Ntantiso

My final group meeting was with two other members; which turned out to be the only group meeting of the course (I always had someone missing, so never had more than a dyad before).  It was the most productive.  As the more or less halfway resident, Bob set up the Skype connections for us stretching from O’ahu, Hawaii to Berlin, Germany.  For me, it was nine in the morning while it was nine at night for Nicola.  We spoke both about the final pieces we wrote and the course in general.  We spent most of our over one-hour talk on the course.  Robert had already agreed with Jane to represent the group and write the summary for us, which was more than fine with me!  I have given most of my comments along the way, either via my ongoing blog entries or elsewhere on this website.  In addition I had been in touch with Jane, Stian, and Philipp pretty much the entire time via additional emails.  So everyone can read my process-orientation from the moment our site went up and I was able to work with it.  I also received permission from Philipp to write my story separately and for other academic venues…. so that’s what I’ll be doing!  Lots of hard work all around for the volunteers and the “students” who managed to stick it out to the end… though not that many of us were left by this week.

I am sending you the version that allows you to track my changes via email as I did not figure out how to attach it here!

A random array of fresh flowers near the entrance of the cemetery designates the new graves. Every time she comes here there are a few new graves, with no name. She’s always amazed by the length of time it takes to name a death. To register it, announce it, carve it in stone. The way the fact of the death hovers amongst the living until it is put down. Mounds of earth, like new born babies, still unformed. The freshness of it, the aliveness of the pink and peach gladiola, white lillies, a sunflower, asters, red, yellow and orange roses.

She walks past Martha Müller and her husband Paul. Martha died 27 years before her husband 51 years ago. He was presumably longer without her as he was with her, or at least the same amount of time. She walks past a row of graves of men, all died in 2006/2007. Their graves are well kept, perhaps their wives attend to them. In between the branches of a group of fir trees in the background she notices cave like spaces that look like mouths, opening and closing in the breeze. She loves fir trees and cemeteries. She grew up in the Black Forest, surrounded by fir trees and visiting the family grave with her father each Christmas eve. Her father had made it seem as if visiting the cemetery were the only event in the year that counted. Maybe it had really felt like that for him. It burnt itself into a secret part of her like a flame struggling against wind or rain. When it goes out it’s rekindled again.

She sits down on a wooden bench in a spot where the sun partially touches her through the branches and leaves of two lime trees. The crowns of the trees meet in an arch above the middle of the path, shaped like a roof. The bench she is sitting on stands obliquely opposite the grave of Anneliese Metzenthin, 1936 -1985. “Geliebt, beweint und unvergessen”. (Beloved, wept over and unforgotten) [I would remove the parenthesis.  In each case where a translation is offered, I think you can incorporate the translation without having to use parentheses – either melding it into the sentence or simply sharing it in a separate phrase]. A rose is engraved over the name. Anneliese Metzenthin wasn’t much older when she died than she is now.  She likes her name, lots of “I”s and “e”s, but that’s not it. The name somehow sounds kind. There’s a trimmed hedge around her grave with a few busy lizzies and other small red flowers. She thinks of her friend Cristina telling her that “cutting roses is an erotic act” -  “Collige, virgo, rosas” – Girls, enjoy your youth and beauty, cut the roses while they are in bloom before time will spoil them.

The cemetery is called Waldfriedhof Pankow: Pankow wood cemetery. It’s in the former East Berlin where she now lives. Her mother’s family on both sides is from Lichtenberg, which is also part of the former East. Her grandmother had never shown her where she’d grown up, only the places where she’d lived after she was married and better off financially. Her mother can’t remember where her grandmother lived in Lichtenberg. She’d often asked her mother to go to Lichtenberg with her but she doesn’t want to go there. “I wouldn’t recognize anything”, she says. [too many „she" pronouns is confusing: is it the child, mother, or grandmother in each case?]

A wedding photo exists of her great grandmother (on her mother’s side) Anna Blau and her husband. She’s upright. Slim. Even her gaze is upright. Not warm, not cold. Her wishes don’t betray her, she keeps them to herself.  Born and died in Lichtenberg, her husband swallowed up in the second world war. As the Russians were marching in he was at work, a stationmaster. He was still wearing his uniform. He was going to make it home in time. That seems to have been the event of his life.  A civil servant’s life in which you die because you forget to change. He didn’t seem to mind. “I don’t mind” his face is saying, because – it’s not my fault. Like a child that one day doesn’t come home. He was never found. Anna married again and opened a pub with “uncle Willy”, as her mother called him. [beautiful imagination!]

She hears a plane pass overhead, its belly hidden by the trees. Pankow is in the air corridor to Tegel airport. All these people, known and unknown to her, passing through her mind with their one event life and their name in stone. What will her event be? Has it happened yet?

The breeze gets stronger, so that it now lifts her scarf at the edges[1] . A woman in a cream and brown outfit further off to her left is attending to a grave, leaning forward, stepping back, rubbing her hands together, kneeling down to pull some weeds. When did she get here? She walks towards her [which woman is walking toward which?  This is part of writing in third person that really puzzled me; unless we name some of these characters up front: or at least identify the main character with a name] to pick up a watering can. Her footsteps on the gravel sound unfamiliar. Suddenly four women almost meet on a crossroad of paths, a couple of elderly women with small dogs, the woman attending to the grave and a woman dressed all in [denim?] walking back the same way she had come earlier. They look like figures on a board game, mechanical, choreographed, as if adhering to a law of symmetry in accordance with the paths. At the turn of the century the cemetery was in fact designed geometrically with lime tree avenues and double paths. It runs along a road that used to be called Bahnhofstrasse, or the Station Road. During the cold war this was the wall strip running parallel to the S-Bahn station Wollankstrasse. Another 50 metres of the cemetery area was taken for an extension of the wall strip. For people trying to flee from the East to the West, the cemetery was a favourable point of departure. A labyrinth of stone and tree, masking other vertical entities as long as they were sufficiently sharp and fast to conceal their mobility. She wonders if any one of these escapees is buried here and which ones got away.

She is not going to be buried here. She’s not going to be buried anywhere. She wants to be burnt and her ashes strewn into a lake. She often pictures it. A small lake surrounded by trees, a secret spot, to which only few people find their way. It’s very quiet. She keeps trying to find a lake like that, but like many others, she has yet to succeed.

It’s getting cold. Even though it’s early September it feels like late Autumn. The weather has changed from warm to cold from one day to the next. She gets up from the bench and walks towards the exit. Her bicycle is parked outside. She gets on her bike and cycles back through the park to where she lives, just a couple of streets away. Ever since the neighbouring Prenzlauer Berg has become more and more expensive and bourgeois the district has been booming. There are four building sites in her street alone. Old houses getting restored, new houses being built. Mostly young professionals and families move here. Unlike Prenzlauer Berg there are still a lot of people from the former East living here. But that will change.

The houses and building sites flit past her eyes like a smudged film. She can’t hold on to any of it. She has no memories of this place. She has hardly any memories of the place where she comes from. The memory of the cemetery in the Black Forest is more like a tattoo. She doesn’t feel it anymore. Each house in this street is familiar, she walks along it every day. She’s nearly home but it feels as if she’s not going anywhere she knows. It’s a feeling that reminds her of the graves of the newly dead, her life like their death hovering.

[beautifully rendered emotions and images!  As with Bob, I felt I was there with you.  I’ve been to cemeteries in Neurnberg and must say it brought memories back for me!  Thank you!]

Office 2004 Test Drive User 23.09.09 18:41

I love this image.

CNF-Week-5-Jefferson-Street-2A-Bob_Metry  CNF – Week 5  – Jefferson Street 2 Rewrite – Bob Metry

Bob: I did a cut & past from the document and it’s not showing my suggestions separate from your text.  I bolded the first few of them and now I’m just going to attach the original document with my line by lines (not sure if it’s working, I don’t think it worked!; if not, please don’t hesitate to ask and I’ll email it to you or I’ll just go ahead and mail it anyway!):

Bob resumed his trek along East Jefferson Street on a chilly Sunday morning in early October 2009.  For two cycles of the traffic signal he stood in the First Street crosswalk in the glow of a half-risen sun, where just a few weeks before in rush hour traffic he had stared down the sprucy lady in the shiny black BMW.  She had seemed willing to run him down so she could race to her reserved parking space in a high rise parking garage three or four blocks away.  Or so he had imagined.  He smiled.  No need to rush to the curb today.

Where he had lived as a small boy a vapid Hampton Inn, eight stories of white stucco, pink brick and flat aluminum framed windows, stuck out of the ground in the middle of a grey concrete car park, tufted here and there with islands of live greenery.  An air of sterility accentuated the building’s dowdiness.  It brought to mind a giant saguaro cactus rising from desert sand and scrub he had seen near Tucson, Arizona years before.  [I love the imagery in this paragraph!]

He remembered a bustling commercial block of narrow storefronts, brown and red brick buildings joined like Siamese siblings. Attached by party walls or separated by narrow passageways, sidewalks lined with wood framed produce stands painted a uniform dark green, they formed the satellites to the retail stores. His father, Morris, had owned a meat market there before being drafted into the Army and shipped out to England in 1942.  His brother, Habeeb – named for his maternal grandfather- , was born there in 1943.

Depending on the season, the weather, the day of the week and the time of day, there had floated on the air the aromas of fresh or rotting fruits and vegetables, wood and coal smoke from 50 gallon drums stoked to keep the vendors warm, cooking oil and kitchen grease from restaurants, waste flowing in the curbside gutters, and motor exhaust.  Today he inhaled only the combusted fuel vapors hanging above any busy road.

Most vividly he recalled the people.  Lots of people of all kinds.[I’d take out this sentence] His people.  His family. Shoppers. Sundays would have been this quiet, though.  One thing hadn’t changed.  No one who didn’t live there came down on Sundays.  Except today no one lived down there.  Just visitors staying in hotels like the Hampton Inn.

Armed with a Kodak EasyShare digital camera (fully charged, loaded with a fresh two gigabyte memory card) and fortified by a large cup of Starbucks extra bold coffee, he set out to document the real present, which he planned to contrast with a recollected (idealized?) past.  A few snaps of the Inn, some of the jeans and hoodie clad guests, checked out and schlepping luggage to their vans, SUVs and compact Japanese cars. He wondered why they had come to Louisville.  Why they chose to stay in this particular hotel.  Convenience?  Economy?  Proximity?  Tempted as he was, he decided not to ask.  It was not relevant to his story, was it?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  Certainly not part of the mission he had set for himself.

He conveniently, perhaps perversely, parked his Toyota at the curb exactly in front of the main entrance.  That’s where the family car might have been left overnight sixty-odd years ago – in front of 109.  Close enough to where the long obliterated address might have been.  It was a symbolic, if not precise, placement, staking out a bit of turf.

Planning to start at First Street and walk the five blocks east to Hancock, Bob had driven past the cleared and half developed ground in the 200 and 300 blocks, the new and soon to be completed construction of 400 and 500 East.  A contemporary version of the depression era housing projects they replaced filled both sides of the 400 block.  The Wayside Christian Mission stood at 432, where St. Michael’s Syrian Orthodox Church stood until razed in 1960. The Church, a converted synagogue, bound the community together for nearly thirty years until moved to the eastern suburbs.  Here his immediate and extended families worshipped and joined in social activities.  Many of the men – butchers, grocers, tavern keepers, restaurant owners, produce vendors – the future patriarchs whose faith and dollars purchased the building in 1934, met there almost daily in late afternoon to play dominoes or card games, usually pinochle, hearts, rummy or a variation of Jacks.  The rhythms of commerce dictated their leisure.

Germany and Japan defeated, his father, a member of the  now “greatest generation,” had returned to Louisville and a postwar down-turned economy in late 1945.  Not finding permanent employment or a good business opportunity, in June 1946 Morris packed mother Malvena, the three boys: Bobby, Ronnie and Habeeb, and Grandfather Habeeb into a new maroon Chrysler Royal, bought with savings from poker winnings and Sgt. Bilko like enterprises garnered in his role of Mess Sergeant, and headed for California.[got lost in second part of this sentence: can it be turned into two sentences?] He was following the trail his parents had blazed before the War, looking for a business opportunity in the Golden State.

There followed a six-month family grand reunion on Morris’s father’s fruit ranch near Fresno, where grew table grapes, plums, peaches, almonds and apricots.  The older grandchildren, none over fourteen, picked ripe fruit and, trusted to wield hook-bladed knives, cut grape bunches from the vines, which they either placed in baskets or laid out on flat trays to dry into raisins.  Nine-year-old Bobby managed to cut himself twice before being relieved of duty and assigned to spreading the raisin trays.

At one time or another Morris’s three brothers and two sisters, their spouses and children, together with sundry kinfolk, gathered either as visitors or part of the clan that had earlier fled west and settled either in the Los Angeles area as entrepreneurs or in the fertile San Joaquin Valley. [How about separating the two lineages and offering a bit more about each separate from the other?] The Lebanese thrived as merchants or as farmers continuing the agrarian traditions brought from the fertile fields in the mountains above Beirut.  Working for a wage was rarely an option.  Disappointingly, prospects in California were slimmer than in Kentucky.  Common dust, not gold pavers, layered the streets and highways.  January 1947 saw tracks retraced across the nineteen hundred or so miles of two-lane road through Arizona, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, mostly along legendary Route 66, back to Jefferson Street.

Back to Jefferson Street, the magnet.  Bob’s maternal grandmother, Selma Karam, had bought the building at 317 East, in front of which her produce stand stood and would stand until 1959 when the building, the stand and all the buildings and other stands would be razed in the name of urban renewal.  Upstairs, Selma, her husband, Habeeb, and son, Eli lived in five rooms.  As did Bob’s family for a while.  The twenty-five street level front feet of 317 East became Metry’s Meat Market on one side and Karam’s Produce, run by Eli, on the other.  Morris was back in the meat business.  The Haymarket district still boomed.  The Church grew into an even greater force in the family’s life, just a block away now.  Grocery store on one corner.  Barber across the street.  Five and Dime six doors up.  Life was neat and compact.

The images in Bob’s mind dissolved in the reality of a chain link fence caging the remains of Produce Plaza, the “new hay market”, a square block developed to replace the original after 1959, after Bob’s 300 block had come down [or had come & gone?].  Now, cracked acres of asphalt and chipped concrete spread from Floyd to Preston, north across Congress Alley to Market Street, bereft on this Sunday morning even of commuters’ vehicles parked there during the workweek.

With a sigh Bob recalled recounting the history of the three north side blocks between First and Preston to a thirty something Vice President of the University of Louisville involved with developing a Medical and Research Center in the adjacent 200 block.  In response he got a weak, indulgent smile, a cock of the head to one side, hands buried deep in gray pin striped suit pants pockets, an impatient sidewise shuffle of shiny black-loafered feet.  The unspoken message: Old man, I don’t care what was there.  You just don’t understand progress.

Straight backed, index finger itching to jab the tidy puffed up buttoned down shirtfront, Bob might have replied:  And you, my myopic friend, don’t understand that activity is not always progress.

Bob’s Jefferson Street existed no more.  Intellectually, he grudgingly accepted the successive changes as well intended, essential for the city’s modernization, and probably inevitable.  Emotionally, he struggled with thoughts of the culture, the humanity he believed had been lost.  Connecting cords, stretched and worn thin with time, still held him fast to the street and the city. His heart stayed tethered to its home base, even as his body and its constituent senses had journeyed beyond this idealized world.

Unlike him, two of his brothers, Ronnie, who succumbed to abdominal cancer just past his fifty-fourth birthday, and Joe, seventeen years younger and a career high school special needs teacher, took permanent root in the city.  Ronnie had owned and operated the Brass Rail Tavern, corner of Jackson and Jefferson, succeeding their father, who had switched trades when urban renewal took the meat market, and moved two blocks east.[again, could be expanded and developed into individual stories.] That building stands no more, the lot now for resale by a land developer.

As well, his eight first cousins who grew up in Louisville, the children of his father’s brothers, married, settled, and worked here.  In one way or another, through St. Michael’s Church, having lived or worked on the street, each of them had ties to Jefferson Street.  His cousin Raymond, slicing a ham, contributed the tip of his right index finger to the sawdust of Morris’s butcher shop at 317 in 1955.  In the ensuing commotion the severed flesh was not recovered and was presumed interred in the day’s sweepings.

Two of the cousins and brother Ronnie already were buried in Louisville, as surely and finally as Bob’s Jefferson Street.  Only brother Habeeb, aka “Hub”, settled away, all of seventy-five miles away in Lexington, his life still centered on “Big Blue”, the University of Kentucky.  Into his 60s he remains an unreconstructed Yuppie:  Brooks Brothers suits, chinos, button down oxford shirts and penny loafers – no socks.  Yet his ties to family and the ancestral church remain strong.

Bob had traveled to Louisville that first weekend in October for the Saturday wedding of his niece, Kristin, brother Joe’s older daughter, Hub’s goddaughter.  Having finished his Jefferson Street odyssey, he was going to join Hub, Joe and dozens of other family members at the home of his sister-in-law Margaret, Ronnie’s widow.

Before going to his car, however, Bob thought it fitting to use the men’s room, as both a biological necessity and a therapeutic homage.  Among the antique photographs lining the lobby and hallway walls he looked in vain for images of the neighborhood, finding only classic Kentucky Derby scenes:  Churchill Downs, thoroughbred horses, beautiful people.  No connection there.  With a shrug of mild disappointment, he headed out the lobby doors to the street.  Oblivious, preoccupied with thoughts of what he had – and had not – experienced that morning, he ignored the guests gathering out front to leave.

“Uncle Bob!”  He turned around instinctively, not expecting that he was being called.  “Uncle Bob, did you forget us already?”  His niece, Kristin, a broad smile lighting up her beautiful newlywed face, grabbed his arm.  Her new husband, Keegan, and Keegan’s brother and best man, Kyle, joined her in chiding him – gently and lovingly, of course – for passing them by.

“Did you stay here last night?” he asked.

“Yes.  We’re going to Dad’s and then to Aunt Margaret’s.”

“You don’t know why I’m here?” Bob said.

“No, but I was wondering.”

He briefly explained his exploration of the family’s past, then tied Kristin into it.              “Your Uncle Hub was born right here. In the 1940s we lived in a building at 109 East Jefferson Street, just about where you’re standing.  You can tell him and your dad about it.  I’m sure they won’t remember.”

These last words he said tongue in cheek as he threw his arms around his niece and her husband in a bonding embrace.

Driving away, Bob realized that he must not let his past encumber the present or impede anyone else’s future.  Recalling the lessons of Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again,” read more than fifty years ago, he resolved his new mission would be to bind the Jefferson Streets of yesterday, today and tomorrow together and not seek reasons to keep them apart.

Reminds me of Miss Woodruff on Woodruff street in Columbus Ohio!  It was 1958.  The entire street was named after their family, but now only one house belonged to the last of them.  Now the two spinster ladies lived on the first floor of their family home and rented out the second floor.  The street (now a parking lot for Ohio State University!) was blissfully quiet except for when one of the Miss’es Woodruff would lumber out of her house, come into the street to yell up at us:

“Be sure to take a laxative!” She’d shout from the street – “this is old plumbing and can’t take anything hard going down and we can’t afford a plumber!”  As a brand new immigrant, with limited knowledge of English & of the American culture, I never recognized the absurdity of this demand from our landladies…

Thanks for the day’s extension/grace period!  I’ve now posted this week’s piece.

I identify very much with this piece – I guess most of us spend a lot of time in our cars.  As extensions of ourselves and our lives we either live in what pleases us or we learn to love (or tolerate) what we’ve got!  I like very much your sharing of a balance in this life.  Almost the bridge that holds you over the transitional waters of life.

I like the style of your writing, though I long to see slightly longer sentences thrown in on occasion.  Maybe it’s because it’s so much the opposite of how my writing comes out and I try so hard to throw in the shorter sentences if I can bring myself to learn how to do it.  I have been trying in my second piece here.  It’s a conscious challenge.  Again, a balance is what I’m looking for and you have that in the content.  I especially liked your bringing in the contrasts presented by music & readings; your students’ lives.  A glimpse at focus and concentration – and the lack thereof – while sitting in a seat that has a different design and functionality from that which it is being used for.  (Ok, sorry about that sentence!)

Have you paid much attention to your dashboard?  My my car-related life has been focused more on that: somewhat staring ahead.  You have done a great job of exploring the whole car; perhaps because at times you are stationery.  How far you go, how fast, and through what kind of territory: the temporal and environmental nature of living in a car (more than you have done so already) can bring in other dimensions.  I used to have a 180 miles commute through three states when I lived on the East Coast.  I was on the main East/West highway through Vermont.  Had to find my way through NH to MA down to Boston & its environs.  So I told a lot of stories and played a lot of games with my then 2 1/2 year old daughter who eventually had to have two sets of everything while I struggled to pay a mortgage and  tend to a near-death husband in Vermont (he wanted to die there – eventually I said “Either you have to die soon or we’ve got to move closer to my job!”)  My daughter’s father is still alive and now living happily in Maine with what was rightfully my earnings of 24 years on top of the task of keeping him alive… Oh, but I digress.  This is your story!  But you hinted at a similar story.

Keeping young kids busy while strapped in can be quite a challenge!  What resonated with me is the “alone time” one has while traveling not only a distance but vast spaces between home life and work life; between inside life and outside life.  Dealing with emotions & feelings during that passage.  A lot of living goes on in between lives.  Thanks for sharing!

I must admit that in some ways I preferred the first version of your work (and so you might also say, justly, that I had grander pursuits in my own first essay!)

Here are a few manini comments (minor details in Hawaiian!) before I expand:  I’d be tempted to change “L”s name to Elle and use the apparently common reference to the names of two-inch sandals:  “Mules”… I’d substitute “aroma” for “smell” in at least the second mention.  Top of page 4, I believe the word is “well” instead of “we’ll” and on page 5 the father plays a “starring” role, perhaps?

OK.  Back to what I missed from the first essay:  the “setting up” of the park as a random meeting place – or even just a “crossing paths” place if not for meeting.  The apparent “indifference” of men vs. a more connected set of women.  Even if the women were not connected to each other, they seemed more “connected” (via phone, or dogs, thoughts or inner struggles) with reality.  So, yes, I think there is now something missing from the first half.  I think the marching band was a nice touch.  There was more about the fountain.  Is there any reason you dropped all that??

It would have helped to set up the two characters’ (L and Michelle) connection earlier on.  I was really confused as to why one lady would visit the other’s home but know NOTHING about each other (their initial greeting appeared to be of “old friends” rather than newly acquainted people who had never met before; OR maybe I just “read” that into the story with the mistaken notion that this character was going to develop into your mother;-)

I also got overwhelmed with the repetition of L’s name – though I’m not sure what suggestion I can give – especially once the second character is introduced, it’s not possible to just go with “she/her” references.  Given that I have no idea how you expect to finish the piece, if the sex of one or the other character is not so important (if I were writing this piece) I’d just resolve this by changing one’s sex so that one could switch between “he” and “she” and not have to repeat the names every time… I’m sure there are better techniques for taking care of this – but I don’t know what they are.  Even distinguishing one as older than the other may help in a descriptive way when referring to their traits or looks, etc.  Maybe when we talk about it this weekend we can resolve that.  By the way, I hope we can set up our talk for Sunday morning again.  I’m heading for an afternoon concert (courtesy of a free ticket!) so please let me know how that might work for you.

If you read my blog from last weekend, you can see my huge frustrations with the essay I started: in terms of not knowing how long the piece “had” to be.  I had introduced bits & pieces of characters with the intent to “unpack” in a much longer piece.  However, the feedback (not from you but from others!) seemed to point in the direction of a “tighter” piece that needed to come to a finish promptly.  So I just abandoned that piece rather than try to rework it into something meaningless for me.  My new essay is totally unrelated.  As I read your piece, I’m almost getting the same impression: some frustrations about the intended “length” of a piece:  are we foretelling bits of a longer story to come? Or was this supposed to be a fully developed story within a dozen pages?  So, it’s really hard for me to comment on your piece other than to say that in its current incarnation it is hard to follow the thread from the park to the apartment and to distinguish relationships or to find out whose story will eventually be followed: Michelle’s or L’s? or both?  Again, since we now have a mother/daughter relationship developing beyond the two characters starting out in the park, I kept getting the three women confused with each other.

Since you and I had spoken before, I am somewhat privy to what your intentions are in the long run; but it is not necessarily coming out of the independent piece of writing you are sharing.  So my views are colored by my prior knowledge (outside the scope of the story) of what is to come.  Maybe you can tell me how long you expected the piece to be?  I know for my first piece I was thinking about a book-sized job!  With my current piece, I pretty much see it as “self-limiting” to what’s in the pages submitted.  I believe that makes a huge difference in how our development of characters takes place.  IMHO I can’t imagine coming up with well developed characters (for three different women) in just five pages:-)  Hope this helps in some small way.  Looking forward to talking to you soon.  I definitely enjoyed our last conversation – perhaps another mother-daughter interaction to tie in!!

I’ve lived apart from my life partner since the middle of 2006.

A year or so ago I wrote the following poem as a part of a chapbook I produced for a course I was teaching on “communicating creativity.”

Here are two that might be of relevance to what I am experiencing this morning, sitting amidst another congregation of silence:  Pardon the missed formatting that I have yet to figure out in this editor.  Can’t think of much that is more frustrating than the inability to format a poem of sorts… At my level of effort, every little nuance counts:-)  So, I’m just using spacing to convey some separation of thoughts – some punctuation for the soul.

(c) 2008-2009 Dineh – I wish to retain copyright to the poems, though I realize that I’ve signed my life away to the Creative Commons for this course blog.  Still, if someone wishes to use these poems elsewhere, I’d appreciate a nod in my direction – just so I’d know how & where the words will be re-used.

The First Line Was Silence

The first line of contentment:
Well fed, dry, and loved

Silence begins in sleep:
Powder pink.

The first line of passion; no words.
Grasping, finding, clinging,
Letting go – sated:
Ruby red, fading to smoke.

Of offense: beating others to the punch:
Coal black.

Of defense: withholding elevates to power:
Royal blue.

Of resignation: with nothing left to say;
Burnt sienna.

Of devotion: the lives assigned
Are the lives we play
in every hue:
Iridescent.

Silence blooms; in shades of wistful words unsaid,
Silence speaks the final line ~

~ Silence is anathema to mediated worlds.

(c) 2008-2009 Dineh – I wish to retain copyright to the poems, though I realize that I’ve signed my life away to the Creative Commons for this course blog.  Still, if someone wishes to use these poems elsewhere, I’d appreciate a nod in my direction – just so I’d know how & where the words will be re-used.

And the Line went Dead

Was it my phone?
or his?
Was it simply a failure of networks?
or the enormity of distant threats?
of death or destruction -
as yet incapable of crossing wires & airwaves?
Was the text undelivered
With mailbox overflowing?
The memory low?
The computer’s crash?
The webmaster’s negligence?
The Cafe closing?
The signal waning in a far-off desert?
in a rainstorm or a shower of meteorites?
in God’s mountains or the depths of seas
a cable munched by a curious soul?
A synchronicity designed by unacknowledged powers
or a simple resignation – a rejection
-a gentle reminder
that life moves on at a different pace
in each nook and cranny
of this misunderstood universe
every enclave at its own pace -
~ every human seeking peace – in silence?

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As an inherent seeker of information, I wonder when obvious things don’t surface for me.  But I recognize that I’m always the outsider.  There must be an insider view to which I’ve never been privy. Inside families.  Inside groups.  Inside countries and continents.

I must have misread the description of this course and its assignments.  I must have been the one who could not figure out that I was supposed to have a “whole” story in six pages: falling from the womb, complete (though permitted to remain unedited and in need of editing).  And that then and only then, and only if I turned into someone else’s voice, would I have had the opportunity to expand what was vague; to unpack what was vacuum sealed; to drop paragraphs that didn’t make sense because the intent had been to tell a much longer story – which apparently some participants want to hear while others just want a rearrangement of thoughts in a potentially-ten-page story?  If the idea were to continue, then why would every nuance need a full explanation up front?  I’m not clear.  I will start again on a different, less emotional and less difficult “view” out my window.  So I’m going to post this second observation of the week and move on to observing the silence.

I began this adventure as I do any other new venture: as a fun challenge.  I take courses to put myself in my students’ place: how does it feel to enter the unknown?  To gain a footing on someone else’s floating island of life experiences?  How do others teach a course or organize their curriculum?  How does someone else’s infrastructure affect their behavior?  All of this and more as a meta-analysis that has nothing to do with the course content – yet.  I’ve taken courses on ceramics and on hypnosis; on the business aspects of professional photography and on watercolor painting; on the basics of monoprint making and on the joys of whole-brain thinking for group leadership or the tribulations of retiring – some day.  In between I’ll listen to meditations of Pema Chodron on the practice of Tonglen and Thomas Morton’s musings on the Dark Night of the Soul.  I listen.  I fall asleep.  I don’t meditate in any traditional sense.  I may listen while playing racquetball – alone.  That way I can sit down in the middle of the court and listen to an especially absorbing piece of wisdom, contemplation, or insight.  No one is going to disturb my peace by asking for the score.  I don’t keep score.  It’s just my general policy – except when I come across someone who happens to establish a clear pattern of just taking and taking and taking.  Then I breathe in the bad vibes, breathe out love, and I walk away.

This morning I washed my car.  It was covered with gifts from many trees and their birdlike inhabitants.  It was distinctly not good for the finish so it was nearly impossible after months of neglect for me to avoid performing this chore; but I really don’t enjoy washing my car.  So I forced myself to go.  Immediately, the experience became a transformative act:  It turned into meditation.  Then as quickly as my body hit Dharamsala, meditations gave way to waves of pent up emotions and insights:  why had I behaved the way I had in this course?  Why such a knee-jerk reaction that I had touched upon in a previous blog but only superficially?  Why had I so vehemently resented the second assignment (“using the third person voice”) that it had simply led to removing myself from the premises for a week?  Well, it was entirely clear now.

I have spent my entire life living in the third person, because no one else seems to inhabit the world I occupy!  I have spent an entire lifetime “observing” myself as though I’m simply a useless fly on the wall with nothing better to do but “observe” myself: analyze myself, criticize myself, occasionally praise myself, but mostly see myself through the eyes of others who see me simply as a third person, inanimate, insignificant (to their lives), and detached.

The social sciences teach us to detach ourselves.  A harsh childhood had taught me to detach myself.  My mother’s genes had pushed me out of her harsh womb echoing in my fetus ears: “detach, detached, DETACH!!”

And here I was, desperately wanting to attach to myself by writing about myself and my experiences and what do I get?  Someone who knows nothing about me dictating that I what I really need, what I can really use as a tool for writing is to write in the third person.  I was immediately transported to the 1960s and why I gave up being an English Lit major because I could not fathom why there was to be only one true interpretation of some author’s work, or only one preferred way to write a response.  It had never made sense to me why MY voice which was clearly a bilingual, bicultural female voice had to remain silent in the grander scheme of the American culture and literature.  So I became a social science major with emphasis on the “political” and stayed far away from English lit classes… until this August!  How I had assumed that the world had changed in the forty intervening years!

I had even noted in my earlier blog how much I did not enjoy the process of writing in the third person.  It was not only painfully obvious to me that I “lost” a lot in the process (just in my inability to translate some emotions or experiences into third person because it sounded awful detached from the real huma), but it was the experience of writing that turned me off from the assignment.

I had spent dozens and dozens of hours preparing for the technical infrastructure that was in complete disarray in my brain.  (I am using the “I” language as we teach our communication students to use the “I” language!  “I” take responsibility for MY perceptions of the world around me.  I was confused and in a state of disarray.)  I had then spent an enthusiastic week finding a location and writing my essay.  I had persevered and was the first to post my first draft.  I even got ahead of schedule by posting the third person version two weeks ahead of time (I thought I was only one week ahead, but apparently I wasn’t supposed to follow the instructions from the course description but from a wholly separate “blog” entry somewhere else…. detached from the syllabus; and detached from the RSS feed I had diligently set up weeks ago).

I spent as many hours as necessary to ask for clarifications, work through the infrastructure and technological confusions, and ultimately gave up looking for answers about what the word “university” meant to the organizers – what it meant to be a “sense-maker” and to whom or for whom and about what? What does it mean to be in a “course” and how does someone “collaborate” with unknown beings??  One can interact. One can begin to make friends; one can even hope to meet someone else of the same persuasion.  One can cooperate.  One can interact and provide advice.  But collaboration, like mentoring, is a concept that is based on a premise of shared and mutual respect in a given field or endeavor.  The relationship is developed over time and by mutual consent.  It’s not a forced entry into someone else’s life.  We don’t occupy someone else’s space and by default become their collaborator or mentor.  Hmmm. Maybe that’s why I’ve never fully integrated into the academic culture or any other culture for that matter.

Bottom line is that I wanted to learn how to write about me, my life, my experiences from the totally opposite end of the spectrum: up close and personal.  And the questions I had already posed had to do with the ethics of how to do this without hurting other people’s feelings.  The MacKenzie Phillips publication (High on Arrival) and interview clearly proved my point in this past week:  it’s hard to bare one’s soul and spare one’s family ties.  I wanted to know how to tread that water more carefully.  Writing in third person is simply a copout for ME in this context.  Once again, let me clarify that I have nothing against writing in the third person and I totally understand the advantages of remaining an observer of the self.  It just so happened that this was the very wrong way for me to proceed with my adventures into a different genre or a different realm of writing.  I can easily rectify that by changing my first essay and going in a less personal direction.

If I say so myself, I can write to spec and get published.  I’ve actually had a job as “writer” and so I  am quite capable of detaching myself from my written words. I’ve worked with editors and I specifically worked with one over a period of nearly a year for a forty page paper!  I rewrote that paper so many times that by the end it was hardly the piece I had originally submitted and  I’d have been happy to put the editor’s name on it as the author if only I could just get the darned thing published;-)  Ultimately, he was kind enough to let me use my own name!  In the end, it was a utilitarian piece that served its academic purpose.  I am eternally grateful to this editor because all I was trying to prove to a third party is that if I set my mind to it, I could publish in a given journal of his choosing.  But that’s not why I signed up for this course… I was not planning on proving myself to anyone in particular… and so I really don’t know how to proceed into the next phase without starting over again from scratch.

I’ll probably start over and write something else.  Since my group has been less than complete so far, I’m sure my “mates” won’t mind if I just start all over again with a third person narrative about a Perpetual Procrastinator…

By the way: if anyone’s counting, the above is now easily six pages of nonfiction writing.  The question is: how creative was it?!!  Perhaps not so much.  So maybe I’ll go back to attempting yet another draft of something entirely different.

N.B. The above paragraph reminds me of a student I had last year who was supposed to keep a weekly blog for his research class (a “writing intensive” class that requires a minimum of 4000 words per semester).  He had so much difficulty with the writing process that I finally relented and told him to just work diligently on his blog and I’d find a way to help him turn the blog into his thesis.  He was happy.  Me, not so much.  I noticed that after a while he kept counting his words on the blog and reporting on it on the same blog.  This iterative self reporting of the number of words soon began to dominate his work as his primary preoccupation and thus began to accumulate as the majority of his contributory notes to the blog… Ooooh, now I have 1669 words on this blog!!.  No.  That really has to stop – at 1683 words!

Tonight I was rummaging through all kinds of past blog comment entries (I have yet to figure out if there’s an easier way to figure out where the “new” comments come in… I have yet to see why my RSS feed doesn’t “deliver” comments to me anywhere…

So, I came across:

Nicola’s Critique to Lee’s The Moment
Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:00:53 -0700

and thought how interesting that Lee and I have the same title for our piece but that the writing also appears to be very similar to my own. So I visited Nicola’s blog where I recognized my piece under someone else’s name! So, given how late it is tonight and how I had not found a single other posting for this week’s work, I figured I should just make this short blog entry in case anyone is reading these comments and let it go at that. Then I thought maybe I should also email this to the listserv as Jane had suggested at some point a few days ago – that’s what I’ll be doing.

After much coordination and “intervention” by Cynthia, she and I ‘met’ this morning. First, on Skype, with a lot of noise and a dropping of the connection. Then I suggested that since it was going to be just the two of us anyway (with neither one of us having heard any response from our much-overworked groupmate!) why not talk on our cell phones? Though I have a really cheap subscription and hardly ever use my cell phone, I do get “free” weekend minutes that are never fully used, so I made the suggestion for switching over to phones rather than Skype. So I have no idea how the Skype conference call might have worked for me if I had tried it. I admit to not being enchanted either with telephone conference calls or their equivalent on Skype.

Just so I’m not dismissed out of hand as a Luddite, I actually used to manage an interactive television program for the State of Hawaii back in the late 1980s and as the person in charge of the control room at Hawaii Public Television, at times I found myself being the coordinator of the telephone bridge in our primary control room/studio space. It establishes “protocol” and, in effect, has to require a mechanism to control one-on-one interactions between the two people who must interact at any given time… Definitely “doable” when necessary, but definitely not the best way to get one’s word across without interruptions: too many nonverbal signals are missing! My ex who worked with blind clients in large meeting settings always made that as his example for the trials and tribulations of conducting mass meetings in the blind. As well, if I so wish, I participate in weekly seminars with Skype on the side for students who cannot be physically present. That seems to work only if the majority are simply “taking notes” and “listening in” while one person gives a lecture or talk for the majority of the “interaction” rather than an attempt at brainstorming.

All of my own courses are conducted entirely asynchronously, especially when there are time zone differences involved; as I see little reason for pretending that I can adapt to a bunch of disconnected people trying to work synchronously over time and distance and personal context of their time and location. But I’m happy to try anything for four more weeks! After all, that’s the idea of experimenting, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m quite sure I’ll get to experience something quite different in the coming weeks to broaden my horizons and put aside over 25 years of poor experiences with teleconferencing across cultural, technological, socio-demographic, and time-zone boundaries!

But I digress – again! Back to the phone call with Cynthia. I thoroughly enjoyed my talk with Cynthia. Albeit relatively brief, as she needed to catch the sun for her Sunday outing, I think we managed to cover both her essay and mine quite adequately. I had already exchanged several emails with her in the past twenty four hours and had suggested a way to formalize/structure our interaction – based on the Elbow method of feedback – which, admittedly is non-critical. Since neither one of us is a professional critic of others’ nonfiction writing, it seemed to work best for us; at least for this first round.

Here are the guidelines I had proposed based on the “Elbow Method” in a previous email to Cynthia:

In terms of critiquing techniques, the only non-academic one I’m accustomed to is the one from my writing retreats. We use the “Elbow Technique” that was created by a fellow named Elbow (at first I thought it was a “nudging” technique!) Anyway, it’s only positive feedback and really NOT a critique and goes along these lines. (we “listen” in small groups, but I’m sure one could say exactly the same things from a “reading”):

1. As I read the piece I felt __________ (some emotion elicited by the piece)
2. Words or phrases I noticed were…..
3. I thought the main idea or feeling was….
4. What I remember best about it is (Or one thing I liked about it is)….
5. My metaphor for this piece might be …. because….(to be chosen very spontaneously; our moderators enjoys food metaphors!)

The idea is to react to the writing from a personal/reader perspective rather than to evaluate or critique the work. I’m quite sure that I personally don’t wish to be judgmental or to impose views on anyone; but I’m certainly open to suggestions.

A few interesting things developed out of our talk and I believe we were supportive but also encouraging that the other explore certain ideas for the future editions of the work. We also went off-topic to find out a bit more about our similarities and differences…