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?