remember this book?

i can read

amy hempel (again).

On the last night of the marriage, my husband and I went to the ballet. We sat behind a blind man; his guide dog, in harness, lay beside him in the aisle of the theater. I could not keep my attention on the performance; instead, I watched the guide dog watch the performance. Throughout the evening, the dog's head moved, following the dancers across the stage. Every so often the dog would whimper slightly. "Because he can hear high notes we can't?" my husband said. "No," I said, "because he was disappointed in the choreography."

my service.

I just received an email from a friend of mine in India. Although it has taken me a bit of time to transcribe, I wanted to post this Amy Hempel story for him - I hope he, and you, will enjoy it.

The Man In Bogota.

Amy Hempel.

The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge--though not, she threatens, for long.

I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

I tell the woman about a man in Bogota. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep this man alive.

Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then-- that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.

**

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.

from an interview with hempel.

RH: In a recent interview with The Believer, you spoke about the lyrical, poetic quality of your work. Can you tell us what importance poetry has played in your writing career, and what can be taken from it? I get the sense a lot of younger writers don't spend a lot of time with poetry. Is that to their detriment?

AH: Poetry is the biggest help in writing stories that I know. You learn so much about rhythm and acoustics and compression and selectivity. No wasted words, no "furniture moving." I read and re-read certain contemporary poets all the time. Look at John Rybicki out in Michigan, someone I quote often. The passion is palpable, the heartbreak--you have to read his new book, WE BED DOWN INTO WATER, to see what a strong man does with soul-shattering grief. I find I bring more poetry into my writing classes than fiction.

this is what I think, too! i'm feeling validated!

new author: amy hempel.

my friend sandra tipped me off to this incredible author, Amy Hempel... I bought her book of short stories, The Collected Stories (2006), and I can't put it down.

I hardly ever find writing this close to perfect. Her sentences are stripped of all excess & extra, she skins each thought to the bone. What's left is essential, honest, and necessary. A vague review, guilty as charged, but to understand my thoughts you will have to experience her work for yourself.

excerpt taken from npr website.


In a Tub.

My heart -- I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God. I passed two churches with cars parked in front. Then I stopped at the third because no one else had. It was early afternoon, the middle of the week. I chose a pew in the center of the rows. Episcopal or Methodist, it didn’t make any difference. It was as quiet as a church. I thought about the feeling of the long missed beat, and the tumble of the next ones as they rushed to fill the space. I sat there -- in the high brace of quiet and stained glass -- and I listened.

At the back of my house I can stand in the light from the sliding glass door and look out onto the deck. The deck is planted with marguerites and succulents in red clay pots. One of the pots is empty. It is shallow and broad, and filled with water like a birdbath.

My cat takes naps in the windowbox. Her gray chin is powdered with the iridescent dust from butterfly wings. If I tap on the glass, the cat will not look up. The sound that I make is not food.

When I was a girl I sneaked out at night. I pressed myself to hedges and fitted the shadows of trees. I went to a construction site near the lake. I took a concrete-mixing tub, slid it to the shore, and sat down inside it like a saucer. I would push off from the sand with one stolen oar and float, hearing nothing, for hours.

The birdbath is shaped like that tub.

I look at my nails in the harsh bathroom light. The scare will appear as a ripple at the base. It will take a couple of weeks to see.

I lock the door and run a tub of water.

Most of the time you don’t really hear it. A pulse is a thing that you feel. Even if you are somewhat quiet. Sometimes you hear it through the pillow at night. But I know that there is a place where you can hear it even better than that. Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down. You lie back and wait for the ripples to smooth away. Then you take a deep breath, and slide your head under, and listen for the playfulness of your heart.

Mindful Living.

space is the symbol of liberty... if you don't have space around you, you can not move.

and therefore in order to be happy, you should allow yourself some space -

inside and outside.

the refreshing moon of the buddha is traveling in the sky of utmost emptiness...

practice bringing space into you and around you.

if you want your loved one to be happy, leave him some space,

inside and around him.

if you have too many concerns, too many worries -

how can you have space?

I am reading Thich Nhat Hanh's The Art of Mindful Living. This part about leaving the people you love space feels very true to me.

still thinking about canada.

ontario's corn fields and cows

from one of Lydia's comments,
Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke.

Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered.

But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy.

The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them.

But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.

all the king's men.

I just finished All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Good book, although difficult to get through, especially at the beginning – I know Warren is known for his novel approach to Southern speak, but in the beginning… I was going slower’n a bread wagon with biscuit wheels. The story picks up towards the end… overall, the book is an insightful and well informed foray into the world of American politics… all about graft and corruption and hope and promise. As Lydia pointed out, a very fitting read for the times. One of my favorite points: That we will never be OK with the future until we are OK with the past. And vice versa. Inextricably linked to this insight is another Warren makes regarding parents and children. He writes,

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Jack Burden, the main character, describes his mother:

For years I had condemned her as a woman without heart, who loved merely power over men and the momentary satisfaction to vanity or flesh which they could give her, who lived in a strange loveless oscillation between calculation and instinct…

After he sees she isn't this way, and he sees the truth about her:

I had given my mother a present, which was a lie. But in return she had given me a present, too, which was a truth. She gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world. Or rather, that new picture of herself filled in the blank space which was perhaps the center of the new picture of the world…

And that meant that my mother gave me back the past. I could now accept the past which I had before felt was tainted and horrible. I could accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and myself (433).

rosshalde, herman hesse.

I just completed Rosshalde, Herman Hesse’s fourth novel. Although I prefer his other work, the novel was worth reading, if only to unveil biographical facts regarding Hesse’s life. Like Siddhartha, Rosshalde explores man’s alienation, social paralysis, stagnation, and ultimately rebirth.

Vermouth, the principle character, finds himself cemented into a life of bored contentment. He views travel to India as his saving grace, and finally, at the end of the book he heads off in an orgiastic spree.

Reminds me of something an old man said to me when I first came to California – he pinched his leathery face and muttered, “So you moved to California, hmm? They should put signs on the borders of California, New York and Florida stating: this state doesn’t work either.”

Augusten Burroughs, "Dry"

Sobriety:

All of a sudden, I feel like an emotional paraplegic. I feel that all of my gains and insights are based on control and denial. I'm worried that I'm so profoundly sick as to appear healthy and together.

Like cubic zirconium, I only look real. I'm an impostor. The fact is, I am not like other people.

Do you have friends like this? I do. I love it/hate it because it 's awesome/sucks. You get me?

The reason I know what we are to each other is because we fight freely and almost constantly, about even the smallest thing. In fact, once we didn't speak for an entire week because he didn't like the way I loaded his dishwasher...I can't decide if we're exact opposites, or somehow exactly the same except for minor cosmetic differences. I do know that all of his friends hate me and all of my friends hate him. We drive each other crazy in ways that nobody else can even touch. We never bore each other. And we both realize what a rare thing this is.

Isabel Allende: last page of quotes.

…..various sources:

Write what should not be forgotten.

For women the best aphrodisiacs are words.

Here, write it, or it will be erased by the wind.

You can tell the deepest truth with the lies of fiction.

I see a more feminine world, a world where feminine values will be validated, the same as masculine values are. A more integrated world. I see that in the future, things that we have lost in the past will be recovered. There's a search for those things, a search for spirituality, for nature, for the goddess religions, for family and human bonding. All that has been lost in this industrial era. People are in desperate need of those things. I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it.

You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend or not.

I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.

Allende's The House of Spirits

How to react to an angry, explosive man:

He shouted like a madman, pacing up and down the living room and slamming his fist against the furniture, arguing that if Clara intended to follow in her mother’s footsteps she was going to come face to face with a real man, who would pull her pants down and giver her a good spanking so she’d get it out of her damned head to go around haranguing people, and that he categorically forbade her to go to prayer meetings or any other kind and that he wasn’t some ninny whose wife could go around making a fool of him. Clara let him scream his head off and bang on the furniture until he was exhausted. Then, inattentive as ever, she asked him if he knew how to wiggle his ears (106).

Ferula, the spinster sister of Esteban Trueba:

She was a regal matron, but with a bitter smile on her face that revealed her inner tragedy (109).

Nana, the Trueba’s live in nanny:

She had been born to cradle other people’s children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people’s roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery (124).

On charity and giving to the poor:

“This is to assuage our conscience, darling,” she would explain to Blanca. “But it doesn’t help the poor. They don’t need charity; they need justice” (136).

Allende's The House of Spirits.

On falling in love with a childhood friend - wedged between the innocence of youth and the trappings of adulthood....

They spent that summer oscillating between childhood, which still held them in its clasp, and their awakening as man and woman. There were times when they ran like little children, stirring up the chickens and exciting the cows, drinking up their fill of fresh milk and winding up with foam mustaches, stealing fresh baked bread right from the oven and clamoring up trees to build secret houses.

At other times they hid in the forest's thickets, most secret recesses, making beds of leaves and pretending they were married, caressing each other until they fell asleep exhausted. They were still innocent enough to remove all their clothes without a trace of curiosity and swim naked in the river, as they always had, diving into the cold water and letting the current pull them down against the shiny stones.

But there were certain things they could no longer share. They learned to feel shame in each other’s presence. They no longer competed to see who could make the biggest puddle when they urinated, and Blanca did not tell him of the dark matter that stained her underwear once a month. Without anyone telling them, they realized that they could not act so freely in front of others. When Blanca dressed up as a young lady and sat on the terrace sipping lemonade with her family each afternoon, Pedro Tercero would watch her from afar, without coming closer.

They began to hide when they wanted to play. They stopped walking hand in hand with in the sight of adults, and they ignored each so as not to attract attention.

Nana gave a sign of relief, but Clara started watching them more carefully (147).

“Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.”

Spring First Flower.

The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd.

August said, "Listen to me now, Lily. I'm going to tell you something I want you always to remember, all right?"

Her face had grown serious. Intent. Her eyes did not blink.

"All right," I said, and I felt something electric slide down my spine.

"Our Lady is not some magical being out there somewhere, like a fairy godmother. She's not the statue in the parlor. She's something inside of you. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

"Our Lady is inside me," I repeated, not sure I did.

"You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside."

Just finished this book... engaging story, but predictable, too typical - I felt as though I had read it before... have any of you read it? What did you think?

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, on Work & Integrity.

Howard Roark's advice...

to Peter Keating-

Never ask people about your work (33).

It's I who have destroyed you, by helping you (611).

general:

Show me your achievement- and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

I am a man who does not exist for others.

I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.... It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

Pain only goes down to a certain point.

To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'

Dominique comments on Roark's work:

There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building (287).

Ellsworth Toohey:

A leash is only a rope with a noose on both ends.

I don't want to be on a leash, I want to be free. And I want to own myself, and do what I love, I want to be my own boss and a free agent... it is not in my Pisces nature to be hemmed in by anything - be it a boyfriend, employment, location -

so?

so I am reintroducing myself to myself, and every day things become more clear.

<3>

Work Ethic.

Curacao July 2008
Originally uploaded by robinannmcintosh

Still reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

I continually read books when I need to read them - I always hear the things I need to hear - I always see the things I need to see - so why can't I believe I feel what I need to feel?

Some Rand-y quotes:

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.

Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.

The most depraved type of human being is the man without a purpose.

Ayn Rand.

I am currently reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand... I want to save my comments for when I finish, but for now here are some quotes related to abundance.

A house can have integrity, just like a person, and just as seldom.

I don't build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

To say "I love you" one must first be able to say the "I."

Worry is a waste of emotional reserve.

I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. . . . It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.