Mahmoud Darwish

A River Dies of Thirst

I am still struggling with reading as a writer. I have always had a hard time removing myself enough from the work to study the craft of the artist. I notice feelings evoked by the readings and will remember a book or author by how I felt while reading. Mahmoud Darwish makes me feel like a child. I am painfully aware that I do not know enough about his life (and life in general) in Palestine and Lebanon, past and current. I am made painfully aware of how blissfully ignorant I have remained in global understandings. His life was spattered with death, despair, and an overwhelming presence of wartime and disruption. I can't begin to imagine what that was/is like. I have a hard time fully absorbing what he has written. I feel quite removed from it. The obscurity and metaphor he uses is beautiful and also out of my grasp. I feel ill-equipped to judge his work. He was obviously well-read, his allusions eluding me at every turn. His intelligence is unquestionable, reminding me of the deep and daunting intelligence of Dante.

The work of reading Darwish, for me, is trying to connect to the work on a personal level. I understand much of what he is conveying, but do not feel much emotion. Much of what he writes seems to come from a place that is accepting of a desensitization that is necessary for self preservation. The tone seems melancholy to me, or rather absent of emotion, as though he is looking out a window at the world, or in a window at an individual and reporting on what he sees, because that is the life he knows...wonder and surprise, shock and disgust are luxuries not afforded him. (This is not a lacking in the work, this is a reality of life for those who have experienced death and destruction on a consistent basis).

There are glimpses of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and a splitting of the self. I sense a divide between a desire to know "what it's all for" and a dreary realization that perhaps it is all for nothing. I love the entries on the aging process, they seem to be among the most tender.

This is all brutal honesty. Every word of it. It doesn't seem to be a calculation or a formula to make the reader feel something. As the back jacket lets us know, Darwish reminds us, "Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance." Through his act of resistance and his conveyance of a world in turmoil, I am compelled to understand I have taken my own safety and blissful ignorance for granted.

Who am I?

I am a mother, a wife, a searching soul. I am a psychic, a medium, a self-critic of the worst degree. I am a slut, a virgin, a daddy's little girl. I am Mama, Mommy, and sometimes plain Ma. I am a nag, hound, and on high-horse lecturer. I am a wannabe writer, a wannabe painter, a wannabe creator. I am a singer, tone-deaf and screeching. I am a dancer, all awkward limbs and lines. I am a reader, of high literature and children's books alike. I am a couch potato at heart. I am the Energizer Bunny. I am the cook, the maid, the coffee-maker and alarm clock. I am a walker. I am a Yogi (if only in my mind). I am a Reiki practitioner, Level I.
I am not a Buddhist Monk nor a surfer nor a snowboarder. I am a girl, trying to locate the Woman I am becoming. She is lost in the stacks of dishes and the loads of laundry. She is lost in the gold Chrysler Town & Country. I am disorganized and organized to a fault. I am disjointed, disconnected, discombobulated and I find my parts on the floor frequently in puddles that I try to sop up. My sobs difficult to discern.

Aaron Shurin circles his subject...

Perhaps it is easier to circle your subject when the subject is...you. But I suspect it is not as easy as Aaron Shurin makes it look. Indeed, his beautiful honesty is not easy to come by. And neither is the beautiful portrayal of even life's ugly side. His memories take on a dreamlike, transcendental quality. His lyricism leaves me in a state of awe...and much of the time, at a loss for words.

I have to say, I am thus far completely impressed with Professor Ramos's choice of texts for this class. I feel like we are sinking deeper, with each book, into a writing life with Professor Ramos setting a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow and gobble as we move along the path. And I am gobbling up these texts. I feel like there is so much to learn from these books. I am generally not a rereader. I am a slow reader and I attempt to make as much sense as possible out of a text the first time through. I have tried to reread certain things and rather than "getting something different with a different reading, " what I got, was bored. However, there are a few exceptions and there are books that almost demand a second (or third...) reading. Cortazar's Hopscotch is one such title. But I also feel that Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, Dillard's The Writing Life, and especially Aaron Shurin's King of Shadows have kernels of truth and secrets of the trade buried within, that upon studying, we will come out  the other side better writers.

Fuck it. I'm trying to get this done with two very loud 10 year olds, a bold 7 year old, and a needy 4 year old running under foot. I am going to scream and it makes Aaron Shurin's summers in garden-surrounded hammocks sound like Paradise. An unattainable fucking Paradise. I can dream though...

I can dream that I will have the time and proclivity to reread this gem. We don't have to steal from Shurin because if we are willing to sit with him, he offers his craft up to us generously. He "flex[es] the page and stretch[es]" right there for his readers to see and absorb. He is daring and puts his heart and his soul on the page, leaving behind remnants of himself, vulnerable yet brave remnants of himself. It is impossible for me to dream of laying myself that bare, exposed. This is something I am struggling with for this creative nonfiction writing. I keep many things to myself out of fear. It is scary to place myself in such a vulnerable place. Shurin's delicate balance of what he shares openly and what he tacitly includes, painted with his precise, transcendental, lyrical prose is "courage and daring trapeze flight without a net." I can hope to rise to the occasion someday. Emerson's epitaph: "We study to utter our painful secret." A student's mode of study, my mode of study, could and should certainly include the works of Shurin. Impossibly beautiful, I could keep reading this book for the rest of my life.
            

  "This, I thought in a rush...is exactly what performing has to be: the generosity, the willful dialectic, the endless acknowledgement of shared meaning or joy. It was a demonstration of how to make art--the outward-seeking contract, the givingness at the heart of creation." 

Professor Ramos--
Where you lead, I will gladly follow.
Wendy

From the Edges: "The Writing Life" of Annie Dillard

I drool. I lust after. I am smitten by the picture painted in Dillard's The Writing Life.

I can't help it, I'm jealous. The green monster has grabbed a hold of me and now I will be forever haunted by this jealousy of a writing life such as the one described in this book. The joys, the tortures, all of it. However, the book leaves me wondering whether or not I have the stomach...or the freedom for it.

It took me a while to learn Dillard's rhythm, and it took me awhile to understand where she was going with her extended metaphors (i.e. the inchworm) but once I fell into her rhythm, I couldn't pull myself away. Even from the beginning of the book, while I was still trying to decipher the writing and the meaning behind the writing, Dillard struck me with thoughts that resonated. She speaks of the sense of freedom that a writer can be afforded. But she speaks of this freedom as more of a deterrent than an attraction to the writing life. She says, "The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever...Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality." This is often how I feel as a mother. Because, who cares (except me) if I get the dishes done or make the beds or finish the laundry? Who cares if my kids wear matching socks or eat a pop tart for breakfast? No one. Except me and my small tribe...and I care disproportionately more than even they. They say life doesn't occur within a vacuum. I beg to differ...it seems both parenting and writing do. It is a difficult trick to learn to embrace and not abhor the vacuum.

I can't help ask, how exactly does one read as a writer? I know I still am not doing so. I have a tendency to interact with the book, have conversations with it. It is difficult for me to understand the craft within the pages, difficult for me to extract it in a way that I can articulate. The "work" of the writing is not always clear to me. I am not sure if it is because I don't have the proper vocabulary, or I am not sensitive enough to the actual craft. I, in retrospect, have thus far read as a reader. I am finding it difficult to switch gears. I will attempt to do so, however.

At first, I thought The Writing Life  was like a diary or journal. If I look only at individual excerpts, it is easy to make this mistake. When the book is taken as a whole, and as I allow myself to be drawn into Dillard's cabin, I realize there is much more than journal entries here. At times I am confused. At times the entries seem fractured and abstract. Her analogies are always interesting, but sometimes weird. But through the quirky rendition of the reality of a writing life, the bare truth is left on the page for me to swallow. She is at times funny(I have little "Ha!'s scattered throughout my margins), sad, satirical, ironic, beautiful, pointed, and harsh. In such a small amount of space, condensation is necessary yet invisible to the naked eye. (How does she do that?) The work is not simply a straight, linear narrative (that is probably what I would have done). It is infused with passages of metaphor and analogy and imagery. She is a story-teller and an advice-giver. Her images are beautiful even as she describes the difficulties inherent in a writing life.

Her words and thoughts are often simple yet profound: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." This is now my new refrain for life! The more I think of it, the more treasures are to be found within these pages than I thought. Removed from it slightly as I try to reflect upon the work, I realize how much I adore this small book that booms big in my breast.

Annie Dillard takes a comfortable, almost conversational tone. I feel like I was almost listening to her tell me the stories rather than reading her book. I don't believe I have ever felt that way after reading a book, but it is not unpleasant. Her dry humor makes me literally laugh out loud. Her love-hate relationship with her career is exhausting to read about (yet alone, embrace) and is made evident through her sardonic, deprecating moments: "Writers read literary biography, and surround themselves with other writers, deliberately to enforce in themselves the ludicrous notion that a reasonable option for occupying yourself on the planet until your life span plays itself out is sitting in a small room for the duration, in the company of pieces of paper."

Dillard uses repetition throughout her book as well. It is a subtle repetition though, a repetition of ideas rather than particular phrases. The sprinkling of this repetition gave me the sense of deja vu or the feeling that I had "heard that before." I felt this lent a sense of credence to her words. This is something I will definitely try to steal for my own writing.

Jealous of her various studies, consisting of cabins on islands and crazy small rooms in dark buildings. Jealous of her solitude, the time she called her own. Jealous of her devotion, her desire, her fire. She makes me wish I were not only a writer...she makes me wish I were her. I am stuck home, with Time being dictated by the small and large tyrants I call my family. I am afraid that perhaps I do not have the freedom of lifestyle to be a successful writer. The thought unnerves and depresses me so I will try to rid myself of it. But doubt is a strong alligator to wrestle with. Is this what Dillard means when she says, "aim for the chopping block?"