My Best of 2011

The year is coming to a close and lists abound.  Best of 2011, in every conceivable category.  Hands down, the best experience I had all year from any artistic offering… Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

I watched the first two-thirds of this movie, literally, on the edge of my seat.  It pulled me in and took me to places I can’t even begin to explain.  It contains one of the most poignant characterizations of fatherhood I’ve ever seen; it somehow covers the entire history of life but still captures what it means to be uniquely human.

If you have ever

-          wondered about birth

-          thought about death

-          contemplated the universe

-          remembered childhood

-          missed your parents

-          been afraid

-          received love

-          marveled at nature

-          felt alive

this movie will make you feel something.

And if it returns to your local theater for Oscar build-up, I urge you to see it.  It’s an experience you won’t soon forget, unlike any film I’ve ever seen. 

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Words, words, words

Yesterday I asked a friend to verify a translation for me.  Two words, English to Hebrew.  She speaks and writes Hebrew, her first language.  What I had found, when I plugged the words into an online translator, was there would be four symbols, two per word. The issue, I thought, was that sometimes the symbols were shown in one order, other times in another.  So, it’s either this:

מר לב

Or this:

לב מר

The words are “bitter heart,” from a Stephen Crane poem that’s always meant a lot to me, a big inspiration for the novel I just finished.

My friend asked me what I meant by bitter heart, because this is not something they would say.  I told her it was bitter in the sense of harboring resentments, heart as in the way someone feels.  She said you could put the two words together but there was probably a better way to say it.  For instance, they have a word for a person who is unhappy, holds grudges, for a long time.  I said that it was interesting, because in the context of the poem, Crane is actually saying that the heart tastes bitter.  She said you mean, like sour?  I said yes, but I didn’t think that’s what the poem was about at all.  Actually, I told her, I’ve always felt the poem was about the creative process and the delving inside oneself, a painful but rewarding and totally necessary process.  She stared, blankly.  I said, what if we just did the two words—which order would it be?

It’s a miracle, really, that we’re able to communicate at all.  With the variety of dialects and experiences, the wide void between each person’s heart and another’s.  Heart in the feeling sense.  And maybe I don’t know what the Crane poem is about, but only what it meant to me.  So when the words are inked on my skin, in or out of order, no one else will understand anyway, not really.  It’s probably untranslatable.

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart.”



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Youth, Anticipating

Last week, I finished the first draft of a novel I’ve been writing, off and on (more off than on, obviously) for over ten years.  I started compiling notes, ideas for characters, little snippets of quotes or scenes, then I went to work on an outline (which changed quite a bit over time).  Last year during Nanowrimo, I wrote the first half of the book; this year during the same challenge, I finished the second.  It is an immense relief and a sense of emptiness all at once. 

Yesterday I took the kids to Mass, the first Sunday of Advent apparently, something I would have known if we attended more regularly.  The sermon was about this season of anticipation and how we should appreciate it, rather than hoping to rush straight to Christmas itself.  The priest compared it to a student waiting to go home for a holiday or a pregnant mother expecting her child.  In the current world, he said, we have lost this appreciation for things in their due course.

The novel I just finished is set in 1999.  Everyone talking about Y2K, cell phones just beginning to become widespread, emails not a substitute, yet, for written correspondence.  And now that I’ve finished the first draft and don’t imagine returning to that time period in my writing, I will have to face the ways technology has changed everything—particularly, the use of certain devices in fiction writing.  Hunting for a pay phone, waiting for a letter, searching for something at the library, being unable to reach someone because their answering machine keeps picking up—will our children understand any of these things?  There was something delicious about the waiting (okay, maybe not the hunting for a pay phone bit); these instances of delayed gratification intensified the eventual contact, the eventual result.

So maybe what I will miss the most is the anticipation of finishing this book, the long period of time where life and other projects got in the way and I wasn’t able to return to it as much as I would have liked, but the thought of it was a constant companion.  Of course, there will be tons of editing so there’s always that conciliation.  But I do wonder…in this immediate world, where news/facts/information are, quite literally, right at our fingertips, and communication has so many forms it’s almost impossible to think of an isolated life…for our kids, for young people, what do they anticipate?  Maybe it’s just what it’s always been—growing up.  The outside world may intrude into their current lives more than it did for our generation, but they still lack the power and freedom to grab it.  And yes, this all relates to my ideas for the next novel...

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Lovin' Humanity

“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”  -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It occurs to me, Mr. Dostoyevsky sir, that maybe this is the reason writers lock themselves away, creating for endless hours a world of their own making, turning imagined universals into expressions of singularity by the creation of characters and specific events, through which readers, in their individuality, will recognize some of these features and thereby, tap into their own pretensions of universality and singing brotherhood.  And everyone can feel uniquely, wonderfully solitary and comfortingly connected to some grand scheme of human purpose and insight, all at the same time.  Something like that.



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Daisychains of Silence by Catherine MacLeod

I've finished a very special book this week, by one of the loveliest people I've met on this writer's journey.  I'm including my brief review below, which can't begin to describe her beautiful writing, and a link to Amazon, where you can purchase the electronic version for the meager amount of 99 cents.  It will be the best dollar you've spent in some time, I can assure you.

In Daisychains of Silence, Catherine MacLeod has sewn together a rich tapestry of images, emotions, memories—all the scraps that comprise a life.  In this case, the life is Daisy’s and we follow her from neglected childhood, to boarding school and adventurous youth, and to middle age, when a reunion with her mother forces her to reassess all that’s come before.  The relationship between Daisy and her mother is especially poignant, especially fraught with long-simmering betrayals and disappointments.  MacLeod has the eye of a photographer, a painter, an ability to draw our attention to details that matter:  a crocheted curtain, filthy from neglect, a beloved hand-made doll, cords of colored thread glistening on a well-used table, scars that form a smile.  The writing itself is evocative and poetic, at times absolutely mesmerizing as Daisy’s world is described.  Forced into an early self-reliance, Daisy learns to keep most things within and we follow her attempts to strike out and discover who she is and what she should do with herself.  But it’s a love story too, a believable love story accented with stops and starts, with mistakes made and loyalties reclaimed.  MacLeod’s characters will stay with you long after you’ve finished this lovely book, and you’ll find yourself rooting for them, each and every one, despite their flaws or maybe because of them.

Buy the book here.

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