FALLING FROM GRACE

By Gerbil (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

We all have heroes, folks we look up to, admire and adore, folks we worship beyond measure.
We all have heroes who save our world, make our world.... contain all  of our worlds.

We may know our heroes personally; they may be family or friends, co-workers or mentors.

They may be friends-in-our-head--movie stars, politicians, business entrepreneurs.

These folks we follow and imitate.  These heroes we quote and cite as our reasons for.... everything.

And then.... comes the affair, the bankruptcy, the murder, the lurid past catching up, the surprising present revealed.


What do we do when our heroes fall from grace?

What do we do with the now hollow praise, the expansive admiration with no object?


We are used to folks falling from grace-- the scandal, the frantic, almost gleeful media reports, the  viral explosions on FaceBook and Twitter. The talk shows. The witnesses coming out of the woodwork, from under rocks, from behind 30 years of silence, to collaborate, to denounce,  to  attest and announce their version of betrayal, each new report adding to our horror or causing us to nod in that cynical "I am not surprised"  way.

For months, I defended Bill Cosby.  These are only accusations. I  said. He has not been arrested or charged. I argued.  Why have they waited so long if this is true? I asked.  What are they gaining? I wondered.

But now we have his own words corroborating everything or at least some accusations.

What do we do with this?

How do we now separate the man from the character that we all loved?  That character that brought the first professional upper-middle class black family into our living rooms each week..

How do we separate that lovable Huxtable Dad who always knew just what to say and how to   help from the man and husband who has caused so much hurt.

Do we still watch the old reruns? Are we still allowed to enjoy them or have we been betrayed so deeply that this is now an impossibility? Will they even remain on the air or be erased from  air wave memory?

And then we have to ask who knew and didn't tell, swept it under the rug, or excused-- for whatever reason?

There are bigger issues.

What does all of this say about how we treat women and girls?  Would we have believed these women individually?  Did we believe them collectively?  There was  a lot of talk about conspiracies and economic gain?  I participated in that talk with lots of other people.

I was wrong... along with many others.

And it is not just Bill Cosby.

We witness this falling from grace often.

Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong,  Bill Clinton, The Subway spokesperson... a host of politicians, sports figures....

We hoist people onto pedestals  and  when  they come crashing down we are shocked and disappointed.

Despite the frequency  of public falling , we never see it coming and we still  take it personally.

What can we do?

As we witness the falling of others this may be a perfect time to  assess our own precarious positions on pedestals that other may have erected for us... with or without our knowledge or consent.

Who will be disappointed if/when we fall?

We can only come to terms with fallings and failings if we recognize the universality of imperfection in both ourselves and others.

And we may cope more easily if we accept the realities and paradoxes of both/and rather than expecting our world to be either/or.

Where can we turn?

When in doubt I turn to poetry.
I write poetry to question, wonder, wrestle, think, figure out what I think...  tell you what i think...

I read poetry in an effort to name my questions, my  wonderings, my uncertainties...my un-name-able.

 In her poem Imperfections, Elizabeth Carlson reminds us to love our own bumps and foibles (and I would add those of others, as well):


...I am learning to love
the small bumps on my face
the big bump of my nose,
my hairless scalp,
chipped nail polish,
toes that overlap.
Learning to love
the open-ended mystery
of not knowing why...

Robert Frost reminds us that Nothing Gold Can Stay.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Remember a time someone you know and/or loved fell from grace.

Write a list of questions you have about the surrounding events.

Your questions may be addressed to the person,  to others involved, or even to yourself.

Write a poem based on your list of questions.

WRITING IS HARD

Čeština: Budapešť, socha neznámého (Writer in Budapest) by Dezidor

Writing is hard.

Writing is hard when
ideas get stuck
in the crowded funnel
interrupting or stopping
the easy flow of words

Writing is hard
when ideas get stuck
in the tunnel carrying our words
from our heart to our brain
to your ears  and your eyes... and beyond.

We are not being honest
when we portray writing
as an easy thing
or when we think writers are just sitting
at a table or a desk,
somewhere in a cozy retreat with a view
churning out pages
and pages
and pages

stopping
every now and then
to take a walk
to smell the lilacs
to sip their bourbon
and feed their dogs
while words are sparring
offering themselves
to be first from the pen
or onto the screen.

No
Writing is hard.

Words are scratched
from the dirt,
once fertile
now famine dry

Words are ground
between our teeth
as we chew and reject
taste and spit out
or swallow whole
missing the savory flavor
for which we search

Writing is hard.
we sit still ...waiting
for an angle, a hook, ..one word
to follow another
to follow another...

Writing is hard.


In June, I  spent two weeks with  a group teachers from the Columbus Area Writing Project, engaged in the hard work of writing,  I wrote beside these fellow teachers as they were also engaged in that same hard work.

We were remembering and examining our lives as teachers, retelling and  reflecting our journeys--including the highs and the lows, the warts and the beauty marks, the inevitable failures and the great moments of success.

As we wrote, we recognized patterns and echoes woven through our stories, individually and collectively.

We identified turning points and  critical moments that split time into a before and an after.

We cried and laughed as we narrated the complexities and messiness of the personal lives that backgrounded our equally complex  and messy teaching lives.

We marveled  at how we had survived --and arrived  at our present points, our current pages in our stories.

Writing is hard.

We got stuck between words sometimes...  sandwiched between too many memories  or trying to push out that one irretrievable nugget.

 Time stood still when we were in the moment  and words were tumbling over each other like waterfalls in hidden tropical caves splashing onto the pages in fresh satisfying drops.

Time raced as deadlines loomed and words deadlocked in the recesses of our blocked writing brains.

Writing is hard.

We offered our pages to the group--  holy sacrifice and sacrament.

We mourned when they suggested a word, a sentence,  a paragraph needed to be changed, reworded--- or even deleted.

We worked to shape nuances and tones and moods.

We modified the  irreverent, and politically incorrect. Our task was to share and reveal, not offend and negatively provoke.

We walked and snacked on nuts and fruit. We sipped water and coffee and an occasional soft drink.

We talked quietly.  We sat... alone.    We sat.... in company

And. we wrote...

Writing is hard.


In a previous post, Writing Wells: Writing Ideas for When the Well is Dry, I offered  ways to get started writing when the ideas are not flowing.   You may find inspiration there for when writing is hard.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have long carried columns in which writers have shared their lives, their processes, their worries and their joys, as well as the hardships and difficulties of living  their writer's lives.

Both editors of these columns, John Darnton and Marie Arana,  have published collections  of the columns, which may  serve as companions on your own writing journey.

                         
 

 If you are looking for lighter inspiration spinning the The Wheel of Process at The Book Architect site  may  be just the ticket  for those days when showing up at the computer, the typewriter, the page  is just not enough.

This unique feature offers 40 articles on writing "from inception through editing through completion."   Their seven articles on writer's block may just what you need to jolt you back into productive composing.

Some days... nothing works... and we just have to acknowledge it.

Writing is hard.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

When has writing been hard for you?  

Reflect on a piece that you are currently involved in writing.

What has been most difficult so far?  How did you work through, write through the hard parts?

Write a poem about writing this particular piece or about your writing life.

SILENT SPACES

By Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho from Lahti, Finland (The Silent  Uploaded by Markos90) [CC BY 2.0

One ambition of poetry is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

-- Mark Doty, Chancellor, American Academy of Poets

I encountered the above quote in The Nothing That Is, April 15, 2015 Newsletter of the Amerian Academy of Poets.


We don't like silence.
It makes us nervous.
We rush to fill the seemingly dead air.
We twitch and fidget.
We begin to chatter when intentional sound does not quickly enough drown previously unnoticed background noises.
We rattle on, grasping for words and topics.
Sense may not be considered.
Eradicating the silence is all that counts
Nonsense may be the result
Anything-- just so the silence doesn't overtake us.

Poet and mystic Kahlil Gibran understood this fear of silence, this fear of being alone in the quiet, as well as the importance of silent spaces for fruitful thinking.  In Talking he writes:

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts; And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape...

 Read Talking in its entirety here.

Silence is not a bad thing-- or something to be feared. (In a previous post I pointed to more positive aspects of silences.)

We have simply forgotten how to be silent.

We have forgotten the delight of having an idea or a thought percolating while we wait in silence for it to bubble up ---in a new form, a generative organism.

We have forgotten the joy of being surrounded by silence.


What does the silent space to which Doty refers  sound like?

I know that silence well.
I have seen it in my former classrooms,  in writing groups of both children and adults, and during the daily read-around in the Columbus Area Writing Project

It is that aaaaaaah! 

It is that contemplative space that remains after we have heard remarkable words read aloud.  These words hang in the air caressing us, begging us to savor them, daring us enjoy them,   beckoning us to follow them into subsequent thought,  challenging us to converse with them, creating new conversations.

It is that  silent space which acknowledges that no words can express our appreciation of what we just heard.

In a previous post, I wrote about silent response to what I call deeper writing.

Aaaaaah!

We all recognize that auditory space of reverent  and "reverberant" silence  to which Doty calls our attention.


Poetry and other types of writing, however, also provide another kind silence--visual spaces of silence.

Using spaces on the page--- between lines and stanzas, between paragraphs and pages, writers force us to pause, to breathe, to come to a full stop.

In that visual space, we ponder the words we just read-- the meanings conjured, the philosophies presented.

Poets spend as much time choosing spaces as they do choosing words and combinations of words to express their meanings.

Do I start another stanza here?
Do I leave a space at the end of this line?
What shape is the space around my words?

 I searched through my notebooks to find a poem in which space is evident and can be considered.
Click here to read  Staring at the Blank Page.  Does the spacing work?  To what purpose? How might the spacing work differently?


Even spaces between words, which we take for granted, are a relatively new development, with manuscripts originally written with no spaces between words. Paul Saenger traces this development and the subsequent rise of silent reading in Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading.

I am currently reading  Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan.

Each of the four parts of her intricate novel  is linked to the other parts, by a harmonica--- and by loneliness, war, and choices.

 Each new part ( and new story ) is separated by blank pages before and after the page numbering and announcing that next part.

Each blank page is a space inviting us to pause to consider what we have just experienced, what might happen next in the narrative we are leaving, what is about to happen in the story we are now entering.

Each silent space calls us think about the several echoes in this story.

As  readers, we often encounter silent spaces.
Spaces in which we reflect and  remember, react and respond.
Spaces that call us to stop-- reverent and reverberant silences.

As writers, we create these same spaces.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Consider the book you are currently reading.

 

How has the writer used silent spaces?

In what ways do these spaces foster the reflective pauses as described by Mark Doty in the opening quote?

Consider a piece of your own writing.

How have you created silent spaces?

Write a personal essay  outlining your process and thinking as you created these spaces.

Write a poem about silent spaces.