You don’t want me around

Can it be home?

When I worked for the Christian Century, I worked on an article about Beck. It was actually a review of an evangelical book that called him an “apocalyptic” artist--one whose work points to the brokenness of our times. I’ve been listening to a lot of Beck lately. I don’t know why. His albums, “Midnite Vultures” especially, skewer the politics and sexual ethos of our culture in a way that breaks my heart.

It begs the question: can art be Christian if all it does is shine a spotlight on our busted culture?

I’m having the same problem with my own work. The feedback I’m getting is that no one likes my characters. I admit, they’re not likable people. It’s a struggle to write the Great American Novel today and not include the repellent Americans that surround us. Maybe we don’t like to hear those stories because we don’t like to have a mirror held up to our own faces.

It’s immensely interesting for me to dive into the psyche of unappealing people. To find out what makes them tick. What could possibly be their motivation for doing the things they do? What’s wrong with our culture isn’t that we’re all a bunch of Hitlers, running around saying: we will crush the Haitians under our thumbs! No. We like to buy coffee at gas stations, drive across town for our yoga classes, eat beef burritos at Taco Bell. It’s those things that keep systemic oppression, structural violence, in place.

We want hope in our fiction, even if there isn’t any. We want characters to be likable, optimistic, heroic, even if the people we’re surrounded by aren’t. Without courageous protagonists as our proxy, what’s the point of art? Picasso had the same problem with representational visual art. Two-dimensional art is, by definition, unrealistic. It can’t represent the three-dimensional world we perceive. In a fraction of a second, we see both the rim of our coffee mug and its contents. Hence, cubism, and, thence, abstract expressionism.

Maybe we’ve outgrown heroes. A truly realistic novel would be immensely boring. People sitting in their cubicles tapping on keyboards. Curled up on their couches at night. Watching flashing screens ninety percent of their lives. Chapters would drag on and on endlessly. We don’t want realism. We want fantasy. We want characters who triumph over our own sordid circumstances.

I feel the same way about Beck’s music, sometimes. His lyrics are obscure, his music difficult. Sometimes I don’t want to hear about garbage trees or leprous faces. Even if I’m all alone in the new pollution, I don’t want to be.

At the depth of my depression last year, I told my brother I was listening to Beck. “Mutations,” mainly. (“Tell me that it’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault but my own...”) He said: “That’s the last thing you want to do! You are absolutely forbidden from listening to him!” I relented, went with John Prine and Steve Earle instead. It’s pretty bad when country music is a step up on the happiness scale.

Maybe I have to relent as far as my characters are concerned, too. Maybe the only way in which a work can be Christian is finding the image of God in people. That’s the only way they can be redeemed. Even Beck agrees: “True love will find you in the end.”

We keep waiting for your footsteps

Lonely tent in morning light

It’s January and I’m camping alone, at Bucks Pocket State Park. I’ve done this once before, a solo overnight in January, as preparation for the Appalachian Trail. This time it’s just a lark. The advantage of camping in Alabama when it’s below forty degrees, and there are isolated patches of snow on the ground, is that I have the campground entirely to myself.

What’s incredible is how easy it actually is to do. I just threw my gear in the trunk, hopped in the car, and drove. I didn’t even know where I was going to end up. I followed road signs and GPS to a likely-sounding spot. Now I hear a rush of water to my right. My little fire holds back the darkness. The stars burn bright. I’m writing on actual paper, not keys, and the whole experience makes me feel like did on my boat, when I was actually living, not just putting in time.

It’s amazing how many more experiences fit into the same 24-hour day when I choose to live and not just exist. I haven’t been this alone, truly alone, in a long time. I haven’t proved to myself that I can do things alone. Things like pitch a tent in the dark, a tent that I stuffed in its sack and forgot five years ago. Things like build a kick-ass fire in under five minutes. Like survive outdoors in the winter.

I’m here because I’m hunting a piece of land. I want to see if I can find a home here, a real home somewhere in the middle of nowhere. On my drive today, the radio played me Roseanne Cash’s new version of “500 Miles.” I don’t want to be 500 miles away from home anymore. I don’t want home to feel forever out of reach, just beyond the next bend in the trail, across the next swell, over the next ridge. Home can be here, if I let it be.

Or can it? This state is notoriously hostile to outsiders, and I have exactly the wrong accent. Here I claim Maine, as it seems the closest state in ethos if not in voice, and no one down here has the least idea how a Mainiac sounds. In Maine, I was told I had a Southern accent. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.

Why is it so hard for any of us, me included, to do this? To jump in a car and cut ties with the known world? Because once I do it, it’s not hard at all. All it requires is a pair of figurative cojones and a good sleeping bag. But it’s still so, so hard. I fought against my own plan for days. I’m not sure if I was more afraid of wandering through the backwoods alone, or of allowing myself to find a place to put down roots.

I know, you’ve heard it from me before. And you’ll hear it again, I’m sure. My quest for home, unlike that of Ulysses, may be one that doesn’t have an end.

It’ll drop below freezing tonight. It may rain. I have twelve acres on a dirt road to survey tomorrow, and six acres outside Tuscaloosa on Saturday. Tomorrow I do the hunt for a campsite all again.

I can do it. I know I can--both the hunt for a home and for the road less traveled. Once I set out, the easiest thing in the world is doing exactly what I should do. If I believe and don’t doubt. If I allow myself to make mistakes. If I refuse to allow other people’s opinions of me to matter. It’s the hardest thing in the world, too.

Sorry My Mistake

Happy baby pose (My sister's photograph)

I’ve been going to an Ashtanga Yoga class—two hours on Saturday evenings. I had a much different idea of what Ashtanga was before I started. Everyone always called it “power” yoga, and I hated that idea, because what I love most about yoga is that it doesn’t deal with archaic ideas like power, or “cardio.” It allows me to focus on being exactly in the moment that I am in now, in the body I am in now.

Ashtanga is many things, but it is not “power” yoga. It’s typical of vinyasa flow classes, where each movement corresponds to a breath, exhale or inhale. And it is intense. Every class I end up moving forward into my practice deeper than I had imagined I could, and it’s because so much is asked of me that I allow myself to move to exactly the place my body needs to be.

My favorite yoga truism is, “your body meets the asana in time.” Asana is the Sanskrit word for pose, and I’ve found that to be true in the rest of my life as well. My body meets the asana in time. In time, I find myself in the place I’ve been trying to be. Half of it is not trying at all, but breathing into the muscles, into the pose, breathing in time. “Do or do not do,” said that old sage, Yoda. “There is no try.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about a Gardner quote lately, from his book On Becoming a Novelist. Even though I adore The Art of Fiction, I resisted reading his second fiction-writing book because its title seemed so cheesy. Shouldn’t a real novelist be able to write without a book on becoming a novelist? It seemed to be more about figuring out how to wear cool glasses and hang out in cafes than actually writing a novel.

But one quote stayed with me:

“In her apprenticeship years, she succeeds, like Jack o’ the Green, by eating her own white guts. She cannot help being a little irascible: some of her schoolfriends are now rich, perhaps bemused by the fact that one of their smartest classmates is still struggling, getting nowhere, as far as anyone can see.” [emphasis, and gender correction, mine]

It’s that “as far as anyone can see” that matters. It’s exactly like yoga. I move forward in a pose by inches, by breaths. Some days it’s merely a finger’s-breadth that my hand shifts forward, but that is where the asana is meeting my body in time. It’s that way, as I write. I inch forward, making no progress, as far as anyone can see. Only I know that I’m releasing, breath by breath. I know that my sentences are strengthening. I know that my plots are taking shape. As I huddle in my basement, dickering over words, shrouded in down and dried out by electric heat, I know I’m exactly in the place I need to be.

Stones polished, then in consciousness

Rocks and water

On the range of art from high to low, from fine to schlock, film has a way of spreading its net most broadly. I’ve always believed that moving pictures are the true art of our generation. They give shape to our zeitgeist, and they also fulfill Wagner’s definition of the highest art: they combine visual art, music, and poetry. But as with all of the greatest art, they have the most capacity to fail.

Baz Luhrmann is one of my favorite directors, not because his films are always successful, but because I always enjoy them, even when they fail. More and more, I’m paying attention to the way in which artists have to constantly pick themselves up after being slapped in the face by critics and the public. Being a successful artist requires, more than anything, resilience. After acerbic critical response (what comes to mind is the Rolling Stone writer, name now forgotten, who asked “what is this sh**?” after a Dylan album from the seventies), a musician, writer, filmmaker, has to pick herself up, dust herself off, and say: I’m going to continue to create.

A good example is Cormac McCarthy. I enjoyed All the Pretty Horses, and then encountered this bitter and caustic review in The Atlantic, and wrote him off entirely. It’s horrible to contemplate that I could write off entirely a writer’s oeuvre because of some thwarted critic’s mean-spirited, if well-intentioned, criticism. But I did. The article made some good points, points that any creative-writing teacher tries to drill into her students. But it also demolished the hope of every working author it mentioned. It gutted them wholesale.

I finally returned to McCarthy, after a ten-year absence, reading The Road this month. Maybe McCarthy was able to take the good criticism with the bad, because he met some of it head-on. What blows my mind, though, is that he found the courage to tell any story at all, and especially such a difficult, dangerous one. The book is a love story, the story of the love between parent and child. In a world of darkness and horror, he posits, love is what saves us.

Maybe the book’s successful. Maybe it’s not. But McCarthy was brave enough to write it. He stood in the face of brutal criticism and said: no. I will continue to write. I will continue to publish. I will continue to take on difficult subjects. You can’t stop me.

Luhrmann does the same thing. I recently saw “Australia,” a film destroyed by the critical press. It was overblown and a little hokey, but I liked it. The line that stays with me is when the Drover says: “I’m the richest man alive because I have the best stories. At the end of my life, I’ll have a story worth telling.”

I do, too. And having a great, grand story means risking failure. It means failing. It means picking myself up and dusting myself off and thumbing my nose in the face of the naysayers. At the end of my life, I want to follow Dave Eggers’s dictum, as he says here.

What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who's up and who's down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.

What matters is saying yes. Eggers says yes. McCarthy says yes. The Drover says yes. I will, too.

Nothing in this world is like you

Lone leaf in the wilderness

Bob Dylan released his first Christmas album this year. The Weekly Standard says, in typically erudite prose: “It’s so bad I can’t believe it.”

Do I believe it’s bad? No. It’s one of the best Christmas albums I’ve ever heard. But of course I would say that. Right? I’m one of those battered Dylan wives Andrew Ferguson talks about. I have to admit--I love even Self-Portrait. Seriously. I was listening to iTunes on shuffle the other day (last month, actually--December is for Christmas music), and “Wigwam” came on. God, do I love that song. It has a flat-out good melody. So catchy. Dah-dah-daa dah-da. I love “All the Tired Horses,” too. The entire album is infused with world-weariness, with exhaustion. And I love Tijuana brass.

I find it interesting that other people (mainly critics on the internet) feel a need to tell me what’s good and what’s bad, in overtly moral language. As if I’m sinning by liking different music than they do. That if I love Dylan singing “how’m I gonna get any riding done,” or “here comes Santa Claus,” that there’s something wrong with me. Sure, I give Dylan a hell of a lot of free passes. I’ve seen him eighteen times in concert. Each and every one of those eighteen shows was one of the best days of my life.

I have a theory about art, though, a theory I’ve been cobbling together since college, when I was exposed to Abstract Expressionism, an entire movement in art that the Weekly Standard writes off in a half-sentence. My theory is that the relationship between artist and audience is the same as that between husband and wife, father and child, creation and Creator--one of trust. If I can trust an artist’s intelligence, trust that the purpose she’s serving is beauty, truth, and the spirit of the holy, then that artist can get away with almost anything. But thinking about it as “getting away with” is a problem in itself. It implies a lack of trust.

My married friends have the same problem. If your husband is working late, and you think to yourself: he’s working late because he loves me and our children, you are trusting him. If you think: he’s not really working late. He’s out screwing someone else. Then the trust in the relationship is lost. But those are your two choices. You can choose to trust, or choose not to.

If an artist puts a table in the middle of the room, and calls it art, I have two choices: I can say--she’s a charlatan. Or I can ask myself--what’s she trying to do here? What reason can there be behind this? How is beauty served?

As someone who wrestles with creativity every day, who struggles to find a place for herself in the universe by putting words together on a page, who fights to create order out of the chaos, I know how much work it is. And if I trust an artist, I’m going to seek to find the meaning I know they fought for.

I trust Dylan. The caustic criticism he encounters whenever he steps out of bounds is the same thing he’s had to fight his entire career. He was a folk genius, the voice of his generation, and people put him in the little box of folk genius. And Dylan said: no. I’m bigger than that. I’m going to follow my muse, and all of you can go screw yourselves. Or you can follow my lead.

To all the critics, I ask:
-Do you think no one’s ever asked Dylan to do a Christmas album before?
-Do you think he’s so senile he wasn’t aware of what he was doing?
-Do you think that all Christmas music is, by definition, bad?
-Do you think that Dylan performs 200 concerts a year, at $50 a ticket, at almost seventy years of age, because he’s trying to wring a couple of more bucks out of his aging fan base? Because he’s trying to punch his audience in the face? Or could it possibly because he genuinely loves music in all its incarnations, loves performing, because all he’s ever wanted is to be, as he called it, a “song-and-dance man”?

Sufjan Stevens can release a Christmas album,and we take it seriously. Johnny Cash can release albums of gospel classics, and we take him seriously. Brooklyn indie artists release albums full of animal howling, and we take them seriously. But Dylan releases an album about Santa Claus and we can’t even give him the benefit of the doubt? Four decades of the greatest music of our time hasn’t earned him that? Come on.

The thing about those smiling Dylan fans? At the end of the day, we have our music. Which we love. And as much as the critics sneer, they can’t take it away from us.

O tempo eu que eu fico

Blooming Christmas cactus

God says certain words to me at moments in my life, moments when he wants to emphasize a point. To bring me to a crux of humility. And I love him for it. I do. I love him like Saint Teresa of Avila did, on her bed in the monastery.

Tonight it was when the Amens from the Messiah flooded my speakers, on the iTunes random shuffle that I insist on using at all times. That way God can speak to me, through the intersection of random electrons in my computer circuits.

When I was a little lost American kid in Bangkok, one of the few cultural events my parents dragged us to was a complete rendition of Handel’s Messiah, performed every Christmas. It was one of the few ways we could get into the spirit of the season. Thailand is a Buddhist country, and the idea of Christmas hadn’t caught on yet. The weather didn’t help. Bangkok is the hottest city in the world, averaging daytime and nighttime temperatures, and winter for us was a week where it didn’t get above ninety degrees.

I don’t remember where the music was performed, other than it feeling distant from home, maybe a Catholic church, where wooden window slats opened onto a tropical garden that felt like Gethsemane, while slow ceiling fans circled above us. Every year, all three of us kids would fall asleep, especially during the Passion Week doldrums at the center of the oratorio, when the bass and the tenor sing recitatives about how much Christ suffered. During intermission, we drank Milo, non-American powdered hot chocolate, curling our hands around the paper cups in defense against the chilly seventy-degree weather. This contributed to our sleepiness.

If you know anything about the Messiah you know that the whole thing was written in 21 days, when Handel locked himself in an attic apartment, had food shoved under his door, and saw the face of God. At the time, he was a rather mediocre eighteenth-century composer at a low point in his career, on the edge of starvation, and paralyzed on his left side by a stroke, or so the legend goes. At the end of his rope, he grudgingly agreed to set a friend’s libretto to music.

The whole thing is brilliant, of course, and even stands up to the Southern Baptist church choirs that butcher it every year. The first section has most of the famous Christmas bits. But even those are more surprising and relevant than you expect. “Comfort ye my people, saith your God,” the tenor sings, crying unto Jerusalem that her warfare is accomplished and iniquity is pardoned. Even if you don’t believe in God, at Christmas, it’s hard not to believe that this means something. Maybe our warfare really has been accomplished.

When Handel dives down into Easter, where it gets very dark, and little children in the audience go to sleep, the text is surprising. “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” And “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow.” Not exactly the Christmas of poinsettias and jolly old elves, but this is the section that ends with the Hallelujah chorus, which, as legend has it, also woke up King George. He jumped up, and everyone else had to follow.

After coming back with the resurrection, the chorus simply becomes the angels singing at the throne of God. “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” begins the soprano. Everything’s over, the whole vast saga, and good has won and evil has been vanquished and the apocalypse is done.

Then you check your program, and you see that one little word printed there, “Amen,” and you sigh to yourself. “Phew. It’s almost over.” But having seen the face of God, for 21 days in a row, Handel can’t let the thing end. The Amens begin quietly, a slow rising melody, echoed by the tenors, then altos, then basses, then sopranos, and they build, and build, and build, for a full twelve minutes. The melody is sweet, but the triumph of victory is gone.

As if he’s saying, “Sure, I know all of this is too good to be true. Maybe the nations still furiously rage together, maybe none of the dead have risen. But isn’t it beautiful anyway? Don’t you wish it were true? Can’t you believe, just for tonight?” And still the Amens keep building, wave after wave, and the sopranos casually hit the high notes and the timpanis break out and it’s triumphant and beautiful but still sad and you don’t want it to be over, you don’t ever want it to be over, and just when you think that it never will be over everything goes dead silent and you think, please let there be more. And there is. At the final moment, not one, but two Amens. Even then he can’t let it go.

But then it really is over. And you go back into the muggy tropical night, and it’s really really late, it feels later than you’ve ever stayed up before, and your little brother’s still asleep and your dad’s going to carry him to the truck and you know that you’re going to fall asleep too as you drive across town and then you’ll be carried up to bed, but in that moment it’s all true. You believe it all. And you will, every time you hear it, for the rest of your life.

I wish I had a river

Sunset on Lake Michigan

I spent two weeks in early October at the beach with my family, at Door County, a peninsula completely surrounded by water. Unfortunately, it was also as far north as the Maine section of the Appalachian trail, so it was like sudden winter onset. It was fun spending the week with my family, but the weather was horrible, and we were all trapped inside, at the beach, circled by white-capped waves and wind-lashed trees. It made me long for the life I had at sea. One day it blew 65 knots, according to the weather.

So we watched Star Wars movies. When I was about as old as Sophia is now, I tried to watch Return of the Jedi with my dad at a beach-front restaurant in Thailand, and I still have a vivid memory of Princess Leia coming up on a frozen Han Solo in a darkened corridor, the light shining from above, his hands clutching out from the metal. I was terrified. So terrified that I convinced my dad to leave. This was when, if you recall, the movie had just come out on VHS. Yes, I’m that old.

So it’s about time for Sophia to be terrified in her own time. When you think about it, Star Wars is a pretty good child’s morality fable. Especially Darth Vader. He starts as Anakin Skywalker--good--morphs into Darth Vader--bad--and ends up redeeming himself as Luke’s father--good, again. It’s nice to have children learn that people can be more complex than being just good guys and bad guys at an early age.

It can be hard to be around my family, though, as much as I love them. I guess it boils down to how my life path has diverged from the standard one expected by my grandparents and parents, by the evangelical subculture, by, maybe, even the culture at large. When you think about it, standard operating procedure equals:

1. Go to college.
2. Get a job and an apartment.
3. Meet husband (preferably good Christian boy).
4. Get married.
5. Buy house.
6. Have lots of uber-cute children.
7. Successfully balance family and life’s work (preferably in Christian service).
8. Die surrounded by loving grandchildren (preferably with great-grandchildren on the way).

Somewhere between items two and three my life got significantly derailed. I decided I hated my job and my life, I hated winter, I hated spending eight hours a day behind a desk, working for someone else’s dream. So I quit. I swore I’d never work in an office again. (Going on six years and I haven’t broken that promise to myself. Yet.) I’m not even so sure about the whole marriage thing, and so far, my candidates for the office of life partner have not been--exactly--good Christian boys.

Does this bother me? I’d be lying if I didn’t say yes. It’s harder when I’m around my siblings, who seem to be managing so well. My sister’s children are uber-cute. My brother’s getting married this summer, to the daughter of a doctor, and a good Christian to boot. And what am I doing? Struggling to find my way. Still. Struggling to swim against the current. Because that eight-point life? I don’t like it. I don’t want my life to look that way. I don’t want that engraved on my tombstone.

I used to say, especially when I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, that the measure of a life should be in its 360-degree views. I remember sitting at a stoplight on my commute to Oak Brook, Illinois, at a five-lane traffic intersection and thinking: this is it? This is what my life looks like? A life constrained by a metal box, by asphalt, and low-budget mid-rise buildings. On the Pacific Crest Trail, I was eating ramen noodles and living in a teepee, but the 360-degree views were fabulous. Snow-covered mountains. Tundra. Streams of melted snow. Glacial ponds. It was another world, and around each corner was something I’d never seen before.

I’m fighting for that kind of life. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning, but I keep fighting. Especially in December, now that it feels like Door County in Tennessee. We had seventy-knows winds this week. I’ve broken out my down jackets and winter hat. The sun has disappeared. I don’t care what anyone says--I hate this time of year. Christmas tries to make up for it, but it doesn’t quite do the trick.