Louise DeSalvo book: Writing as a Way of Healing

This here's an amazing book. Turns out there's credible research showing that if you write for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, about traumatic or dramatic events in your life, how you felt about them then, and how you feel about them now, you actually get healthier and stay healthier. Mental health, physical health, the works. More writing, more healing. But even four days will make a difference.

Apparently the constant mental stress (which expresses itself physically as well) of deliberately avoiding memories of painful events gradually wears down your capacity to resist present day threats and troubles. You'd think that facing that kind of stuff and writing about it would make us obsessive about it, but in fact we obsess about it even more when we avoid it. Think about it: when you write about it, you accept it and integrate it into your overall story of yourself so it just becomes part of the fabric -- the experience loses its separateness; when you avoid it, it's always there, distinct, tapping you on the shoulder, bugging you, but NOT GOING AWAY, so it's a continuing focus of negative attention. Accept it into your life story, and you're that much more whole and that much more accepting of who you really are and really have been.

It's an internal process of healing, so it doesn't matter whether anyone else reads what you've written. You can let folks read it if you want to, or you can stash it away, or you can burn it or whatever. But don't burn it. Think how fascinated you would be if you found such genuine, personal, truthful stories written by your great-great-grandfather, someone you never even knew but who is part of your family history. How much more that person would be to you now than just a name, a couple of dates, and an old photo. And then think how meaningful and helpful this could be to your own great-great-grandchildren. Your story is real and true, and well worth the telling.

So write about what happened, how you felt, and how you feel now. It may be a painful process, but it can yield tremendous good. The truth will set you free.

Summers I Remember

Summers I remember,
Bluejays rasping in the black walnut tree
Out the spare room window
Of my grandmother's house,
Dappled light filtering gold
Through orchard leaves behind the house,
Fat bumblebees in the roses,
And just outside the kitchen door
My own stout grandmother,
Nana Rose.

"We'll bring flowers to Grandpa's grave today," she said,
And into the car, and down from her house,
Down long Butte House Road
We drove to Sutter,
Where more souls rest in the district graveyard
Than hearts beat in the town.
If the dead could vote, they'd run the place.
But this is not Illinois.

We left the car and stepped onto the grass,
One, two, three rows back,
Into the cool shade of a wide valley oak,
Where his name lay etched in stone.

A metal cup was in the stone.
I drew it out and walked it to a water tap.
She called to me:
"Don't cross the graves, dear—
"Step around."

Why? Bad luck? Disrespect?
Or just to slow my dawdling steps
That much more--
So she could take her sweet, sweet time
There, alone with him again,
Standing over what would one day be
Her own snug grave.

I ran the tap.
Around me, set in close-cut grass,
Flat stones bore silent testament:
One name, two dates for most,
And here a loving mother, there a Mason.
So many passed so long ago
That stone alone remembers them.

I filled the cup, walked it back,
And slipped it into place.
And then I watched her fill it further still
With fresh, sweet roses
Cut that morning
Outside the kitchen door.

Invasive Pests ads on TV

I think the "Hungry Pests" ads now running on TV are about the creepiest thing I've ever seen — and not because of all the bugs and rotting fruit. The creepy thing is the visual metaphor that equates an apparently happy, carefree child with insidious, imported insect pests that destroy our food supply.

This kind of imagery has got to be just as confusing to kids who see it on TV as it is to adults, and it probably doesn't do a heck of a lot for anyone's self esteem.

All I know is there's one ad executive whose inner child I do NOT want to see.

Focus

On her radio show the other night (NPR's Piano Jazz), Marianne McPartland asked guest Bud Shank did he still play the flute, since he had been such a good player and had made a number of records on flute earlier in his career. He said something like, "Well, when that band broke up I had some time for reflection. And I realized that what I really wanted to be most of all was to be an alto sax player. So I figured the only way to get there was to throw away all of my flutes. And that's what I did."

There was a moment of stunned silence while that notion sunk in. Beautiful flutes. Thrown away. What a waste. What a stupid, wasteful thing to do. What a dissappointment to his fans. Would I throw away all of my pianos?

But then it started to dawn on me what an exceptionally disciplined and courageous thing that was for him to do. Really, it seems simple: what better way to narrow your focus than to eliminate distractions? It's like a painter who feels he needs to learn sculpture instead, and throws away all of his brushes and canvases and paints. Questions of value (How much could I sell them for?), responsibility (Shouldn't this stuff go into the hands of someone who can use it?), and attachment (Can I really part with such a lovely, comfortable brush? Such a well-worn pallette?) are themselves distractions that pull him back into involvement with the whole painting process, its aesthetics, its virtues, and pull his mind away from sculpture just when it's time to move on. Years later it could seem to others, just as it seems now to the artist, to be a significant turning point, a brilliant and dramatic shift in direction leading to new possibilities, new works, and new levels of achievement. For now, though, they might all think he's nuts.

And well he may be. The next night, a writing instructor speaking at a seminar I attended said in an offhand way that, paradoxically, the only safe path for a writer was to keep taking risks -- to keep changing, keep trying new and different things. In essence, "Once you've said something, it's time to say something else."

The only safe path is the risky one. If that isn't nuts, I don't know what is. But it's no crazier than thinking you can make a career out of telling stories and making things up -- even though that's got to be one of the oldest professions we've got. I mean, we wouldn't have any evidence of the other "oldest professions" if they hadn't been recounted in stories.

There's a saying among some writers that the best way to write a story is to just get out of its way and let the story tell itself. Stories know what shape they want to take. They know when they are believable and when they are not. They have rules that they generally follow and occasionally break.

Maybe that's the best way to go about life, after all. Just start off in a direction and then get out of the way. And hope yours ends up a comedy.

The Poetry of Pain

Here's a found poem from entomologist Justin O. Schmidt (via Wikipedia), in the form of a numeric/descriptive scale for rating the pain of various insect bites and stings. I give you The Schmidt Sting Pain Index:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.


• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.


• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.


• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.


• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.


• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.


• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.


• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.


• 4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.


• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

Many thanks to cousin Kathy Keatley Garvey for mentioning the Schmidt Index in her excellent blog!

Artificial Tears

I've got a little box of artificial tears.
I don't need them anymore; you can have them all for free.
My eyes, they used to get so dry it hurt to look around
But some days they get so wet now, that I can't even see.

Three months ago I got these contact lenses.
Thought they'd make me look a little younger, and they did.
My baby liked it, then I guess she got to thinkin';
And pretty soon she wants to run off with some 20-somethin' kid.

And I said, Babe, it's time we start to act our ages
We'd better smarten up ourselves while we still can
And if you'll agree to be my own old woman
Then you know I'll be your good old man
We'll stop dressing up like a couple of skater punks
And we can be ourselves and live our lives away
Singing, and loving, and laughing and swapping stories,
Happy for the silver threads among the grey.

So I'll go back again to wearing my bifocals on my nose
No more muscle tees and sandals, I'll have orthopedic hose.
And the only six-pack you'll find here is in the ice box in the kitchen
Those young kids'll probably think we've let ourselves go, but I think we're pretty bitchin'.

I've got a little box of artificial tears.
I don't need them anymore; you can have them all for free.
My eyes, they used to get so dry it hurt to look around
But some days they get so wet now, that I can't even see.

I want to stick with you, Babe, we can act our age
And grow old together gracefully.

Natural Selection (a fast-talking blues)

Conventional wisdom tells us that opposites attract.
Well, I guess that's true if you're magnets or a couple of snaps;
But when you're pairing up the more sophisticated organisms
Like you and me, you're better off choosing some other syllogism,
More like birds of a feather, or sheep in the fold.
We tend to like the same music, and the same jokes were told
By our great-grandfathers, and we'll pass them all along
To our great-grandchildren someday. Now, don't get me wrong,
I don't claim to be entirely resistant to change
And I've encountered total strangers who weren't totally strange,
But when you're looking for companionship that's certain to please,
What you want to find is someone with irreconcilable similarities.

Now, here's how you do it: Don't be harsh or selective,
Just be creative in the way you see whatever's reflective.
First you mutter something witty that's opaque or obscure,
In a crowd, and if some girl laughs, you sidle over to her.
If she isn't so tipsy that she's laughing without cause,
You can toss off another – I tell you, it's better than applause
When that one, single person you've been trying to attract
Turns back around and she's smiling right at you.
So she's thinking you're not ugly, maybe thinks you're pretty funny,
That's great! Who cares if you haven't got money?
Your looks and your charm have won you a new main squeeze,
Maybe someone with irreconcilable similarities.

Now of course there's always one more side to a coin.
Some folks could be joined at the hip, but they're just too hip to be joined.
And remember, just 'cause someone happens to be whole lot like you
Doesn't mean she's gonna happen to like you a whole lot. Sad, but true.
You gotta roll with the punches, learn to live with rejection.
You won't always be everybody's idea of perfection.
But if you keep on trying, soon you'll make that connection.
There's something almost supernatural about natural selection.
And you'll know that it's right just as soon as you've found it --
Even if you've been around some, you just can't get around it.
And before long you'll both be humming with the birds and the bees
About all your irreconcilable similarities.

You'll be grinning and humming with the birds and the bees
Humming about all of your
Irreconcilable
Similarities.

Squaring the Circle

So I'm on my way to the men's room at work, pondering the infinite (as usual), and I've got these two simple images in my mind: a simple line circle and the immediately visible portion of an infinitely long straight line. Just two black lines next to each other on a white piece of paper: one circular, the other straight. And I think, "They're both infinitely long, in one way or another, since neither has an end." Then I think of a graph of that logarithmic approach to infinity, or to light speed, the curve getting ever closer to the limit line but never quite reaching, and never quite flattening out. I see the curve of the circle next to the straight line appear to become flatter and flatter as the circle gets bigger and bigger around, but the circle's line never really becomes flat because, of course, it's still got to have a curve if it's a circle. And then I think of the circle pivoting away from me, as if hung by a single hinge at the point closest to the infinitely long straight line, so that the circle swings downward into the piece of paper until I'm looking at the circle edge-on. And it's a perfectly straight line.

And I'm thinking, two things that appear to be fundamentally dissimilar from one perspective can appear to be essentially identical from another. And is that a way to make the conceptual leap from the finite to the infinite, or from sub-light-speed matter to light-speed energy? Is it just a matter of looking at things differently, and that's the way they are, like in Madelein's L'Engle's books?

Is perfect understanding always there, everywhere, waiting for us to see it as it truly is?

Separation Anxiety

How can I tell?
How shall I know?
When are you old enough to go?
When do you stop being a child?

You wobble at first, walking upright in sheer defiance of gravity,
Each downward slam of foot a deliberate effort to prevent otherwise-certain prostration,
Then gradually you gain your legs, and soon you gamely walk, skip, frolic, and dance,
And can look, in motion, off to the side or into the sky without calamity.
This is your sense of balance.
And this is a blessing,
And now you can stand on your own.

With mobility then comes the urge to explore – Adventure! –
Paired with the equal urge to cling that much stronger
To me, to your mother, we who mean home to you.
With every stepping out you test your knowledge and judgment in the world
And with every misstep you cling (albeit more and more briefly) to those
Who brought you into this world,
Your guides into adulthood,
Just as they make missteps and afterward cling to you
(Largely in gratitude that their mistakes were not too severe, as evidenced by your survival).
Then gradually you gain your strength, your judgment, your agility in adjusting to the shifting circumstances that you face,
And you make your own personal choices that adapt to the conditions around you and that have no fatal consequences.
These are the beginnings of common sense.
And this too is a blessing,
And you can walk on your own out into the world,
Knowing when to step, when to stand still, and when turn back to home.

This is how I tell.
This is how I know.
I will gradually become less and less necessary.
You will gradually share more and more your friendship, your love,
While looking back neither for approval, nor advice, nor direction,
And gradually I will look to you for less and less of these things.

And I will never tell.
And I will never know.
And I will always love you.
And you will always be my infant child.
Your glow of trusting, innocent warmth
Long ago laid a foundation in my heart.

Still today you find comfort in my arms
And still today you give comfort back in kind.

The Old Corner Bar

The downtown streets were deserted one scorching afternoon last week when, looking for shelter, I spotted the sign of the tipped cocktail glass in the concrete floor of an entryway where an unfamiliar, dark doorway stood open, and in search of relief from the stifling heat I stepped inside. Cool, still air met my face and a blinding darkness filled my eyes. I touched my left hand to the paneled wall for balance, and waited. Familiar sounds -- liquor and ice into glass, glass onto wood, a wooden chairleg's judder as it shifted on a worn linoleum floor, low voices, subdued laughter -- all circulated through the ebbing darkness as, one by one, elements of vision revealed themselves to me. The bottles, beer mats, glassware, the long-polished brass, were comforting, just what I expected to see. And then there were the faces. One by one the faces of a barmaid and ten or so regulars (or so they appeared to be) became visible to my blinking eyes, all of them, men and women, in their 70s or 80s I would guess, and every one of them dead.

Odd enough to find a bar filled with dead people; odder still to see them talking with each other, playing cards, walking back from the restrooms. But they were dead, alright. These were faces I'd seen, smiling or stern, in the obituary pages, their lives summed up in a paragraph or two. "Loving husband," "Devoted daughter," "Avid sportsman;" dates in, dates out; survived or preceded by any number of dear friends and relations. Cherished in the hearts of.

Some of these I had known in life, at least in passing. There was Fred Miller the retired postman. Mrs. Belson, who volunteered at the library and was a great-grandmother. Others were less familiar. But they all seemed to know one another. And they all had an air of calm, and absence of urgency that would put the retired seniors of life to shame.

The barmaid seemed to sense my unease and beckoned me over. "Don't worry," she said. "You don't have to stay. You can just have a drink if you like."

"What is this place?" I asked her, accepting the scotch on the rocks I hadn't even named. Some bartenders know.

Gear of Living Dangerously

"Bullet-proof vest." There's a phrase with a comforting sound to it. Unfortunately, it's more of a misnomer than "maintenance-free" battery, for instance. The battery is only maintenance-free because there's no way for you to maintain it -- just use it till it stops working, and then off to the recycler's. The bullet-proof vest, on the other hand, isn't necessarily bullet-proof at all. Some calibers it'll stop, some it will slow down, and others it will yield to, given the right (or wrong) circumstances.
"Flack jacket" actually sounds more secure, even if it makes a far less specific (and so, far less false) promise of protection. The vest is nowadays an anachronistic, decorative garment.

Ground Rules

From his first recollection, Douglas Pitt knew exactly where his life would ultimately lead him. It's not that he hoped or dreamed it. He knew. After everything was said and done, Doug would be here in the Central Valley of California, lying beneath a stone and four feet of earth in a quiet cemetery on the southeastern spur of the Sutter Buttes. The sun might bake and the wind might blow, but there he would lie, peaceful and among family.

The Pitts were an extensive family with branches going back three and four generations in the area, so Doug saw his share of funerals as he grew up. Some of the family were buried in this public cemetery, some in that. A few found rest in a plot on a family ranch, and one was scattered as ashes to the wind, off a bluff over the Pacific Ocean. But the vast majority—with Pitts numbering in the twenties or thirties and otherwise-named relations stretching far beyond that—lay in the ground at the town of Sutter.

No one in the family nowadays actually lived at Sutter, or at least no one nearer than a third or fourth cousin—and once you trace things that far back, everyone's related. Suffice to say, no one lived in town who was close enough to, say, host the reception in their home after a funeral. The town had a modest community hall down the block from the cemetery that the family could (and often did) rent for a gathering after a burial. There a person could touch bases with cousins, uncles, and aunts of all varieties (firsts, seconds, removeds, and greats, most of them seen so seldom as to be indistinguishable one from the other to a child of less than 10 or 12 years) at the same time as you avoided the scattering of pariahs who were always in attendance despite being more or less shunned from the family for long-forgotten offenses of their own or their ancestors', or (shamefully) for their mental or physical shortcomings, or even for their chosen form of conveyance (anything with fewer than four wheels was severely frowned upon).

A young boy, being invisible, could see and hear a lot on such occasions. Because it was a rented hall, there was no consistent host from one reception to the next, and a major topic of conversation was always either how well everything had been arranged (when speaking to one of the hosts) or how you thought thus-and-such really ought to have been done differently (when speaking to anyone else). Booze was entirely prohibited both by family convention and the rental contract, which meant that it was plentiful and varied just outside the back door of the hall. A man who stepped out that door and under the awning stripped off one mask (of wisdom, concern, and sobriety) and swapped it for another (of a nervous, guilty sort of relief—at having escaped the indoor formalities, having made it to another funeral in a vertical posture, at seeing, outdoors, this or that relation again after so many months or years). The women found a similar release in the hall's kitchen, where the wrappings came off the cold chicken and plates of cookies just as they came off their own deeper emotions and feelings toward one another. It became clear early on to Doug, as he drifted between the kitchen, the hall, and the back porch, that one of the most important functions of a funeral was to give people an opportunity to tell stories and to pass them along. This was the Grand Central Station of family lore. This was the second thing he knew.

The third was an outgrowth of the first two: that the life you lead, the choices you make, and the adventures you have along the way all HAVE THE POTENTIAL to influence what some of those posthumously related stories might be. Some things you couldn't control, of course—such as how people will interpret what they see or hear, or how well they will remember the details of actual events, or whether in the confusion the things you have done or said might not be ascribed to someone else, or vice versa—but still, you have the opportunity in life to do your best to give them something interesting to talk about when it's all over.

All of these things Doug knew, somewhere deep inside his being, from an early age, but he only became consciously aware of them when he went to his twelfth funeral (Great Aunt Pearl) at age fourteen, and discovered that he was no longer invisible. Adults noticed when he entered a room, and they changed, hushed, or interrupted their stories. Aunt Pearl had been particularly close to his parents and sisters, so maybe the rest of the family saw him more as one of the hosts than one of the guests. Or it may have been that at fourteen he was nearly as tall as a man, and near enough to eye-level to be detected by his elders. Still, he was far too young to drink, and that put the back porch out-of-bounds; likewise the kitchen, since he was neither woman nor child. On this particular rainy day in April, that left him only the main hall with its small clutches of outcasts and quiet murmur of conversation that faded to silence whenever he approached a group.

Alone at the gathering, Douglas sat at a table by himself and thought. He ate cookies and he thought about the stories he had heard about Aunt Pearl and other relatives down the years. He thought about which stories were his favorites, and why. After twenty minutes or so, he settled on one that he wanted to share, the story of how the power went out when his family was having Christmas dinner at Aunt Pearl's one year, but having never told a story at a funeral before he didn't really know how to begin. Eventually, he sidled unnoticed up to a group of two aunts and an uncle, waited for a pause, and started in, but he stumbled early in the telling and was rewarded with unlooked-for sympathy and dismissal – "the poor boy!" the seemed to say – and they turned away from him and back to their own talk. Well, that didn't get him anywhere.

Left again to himself, Doug got to thinking about what it is that makes a good story, and what it takes to tell one. The family certainly had its share of storytellers. Some held their listeners in thrall by virtue of their place in the family, whether because of their age or their status as the only one living who could remember thus and such; others held the minds of their listeners, even with an old story many times told, by their obvious love of the stories, and the telling, and the listening of their audience. These would make a point of catching in new listeners by tossing out an intriguing phrase as someone happened to walk by or pass within earshot, and took delight in tempting otherwise-occupied people into interrupting errands and other busyness for the sake of listening, delaying meals, chores, and departures for the sake of a tale. Doug had watched them many times, watched and listened, and had seen them coax and play their listeners like fish into a net or sheep into a pen. Like otherwise respectable people into a carnival show.

Recession Reflection

If it took as long to know you're dead as it takes to tell you're in a recession, a lot of folks would be rotting in the streets.

Fire

For Michele, on her birthday.

The sunlight's sheen
Seemed to light your brown-red hair ablaze
With brilliant, dazzling fire lights,
Sparks, shimmers.

The green depths of your eyes,
So striking, so true,
Caught my gaze,
Caught my heart,
And would not release me,
Will not,
Even til this day.

The sun-warmed apricot glow of your skin
As it caught the reflected blaze, like fire,
Of that copper silk dress,
The vintage dress, shoulder pads removed,
Your own shoulders stronger, broader, finer
Than any dressmaker's dream,
Coppery silk dotted with tiny green birds' eyes
Gazing sharp down its pleated length--
That blaze reflecting in your own fine features,
That dress following your own fine form--
And I was smitten
With a wound to the heart that I bless,
That I will carry precious with me to my grave.

Still, now, thirty years on,
When I see you across the room
Across the table
Across whatever distance or nearness
Or in my own mind's eye, I see this yet:
The green in your eyes, the glow of your skin,
And the fire of the sun in your hair
As when I first saw you
In that bird's-eye copper silk dress.

From Approximately Coast to Coast . . .

I got to read some of my poetry and my short story/memoir, Unfinished Business, on the radio today! Lois Richter asked me to join her for her "That's Life" radio show on KDRT Davis today at 1:00 PM, and we spent about an hour talking about the writing process and reading some, too. The program went out live and will be rebroadcast on Monday, February 2, from 10 to 11 AM (95.7 FM in Davis), or you can listen to the podcast version.

We started out with three short poems (Tramps, Earth, and Laughing, She Said), and then I read Unfinished Business in its entirety. That one piece took about 30 minutes to read. All of this with interview time in between. The interview was really enjoyable, and Lois was a very gracious host. Take a listen if you can.

Dry Spell? But It's Raining . . .

This last month and a half I've been concentrating on some non-writing arts, specifically helping my daughter to shoot a short movie -- an enterprise that involves begging, borrowing, improvising, and otherwise wrangling production equipment of all sorts, re-learning everything I've ever known about lighting, sound, and cinematography, planning out details to a ridiculous extent (and leaving an even more ridiculous number of factors up to chance and dumb luck), and staying up WAY past my bedtime.

All of this means that, though my life itself has been something of a complex work of many moods and movements, I've managed to get very little written down on paper lately. So I haven't given it up  entirely -- or at all -- it's just that I've been getting my creative endorphin supply elsewhere. Wait a minute -- That makes me feel like an unfaithful junkie or something. But it's not like that at all!

Shooting should be wrapped up around February 1, and then my part is over and I can redirect that creative stream, that copious, spurting artery of, well, "art," to deposit its . . . well, that's an awful metaphor. How about:  ". . . and I can keep riding that gnarly wave of creative energy into a Maverick's of prose and poetry."

There are so many arts, and they're all so powerful and so much fun!