Lit: almost larger than life

Lit: A Memoir, by Mary Karr, moved on to my “must read” list mainly through the high esteem in which blogging colleague Shirley Showalter over at 100 Memoirs holds both the book and its author. (Here, her review, and warm letter to Karr after they’d met.)

I reserved the book at the library, but when I arrived to pick it up, I realized I’d made a mistake in my order. It was the large print edition. I still manage just fine with regular print, so reading it this way wasn’t that comfortable, physically. I had to hold the book somewhere near my knees to get a decent distance from the big type, and sometimes after an extended period of reading, my eyes felt curiously maladjusted. I found myself rubbing them to get the familiar proportions of my environment back.

None of which is important, except that this seemed a kind of metaphor for the experience of the story as well. Lit is powerfully absorbing. Mesmerizing. The life it describes is about as large — in its intensity and visceral impact — as it gets without beginning to feel unreal. But it’s real enough; Karr is known to be scrupulous about writing fairly and accurately.

This book picks up where two earlier memoirs — The Liars’ Club (about her childhood) and Cherry (about her teen years) — leave off, with Karr’s education, marriage, becoming a drunk, getting sober, writing a bestseller, finding God. Karr has a lot to work through because of the damage her dysfunctional parents inflicted, and the damage she’s inflicting on her husband and beloved son Dev.

The plot may sound maudlin, like one of those too common grovel-to-glory accounts, but there’s something different about how Karr handles her material (and I don’t mean just her rather earthy language). I think it’s that she took the advice her friend Tobias Wolff (of This Boy’s Life) gave her:

Don’t approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don’t be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity.

Such writing follows much the same path an alcoholic has to take to sobriety — facing, listing, confessing “my sinfulness in all its ugliness.” It’s a stance Karr maintains throughout. Interestingly, by taking no regard for cautionary fruit, she ends up being instructive — an example — anyway. She’s very good at describing growth, conversion, transformation, call it what you will, those small moments (that eventually add up) in which the soul opens a little, or shifts perhaps. Such as when she kneels in front of a toilet in the hospital, after checking herself in following a near suicide attempt:

If you’re God, I say, you know I feel small and needy and inadequate. And tonight I want a drink.

The silence fails to say anything back. I glare at it. It feels like judgment, the silence. And at that silence I give off rage; I start a ranting prayer in my head that goes something like this: Fuck you for making me an alcoholic. For making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny…. And my daddy withering into that form. What pleasure do you get from… from smiting people?

I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is–strangely–the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son. It blesses me an instant like incense.

My eyes sting, and I blurt out, Thanks for them.

I feel the stillness around me widen a notch.

Karr’s writing reminds me of Anne Lamott’s, another writer who seems larger than life, raw and revealing, yet not diminished for all her carelessness of personal dignity. It’s an art perhaps, such honesty, and certainly the poetic language is, but it seems a gift as well. At any rate, I recommend the book. Unless you really need large print, read it in regular, however; Lit is quite strong enough without the additional shout of those great big words.

Pumps, the problem with poverty alleviation, and more

If you’re interested in development issues, you may want to check out my brother’s new blog, Raspberry Jefe, listed at my site under “Family and Friends.” Opener posts include discussion of what’s wrong with poverty alleviation, the math about treadle pumps, and why IDE (the organization where Al works as CEO) doesn’t have beneficiaries. Posts of a more personal nature are part of the mix as well, including an explanation of his rather marked fondness for raspberries! — And no, I’m under no obligation to mention the site, but I think it’s good stuff — and relevant — and some of you may enjoy it as well.

Do I golf?

It’s high summer, the Gulf oil spill seems to be capped, so time for something lighter here… a bit of fun. Please note, dear friends and acquaintances, that the following is an amalgam of conversations/experiences over the years; no one should feel recently or personally incriminated!

It always begins as the most pleasant, the most innocent, of inquiries, asked with so much anticipation, as if the asker and I are about to be fast-tracked into understanding one another perfectly.

“Do you golf?”

I hesitate.

I could say, “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” and then I’d be inside, I’d be a Someone Who’s Grasped the Good-life Secret.

But where would such subterfuge get me? Next thing I know, we’d be booking a game and the truth would have to come out.

Better to admit it.

“No. No, I don’t golf.”

Following this, disappointment or even pity may hang in the air. (I guess we won’t be tight after all.)

But sometimes the asker’s hopeful enthusiasm is simply re-directed. Attempts to ferret out my reasons and then overcome them begin in earnest. (Many golfers, I’ve noticed, tend to be zealous on the game’s behalf.)

“Whoever was tortured, stays tortured”

I’d like to draw attention to – and recommend — “Living with the Enemy,” an essay by Susie Linfield, which applies the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to the current challenge of reconciliation in Rwanda. (It appeared in today’s Arts and Letters Daily, my Safari homepage.)

She begins,

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light…

Linfield discusses Améry’s writings, then draws on the trilogy of Jean Hatzfeld (which I reviewed here and in three subsequent posts last March), as well as the work of Primo Levi and photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to remind that “whoever was tortured, stays tortured.”

There’s much that could be said about forgiveness and reconciliation that’s not the least bit glib, but of course Linfield is right. The way we inevitably go at it, in our hopes for — and advice to — others whose torments we have not shared, never mind understood, is too quick. We like happy endings, and the sooner the happier. Linfield’s essay slows our expectations. It challenges our minds about what’s really at stake in a lasting reconciliation.

Alfred Neufeld reads the past, for the future

I’m home from B.C., tired and brain-full. The Renewing Identity and Mission (RIM) event I mentioned at the end of my previous post was interesting and well worth attending. It was packed with workshops — three tracks running concurrently in every time slot, which means it was impossible to attend more than a third of them.

For now, I think I’ll simply post a few notes and reflections on the opening address of the RIM consultation, delivered by Alfred Neufeld of Paraguay. His paper served as a kind of foundational analysis for much of the conversation in subsequent sessions, as well as provoking some good discussion immediately. It deserves — and needs — further discussion, it seems to me, especially when the longer paper upon which his presentation was based is available as well.

Neufeld is an educator and writer with a long list of credentials which I won’t list here, except to say that he’s one of the denomination’s leading theologians and so it was fitting, I think, that he deliver the keynote address, attempting to draw an analysis of Mennonite Brethren (MB) identity with reference to its founding in 1860, as well as posit a vision for the future. He is also, thankfully, easy to listen to.

Neufeld’s reading of 1860 (shorthand for MB origins), he said, is threefold:

-Mennonite Brethren wanted to recover the essential nature of the church.

-Mennonite Brethren wanted to recover the existential dimension of salvation.

-Mennonite Brethren wanted to recover the transcultural mission of the Holy Spirit.

More precisely, Neufeld follows J.B. Toews in calling the MB origins “a phenomenon of renewal.”

Neufeld then provided a fascinating list of how historians and various members of  “the community of scholars” over the past 150 years have described the essence of the 1860 dissent that formed the MB Church. (I’m working from my scribbled notes here and apologize in advance for their inadequacy).

No grand tour

A new postcard slice as header: still Baku in Azerbaijan (on the Caspian Sea) because I want to maintain a connection, roundabout as it may be, to the current oil spill in the Gulf and the shared global sorrow of that.

(The connection is our love affair with oil. By the end of the 19th century, Baku’s fame as the “Black Gold Capital” had spread throughout the world. Between 1897 and 1907 the largest pipeline — 883 km. — at that time was built from Baku to Batum; Baku had more than 3000 wells by 1900. As I mentioned here, the Nobel brothers were the region’s oil tycoons of the region.)

But Baku in colour this time, and a view of The Boulevard and the “baths” at the sea. (It’s not colour photography as such, but was a tinted photo, creating a charming if somewhat surreal effect.)

This is one of 10 cards of Baku in my grandfather’s postcard collection. (See other postcards from his album here and here.)

The Boulevard and baths at Baku

He served as a conscientious objector during World War I, in a provision the Mennonites had won with the Czarist government for non-combatant roles. He worked on the medical trains, transporting the wounded away from the front lines of Russia’s southern front in the Caucasus region. This service gave him an opportunity to see places he might never have seen otherwise. “Never did I dream that I would travel as much as I have done by now,” he said in one letter to his fiancee, Helena.

It sounds almost poignant to hear him continue:

After this time of rest will come a time of work… and when we have then worked for some ten years and God makes it possible for us, then we will travel abroad. The travel route is as follows: out through one of the harbours on the Black Sea, through the Dardenelles into the Mediterranean Sea, not forgetting about Greece and Italy, into the Atlantic Ocean to see the New World, and then on to England, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Germany, and back home to our peaceful home on the steppes of Russia. Are you satisfied with such a route?

Train station at Baku

Poignant because the Russian Revolution intruded into such dreams and it would be decades before the steppes of Russia could be said to be peaceful again. Under those conditions, the  grand “tour” never happened. Heinrich and Helena were fortunate enough to travel to the New World as refugees, where they settled on a farm in southern Manitoba.

“It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency,” Penelope Lively said. So for my grandparents, so for the people and creatures at the Gulf.

————–

Next week — Monday to Wednesday — I’ll be attending RIM (Renewing Identity and Mission), a consultation at Trinity Western University, consisting of some 30 presentations, taking place before the Mennonite Brethren Celebration 2010 event. I’m looking forward to it, and also to sharing bits of it later, here at Borrowing Bones.

Wolf Hall

The book I read on our recent vacation was Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This book, big enough to double as a door stop, is set in 1520s and 30s, the time of England’s King Henry VIII– he of the many wives — and tells the story of the English Reformation most particularly through the life of Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. The book is beautifully written, and so rich in detail about characters, land and cityscapes, daily life and life at the court, and the unfolding events of Henry’s divorce of Katherine to marry Anne Boleyn, defying and then breaking with Rome to inaugurate the Church of England, you feel you’ve been taken back in time to be part of it. Mantel effectively establishes a world, a historical fictional world, and well deserves the 2009 Man Booker Prize she won for her efforts.

I was struck by two paradoxical things. One is how large — in their complexity  – the changes that we can later call a Reformation are, and how slowly they happen. We study histories of the church (or other institutions) and give dates for beginnings, usually linked to some piece of paper like Martin Luther’s 95 Theses or  in the case of my little denomination, the Document of Secession, but there is much more going on than that, before and after, personalities intertwined in long and interesting ways, convergences of all sorts, and misses too, which make up what we later name and date in our history books.

(I would have liked a stronger sense, in Wolf Hall, of the religious issues at stake, although they are certainly alluded to often: arguments over the sacraments, vernacular translations of Scripture, spiritual authority, and over on the Continent, religious ferment of all kinds, including those extreme Anabaptists at Muenster. The English Reformation has been described as more political than theological. But perhaps shifts in belief or religious practice are never as purely “contesting for the faith”as we’d like to imagine, but collide and congress within individuals with their varying strengths and weaknesses and needs and agendas. So when we thank God for whatever reformation we’re particularly pleased about, we’ll probably have to recognize and thank for it in forms more human than holy.)

At the same time, I was struck by how small a wheel can make a change. Mantel puts it best herself, in this passage from the book:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtains, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

Rich vocabulary for the beautiful game

Normally I’m not much of a sports fan, but for the big events like the World Cup, I also get involved, enjoying the televised dramas of athletes and nations, and the remarkable skillfulness and intricacies of what’s been called “the beautiful game.”

A bonus in this particular series is listening to the play by play commentary of the announcers (British they seem to be). I’m not the first person to mention this. Early in the series I recall a newspaper writer saying he’d taped an otherwise unremarkable game just to listen to the way it was called. The announcers have at their disposal a rich and fascinating vocabulary, drawn sometimes from the world of epic battle, sometimes from the earthy informality of schoolboys playing on a neighbourhood vacant lot, and it streams from them quite unstudied, it seems, as if they always talk in such vivid and varied ways.

I jotted down a few examples from today’s Ghana-Uruguay game. It was a “potentially crackling game,” though as the game progressed to its end with a tie, no prediction could be “forthcoming.” When one team did something well after a sluggish stretch, they were “rejuvenated.” A good opportunity stopped by the defense? They’d made “a total hash of that.” The Ghanians, it was declared, have “an insatiable appetite for work.” Something happened “in the winking of an eye” and a saved ball landed in the keeper’s “welcoming arms.”

It’s the game’s pace, perhaps, that leaves a little more room for adjectives than (our game) hockey’s “he gets the pass, he shoots, he scores.” One play was “a valiant job,” another “a heart-stopping moment.” On one play, the defenders not only defended but “bravely” defended.

Verbs of all sorts too, of course — strong and varied ones. Players “instigated” plays, the crowd was “roaring in anticipation” (and later, “had another blow on the vuvuzuela.”)

When Gyan missed the penalty kick in the last moments of overtime, he had his “glory snatched away, but he served his country well enough.” And when he stepped up for his turn at the deciding penalty kicks, “the whole of Africa [was] praying lightning doesn’t strike twice.”

Once, after a number of attempts on goal during regular play, the announcer said that no shots had been “particularly cogent.”

Did he just say cogent?

Beautiful game indeed.

Catch-up

The industrial bleakness of Baku’s Black City (above) depresses me slightly every time I come to this blog, because it reminds me of the still gushing oil spill… But Life Must On, as they say colloquially, and here it’s time to catch up.

When I first started “Borrowing Bones” last November, I commented that I don’t “use” my children in my writing much, because they have their own lives to interpret and describe, but — it being First Son’s birthday that day — I did post a baby photo of him and remarked how glad I am to be a mother. I also said that I would follow suit with the next two when their birthdays rolled around.

Daughter’s birthday falls at the end of May, and Second Son’s in the middle of June — so it’s more than high time to keep my promise. (Any parent knows you have to be fair to each child in turn, and you have to keep your promises.) So the little snapshot above is Daughter as a baby, held by her brother. Wow, they’re so cute — wish I could go back in time for a little cuddle with each of them.

And now? — Okay, just this once. Our oldest son is an engineer. He and his wife, who works as a doula and photographer (you can see her work on her blog under my “Family and Friends” list) have four children and live in Tsawwassen, B.C. Our second son just graduated (with honours, Mother inserts) from the University of Toronto’s law school. His wife is a teacher and they live in Toronto. And, they’re expecting a baby in November! Our daughter has been working here in Winnipeg for some years as an architectural technologist and living on her own, but just moved to Vancouver. She’s going to bike the summer away, as well as hike the West Coast Trail with the brother pictured above and other assorted relatives, and then see what the fall unfolds in terms of further adventures and work.

H. and I are no longer in the middle of their hearts, and that’s how it should be, but we’re still in the middle of the country, reasonably healthy and usually happy. Yesterday I enjoyed driving to Winkler, then reading from This Hidden Thing at the Winkler Public Library. H.’s huge number of tomato plants and carrots are growing well. (Tomatoes and carrots are two of  his favourite foods). We’re thrilled with Paraguay’s advance to the next round of the World Cup.

And in between our thoughts flit east and west.

The company of other writers

William Zinsser, whose classic On Writing Well is one of the few how-to books on writing I own, states in his last post at his weekly blog column that he doesn’t hang around with writers.

He’s not “a citizen of writing.” He doesn’t join writers’ organizations, or show up at writers’ talks and panels.

Writers tend to be not as interesting as they think. What they mainly want to talk about is their own writing, and they also have a ton of grievances, their conversation quick to alight on the perfidy of publishers, the lassitude of editors and agents, and the myopia of critics who reviewed–or didn’t review–their last book.

In my humble opinion, thinking oneself more interesting than one is, wanting mainly to talk about one’s work or interests, or complaining about those who make that work a trial can be fairly consistently observed across the board of humanity. Still, for all that it smarts, his assessment of writers is probably right, even when he goes on to describe them as “one of nature’s most insecure species.”