] Pancho Villa […] was indeed in Paris […] but I had little contact with him and certainly not yet his lover although he had pressed my breasts and tried to insinuate his hand underneath my skirt at the meeting of 23 July at my aunt Thérèse Perrault’s house in the Sixteenth […]” (85). Though the situation is incalculably strange, her recapitulation rings with rational detail and clear imagery, qualities accustomed to realistic portrayal and thus evocative of that familiar sense of the real. So specifically does Barthelme draw her that even in unlikely scenes in which she imagines driving over Bluebeard’s palace rose bushes in an early model Daimler in order to assuage her husband’s ego (83), the story projects her shrewdness and her husband’s myopic tyranny equally as soundly as the bizarre parade of its impossible hosts.

By the end of her story, the complexity of the wife’s efforts to avoid her husband’s wrath is a legible path through unusual terrain. Eventually, it is revealed that Bluebird’s most secret possessions  are seven decayed zebra carcasses dressed in designer evening gowns, hanging from meat hooks (87). The scene in which this image is revealed is steeply surreal, but the narrator’s anticipation and then her reaction seem perfectly emotionally sound: “My husband appeared at my side, ‘Jolly, don’t you think?’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes, jolly,’ fainting with rage and disappointment….” (87). Juggling a reasonable fear of his unpredictable wrath and the disappointment of discovering his ridiculous and idiotic perversion strikes her with a sense of futility that surmounts the oddity of the picture she has so clearly presented and makes her a woman, again of this world, who has lost her own interests in the shadow of circumstances.

Barthelme’s work is surreal, but his voice is comfortable, brimming with humor.  In the strangest turns and most outlandish environs, he is able to calmly look about and capture with precise pitch of these odd worlds as he unfolds them. This combination of the unreal and the exact, the fantastical and the precise works to create a transcendent sense in which Barthelme can play in relaxed fashion with almost any subject of any depth, and strangeness and normalcy alike are characterized in the company, shaped in the shadows, scrutinized in the details.

References

Barthelme, Donald.  Forty Stories. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, USA, 1987.

I am working toward an MFA. Our work is fashioned into cyclical slams, program-wide due dates that, no matter how dedicated I am, just don’t agree with my nature. But, even when I’m not delighted with the task in front of me, fear appears to be a muscled motivator, because as this due-date-ending-week got closer to certain doom, questions of academic insecurity and intellectual puzzle shivered into something like clarity. Or, at least, I found a clear way to approximate the quality of work I expect myself to produce.

Through it all, my sweet, silly dog, whose heart is at any given moment on the verge of bursting for joy at the sight of me, watched me with a face full of faith and her favorite toy at the ready just in case I looked up from the keyboard with anything like an inviting expression.

Eight and a half years ago I was driving to the school where I worked, teaching for a living but living through it by thinking constantly about escape from the classroom just as often as I had as a school-trapped child. I turned off the busy, main road to ride the last mile through a residential labyrinth. That way was safer, slower, and I was able to talk myself down inside, talk myself into one more day of bells and administrators and paperwork.

Just turning a corner, coming into the slant of morning sun that a moment later would have whited-out my windshield, I spotted a little, animated dot on the sidewalk ahead of me, moving. It jotted into the street as I slowed. Cat? Puppy! And it bounded in a coal-black streak straight under the front wheels of my car as I braked into the floorboards.

I had slowed down as soon as I’d seen it. I wasn’t going fast. But it wouldn’t take so much as a nudge to crush a tiny little thing like that. I sat there behind the steering wheel, my heart riding the vomit-elevator, feet-to-throat-to-feet-to-throat. Slowly I swung my door open. I eased out of the car, let myself down onto knees that seemed too weak to hold do more than kneel. Just as I was about to bend down and take the necessary, dark look under my wheels, out from under the shadow of tired treads burst a waggling, slobbering, panting puppy. She was just a baby. Milkspine teeth gnawed on my fingers and wrists as I tried to get hold of her.

Fitting neatly in one palm, she weighed nothing. Her sides were rounded, bloated, not with food. She was filthy, wrinkly, and I was in love before I stood all the way up. Ill-fated, I thought, because we worked too much to have a dog, rented and couldn’t risk having a dog damage anything, didn’t have enough money to feed a dog.

No one claimed her in response to ads and calls and signs. I named her Frida. My husband bought her a collar with tiny little hula dancers on it.

A few weeks went by and, growing more and more worried about the consequences of having a dog when we clearly should not, we found someone to take her off our hands, but at the last minute she said, “And she’s so cute, if it doesn’t work out, I can just take her to the Humane Society and I’m sure she’d find a home.”

That night, Frida slept on our bed and I said, “My girl.”

Funny thing, after being assured that we were unable to have children, three months after settling down to spoil our mutt-mixed babydog, we discovered we were going to have a baby, a for real, of our own, baby-baby. I have always credited Frida with opening some door in the universe through which our child traveled to find us.

Now here she was, every day of this last week, waiting on the couch just behind my turned back—50 lbs. of Frida, perfectly aware that I was not in a good mood, that I had for days rejected her attempts to play, had taken meals at the computer, greeted the computer first every morning, and outlasted everyone else in the household in the evening, still at the computer.  Yet, she was ready to turn the corner with me, her elm-switch tail lashing the air, grinning, bouncing, kiss crazy, satisfied with the perfection of life beginning at the moment that the balance of my visage changed.

When I paint, I can plainly see if what I have done fails. I know when an image isn’t right, because it shows, and I know the line of my ability’s limit, because I’ve smacked into it with my brush. It hurts, but, thankfully, it can be pushed out a bit further and a bit further with patience and practice. With writing, there is often no knowing how much further I have to go to get the impression I so want. Or if I have it in me. Or if the idea I’m working so feverishly toward has any significance outside of itself.

Experienced writers claim to know. I’m not so sure that objectivity and words work together, ever—or, at least, not with certainty. I just finished a book by a respected literary voice, a known work, that whistled its way past the graveyard, into status, riding on its writer’s name. The book itself is so much chalk dust, clothed in accolades earned by previous work. What did this important writer imagine he’d written? Something perfect, perfectly told. Maybe his impression of it and its success are plenty, and I am splitting perfectionism down to the follicle.

I debate this while I write, trying to find the right way to make denim overalls read with texture and color and that little jingling sound of brass buttons, shoulder hooks. Frida yawns loudly behind me. She doesn’t hear anything but the monotony of clacking keys. I smile at her, she becomes instantly thrilled.

Ignoring her enthusiasm, I go back to splitting thoughts. I know I’m not perfect. I just don’t want to be perfectly off. I expect the words I put down to get up off the page and tell the stories, sensibly, vividly. Right now I am working on a story about my mother, Helen. After writing a bit about her for the blog, I have decided that, by popular insistence, she is a good subject for serious exploration.

This is a big job, since she was real and there are certain feelings that have to be presented in fullness, or glossed over in haste. I have to get her gruesome, psychotic, hilarious stories right, or they will be awful. Structure, timing, voice, content, level of appeal, narrator position, it all has to be perfect. It has to say the right things.

Frida has gone back to sleep. Her breathing tells me she’s chasing birds in a dream. The birds take a bad turn. She whimpers.

I get up from my writing, pet her carefully, trying to end the nightmare without waking her entirely. This is her creative state. I do not want to interrupt it.

I feel dreamy, sitting there beside her. Her alpha waves over-wash the anxious clock.

Writing, even without the deadline, is nervy work. There is an internal hue to the elements from which a story, a poem, a creative essay are all comprised that can delude the writer, creating mirages of wonder. A writer drinks the water they’ve written into the desert at her or his own peril. Every line is a potentially poisoned well of expressive imperfections. Or maybe you’ve written something that will save you, something that will comfort thirst in a land of dry air. Or maybe you’ve written a grocery list in the sand and called it water.

I stare at the computer from across the room; sitting by my dog, her head on my lap, six hours to go before the deadline I’d set for myself. 24 hours before the actual deadline. Time sails down a jittery river without me.

Frida cares not. She dozes on the couch and waits for the sun to come out, the deadline to pass, the story to end, well or poorly.

 My second-grader’s teacher—or maybe it was the librarian or a classroom aide, someone—had innocently admonished several girls, walking along holding hands, to enjoy it while they could. “The time’s coming,” she reportedly told them, “when you’ll be too big for sweet stuff like holding hands!” It was a normal enough reaction, a sort of sentimental opine to the woman’s own, bygone girlhood.

I tried to tuck my girl’s worry away by relieving the notion that this separation was imminent—you’ll all still be holding hands tomorrow, and next week, and the week after that. I reminded her that I hold hands with people all the time.

—No you don’t.

Well, I do sometimes.

—I’ve never seen you.

I hold hands with you and Daddy.

—That’s exactly what I’m talking about. When will friends not walk and run and hold hands anymore? And I’ll have to be related to somebody just to hold their hand. I still like it. I’ll always still like it.

I find it just as sweet as you do.

—Then why don’t you do it?

Maybe it’s because I spend most of my time with you.

She seemed satisfied or distracted or tired by this. I made myself feel better reckoning  that she called to mind an image of us walking along hand and hand; she is my constant side-kick, my dancing satellite—or maybe it’s the other way around. She’s always with me, in the crook of my arm, hanging onto a hand, jumping just ahead of me all gangly legged over shadows on the sidewalk, pocks in the cross walk, sprinkler puddles in the park trail.

Maybe she thought of that. Or maybe she figured I was empty of an answer and just let it go.

But even as she began to settle down and rattle off other news of the day—apparently a boy named Jonah was spending a lot of time pushing his luck with the teacher’s patience—the question caught me in an unexpected way. How long? How long until I am not the same as I am now? And, having put that question to a task, I wonder how it is that the mind goes on quantifying without direct intent.

1,000 days, my love, more or less.

I remember the day that my dolls stopped talking, the exact moment I stopped being able to speak through them. They who had been my most kindred mates suddenly failed to live,  sat plastic and blank. This sudden shift in my inner world left me unexpectedly self-contained, bottled up, isolated though I did not know the words for the feeling.

There was suddenly no life in anything that wasn’t riding on the surface of the visible world.

I looked at my sister and couldn’t hear her thinking. I forgot the elaborate spookiness of riding my bicycle down the street in the dark, for the sole and dedicated purpose of feeling scared—spooky thrills just stopped mattering.

I looked at myself and realized I had hair on my legs. It may have been there for ages, but I’d never seen it before, never cared and yet there it was, a horrifying downiness.

One night, I came inside to use the loo during a game of hide and seek, only to discover I’d started my first period. I thought I was dying, screamed for my life, then when it was all made clear as it could be made, I went back outside, but I didn’t dare play, had no idea what to expect. I needed to think, to search this unanticipated change. I was eleven.

My daughter is nearly eight. She has about 1,000 days of childhood left before the next part of life takes her up in its chemistry, its emotional swirl. 

As I drove toward home and she talked about hand-holding and Jonah and time out chairs, my brain seized that number and worked on it, worked on training its associative sequence.

From here, should I be working out a formula, an equation for the perfect end of childhood?

I continued to figure—if a bit of frustration and mild disappointments are, in the scheme of a life, good for growing the patience and perseverance an adult will need to handle normal stressors, then how many more minor disappointments should she have over the course of the rest of her childhood? 300? 500? Major jolts of gritty reality? Two? Three? What will they be?

How many times should she get precisely what she wants? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 200? Fewer?

If she asks me a gaggle of silly to important questions almost every day, how many of my answers will shape the way she looks at the world, will influence the flow of her thoughts, her perceptions? How many more will I answer until she decides she should ask somebody else who isn’t so old, so out of touch? 10,000? Fewer.

How many paradigms will I and her father unwittingly ingrain? How many subtle lessons should I art into our talks? How many days do I have to change my own habits, personal glitches that are imprinting her by example?

When she was barely four, she wrote a song called, “Twinkle, Sparkle, Baby”:

Twinkle, sparkle, baby

Let the night shine in your eyes

While I sing you lullabies

And you fall asleep so tight and sleep through the night

Twinkle, sparkle, baby

Let the moon glow in your heart

You and I will never part

So baby go to sleep so tight and sleep through the night

Twinkle, sparkle, ba—by

If she still loves for me to sing her special song to her just as she’s falling off to sleep at night, if, as she says, it makes her feel “like you move my day breath to dream breath” how many more times will I sing that song before my voice loses its connection to her heartbeat, to her blood? I refuse to answer. I think of the last time she nursed. I didn’t realize it was the last time, it just was.

As I drove us toward home, I began to repeat to myself Dylan Thomas’s most perfect poem, “Fern Hill”:

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turnings so few and such morning songs

Before the children, green and golden

Follow him out of grace

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would

take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Time held me, green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea

 Her voice, chatting aimlessly now from the back seat, sounded like the cry of little gulls. I tried to stop torturing myself. I tried to find the realization that something amazing and beautiful would bloom just over the horizon, just past the small part of her childhood. I realized I needed a cup of tea, possibly dosed with something stronger.

 I have about 1,000 days. To do so much. To help her feel like she does not have to be only a cute face, like there is more to her than what boys she attracts, than how many of her friends think she’s pretty, how many compliments she’s paid for her outfits.

 I have about 1,000 days to make sure that my tiny little girl has in her possession the very last drop of sweet infancy.  And every inroad I can open for her that will lead her to her voice, her creative force, and her love for herself, her whole self.

 I hope she does not have to wake up, like Dorothy Gale in reverse, to the color and wonder of life forever fled. For artists, our job is to play with that tickle of fancy that registers as color against grey and tease it out into the fullness of our work. I feel as open to the rain of starlight as I ever have. Maybe  in my case it’s regression, but I tend to think of it as reclamation. I cannot see why she would ever have to lose hers, but I am comforted to think she might find it again in any event.

 In 1,000 days my daughter is not going to break away from her blithe and flitting spirit. Though I have no doubt that we will weather a change, I want it to be an opening change.

I have a lot to do. In that time, I have let her see me in the act of creation every day. If I’m her model, there is no time left for me to loll. I want her to know that I am comfortable with who I am, that how I look is not the focus of my life (I think she knows that).  That I enjoy myself and imagine and play and see the invisible. And love without fear or self-consciousness.

 1,000 days. The first thing I have to do is start holding hands with my friends. And then we all have to sing in those goddamn chains.

My Pacific Northwest MFA program seems a safe distance from sunchoke lands. Goddard holds its residencies on Puget Sound in a Civil War era fort. The Strait of Juan de la Fuca laps at our haunted doors. The Fort Worden ghosts are their own story, though they were shy this time, perhaps hiding from a delegate of Evangelical Catholics with whom we shared our housing and dining. The religious delegates made a great crowd of elderly nuns in heavy habits who would nightly trail around behind priests in long cassocks who headed processionals holding gold crucifixes and oversized portraits of saints and martyrs aloft, while the company chanted and sang and wound around the complex of old, dark-eyed houses in the incessant drizzle. This is part of the beloved and creepy fabric of residency.

After the first three days at school, the Catholics left. The quality of the food instantly sank from behind a churchly façade. Without the holy people, we writers got no courteous pretense from the kitchen.

Jerusalem artichokes. What starving band of mothers tore into the ground looking for grubs and squirrel caches first found these awful little knobs and thought of them as potential for food? 

Looking at the jumpy green stalks, fairy wing leaves, the yellow crowns in familial bouquets, it is hard to connect their spritely air with the knotted yam that anchors them down. The roots of the Jerusalem artichoke form fists that lace together in a hairy web of feelers and aerators.  They don’t drink much, but chew, it would seem, through a thin but leathery hide of no color; they inhere the local flavor of earth.

And thus they fit the general foul theme that ruled the residency cafeteria. Cold and tired, coiled in stress, empty as the first page of an unwritten story, the fifty or so of us who couldn’t come up with doctors’ excuses to opt out of the campus food plan would limp into the commissary dining hall three times a day to risk death by the bite. The food was so bad, it became its own dark comedy.

I should talk less about the food, whine less, and shine on instead about the workshops wherein all bets were off. Wherein there was no hold on what could be said, crafted or rough, providing it was attempted in truth. There is no judgment in workshop and childish ideas rooted in talk-show paradigms and convenient reactionaryism faint in their own thin stew to leave an empty space between blank eyes where something stronger and plainer can grow.

The sharing of creativity is an intimate action and there is no superfluous energy available to give stagnant ideas about tender issues. Where writers write and share, taboos are taboo: women are not huddled under the shroud of nurturing, men are not stunted by the demands of courage, for here is finally in this life a place where we are not women and men but wholly conduit to idea and experience, ageless, sexless, but of age and rounded by soul and sex and the knowledge of the body and the perfection of the conscious exercise of will and mind. 

But that’s so hard to capture, so I return to the food. It was spectacular and wretched and easy to say.

To start, everything appeared yellow and red curried, the chicken was dry, the chickpeas swam in unseasoned tomato puree, coconut covered everything remotely sweet. The soup was always a puree of the previous day’s side dish, even when the side dish was a salad. There were olives and that was good. The tofu was served with fresh spinach, which saved breakfasts.

By midweek, by all appearances, the kitchen began to cut back on refrigeration. The tofu slowly turned grey. It began to taste faintly of ammonia and dish soap.

The olives began to dry out.

Bugs crawled into the salad, into the salt shakers. A chef came bursting into the dining room one day to announce that the bug parts in the salt shakers were really peppercorns, and he knew this for certain because he had eaten some of the bits of things that, granted, looked like bug parts, but they tasted like pepper to him and he was a real chef and would certainly know pepper from a bug. There were no peppercorns in the dining room or on the food. We doubted his sincerity and, frankly, his judgment, his palate, his discernment on whatever life path had brought him to that moment, standing over a sink, licking dirty salt out of his hand, bragging about it.

Hidden-hair checks became the first thing we did when we sat down with our plates, bowls, and suspiciously fibrous greens.

The eggs were punctuated with bits of tiny plastic triangles, which were easy to find in a mouthful of egg, though some of us accidentally swallowed on the realization instead of spitting.

The spinach started to taste like candle wax.

Portions got very small. No one complained, though anything palatable was the object of open begging, “Please, just one more carrot?”

Brussels sprouts bent fork tines.

Chicken was either leather or blood. Always rubbed in something like yellow flea powder.

The macaroni and cheese was inexplicably seasoned with vinegar.

The chocolate cake had no taste of chocolate. Could not be cut without wiggling the fork back and forth, like a saw or a serrated lever. It was cake that required machinery.

The ribs were tough, gamey, striped with livered yellow sinew. I suspected downed meat.

The bacon appeared to be flavored with an orange spray that looked like a fake tan and induced gagging.

Potatoes began to jump around, inhabited like tourist shop beans. We stopped looking at them, ate with our eyes closed. Maybe that’s why no one recognized the Jerusalem artichokes when they appeared the last night, masquerading as roasted potatoes. Here’s what I learned about them: they are loaded with inulin, a polysaccharide agent of stomach cramps, nausea, flatulence, and sudden writer’s block. And there we all were, crowded into radiator warmed rooms, gassy and emotive, full of inulin, sunchoked.

And that’s where I retreat from this parade of gastric hell to stay with the readings, where my fellows and my advisors floored me or lifted me and that was absolutely satisfying. I like to think about the workshops where we carried around metaphors in big gold frames and chanted and sang. Workshops grew their own sense of place.

On Monday, Kafka was a rock star.

On Tuesday, we had fables and channeling.

On Wednesday, we wrote about violence, enduring it, committing it.

On Friday we spent three hours to attempt to depict sexual experience through spatial metaphor. There was a lot of wallpapered bathroom masturbation but also the eggshell white and chipped paint of molestation, of nonconsensual hallways, and suddenly shadowed mudrooms. We shuddered and nodded and built awkward stages.

Someone still learning to let go of the rails became confused—was it Thursday?—at the thought of a woman who would not love a child. And then the child stood up off the page and stabbed her defender while we clapped and called for an encore reading.

There was a play and all the boys wore wigs and sheets and proved they loved each other with their fool faces.

There was a lot of wine.

Truthfully, originally, I was going to write about the Jerusalem artichoke as a kind of  anti-metaphor for my MFA program, but I think I have decided that this nasty root is an inadequate metaphor. They are daisies that look like sunflowers. They taste bad. They are virtually unchewable, but why would you want to chew one?

Unwinding that, it would imply that writing that looks pretty and casts everyone in a holy light of morality can also be a source of emotional bloating and substantive starvation. That much is true, but here is where the flower fails—part of our process is learning to endure truth, even when it shakes the floors and tastes like gunpowder. Grandmothers and punk girls, academics and activists come to grad school residency for a fortnight of familyhood and absolute, unashamed truth and love. Though food is often scarce and metaphors are almost never entirely perfect—for there is no truth nor love that would induce me to eat another Jerusalem artichoke, ever.

The Metonymical Pen will be on a brief hiatus while the author spends time at an important eleven day residency in Port Townsend, Washington. Until then, enjoy this Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto classic.

–       Henry Van Dyke, Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land (1908) p. 193

        He is a Presbyterian first and an artist second, which is just as comfortable as trying to be a Presbyterian first and a chorus girl second.  

–       H.L. Mencken, “The National Letters,” from Prejudices: Second Series, ch. 1 (1920), about Henry Van Dyke

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I bought a book to break. 

I went out looking for a tome to deconstruct, rearrange, paint over, cut apart, fold, rip, glue—it was to be a public domain, literary cadaver. Preferably something old and yellow, because I love the smell of dust mites.

Last summer, under the tutelage of Rebecca Brown, I learned how much fun it is to ruin a page of prose by turning it into something else. A whole stack of in-process desconstructions now hold down the floor next to my computer table. I’ve been working my way through Pride & Prejudice with poems about the art life, writing, creating, and doubting. I’m also de-wording a tattered copy of Fellowship of the Ring with nature haiku and gouache.

So it was with great pleasure that in our local Friends of the Library spider web stacks, I came across the un-creasedthough somewhat faded spine of Out-of-Doors in the Holy  Land, by Henry Van Dyke. The publication date is 1908 but the paper isn’t even yellowed. I don’t think the book had been opened since it was inscribed as a gift 103 Christmases ago. The plates are still bright and hold their crisp, inky detail and raglan striations. The plate tissues are smooth and misty white. And then there is Van Dyke’s prose:

Yes, here are my friends, in garden of the hotel, with its purple-flowering vines and Bougainvillea, fragrant orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on their perches. When people really know each other, an unfamiliar place lends a singular intimacy and joy to the meeting (17-18).

 And when coming into Jerusalem:

Out of the medley of our first impressions of Jerusalem one fact emerges like an island from the sea: it is a city that is lifted up. No river; no harbor; no encircling groves and gardens; a site so lonely and so lofty that it breathes the very spirit of isolation and proud self-reliance (47).

And again later, when traveling cross-country by camel, his group meets a wedding party:

            A score of cavaliers in Bedouin dress, with guns and swords, came after us in hot haste.

The leaders dashed across the open space beside the spring, wheeled their foaming horses and dashed back again (236).

 This long gone view of place and people begins with the question, “Who would not go to Palestine?” The answer goes on to chronicle an ivy-league professor’s travel diary of a trip taken at the turn of the twentieth century in search of a more meaningful connection to his religion, to Jesus of Nazareth as his religious figurehead.

Through soullessly cold temples and poverty stricken cities, where the poor crowded rundown corridors of makeshift hospitals and children died in the streets outside, Van Dyke looked for some kind of spiritual connection to his religious ideals, seemingly oblivious to the luxury and largess granted by life to his quest.

Before I knew what was happening to me, I tripped and fell into his company, found myself astride a horse, galloping away from the blighted urban coast, ready to ride a camel through rougher and roadless country.

We ate dust and dodged bandits on the road from Bethlehem, and as we drew nearer to Hebron, we laughed together at the way a camel’s load never looks quite as large as a donkey’s, but the camel always seems more displeased with its work, the droop of its lower lip expressing an unalterable disgust with the universe.   

I myself bartered with water sellers, trading off my best garments of macintosh for the day’s drink. We hadn’t yet learned to conserve when we left Jaffa.

I thought Van Dyke, although by now I was calling him Henry, should have taken some time out to interview our various guides and I argued this point, but he was too consumed with worry that he would not find his spiritual boon to see the opportunity he was missing.

In the end, after months at travel, what Henry Van Dyke realized, what he encouraged his fellows to try and grasp, was that his object of obsession, his son of god, was a person, a child whose mother dragged him to weddings, a youth who ate brined olives and sat on a rock wall listening to neighbors gossip, a man who saw with eyes full of afternoon sun the ill will of camels and the patience of donkeys.

The physicality of this image electrified him. After the emptiness of missions and churches, altars and ceremonies, sitting under an orange tree in a desert garden made this prosy professor realize that he was worshipping a man, a creature of flesh who was subject to the comforts and hostilities of heat and sudden rain, sweat, hunger, humor, and fatigue. ForHenry, this made the ideological Jesus he had looked for a moot and mythological phantom and thus vitalized his view of the potential for divine manifestation in real, callous-handed humanity. He stood shaking and awake on the threshold of the idea that he was not separate from the perfection he saw in Jesus, the person.

But then, in the book’s summation, he began once more to apologize to the idea that it’s all real, it’s all real, we couldn’t have made it up. In the turn of a single, still un-yellowed page, he lost the relationship he’d gone to Palestine to find. His grasp on the textural quality of his new faith in the divinity of reality fizzled as he retreated to ideology where I have to assume he stayed. I don’t know because I left him, hunched over his desk, trying to vet the heretical from his final speech.

I was disappointed to get all the way across the open desert to the mountains of Samaria and then be asked to turn around and go backward, out of song, into litany. But I understand, too. What we can imagine as divine is so dependent on the paradigms of our origins. Transcendence, then, is dependent on the cultivation of the ability to create within those paradigms and to continue to abide and evolve with that living creation without retreat. This idea might explain why, for me but not just for me, art and awe are so engaged with one another.

So, I took Henry’s diary, which by now is my private property, and put it on a shelf to live out its time with me in the printed peace of its compromise, and, not unironically, the physical beauty of its art deco gilding and color plates—its reality. Weak for the language, still eager to engage the old traveler in disassembling dialogue, I ordered a second, later copy of the same book (for $2.00, because value is subjective) so that I can cut Henry up and preserve him, too.

While I wait for Henry’s second coming in the mail, I have turned my intent to cut something up on a little book of popular poetry published in 1923. I picked it up for virtually nothing not long before the travelogue by my new friend and figured it would be a fun exercise in mini-mini deconstruction.

So here it is in my hand, exactly palm-sized in its blue-rubbed-grey cloth cover, Poetry: Elegies and Hymns, a different book entirely, edited by Henry Van Dyke. I have to laugh at the creative energy of a trend.

So, more accurately, here my blog is in a new place—metonymicalpen.com.  It was a ridiculously confusing decision to make, plagued by Google’s move to become an overlord of the internet on the one side and WordPress minimalism on the other. I am a lot of things—minimalist may not be one of them. I don’t feel visually at home here, but I have a vague sense of being better off. For starters, I’m pretty sure, since I foolishly signed the blanket user’s agreement, blogger has the right to my organs should the whim arise to come and fetch them. Who could write absent minded catch-up prose with the specter of some corporate kidney hunter hanging over the tagged-for-convenient-censorship url at the top of the page?

It’s true to say that I loved the way my original hyper-real studio looked more than this one, but it is more important to me that the page works. So, now, I hope anyone who wants to can comment, join, follow by email, and at the very least, find me. That is, I hope everyone can find me except the spammers who haunt Google pages, somehow making invisible but bountiful cash for clicks.

And it’s refreshing in a way, this move, because moving is one of my most present goals. Somehow, it would be a much easier decision in real life than in blog-life, if only the reality were not so heavy and awkwardly substantial. Furniture, pets, rent, child, jobs. Details that don’t respond to widget placement.

For now, it’s my blog that has moved. Good, I am willing to be led by word and picture.