Growing up in my family, it didn't do to be reductive. Superlatives and absolutes tended to be greeted with deconstructive comments (not un-constructive, but rather debunkingly analytical), and so I learned early to avoid stating many extremes.
Well, I didn't learn not to state them. But I did learn that if I took anything to a descriptive limit, there would always be someone standing by that boundary to prove it was far more distant than anything I could quantify, or that the very boundary itself was imaginary.
So I began at a young age to take the concept of "favorite", for instance, to its illogical conclusion, and to avoid the idea assiduously. I can actually recall taking my idea, that green was my favorite color, and lying in the backseat of my parents' very green indeed Plymouth Fury station wagon, peering at the physical greenness of my surroundings, and imagining green as the ONLY color I could ever have, and being disappointed.
It's one of the million ways we affect one another as humans, this sort of tiny influencing commentary of a family, which becomes a very silly part of someone's being, far far beyond any real intention or even expectation. My parents and brother might have wanted me to become a critical thinker, but to provide me a mild neurosis about favorite things could hardly have been their point. It means (per my blog's very headline) that I contain multitudes, but it also means I make a rotten interview, because I snark on about how reductive questions are instead of answering them.
And so I am aware that people are capable of feeling that one color is best, or one food is peerless, but the idea of choosing gives me the distantest echo of Sophie's dilemma, in that I despise to pick one superlative because everything apart from "the best" still creates the richness and variety and context that makes anything truly shine. Intellectually, I can know that loving one thing most doesn't doom all else to destruction - and yet, the only context in this world in which I can honestly say I have a favorite is in Mr. X, who is my most favorite person in the world with whom I don't share DNA. I peek around from time to time, just to be sure, but at almost eleven years knowing him, it seems reasonable to state he really did ruin me for all the other boys.
It can be bewildering, though, to run across other people's favorite things, because there can be hard lines in this world it's trickier to negotiate if you don't draw your own. Other people can put you on a path or hem you in with their ability to hold absolutes - in religion and politics, of course, this can get dangerous. And, at times, it can be more comfortable to be persuasable ("where do you want to eat?"), but of course there are those who see a certain type of flexibility as waffling.
I have my convictions, but I keep them pretty close and refuse to hand them out to anyone I am not pretty intimate with. Most of my own hard lines took me decades to draw - and, as I have grown older, I have discarded some of those things I thought were non-negotiable when I was a younger person. Few of my deepest ... expectations (beliefs can be a different thing) ... have ever actually changed - and yet, I have seen my methods of managing their presence adapt in amazing ways over my lifetime.
This calendar year has seen some of the profoundest philosophical changes in me - without compromise, and yet without radical outward alterations. It is at the deepest level I've let go of certain boundaries, and in the quietest solitude of my soul I have found liberty it astonishes me to have given myself and my heart.
Relinquishing certain expectations has only solidified the power of what drives and matters to me most. Letting go of certain ideas of practical living, of faith, and even love, has only deepened these things by providing clarity. There is great peace in the understanding this can give, and such emotional power, and all over again I find myself grateful with the blessings that seem to provide themselves to me, all undeserving. Paths are easier to follow, fears are fewer.
I don't know a lot of people who can claim the assurance I feel, simply by letting go of certain ideas about conviction, by questioning those things which are supposed to be "given" for us as human beings.
Question something you hate, or love, or fear. Really let yourself be wrong ... or, more terrifyingly, right. There's almost no liberty like it. Almost no power at all. It is joyous.
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Monday, September 2, 2013
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Author, Arthur
Elizabeth Chadwick recently wrote a nice piece about her formative influences, which inspired her to historical fiction. I came to actual authorship far, far later than she, but those works she wrote of I am familiar with set chords thrumming, and those which I don’t know, and which are out of print, have me most intrigued.
That and a recurring crop-uppance of Arthur recently have me thinking along similar lines: how did I come to where I am as a writer? Not as an author, but as a writer? For me, the author is the business steward of the work I as a writer – that solitary thing, that creative animal not participating in the querying and all else – creates. Why am I the writer I am?
The short answers have been written – how I came to write about Clovis, specifically. But why do the things I gravitate to fascinate me?
I tend most often to remember the books my mom put down – Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Norah Lofts – and think that was my entre’, along with the appearance of Mary Stuart and Myrddin Emrys just at the right moment, that summer I was fourteen and staying at my Aunt Leila’s house. I can still remember the bookstore, the sun, the very wall before which I stood, when I found The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills. Today, though, for whatever reason … the name Malory appeared somewhere or other. It’s been a long time since I remembered that my dad had a copy of Steinbeck’s very late Arthurian work, the 1976, modern translation of Le Morte. And now I can think of little else - oddly, that work tied up to a reading of Connecticut Yankee when I was young as well.
I have not touched Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in thirty years now, but suspect I still own it, and am burning to pick it up again. My recollection of it is fairly clear as something very unlike other Arthurs (though, like most, Arthur himself is just the excuse to tell others' stories). Steinbeck’s experience of violence, Steinbeck’s cynicism, Steinbeck’s humor and even extreme disillusion permeated that writing. And it was writing, pure and clear – nothing worried over with an eye to any market, nothing coddled for the needs of any agent. It was a raw thing, as I remember it, but that is not to say it was a draft piece. I remember its view of women – both a pitying and pitiless view, a consideration of characters from the man who wrote Rosasharn, the man who had no "feminine side" as the kids call it nowadays, but who has nonetheless touched millions by now. I remember being affected by that book. It may be the first book that ever involved me quite as it did emotionally, it may not. But I remember it – not as clear as Stewart’s Arthuriana, which I re-read and re-read, and which still is new to me when I leaf into it a little – but perhaps more deeply. That it ended incomplete – the place it ended – always physically hurt me.
Given my leanings, you might think I’d have been more of an Arthurian nerd, but if the truth is told, even with friends and family thinking of me that way and even giving me Arthurian books, some of them beautiful artifacts in themselves, I rather limited myself after Steinbeck and Stewart. Who was going to improve on my experiences of those two writers’ works? Nobody. It wasn’t a need for Arthur that interested me – it was Stewart’s Merlin, it was Steinbeck’s impossible talent. It never really was Arthur himself, and the truth is, in the books I did read, he wasn’t even the main character. Only a frame on which more interesting stories were hung.
I was in college before my Aunt Leila (she and her own bookshelves had a great deal to do with my fascinations; I wish I had ever told her that before she died …) gave me the Kristin Lavransdatter series by Sigrid Undset. Lavransdatter intrigues me, as I grow older, as a study in the way we read things differently as we mature (or not). The first time I tried to pick up The Bridal Wreath, I found the writing arid in the extreme. The whole of the works is, after all, very hefty. So things do not move at a clip, though there is no lack of action in Kristin’s story. I recall finding the story offputting, as a girl of a certain moral conviction, and disliking the leading man very much indeed. It was hard, therefore, to much like the girl so taken with him, and the first experience for me was clinically unappealing. I thought I wasn’t smart enough to get the novels, and indeed I probably wasn’t – the story was geared to be archetypally feminine, and I at that age had hardly experienced my own feminine life.
I don’t know whether I read them in the interim, I think that I must have, but my next recollection of reading Kristin is when I was just past thirty. I remember sitting in what we joked about being my De-Lux Apartment In the Sky. I remember the 3-CD stereo my dad and I had bought, listening to only two on random rotation – Fiona Apple’s debut and David Bowie’s “Hours” – some of the best reading music ever written, and I’m not much for music when I’m reading, actually. I remember giving my brother a copy of “Hours” and his saying to me, “I hope you bought this for me because you have it” – it is that good a piece of art. I remember sitting in my grandmother’s chair, in the alcove beside my door, feet tucked up beside me, facing, but hardly looking up from the book to actually gaze, westward. I remember the light in that apartment. I remember that reading, those days, those weeks, those hours, as sacred time. It may not have been peace in my life, but those books, that music, that light, that chair. Peace in the sacred space we create when reading.
Older now, I look at Kristin and understand why some voices of posterity remember the story as somewhat melodramatic, a bit soap-operatic. But I know, too, why this histfic has the staying power it has.
Likewise, Anya Seton’s Katherine, the story of Katherine Swinford, nee de Roet, who shaped English history for centuries.
My mom found this one at an antique store, and amazingly I had never heard of it. She gave it to me around the time I had split from Beloved Ex, and that seems late to me for the discovery of this work. For one, its place in the genre is perhaps as well known as Lavransdatter. For two, the first time I read it, I was utterly ensconsed, and a later re-reading felt just as pleasant but very different. It came off more as a romance novel than it had seemed to me at first, but still a high quality story I know I will read again.
It is this kaleidoscopic experience of perspective which drives me to return to works I have loved. Some never pall for me – A Memory of Lions, I know, will never lose its place in my heart and mind. Some simply shift a little. A recent re-reading of the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide reaffirms its appeal, but exposes to me the extent to which I am no longer the facile kid I was when I first knew those characters. (The blasphemy – H2G2 will never die for me, but I like the Dirk Gently novels better …) So I am burning to pick up Steinbeck’s Arthur again, to clarify in my mind those scenes with Lancelot encountering the tragic, the ridiculously sad, the cruelly tempting. Between picking up my own work – and picking it apart once again – there must be something else to fill, to occupy, my reading mind. Because that’s what a writer is: a reader.
That and a recurring crop-uppance of Arthur recently have me thinking along similar lines: how did I come to where I am as a writer? Not as an author, but as a writer? For me, the author is the business steward of the work I as a writer – that solitary thing, that creative animal not participating in the querying and all else – creates. Why am I the writer I am?
The short answers have been written – how I came to write about Clovis, specifically. But why do the things I gravitate to fascinate me?
I tend most often to remember the books my mom put down – Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Norah Lofts – and think that was my entre’, along with the appearance of Mary Stuart and Myrddin Emrys just at the right moment, that summer I was fourteen and staying at my Aunt Leila’s house. I can still remember the bookstore, the sun, the very wall before which I stood, when I found The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills. Today, though, for whatever reason … the name Malory appeared somewhere or other. It’s been a long time since I remembered that my dad had a copy of Steinbeck’s very late Arthurian work, the 1976, modern translation of Le Morte. And now I can think of little else - oddly, that work tied up to a reading of Connecticut Yankee when I was young as well.
I have not touched Steinbeck's The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights in thirty years now, but suspect I still own it, and am burning to pick it up again. My recollection of it is fairly clear as something very unlike other Arthurs (though, like most, Arthur himself is just the excuse to tell others' stories). Steinbeck’s experience of violence, Steinbeck’s cynicism, Steinbeck’s humor and even extreme disillusion permeated that writing. And it was writing, pure and clear – nothing worried over with an eye to any market, nothing coddled for the needs of any agent. It was a raw thing, as I remember it, but that is not to say it was a draft piece. I remember its view of women – both a pitying and pitiless view, a consideration of characters from the man who wrote Rosasharn, the man who had no "feminine side" as the kids call it nowadays, but who has nonetheless touched millions by now. I remember being affected by that book. It may be the first book that ever involved me quite as it did emotionally, it may not. But I remember it – not as clear as Stewart’s Arthuriana, which I re-read and re-read, and which still is new to me when I leaf into it a little – but perhaps more deeply. That it ended incomplete – the place it ended – always physically hurt me.
Given my leanings, you might think I’d have been more of an Arthurian nerd, but if the truth is told, even with friends and family thinking of me that way and even giving me Arthurian books, some of them beautiful artifacts in themselves, I rather limited myself after Steinbeck and Stewart. Who was going to improve on my experiences of those two writers’ works? Nobody. It wasn’t a need for Arthur that interested me – it was Stewart’s Merlin, it was Steinbeck’s impossible talent. It never really was Arthur himself, and the truth is, in the books I did read, he wasn’t even the main character. Only a frame on which more interesting stories were hung.
I was in college before my Aunt Leila (she and her own bookshelves had a great deal to do with my fascinations; I wish I had ever told her that before she died …) gave me the Kristin Lavransdatter series by Sigrid Undset. Lavransdatter intrigues me, as I grow older, as a study in the way we read things differently as we mature (or not). The first time I tried to pick up The Bridal Wreath, I found the writing arid in the extreme. The whole of the works is, after all, very hefty. So things do not move at a clip, though there is no lack of action in Kristin’s story. I recall finding the story offputting, as a girl of a certain moral conviction, and disliking the leading man very much indeed. It was hard, therefore, to much like the girl so taken with him, and the first experience for me was clinically unappealing. I thought I wasn’t smart enough to get the novels, and indeed I probably wasn’t – the story was geared to be archetypally feminine, and I at that age had hardly experienced my own feminine life.
I don’t know whether I read them in the interim, I think that I must have, but my next recollection of reading Kristin is when I was just past thirty. I remember sitting in what we joked about being my De-Lux Apartment In the Sky. I remember the 3-CD stereo my dad and I had bought, listening to only two on random rotation – Fiona Apple’s debut and David Bowie’s “Hours” – some of the best reading music ever written, and I’m not much for music when I’m reading, actually. I remember giving my brother a copy of “Hours” and his saying to me, “I hope you bought this for me because you have it” – it is that good a piece of art. I remember sitting in my grandmother’s chair, in the alcove beside my door, feet tucked up beside me, facing, but hardly looking up from the book to actually gaze, westward. I remember the light in that apartment. I remember that reading, those days, those weeks, those hours, as sacred time. It may not have been peace in my life, but those books, that music, that light, that chair. Peace in the sacred space we create when reading.
Older now, I look at Kristin and understand why some voices of posterity remember the story as somewhat melodramatic, a bit soap-operatic. But I know, too, why this histfic has the staying power it has.
Likewise, Anya Seton’s Katherine, the story of Katherine Swinford, nee de Roet, who shaped English history for centuries.
My mom found this one at an antique store, and amazingly I had never heard of it. She gave it to me around the time I had split from Beloved Ex, and that seems late to me for the discovery of this work. For one, its place in the genre is perhaps as well known as Lavransdatter. For two, the first time I read it, I was utterly ensconsed, and a later re-reading felt just as pleasant but very different. It came off more as a romance novel than it had seemed to me at first, but still a high quality story I know I will read again.
It is this kaleidoscopic experience of perspective which drives me to return to works I have loved. Some never pall for me – A Memory of Lions, I know, will never lose its place in my heart and mind. Some simply shift a little. A recent re-reading of the Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide reaffirms its appeal, but exposes to me the extent to which I am no longer the facile kid I was when I first knew those characters. (The blasphemy – H2G2 will never die for me, but I like the Dirk Gently novels better …) So I am burning to pick up Steinbeck’s Arthur again, to clarify in my mind those scenes with Lancelot encountering the tragic, the ridiculously sad, the cruelly tempting. Between picking up my own work – and picking it apart once again – there must be something else to fill, to occupy, my reading mind. Because that’s what a writer is: a reader.
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