Writing and Work: The Lowell Offering as example

Before I got into graduate school, I worked at a glass factory. Pint glasses, beer mugs, wine goblets, coffee cups—we made everything.  It was tough work that kept you moving. And at the end of the day, your body ached so that when you got home, you craved simple comforts: a hoppy beer, a plate of cheese fries, a hot bath.

I did not like this job.  Two things (other than the money) kept me coming back. 1. It was temporary. 2. It required little brain space. The work was not mindless, no, I don’t mean that.  What I mean is that once you got into a rhythm, a groove, it became rote: you could execute the tasks with minimal thought. This meant you could think. About writing, about stories, imagined or real. And at lunch you could read: that stack of neglected New Yorkers, whatever short story collection you’d plucked from the library. Reading and thinking (and not the academic, scholarly kind thinking, but the fantastic, imaginary sort of thinking) were luxuries I valued immensely.

At the factory I worked in Northern Kansas, not many people read. Not just at work, in the break room, as I did, but at all. The stack of books I hauled around was an anomaly. So when people saw me reading my tattered paperback of “Cannery Row” at lunchtime, they commented.

“Why are you reading? School project?”

This is not to say that the people I worked with were illiterate. No, they were not that. They were smart. They were smart but when they thought of reading they thought of school work, of paper work, of something they didn’t have to do anymore.  This is not surprising. A fourth of the country fails to read a book a year. And most Americans read on average four books a year. And so it goes.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine another America. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, an America where factory workers read voraciously. It’s hard to imagine an America where factory workers organize improvement circles and literary societies where women talk about poetry and write essays on weather, friendship, life and work. I’m talking about the Industrial Revolution. In particular, I’m talking about Lowell Massachusetts: The City of Spindles.

In 1840, American factory life produced an odd thing: the Lowell Offering, a quasi literary magazine that published poetry and prose written by workers, all of them women. According to its own tagline, the Lowell Offering was “a repository of original articles written by females employed in the mills.”

The women writers—the stitchers, doffers, spinners, spoolers and weavers ages 10 to 35—did not imagine themselves as great writers, or even, sometimes, competent ones. But they wrote nonetheless, sometimes peppering their prose with defense statements, such as the one Betsey Chamberlain gives us in her article “A Letter About Old Maids:” 

“I shall care little what opinions are entertained or expressed in relation to the style of the composition, if the moral be remembered and regarded.”  But careful perusal of the publication shows us that the style of the composition was thoughtfully rendered: precise word choice, skillful cadence.  In an essay on the evolution of the Offering, one of its writers, Harriet Farley, speaks of her own admiration of the journal—“They appeared to us as good as anybody’s writings. They sounded as if written by people who had never worked at all,” she writes. And what strikes me about the sentence is the mere assumption, perhaps a national lingering one, that workers and writers are two different things. That those who write only do so because their hands are free to pick up the pen.

Every writer dreams of getting away, of finally having time. Time to write, to think, to read, to dream, to rewrite. But this assumption that you have to step out of life in order to write well is a fallacious one.  It ignores the fact that it’s out of life that art emerges.

One must isolate to produce art, yes, but this isolation mustn’t be prolonged. I think of Kafka, who kept a job throughout his literary career. At times the job diminished the frequency of his literary productions, but I can’t help but think it also fueled and shaped them in meaningful ways. Examples abound: Borges was a librarian; Joseph Heller, wrote promotional copy for an ad agency, penning the first chapter of “Catch 22” during downtime at work; William Carlos Williams worked as a doctor and his best short story (essay), “The Use of Force” is about his job.

I do not mean to glorify work or glamorize life at Lowell.  Factory standards were not ideal, I know: Women worked 12 hour days, more than 70 hours a week with meager living conditions. And even the “Lowell Offering” was not a purely harmless product; factory owners recognized its potential as a PR tool, inspiring such articles as “The Pleasures of Factory Life.” But it’s an interesting artifact nonetheless. It’s notable for the portrait it paints of America during the Industrial Revolution, and for the window it gives us into the blossoming of feminist thought. But it also provides a valuable glimpse into the lives of a group of workers who found the time to write.

I think some of our best writing emerges from a place of yearning. And sometimes that yearning is a product of wishing you were somewhere else. I think of “A Merrimack Reverie,” a short burst of an essay that printed in volume two of the Lowell Offering. In “Reverie” the narrator falls asleep at work and dreams of turning into a mermaid—“I began to sail up the stream,” she writes. The journey takes her into Lake Winnipisseogo, where she admires the beauty of the water and the shores and the bay and harbors. After time, she knows she must return to work, to the City of Spindles. She begins to “leisurely retrace (her) course.” We get the sense that the narrator doesn’t want to return.

Knowing she must, the narrator thrusts all of her energy into a meditation on the ocean: “…We see the whole human race embarked on the restless stream of time, driving with rapid current towards the vast ocean of eternity—now tossed by the billows of passion and folly which threaten every moment to dash them against the rocks of contention and strife, or to swallow them in the whirlpool of vice and dissipation.”   

The excitement of the essay tamps down once the narrator realizes she’s at work. The prose loses steam. Everything becomes peaceful. The narrator had imagined the entire reverie while at work, her location has not changed, but her imagination is no longer aloft.  Her head fills with the sounds of the factory, which she tells herself are pleasant noises—“the machinery in our room rattling away merrily as ever.”  But the reader knows to distrust this: it was the machinery and its “merrily” rattling that had sent her into fantasy, into thought, about writing, about stories, imagined and real. 

Chansi Long is a former journalist who spent a stint working at a glass factory. She's an MFA candidate studying at the University of Iowa. 

Dinty W. Moore: #Brevity

Hello Essay Daily!  My name is Dinty W. Moore and I started Brevity, the journal of concise literary nonfiction in 1997, on pure whim, with just five contributors and – counting myself – as many as six readers.

Sixteen years a later, we average 10,000 visitors a month, or roughly 40,000 pairs of eyeballs for each issue, and given that we are online, geography is no limit: we’ve accepted submissions from India, Egypt, Ireland, Spain, Malaysia, and Japan, and our readership is similarly international.

Still, though, I wake up certain days and wonder, why am I doing all of this?  Thanks to a few dedicated volunteers, Brevity is no longer a one-man show, but we still have a very tiny budget.  For reasons outlined here, we adopted a small reading fee a few years back, and thankfully that means we now pay our writers.  I wish we could pay our editors as well, but life is tough out here in the literary magazine world.

What are we looking for? I’ve adjusted my standard answer a few times over the years, as brilliant writers show me how much can be done in 750 words or fewer, but here is what hasn’t changed – we are looking for absolutely crisp prose and tight sentences, and a strong sense of voice.  I want to feel the author’s presence, know the author’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, as well as her experience or memory.

One of my recent favorites – it is hard to pick favorites, of course, since nothing gets published unless we love it – is Jill Talbot’s “Stranded.”  Notice how much is at play in the very first sentence: “This night like a photograph neither one of us can make out when I call you fifteen years later to ask if you remember the gun, the men, the comet.”  Notice how mood is set through crisp description: “You are standing behind me, a gun in your hand. We’re both wearing our long-sleeved flannel shirts, khaki shorts, flip-flops. The truck that pulled up behind us is dark, quiet, and we can’t see the men who got out of it. The back right tire of my car is flat.”  Notice how it seems to be about one thing – the men in the truck – but is actually about another: “(I read a) postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle: ‘Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter if I ever see you again.’ ... And then I stopped, the lines too close to the things we were doing back in Lubbock. You with that one man. Me with that other. The two of us taking turns driving out of the state to change our state of mind.”  And all of this embedded in a phone call, fifteen years after the fact. A tale of survival.

Sejal Shah’s “Thank You” is markedly different, but similarly urgent.  “You will never know me,” it begins, “will never know your father once professed ... to love me, will not know the first time we made love you were in your bedroom next door sleeping, and we paused to listen when we heard you ... call out in sleep.” All of the pain of a broken love affair is revealed through direct address to a child the author never met, and through intimate details such as these: “Your father showed me pictures of you in pale pink leotard and translucent white skirt, a series capturing your curly hair and sparkly eyes, and assured me you’d love me. But you will never meet me now, and I will never meet you, though I heard months of stories about you and gave you two books, both of which I heard you loved.”

But the truth is, what gets me most excited in the submission queue is an essay that does not resemble other Brevity essays, something new in both form and content.  That’s hard to do, I know, but thank goodness there are so many writers who are willing to keep on trying.

*

Dinty W. Moore is author of numerous books, including The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, and the memoir Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. He recently edited THE ROSE METAL PRESS FIELD GUIDE TO WRITING FLASH NONFICTION: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers.

Antonio Pigafetta's First Voyage Around the World: A Travelogue

On September 8, 1522, the crew of the Victoria cast anchor in the waters off of Seville, Spain, having just completed the first circumnavigation of the world. On board was Antonio Pigafetta, a young Italian nobleman who had joined the expedition three years before, and served as an assistant to Ferdinand Magellan en route to the Molucca Islands. Magellan was dead. The rest of the fleet was gone: the Santiago shipwrecked, the San Antonio overtaken, the Concepcion burned and the Trinidad abandoned. Of the 237 sailors who departed from Seville, eighteen returned on the Victoria. Pigafetta had managed to survive, along with his journal—notes that detailed the discovery of the western route to the Moluccas. And along the way, new land, new peoples: on the far side of the Pacific, the fleet had stumbled across the Marianas archipelago, and some three hundred leagues further west, the Philippines.

Pigafetta’s journal became the basis for his 1525 travelogue, The First Voyage Around the World. According to scholar Theodore Cachey Jr., the travelogue represented “the literary epitome of its genre” and achieved an international reputation (Cachey, xii-xiii). One of Pigafetta’s patrons, Francesco Chiericati, called the journal “a divine thing” (xl), and Shakespeare himself seems to have been inspired by work: Setebos, a deity invoked in Pigafetta’s text by men of Patagonia, makes an appearance in The Tempest (x-xi).

First Voyage, Cachey points out, is intent on marveling at what it encounters—and therein lies much of its appeal. It is a work that is intent on wonder. On astonishment. In travel writing, one often must recreate the first moment of newness, that fresh sense of awe, on the page for the reader; Pigafetta does it again and again, by reveling in odd and odder bits of detail. We watch Pigafetta wonder at trees in Borneo whose leaves appear to walk around once shed, leaves that "have no blood, but if one touches them they run away. I kept one of them for nine days in a box. When I opened the box, that leaf went round and round it. I believe those leaves live on nothing but air.” (Pigafetta, 76). We marvel, in the Philippines, at sea snails capable of felling whales, by feeding on their hearts once ingested (48). On a stop in Brazil, we see an infinite number of parrots, monkeys that look like lions, and "swine that have their navels on their backs, and large birds with beaks like spoons and no tongues" (10).

And yet, the very newness that can give travel writing so much of its power creates problems of its own. For the travel writer there is, on the one hand, the authority of his or her observational eye, and on the other, the call for humility in confronting the unknown. Pigafetta, encountering a new people, tries to earn his authority through a barrage of detail. He attempts to reconstruct their world for us--what they look like, where they live, what they eat, what they say--he gives us pages and pages of words, from Patagonia, from Cebu, from Tidore. But there is little humility, and one can hardly expect there to be so, not early in sixteenth century, a few decades after the Pope had divided the unchartered world between Spain and Portugal,and certainly not on this expedition, where Magellan and his partners have been promised, in a contract agreement with the Spanish monarchy, the titles of Lieutenants and Governors over the lands they discover, for themselves and their heirs, in perpetuity. And cash sums. And 1/20th of the profits from those lands.

In First Voyage is great gulf between what Pigafetta sees and what Pigafetta knows. I grew up, in the Marianas, hearing about this gulf. It is part of why travel writing can be so fraught for me now. On reaching the Marianas after nearly four months at sea with no new provisions,"The captain-general wished to stop at the large island and get some fresh food, but he was unable to do so because the inhabitants of that island entered the ships and stole whatever they could lay their hands on, in such a manner that we could not defend ourselves." (27). The sailors did not understand that this was custom, that for the islanders, property was communal and visitors were expected to share what they had.

So in that first moment of contact, Magellan and his starving crew retaliated. They went ashore and burned, by Pigafetta's account, forty to fifty houses. They killed seven men. Mutual astonishment at the new and the wondrous took a dark turn:

“When we wounded any of those people with our crossbow shafts, which passed completely through their loins from one side to the other, they, looking at it, pulled on the shaft now on this and now on that side, and then drew it out, with great astonishment, and so died; others who were wounded in the breast did the same, which moved us to great compassion. [...] We saw some women in their boats who were crying out and tearing their hair, for love, I believe, of their dead.”(27)

Magellan named the archipelago Islas de los Ladrones, the Islands of Thieves. The name would stick for the next three hundred years, long after the islands were absorbed into the Spanish empire. The name, the bold, condemnatory stroke of it, has long been anchored to my past, to those old history lessons. There is no feeling in it but rage. So I was surprised to see, in Pigafetta's text, the sailors moved to compassion. They seem to understand, in that moment of astonishment, that the islanders are defenseless against the unknown.

From the Marianas, the fleet moved on to the Philippines. They linger there, exploring the land, exchanging gifts with the chiefs, observing the people. And I know what's coming for the people; I know that we're seeing, through Pigafetta, the hush of a world just before it changes, wholly and entirely. And there is Pigafetta, marveling, at the coconuts and the bananas and the naked, beautiful people. It's happening even now in the text, as the Filipino pilots are captured to direct the way to the Moluccas, the way to the spices. There is Pigafetta, roaming and cataloging and recording, caught up in the first flush of a new world, and as I read I can start to hear my father describing his country, wondering at it, my father traveling as a young man up and down Luzon, across the sea to the Visayas, across the sea to Mindanao. I can hear the ardor and the sadness and the terror and the delight. I can hear the wonder. I can feel the pulse to move.

I suppose this is what great travel writing gives us: a way to wholly enter a moment, a feeling, a body. A way to be changed. I can be my father, marveling at his country, our country, transformed by its vast expanse. I can be Pigafetta, on the deck of the Trinidad, moved to write from shock and wonder. And I can be the woman on a boat in the Marianas, crying out of love for the dead.

Sources:

Pigafetta, Antonio. The First Voyage Around the World, 1519-1522: An Account of Magellan’s Expedition. Ed. Theodore J. Cachey, Jr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

History of Micronesia: A Collection of Source Documents. Ed. Rodrigue Levesque. vol. 1: European Discovery, 1521-1560. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994.

Rogers, Robert. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995.

Jose Rizal and the Essay as Letter to Home

In the wake of typhoon Haiyan’s destruction in the Philippines, I am finding it more and more difficult to think of home. When one is faced with pictures of whole communities flattened by wind and waves, dead bodies left for dead on the streets, the ravages of the living, one wonders whether one considers oneself lucky or unlucky to be away from one’s country. One is left, for the most part, watching news footage, following friend and family’s status messages on facebook as they desperately wait for news from loved ones, wondering whether everyone is safe. One is left with no choice but to watch and wait.

In the past few months, every time I would start missing home, I would ready a copy of Reminiscences and Travels of Jose Rizal. Jose Rizal (1861-1896) is considered the national hero of the Philippines and was a writer and a revolutionary. He is most well known as the author of novels that shaped the Philippines revolution: Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, and for which he would be executed. His novels are standard reading when I was in high school, but he was also a writer of essays: journalistic articles, scholarly papers, diary entries, letters. The letters I have been reading are from a  collection of Rizal’s diaries and letters called Reminiscences and Travels of Jose Rizal published in 1961. Translated from the original Spanish into English, the lette are from his travels around Europe and the US between 1882 and 1892. I had never read these letters before and I have found a serendipitous affinity with the Rizal that I find in these letters.

Letters have always seemed to me to be proto-essays, displaying many of the qualities to be found and loved in the personal essay form: digression, the mix of formality and informality, a simultaneous focus and  waywardness. When Rizal, for example, combines messages of well-wishing for his parents, descriptions of streets in Barcelona, and complaints of his trip, they read like a mix of memoir, travelogue and social critique. By virtue of being private documents, they bear the intimacy of eavesdropping on secrets being told. But their public nature also document the interaction between peoples and cultures. They reveal the tenor of the times. Jose Rizal, for example, in one letter assures his cousin that he has tried his best to get him a job promotion but pleads patience, patience. Colonial bureaucracy  merges with family gossip and reading the published letters more than a century from when they were written one can’t help but relish in the transgression of boundaries of time and space: a transgression I’ve always associated with reading personal essays.

 

Rizal’s letters, however, are also important because they present a counterpoint to the tradition of travel writing. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a number of Filipino mestizos, ilustrados, traveling to Spain to study. This led to many correspondences between homesick Filipinos and their parents. These letters have been of interest because they document the birth of the idea of nationhood to these Filipinos who would later be involved in the revolution. But they also document the intimate encounter of Filipinos with a foreign country. When travel essays are dominated by accounts of Western travel to the East, the letters of Rizal and compatriots reveal a return of this gaze. Their accounts reveal an expected appropriation of the genre and an inherently radical revision of it. What did the West look like in the eyes of my brown brother Jose?

 

Mostly praise and awe. He is a fan of eating dates. In a Barcelona zoo he exlciams. “they were some [monkeys] that resembled human beings, extending their hands to you as if asking about your health.” In Paris: “the Hotel Dieu has magnificent verandas!” and “Here there are water closets on the streets where for 15 centimes one can use them and they even provide on with soap. There is excessive cleanliness!”

Rizal interestingly dons the lens of European anthropology and turns back this Western gaze on its own inhabitants. “The Basque type is tall, masculine, ordinarily the face shaven, long rather than oval; small eyes, aquiline nose, and the general aspect reflects honesty, ruggedness, and frank affability.” (Paris, June 21 1883) To his eyes, they are exotic as he probably appears to the people around him.

 

Rizal’s observations, of course, are not all complimentary. He hates Madrid. “The streets were filled with dirty and thick mud, the ground was slippery and between the holes in the old and worn-out pavement were pools of water and little marches. Afterwards, a cold that penetrates through the marrow of the bones and nothing more can be asked. How ugly was Madrid!” In Paris, he whines about not having enough to go sightseeing. Many years later, on a trip to the United States, he, to no surprise, complains: “Ill not advise anyone to make this trip to America, for here they are crazy about quarantine, they have severe customs inspection, imposing on any thing duties upon duties that are enormous, enormous.” This may very well have been said in 2013!

 

Another common complaint of Rizal is the invisibility of the Filipino traveller. He is often mistaken for a Japanese. He complains how a display of Filipino dresses in a show is mistaken for being Russian or Canadian. In Barcelona, he relates: “ I strolled through those wide and clean streets, paved like those in Manila and full of people, attracting the attention of everybody who called me Chinese, Japanese, American, etc, but no one called me Filipino!” He is both hypervisible and invisible: a specter, an amalgamation of multiple visions and identities. He is unnamable.

 

My favorite letter of Rizal’s is the first one that’s published in the collection. It is written in June 7, 1882 when he is traveling from Aden in Yemen through the Suez Canal. Not only is this moment rife with symbolic significance (a Filipino entering past the gateway into the west), but it is a letter that is characteristic of many of the letters that follow and that displays Rizal’s unique perspective regarding both Europe and the Philippines. In describing the Suez Canal, Rizal falls back on the memory of the mother country: “Two beautiful tunnels one of which is as long as the distance from Capitana Danday’s house until that of my brother-in-law Mariano”. This is a letter addressed to his parents, and is predicated on the fact that any letter to home is really a testament to two landscapes – the one that has just been discovered and the one that’s been left behind, which he must imagine surrounds his mother and his father as they read his letter. His letters trace as much the cartography of the foreign, the West, as the familiar, the Philippine landscape. What is discovered (re-discovered?) is what he has known all along.

 

In the end, I find it interesting that it is this view of the nation from afar that will eventually shape Rizal’s perspective and then the rest of the country. It is a vision shaped by distance and dislocation, as if an archipelago of 7,107 islands could only be conceived as unified only if seen from the vantage of first looking away and then looking back. Or do I only think this because Rizal the traveler mirrors my own predicament right now. I think of Rizal’s statues that stand in public schools all over the Philippines dressed in winter coat that he would never wear under the tropical sun. He shivers from a cold we are taught to imagine. He is in many ways a kind of mirage: a vision from somewhere else, an overlapping of two places, not too different from what he describes in his letters from the Suez Canal: “Here I have tasted cherries, apricots and green almonds. We have seen the curious spectacle of a mirage which is the reflection on the desert of seas and islands that do not exist at all.”  It is the mirage that is home.

When typhoon Haiyan cut down major communication lines and isolated whole cities from the rest of the world, many scrambled to find out whether their loved ones were still alive. Many had to wait five grueling days, a week, before they found out. Some are still waiting.

A journalist who had been covering the typhoon in Leyte collected messages written on paper from the survivors. Most of these letters bore the barest of messages: “Alive.” “Ok”. Some just bore names: the shortest way to signify survival. Isn’t that what every letter, every essay says anyway? “We are, in writing this, alive.”

Lawrence Ypil is from the Philippines and is the author of The Highest Hiding Place: Poems (2009) He is an MFA Candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Something Understood: On George Herbert's "Prayer"

Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal, new out from FSG, is a gorgeous little volume – the book includes facsimiled pages in O'Connor's longhand – made all the more remarkable for the vulnerability and breadth of spiritual expression in the prayers.

Composed while O'Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the journal entries are aggrieved, contrite, confused, prolix, playful, sincere, self-obsessed, self-obliterating, nit-picky, breezy, complex, severe. "[O'Connor's] mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer," wrote Marilynne Robinson in a recent review.

Indeed, for those of us who might relate prayerfulness to quiet meditation, mindless incantation, or the pat recital of traditional forms, O'Connor's philosophically discursive, emotionally bracing brand of hand-scripted devotion, even if a fount of consolation, can hit as something of a shock.

But the young writer's prayers would not have surprised the 17^th century British poet George Herbert. Herbert's "Prayer," a sonnet included in the posthumous collection The Temple, remains one of the great essays on the spiritual discipline in English. The poem makes for an interesting abstract to O'Connor's journal. I might have printed it on the first page.

I call Herbert's poem an essay cautiously but not without intention. To my mind "Prayer," much like Herbert's entire poetic enterprise, has that sense of mental peregrination – that feel of a deliberate thrust in a general direction, that overture at discovery – that we associate with the essayistic mode.

"Prayer," in particular, seems far less concerned with lyrical derring-do (of which it has plenty) or thematic prognostication (Herbert, after all, was a preacher for the last three years of his life) than with the experience of mapping the trajectory of an idea.

In other words, the surrender to content, more than the wielding of craft, is what gives weight, and a certain clairvoyance, to Herbert's verse. "These poems," said T.S. Eliot of The Temple, "form a record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling and enlarge the understanding of those readers also who hold no religious belief and find themselves unmoved by religious emotion."

The Scottish novelist George MacDonald: "It will be found impossible to separate the music of [Herbert's] words from the music of the thought which takes shape in their sound."

Spiritual struggle is everywhere present in "Prayer," as is the "music of [Herbert's] thought." At first we think he may be angling toward a conventional definition. The sonnet begins: 

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,

Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage

Prayer, at least in this opening salvo, is ancient and angelic, akin to a victory feast, a life-giving exercise that engages the lungs, the heart, the soul. But the glorious appraisal is quickly complicated. The descriptive catalogue continues with a snarl:

Engine against th' Almightie, sinners towre,

            Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear

The banquet, once so satisfying, has become a griping session. The pilgrim has grown homesick and sore. No sooner does he bless than he questions and tests, raging against the numinous with murder in his heart. And this, too, for better, for worse, according to Herbert, and in accord with lived experience, is part of the heavenly tête-à-tête. Prayer occasions praise; prayer occasions repentance. The failure to concede as much makes prayer into a kind of prayerlessness.

The turns in the poem, of which the above is only the most dramatic, have the effect of shifting our perception of Herbert's aims. We feel the poet reaching to find expression for something deeper and more inchoate, not for a definition per se but rather towards an essence. Seamus Heaney, in his Oxford lecture on Herbert, called the poet's method an "impulsive straining towards felicity."

The phrases accumulate, the contradictions accrete, the scope widens ("the milkie way") and contracts ("man well drest") until we arrive at what Eliot called one of the most "magical" couplets in English literature, a pair of lines that W.H. Auden said foreshadowed the syntactical experiments of later poets such as Mallarmé and which Auden himself seemed to have channelled for his description of poetry ("it survives, / a way of happening, a mouth") in the second stanza of his elegy for Yeats. "Church-bels," writes Herbert:

               beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,

The land of spices; something understood.

What began with the vaunted language of feasts and seraphs has come round, has been been boiled down to the prosaic and yet infinitely more mysterious "something understood." In two lines we have moved from deafening music to deafening silence, from the outskirts of the universe to the marrow of the spirit, from awe to some sort of comprehension, from the shake of the head to the nod of the head.

The coda does not elide the preceding phrases. No, in "something understood" we hear the alliterative echoes of "souls bloud," even "Churchs banquet." We get the feeling that we would never have reached these quiet waters without weathering the preceding rapids. The tension in the lines, the meandering nature of the composition, the mix of highbrow and lowbrow diction, the sense of change and arrival – here the poem seems to engage the very exercise it essays. With prayer, as with writing, Herbert suggests, the experience, the wily half-discipline of it all, often supplies its own solution.

"Prayer," Flannery O'Connor wrote in her journal, "should be composed I understand of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication and I would like to see what I can do with each without an exegesis.”

She wrote: "I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head—unconsciously even.”

And: “My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You.”

We can almost hear Herbert say "Amen."

Drew Bratcher is a writer and editor who divides his time between Iowa City and Washington, DC.

Nathaniel Brodie: Before the Infinite Play of the World

Northern Burma, a gang of bricklayers blasting traditional folk music out of an antique boombox. I stood there, my ears agape. Utter disbelief. Is this…music? It wasn’t so much the strange stringed and wind instruments but that the sound lacked what I associated as rhythm or harmony. It was all jangly discord, tinny chaos, alien tonalities, composed by a mind that worked at different angles and slants.  I was to hear it for months and never quite get it, never understand it. Once only, hanging off the back of a passenger lorry, did I catch myself enjoying it, understanding it, and then I realized that it was a Chinese cover of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.”

Dream: a boy with flies for teeth.

The Myth of Hermaphroditic Hyenas “undoubtedly arose when people noticed that hyenas with large pendulous udders (indicating they were obviously females) could suddenly develop impressive phallic erections such that they also looked like males. Interestingly, although a female spotted hyena has a uterus and ovaries internally, externally she does in fact appear to have “masculinized” genitalia. That is, the female’s clitoris is enormously elongated to form a fully erectile pseudopenis through which she urinates, copulates, and gives birth. “--www.hyaenidae.org

Amygdala: part of the brain pinged by, say, the word “fuck.” 

 “The fact that I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.” –S. Dali

Fiona Wren’s first day of daycare and she can’t stop hugging the other kids.  Like that part in Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, when Jane placed a bunch of bananas in a clearing and two chimps came ambling up and spied the trove and stopped and broke out in huge grins and threw their arms around each other and started jumping up and down and hooting in delight, their arms still around each other, the celebration going on for a good couple of minutes before they even moved towards the bananas. But not really like that: the other kids don’t hug Fio back. They just stand there, and then eventually both of them topple over, and the other kid cries, and Fio’s like, what?

 “...a woman who was born with only stumps at her shoulders, and yet, as far back as she could remember, felt herself to have arms and hands; she even feels herself gesticulating as she speaks…People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom limbs in painfully contoured positions could relax”—Atul Gawande, New Yorker, 6/30/2008

Sam Cooke played a Bob Dylan album to Bobby Womack and Bobby didn’t get it and Sam had to explain to him that it was no longer about how the music sounded or the singer’s voice but about believing that that voice was telling the truth.

Idiom: “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

When I fish I catch everything but fish. This doesn’t bother me, as perhaps the catch is not the point, but perhaps I should not call it fishing. Searching, maybe. Once on the slow brown Chehalis River I caught a river mussel. It had clamped its shell around my wormed hook. The same river, different day, I caught a rough skinned newt, though it was just stubbornly clenching the worm as I reeled it in. Today, as white-bellied swallows skimmed the surface of the lake, I cast and cast and caught a leaf. A brown, decomposed, soggy leaf that ever so slowly sank back down and out of sight. Searching.

Chinese eunuchs traditionally preserved their “bao”—their severed, pickled genitals—in a jar and carried them in a bag hung on their belt. This way, if a eunuch died he had his genitals on him and could be buried with them and be reincarnated as a "full man."

Airplaned next to a man whose mustache resembled a cumulonimbus cloud.

Barthes: “the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world  is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.”

Listening to James Brown, Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1971, good stuff, and just realized that those moments when he is not gasping, grunting, shouting, or singing, but the band is still laying it down thick and the roar of the crowd picks up…it’s because he’s dancing. And it’s wonderful, ‘cause you can’t see it, don’t need to see it,  what’s lacking in the medium is present in your head: James Brown dancing the Buttered Popcorn or The James Brown, that fancy footwork, that effort, that sweat, that’s enough, that’s always enough, one of those emissions that is in fact a universe, an opening…

Dream: fucked her upsidedown.

Hungover. Something is disturbing the crow in the bigleaf maple outside the window—the morning light on yellow leaves against its black feathers, perhaps. It won’t stop screaming. Maybe the dump truck will scare it away. No, crows know dumptrucks. It barks anew. 

Watched Godfather II again last night. So many classic scenes, but the one sticking with me this morning was when Vito Corleone is sacked from his job as a grocer’s assistant because the local gangster wants the position for his nephew. Vito, confused at first, quickly grasps the situation and stops the grocer’s hand-wringing apologies with a firm “I understand; you have been good to me, and I thank you.”  No sniveling, complaining, self-pitying: nothing but calm, gracious, masculinity. Being a man might be confused with giving it, but taking it is the true measure of a man. Like Jesus. That’s what I aspire to, even if, every so often, I feel like Fredo whining “I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says…like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”

Howlin’ Wolf, classic 1950s Chicago Bluesman, 6’6 and 300 lbs, real name Chester Arthur Burnett.  His childhood idol was Jimmie Rodgers, and it was by trying to mimic Rodgers’ blueyodel that the Wolf developed his howl. Sam Phillips, of Sun Records fame, said:"When I heard Howlin' Wolf, I said, 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.' That’s how I felt when I read Hoagland’s “Learning to Eat Soup.” This is for me. Like a window thrown open wide. Like, “here, relax.” I didn’t care what it meant or didn’t. Later I read that Hoagland just selected various quotes and passages from his twenty-years-in-the-making, 500-page journal. The soul of a man.

Marx assumed that the notion of reconciliation was obsolete and added that all we can expect of our artists today is their acknowledgement of the impossibility of resolution.

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Nathaniel Brodie received his MFA from the University of Arizona. Brodie served as an Agricultural Extension Agent in the Peace Corps (Paraguay) for two years, and has worked as a carpenter, farmer, backcountry stone mason, journalist, and beekeeper. His essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, High Country News, Terrain.org, and other publications. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon. 

Brian Doyle: It is a Shaggy World, Studded with Gardens

No man ever yearned more for a “hard & active life out-of-doors” than the great Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), and few men ever faced such an endless litany of ills keeping him, generally, from the wild world he loved so. (“My body which my dungeon is…,” as he wrote.) Yet the frail Stevenson, the most popular writer of his time, was able to catch and celebrate the vigorous natural world in work that ranged freely in genre (novels, essays, letters, stories, poems, fables, tracts, and prayers) and in setting—capturing the flavor variously of Scottish highlands, French countryside and mountains, Swiss alpine valleys, dense North American wilderness and plains, and the lush islands of the South Seas, where he spent the last six years of his brief and exuberant life.

Despite his spotty health, he spent much time in his adolescent years among the Scottish mountains and islands—hiking, sailing boats with friends, and working outdoors, one memorably strenuous summer, with his engineer father Thomas, the most talented in a family of engineers still famous for building lighthouses along the Scottish coast. After college he began to write, and his first books were Thoreauvian accounts of his travels through wild country – a canoe trip through rural France, which became An Inland Voyage, and then a long hike in the French mountains, which became Travels with a Donkey. The wild Scottish Highlands and coat he loved starred in his novels Kidnapped and The Merry Men, and the deep forests of New York’s Adirondack Mountains, where he spent one bitterly cold winter, are the setting for much of The Master of Ballantrae.

Everywhere he went he clapped his sharp eye on the land, and wrote of its temper and creatures with respect and affection. “The earthy savour of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce a difference,” he wrote of the Scottish coast; and “it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel,” of his native land as a whole.

Of the great plains of Nebraska, which he crossed by train, he wrote with amazement, “We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression. It was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution…Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land. To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon…”

Of the Marquesas: “The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass…The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains. In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit.”

He was a student of the linguistics of the natural world: “The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the winter wind. Snell, blae, nirly, and scowthering are four of these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with them…the inclemency of heaven has thus endowed the language of Scotland with words…”

And he was eerily prescient of the future of the wild, too: “California has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation,” he wrote while living in Monterey. “We may look forward to a time when there will not be [a tree] left standing in that land… man in his short-sighted greed robs the country of the noble redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais...”

For nearly three years Stevenson wandered the Pacific, visiting the Marquesas, the Paumotus, the Hawaiian islands, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Society islands, New Zealand, Australia, and the Navigator islands, better known collectively as Samoa. At each landfall he would wander briskly and joyfully into the forest and along the beaches, and spend many hours with residents; he was by all accounts an indefatigable walker and talker, no respecter of position or privilege, and so a man who explored nature and natives to a degree unusual among writers of his time. He and his wife finally settled in Samoa, on the main island of Upolu, where the Stevensons bought 300 acres of land, built a house in the hills three miles from the harbor, and settled in.

Their land was so veined with creeks and rivers, or “burns,” as Stevenson called them, that he named the property Vailima, Samoan for Five Waters. It was the first wild land he’d ever owned, and he reveled in it, partly for the stunning variety of its flora and fauna, but partly too because finally he had enough health and strength to work his land. “It is like a fairy story that I should have recovered health and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men, boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest,” he wrote. And in a letter to a friend: “Went crazy over outdoor work, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-making…it does make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And the strange thing that I mark is this: If  I go out and make sixpence, plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted.”

For three years he worked his woods and farmed the soil, hosted an endless stream of visitors (among them Henry Adams, who was peeved that Stevenson didn’t know who he was), became deeply involved in the chaotic political life of Samoa, and wrote furiously—most notably half of a Highlands novel called Weir of Hermiston that, had it been finished, might have been among his very best books.

On December 3, 1894, he “wrote hard all morning” on Weir, spent the afternoon writing letters to friends, and came down from his study at sunset. He opened an old bottle of burgundy, set to making a salad for dinner, and was cheerfully chaffing his wife when he suddenly clapped his hands to his head, cried out in pain, and fell to his knees. Within minutes the massive stroke sent him into a coma; and at ten minutes past eight o’clock he died.

At dawn, forty local men cut a path through the woods to the flat summit of Mount Vaea, “no bigger than a room,” where they dug a grave for the man they called Tusitala, the teller of tales. In the afternoon his hand-carved coffin was carried to the summit and laid to rest. Among the prayers said over his body was one he had written himself: “Lord, Thou sendest down rain upon the uncounted millions of the forest, and givest the trees to drink exceedingly. Teach us the lesson of the trees. The sea around us, which this rain recruits, teems with the race of fish; teach us, Lord, the meaning of the fishes. Let us see ourselves for what we are, one out of the countless number of the clans of thy handiwork. When we would despair, let us remember that these also please and serve Thee.”

Next day the chiefs of Samoa forbade the use of firearms on Mount Vaea, so that the birds and animals “might live undisturbed, and raise about his grave the songs he knew so well.” Some years later a large tomb was raised over his grave. On the tomb there are bronze plates with bas reliefs of a thistle and a hibiscus flower, the characteristic plants of Scotland and Samoa, and Stevenson’s poem, “Requiem”:

                                    Under the wide and starry sky

                                    Dig the grave and let me lie.

                                    Glad did I live and gladly die

                                    And I laid me down with a will.

                                    This be the verse you grave for me:

                                    Here he lies where he longed to be;

                                    Home is the sailor, home from sea,

                                    And the hunter home from the hill.

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Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. His most recent books are the spiritual essay collections The Thorny Grace of It and Leaping (in a new and expanded edition), both from Loyola Press.