I should be cleaning in preparation for Mom’s visit or pre-reading Jurassic Park for Jack or planning school for next week or sorting laundry. And I will do all those things today. And I’ll cook and do dishes and exercise. I love ticking things off a list and I love an organized house.
But for the past hour I’ve just been looking out the window at the clumps of snow blowing off the trees and listening to the sounds. The jays, the furnace, wind chimes, the boys…
They are squabbling good-naturedly over legos and making exploding sound effects as they “blow up” each other’s creations. Gosh, the years have gone fast.
We’ve been in our new area for over five years now. The kids have really grown up here. They are less like transplants and more like natives. Their accents have changed. Ah well, it’s been good. They have a freedom here they never could have had back home.
Me too. I have become strong and confident here. The space has given me room to grow in ways I was afraid to. But
truth?
I still feel like a stranger here. There’s a feeling of always having to explain myself. It’s not exactly homesickness. I don’t miss the noise, the lights, the crowds, the litter, the smells, the sadness. But sometimes I miss the energy, the common ground, and yes, the pizza.
Crazy. I didn’t move to Thailand, just a different part of my own home state. But it really does feel very different.
The sun had already set, but the twilights this time of year are long, especially up on the hills. I carried a book in my hand, and a pencil, because sometimes I like to argue with my reading material. I climbed the slope up to the vegetable garden with Snake, my favorite barn cat, rubbing in and out of my legs. His mama was here before we moved in and he was born right on my kitchen porch.
I sat criss cross applesauce on the rough and weathered wooden bench overlooking the raised beds, with the hill and woods and pond at my back, and opened my book. Snake was having none of it. He walked across my legs bumping and rubbing on my book, my arms, my elbows, back and forth, over and over, trying to share a flea or two because he’s generous like that. After some negotiation we settled into a rhythm of simultaneous reading and petting. The darkness began to spread through the light but I barely noticed.
Suddenly, Snake looked up. Something over my shoulder had caught his attention. His ears cocked forward, eyes wide, whiskers trembling. There was movement in the brush behind me. A bird? Deer? Ax murderer?
You have never seen a dumpy middle aged woman move so fast. I rolled down the hill. Once at the bottom, I looked back to see that the cat was headed toward the barn, but there was no urgency in his saunter. He had done his good deed for the day in saving my life and now he was off to the Jellicle Ball.
Knowing how a magician does his tricks means that you will never be able to enjoy the illusions in the same way you once did. It isn’t real magic for you anymore, it is artifice.
I like reading fiction. I like being entertained, moved, instructed, surprised. Sometimes I don’t even read the chapter titles because I don’t want to guess what’s coming. Letting go is part of my willing suspension of disbelief.
I have intentionally avoided analysis, the purposeful breaking down of art into its components. My husband tried for years to talk to me about movements and influences, hows and whys, contexts of art – and I have not been ready. I have said things like, “Why does everything have to be so hard? Can’t I just read the story?”
And of course I could.
But there are ways to appreciate a good show that are closed to someone who swallows everything whole. It’s a secret club and if you don’t know the handshake you can’t say, “OHHHH. I see what you did there,” with the magician winking in your direction.
And my willful ignorance limited my ability to criticize intelligently – I could say little beyond whether or not I liked something or somehow intuit its merits. I could not tell you why or how.
Some times growth happens against our will. Whether I wanted to or not, whether I recognized it or not, art feeds the soul, the intellect; and a steady diet of a particular kind feeds it in a certain way. You are what you eat. This week I’m mostly coffee and goldfish crackers.
Or to use another metaphor, you are being grown in a particular direction whether you know it or not. Espalier.
As an adult in a “free country” there is an element of will and it can be argued that I have grown in the direction I chose or into which I was naturally inclined to grow, which seem like opposites but really are just facets of the same jewel.
However it was, I woke up one day and realized that I was somewhat different than I had been a few years before and I wanted to know why. What had I been eating? And how can I get more out of it?
So I read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. It is highly respected, intelligent, chockfull of useful techniques and ways of seeing, and it was helpful to me in my reading of non-fiction. But, I didn’t like it. Because why does everything have to be so hard? Can’t I just read the story? The book is good, great, correct, terrific – the problem was me. I still wasn’t quite ready. I was recognizing my need to be led in a particular direction, but I was still fighting the bit.
But what if I were toying with the idea of BEING the magician? Then I’d have to understand the tricks and the how would become interesting.
Writing convincing fiction requires analysis. It requires knowing what the pieces are and how they fit together.
I’m in the middle of reading John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, and it has done two three things for me already.
I have been reminded how woefully inadequate my education has been and how little reading I’ve actually done. If it weren’t for homeschooling my children, I’d never have read Beowulf, or The Iliad. and there are dozens of other references that I just don’t get because I haven’t read broadly enough.
And it has already helped me to understand why certain books have appealed to me or not. For example, I knew I felt mocked when I read Cold Comfort Farm, but now I know why; it is a kind of metafiction.
It is making my husband excited to have conversations with me about art! Love. 🙂
Breaking Ground 