Community, Where You Can Find It

People like to throw around the term 'community." There is the local community, the community college, the black community, the latino community. In writing classes, the University calls the students a 'discourse community.' We believe we should build community, and act for the benefit of the community. And so on.

I myself must admit that I have frequently complained about the poverty of the local writing community, as if there were such a thing as a 'community of writers' (as opposed to a group of solipsistic, egomaniac narcissists showing off for one another and forming self-serving alliances-- yes, I write those words with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference about to take place in Chicago without me, by choice). What I mean when I complain is that there are too few local writers and book lovers to sustain the sort of vibrant literary scene that I imagine exists in Brooklyn or San Francisco or even Portland. There aren't readings to go to and chances to read, writers to drink with and publishers and agents to rub shoulders with. There isn't the illusion of breakthrough that a place like Brooklyn can temporarily offer, where you might be one bourbon from accidentally befriending the right connection or literary light. Still, illusion is sustaining until its elusiveness is exposed-- my friends who haunt Dumbo and the Mission have had as hard a time sustaining their artistic dreams as anyone else. Writing is at heart a solitary pursuit, a venturing out alone into the dark. The success of the pursuit has much to do with the worldly, or as my friend Leo London puts it in lyric, "who you know who acts like they believe in you," but that occurs after, and it is not really about community. There is no one coming to comfort and compliment you, and along the way the going will be lonely. That is the nature of writing, despite how the internet can seem to suggest we are 'connected', that the immediate performance can reap immediate attention. That attention is fleeting. You, gentle blog reader, are not helping me focus my attention on the piece about my brother that waits in word document. Your hits do not, unfortunately, get me any closer to the satisfaction of having said something meaningful.

The same isn't true for other sorts of community. When I was in college, I lived for a couple years in a co-op, a three-floor mansion just off Campus Row with a great, sloped green lawn and the high awnings and ornate trim of a Victorian-style house built in the fifties. Being Stanford, the Co-op was not particularly 'hippie', but we did share the work of cooking dinners and doing the dishes, of cleaning the bathrooms and shared public spaces. At six the forty of us would gather for the meal in the dining room on the first floor, the long tables pushed together into a giant T; we would go through the serving line and load our plates, applaud the cooks, regardless of the success of their culinary attempts; and then sit, eat, talk, and laugh, those of us who had 'drawn in' to the house often sitting together, but just as often, we would sit with housemates we hadn't known before, arguing world politics and the nature of the global environment and what new physics meant for metaphysics and why it was that at Stanford, it was all but impossible to find love. Stanford was already the sort of place that can ruin a young man for the real world-- what a paradise of ideas and support and comfort, the stuccoed rooftops and Romanate arches, the soaring towers of knowledge and privilege and imminent influence. That Co-op was the best of that world, students wanting to live relatively cheap and willing to work instead of paying for cooks and cleaners, self-sufficient and idealistic and certainly naive. But we truly were a community-- people who took a shared responsibility, who sat together for a meal and listened to one another speak, who applauded each other's efforts at pursuits we were not particularly suited to.

In all the years since I left college, the only thing approaching such a community were my close friends in the Delta near Indianola, with whom I had brunch each Sunday morning, all of us gathering to cook together and eat together. The group was smaller-- some ten of us, perhaps-- but really, without those Sunday morning brunches, pancakes and eggs and banter and laughter before the long day of grading and preparing for the coming week in the classroom, I might not have made it through the crucible of those years in Mississippi. And that is why I find myself talking about that word, community, today-- for in Eugene, I lack it in so many ways.

The literary is smokescreen; I accept what I lack, and too, I have my readers in Portland and Corvallis with whom I exchange work, and I am lucky to have friends like those. That I don't live in a city with a concentration of intellectual and artistic talent is simply a product of my choice to remain in a small town with a good job, close to my family but with too few friends. And it is 'community' that I actually long for, and that is too often absent even in the places I seek it-- in my pool league team and nights playing challenge table out at the bars, in this standing today in the public space of the cafe where at least the baristas know my name, in the climbing gym where I do boulder with the same six or eight people and the strong young monkeys (stronger than me) on the junior climbing team, even in the classroom, where for a time after a quarter or two, classes can take on a chemistry so positive that I actually look forward to seeing the students and joking with them. These communities are overloose, or I am always staying at too great a remove-- whatever the case, there is not the same comfort as back in college when I didn't know enough to know what I had.

Perhaps such a sense of community and cameraderie was artificial, possible only because we were not yet thrown into the scrum of adult responsibility. Perhaps the domestic fills this gap in the institution of marriage, the partner and family becoming unit, though I am hardly in a position to know. What I do know is that I long for closer ties, for a common dining room and a dozen familiar voices, for my friends who are elsewhere. For communities I used to have, friends I used to know, in what seems now like another life altogether.

I taught a class today on frat boys, sorority girls, and music. Yes, my job is that awesome, at least when I reach my identity unit for Writing II, and get the chance to help my students find the stories that will bear out their identity-- I ask them to locate themselves in terms where they're from and who they've been and where they want to be. The first class in the unit is intentionally light, as I got a round of essays in-- we read an essay about a teacher surprised a group of frat boys can act mature when she had often used the term to refer to a certain kind of backward baseball cap wearing jackass undergraduate, and another essay about a black girl who loves country music even though where she grew up, in inner-city Houston, liking cowboys wasn't a choice available to her. I got to hear what my diverse students think about frats and sororities-- most of them were held out by class, that is, the expense, and didn't believe they would feel welcome anyway. The exception, somewhat unsurprisingly, was with one girl out of 36, Asian and first generation, but with parents who had money and who had grown up in the Portland suburbs. The students were surprised I understood that SAE still tended toward Sexual Assault Expected, and laughed when I asked whether frat parties still consisted primarily of upperclassmen creeping on freshman girls while providing massive quantities of alcohol. I was unsettled when a black student from inner-city Atlanta told of an experience he'd had-- standing at the door, being told he couldn't enter because the guy-to-girl ratio was low; having someone inside holler "Keep that nigger out!"

It's funny, this was meant to be my light day, but instead we ended up speaking about this allegedly progressive, 'activist' campus, and the distance between the post-racial assumptions of so many people in my student's generation, and what actually happens out in the night. We hardly made it to music at all, but it seemed important to talk about the serious stuff, story after story from students about the things people hollered while drunk, the come-ons to black girls from drunk white guys using 'ho', the harassment of Japanese-American Hawaiian kids by guys in pickup trucks, all the incidents that make up the lexicon of modern American racism that the election of a President Obama allegedly has overcome. A change in symbols is powerful indeed, and my students are resilient-- they all refused to let a single incident change their optimistic outlooks about this place and their future. The black student simply turned his back and walked away. But it is a shame that it's on them to be strong, because America still has so far to go.

The Possibility of Ocean

Today I found that Post Road 18 is finally available online.

That means it's possible to read my essay "The Possibility of Ocean," there, about Mexico, fathers, sons, and family.

It is Friday afternoon. I am waiting for my bus in the college bar around the corner from the building I have spent all day conferencing student papers in, sipping whiskey and waiting on a chicken quesadilla. Today I woke to a pour of light, the sky clear and the day bright and full, brazen with promise, but I was stuck all day in the prison block of PLC, the oldest and ugliest building on campus, and now the clouds have reclaimed the sky and a bitter wind blew as I walked the block here. A few minutes, a whiskey, bridge between the long week and the open evening. The hardest week of the quarter, unending work on the queue, 50 conferences, 54 reader responses collected, graded, and returned, thirty essays graded, three classes taught, the heavy lifting all done. Lay me down, or something like. Bring on the bourbon, and the freedom of a morning I do not have to wake early with much work ahead.

And yet, I feel a shift in me, in my heart, these last weeks. In part it is that I have proof now I have been here too long-- I was asked last week to gather materials to support my promotion to 'senior instructor.' I had not intended to be senior anything until at least my seventies, but I see I failed to reckon with staying here too long. There will be a small raise for the same work if they approve promotion, validation of my commitment to teaching, I suppose, though really I think it is the English Department's own rules coming into play: keep someone too long, and you must salute their performance or show them the door. But really, what I feel is not professional in origin. I love teaching the kids no less or more than ever. Rather, I have the sense that it is time to quit blaming either this town or myself for what I want and do not have, and to see instead if there isn't some other way to be. I don't need to heal myself or change myself-- there is nothing innately wrong with me anymore than there is anything wrong with this town. I need to see beneath surfaces. To tell the truth, I have been sad and fearful-- of what I have lost, of loneliness, of failing to succeed even on my own terms. And I have told myself a story about how that was and came to be when really I need to face it, and stand up and move on.

These days, I am ready to walk. Past, into, and through. And in recognizing that, I feel better already.

Or perhaps that's just the whiskey.

But I suspect it's not. This morning, waking with so much light, I walked to the window, passed the point of the frame that blocked the actual orb and stood blinded and dazzled, washed in it, and I did feel cleansed. Today though the student queue was unending and many of the papers questionably crafted, the small satisfaction I always get when I see that a student has understood aggregated as it often hasn't lately, filling me with the small pleasure of having been useful and kind, and rather than growing tired late I felt better as I went, joking and smiling even through the ugliest of sentences, and when a student literally wrote that MLK JR came and freed the blacks from slavery as a joke-- I had said in class that once a student had written that, which was true-- I laughed long and hard. My quesadilla is here, and it is cheesy and greasy and good, and soon it will be time to walk to the bus through the last light of sunset silvering the rain that unsurprisingly has begun over the v-ed roof of the brick buildings across the street and the sidewalk thronging with students with heads buried in hoods, and soon I will go out to that sidewalk and catch the bus that will be coming, and go to the climbing gym still a little liquored and climb until sober, and later tonight I will see what there is under this sky, clear or cloudy, in the green valley where I was born. I will not expect answers, and I will not find any, but that is alright, as I am alright. And I hope, friend, that you are too.

Well, after my "American Beauty," moment a few days ago (the beauty of the plastic in the wind, I know, I know), I found myself thinking, friend, you need to show more restraint in how you publicly present yourself on the interweb. People may notice your poetic waxing about polymer-based mystery, and tire of yet another post concerning rain, Eugene's size, or the infinitely melancholy nature of longing. They do not want to hear any more same-seeming posts about playing pool at bars, or grading papers, or despairing about the difficult state of publishing. A girl I once was close to and who still is a friend wrote to me ask me how I was doing yesterday, and informed me that there is nothing on my blog worth reading these days. I am afraid I am guilty as charged, and Tuesday's post about the nature of retrospection in Willa Cather couldn't have done much to excite the blogosphere. And then yesterday, I was asked by an old acquaintance, a poet, about blogging and being a writer, and I had to tell her that I don't know a damn thing, that I have the idea that you ought to have a twitter though I rarely tweet, that I have Facebook but mostly use it alienate old friends with relentless self-promotion, that my blog is mostly full of semi-poetic musing somewhere in the key of Seasonal Affective Disorder, especially since I've grown careful about posting work-in-progress for fear of disqualifying it from publication. And when I realized just how foolish that sounded (and no doubt makes me sound), I took a deep breath and remembered that I really don't care. Don't care what the three people on the internet who take the time to read this actually think about my oversharing or a-lyric prose; don't care to craft a self-image that is any better polished. Here, you will find authenticity of only the most banal and redundant sort, and that is all. So be it.

~~~

On to the self-promotion: you can buy Camera Obscura: A Journal of Literature and Art 4, which contains my story "True Conditions," at the nearest Barnes and Noble, or directly from the fine folk who run that beautifully produced magazine. Forget my fiction-- the photographs in this issue are themselves worth the price.

~~~

If phones which can multi-task, connect to the internet and serve as gps units and find restaurants and bars and shops and hotels and act as credit cards and play music and manage Facebook are "Smartphones," then I have a phone which is decidedly dumb, of a different age. And sadly, it does not take good photographs. Nonetheless, a few weeks ago I was on campus at early sunset on a rare, clear afternoon, and as the sun went down the single bank of clouds which ran a line overhead, lit orange and gold, cleft the sky in half as if by the stroke of a lit brush, and the entwined branches of the oak were black and stark against the rent horizon, and I took a picture with my phone because I couldn't bear to forget.

It is a strange accident of memory, though, that though I wrote this having looked at my small screen, at the dull image of what was glorious, that I haven't looked back at the picture in writing, because the moment is truer in memory even as it no doubt is less absolutely accurate. There is a debate raging about 'fact' in nonfiction-- where does the responsibility to tell the truth run up on the ways we can never recreate or recover with absolute factual accuracy, but must inevitably seek to realize essence even if that means accepting that things may have in fact been different? Memory is re-written every time we access and fire synapses. I have fictionalized my experience in Mississippi to the point that at times I cannot recall whether I am remembering or imagining a fiction is how a story really happened. If the sky was not broken by a line of fire that was cloudcover, but a ragged and broken trail of jet exhaust, must I get that right to have you understand that I took the picture and stood with my head turned to the sky for minutes and minutes, only able to think, this is beautiful?

The Warmth of Willa Cather

I am coming to the end of Willa Cather's "Five Stories," a collection of her short fiction that spans the course of her literary career. The first story in the collection, "The Enchanted Bluff," is written in first person. It uses retrospection powerfully and brazenly; it concerns a river and a group of boys who grow up in a small town, how they are all taken with a story of a blue mesa and a city ensconced in it, hovering above clouds, where an ancient people once lived. They will go on to be dulled by adult lives; they never live up to their promises to travel to the mesa, though the fellow most taken with it still says he will. The story is about the pull of mystery, the magic of this imagined city of an extinct people, how the very existence of it enlarged these boy's dreams and too how time and circumstances dulled them, and kept them from seeking the mesa. It ends like this:

"Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over, and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he thinks now he will wait until his boy Bert is old enough to go with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff."

That end takes on such a size as a result of the retrospection; and though there is a sadness in how clear it is they will never go, there is a sort of hope, too, in how the story has been passed on, how now it has taken the imagination of Tip's son.

The second 'story' I had already read: it is the discrete, odd chapter "Tom Outland's story," which forms the center of the novel "The Professor's House," a book I read when I was an undergraduate at Stanford and did not understand at all-- I said things about the grace of the prose, and certainly, I noticed how the chapter seemed to stand alone, as if Cather had wanted to construct an entire narrative around one perfect and discrete and self-contained story, as if the entire story of the Professor was pulled toward the mystery of Tom Outland's story. And Tom Outland's story is that of a young man and his friend Roddy who happen on the Blue Mesa and go into the city and explore it, how to Tom Outland the Mesa is perfect, sacred, and how his friend Roddy, believing he is doing right, sells the artifacts they unearthed when Tom is unable to get anyone in Washington to fund their exploration. Like the first narrator, Tom is looking back both on his time at the Mesa, and at what has been lost: the Mesa, his youth and innocence, and by his own choice, his friendship with Roddy, for in his anger at Roddy's having sold the artifacts without consulting him, he tells Roddy to leave and is never able to find him again even though Roddy meant the money for Tom, to support his education. The story ends hauntingly:

"Now that I was back on the railroad, I thought I couldn't fail to find him. I went out to Winslow and to Williams, and I questioned the railroad men. We advertised for him in every possible way, and had all the Santa Fe operatives and the police and the Catholic missionaries on the watch for him, and offered a thousand dollars reward for whoever found it. But it all came to nothing. Father Duchene and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I'm not very sanguine about good fortune for myself. I'll be called to account when I least expect it.

In the Spring, just a year after I quarrelled with Roddy, I landed here and walked into your garden, and the rest you know."

I think about that line-- "Anyone who requites faith and friendship...will have to pay for it," for I once lost a best friend, neither of us able to forgive, though the first error in turning my back on her was mine. And I recently lost a friendship that meant a great deal to me, or at least, I fear it has been lost, and I think of those lines as well. Close friendships between men and women can be difficult to sustain. But I do not feel I am exempt from the price; we may get only so many people who care for us deeply and can understand us fully.

What most interests me about these two stories, the only two in the collection written in first person, is how the stories echo back on one another, the Blue Mesa as figure, and the Blue Mesa as lost paradise, a pure but only temporary mecca. The stories overlap, reflect and refract, just as Tom Outland's story itself ends by returning to the Professor's story in a way that changes and enlarges that narrative-- the Professor, as I remember it, becomes obsessed with what Tom Outland has told him, the Blue Mesa and the life Tom Outland had and the loss of Roddy's friendship haunting his own days but also enlivening his dreams. In all of Cather's first-person, the power and size of her first-person narration is accomplished not by lyric-- and she hs considerable lyric talent-- but by retrospection of the sort Fitzgerald uses in Gatsby, moving through time to show us not just what has become, but the full measure of what we have been shown. In a less generous writer's hands, retrospection can ruin and overburden; it is a dangerous tool. Cather uses it with precision and heart.

The wrong sort of story

Today, I woke late. It was cold in my apartment-- this year, I have stubbornly refused to turn on the heat, as little as I am home and as much insulation as the thick stone walls of my building provide, but last night was a deeper cold. My mouth tasted of last night's last Jim Beam. The daylight was dull through the shades, and when I pulled them back, the whited sky stretched long and barren to the slumped hills. Ahead of me, a mountain of grading I do not want to do, the sullen end to a long and bitter week. It hadn't occurred to me that it is possible to lose what you never had. A new category of loss, to go with things like keys, dignity, youth, innocence, friends and love. And I do not excel at letting go, think of Elizabeth Bishop on the question of, and try not to think, which I suppose I also do not excel at.

Last week I finished a first draft of an essay called "Naming the Unspeakable," that sought understanding of my innate narrative tendency to seek to understand what is difficult to admit, whether that is failure or transgression, betrayal or shame, fear or culpability or complicity. That inclination has yielded my best fiction and nonfiction, but comes with its own limitation: people have only so much stomach for what is serious and at times discomforting, narrative that is unresolvable in nature. We prefer happy endings and safe answers. I include myself because I often find myself making glib and self-serving choices even when I think I am not-- I wrote the essay itself after sitting on a panel with a number of other Teach For America alumni, and listening to myself tell them how great of an impact I have today in the classroom, how the Delta changed me for the better. They believed me, but I did not believe myself-- the truth is that I couldn't bear to stay there and fail, and that years later, having fled responsibility, I lucked into a position that is relatively easy and comfortable, teaching young adults who may not be privileged but who are easy to teach. After all these years, and even knowing better, I lied in the public arena, pitched myself as I would like to be, as being better than I am. And the lie was bitter as I considered it, and worse still in the unpacking, for there is a cowardice in asserting character you lack.

There is only so long that one can recur into the past; I hope to place my novel soon, and let go of that history having understood it as best I can. I am afraid, however, that my narrative tendencies are now afflicting my personal life as much as my professional life. I need to stop living my own life as if I am a character bound for some inevitably sorrowful end.

~

I did my grading, finally, the strength of my student's efforts drawing through the long stacks as the afternoon wound through and the sun set out the windows the cafe, and I left at dusk, headed across town to do laundry at my parent's house and get a small dose of their beagle-shepherd mix, Aya, who is a bit of princess but fortunately is cute enough to make up for her self-regard. The sky was almost blue-black and the clouds hid whatever moon or stars might have been, and the lights of the cars in front and behind flashed off the wet asphalt in red and yellow flickers as if lit by the passage of the vehicles themselves. As I came over the Ferry Street Bridge in the left lane, the Willamette a black, milky shadow below, a piece of plastic hovered in the air three feet off the ground, borne by some steady twister or some accident of opposing winds, the piece turning and shimmering in my headlights like some quick, live thing, and I did not want to strike it and end its flight and so glanced over my shoulder and cut quickly into the other lane. It still hovered there in my rearview mirror as I motored away, sure to be gone soon when the next car reached it, but still magic for the moment, no victim of my own hand, and I felt my throat seize a little. Surely this is no way to feel, to live, imagining so much unintended harm from one's own hand? I've meant no such harm; I've done no more than the next fellow. Still, this piece of plastic hovers before me tonight, as I watch the laundry turn in the drier, and upstairs in the kitchen of my childhood home, I hear the clatter of my mother about the pots and pans, talking to herself out loud about this ingredient and that step, humming sometimes songs from "The King and I," as she has since I was a child. There was magic, I find myself saying, though what I mean is that there was beauty and small mystery that I witnessed and did not sully, that somehow on a day like today that felt like a victory, like reprieve from every other disappointment. Like a reason for hope.