You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Ground Level' tag.
I most of the time feel like sarcasm and bitterness are uninvited in my life, and most of the time they are. In this moment however I print their invitations with my imaginary printer that I am using to print everything I need to print, which includes transcript requests to The Lipscomb, because the Registrar doesn’t know how to use email, and also forms for The Grad Schools. The Grad Schools know how to use email, and they know how to make online applications, which they have made and are lengthening according to the lists of their applicants and the suffixes on the names of their five highest-paid employees, whose salaries are lengthening according to the string of imaginary zeroes after the imaginary heading in the Book of My Life: Things I Have Accomplished, and Will Accomplish. 000000000.0000000000
If I can make Christmas presents happen by the 25th, make a grant application happen by the 17th, make four or five grad school applications happen by the 31st, and make rent and loans and utilities happen by the 1st of January, then I will be alive, inexplicably, sane, not wandering around the Broadway post office leaning in car windows asking for money to go to Burger King. If I can make it alive and sane and un-homeless to January, maybe the 31st of January, when the last of the bright & shining applications and portfolios will be either thumbed or unthumbed, either in the inbox or the outbox, either liked or disliked, then, I can wear something with a hood, maybe something red and a note in my chest that someone wrote that says in so many words i love you, and walk around in a place that is far enough away.
It would be nice, in proportion to the difficulty, to take a trip. I have the lists of places, lengthening in proportion to the lengthening list of places I have not traveled while reaching this age, twenty-four, twice twelve, twice twice six. Even in my soul I am untraveling, and this is probably the most important of anything. At this point I will not mail the invitations to sarcasm and bitterness, but will shred them, in my imaginary shredder that I am using to shred the invitations I printed for misery, wretchedness and poverty, which is even now spitting out in long strips the words “misery,” “wretchedness” and “poverty” sliced into unintelligible pieces along with a humming sound (like the happy librarian pushing the cart or the nipped & jaunty downtown-walker) and a crunching, as of snow in the morning, or cereal in the morning.
I guess things are ok.
lately about Peter, and how he dealt with Christ leaving. I’ve been having a still and silent couple of days, walking in and out of rooms like every one was a garden, and following sunlight like a leaf. I have so much to do but I’m only doing what I can, and not crying about the rest, which is normally what I do. Yesterday I bought two new tires and got a partial alignment. Good, that my Dad wants to take care of me, wants to drive away from his workplace to meet me and look at tires, wants to loan me enough to get tires with 40,000 miles on them. I got a kefir at the Co-op, and he got fig bars.
Stillness of days has to do with thinking, this about how I get cared-for, this about how rich I feel, being the owner of two new tires! Also with Innocence Mission, since I put on Christ is my Hope yesterday and haven’t taken it off. I take it to the car when I have to drive, bring it inside when I have to come inside. I realized (an aside) that “O Lord of Light” is a Gregorian chant. Of course, oh of course. Maybe someday I will meet the Perises on earth … otherwise, it will be after. The stillness also has to do with an empty house (wonder where my roommates are), and with reading Acts, thinking about Paul and Peter. How were things, just after Christ left? It seems that paradigms were being broken. Strange, that things would change so much … but only after He left. It’s like Him being there was so many years of people being incredulous, so many years of people standing there looking at the sky, wondering if they were dreaming. Sometimes you have to leave the presence of a miracle before you can understand it, or let your life be changed by it, I think. I’m still thinking.
Yes, I thought wearing these cable-knit black leggings would give me enough lift this morning to send me confident into all the research, all the re-doing all the poor planning all the silly ignorant deadlines and assumptions about funding and trouble.
I’m giving up on ridiculous Sarah Lawrence and retarded Hollins and hoping to create the perfect list of MFA programs that are not too expensive to apply to, not expensive to attend, not requiring two TA classes per semester, that are in or near mountains, that may be impressed by a partly-confused-partly-articulate portfolio and statement of purpose, by a 720 on the Verbal. This list could be eight, not more, I hope not too many less. I’m looking at UNC Greensboro, still UVA, still Vanderbilt, still Ole Miss, possibly now Syracuse? If I can pull together $130 by next weekend, I’ll be applying to the first four of those. Or, if I can get more feedback on my portfolio, rework it satisfactorily, write bright & shining statements of purpose, and still be alive by then. Talking to Dana, to Austin, to Michael, it’s all helping but still I’m sitting in Java, wired and listening to Radiohead and looking at all the pending and hinging possibilities and feeling a bit panicky. The fact that I also watched Michael Clayton last night is also relevant to my state of mind. Which, by the way, was an incredible film. Wow.
I hope I can make money and work on this stuff. I have high hopes.
Tonight, though, after all.
This morning I freaked out on M and had to go take a walk, at first I thought I was going to where the big trees grow, next to the Federal building, but I kept going and was turning around the corner of St. John’s Episcopal. Of course. A church; and, just like Christ the King, a courtyard.
Christ the King is a church and school that I used to pass all the time, walking or riding my bike down Belmont Boulevard in Nashville. I took Belmont to get downtown and to get groceries at a little neighborhood grocery store across the street from Christ the King’s sports field. One of the first secret places of beauty I discovered in Nashville — still a freshman — I walked up and there was a walkway going back into a memorial garden, with maples surrounding and flowers filling. A fountain had a Thomas Merton quote inscribed on it, if I remember correctly, and I would go and sit there for an hour to regain sanity. A weather-stained statue of Mary and child Jesus stood under a huge, half-dying oak.
I feel as if I’m betraying a secret, talking about these places in such a public place. Secret places are necessary, for me, even if I rarely see them and they are preserved in inaccurate memory. So I think St. John’s courtyard steps into my life in a time when I needed another secret place so much, a still place in the city, with a labyrinth (which I walked, oh it stills the soul) and great bushes of myrtles and bleeding hearts and rosemary.
What Rilke says about solitude is true, that a great function of friendships is to guard each others’ solitude, since solitude is such a powerful place for God to speak. Which brings Kierkegaard to mind, and what he says about the individual having to stand alone before God. Tonight is growing slowly into tomorrow and I had to write these down. Just some thoughts.
What a gorgeous day. Dawning so bright, so bright. Today I pulled the curtains, took a shower, cut my hair, made biscuits, peered at Brittany’s lustrous ring, finally vanquished the confused tomatoes, tore up the nasty old vines next to my back porch, and planted my birthday-present bulbs (Alpine Bells, Dainty Dutch irises and Angelique tulips) (thanks, Mom and Dad) in the tomato beds and in the bed next to the Dear Spot. THEN! I studied for the GRE, making lists of important points and vocabulary words, and feeling the chills of excitement. I like taking standardized tests, not because I’m a minion of the machine, but just because I’ve learned how to do it. And I feel like I just want to take the practice test NOW.
By the way, does anyone know which phrase refers to the act of pulling a curtain aside to let in light: “pull the curtain” or “draw the curtain”? I’ve always been confused about this, and now that I’m taking the GRE — well!
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future, of course. As I always do. Sometimes I think it is terrible, contains monsters, or death and decay, sometimes I think it is full of warmth and light. The latter lived mostly in high school … the former is living mostly these days. I drove to Marshall’s parents’ house with him last night, as his grandmother was in from Phoenix and all the Knoxville family was coming over for dinner, and felt like I was hurtling into space. I wasn’t sure anything was going to be ok. I know this is normal for people in my position, but even normal things are sometimes horrible. I’m coming back to a kind of equilibrium today, today all full of a kind of peace I didn’t even think to ask for. The kind I ought to have gotten up in the middle of the night to pray for, before I got.
I’m getting further and further from the fear of love, too. I was thinking about this this morning, how it’s not dangerous to love, it’s just dangerous to live more with yourself than with God. Everything that happens when you love someone has the potential to become beautiful, if you’re patient. I want to put a Rilke quote up here about patience and love and living. I would someday like to have become a patient person.
I’m getting ready to put together a portfolio of poems. If anybody wants to help me sift & proofread, let me know.
1. I was awakened, night before last, at about 4am to the sound of very loud scratchings at the wall next to my head, which had been asleep on my pillow heretofore. The rats are now climbing in the wall above the kitchen sink and about level with my bed. Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard scratchings and walkings and shufflings in the wall above the windows facing into the backyard. The rats are now climbing underneath the siding and swimming through the insulation, toward me, in my bed, to burst out of the wall and attack my face. What a thrill!
2. I’m making a spreadsheet of grad school information, and (shocking!) the University of Missouri is at least leading UTK. All these hoity-toity MFA programs (“full funding is offered to all students admitted” and “ten students are accepted per year” and “solid gold laptops given to first-year students” etc.) are a bit discouraging, and a sound MA w/emphasis in writing could really be very, very fun. I miss studying literature anyway, and Scott Cairns teaches at Missouri. Thoughts.
3. Pumpkin scones, today.
4. I’m going to start yoga. I used to want to be this graceful thing, this little dancer whose body swept along in long, shallow curves. I used to want to dance so much. This is something that I’ve given up hope for, but I can at least have graceful moments, like on a yoga mat.
5. I’m reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and it’s as gentle a source of wisdom as I’ve ever known. I hope it will change me.
6. Me and Marshall hiked the Chimney Tops the other day, and got to sit on top of the world and see the colors creeping up. Far too many dead trees… but there were UT orange ones, crimson ones, and frozen rivers of still-green ones on the valley floors. This old man from Maryville or perhaps an original Gatlinburger had to tell everybody what he knew about it all, which was Siler’s Bald and where Pigeon Forge is and how you have all these teenagers who come up and get tired and turn around a quarter mile from the top! I mean, you’re not gettin your money’s worth if you don’t come own up here! A chipmunk almost sat in my lap.
— later —
7. I’m taking the GRE on November 11th, 9a.m., THAT’S IN TWO WEEKS, OMG EFFING EFF.
Julian of Norwich, medieval anchorite, has been something like a dear friend for more than five years, now. I discovered her while reading a neighboring Margery Kempe excerpt in a Norton Anthology and I still remember the urgency and eternity of that moment, much like the moment I was listening to an Innocence Mission song and realized that it was a G. M. Hopkins poem. Julian: late at night leaning over the desk in my dorm room, underlining every “all shall be most well,” copying passages into my journal; Innocence Mission: Carla’s “Befriended” on Carla’s stereo & me running across the white-carpeted room to turn it up. Marriages of these loves of mine are things that make the beauty of living hard to believe, in spite of everything.
This morning I pulled out this little magenta paperback, “Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich,” and took it with me on a walk. With some tea. I slept later than I wanted to, and the weight of my life — the sense of it no less than the confusion — seemed very heavy and I wanted to hear just one word, one secret that would be alongside. I read this: “He lays upon every one he longs to bring into his bliss something that is no blame in his sight, but for which they are blamed and despised in this world — scorned, mocked and cast out. He does this to offset the harm they should otherwise have from the pomp and vainglory of this earthly life, and to make their road to him easier” (55).
The language is archaic, but the idea here, that there are heavy things we’re carrying that God brought/allowed in order to “make our road to him easier,” this is unarchaic, this is a piece of eternity. I was walking on a bridge when I read this and am reading it still, in my mind, and the hours are passing. I think she means self-contempt every bit as much as other sorts, and the idea that I’m my own outcast more often than anyone else’s informs my understanding of it, too: for this reason (making the road to God easier) I’m allowed a propensity toward self-accusation. Isn’t that amazing. And it does make my road to him easier,
which road, for me, is desperate persistence. Sometimes desperation without persistence, sometimes persistence without desperation: God is kind to people who don’t know to be desperate and don’t care to be persistent. Me being in both categories. And having known that kindness. Just a thought that I had when I was writing an email to you, Katie.
I’ve brought the laptop and five-subject notebook to Panera to do some real work on this World Lit syllabus, this morning, and as I’m getting cut off from the internet and condemning the Panera Big Bosses to everlasting waiting-room limbo with laptops + no wireless networks (harsh, but I feel strongly), I hear conversation from the next table over. These are girls from some high school soccer team, navy jerseys, long straight hair, and the talker of the four of them is saying that she had this bump under her tongue two days ago, and after it went away two more came back. Is this normal, and can you be very aware that this is happening to me, oh my god, etc. This after an animated conversation about boys, the specifics of which both eluded me and are always with me, since you can never forget these high school dramas. But more interesting even than these is the small dark one next to her, black plastic straw in her mouth, still brown eyes, silent and thinking a thousand thoughts.
I’m looking at her as she stares out the window and remembering my younger life, that brief catapult, how I was so bored with things corporeal because the structures of Life were just beginning to gather momentum, to gather names.
I want to run a record of my life, so that when I’m fifty-five and the kids have left and I’m walking into the study every morning and looking at my journals, thinking about who I have become, I will have some kind of answer for the question that someone will ask: “So what have you figured out?” If I am as confused about life then as I am now, I will be both disappointed and relieved: so there was something I understood all along. If I can document the confusion and the strange and beautiful structures that come slowly lifting out of it, then I will have made a kind of sense out it, and if there’s anything I can do to make sense, I will. Do you remember that feeling that there were larger things in existence than you had heard of, yet? Do you remember losing that feeling to another one, that the only things in existence were relics of other people’s religions, shrunken heads or patterns of words? I’m writing it all down. Maybe someday when I’m paying attention I’ll realize how many of these things were on-purpose.
In the meantime, miserably dull things, like being miserable that anyone is thriving since I am not. That anyone is buying cheese since I am not. But I’m writing this down, too, since the structures of life are relaxing into webs and sinews instead of bones and ridges and all the names I find for their forks, elbows, doglegs, are becoming obsolete. Finding better names is mostly losing the most unworkable ones, right now, and that’s ok. Somehow this backward movement is actually forward, counter-intuitively, and gathering a breath, again, of momentum.
I’m rebinding books today, and binding some that haven’t yet been bound. all this on the porch, where the mosquitoes are still taking their midday nap and I’m kind of watching, just watching things happen. there was this awful, terrible stray cat who was having a crouch-off with the little homey striped grey cat that lives across the street, and I had to run over and chase it away. it was yowling in the weirdest way, like a baby crying, and I kept having the dreadful feeling that a cat-rape was about to happen. but now the homey cat is safe. (for now … the terrible cat will live & prowl forever.) so this is what it’s like living in the city…
most days I’m home alone all day, but today I went to KC Leatherwerks and Jerry’s Artarama to get stuff I needed for rebinding Randy’s bible and Liesl’s novel. the rest of the day is falling down like a flight of stairs; those steps there are about working on Katie Gray & Emily’s Box of Treasure, those there are about working on Liesl & Rosa’s World Lit syllabus, and those right there are me checking my Global Seeds email to see if grant stuff is moving along. last year I imagined I would be where Claire (my roommate) is, almost, working on my master’s at UT, money in money out, sometimes writing papers and sometimes writing poems, lots of times writing letters to friends about how I’m doing great, everything’s so great, I love school. I think yesterday and today, all of it, from beginning to end, is about letting God write my life.
you throw the worst fits in times like these, because you feel you’re being treated so unjustly. and God is about justice, so there’s such a chasm of thought that can’t be bridged, how to get from the injustice of your life to the justice of God creating your life.
and the two best moments in this entire week of alternately throwing hate mail down the chasm and trying to act like I could care less about the chasm were these: the moment after I quit throwing the Big Tantrum yesterday, which was me letting God be the author of my life, and the moment last night when it was very still and oil-lamplit and I told Marshall about it. because sometimes it’s as horrid for him as it is for me, when I’m feeling horrid & unwilling to let go of my sense of fairness. and it’s nicer than anyone can say, to lean on someone’s shoulder and tell them about a moment of peace.
the memory of which is v. v. good, right now. Christ will bring opportunities, open doors that I can recognize and unsteadily go through, and my life has never been like this before. so I can have mercy on myself, a little, too.
I usually resist the urge to write blogs in the morning, because the morning is new and by the end of the day whatever I wrote seems impossibly obselete. It’s 9:12, though, and there are things I have to say before they become obselete, or (if this is actually truer) before I become dusty and old.
I’m coming back into some kind of beauty, and I have no idea why. For months I’ve felt either crowded or empty, too much with people or too little, and the fields in my soul have been mown with tractors, leaving sharp stubble, no flowers, etc. But I’ve been reading some of Franz Wright’s new prose, I’ve been finishing Moby Dick, I’ve been grabbing something like the sleeve of God and have been following Him around sometimes with my face upward, upward. Being-in-a-relationship is of course nothing like I expected and now that I’m beginning to calm down about it, about my new roommates settling in, about rent and the other four bills sitting in a stack over there, about God in fact still being interested in my life, I’m seeing this mown inner field growing longer, it’s tender blades now, they’re starting to ripple in the breeze and those are swallows falling through.
I was reading Beuchner this morning and wondered if I would someday be able to write with that sort of transparency, the strong poetic language trying very hard to make something besides itself clear. That’s incredible, it’s almost like what I mean when I say I want the signifier to lead inexorably to the signified. I love style, but the self-conscious opacity of people like Melville (so far) is unsatisfying, so unsatisfying that reading these Beuchner excerpts is like getting the walls and roof taken off your room while you’re sitting there, typing on your computer. They come off with a rushing of air and suddenly you’re outdoors, blue sky overhead. It’s surgical, almost like all good poetry, prying at the artificialness or scar tissue of that one room in your heart.
Anyway, I’m starting the day with coffee, Starbuck’s dark roast that’s been sitting in the cabinet for maybe a year (still good!), with another shortening scone, yellow lamplight, yellow flowers, blue blue garrett and everything either in stacks or bouquets and letters from my sisters on the table. I am not lonely, this morning. I have days that begin with a makeshift hopefulness and then run into the ground, and I have days in which I remember something true in the morning and write it on my arm so that I’ll know what to do when I get lost. Which I will. God, like a parent in the mall, writing down His information on my arm so that I remember who I belong to when I run away and am accosted by strangers.
