Sit down. Write the whole damn thing. Look at it. Sit back in your chair and read it from there. Get up and pace. Sit down and read it again. Think: Shit, this is brilliant! Print it up. Go get some coffee/beer/wine. Tell everybody you’ve written your best poem yet. Go get it from your desk and read it. Realize it’s actually the most god-awful pretentious crap ever committed to paper. Crumple it up and throw it away. Erase the file. Sit and feel humiliated and stupid. Decide that no one has ever written a really good poem about feeling humiliated and stupid. Write a stupid couplet about what a schlumph you are. Realize nothing rhymes with schlumph. Go get some more coffee/beer/wine. Get mad at your stupid self for being such a sissy. Start another poem. Have absolutely no inspiration whatsoever. Decide, what the hell, Hemingway couldn’t write worth a damn, and look how far he got. Start writing one-syllable words. Remember a couple of lines from that sorry excuse of an ink-waster that you wrote earlier that actually weren’t so bad and look for the file. Remember you erased it. Curse loudly, alarming your spouse and spilling the dregs of your coffee/beer/wine. Go reassure your spouse by lying that you had just stubbed your toe. Go back and clean up the mess, discovering the crumpled paper with the poem containing the not-so-bad couple of lines. Start reading it and realize that, actually, with a little work, it could be a pretty good poem after all. Go to bed about midnight, feeling tired but great.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
Explaining the Holy Trinity
Okay, so, God himself is male, although there doesn’t seem to be a Mrs. God, or even any Girlfriends. All the same, he has a son, Jesus, who, in spite of his name, is not Hispanic, but Jewish. The reason for this is that his mother was Jewish, and as we know, descent is reckoned matrilineally in that tradition.
Why his mother was Jewish is rather complicated, but it all goes back to the fact that there aren’t any Goddesses. There used to be, of course, along with dozens of other Gods, but that was before all the Mergers. A lack of Planning, no doubt. At any rate, God needed a son, apparently. This was because the original people, by finding out the Big Secret, had annoyed him to the point that the only way to fix things was for him to have a son and have people kill him. It’s not clear who made that rule; you would have thought that would only have annoyed him even more. But never mind, that was the rule, and there was no squirming out of it.
So there’s God, needing a son, and no obvious way to get one. Except, of course, being God, he could have just created one on the spot. Or he could have just said, “Forget it, that Adam and Eve thing was so long ago, who even remembers?” But of course there was the rule. Maybe God has a Mom we don’t know about?
But I digress. What to do? Well, humans had beaucoup females. A bit kinky, but well within divine tradition, and after all, the whole issue was their fault. Of course, she would have to be a virgin. I mean. And it would be way cool if she could stay a virgin through the whole thing.
God was living in the Levant in those days, and found a suitable girl, Mary, in no time. The permanent virgin thing was trickier. Enter the Holy Ghost.
I’m not saying that all of the above has been a paragon of clarity, but this is where things get a bit fuzzy. See, in spite of being the Holy Ghost, he’s not a former Holy Live Person, as you might expect. To complicate things even more, it’s not clear exactly what he is. I say he, but even that’s not clear. Sometimes he’s a dove, sometimes, especially when he’s making religious people spout gibberish, he’s, like, fire. Not like a house fire, more like a little Bic fire, sprouting from their heads. With regard to the whole Mary thing, you often see him in paintings as a dove, but I’m going with the Bic; more consistent with permanent virgincy, don’t you think?
So. That’s your Holy Trinity: God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. Mary doesn’t count, as she’s a she, and everybody agrees nowadays that persons of that persuasion don’t have sufficient gravitas. They have obviously not met any nuns. Ditto for the possible Holy Mom. This may leave you wondering, who is Jesus’ real Dad, God or the Holy Ghost? It also brings up the whole issue of the Holy Ghost’s rank, so to speak. Is he a Brother, an Uncle, a Pet? Or if they are all the same person, as people claim, how does that make any sense? As it happens, I have had the privilege of twelve years of Roman Catholic education, from kindergarten through high school, under the tutelage of first the fine Sisters of Providence, and then the Franciscans. I am highly qualified to give you the best answer from the highest authority.
It’s a mystery. Shut up.
How to be a critic – or not
When I write, I occasionally think in terms of mechanics like structure. Generally, though, I’m sort of a gut writer, meaning that an idea pops into my head from god knows where, and I sit down and start writing. I write until I can’t. Then I mope about until more ideas from the ether inject themselves. I write some more, stop some more, and so it goes until the thing resolves itself. Those of you who have read my posts on this blog are probably not terribly surprised at this revelation.
I do revise, of course, and over the years of reading and writing I’ve internalized the rules of style and structure to the point where they function at the same level as the rules of grammar. This is a nice way to operate, as it leaves me free to flit about like a butterfly and not think about rules until I’m ready to break them. Which, come to think of it, is rather a lot, like right now. On the other hand, thinking about them tends to send me off on a tangent, like right now. I have a friend who delights in finding obscure, forgotten poetry and reviving it. This usually involves precise meter and line counts, cryptic messages, and rhyme schemes that blow right through the alphabet. She whips up these delectable tiered confections as easily as if they were Aunt Jemima’s Buttermilk Pancakes, with absolutely no apparent sacrifice of spontaneity or evocative power. I love what she does, but I’m afraid I’m better at granola, myself.
Anyway, I’m telling you about my writing habit to explain why I’m a lousy critic: because the art of criticism involves re-externalizing all that stuff I’ve spent a lifetime internalizing. Worse yet, it makes you read through all that scaffolding out where you can see it. From a lit-crit point of view, I’m a terrible reader. I take characters at face value. I don’t care what Achilles symbolizes, he’s a jerk. In short, I cheerfully fall for all the author’s tricks and traps. I squirm and get crabby when people start talking about the true meanings of things in literature. I want that stuff to soak in slowly, naturally, the way a gentle rain permeates the soil after a dry spell. If I fancied a swill I’d get Cliff’s Notes.
I used to have an on-going argument with a friend, no longer with us, whose specialty was lengthy exposition of all the bits and pieces and hidden meanings of films. Our disagreement concerned jokes. I maintained that while you could get some pleasure from a joke that had to be explained to you, it could never match the pleasure of “getting” it spontaneously. He insisted just as adamantly that it could, and that I was a heartless elitist, and probably a fascist swine to boot, to insist otherwise. I put poetry, mythology, and most other literature in the same category as jokes in that regard. It’s fine, of course, to re-read, re-hear, and take as long as you like to reach that moment of enlightenment, but, to me, explanation diminishes it.
The upshot is, I can’t be counted on for clever comments, as a rule. If you see something along the lines of, “The lyric keeps an outward appearance of spontaneity, but it is inevitably inflected with an awareness of its impermanence,” you’ll know it ain’t me. My comment is more likely to be something like “That was grand! You’re so good at that.” or some other such insightful remark. Don’t get me wrong. It’s vital to my craft to know how to put the erector set together, and I even enjoy reading critical essays about literature in general, that is, about some aspect of it, rather than some particular work of it. Then I find room internally for that information, and move on.
You know how you spend a week in some hotel, and unpack everything from your suitcase? I’m pretty sure that if I ever objectified writing to the point that I could do an adequate job of criticism, I could never get it all crammed back into the suitcase. At least that’s my fear.
Omniop 