Obvious - And Not So Obvious - Virtues

I wasn't at all sure I was going to finish Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's book, The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying when I started it.  Kubler-Ross is best known for her work on the five stages of grief, and if her writing is any indication, the woman did not lack for confidence.  It probably helped her as a psychologist and researcher, but as a writer, especially one of memoir, a little humility sometimes goes a long way.  Within the first pages of The Wheel of Life, I found myself craving a lot more humility from the writer, something the book never quite delivers. 

But in some ways, Kubler-Ross's story is so full of obvious virtues, it's easy to forgive its tone.  She writes about volunteering to rebuild villages in Poland after World War II as a young adult, visiting gas chambers and touring a Holocaust facility, and meeting one survivor who lost her entire family there, who told her, "There is a Hitler in all of us."  These stories, and the ones that come later about Kubler-Ross's ground-breaking work with people who were dying, feel so important, so educational and full of compassion, and I feel grateful to have learned so much while reading about one woman's life.   

The thing I didn't expect is how the book and Kubler-Ross's life swerve into psychic territory.  I won't say any more about it, so I don't spoil anything if you read it, except I don't know why a book about a psychologist who examined what dying people could teach us about life for a living shocked me when it veered into the world of spirits, but it did.  It also amused me.  (Life!!) 

I don't quite recommend the book, per say, but if only to learn about the too-recent past where we institutionalized people with physical deformities and treated psychiatric patients with cruel ignorance, I'm glad I read it.  These were practices Kubler-Ross felt strongly needed to change. Her medical interactions, at least those recorded in the book, put the primacy of people's emotional life at the center of her focus, and that is something this Pisces lady can get behind.  (Hello, watery depths!) 

The other thing I loved about the book was how aphoristic it could sometimes be regarding spiritual matters.  For someone who grew up going to church, who believes strongly in the undercurrents of grace that carry us all along, I found Kubler-Ross's intensity a welcome visit to some forgotten themes in my life, or a welcome fervor piling onto convictions of my own.

The following quote comes from a passage about a woman whose child is born blind, a woman who has been encouraged to put the otherwise healthy child in an institution (the practice at the time). Kubler-Ross tells the woman to keep the child and send her to school.  She writes:

"Obviously, I could not offer any miracles that would return her daughter's eyesight, but I did listen to her troubles.  And then when she asked what I thought, I told this mother, who wanted so badly to find a miracle, that no child was born so defective that God did not endow him with a special gift.  'Drop all your expectations,' I said.  'All you have to do is hold and love your child like she was a gift from God.'

'And then?' she asked.

'In time, He will reveal her special gift,' I replied.

I had no idea where those words of mine came from, but I believed them...Many years later, I was reading a newspaper when I noticed an article about Heidi...All grown up, Heidi was a promising pianist....I wasted no time looking up her mother, who proudly told me how she had struggled to raise her daughter.  Then all of a sudden, Heidi developed a gift for music.  It just blossomed, like a flower, and her mother credited my encouraging words. 

'It would have been so easy to reject her,' she said. 'That's what the other people told me to do.'" 

I know the topic of divinity is sensitive for a lot of people, and it's hard to do justice to spiritual discussions on the internet (or in any kind of writing, for that matter), but I love the confidence Kubler-Ross showed when a panicked mother consulted her, and also the extreme, daring compassion she offered as a medical professional.  I also happen to agree with this philosophy of child-rearing.  We don't all need to be good at everything.  We really only need to be good at one or two things.  We can help each other out with the other things.  That's how community works.  I'm not saying I practice this perfectly, but the older I get, the more I prefer to watch wildness unfold. 

Speaking of wildness, RIP Jim Harrison, the man whose prose knew no end of meat, drinking, and poetic, comic truth-telling.  Who will write about prostitutes and bird-hunting on the same pages now?  It won't be me, but Harrison's stunning 1988 Dalva may have changed my life.  I may forever remember discovering his novellas and reading about dog-training and wood-splitting and achy tangled relationships, as I sat against a window in bed, chilled beneath the hooded sweatshirt I had borrowed from my new boyfriend, Tim. 

This not-so-recent but well-written story from Outside magazine is a great primer on Harrison for those who desire one.  At the end of it, Harrison says something that feels so true about being an artist-wilderness-type, and that is he gave up all kinds of opportunities to keep going "outside."  He needed to be able to wander and roam, something that takes time and patience and for him could not be comfortably fit into an academic environment. 

Every time I try to lure Samantha to the car for an errand lately, I am coaxed up our hill and around the neighborhood by her.  Sometimes she sits on strangers' stoops.  Other times we sneak up on rabbits.  Often she picks up sticks and rocks and leaves, not to collect them but simply to handle them.  Yesterday, she identified a robin on her own with glee, and today she stood in front of one and offered it a guileless, "Hi."  I also had to beg her not to sit in thawing, muddy ivy, and I don't think a single plane has passed overhead without her hearing it long before it appears.  This girl is awake and aware and wants to range.  I can't believe I'm surprised. 

XXOO
Kara

Blind Cave Fish (and Other Miracles of the Midwest)

It has been a shamefully long time since I last wrote, although I have mostly fallen out of habits of shame this winter.  But winter is close to over now where I live, a fact I welcome.

We went to Indiana for vacation because who doesn't like to visit landlocked, overcast states?  It was glorious to be away from home, which I have a habit of tidying too much and worrying about, shuffling paint swatches like puzzle pieces while also staunchly refusing to actually paint anything, because toddler. 

It's always a good idea for my brain to travel, I think.  Changing the scene and getting in the car with Tim and Samantha, driving and talking and occasionally eating shelf-stable pastries sometimes just makes my life work.

Also, we really did have a good time, and I found out something that makes me happy to be alive: there exist in the world fish who have no eyes.  NO EYES.  What?!  They live in deep, dark caves so Tim joked the gods said: "You're not gonna need those where you're going." 

I don't know why finding out about an animal like this makes me so happy, but it does.  It blows my mind and having my mind blown by a scientific, biological fact is so much more welcome than having it blown by too little sleep, which is often the other way it blows these days.  (Not because our daughter keeps me up at night or gets me up in the morning, but because I do things like stay up late watching Shakira belly dance on YouTube.  True story.)

On that note, due to a misfire of the keyboard while on my library website one night, I discovered and then read a book by a chef I didn't even know existed: Cat Cora, whose memoir Cooking As Fast As I Can was ghost written by Karen Karbo (whom I mistook for the writer of Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, written by Koren Zailckas.  I know, I know - they aren't even close).

This is all to say I liked the book's cover so I read it and guess what? I liked its insides, too.  (Gross.)

One of the things I'm finding out about myself as I age and my eyes sting reading certain pages of certain books, is that I really love a good heart-tug.  I don't mean I like to be manipulated by sappy crap, but when I read about Cora, who was adopted, searching for her biological mother and how that mother had written a letter to the adoption agency every year since Cora's first birthday telling her how much she loved her and hoped they will know each other someday, I was weeping in the corner of our hotel room, crouched over the book with my headlamp while Samantha snoozed in the dark. 

I also liked a passage early in the book about Cora's grandmother, who moved in when Cora's mom temporarily moved out of town to pursue a PhD (weird, huh?). 

Cat Cora/Karen Karbo writes: 

"Our mom was a firm believer in the character-building values of chores, a set bedtime, and a strict schedule....But when Grandmom Alma moved in during my freshman year of high school, she dispensed with all that.  She delighted in taking care of us....She spent her days producing a nonstop stream of classic egg salads and chicken salads, stupendous cheesecakes, and for our birthdays, her silky Italian cream cake..."

That passage is actually one of the few in the book that describe food, and while I'm not at all opposed to descriptions of foods, I do prefer them to be written by people who work with food.  I guess one of the things that kind of moved me about Cooking As Fast As I Can is that it was about life, and one woman's life in particular, and while I can't express how little I care about Iron Chef or television or celebrity in general, the events of this woman's life--her closeness with her family and her access to Greek and Southern culture through family and friends and cooking--seemed remarkable to me. 

So I'm remarking on them, okay?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the older I get, the more life moves me.  The more real family feels to me, and literature about it makes me cry.  In a good way, like happy/sad tears.  Like: Life Is So Crazy, Can You Believe That Happened?  

On that note, I give you a Jack Gilbert poem.  This poem was on The Writer's Almanac sometime in February, a month which is always full of fun events and good wine, and is so short but so full of chocolate that I'm going to cling to it as my excuse for not writing to you, okay? 

To make up for my sloth/hibernation/studies of life, here is a master who loved life enough for all of us.  

Failing and Flying 
by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

 

One last thing.  My sister-in-law J.L. Conrad has a new chapbook of poetry coming out soon called Not If But When (what a title!) and you can find out more here.  I first heard some of her delightful "Poems In Which" when we were all younger and childless, when she and her husband visited Tim and I in Colorado, where we ate tortilla chips for dinner, walked the dog, and debated the artistic merits of Lady Gaga's meat suit.  Those were magical times, and vacations with Tim's family may be some of the few times I might trade motherhood for youth.  His clan's family-ness is admirable and earthily Midwestern to me, and I am so damn grateful to be a part of it year after year.

Until soon(ish), my friends,
Kara 

 

Dogs And Doggedness

Over Christmas vacation, I listened, perhaps not surprisingly, to Elizabeth Gilbert's book-on-cd, Big Magic. The verdict?  Just okay.  I say this knowing how much work goes into writing a book, how much generation and then, if you're lucky, how much blessed editing.  I'm not sorry at all that I listened to Big Magic, but I also didn't feel like I learned very much, either.

I don't mean that as an insult.  I appreciate Elizabeth Gilbert's voice in the world.  (Obviously?)  I find it essential to the times we are living in, when women's choices and independence in the Western world seem, on the surface, to be wide-open.  In many ways, she is the voice of creativity, a newscaster from the front lines of "making."

She also seems incurably optimistic, dogged - chipper even - and that can be annoying.  I know this because I am all of those things and while so many people just get me in snippets, the people who live with me and are related to me have to deal with the ins-and-outs of this kind of mental makeup, and I've heard from those close to me that it can be exasperating. 

Happy Birthday, Tim!

This isn't an apology, exactly.  Besides, if it were one to the people closest to me, that would be an awkward use of the internet, wouldn't it?  Tim jokes that I'm actually the bigger cynic in the house, and that my optimism is a shield against the dark pits of life.  I think he's right.  I'm also happy to be me.  I never promised anyone I would be cat-like: broody, slinky, or subtle.  My advice, like my heart, has a lot of Labrador at its core: big, friendly loping along, slobbering on lots of ideas without much consequence.  Or, rather, the consequences are that I sometimes appear a little chipper, and my masks sometimes freeze in a smile. 

Therefore, I listened to Big Magic despite my occasional resistance, because I know from personal experience that the woman's can-do spirit serves her for whatever reason, and it's her job to know that reason, not mine.  I also listened because I like her plucky insistence, and her message that seems to be: Speak up and rant or dance and have your fun.  You'll be gone before you know it so you might as well be here while you are.

With that, I give you my two favorite excerpts from Big Magic.  These are transcribed from my iPod listening, so if they don't match the punctuation in the text exactly, that's why: 

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying.  We are all the chosen few.  We are all makers by design.  Even if you grew up watching cartoons in a sugar stupor from dawn to dusk, creativity still lurks within you.

And, perhaps the more useful quote, one I completely relate to:

Possessing a creative mind is something like having a border collie for a pet.  It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.  Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do.  And you might not like the job it invents: eating the couch, digging a hole through the living room floor, biting the mailman, etc. 

It has taken me years to learn this but it does seem to be the case, that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something - myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind.  I firmly believe that we all need to find something to do in our lives that stops us from eating the couch.

So there.  I don't necessarily recommend the book but I don't un-recommend it either, you know?  For whatever reason, that seems to be worth something, too. 

On a different note, I recently hammered out Purity, Jonathan Franzen's latest novel about masturbation.  Woops!  I mean his latest novel, period.  It's about Germany and the internet and bad (sometimes illegal) sex.  I made myself read it, after aborting my first effort, because my friend Amelia told me Roxane Gay wasn't impressed by it and I was dying to know what Roxane said.  The only way I was ever going to get through a book with so much disturbing psychology in it, besides sheer reams of time (which I do not have) was to dangle the carrot of Roxane Gay at the end of it.  My ploy worked and, as usual, I floated along the river of Franzen's prose (don't say!!).  Though I disagree with many of his social theories and felt pretty sad about what his childhood must have looked like while reading the book, I'm starting to think his prose is almost always worth reading. 

I had a couple of thoughts while reading Purity: 1) Thank goodness he didn't write too much about birds!  PHEW.  That was hard to get through in Freedom, even for someone who loves birds. 

2) When he compared a Bolivian man who works in domestic service to the goat in the front yard who also seemed happy enough with his job, I worried.  A lot.  

3) I don't write weather well myself, so maybe it's the envy talking, but when Franzen writes "Scraps of morning cloud and mist were shredding themselves on the sandstone pinnacles, the sun gaining the upper hand," the schoolmarm in me starts fumbling for my red pencil.  If I were a fourth-grade teacher, I might discourage this kind of writing gymnastics, so it's probably best that I'm not, because he's obviously having a good time of it and that kind of unabashed love for your work is, perhaps, admirable in itself, no?

I noticed something similar in Lauren Groff's latest novel, Fates and Furies, when I read it over Christmas.  It's a lovely, consuming book and I definitely lose my mind with envy each time she writes a new one.  Mom of two!  Go girl. 

Lozenges of moon dissolving in the sky notwithstanding (I swear that's how Franzen described one cloudy evening), here's a passage from Purity that, to me, distills the pure pleasure of Franzen on the page:

As soon as they were on a court, she discovered that he was bad at tennis, even worse than she was.  He tried to crush every shot, sometimes missing the ball altogether, more often sending it into the net or over her head, and his good shots were unreturnable bullets.  After ten minutes, she called a time-out.  Choco, leashed to the outside of the fence, stood up hopefully.

I don't know why everything in this post is about dogs.  I used to love dogs, and love them still on some distant planet, the planet where life resumes once my daughter is older and I consider other facets of life without suddenly feeling a hundred years old. 

Until then, I continue on with life which goes a little like: coffee, breathe, coffee, breathe.  In the middle of all that is a little yoga, lots of books, some writing, and plenty of snow to keep things fresh.

Happy 2016!

XOXO
Kara

Art in this post courtesy of Tim and Samantha.