Unadulterated

Unadulterated

Outside the Krol hearing

a witness sits

in a holding room,
the door cracked open

so he could breathe.

A paper cup

stained red by worried lips

desiccates under fluorescent light.

White hair buzzing, she flares

gray over me.

You have no place here

so help me god!

As if god or some judge
could ever stop her.

The maroon smeared across the linoleum
must be coffee.

This is a rewrite of Periodic Evaluation. The previous title didn't do much, and I've referenced Krol hearing directly,which while more arcane, is google-able and precise. The new title is also probably too cryptic, but I like the word. There are 4 ways in which the "she" is unadulterated:
1. No lipstick, no hair color ... her natural self
2. Yes, institutionalized, she is taking her meds, but they aren't really changing anything.
3. Allusion to adultery.
4. Like meds, neither god nor the judge is changing anything.

I've tried to clarify the pronouns, and that it was the "she" talking. There are 2 things I worry about in this rewrite: have a lost any immediacy or surprise or velocity? And can the reader see her barging in--the shock, the surprise of her entering the supposedly safe conference room. I've tried many ways to make this more clear, but haven't found one I like.

Rewrite of Bordeaux poem

Rampage

The glass tapers so the wine avoids the tongue
and worms down the throat into the brain’s meaty pit.
In the browning edge the waitress says something I miss.
The glass breaks like an egg. A few drops bleed
into the table’s grain. Disappear. I hold the glass still
aloft so she could see. A peony slumped on the asphalt
defeated by the morning dew. A crumpled bird that smacked
a window. Is wine contained like yoke in a broken belly?
My palm is wet. Red drains down my wrist, pastes jeans
to my leg. Dig out the shard. Make blood run like wine.

Link to previous version. I tried to fix some problems. 1. Old title did very very little--making sure the reader knew the wine was red and that the glass was more tapered than, say, a burgundy glass. 2. "More glasses would survive" was trite, and symptomatic of the shock I was in (Jack) at the time. It undercut the point of the poem which was my prayer for rage.

Prayer at Gray’s River

Prayer at Gray’s River

When a mother seizes one life
god moves mudstone like water
for miles toward the Pacific
and ash rains for months.

I build a little cairn from mudstone
crumbling along a bleached river bed
exposed by floods most winters.
If I leave the cairn sit,

Jack’s memories leach away.
So sometimes when I’m strong
I take one shard from the top
and taste the grit.

The stone is weak, unlithified,
like my memories.
I place it back gently--
undo only the slightest fleck

with my breath. The last time
I admonished Jack
I can’t remember my words
but I do see a glaring sun

and his cheeks flushed from drills
his sweat-matted hair
brushed back, the tears in his eyes
while he watches me instruct him to work harder

with the same eyes that challenged his mother,
It’s not like I’m going to die!
he vowed, two nights before she drugged him
and drowned him with a pillow.

Looking Like Yourself as Seen by Others

To get started, here's a poem from John Burnside:

II Self Portrait

The one thing you want to portray
is the one thing it lacks.

Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:
a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,

or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen
for longer than you had expected.

You do this again and again, as if your life
depended on nothing,

light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound
of shoppers and that constant sense you have

of some place less than half a mile from here,
a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone's bed,

the place you could be right now, with snow coming down
through neon, or that baize light on your hands

that makes you think of summers long ago,
the 'water's edge', the 'faint breeze in the pines',

those girls you really loved, before this patient
look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.

Burnside reads this poem towards the end of this Start the Week podcast. Burns explains that the "look-alike" is the poet looking like himself as seen by others.

From near the end of Dear Denise:

Saturday, June 30

This afternoon I visit the Frick Collection off Central Park East. Another destination to pull me into the city and out of my neighborhood. The promise of a nice dinner. Maybe I meet someone. Better chance at a restaurant than in my house watching Tivo’d reruns of House.

I’m sitting on a bench in the West Gallery staring at the Rembrandt self-portrait. A girl sits beside me. I’m writing my memoir , I want to say.

“I need to work on the backstory. The main part, the flow from the big tragedy until now, until the legal resolution and ultimate divorce, is pretty natural. Any reader will have no problem staying with that narrative.”

The girl might ask what happened? What was the tragedy? But if she didn’t, I’d just continue. “There’s a natural suspense. What happens to Denise? Is Libby going to be ok? Someone close to me is saying I have to flesh out the backstory. I have to make my life before clear. Early days with Denise. The first kiss. The wedding. Then our family. Our perfect life together. Even up to the last night: Jack shoulder to shoulder with me on his bed. We each read our own book.”

The Frick has many portraits, El Greco, Vermeer, van Dyck. Portraits of women by Lawrence and Gainsborough. I sit with the Rembrandt in front of me. “I lived in Holland. Many, many times I’ve been to the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh. I have history with the Dutch masters.” I take another tack. “Self-portrait is memoir. At first glance Rembrandt seems fatigued. You can see his eyes, his life has known sorrow.” He is not showing a reflection of the past; he is showing his present. He had known fatigue but he is not tired in portrait. He is calm, resolute. “Like the painter, who looks for himself on the canvas, I write this memoir.” His oriental robe, red sash, is ostentatious. Is the portrait true to his self? Is it a purely private truth or did he try to make it visible to his audience?

“When Jack was just a baby,” I continue, “he was ugly. His face was all scrunched up. Big head. Looked just like a pug, or like Winston Churchill. Big head, big brain, we said. And at about eight months, the ugly duckling turned. He became Adonis. We loved him ugly. We loved him handsome and beautiful.”

“But love,” I would ask the woman, tacking upwind. “What do you think about love?” My voice would challenge. “You think love is always wonderful, always benign, always a good thing?” She’d be silent in the force of my questions. “Denise loved him too much .”

I wouldn’t be saying this. I wouldn’t be talking about Jack that way. Not to someone I didn’t know. Not to someone I just met.

₪

In Burnside's poem the problem with self portrait (introspection) is that it isolates the Self from the Others.To address this, Burnside layers in the outside world (observed and remembered): snow falling, the sound of shoppers or a piano.... We are social creatures. Without the outside world we are only partially ourselves, even as we strive to emulate the Self seen by others.

If our Self is defined by others, mine started with my parents, my sisters. Over time my others switch to Denise (behind Denise my colleagues at Lucent) and to Libby and Jack. In the memoir, I've lost Jack. I am breaking free of Denise and a yearning for new Others. In this scene I discuss Rembrandt and my memoir with an imagined woman.

In my memoir, I include letters to Denise. She is one reader, one Other. I hope you will be another. Even at the time, I knew those letters would make the backbone of my memoir. I knew they would stand watch against all the portraying and enacting in the narrative that surround them.

Book Fatigue

I'm in the last 30 days of the book and I'm tired.  If the "art" of my book is depicting my grief, then I've read one too many fragmented emails to my daughter or to friends.  I don't know whether my fatigue matches the Reader's, and I should pay editorial attention to it.  Or is it just that I've been at these two rewrites for a year?

Since the clear conventional wisdom says I have too many words, when in doubt, cut.

I'll try the incremental approach--much like I do everything else. First I'll prune the bush. As close as I can to the trunk. What dies will eventually fall to the ground.  A strategy.  One that keeps me in it until The End.

In my session today, my therapist John, said he'd read my memoir as if it was a novel. Rick Rofihe, one my fiction workshop teachers, said I used "novelistic" techniques to tell my story. I guess my new agent query letter should reflect something of this. In one of the many ways this memoir is unconventional, the narrator (I) tells a story, with a protagonist and an antagonist, a beginning, middle and end covering a specific period of time, the year after Jack was killed.

Book Length

My word count is ~150,000. A quick survey of blog posts recommends 110,000 as the top end that I should shoot for. That seems consistent with guidelines from a couple of book contests I'm looking at--a maximum 400 pages. Check out Blue's indefeasible blog for example word counts, for example, on PEN/Faulkner Award winners.  Coincidentally, this 2008 post from Blue seems like her final post.

If I cut the epilogue, my word count is 148,292.

If I were to do some book-wide deletions, among areas to consider are:

• all email (Libby/lawyers ...)
• fugue ... no I think the sensual/physical companionship is important
• all excerpts from books (Damasio ...)
• dramatic cuts redundancy and chit chat from letters
• Sadoff visit
• long letters on the Dad's and on anger
• Lucent stuff ... Craig said interesting
• rework the "long" stuff ... when I read it it feels like a slog even to me
• Houston Law Review article
• bail argument
• Munchhausen

Here is one argument for self-publishing.  I can make a Director's cut.  I can rage war on my manuscript to submit it to contests, and then add content back in.  It won't be a complete waste of time. I'm sure that forcing myself to 70 pages would yield some very good ideas.

Distracted

Last Wednesday the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords offered a workshop on self-publishing: I Typed "The End." Now What? How to Turn Your Manuscript Into a Book. This was as disruptive to my revision process as Tony Hoagland's workshop where he insisted our journal writing should be in complete sentences.  Tony is not someone one can ignore.

One of the first things I had to do was go through my manuscript and delete the double spaces at the ends of sentences. And learn to compose new sentences without them.

This morning I've been trying to decide what size book I should publish: 5 1/4 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, or 6 x 9.

Yesterday I activated the Kindle app on my phone and laptop. I downloaded calibre.

I can't stop pouring over the Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer blog.

I've barely noticed the S&P 500's decline (not true). Why am I doing these things instead of writing? I'm returning to Beth Jusino's self-publishing workshop Wednesday night in Ballard for Selling Your Self-Published Book: Getting Your E-Book in Front of Readers.  Will I see you there?

Finished the (this) rewrite

About two weeks ago I finished the rewrite.  Since then I've been going through the draft mostly to catch up to the way I handle tenses ... the present of 2006 & 2007.  The past in moments of reflection.  I've also cleaned up some formatting.

Now I'll read through it again and hopefully tidy up some stuff.  I have left lots of comments and highlighted sections in the manuscript that I know I have to return to.  I don't know how other writers do it.  Do they force themselves to stay on a page, in a paragraph until that get the revision perfect?  Or do they plow ahead and hope a light bulb will go on sometime and the revision will be obvious when they return?  That's my method.  But it may lead to endless rewrites.

I think it is also time to resume sending off query letters to agents.

I gone through all my comments, deleted about 100 which were taken care of in the last couple of revisions.  I have ~200 left to consider.

More of the Richard Ford branch I pruned

Thursday, June 21

In Ford’s book now, Frank is sitting at a bar browsing the pages of a free advertising rag, “The Buyer’s Guide,” and comes across a framed box entitled “Profiles in Real Estate Courage.”  The story celebrates Frank Frantal getting back in the saddle selling real estate, a year after his son had been killed by a drunken snowmobiler in eastern PA.

In this strange state I for this moment find myself, and for reasons both trivial and circumstantial (the bar, the booze, the day, even Frank Frantal), my son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy’s sake, age nine) comes seeking an audience.[1]

It may go without saying, but when you have a child die—as I did nineteen years ago—you carry him with you forever and ever after.

I was with Ford here.

Though what has happened is that my life’s become alloyed with loss.  Ralph, and then Ralph being dead, long ago embedded in all my doings and behaviors.  And not like a disease you carry, that never gets better, but more the way being left-handed is ever your companion, or that you don’t like parsnips and never eat them, or that once there was a girl you loved for the very first time and you can’t help thinking of her—nonspecifically—every single day.  And while this may seem profane or untrue to say, the life it’s made has been and goes on being a much more than merely livable life.  It’s made a good life, this loss, one I don’t at all regret.  (The Frantals could not be expected to believe this, but maybe can in time.)

I was with the Frantals here, furious at the presumptuous words.

---

[1] Ibid., pg 344.

I had these excerpts in my memoir draft, because they were in my journal from 2007.  It was part of my unfolding life.  I was reading psychology and neurology books, that year, looking for an explanation.  I also read poems and novels.  Richard Ford wrote about losing a son; it resonated.  Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, resonated--a loved one gone crazy.

So why delete it?  This part is in June, towards the end of the book, and while it may depict my grief to the reader, I've already done quite a bit of that by now.  The reader will be looking for climax and denouement.  And I didn't have one ... Frank, his dead son Ralph, the Frantals didn't lead me to one ... and the reader might feel a bit jerked around if this late in my story I include these excerpts and then don't come back to them for any resolution whatsoever.

Now years later, I might write that alloyed with loss is an excellent way to describe my life after Jack was killed.  And perhaps after a full nineteen years I could echo Frank and say it's made a good life.

Deleted one stranded branch of my tree

Excerpts, now deleted, from my memoir.  (I do agree with Ford that some times simple words like surprised are the best we have.)

Sunday, June 11

After 200 pages I’m starting to relax into Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land.  I’m gradually lowering my guard.  I have a ton of respect for Ford.  I’ve read all his books.  He was the first author whose hardcover first editions I bought—at list price—wanting him to have the just proceeds of his work.  But I’m not willing yet to trust his judgment on the death of your child.

There are similarities between Frank’s life, Ford’s narrator, and my own.  Frank has lost a child.  Frank has had a marriage dissolve.  Frank has a daughter.  Frank lives in New Jersey.

Frank rejects the “ethical-cultural-response that catastrophe’s ‘a good thing for everybody,’ because “it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice-connected response to things is just made-up stuff anyway.[1]”

I couldn’t agree with Frank more.

The catastrophe in this case is that Frank’s second wife Sally has just come home from a weekend at her former in-laws, where she faced the surprising reappearance of her ex-husband, lost and presumed dead for thirty five years.  When Sally sat Frank down on the couch and gave him this news, Frank was as surprised as Sally that her long-lost first husband had appeared in her in-laws foyer.  “Sometimes simple words,” Franks reflects, like surprised, “are the best.”

In Sally’s behalf, Frank narrates, she was dazed.  She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost.  It’s the kind of shock that make you realize that life only happens to you, and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, and union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness.[2]

I was willing to trust Ford enough to see what happened next.

---

[1] Ford, Richard, The Lay of the Land, pg 222.

[2] Ibid., pg 227.

Finished May rewrite

It took me a long time to finish revising the month of April.  May went faster.  Now I start June.  The book will end in the middle of July with my "culminating" letter to Denise and a visit with Dr. Sadoff.

Certain things are wrapping up now (in May).

• The court case.
• The unsent letters--the conversation with the memory of Denise--the present, thankfully, crowding out the past.
• Libby's school year.
• My dreams seem to be building to a climax
• Reclaiming my complete self

Is that enough denouement to satisfy The Reader?

Certain things are taking over.

• Alcatel Lucent -- implicitly.  My job too boring to be too explicit.
• loneliness
• what I label it my fugue life--indulging in a fantasy search for a new woman/ mate/ partner/ companion

Does my loneliness and fugue state give the lie to "reclaiming my complete self?"  Particularly that word "complete?"  Or does it make it true?

Other things will start soon--the divorce and ultimately selling the house and moving.  These won't be in the book.

Each day when I approach the draft I have to nourish my mood.  My mood (motivation, energy) can collapse various ways:

• I start believing all my writing is shitty
• The content (anger at Denise, grieving Jack)
• And my own sense accomplishment, contribution.  Like Maria Popova writes of Flannery O'Connor, I am afflicted with time.
• And then the just utter bullshit things like:  is the stock market up or down?  how is USA or Holland or CONCACAF doing in the World Cup?

Hoagland on Glück

Glück's early poems are characterized by "imperial tone, and plain, relentless language. Glück issues forth her truth-statements with prosecutorial logic."  The Reader feels the "thrill of absolutism."

Hoagland quotes "Moonless Night:"

Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things.

In later work (Ararat) Glück explores the "paradox of certainty achieved at the cost of estrangement."

Hoagland on Hass

"Hass would like to avoid the regrettable crudity of being explicit; he would rather endlessly infer."  That sounds something like what I'm worried about in writing past truth.

"Hass would rather be a scribe than an oracle."

"Hass perceives the world as so stuck together, it can't be unstuck: out of the adhesion comes the poetry."  Hoagland can appreciate the "rippling resonance" of Hass's writing in a way most readers cannot. The Reader, like myself, who just meets the poem on the page and is not versed in Hass's personal biography will still recognize the extraordinary writing.

My memoir has coded language that someone who knows me will find more resonant.  While that must be true of any memoir, since "Dear Denise" is full of verbatim letters and email from 2006, private meanings particularly weigh down my book.

In my memoir I'm at April 16, 2007.  I'm fumbling through metaphors, on the page, for how I parent Jack.  Does blood transfusion work?  Is Jack a bank and I'm depositing money?  Pruning a tree? Training a long distance runner or swimmer?

I'm not sure there is a day of writing that passes that I don't recall Alice Truax's advice: intentionality.  I have to intend every word, image, feeling.  The Reader has to know I'm in control.

Since I'm revising from the calm distance of 2014, I should present the single best fully formed metaphor to The Reader.  Then there can be other writing, like the verbatim letters or cryptic notes from therapy sessions, that are fragmented and impressionistic, that will infer and not be explicit.  And the art, as Hoagland writes about Hass, is in "the arrangement of scale and variety."

Hoagland on Pinsky

I picked up Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun; I don't know why I ever put it down.  In Chapter 3 Hoagland gives Pinsky, Hass, Gluck as examples of how poets (great poets) develop over time.  He writes "the loss of innocence is inevitable, but one that has its compensations: skill, perspective and choice."

Pinsky develops from "explicator to gnostic namer ... one who ushers us toward Mystery."  Pinsky wants to render the kaleidoscope of experience, "to praise it, to invoke it and to provoke us to wonder."  He doesn't "strive toward intimacy with the reader."  The poem is a "dramatic performance" that offers "spectacle and sensation."

In an age that mistrusts language as never before, in which many poets take the inadequacy of speech as a central preoccupation, Pinsky is a rarity, the contemporary poet who has found language adequate, fruitful, and enlivening.

In "Ode to Meaning" Pinsky declares "You are the wound. You | be the medicine."

For my memoir I need to keep these words close: offer spectacle, be the namer, render sensation, provoke wonder and challenge Meaning to be the medicine.

letters want to be read

I was reading this month's Harper's, the LeBlanc article on Doug Stanhope, and LeBlanc' points out that the place to perfect a stand-up act is in front of the audience.  What is the equivalent proving ground for a memoir?  If I had subscribers, I would publish like a Hardy serial and get feedback from readers.  Isn't that the way Wool developed into a book?

The book is epistolary ... letters want to be read.

If I'm having a conversation with someone don't I often go out of my way to be understood?

I'm starting in on March now ...

writing past truth

My rewrite has slowed considerably in the last couple of weeks due, in part, to a lot of anxiety about money.  But also I suspect that I'm not really in a hurry to finish.

A writer, Sol, I met at the Ballard Starbucks recommended Constance Hale's Sin and Syntax.  Yes, we should rewrite until our thoughts are clear and vividly expressed.  But what do you do when you distrust the clarity?  What if I write past truth to clarity?  In my memoir, now, I'm rewriting mid-February and I'm revisiting how I fell in love with Denise despite the beige jeans she snagged on the chain-link fence protecting Waveland golf course from late night escapades.  I can be clear about the setting, and I be clear about what the beige jeans reveal about me, but how I can be clear about love?

How I Save the Past?

I’m thinking about memory right now.  Different types of memory … maybe I rank the types from most vivid to least.  (I’m trying to depict in my memoir why there are some memories of Jack, I don’t want to recall, because I don’t want to lose them.)

1. A flashback.  Whatever the trigger, a smell, reading an email from 2006 for the first time, a photograph ... I’m transported straight back into the scene.  Almost like a waking dream, or perhaps, psychologically, a delusion.   Feels real.  I have the same emotions in the present that I had in the past.  No discontinuity.  They start where they left off.  Or maybe even new emotions now … that I was unwilling or unable to let myself experience in the past.  As if they were locked up waiting for a trigger to unlock them.
2. I’m walking down street on my way to coffee on Phinney Ridge and see a fence with slats.  I recall my dog Prince from my childhood.  I come home from school and find Prince smiling at me--his head stuck between horizontal slats in the fence.  He's dying of thirst, he tongue droops from his mouth, and he's happy to see me.  That memory is emotional, but I know I’m experiencing a memory.  I’m here, 53, in Seattle, revisiting a pleasant scene from my childhood.  I almost feel that hot, Gulf Coast sun on my face.  And the humidity.  Almost, but not really.  (It is also a social memory.  A boy and his dog.)
3. Type 3 is a kind of rehearsed memory.  It is familiar.  I return to it often and it has lost some of its emotional significance.  Diluted.  Maybe from my childhood, again, sitting on pink, ratty sprung couch watching Hogan’s Heroes with my dad in the den.  There were years of evenings like that … so my memory may not be a specific evening but a blend of many.  It feels indicative--a second or third layer removed from the actual event.
4. Unemotional memories … like my phone number.  Or maybe directions to the house I grew up in.  I could describe to you precisely how to get from the airport to my house in Nassau Bay.  But if I’m down there in Houston, and actually in a rental care driving the route, the memories become more vivid /emotional … a song comes on the radio from my high school days.  Then it is like memory 2 above. 

Memories types 1 & 2 surprise me, catch me off guard.  (Much coaching on vivid writing is about making the words surprise The Reader, and giving the words emotional weight.  I don't want to resort to tricks or gimmicks to surprise, but when I can find a way in the memoir to surprise, w/o the gimmick, then the memoir is better.)

So how do I save the past?  How do I preserve the freshness/immediacy of memories of Jack?  If each time I replay a memory, it loses significance.  I guess that’s a gift or skill actors have.  If they have to cry in a scene, there’s a memory they can draw on, and they can put themselves back in that emotional state.  Maybe they have the ability to infinitely re-imagine, recreate the scene … vs. remembering it.  How do I develop that ability?

Memory 1, the flashback, ironically I guess, is a symptom of PTSD, and those flashbacks are really really hard to get rid of.  Often they are violent.  So that durability makes me hopeful that I won't lose the flashback no matter how frequently it is triggered. I yearn for any flashback to Jack.  Even a traumatic one.

I worry, though, about fading and changing the memory and losing the connection to the past.  I believe that science posits that each time you recall a memory, you corrupt it a little with something from the present when it is returned to the memory banks.  (The present can be from your narrative self--other parts of the story you are telling yourself now about your past.)

But I might be conflating two things.  The trigger and the memory.  The object, for example the photograph that triggers the memory.  Maybe the photograph loses its impact as a trigger if you keep going back to it.  Maybe the memory is still there but you have to stumble upon a different, fresher object (memento, totem, talisman … ) to trigger it.

A rhetorical question.

And another, what past do I save?

the author fires the arrow prepared for him

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” 
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

My friend and I have been talking recently about the connection between reader and author, between artist and viewer, calling attention to something already known or felt.  Or, perhaps misapplying a Kafka: "the wound fits perfectly the arrow."  The author fires the arrow, maybe an author long dead, and it fits the reader's wound.

(PS. I went to Goodreads to find the Kafka quote, and its version was: “all that matters is that the wound fit the arrow.”) Really quite a different meaning.  Now I'll have to search out the original.

(PPS. Mark Slouka's article in 2003 Harper's gave me the Kafka quote.)

(PPPS. I'm getting close to finishing chapter four, November, in my rewrite.)

terrific action of unfathomed nature

From my reading couple of weeks ago:

[Boldwood] had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all. He saw no absurd sides to the follies of life, and thus, though not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men and scoffers, and those to whom all things show life as a jest, he was not intolerable to the earnest and those acquainted with grief. Being a man who read all the dramas of life seriously, if he failed to please when they were comedies, there was no frivolous treatment to reproach him for when they chanced to end tragically.

Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.

I finished Far From the Madding Crowd Sunday. Spoiler alert: Mr. Boldwood's "wild capabilities" surface.  He murders Sgt. Troy at the book's climax, and uses the insanity defense to win a life sentence.  Wasn't expecting the insanity defense.

The book ends, rapidly, just pages later, with our long-suffering, dutiful hero, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene marrying.

In the afterword, James Wright paraphrases Yvor Winters that "the language of Hardy's novels is often most beautiful when it is most like the language of his poems."

Then Wright quotes D.H.Lawrence: the "quality which Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself..."  Through Oak's "wise passiveness, the sorrows of Bathsheba are given their shape."

Like Oak, I want my protagonist to be both part of the "small action" as well as the "terrific action of unfathomed nature," and like Gabriel and Bathsheba, act morally in the face of the uncomprehended and incomprehensible.

Hardy's characters don't develop so much as mature, age in the face of new circumstances.  They stay true to their personality.  In my memoir I don't think any characters change.  I'd been viewing this as a failure of the narrative--its dramatic arc.  I'm more at peace with the revision process now.  I've finished the rewrites of Aug/Sept/October--at least this pass.

World of Fire. World of Original Experience.

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.” 
― Joseph Campbell

"Enter the forest at the darkest point."

"You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations."

Today I'm re-writing October 5th and my mood is sinking.  Because of technical problems and self-doubt about my craft and the story (replaying conversations with my old boss, my new boss and Grace in narration--should I break the scene apart?) but also the hero's path.  October 5th is a dark entry point, but is my memoir the right forest?  Using Campbell's word "bliss," which strikes me as ridiculous, if I finish this rewrite will I find bliss?  Or does this path lead to misery.  After I spend and hour or two on it, I'm reliably depressed.

I guess the analogy is false.  The book is the dark path.  The forest is life.  I can choose another path but not another life.