"Using a gouache of humor, science, and compassion, he'd set forth the foundations of our friendship." [from pages 124-125 of the book.]

[From pages 124-125 of the book]

I had arrived on campus that summer's end quite full of myself.  Not only was I the first child in my family to go to a university without the intention of committing a crime, but the first child out of all 40 cousins on either side of our family to have reached the age of 18 and still have no intentions to marry. 

It made me a "know-it-all."  However, in less than an hour, which was all that it took to get to know each other, Owen had exposed in me what I'd already believed about most of my fellow students: How much smarter I was than they; what an individual I was; and how bright, how very bright I was going to be.  Question followed question from his streetwise and quick mind, as he gleaned from me my family history and what I was doing in Peoria; in that Socratic order was his meaning.

Harry Stack Sullivan

Abraham Maslow

 Before he'd ever taken a single course in psychology, before he'd ever read Maslow, Horney, Perls, and Sullivan, he'd forged for himself a technique of observing and understanding, at high speed, who and what he was currently dealing with, either in confrontations or in conversations. He might have had time yet to come into contact with the sons and daughters of Freud and Jung, but he nevertheless knew how a man thought and what he feared.

Frederick "Fritz" Perls

 

Karen Horney

He'd told me who I was, for what it was worth: Those revelations were as enigmatic in their origins as they were concrete in their disclosure.  He'd told me who he was, leaving enough unsaid to maintain his privacy and his mystique.  And wielding a paintbrush with all the vision of recorded history, as if by the hand of a Renaissance master, he'd placed a canvas before me.  Using a gouache of humor, science, and compassion, he'd set forth the foundations of our friendship. 

Some quotations from Maslow, Horney, Perls, and Sullivan:

"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge." [Perls]

"When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term." [Sullivan]

[2 from Horney]: "Life itself still remains a very effective therapist."    "Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression."

[2 from Maslow]:  “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”   “The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”

At what cost do we get used to things?

A quote from Jose Saramago's The Cave.

And if, at that moment, Marta had asked, What will you do with your life when we leave, she would perhaps have replied as calmly as she had before, I'll get used to it. 

Yes, we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I'll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance, because there really isn't any other way, at least none has yet been discovered, of expressing in as dignified a way as possible our sense of resignation, what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things.* 

Saramago, Jose. The Cave.  (Margaret Jull Costa, trans.) New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2002, p. 213.

(*) Emphasis is mine. -M.Z.

Books are the stepping stones across the river.

Pasted inside one of my favorite Xmas gifts in many a year (a 3x6x8-inch shadow box given to me by my friend Donna DeRosa) is a painted, cutout picture of a shelf of multicolored book spines.  Above it is a miniature framed photo of my novel.  Hanging next to that is a miniature framed collage of pictures from my Facebook page.   And sitting in front of that collage, on a stool, there is a miniature stuffed bear (Aloysius from Brideshead Revisited) cloaked in a hand-made shawl.  The detail on these items is remarkable, and it brings to mind the collection of life “things,” the artifacts of one’s days, written about in Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. It brings to mind the set, photographic portraits written about by Marianne Wiggins in her book The Shadow Catcher, which then brings to mind the minutiae of sociological detail in the insect world that Edward O. Wilson talks about in Naturalist.  Following which is brought to mind the geometry of Brooklyn in Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which finally brings to mind BOOKS; which is the subject of this essay: Books, and how reading saved my life this year.

 I have always read, some years sparsely others more acutely. This year, as Jose Saramago wrote in The Cave: "I've lived, I've looked, I've read, and I've felt."  Saramago goes on to say "...the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters, unless those rivers don't have just two shores but many, unless each reader is his or her own shore, and that shore is the only shore worth reaching." 

 For me the shores were the Pacific Coast, where I have been out of work for nearly a year, searching for gainful employment, and the Atlantic Coast, where I spent four months helping to care for my parents as my mother systematically died from leukemia.  It was certainly An Intimate Year of Deaths, not only my mother's, but the death of her brother Joe; the accidental death of my cousin, Tim (Joe's son); Terry, a colleague, was killed in Malibu--a motorcycle accident; the death at the end of Alzheimer’s for my friends’ uncle, Sammy, in Las Vegas; and then there was the death of the Travelers Aid Society, for which I worked these past 18 years.

 Books were my grief counseling, not because they were a new initiative to be taken, to rewire my consciousness, but as a modem of continuity: the face of hope, like the languid presence of a beloved dog lying next to you in the twilight, was never out of sight; the inkling of terror, caused by the insecurity of loss, remained but an ever-present, harmless glow.

 It was A Year of Tomes, Trilogies, Twins, and Titans.  Among the Tomes there were Peter Ackroyd's William Blake and Andrew Mango's Ataturk and Keith Richards' Life for the nonfiction side; for the fiction side there was Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Mantel well deserved her Man/Booker Prize; this book about Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, Cardinal Woolsey, was fascinating.) and Bring Up the Bodies; and Philip Roth's Letting Go and The Anatomy Lesson.  Another Tome was Jared Diamond's colossal, and sometimes tedious, Collapse, about how societies COLLAPSE!

 I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Pico Iyer's The Man Within My Head; I think I was first in the queue at the library.  It was about his intricate and coincidental obsessions with Graham Greene; I'm a big fan of Iyer, and this kept his star up with me.  There was Blue Latitudes by Tony Horowitz, about revisiting, by modern methods, the voyages of Captain Cook; it was a very entertaining and educational book.  There was Michel Houellebecq's latest The Map and the Territory; another book for which I waited anxiously and got strategically placed in the reserve queue.  Ivan Doig's English Creek, picked up where Dancing at the Rascal Fair left off (2011’s read), and then there was Thomas McGuane's The Bushwhacked Piano, which I have to say was disappointing and nonsensical.  Life is too short to have to read another of his books.

 There was, during March, Doris Lessing's Love, Again and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, an agonizing but beautiful read, and a second reading of Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, because the first time I read it, it left me somewhat confused as to its essence.  So I needed to read it again.  I was glad that I did.

 As part of the trilogy completion effort, I read Richard Ford's Independence Day (and as you may know I've become a devotee of Ford now) and Lay of the Land, completing the story begun with The Sportswriter [which I read a couple years ago].  I don’t recommend reading Lay of the Land right after you’ve lost your mother; but if you do, it will be an unforgettable experience. 

 Also read Richard Ford's Canada (reinforcing my admiration for that author) and J.B. Priestley's The Good Companions.  I think The Good Companions can count as a Tome, since I never thought I'd be done with it. 

 In April I read and very much enjoyed LushLife by David Hajdu, a biography of composer/songwriter Billy Strayhorn;  Bill Bryson's Neither Here Nor There [I’m always up for Bryson, he makes me laugh and expands my mind simultaneously].  There was also more of Michel Houellebecq, his earlier novel Whatever;  All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (which I liked so much that it engendered interest in Home and Housekeeping--thus another of the Trilogies).

 Late spring began with Philip K. Dick's doctrinal The Divine Invasion; Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table; and Michael Gruber's Book of Air and Shadows (a very intelligent thriller involving rare manuscripts and greed, deception, sex, good and evil, whatever you need). That gave me a segue into Edward O. Wilson’s endearing Naturalist.

 Another Trilogy that I completed was the Pat Barker "Regeneration" trilogy, which I began in 2011, reading Eye in the Door in September and Ghost Road in November.  I finally finished Wu Ch'eng-en's Monkey (it wasn't easy), Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole (which I think was surprisingly good; a lot of sweet loving prose therein), another Alan Furst novel The Polish Officer, and a thin but very interesting novel about Mary the Mother of Jesus by Colm Toibin called The Testament of Mary which has Mary being more than a little put out by Jesus and his friends.

 Grace Paley was sensational and instructive (to me) with her short story compilations The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute during November, trailing my completion of Orhan Pamuk's Silent House, which, being a Pamuk nut that I am, I liked very much.  Another visit to Daniel Woodrell's Missouri Ozarks with The Outlaw Album and all I wanted to do for many weeks was talk funny, kick a dead animal, drink heavily, and write short stories--a form that is incredibly difficult but incredibly beautiful, controlled, and from Woodrell, inspiring.  And a novel by Woodrell: The Ones You Do.  That, too, hit the mark.  I read Jonathan Lethem's much-acclaimed The Fortress of Solitude in October as well as another Anne Tyler book, Noah's Compass (a very minor work). 

 A little more sci-fi was provided by William Gibson's Neuromancer which I read because of its importance to the genre regarding cyber space, the Internet, etc., but it was lost on me.  It was a circuitry board of terminology and wasted tension.

 James Crumley was the Titan for me in 2012: books like The Wrong Case, Dancing Bear, Bordersnakes, The Final Country, and The Right Madness, gave me a whole new respect for the mystery/PI genre and a salty, dry, reverence for Herradura tequila.  He took an appreciation for the American West, for violence, for sex, for cocaine, for hypocrisy, to an altogether new level.  My friend, Joe, who had already read these books, kept saying to me: “Just wait; just wait.  You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”  Another Titan was Barry Hannah; I read his book of short stories High Lonesome and a novel Boomerang.  It was Barry Hannah who inspired me to put a lot of energy into writing the short stories that I did during the year.

 I read Edward Abbey's classic DesertSolitaire and Josyan Savigneau's Carson McCullers: A Life, along with Along the Way by Martin Sheen & Emilio Estevez (after having seen the movie "The Way").  I thoroughly enjoyed and loved quoting from Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve; there was Steven Rinella's Meat Eater (which was inferior to the two previous books that I’d read by him); Mitchell Pacelle's Empire (wild story about the building and purchase and sale and purchase of the Empire State Building); and Ben Macintyre's Double Cross (they all kept me busy during the month of October).  I highly recommend Double Cross for those of you who enjoy WWII history, or the early years of the intelligence side of that ghastly time.  It was fascinating.  I rounded up my nonfiction journeys in December with Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (hiking the Pacific Crest Trail), as well as Luc Sante's Low Life, about early New York City history, especially The Bowery. 

 So now that we’re done with the ravages of 2012, let’s begin at the beginning.  I’ve already started Saramago’s novel The Cave and Marc Seifer’s bio on Nicola Tesla, Wizard.  I can’t wait to start lining up the rest of them.

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The Actual List

Celebrating William Blake, the Nativity, and the Imagination

The Nativity by Wm. Blake

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
by Wm Blake

I'm commemorating the Nativity with having, on Christmas Eve, finished reading Peter Ackroyd's "thick" biography of William Blake.  What extraordinary work, such intense labor, and I'm not just referring to William Blake, mind you, I'm talking about Ackroyd's bio.  Blake's world, inside and out, was to say the least as sublime as it was penurious.  His visions are repeatedly heartbreaking, fearsome, and although his petulance and at times manic distrust of his friends colors some of his personality throughout, he is still for me, as he has been since I first read him at Queens College many years ago, a standard bearer, one of the horsemen of my own interior apocalypse.  Here is some Blake--


"You ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men.  That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care."

Portrait of Wm Blake by
Thomas Phillips

"I know that This World Is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision.  I see Everything I paint In This World, but Everybody does not see alike.  To the Eyes of Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes.  The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way."


"But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.  To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination."




Angel of the Revelation
by Wm Blake

 

 

Blake talked about the notion of "States."  Ackroyd writes

 "His first mention of 'State' comes in the penultimate 'Night' or chapter of the poem in which he declares that it is necessary to know 'The Difference between States and Individuals of those States.'  These states may be of desire, or rage, or longing; they may also be of the material selfhood itself, and the Individual passes through them while retaining an essential spiritual identity.  You can be 'in drink' for a while, but that does not mean you are a 'drunkard.'  ...it was a way of considering the passage of the soul through the world without dwelling upon sin and guilt but rather upon forgiveness and redemption."

 

The Ancient of Days
by Wm Blake

 "Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent;
 that which pitieth:
To a devouring flame;
 and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night...
Then the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions,
and man became an Angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning;
God a tyrant crown'd."



When the Morning Stars
Sang Together by Wm Blake



"The other evening...taking a walk, I came to a meadow and, at the farther corner of it, I saw a fold of lambs.  Coming nearer, the ground blushed with flowers; and the wattled cote and its woolly tenants were of an exquisite pastoral beauty.  But I looked again, and it proved to be no living flock, but beautiful sculpture." [Blake]

 

 

Nebuchadnezzar by Wm Blake
This is one of my favorite prints by Blake.
It's an accurate representation of myself in the morning;
it's why I need coffee, first thing.

 

 

 

"What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath in his house his wife his children

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy

And in the witherd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain."

 

[from Vala or The Death and Judgement of the Eternal Man: A Dream of Nine Nights by William Blake]

 

 

 

 

"The imagination is a great disturber of theories..." John Cowper Powys Page entry #8

a selection from Obstinate Cymric by John Cowper Powys

"...the sensations of walking for the sake of the pleasure it gives us is a very different thing from noting the impressions left upon us by what we catch sight of on our way to work.  ...The imagination is a great disturber of theories and we must qualify all our conclusions where poetry is concerned by reminding ourselves that there come moments of inspiration when experience or lack of experience matter little.
 
     "Life at such moments is grasped in planetary perspective and with a peculiar kind of emphasis hard to define, an emphasis neither moral nor cynical, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but so intimately concerned with the unchanging pathos of terrestrial fate that of necessity it appeals to the hand-worker equally with the brain-worker.

     "That is the mysterious emphasis for which the human race has no name but which all men born of women needs must feel."

Huw Menai, 1886-1961

Powys is writing about his admiration for the poetry of Huw Menai, a Welsh coal-miner who wrote poetry which spoke      "...indignantly and wonderfully of all those workers in mine and factory whose reserved, long-seasoned, experienced, and far-sighted revolutionary insight finds it as hard to conceal its contempt for mass-hypnosis and mob-frenzy as for the Machiavellian tricks of the privileged:
     'Once in his cups, he howled aloud
     His true opinion of the crowd.'"


[and from On Seeing Leaves Falling on the Clean-Way--]

"Our hearts are still inexorably weak
For all our conquests of the earth...and late
Tasting our impotence we sadly seek
Some larger scapegoat for the larger Fate;

For we who have the grace to be ashamed
Of our mean actions feel that life would meet
Our prayers half-way if only the nameless named
Had tithe of our pity for the blind and maimed
And the dumb lowlier things about our feet."

"Huw Menai's thoughts [writes Powys] resemble wind-whipt waves breaking one after another on a rocky shore, each particular wave following so hard on the one before it that we might almost say that its choice between breaking into foam and rolling foamlessly forward into the rock pools was conditioned, decided, and predestined by a revolt from, or an imitation of, the choice made by its predecessor.  ...A reader can never be quite certain whether it will be a pagan "Tarot card" or one from the other pack that will turn up next."

(The Simple Vision: Poems by Huw Menai, 1945)

  [The above selections are from Chapter 8: The Simple Vision, Obstinate Cymric, by John Cowper Powys, London: Village Press, 1974.  Chapter 8 ("The Simple Vision") was first published in  1946.]

Page 214: "Revenant found a bottle of homemade farigoule on the table. ...a bulwark of a wine, yet [he] drank it like it was champagne."

From page  214 of the book:

Between the wine and the delicious food prepared by Gerard's, my whole body became a receptacle for the noise, the conversation, the perfume and the after-shave, the rustle of bodily movements, and the living organism that the party had evolved into.   ...I was looking out for Revenant's best interests and if I could steer someone to him or away from him it could be done by my roving antennae.

  I was, however, unaware of how much he was drinking and that he'd been drinking before he arrived.  Once he'd greeted everyone, Revenant found a bottle of homemade farigoule on the table.  Farigoule is a bulwark of a wine, made with thyme leaves.  It was too strong for a social occasion, yet Revenant drank it like it was champagne.

Thyme, a central ingredient to Farigoule

  ...In another corner, Owen stood by the hors d'oeuvres table with Mr. Benoit and Mr. Cans.  They were listening to Mr. Perrein pontificate on recent actions in the Chamber of Deputies; this time in English, so that Mr. Cans was lost.  Owen turned and reached for a pitcher of water.  I stuck my hand out to stop him.
    "Remember Lot's wife?" I asked.
    "Yeah," he said.
    "Well, she drank that water," I said, and handed him a bottle of unopened mineral water.
    "Barbaric country," he said, unscrewing the top.

the chamber of deputies

  
  

There's my father. My father is that man. I used to know him. [Reading Richard Ford's new book, Canada.] or [You gotta love Richard Ford, part II]

Excerpts from Ford, Richard.  Canada, New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

   "...and since so much was about to change because of him, I've thought possibly that a long-suppressed potential in him had suddenly worked itself into visibility on his face.  He was becoming who and what he was always supposed to be.  He'd simply had to wear down through the other layers to who he really was.  I've seen this phenomenon in the faces of other men--homeless men, men sprawled on the pavement in front of bars or in public parks or bus depots, or lined up outside the doors of missions, waiting to get in out of a long winter.  In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.  It's a theory of destiny and character I don't like or want to believe in.  But it's there in me like a hard understory.  I don't, in fact, ever see such a ruined man without saying silently to myself: There's my father.  My father is that man.  I used to know him." [pp 75-76]

 

A view of Great Falls, MT

 

 

"I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think.  Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today.  And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly--first fast, then hardly passing at all.  Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself.  What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed--caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.
"Who wouldn't want to stop that--if he could?  Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present?  I would.  Only a saint wouldn't."
[p.120]



 



A view of Great Falls, MT