Robert Metry

My CNF experience was worthwhile on many levels.  A lifelong learner and former for-profit university officer, I enrolled to gain skills and to test the P2PU concept.  On the first goal, I grew as a writer and learned much about myself in the process. I especially commend Jane Park for her diligence, intelligence and flexibility – and consistent good humor.  Her critiques of my efforts were accurate and constructive.  The Thomas Farber videos were marginally useful.  I got much more benefit from his book, Brief Nudity, and would have welcomed his in-person involvement.

Respecting P2PU and sticking with the “shake down cruise” analogy, I ask first: What did the P2PU crew learn about the system’s design and operation?  I heartily endorse the concepts of “free” and “peer to peer” but they will succeed only if the “peers” are fully engaged.  In the vernacular, if the students don’t have “skin in the game”, that is, an investment beyond the bare desire to experience the course, their motivation and participation wane as demands are made on them to perform.  Succeeding courses might require modest, more than token, fees.  Money is only one form of investment, however.  What investment will future enrollees be required to make besides a bare commitment to participate?  On the other side, what are the incentives?  P2PU’s target student profile, enrollment criteria and applicant  screening procedures could address this.

Also, peer to peer works only if the peers constructively interact as a community of learning.  In only one of the three small groups did I succeed in connecting by conference call with fellow students and engage in real time person to person conversation about each other, our work, and the program.  We generally agreed the experience was positive and that we would have benefitted from more guidance and a clearer understanding of what was expected from us, that we may have been left too much on our own.

I conclude that we were essentially volunteer guinea pigs, that structural and technical details have been and will continue to be worked out.  In hindsight I would enroll again and looking ahead I hope to enroll in other P2PU courses.

As you  pass from shakedown cruise to maiden voyage I continue to wish you calm seas and following winds.

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 [the name?] is put down. Mounds of earth, like new born babies, form 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 [than] 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 [weak word] of fir trees in the background she notices cave like spaces that look like mouths, opening and closing in the breeze. [I like the simile] She loves fir trees and cemeteries. She grew up in the Black Forest, surrounded by fir trees and visiting the family grave [site?] 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 [linden?] trees. The crowns of the trees meet above the middle of the path and are shaped like the roof an arch. 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). A rose is engraved over the name. Anneliese Metzenthin wasn’t much older when she died than she [the narrator?] 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. [“gather ye roses while ye may…”]  [use of “her” and “she” confusing, whether narrator or subject]

The cemetery is called Waldfriedhof Pankow (woodland cemetery Pankow). It’s in the former East of 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. [confusing use of “her” and “she”] [there is a richer story here; I would love to hear it told with more passon/emotion]

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 does not betray her desires?], 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 [his face in the wedding picture? It predates his death]. 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.

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 [unclear] 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. [clear, concise, neat!] When did she get here? She walks towards her 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 Jeans material [blue denim?] walking back the same way she [who?] 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. The cemetery was in fact designed geometrically with lime tree avenues and double paths at the turn of the century. It runs along a road that used to be called Bahnhofstrasse (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 [favored?] 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, which only few people find their way to. It’s very quiet. She keeps trying to find a lake like that, but like many others, she doesn’t succeed.  [vivid contrast between the earth of the woodland cemetery and the water of the lake, which is also wooded; secret lake vs public cemetery; I’d love to see this expanded]

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. [vivid simile] She doesn’t feel it anymore. Each house in this street is familiar, she walks along it every day. [“no memories” and “familiar”: the references seem inconsistent] 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.

I enjoyed the story but found it hard to read in places trying to relate third person singular pronouns to their antecedents.  You bring the cemetery to life and convey its significance to the narrator.  The people in her life, by contrast, are stiffly drawn.  I felt little emotional attachment to them.  The cemetery as a jumping off point for escapees from the East is particularly significant as the 20^th anniversary of the Wall’s fall approaches.  You could write a fascinating narrative on this aspect, relating it to people and events.  Keep writing!

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Daytime View of “The Perpetual Procrastinator”

Sunset View of “The Perpetual Procrastinator”

The Many Lives of The Perpetual Procrastinators

A sunset view might cause others to draw the curtains and prepare for a long, dreamless night.  Not so for Viola.  In her case, this is her own customized version of  The Morning People’s dawn.  A creature of the night, she prowls the back alleys of her tarnished [howso?] emotions only after she has fed her family; made love to her husband and put him to sleep; and switched off all the lights.  All that remains to guide her journey now is a glimmer that emanates from her computer monitor.

She peers out of the window into the endless merging of sky with its distant clouds and the water beckoning the moon’s shadow.  Once the sunset hues give way to the rusty blending of the night sky into the horizon it takes little time to scan the neighborhood and reassure herself that all is as right as it can ever be.  She knows, instinctively, that the night will shade her secrets once more and honor her wish to prowl into unconquered territories of the uninhibited mind.  All she needs is a cup of tea and peace on earth.

She sniffs her more immediate surroundings with the deft whiskers [sniff with whiskers?] worn down by a thousand nights of roaming this strangely familiar neighborhood.  The Night Prowler in her soul is more drawn to her other senses now that the lights are dim.  She scratches around for moral and creative sustenance.  Her hunger draws her willy-nilly to the old painted walls near the dumpster of her desires.  She longs for any shard of sensible material that will bring tonight’s project to a close.  Through decades of juggling the Day Character with the Night Prowler, she knows her routines.  Aah! Routines: the bane of her existence and the salvation of her life on earth.  The barbed wire fence upon which she must perch gingerly looking one way toward the rule of Days and another way toward the freedom of Nights.  The populated world’s logical demands and the irrational wanderings into blissful fantasy.

She sharpens her claws on the rough surface of the old wall, peeling layer upon layer of mottled paint.  No.  This is nothing like the peeling of an onion to get to the empty core, she muses.  It’s nothing like the flowery philosophy of her dharma instructors trying to bore down to the pure inner light of her unconscious.  The variegated curtains of dust and lead, and -who knows: possibly of asbestos? – pour down on her head.  She blinks.  She sneezes.  She pulls away momentarily, in confusion and disgust.  Yes, it’s never tidy in her night world, but it’s her sole (soul?) proprietorship.  The night lasts only so long.  When the Morning People – or the MoPes [pronounced “mopes” or “mo peas”?], as she likes to call them  – emerge in the early light of dawn, her travails will be over.  Only then, of course, the MoPes will put her to the real test: Can she function in a whole other capacity in daylight hours, despite her long night of labor.  How long can she keep up this double life under their daytime rules?

Just a few days ago, she had even shared a secret poem with a MoPe.  Clever, they are.  They come in their own hardy disguises [the MoPes or the poems?]!

Day people run the world:

Dictate,

organize,

and command.

While the people of the night

lay their sacrificial souls

at their altar

in the depths of darkness

birthing the essence

upon which

day people feed.

Symbiotic?

Yes!

Joyful?

Perhaps – along the aquamarine haze of blurred boundaries

some dare not cross.

These barriers of darkness into light.

It is The  Others who see no need

to disrupt their sanguine sleep

so essential to their early morning appetites:

devouring their self-proclaimed birthright

to this: their nectar of life.

Of course, Viola’s poetry is just a stop-gap measure to avoid all other kinds of work.  In her eyes, it legitimizes procrastination, her strongest passion and the source of her deepest pleasures.

It’s not often that she can write in the daytime.  In fact, night-work had been such a big part of her life that until her first morning arrival at her new writing job she never even realized she couldn’t write by sunlight.   But she was hired to write.  “Writer” was her full job title!  Though, technically speaking, the job description leaned far more toward copy-writing, still in her youth she had mused:  “How amazing is that?!”

In this, one of her many past lives, she had been hired in an in-house ad department, sight unseen, after sending in some writing samples.  Sitting at her desk now on that first morning at work she had a clean office; sharpened pencils; a brand new Selectric typewriter; and no clue how to write in daylight.  No choice but to report to her boss and confess her sins:

“I really did write those samples, but I’ve always written at night.  I had no idea I wouldn’t know how to write in daylight.  I’m so sorry!” She had babbled on, half wanting to convince her boss and the other half wondering if the prior writings had all been a fluke.  Did some other force channel through her at night and at any moment desert her for good?  How sure was she, really, that she could ever write again? [nicely done: convincing]

“That’s OK” her lenient boss had replied, so many years ago,  “I know how that feels.  We’ll think of something.”

This was the very boss that she’d be asked to fire as her first act in the new position offered her as Vice President for Marketing.

“No, I’d rather quit than make such a bargain with the devil” she had thought over a weekend of agony; weighing her need for money and success against the morality of firing the woman who had been instrumental in allowing her the nigh-life.  She had quit instead. [consider repositioning these two paragraphs; shift in time interrupts flow]

“Maybe you can spend the days doing research; then do your write-up in the evenings,” her boss had offered kindly.

“Work four long days and take three-day weekends.”

“This might work beautifully after all, given that I have a 180 mile commute back to my home!” “– two state-lines away.”  She was grateful for any job, but especially to one with writer in its title.

“Just bunk with my family for the mid-week nights and spend the long weekends at home.” She had finally offered, thus starting an interlude memorable in so many ways.

That was during the reign of her Fourth Life, when she was carelessly flaunting the five more she had left under her slightly protruding belly [aging, overweight, pregnant?]. She had always aspired to be a writer.  It ran in her family.  Both sides.  It was her calling.  Or was it?  Was it, in fact, more likely that it was her calling to buy stationery and notebooks, gorgeous pens, multi-colored pencils, and stockpile them?  Maybe her true calling was to open a stationery store.  Maybe the papers looked so much better in their pristine condition, unfettered by her occasional scribbles.  May be.

Now, her whiskers had turned visibly gray after decades of roaming in the dark and the layers of paint on the wall told a different story:  The eight hues of paint scratched out with her worn-down claws reminded her of how little time may be left for her philanderings.  Still, she had to wear down those sharp claws and what better instrument than the wall of memories in the back alley of her temptations.

That brief nostalgic look back could have been a split second in mid-night time or the better part of an hour.  Time-warp is a condition Night People approach nonchalantly, as they would the drifting of clouds on a moonless night.  But tonight, there was a waning moon to hold her attention.  She began to scribble.

It used to be

When deadlines were closing in on me

I’d wash the kitchen floor,

Hang pictures,

Or write a long-overdue letter

to a long-forgotten friend.

—

Gleaming countertops

now reflect

wall-to-wall pictures of

those long-lost friends

Dust-proof carpeting covers my kitchen floor.

Stooping low to read junk mail;

Upgrade all my software;

And compose this poem;

I cringe beneath

The next inevitable deadline.

It saddens me to think

That poetry has sunk so low

In my long list of priorities.

“Procrastinators,” (she shifted from the yellow legal pad where she wrote her poetry over to the computer where she kept the many hundreds of her half-finished writing projects),

“Procrastinators” she began again with deliberation, “get a lot of bad press because of the Morning People (MoPes) who believe that by getting up one hour earlier every day you can get through the lifetime backlog of unfinished projects and new aspirations.  Of course, Morning People’s genetic make-up, which also seems to include organization, logic, and sequential thinking, allows them to get two to three hours worth of work out of that one extra early morning hour.  To them, procrastination is equated with lack of positive, productive work.”

She took a deep breath and poured out her soul in that combination of night-energy and day-determination, hoping that the catalyst of procrastination can serve her well.  [inconsistent tense]

“If truth be told, though, procrastinators are really the canaries in the coal mine.  [the canary dies from methane gas, warning the miners to get out: is the the image you intend?] Who, at Death’s Door, would not hesitate to put it off a bit longer?  Who among us chooses to jump right in?  If thinking twice is a pretty good rule of thumb; then thinking it over and over again is even better.  We don’t tend to rush through the pleasures of life so much – do we?”  [I really like this “procrastinator’s manifesto”]

Viola was now on a roll, in her element.

“It’s a well known pseudo-scientific fact that most procrastinators are avowed Night People.  Most others are simply repressed Night People.  Their condition is a predisposition very much akin to left-handedness, and the inexplicable desire to live in houses with ocean views.  Morning People happen to rule the world simply because they’re up before everyone else, bright eyed and bushy-tailed, excited about the prospects of setting the rules while the rest of us slumber.  They have conspired to keep us in toe [tow?] by refusing funding for any research that will lead to a scientific confirmation of the origins of, and necessities for, procrastination; thus setting procrastinators free from bondage to socially sanctioned MoPe norms. Though procrastinators have a natural tendency toward serendipitous discoveries, they are simply missing the genetic link that takes them from discovery to publication of results – keeping them in forcible obscurity.  Here and now, we begin to even out the score.”

“For many years now scientists and plain old intuitive, common-sense-driven folk have been chasing the spurious connection between self-proclaimed Night People and their tendencies toward holistic, synthesizing, integrated thinking, and the creative arts.”  Viola stopped short of admitting the very near connection between creativity and insanity, schizophrenia, and similar mental disorders.  She was not here to cast aspersions on herself and the people she loved and wished to protect.  No, this was going to be a sunny-side-up display of unity.  So, she continued:

“It goes without saying that those who battle with the procrastination bug every single morning are simply not going to follow the MoPe maxim: ‘Just set your alarm for one hour earlier in the morning and see how much more you can accomplish with your life.’  Of course, if you’ve been reading all those self-help books that admonish you for not being disciplined, you’ll find that in order to actually get your life together, you’ll need to go into major early-morning-time-debt.

“For beginners, you’ll need to double or even triple the time allocations prescribed by the MoPes.  Here’s a small sampling of how much earlier you need to get up every morning just to fit in the basic social norms of being organized and healthy in mind, body, and spirit.  According to various MoPes, depending on their own specialization (yes, they all seem to specialize in something we cannot live without) begin each morning with the following regimen prior to setting off for work:

·      Ten minutes to write your to-do list in your day-planner; and to distribute the not-done list from yesterday’s date into well-reasoned plans for today, tomorrow, and beyond.  If your backlog is considerable, you will need to invest in a multi-year calendar.  Adjust the time upwards.

·      Begin your exercise routine with 10 minutes to stretch and warm up followed by 15 minutes cardio and a five-minute cool-down for whatever exercise regimen you happen to be following at the moment.  This could be anything from Tai-Chi or jumping on the trampoline to skipping rope or chasing the neighborhood dogs away from your lawn.  Just don’t skip the exercise if you expect to live a long-healthy life; and be sure to rotate in some weight lifting to tone those muscles!  All it takes is maybe three hours a week.

·      Thirty-minutes for a quick jotting down of your thoughts in your journal.  You will want to set aside ten minutes for free-writing or automatic writing, as you wish, and then get down to the highlights of yesterday’s happenings.  By waiting to write the journal in the morning, you have the opportunity to reminisce about your dreams and to further synthesize what has already passed; viewing it now from a more reasoned distance.  Write a haiku or short poem to capture your mood for the day and to get rid of loose thoughts before you sit down to meditate.

·      A fifteen-minute sitting for meditation is really rather minimal.  You will eventually want to work your way up to one hour or more.  This will clear the last of your nagging stress and provide the centered respite from which you will gain your strength to face the coming day. Additionally, as Mortimer Adler once noted: “You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think”

·      Twenty minutes to take a shower, groom, and get dressed for work (to allow for greater efficiency, lay out your clothes the previous night and be sure there’s enough gas in the car as you will not have time to make unnecessary stops on the way to work.  Preparing your lunch the night before is also a time-saver for early morning hours.  But who’s counting the night-moments here?!)

·      Thirty minute allocation for a leisurely breakfast that gives you the opportunity to enjoy the healthy habit of sharing the start of this new day with your family.  Of course, if you must also feed the kids and spouse, you may wish to allocate more time for this most important meal of the day.  Everyone but everyone claims this is the most important meal of the day – regardless of the fact that Night People may choose to sleep until noon.  Still, if you wake up at noon, be sure to have breakfast before you move on to lunch.”

Hmmm.  Let’s take out that calculator, the MoPe’s best friend… Viola took a breath.  But her task was nearly done.  Must press on.

“If you must report to work by 8:00 A.M. and assuming that you are lucky enough to live only one-half hour away from work, the above regimen will require a minimum two hours and forty-five minutes of Morning Time prior to the actual start of your day ‘at work.’  So, set the alarm for 5:15 and stick close to the schedule as I [you?] have not left much room for dilly-dallying.  For each additional person you must prepare for departure, add forty-five minutes to one hour and adjust the alarm accordingly.”

“Then, again,” She continued in a new frame of mind:

“Then again, you have the option to take a deep breath and, without even bothering to waste any time to join Procrastinators Anonymous, re-set the snooze button and extend your leisure-time in bed.  Take a stand against the MoPes.  Better  still, don’t even bother to stand up.”

“With no to-do list to worry about you are already on step number two.  Stretching in bed is just as effective as putting on yoga clothes and stretching on a mat.  Skip Step Two.”

“Who needs a journal when your brain is not overstressed from the sound of the alarm?

Skip Step Three.

“…And with the money you save by not having to buy an alarm clock, exercise clothes and equipment, journals and pens and meditation tapes, you actually don’t have to work quite as hard to enjoy life.  What’s critical, though, is how you choose to spend your new-found leisure time.  Remember: it’s not the delay factor itself that gets you into trouble.  Rather, it’s what you do with the time you’ve gained that separates the sinners from the saints.  Enjoy your time off; you can always read the next chapter later this evening, after the MoPes have already gone to bed.  You can count on me.  I’ve been there.

I used to be one of the night people for most of my life.” She lied happily. “ Somehow I found daydreaming a lot more pleasant late at night.  Then child care and work made me into a morning person by law.  You realize immediately that such laws exist the moment the baby screams for milk and you find the feeder directly attached to your body but absolutely not under your own control.  Procrastination is automatically punished by excruciating pain and an extra trip to the laundry.  Once you become a law-abiding citizen, breaking your will comes easy on all other counts. By now, with advancing old age, I realize that another natural law requires that I burn the candle not only at both ends, but also from the middle: night-time, as usual, because that’s my natural biorhythm; early morning based on three decades of habit; and middle of the night for a bathroom run.”

For some reason, she contemplated aloud, the authors of most self-help articles and books are Morning People.  I’ve hardly ever read any of them say:  “To get more work done, just stay up two more hours at night.”  Yet, I know for a fact that that’s when I get most of my own work done.  That alone should serve as the best credential for my expertise in procrastination.  Yet, I can boast another accomplishment as well.  I started this book fifteen years ago – but as a second choice to another as-yet-to-be-written book which was far more important for my promotion at work!

“Remember,” She concluded with a definitive nod to this task: “Nothing is improbable when you have nothing but time!  Enjoy, but do heed the warnings!”

Morning light was filtering through the sun shades on her window.  She saw her reflection in the mirror behind her computer screen.  She looked surprised and puzzled.  Grabbing the yellow legal pad, she went into her poetry mode and jotted down the last of her notes:

A Necklace

There is a mirror beyond my keyboard

Its original intent: to reflect the ocean behind,

a roundabout way to juice the landscape without

Today I happen to catch a glimpse of myself

from a corner visible beyond the computer screen

It appears that I’m wearing a necklace –

which I don’t recognize.

In fact, I hardly ever wear necklaces at all,

let alone when working alone at home.

I steal a second glance.

The reflected smile I witness: genuine glee!

The necklace as real in its permanence: a tattoo of wrinkles

Where my sixtyish neck meets a forty-something shoulder

Complementing, on the top-side, fifty years of smile lines

in the corner of my eyes,

In a thousand year-old body waiting to bloom.

© dineh-2009

She would be crawling into bed just as the MoPes were arising to rule her world one more time.  No matter.  She had almost beaten them at their own game.  She would retire into her own Night of the Sacred Soul with her tail curled around her body for warmth and protection; her whiskers resting on her front paws; the puddle of her existence kept secure in her knowledge that all is as it should be. “MoPes!” She surrendered, “You Are Welcome to the World of My Creation!”

[As an accomplished procrastinator I got your message loud and clear.  Well told and witty.  Sometimes I would get lost in the night person descriptions and have to reread.  You paint vivid word pictures.  You might want to consider tighter editing to avoid losing the reader in multiple images.  Inserting Viola’s poetry is a nice touch.  Gives her depth and a platform for more abstract expression.  I was once a night person, from doing homework to composing legal documents to creative writing.  Now I incline more to early morning after a few hours of sleep, ending about dinnertime.]

Waldfriedhof Pankow

Nicola Caroli

Waldfriedhof Pankow

Nicola Caroli

Fresh flowers straight ahead of the entrance of the cemetery. New graves with no name. They make me think of the time that comes between the time of death and the public naming of it, in most cases for the last time. [Is it the public naming of death or the dead?] Fresh grief in the process of decay. The liveliness of it, the gaudy mix of flowers, pink and peach gladioli, white lillies, a sunflower, asters, red, yellow and orange roses. I walk past Martha Müller and her husband, Paul. She died 27 years before him. He was presumably longer without her than he was with her, or at least the same amount of time. [The images are vivid but seem not always to connect smoothly (e.g., what is the „it“ associated with "liveliness“?

Most of the people buried here were from the East, East Berlin, and there are not that many newcomers since the wall came down as the area was considered to be way out East. Only in the last five years it has begun to become popular with young families and the old houses are being restored and new ones are being built. In my road alone there are five building sites.

I walk past a row of graves of men, all died 2006/2007. Alone and well kept, their wives presumably attending to them. I'm not from here and I don't want to be buried here. I don't want to be buried anywhere. I don't want to hear the police sirens and the constant traffic noises. But perhaps I shall miss the trees, the fir trees, familiar to me from the Black Forest where I come from. I think it's their constancy that moves me, the way they don't lose face, or rather needles, colour. I shall not miss the statuesque [statuary?], the arrangement of stone, the wooden garbage container for compost only. A grey cat with white paws walks past. It seems to have caught something but after digging a while it seems to have lost it. I notice the spaces in betweeen the branches of a group of firs, like mouths opening and closing in the breeze. Darkness behind the dark green exterior, a way inside. And there are the secretive dots of the yew. [Powerful and evocative imagery, juxtaposing life and death, connecting them through sensation (hearing and seeing) and action (cat digging, fir branches opening and closing like mouths; darkness behind darkness.  I don’t get "the secretive dots of the yew.“]

An old woman in creamy colours walks in the distance with her chocolate brown dog. A younger woman walks past in front of me, all in blue. Jeans, Jeans jacket, blue cowboy boots. She walks steadfastly past me. Dogs are not allowed in this cemetery and some of the gardeners use this prohibiton to make someone else’s life difficult. One of them once shouted at me. The sheer hatred in his face and his voice made me afraid. I hardly ever walk with me dog here now. [blues and browns: colors of sadness and melancholy]

My eyes ache. As if they were endlessly tired. My left kidney feels as if someone were pulling at it. I’m sitting on a green bench with my red coat. As if all the berries from the yew had melted into one blob of colour. The breeze gets stronger, so that it now lifts my scarf at the edges. A woman in a cream and brown outfit further off to my left is attending to a grave, leaning forward, stepping back, rubbing her hands together, kneeling down. When did she get here? She walks towards me to pick up a watering can. Her footsteps on the gravel suddenly an unfamiliar sound. I must have been absorbed by the trees. Then four women almost meet across various paths, a couple of elderly women with small dogs, the woman attending to the grave and the Jeans woman walking back the same way she came. They look like figures on a board game, mechanical, choreographed. As if adhering to a law of symmetry in accordance with the paths. The cemetery was in fact designed geometrically with lime tree [a personal preference: would have expected "linden“ instead of lime trees] avenues and double paths at the turn of the [20th?] century. The thought that there is nothing here for these people [the four women?], no food, no paper, no music, no TV, no attraction. In other words, an oasis [reconsider „oasis“]. Not even the dead are here. The’re not here, among the living, like they are in other cultures. They’re not gone anywhere and they’re not nowhere. They “are”. But where? A cemetery is not a place for the dead but for the love of arrangement, of gardening, of strolling, of respite. And because the dead are not here there is no need for their naming and numbering, the differentiation between young dead and old dead, the dead from the former East and the dead from the East who remained living here after the wall had come down and the dead from the West who moved here and for the dead who don’t know the difference. [profound and moving] Like the child whose ceramic angels had been stolen from her grave this summer. The parents, somehow bereaved a second time, had put up a notice, asking why or how this could have happened, how anyone could have done this and to please, please return them. To whom?

No, I should not like to hear the traffic noises around me when I’m dead and I should not like to be bound to the earth with ceramic angels, if anyone should miss me that much. Perhaps I should not like to be bound to the earth by love so that I should need angels to lift me up and take me away from the living. I should like to go somewhere I have not been before or to cease or to be able to diminish every trace I have left: steps, gazes – perceived or not perceived, thoughts and the repercussions of thoughts that have generated further thoughts, my own and others’. The dead are what they leave behind: their debris, their remains and I wonder if it would be better if they had nothing and left nothing. Perhaps the living grieve because the dead can’t be destroyed and living lasts forever. [The thoughts in this paragraph seem to clash with those of the preceding paragraph.  For example, if "the dead are not here“ how could the dead you "hear the traffic noises?"]

The cemetery runs along a road that used to be called Bahnhofstrasse (Station Road). During the cold war this was the wall strip running parallel to the S-Bahn station Wollankstrasse. Another 50 metre 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. I wonder if anyone of these escapees is buried here and who got away. For me, sitting here, there has neither been confinement nor escape. I am well visible in my red coat on the green bench. In writing this I am revealing something which I’m going to share with other people, with strangers. Without fear of them, without fear of getting caught, without fear of dying. I wonder why I do this.

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. I get up from the bench and walk towards the exit. There is the flower shop whose owner had also once shouted at me for going into the cemetery with my dog. As if she’d known for certain I wasn’t attending to a grave. And as if that had given her the right to vent all her aggression on me, for everything that was the matter with her that day and every dog that had ever pissed against her hedge. I’d hated her for instilling such fear in me every time I went in there, fantasized about threatening her with ill omens about the future of her shop, threatening her with thrusting my chest out and showing her my fist, trying to rev myself up in case I encountered her again. Mostly heather plants for sale now. I’m not going buy any here.

I’m just cold now and not looking forward to the way home because on my bicycle I will continue to be cold. Soon I’m absorbed by the activity in the street, of the park with mothers with their prams, joggers, dogs and the noise of the planes flying overhead. I have no physical enemy to contend with. No one stops me from going where I want to go, I’m not dying, I’m not grieving.

Three days later she sits in a spot where the sun partially touches her through the branches. Planes pass overhead, their bellies hidden by the trees. She sits under two linden trees whose crowns meet above the middle of the path. Their crowns are shaped like the roof an arch. She sits on an unpainted wooden bench, obliquely opposite the grave of Anneliese Metzenthin, 1936 -1985. “Geliebt, beweint und unvergessen”. (Beloved, wept over and unforgotten). A rose is engraved over the name. Anneliese Metzenthin wasn’t much older when she died than she [the narrator?] is now.  She likes that name, lots of “i”s and “e”s, but that’s not the reason. The name sounds like it belongs to someone who is 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. [a lovely rendering] Cristina is working on a textile installation about dowry, using lines from Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni. Alfonsina Storni talks a lot of roses, of cutting roses in her poetry. Thinking of Cristina’s project in turn reminds her of her friend Mirja’s new project about Ophelia, whose suicide by drowning transformed her from a pretty girl that doesn’t say much into a mermaid like figure = sex icon. Cut down and flourishing. [An image of flowering after death. Awkward wording.] Women. Roses, mermaids, her artist friends.

Alfonsina, like Ophelia, committed suicide by drowning. Though Alfonsina walked into the sea. She is a most beloved South American poet. There are countless songs about her life and death, the final act that made her into a tragic heroine. Most people like to leave out that she had cancer when she walked into the sea. They prefer her to just walk into the sea. [Work on the prose.  Too reportorial.  Apply your gift for imagery.]

Cristina, Mirja, Alfonsina, Ophelia and their artistic projects. Trying to get out of their bodies, shedding their skins. She is like them, her hand lightly warmed by the sun, casting a huge shadow over the page as she writes down her thoughts, streaming forth from her mind in the same kind of motion as the traffic on the road alongside the edge of the cemetery further behind her. That’s just the way it is. Is it to do with the men in their lives? Genes? What do they want? What do they hope to gain or lose?

The light of the sun sways on her page as if on the surface of water. The swaying is caused by the movement of the branches, not by water.

Anneliese Metzenthins’s grave is now also lit by the sun, the hedge is a succulent green, like the colour of wheatgrass. Her chest is heavy, it often feels like that when she’s exhausted herself. She lies down on the bench and looks up into the linden roof. She almost falls asleep. Someone is walking past, on the path, behind her head. From this position the footsteps sound like knocks [knocking?], not at all like footsteps.  A mosquito on her face jolts her upright. She sits up on the bench and the sun is gone behind a cloud and it’s suddenly cold.

Her grandmother and her great grandmother were from East Berlin, Lichtenberg. Her grandmother had never shown her where she’d grown up, only the places where she lived after she was married and better off financially. Her mother can’t remember where her grandmother lived. She’d kept asking questions but no response. What would she do with streetnames, house numbers anyway? Why would she want to go back there?

Her great grandmother’s name was Anna Blau. A wedding photo exists of her and her husband. She’s upright. Slim. Even her gaze is upright. Not warm, not cold. Her wishes don’t betray her [She does not betray her wishes?], she keeps them to herself. She doesn’t look at herself, but she doesn’t look at another either. What does she see when she serves her customers each day, sausages, black pudding, brawn, drawing beer, pouring Schnaps, echo of the tray on the counter. What is she looking at? A sensible woman, Anna Blau. [Does all this come from the wedding picture?  If not, place after pub disclosure below.] Born and died in Lichtenberg, her husband swallowed up in the Second World War. As the Russians were marching in he was still wearing his uniform. He was going to make it home. Even in the wrong uniform. His whole life seems to have been like that. A 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. I’m innocent. Like a child that one day doesn’t come home. Never died, still around somewhere, maybe but not likely. Did Anna mind? She married again and opened a pub with “Uncle Willy”. [Here the image of serving beer and sausages]

It’s gotten cold. She gets on her bike and cycles back through the park to where she lives. Just a couple of streets away. In the former East, from the West. In her thoughts going back to the former East, before it was East Berlin and Anna Blau could not have imagined the wall. Or that a Russian would be saviour [confusing: save from what?], a rapist and one day keep her from meeting her daughter at Savignyplatz at the arranged time.

She doesn’t feel at home here or where she comes from. Recently she went to visit her father’s sister, another aunt. They looked at her curiously, anxious about what she might say. She doesn’t tell them about Alfonsina Storni, that she walked into the sea, about her walks in the cemetery, about the ceramic angels or the planes passing overhead. It’s too far away, for them and for herself. Even what is near is far away like the planes’ bellies.

Like waking up from a dream, looking at oneself in the mirror or living with someone. Feeling together, feeling alone. Familiar and estranged at the same time and uncertain for how long. That’s what she likes about cemeteries. The dead don’t become more dead, they don’t move away or leave. You can address them, they can address you, without touching. There’s no skin between you. It’s a place peopled by no one. A congregation of names and dates on stones.

[Assuming that English is not your native language, I am impressed at your ability to build such evocative word pictures of the tangible and intangible: concepts, feelings, events, trees, graves, people.  Woven like tapestry.  Your story inspired me to Google “Waldfriedhof Pankow” and from there to access Wikipedia and source materials.  You juxtapose life and death in so many ways and so effectively, although sometimes the images become confusing or appear contradictory.  You use the sun to portray both light and shadow, reinforcing the sense of death/dying as an integral part of life/living.  You have nailed the essence of the feminine as the “dark” force, the earth, the yin, the erotic, especially with your deft use of literary sources (Ausonius, Shakespeare, Alfonsina Storni).  Edit your work more carefully to realize the full effects of your gift.  Check spelling.  Tighten your prose. ]

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Open Creative Non-Fiction

Cynthia Jimes

Assignment 2

9.26.09

We grow up loving our parents. We soon start to judge them. Sometimes we forgive them.

– Oscar Wilde

It was half past five and L. stood near the fountain with her faced pressed into her pink phone. She could hear two dog owners in the adjacent grass, exchanging their dogs’ names.  Joshua and Jennifer. What kind of names are those?” she thought. She raised her phone voice to drown them out.  “Sweetie, looks can only take her so far, and she’s not even that pretty. She’s not going to make it as a writer or a singer or a photographer unless she gets more fire in her belly.”  [Who is “she?”  How does she connect to the story?]

L. held the leashes tight. Her two Cocker Spaniels were light but strong and they pulled her toward the grass. She almost regretted wearing her two-inch sandals. As she talked into her phone, Joshua stopped to greet the Spaniels, and his owner asked if the dogs could say hello. “Sure, sweetie,” said L. As the dogs sniffed, the man moved his eyes slowly from L’s metallic orange toes, to her tall gold sandals, to her khaki pedal pusher slacks, to her leopard print blouse that snuggly fit her small, lazy breasts. His eyes continued to move up her face, past the full orange lips, the ivory cheeks hidden by too much Mary Kay cream cake foundation, the large lids with blue eye shadow, and the yellow-white bouffant hair held in place by a thick gold bow. “Have a great day,” he said, and walked on.

L. noticed Michelle walk up the park steps and waived her over in excitement. L. hung up her phone, now covered in cream cake foundation, dropped it in her bag, and dug for her orange lipstick. “God bless it, I can never find anything in this bag,” said L.

Michelle laughed to herself as she walked up. She liked L.’s southern accent, and how L. was always getting mad at herself. They’d met in the park several months before, when L. had just arrived in San Francisco from Oklahoma. L. had moved to be near her daughter, but her daughter had recently moved to Los Angeles for a job.

“Hi, sweetie! You ready to go look at that couch?” L. said.

“Sure. Where is your place?”

“See that big ugly high-rise right there? That’s me,” said L.

I love that building, Michelle thought, but it’s probably very different from her house in Oklahoma. As they moved toward the high-rise, L. told Michelle that she was leaving for her “Mary Kay reunion” in two days, and needed to get the old couch out and a new one in before her daughter arrived after the reunion.

“Mary Kay reunion? As in cosmetics?” asked Michelle.

“Yes, it’s something we’ve been planning for a while, me and the girls. All of us who worked the Dallas Fort Worth territory in the 70s. It wasn’t just about pink Cadillacs, you know. We put those book clubs you girls have to shame. We’d meet twice a month to talk about what we’d read. About sales and strategies for pushing our products.”

They entered L.’s building. Michelle mumbled under her breath that book clubs were annoying, and she’d rather be living in the 70s. L’s hearing was surprisingly good for a 69-year- woman. “I’m not sure what that means, sweetie, but ok.” Michelle wasn’t really sure what she meant by that either. Her opinions and frustrations tended to change depending on the moment.

The inside of L.’s apartment was covered in brown paper and sheets—the cabinets, the floors, the furniture, everything. Except for the couch she was selling [giving away?]. “Don’t mind the sheets and paper. It’s for my husband. If I don’t cover everything up he’ll make a big mess, and then when I come home I’ll have to clean it all over again. And I want things to be nice when Christina arrives after the reunion. We’ll fly in the same day and drive back from the airport together.”

“Christina your daughter?” Michelle asked. And then in the same breath she said, “Your husband doesn’t mind?”

L. chose to ignore the question about her husband and answer the one about her daughter. Yes, she’s the one in L.A. She’s my baby. I just wish we could all live together, in the same city. I thought when she got her divorce she’d want to be near her family, but I guess not. She’d rather live in L.A. where that stupid Sandy, her friend lives. I mean, L.A.’s ok. At least you can drive there. And park. And people appreciate fashion. I wish she’d told me she was moving to L.A. before we sold our house and moved here. I don’t think she realizes what it took for me. But oh well.

“Pumpkin! You leave my sheets alone!” L. said. Pumpkin was L’s orange Cocker. It was the third Cocker with the name of Pumpkin in L’s family.

“You know. I went to the vet last week,” said L., “and I just happened to ask how much he would charge to de-claw Pumpkin and Midnight. I don’t want them scratching up my tile floors. Well, he looked at me with this look, and he started talking to me as if I was an idiot, telling me about the tendons and the pain it would cause. They do it to cats, I thought, and how was I supposed to know? We’ll, I’ll never take my dogs there again. I swear.”

Michelle listened to L.’s story, tried to sympathize with her, but couldn’t, and ended up siding with the vet. She changed the subject and said, “Let me try out the couch”.

As she hit the couch with her weight she smelled a flowery, powdery smell rising up from the cushions. Probably something to do with Mary Kay, she thought. She wasn’t crazy about the smell, didn’t really like the paisley print fabric, but told L. she’d take it because it was comfortable, free, and would be delivered that evening by L.’s husband. He had a truck with a bumper sticker that said, “Yes, this is my truck, and No, I won’t help you move.”

Michelle left L’s apartment and walked past the park. I need a drink, she thought. I’m in the mood for…what am I in the mood for? Not scotch. Not beer. Not wine. I think I’m in the mood for a vanilla vodka on the rocks.  Michelle looked up at Grace Cathedral. Huge, gothic, pale, stone and beautiful, the church confronted her with the guilt of not being pious enough in her teens and early 20s, with the dissonance created by reading Bertrand Russell in her late 20s, with her anger about the too-close relationship between religion and American politics in her mid 30s, and with an appreciation for the symbols, comforts, and traditions it offers to the world, now, in her late 30s. [nicely done: covers a lot of ground cleanly, clearly, efficiently, expressively]

But religion still caused problems for her, especially when she went home. Something Michelle had always thought, or at least something she had come to think in the last ten minutes, was that her mother was like most mothers. They all played movies in their heads that defined their realities. And Michelle could recite her mother’s movie scripts by heart. Michelle’s father was one of the starring actors in those movies. Whenever Michelle tried to open up to her about her own relationship problems, it was a cue for a scene from one of her mother’s movies. And it was never relevant.

Michelle blamed her mother for most of her failures. For not encouraging her to read beyond the requisite Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, for not talking enough about politics at the dinner table, for not using colorful vocabulary around the house so that she might comfortably use words like proselytizing during informal conversations. Even though dad was absent, completely absent, Michelle’s mom got all the blame.

[Good use of dialogue.  People are believable.  Is this L’s story or Michelle’s?  Both? Segue a little rough.  The stories seem disconnected.  I would like to know more about Michelle’s relationship with her mother and  “her failures.”]

You might not hire me based on my resume. In a world increasingly favoring specialization I have repeatedly sought new challenges, leaving behind untied ends. At times I have taken leaps of faith and, like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, stepped off the ledge onto a propitious bridge.  What I remember best is how much I have enjoyed life and still do.  I have loved learning and consider myself, as must each of you, a lifelong (in my case 71 years and counting) learner, else we would not be taking this course.

In this nth iteration of myself I am beginning to do freelance writing in career education and core employment skills (combined with workshops for people in “transition”, the current euphemism for looking for a job).  My dba and website (under construction) name is The White Schoolhouse, representing a historical (and mythical) place for learning.  ”School” is not a place, however.   Learning happens everywhere all the time and, to appropriate the overquoted philosophy of Forrest Gump’s mother: Opening the schoolhouse door is like reaching into a box of chocolates; “you never know what you’re going to get.”

I am licensed to practice law in Kentucky and Tennessee and keep my hand in health care and education law for a few clients.  In past lives I have been among other things, a student, US Marine infantry officer, legal assistant to a Kentucky governor, associate in a large law firm, sole practitioner,  health care executive and general counsel, chairman and legal counsel of a for-profit university system, Trustee and Vice Chairman of The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels (yes, it’s a real organization, generous supporter of worthy causes).  Love of language caused me to focus on legal documentation – plain English contracts, briefs, securities prospectuses, regulatory compliance policies, an occasional article.  I have written creatively over the years, mostly for myself, although this year my novel A Jury of Peers made it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinals.  Yet to be edited for publication.

My wife, Alyssa, and I live quietly below the radar in Franklin, Tennessee, south of Nashville, with our not so docile wire hair fox terrier, Shiloh.