Helen

I spent last night laughing out loud with my sister about the holes in the kitchen wall of the house where they all lived years before I was born. My sisters, early acclimated to tornado weather and our parents’ fights, used to pretend that the two, fingertip sized holes were made by an outlaw’s bullets—shots gone astray when the saloon girl grabbed the gunman’s arm as he swung his six shooter up from his hip, aimed right at the head of her true love, the intrepidly handsome gambler.  In actuality, those little beady eyes of vandalism had been made by a kitchen fork, the two pronged, sharp as an ice pick kind that my mother had intended for my father’s heart.

I’ve seen my father duck at the last minute. He was agile and still enjoyed a good goad long after the affair with the fork was history.

“A towel?” he roared in laughter when once she threw a damp cup towel across the kitchen, “Is that the best you can do? Oooooh, my knees are a’knockin’ now!” And so she threw a baking dish at him. Corning Ware does, in fact, break, though it cries out its end with more of a clang than a shatter.

As the ringing of breakage subsided, we discovered that she also had a pot lid—more clanging, that—she had a phone book, she had a can of spray paint for some oddball reason, she had an electric mixer, and, finally, a can of creamed corn, which just grazed the bobbing top of his bald head and left a bloody skid mark. I won’t say what came next, but it all ended with a typical Kraft spaghetti dinner and a puzzle on the table afterward. Storm rolled in, storm rolled on and now we laugh about Helen's stories, like one about the three months that we ate nothing but grits because she had a food compulsion and couldn’t have other edibles in the house.

 Or the time, many, many years later, when, after weeks of begging her second husband to get rid of a raggedy fishing shirt given to him by his first wife, she set it on blazing, lighter fluid fueled fire, “Wear the piece of shit now, you old sonofabitch.“

Or the time she drove her huge boat of an Oldsmobile down the wrong side of I-35 for ten miles because, “No one in their right mind would go all the way down to the exit! I only wanna go right there. I can see it from here, and the cars coming this way can dadgumwell see me!”

Once, when I was small and she thought I was too sick to take care of at home, she bundled me up, took me to the emergency room and told them I was having seizures. I wasn’t, but when I said this to her, quietly, secretively because I knew not to contradict her in front of anyone, she simply said, “Well, if you were having seizures, how would you know? You’d be out of your head. So, for all you know, you were.”

Then there was the night she poured a can of gas on our neighbor’s fruit tree because he’d asked her to move our garden hose from along the property line so he could mow. Gas is hell’s water: the tree died.

There was the time she broke into our old apartment to steal back our piano, and the time she pretended to be Navajo so we could shop at the government commissary, and the time she went out for a weekend trip and didn’t call for six weeks. Meanwhile, I was home, alone, with strict orders to ration my food and not to tell a soul.

And the year she moved and threw away every picture of any of us that had ever been taken.

Or the time she showed up at my house a week before my wedding with a car, a big car, full up to the roof with packages of toilet paper and a huge, anchorishly heavy black plastic garbage bag of pennies.  She had decided to leave her fishing shirt husband and move in with me and my intended. “I tried to bring stuff you’d appreciate. I can’t help it if this is what I thought of when I thought of living with you.”

Once, she took up a collection from the old folks at her retirement village for a hardship that was really a whim to drive back to Texas on a revoked license in a car she’d begged us to take care of and then called the police and reported stolen. She got kicked out of the retirement home, wrecked the car, and lived to pawn her diamond rings and accuse the housekeeping staff at her new retirement village of theft.

 Then there was the time she reported her home care aide to immigration and very nearly successfully had him deported even though he was from Utah.

Or the day before she died, when I got in my car, after hours of sitting with her in her room at the last stop group home, and discovered a hornet buzzing around inside with me, slamming itself in a rage against the windows. I pulled over and flung my door open, running to what I imagined a safe distance until it found the way out of its trap.

In life, there was no safe distance from this bottomless drink of radioactivity and vinegar-spiked Everclear that was the woman I would have called mother if it hadn’t felt so much more natural to simply call her by her name—she defied the boundaries of the superficial roles of life. She was all her, for her.

Last fall, I wrote a story about a woman who finds a way to murder her son-in-law by reporting a petty crime to the police as though he were a suicidal terrorist. My grad school advisor worried that the woman was too willing to hate for no reason, too disposed to behavior beyond the normal range of eccentric thought. I worry about writing so many older female characters that are simply batshit crazy. But they are mean in a funny way, from this distance.

Last night, I sat laughing with my sister because we were savoring again the shock of the first time we realized that when she did things like throwing pronged forks at our father’s heart, she meant in that moment to kill him. Her commitment to her actions was whole and in its wholeness elicits a kind of awe.

I would like to be as committed to my actions as she was to any one of the thousand inexplicable violences she perpetrated, any one of the hundreds of thousands of incidental curses she leveled. Laughing at it all is a silver net, and maybe this semester, as I grad-school my way through the year, I will find a way to write about her bad beauty. And it will be funny horror, hilarious gore, a genre for Helen.

Fire-Eating

I had another of my interesting dreams.

After a busy week of creative nonproductivity, buried under screamingly busy surface issues like traffic and work and grading and laundry that came out of the washer tied in mysteriously intricate knots, I fell against my will into a sudden stupor of sleep on Wednesday afternoon. Now, I am not a napper. In a perfect world, my body would love for me to be a late afternoon snooze hound, but in reality my schedule won’t bear it. When I give in to the midday, drowsy undertow, I pay by degrees of soupy headedness for the rest of the afternoon and evening—my work hours. I wind up behind the wheel of the car in the dark, swilling coffee or soda or both by turns, singing loudly to songs I don’t like at all in hopes that the annoyance factor will keep me alert enough to swerve all the texters on my night roads.

But on Wednesday, I sat down to read, and as soon as my ass hit the couch, reality tuned in a new station.

As it unfolded, here is what happened:

Unexpectedly, I find myself hiking, empty handed, through an arid, unpopulated place where the trail is so dusty that as I walk along, I stir up a fine caliche mist. White flies make blurry hurricanes around me. I swat a space for breathing, and realize that the motion of my hand is the only stir in the air. It occurs to me that I will not last long without water.

This is the second time of late I have found myself hiking in a dream without the right supplies.

Ahead of me on the trail, there appears a black rock wall and in that wall I see a small, triangular crevice, just high enough for me to stand up in. Without one question in mind as to why I would go into a cave—my waking self being very disinclined to do such a thing—I gamely walk in, almost hurrying down the rocky tunnel inside its rim. The floor is a narrow channel, splashy wet, tumbled with little round stones. I can see the rippled walls in a growing half-light and I wonder if it’s really a cave or if it’s just a drainage ditch the ground is dressing up in moss and roots and rocks.

Walking in the trickle of cold water, the air cooling down, I half step the graded slope toward some bright point ahead. After miles of tunnel, bending lower, but gently so, I trip on a root or a rock and almost fall out onto a meadow of soft, pale grass topped by a bright blue cirrus swiped sky. There is a breeze, sweet as the scene, little insects milling and chittering so that the country is alive in its empty space. There are low, sloping hills in the distance, some kind of pronghorn deer grazing off a ways. A couple of them look up at me and then go back to eating grass.

Just ahead, there is a campsite. I make for it, feeling at home and unconcerned. I am so chill in dreams. When I get to the clearing, I find it is a wide circle, made of wood chips, pebbles, the charry remains of old campfires all scattered about. My feet crunch over the ground. Here and there are cairns, different sized heaps of stones arranged in some specific way that doesn’t mean a thing to me.  I don’t have anything to do with those, so I walk by. On the far side of the circle, there is a shelf, a kind of dark box that stands about waist high. On that shelf there is a fire burning, smoking. The heat is encouraging though I have not been cold.

Now, as though I had meant to all along, I reach out and take a handful of this fire and begin to eat it. There is a flitting, a flickering in my mouth, a smoky, burned cinnamon flavor, and then a sort of hollow, brickled popping of the burned wood and coals as they crunch between my teeth—as though I were eating a sugar wafer made of spent fuel, a burned-cookie and ash offering. The fire itself is hot, alive, but not injurious. I swallow it all like medicine.

Still chewing, swallowing, cramming the fire in as though I were starving for it, a shadow falls. I feel a…something…behind me. I turn around and there stands on its hind legs the biggest bear I have ever imagined. He is red-brown, and he smells beastly, loamy, his breath all hot juices and spent smoke. His face is longer than a bear’s ought to be. I think. I have never seen this kind of bear before so I don’t really know, but it strikes me as very long, pulled into a considering expression. I wonder why he’s there, since I have never had much to do with bears, but I fail to run even when it occurs to me. We stand there for a bit. He’s my bear, I realize, and when that thought finally sits down inside my head, he holds out his bearish hands. In one there is a huge round river rock. Grey, smooth, cold, heavy. In the other there is a pile of little delicate bones all whitened by the sun. Those are some of my bones, but I am not upset by this. I think, I don’t miss them at all, so that’s fine. The bear is pleased. I turn around again to see the fire still burning. Beside the campfire shelf appears a smaller, black bear, swaying from foot to foot, looking at me. His movement seems to be bringing the night over the hills like a quilt pulled over the foot of a bed.

I start to dance around, too. The thought of staying with my bears begins to spread out in my mind with the stars coming on.

At that moment, a bright light, a flashlight shines in my eyes and a hand, very human, masculine, grips my face. I squint, pissed off, into a face I can’t quite see, but it’s definitely a man’s. He’s wearing a miner’s hat, light blazing, and he’s sooted and dressed for work in the mines.

Without explanation, he throws me over his shoulder, makes for the tunnel. I can see the divide between the bluing evening grass and the black, wet rocks of the tunnel. We go up, the grade steeper than before, seeming to go straight up a mountain. After an uncomfortably long time, during which I have established that struggling is not productive, we emerge, he dumps me on my back in the light of a desert day, bends over me, his face still obliterated only now by sun, and says, without malice but with authority, WAKE UP!

I did.

Generally, I do not understand my dreams. But I know this much—there is something afoot in the inert regions of mind and impulse. I see evidence of this more and more. Whatever genie lives in my heart that loves so much to play and say what it pleases in paint or poetry or prose is not content. There is a revolt under the mountain of my dailies. We are at a stand off, my dreams and my jobs, both a full measure of my whole self. The tides of waving flags muster just at the lip of sleep's deep well. And while I consider the uprising in my dreams and the business that goes without my awareness, there in the deep, I have to wake up and shake it off.

I wake up and shake it off.  And I consider the cofederacy of bears and miners and wonder what fire I've swallowed without caution.

Love & Whiplash

In 1934, the great Polish writer, Bruno Schulz—who has become a kind of art totem for me—wrote a letter to Julian Tuwim, a famous poet, thanking the man for promoting Schulz’s book, Cinnamon Shops (The Street of Crocodiles). While affectionately praising his poet benefactor, Schulz speaks candidly of the painful love one artist harbors for another:

“When you came to Drohobycz years ago, I was in the audience: I stared at you with rebellious hostility, filled with gloomy worship […] Certain of your poems drove me to despair with helpless admiration then. I ached—reading them over and over, heaving uphill that heavy boulder of admiration which, just before the top, unable to keep its grip on the steep incline of delight, came hurtling back down each time. They annihilated me, those poems, but at the same time they brought on an exhilaration, a presentiment of triumphant, superhuman powers that would one day be at the command of the happy, unshackled person.” (1)

Just last summer, I had the opportunity to attend readings by Rebecca Brown. Her openness, the wilding visions inspired by her words, seemed to offer a profoundly personal permission to create with like courage. I felt the swelling yelp of words, of pictures, of weird sculptures made from glass and wire and bear traps. All of us in that room, I thought I heard her say, were charged with the order to jump up, break the windows, smash the chairs, scratch up the floor boards and build with the bits something jagged and new and rougher enough to tell the truth. I sat rapt, brimmed with new energy for the work to come, at once vital and yet weirdly dry mouthed from the zap of understanding that I won’t ever write like that.

When I was in my early twenties, I saw an exhibition of the late works of El Greco. His eyesight failing, the old master had worked on his oversized images with his head cocked to one side to favor his better working eye, a technique that altered the frontal perspective of saints and patrons, great cities and angelic episodes, twisting everything eerily clockwise. To see the images unskewed, in emulation of the artist, the viewer was obliged to tilt, chin over, sightline right to favor the upside eye. At just the right angle, up and down balanced precisely with back and forward, the cliffside of swirling color and light snapped to its true muscular armature and all but walked off the wall, out into the comparatively flat air of Dallas in autumn.   The annunciation over, El Greco’s Mary looked down, burning with secrets, unlocked her stiff-angled limbs and climbed off the wall. She walked away, not caring a whit that I was running behind full of questions.

I admit that I was strangely depressed after that experience—in a full-hearted way that made me glad to know what was possible but certain that my own painting was useless, all original beauty having been long ago cast onto canvas—once you’ve been ignored by El Greco’s Madonna, you know that there is little left for you to do with your paints that hasn’t been already exceeded.

Familiar, then, were the feelings that emerged from listening to Rebecca Brown read. I fell in love with her words, and instantly, by implication, disenchanted with my own. This happens every time I fall in love with some new art, artist, or rumor of perfection.

In fact, reading Schulz provokes the same internal argument to abandon creative fervor as prospective projects grow pale and flimsy next to the unearthly brilliance of his prose. I snap from one state to the other—inspiration whiplash being so common to my experience that I will admit being enthused and then immediately crashing when looking at something I did myself—and I know I’ll never do again. Not that I have work to compare to Bruno Schulz, but I have written stories and painted paintings that sometimes feel like my size two jeans circa 1978, just...beyond me, from the very moment I finish them.

I am helped by looking at it as something that can be addressed by therapy. The Sisyphus in me may go on rolling his stone up and running like hell when it chases him back down, but on the way down, if I type an essay, start a story, paint a mandala, and revise some dialogue, the running doesn’t wind me nearly as much. The work is therapeutic fortifier. The stone has its gory moment, but I always catch the next infatuation with art, rise up and resume the hill.

(1) Ficowski, Jerzy. Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: with Selected Prose. Trans. Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1992. Print. 

A Party

 I have been out of town to attend a party thrown by our friend, a devotee of the Hindu goddess, Lakshmi. The occasion was the welcoming party for his two month old baby, a beautiful, already laughing child named for the embodiment of the divine, held in the arms of her mother, whose name means peace.

My own child, with whose name rise bubbles of joy, hit the edge of the party crowd and suddenly grabbed my arm, clutched me in a way that I had to unwrap her hands from around my hips to move. And we had to move—so many people were pouring through the door that the force of those entering created a swell of motion at our backs while we surged through, between, behind those already present. Top heavy with arms and legs, I tip-toed between rows of solidly seated party heads to find empty chairs. By some turn of luck, though we had to sacrifice my mother and father in-law along the way, I laid claim to perhaps the last three chairs in a row together as the dinner accommodations turned to standing room.  There, in the middle chair, I disentangled my daughter’s fingers from the neck of my new sweater and tried to lower her into the seat without dropping her the last foot or throwing my back out in public. I was sure that the room, the crowd, the noise, and all the fawning hugs and hullos and sit here, drink this, look at that den was too much for her seven year old sensibilities.

But when I sat down beside her and brushed the hair back from her face, what I saw was not anxiety of any kind, but mad, gleaming joy. She was rigid with the affirmative, thrumming inside and grinning like a tiny little lunatic.

As soon as the freeze of the initial wow subsided, she surged. For an hour I chased her around the crowd and watched her darting in and out and among people, stopping to ask questions about some especially beautiful salwar kameez or show off her own, which was a present from our hosts.

Then the guests of honor arrived, the mother and child joining the host, our ecstatic friend, to make a family of three again. Everyone rushed to greet them, to welcome them. They stood, father, mother, child, in a ring of dancers—Sedona being ever-eclectic—while their family members took turns blessing them by encircling their heads with stacks of dollar bills, which were then hurled into the air above them to rain down like flitty flowers.

Somehow, through the grace and good humor of this family and my child’s explosion of bliss, despite my attempts to put a well-mannered limit on her involvement in the central festivities, she was included in several of these blessings, she received many blessings, danced around the mother and child--another blessing, danced all alone for everyone to the whirling bang of disco raga, and made personal friends with more people than I could receive by way of thanks: Yes, she is mine. Yes, she is wonderful. 

Occasionally, over several more hours and into the evening, I noted a register of surprise when I confirmed that she was my little one. Really? their eyes seemed to say. But in my bedraggled, less than enthusiastic defense, I had started the day three hundred miles away, fighting with a leaky rubbish can, chasing down the cat when he slipped out to tempt the neighbor’s half-rabid mastiff into eating him, picking up dry-cleaning, gassing up the car, packing the bags, and vacuuming up the coffee grounds I’d spilled so that our pet-sitter would not be too appalled with the condition of our house to come back next time. It had been a typical day up to the very moment we stepped through the restaurant door and into the party world, and as such, the evening had not found me as brightly lighted as I might have liked.

And therein is the round meaning of the night. In the span of a day in which I know I will address reading, writing, and if I am supremely fortunate, painting or fabricating, I will also manage school lunch boxes, traffic, overloaded laundry baskets, students with anemic motivation to think, traffic, more traffic and then supper to fix or fetch and, in any event, clean up.

The flow of creative juiciness shrivels in the draw of the mundane, where the zeal for bliss is reduced to a bullet point on the daily calendar. But joy has an investment in creation, and the attraction is joined by creation’s need for joy, and thus, the work of vision and expression incarnates as the divine romance of art and artist.

After the party, after the child that charmed the world in a room finally lay her head down and, dreaming, led her still-dancing feet into sleep, I crashed, too. And in my dreams my husband and I walked up a red rock trail, winding around trailheads, mounded towers of sandstone. We were wandering without direction for what seemed a desperate long time. We were lost, stupid city hikers with no map and no feel for the open terrain, out of breath, thirsty. Our climb leading us nowhere. Then, going over a steep rise, we came all at once down into a bowl shaped valley, fringed by  scores of people whom we could not quite see but could hear and perceive as present. They were singing and clapping. The valley before them was carpeted by brilliant flowers in all colors, shining as the sky turned red on the horizon, visible between the slot of the far walls.

Over us all floated a huge sphere of red fire, burning like its own sun above the center of the valley. From this body of pure flame and oozing heat poured a trembling awe. We wanted to back away, but the will to act on urge was not in our possession while the red orb burned. As I watched, enthralled, the flames swept back, swept open, leaving a sliver of still red flickering flames in a ring of cool fire. In the center of this brilliance was seated Lakshmi, known to me only from her image painted on mural of a restaurant wall.

In her radiance, in my dream, she was—indescribable. Huge, but human, surreal, but all-present in form, in glory, in consciousness.  She was flesh, but luminescent, sitting in the lotus position, flowers raining from the palm of her outstretched hand, flowers pouring down to the floor of the earth and with them her love, her abundant gifts.

 Her eyes were closed, and I was thankful for this, being already awestruck, pinned to the vision of her velvet skin, the poise of her four hands, each one offering an intricately different face of blessing, and the smell of flowering perfume coloring the air, the ring of flame around her as she floated there, the force of origin issuing from her moving, not moving fingers, her palms, the flood of her light. It was a kind of conversion. It was a dream of creation with no meaning or attachment to the life of day other than its possession of joy in abundance.

The Atom of Artsy

Yesterday, I took my band of thieves to the park to curl the winter grass between bare toes and chase the hours over the hump of a crowing hill, the high spot of late sunlight where the boat tailed grackles set a twanging, static-calling watch for the first glimmering star. They point their beaks up like antennae tuned in to the sky, as though they could be an alien race under our noses, waiting for their mothership. To the dismay of many neighbors, nightly they sit there and build, noise on noise in scraping cacophonic layers until, at some indiscernible signal, they ascend the two pine trees on either side of the hill in one breathtaking cry of flight.

The first birds were dotting their roost while my daughter was gamely striking up friendships with children, toddlers, grandparents, and groundskeepers. Most of my attention was spent sussing up whoever the little bee was buzzing around at any given moment, but I chatted off and on with other parents. The grownup conversation fiddled and flowed, when in the middle of an idly begun chat about nothing much, I suddenly winced to alertness at a chuckled question about my child that reached out and pushed me:

“Well, you say she’s artsy, are you guys trying to steer her towards the sciences?”

Accurately, literally, what I had said to this grass patch friend was that my little girl loves art, both looking at it and making it. The comment seemed in keeping with the playground chat, mostly constituted of halfheartedly mulmed thoughts on the various school break pursuits of little girls. Within that pink sweatered and soccer ball dotted context, I had remarked that my child loves art.

Defensive maternal posturing aside, this question is a box of ugly treasure, for it forces contemplation of the balance between aesthetic purity and objective pragmatism.

Clarice Lispector, the great Brazilin writer who gleefully drew the aesthetic event horizon as a trans-dimensional gangplank, prompted one of her most mysterious narrators to explain the scale and scope of his own creative impulse: “Made of porous material, I shall one day assume the form of a molecule with its potential explosions of atoms.” (1)

Truly, the most volatile art tears its way free of the most precise focal point. If I could strip away the other consciousnesses and exercises of this life and become Lispector’s molecule, I might not be able to resist the force of my own holler. I believe that might be transcendence.

Back in my own reality, there are objective truths that, though I can conceive of them as illusory, must still be managed on this plane—and I grant that science is better than art on a purely pragmatic plane where creativity equals eccentricity, and eccentricity is tolerated as comic relief. There are worldly limits to what is manageable.

But the dichotomy is driven to confrontation from both sides. My sister’s old boyfriend, a professor of Romantic Literature, liked to say that if you intend to make money from your art, you should not call yourself an artist, but rather an artisan, the distinction acting as indictment. In the shadow of that veil, the incidental dismissal of the creative life is made with the finest intent—to protect both the temple of art and the belly of the creative child.

By the lime green grassy light of a waning afternoon at the park, I get reflexively angry when my girl’s love of art, music, and language is meted with pity for me. There is an assumption at work that I have seen before—that I have much shepherding and steering and outright pushing ahead of me to keep her from doing the wrong thing—whatever that is—as if in some way, just the tendency to think abstractly is enough to lead her to capitalist ruin. Judging by my own experiences, maybe that’s true enough.

Always, I have been diluted in spirit by the tug on the one side to be the art and on the other to pay the rent, but I have no hard feelings either way. I think the point that might have eluded the practical park mother, my sister’s boyfriend, the teachers, the counselors, the bosses, my mother, is that there is no relief in de-emphasis. Recalibrating an artist as artsy does not cleanse the soul of unpredictability and impractical desire any more than turning a painting into a vow to purity pays for supper. The barrier of exclusivity between the two worlds only serves to disenfranchise. Eventually, creation finds the artist, the atom excites, even if you are hiding in a classroom or a cubicle. Though sometimes nothing is created except loss.

For now, I am trying to find a more concrete answer for my child, because I think that would be a nice present to give her one day—here, sweetheart, this is what you should do and I’m sure I’m right. But at that yesterday moment, all I could do was frown a smile at this woman and follow my chasing child up the crow hill, where we stood with the birds, looking up at the gloam, listening for the signal.

(1)      Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York, NY: New Directions Books, 1992. P. 13. Print.