Christians rise! the world is bare and bleak and dark with want and care

It can be difficult to push oneself to work hard only for one's own self. (I have written about this before.) This year I had lofty plans for my Thanksgiving. Even if I was to spend it alone, I intended to feast sumptuously: turkey, gravy, pie, and wine. I was going to take excellent care of myself. Then I invited a guest and looked forward to sharing the celebration. A day or two before the holiday, I felt my own weariness and I knew absolutely that, were I not expecting a guest, I would have cancelled my feast. I might have made a bowl of popcorn or a plate of eggs and called it a day. I would have forgone the whole thing--too much effort to do it all just for myself.

I think there is a tendency, at least in myself, to sink to such a comfortable kind of laziness in many areas of life. It's just me, so why bother? It's only for myself, so why go to any trouble? I only have myself to care for, so I needn't work too hard--I don't need much.

If I hadn't roused the energy to cook the feast, I wouldn't have been able to share it with anyone on Thanksgiving Day. I knew someone would be coming over, and so I cooked and tidied up and cleaned house--all things I wanted to do for myself, but would not have done. And the day was lovely. Knowing there is a definite someone to work for and with, a definite someone with whom to share things can be an excellent stimulant. And that is a perfectly fine thing.

The next step, the next goal or project, is to work for an indefinite someone, toward indefinite others with whom to share things. To be ready to share one's surplus, to be ready to be a generous host, to be ready to give what one has made, even without a known recipient or guest to anticipate. To be ready in case Someone comes.

If you want to hear the angels commanding you to share what you've got, then you've got to get something to share:

If ye would hear the angels sing

    "Peace on earth and mercy mild,"

    Think of him who was once a child,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

If ye would hear the angels sing,

    Rise, and spread your Christmas fare;

    'Tis merrier still the more that share,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Rise and bake your Christmas bread:

    Christians, rise! the world is bare,

    And blank, and dark with want and care,

Yet Christmas comes in the morning.

If ye would hear the angels sing,

    Rise, and light your Christmas fire:

    And see that ye pile the logs still higher

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Rise, and light your Christmas fire;

    Christians, rise! the world is old,

    And Time is weary, and worn, and cold,

Yet Christmas comes in the morning.

If ye would hear the angels sing,

    Christians! see ye let each door

    Stand wider than it e'er stood before,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Rise, and open wide the door;

    Christians, rise! the world is wide,

    And many there be that stand outside,

Yet Christmas comes in the morning. 

--Dora Greenspan                                                                                                            

on being the bullet others dodged

I saw a man I once dated the other evening. He smiled and said hello, and I did the same. It was perfectly pleasant. I believe he's now married, and has kids; he seems to be quite happy.

I remember picking fights. I remember him telling me that it seemed I always had one foot out the door. I remember telling him he could burn any of the things I had left at his place "like he burned my trust in [him]." And I remember how we laughed over that not long after I'd said it. I remember how volatile I was. I remember how unfaithful I was. Unfaithful in so many ways. I remember feeling piercing jealousy. I remember how little I respected him. And I remember how I took his kindness as proof of his weakness, of his blindness.

I remember not wanting him, and I also remember the pain of his rejection of me. I wondered whether the lung-crushing pain of missing the shape and warmth of his body while we slept would ever go away. (It did.)

It is unpleasant to think of myself as that person I was. How on earth am I to be trusted?

He and others like him from my past seem to have recovered nicely. Many of my previous partners have lovely wives, stable jobs, and beautiful children. I don't seem to have ruined anything. But I still will always have been that person.

to swell so high that I may drown me in you

It is a perfect pre-holiday Monday: the sky is a grim iron-gray and it isn't raining so much as it is weeping. It is just chilly enough to require a sweater, just cool enough to claw a bit at your soul. A soft sort of coldness: not the sharp iciness that could destroy, but a nagging lack of warmth that presses one down.

I think the best holidays, like the best parties, require dark and gloom and difficulty. A summer party is, of course, just fine, as are any summer holidays (and I am, I suppose, separating what need not be kept separate: parties and holidays can of course coincide). But to prepare in the cold, in the dark, a celebratory feast demands one bring devotion and desire. One must resist inertia like any artist and make something appear where little was.

Setting the table is difficult enough on the best of days. It is too easy to forget that each meal is already a gift, already a sign of love. To rally and remember--to remember to remember--the blessing every meal is is an accomplishment. And it is the darkness, the gloom, the endless night against which our winter holidays flare out that helps one--that helps me--to see at all the great achievements gratitude and celebration are.

A celebration--a real celebration--is a charge, a determined stance against nothingness. To celebrate is not to turn away from the darkness, the nothingness, as if to pretend that one doesn't see it. It is to displace the nothingness with something bright and hot and sparkling. This is why I love the winter holidays; they blaze so clearly, so definitely and defiantly against the bleakness that threatens life. A full, rich life is a celebratory life, a life that creates, a life that pours out devotion and desire. I need the coldness, the bare darkness, the howling wintry-ness, the breath-sucking gloom to feel this, to remember.

"play louder. you will not succeed."

Of course, Margaret Atwood gets at the beauty of winter even better than I do:

"But still there’s a sense of anticipation: you tense for the combat."

                                                                      —The Blind Assassin

That's part of what I love: the fight. You rally, you muster all the strength, all the courage, all the endurance and you fight the cold, the dark, the bare, the desolation; you fight death. Every act is tattered flag waving brightly against the surrendered world: I'm here! I'm still here! I'm alive and you can't catch me!

William Carlos Williams beat me to that, too:

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.

I am not good at fighting, at rallying. As soon as things get hard, I sigh to myself "I want to go home." Still, I love it. I love it in other people and I thrill at the hope I might become able to do it myself. Winter, with its bleak black-and-whiteness, turns the world into a morality play where evil is everywhere and obvious. In the face of obvious evil, what else can one do but fight? 

fyer, fyer! my heart!

What I love about winter is the hardness of it. Winter is hard. Brutal sometimes. It steals the breath straight from your gut, it pushes you forward and backward no matter where you're trying to go. Winter adds obstacle upon obstacle to normal life: Walking on even sidewalks grows challenging when the ice is invisible and the packed-on snow adds grip-impeding texture to sidewalks for which no one will claim responsibility. One is certainly much less agile in layers (even soft, loving layers) of wool, cashmere, down, leather, and fleece. Even the act of breathing--something so basic so as to be usually unnoticed--becomes a hurdle as the icy dry air cuts slivers into your nose and drives daggers into your chest.

In the places where grass usually grows in the summer, mountains of sludgy gray snow steal color from the cityscape. Gray-brown skeletons of unbelievably living trees flatten against the gray sky. Gray buildings bleed gray slush running down to gray sidewalks, spilling over into gray streets. Ash-tender gray leaves flutter beneath clumps of gray snow to be picked at by gray birds who fly and huddle in gray masses.

Winter is the most beautiful time of the whole year. Can you survive this hard beauty? Can you be the color in a gray world? Can you breathe the sharp air, feel it slice its way into your lungs, and smile from the exhilarating aliveness the pain brings with it? Can you wait for spring and find the waiting beautiful--the waiting itself? Can you sit in the death of the world and glory in it--without trivializing it? Without running away?

Can you be broken, hour by dark hour, by the unrelenting challenges of winter? Can you let the cold seep into your bones and still find warmth to share with others? Can you be the fire by which others warm their frostbitten hearts?

What I love about winter is that it doesn't let you off easy. It doesn't let you bring anything less than everything you've got. Only the hardest of winters could push you to build the hottest of fires, could make survival depend upon the most intense, most passionate desire to live.

anticipating a feast of thankfulness

I am feeling sort of desperate for Thanksgiving. I can't wait. I am longing for Thanksgiving.

I think about it constantly: five whole days. Five. Whole. Days.

I will not travel north to see my family. I do feel a little guilty and a little self pity; but Five Whole Days..Five of them! All mine.

I will sleep, certainly. I will make a cranberry-sage pie. (Practice for the madrigals potluck. Scientifically required.) I will probably roast a turkey (and then make turkey stock with the frame after I've roasted that). I will get to fill my freezer. And I will eat very, very well.

I will probably clean: I will scrub everything so that when I sit down to my turkey and pie, I will do so in a shining home. All will be tidy, all clean. It will smell and look dazzling and delicious.

I will probably go to the Art Institute. Probably on Friday. I will spend as much time there as I can stand. I won't bring my phone--I won't even bring a purse of any kind. That way I will be able to move as freely as possible.

[I will grade, of course. I will have a stack of final papers to grade. I will grade in between scrubbing floors and washing dishes. I will grade in between rolling out pie pastry and basting the turkey. I will grade before and after my trip to the Art Institute.]

[And I will plan for the spring semester, if I can. And put together still more job materials. I will, somehow, by some miracle, do these things, too.]

I will go for a long walk. Saturday, probably. I'll take nothing with me but my keys and I will walk as long as I can. I will walk in the middle of the day, no matter what the weather. I will walk along the lake, and if it is gray and doomy, so much the better.

And I will sit quietly with God. Between the walking and the working; between the grading and the art; between the pie and the portfolio--between everything, I will sit for a few minutes here and then there, and I will sit quietly and I will attend to God.

And when I meet myself, I will shake my hand with curiosity and awe

I wonder sometimes whether I could ever write fiction. My sense is perhaps not--I have very little sense of plot. I don't think in terms of plot; I am not drawn to notice potential plots. But little scenes. Vignettes and still-lifes. I could collect those, I think. I would like to write by candlelight even if I learn to see by searchlight.

I wonder sometimes whether I might ever be able to grow anything. I love the idea of growing things; of plunging clean fingers into rich dirt and planting seeds, rooting out weeds, clearing away dead and dying things so that living things can flourish. I could wear a wonderfully unflattering, floppy hat while I bend low to the ground, nearly crawling.

I wonder, too, whether I might ever have the privilege of caring for someone. Not about, but for. I mean the work of caring (though it sounds cold and transactional to put it that way). Might I get to feed or clothe or soothe someone I love? Who would I be that I could do such things?

I wonder if I will find, one day, that I have grown into my remotest extremities. Will I stretch myself so that my timid little soul fills my fingertips and my toes? Will I sing myself through the top of my head? Will I become radiant with heat and flame?

a meditation on when death comes

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I am risk-averse. I hate to say a thing if it isn't true but I'll avoid even saying the true things if they get too close to what is raw, real, and risky.

I feel hungry for beauty and I seek it out in electronic images. Pictures of mountains, especially taken close-up, from the valley below, captivate me utterly. I almost get to the point of saying "I want to go there or to some similar place. I want to see that, to feel it." But I stop. Could I? Would I, really? Or would I find every reason to stay at home, sip my sweet milky tea, and scroll through images on a dead screen? The answer is the latter, every time. So no, no I do not want such beauty that badly.

I am drawn, moth-like, to the alchemy of romance, to the burning fire and passion of it. To think of wooing and being wooed tantalizes; to think of the dance enraptures. But would I really? Would I throw my heart into the crucible―all of it or else the magic will fail? Or would I coat myself in nacre and, from my untouchable prettiness, find fault with every would-be lover? The latter. Always the latter.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.   ―Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes"

Meditation on "There is only one of everything"

All day I have thought I was empty--empty of even the ghost of desire--
but the smell of herbs and water simmering fills me with longing for the life I have.

There is a woman at my church who looks like Margaret Atwood
(In my head, I say, Oh, Margaret Atwood is in her usual place)
I feel Atwood-like, smelling the simmering herbs:

I can even say it,
though only once and it won't

last: I want this. I want
this. 

There is  only one of everything, isn't there, Margaret?

This is my life, this is the life I love:
The herbs and the simmering
The people in their places
The poetry and the song
The hot and thick afternoon air I love to hate
Even the burning toast; even the burning toast
Is mine, is me, and I love it.

pack up all my cares and woe

Generally speaking, the thought of travel intimidates me. Everyone will know I don't belong! Still, there are a few places that have so thoroughly captured my imagination that one day, when I can, I will rouse myself and leave my cozy little nest:

Iceland.
Iceland remains at the top of my list. I'm half in love with it, really. All that cold and snow and dark; those mountains and geysers and volcanoes. And it's an island.

Venice.
I think it may have been Jeanette Winterson's The Passion that first fueled my desire for Venice. But I must see it before it disappears.

Maine.
I am sensing a water theme here. And a strong desire for ice.

recent miracles

1. Just before I was to defend my dissertation, my hair dryer started acting funny. First, it would work so long as I plugged it in anywhere but the bathroom. After that, one by one, it stopped working in all the other sockets throughout the apartment. The week after I defended the dissertation, Aldi had hair dryers as a "special buy" for only fifteen dollars. I bought one and set it aside until the old hair dryer died completely. The next day I found that the hair dryer had died completely, having lasted just until the day I was able to get a new one.

2. Tenants in my building often leave unwanted items in the corner of the east stairwell near the entrance to the first floor. The other day there were, among other things, a perfect 6-cup muffin pan and a pristine, glass 9x13 baking dish. I have never had a full-size 9x13 baking dish (mine is shallow), and here was one, free, that even suited my aesthetic tastes.

3. The other day was one of those ominous, late-summer, oppressively muggy days. All day the air was thick, nearly viscous. Just after noon, the temperature dropped so that the city swam in damp, swirling fog; I stood on an el platform in the middle of that sticky, cool fog. Rain was clearly imminent and I wondered whether it would hold off until I got home. Just as I walked in the door, the rain started. Within five minutes of my safe arrival home, the sky was as dark as dusk and the rain came down in torrents.

On waiting for barbarians; meditation on three poems by C. P. Cavafy

The semester begins today. I will teach four regular classes this term--for the first time I will teach in a regular semester. The past week or so I have been restless. Concentration and preparation have been either difficult or impossible to come by. Instead of working diligently (even with rests) to prepare for what will be a challenging term, I have been waiting for the barbarians.

Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

            Because the barbarians are coming today.
            What laws can the senators make now?
            Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

I've been waiting for something to happen, something external. Then, when that something happens, I will have to respond to that, so I really ought to save my time, energy, and attention for that. Waiting is clearly the prudent choice.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

            Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
            And some who have just returned from the border say
            there are no barbarians any longer.
 
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution. 

This waiting has been itself a kind of response, a way of shaping the present and the future. Why do I forget this? Why am I waiting for barbarians when I could become an Antony?

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

One does not prove oneself worthy of, say, an Alexandria, or even, especially, of an Ithaka, by waiting anxiously for barbarians who may never arrive.  

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 With Ithaka on my mind and Alexandria in my heart, what can barbarians do to me or for me? 

learning from previous selves

A little more than six years ago, I wrote this (lightly edited) meditation on Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body:

And so here is the humbling bit, for the narrator and for every reader who identifies with the narrator: for Louise (and any and all of our beloveds), it might not be worth it to be saved if the salvation does not include the beloved. Can we ever believe that we might be valued so highly by the one we love? Is it selfish when we want to so believe, or if we want to be so loved?

We are not to love the beloved more than God—that is blasphemy. We are not to love the beloved more than ourselves—that is antiquated and un-feminist. We are not to love the beloved more than our career, our children, our friends, our lives. What, then, is so beloved about the beloved?

We are supposed to love properly, efficiently, moderately—no blistering-hot, full-to-the-neck baths for us, but tepid 5-minute, water-saver showers. Turn off the water when you soap and when you shave. 

No longer may we lavishly love: it is wartime and to ration our passion is a virtue. We must be economical. The heart is too precious for everyday consumption, we must enjoy our diet of corn flakes, graham flour, and winter savory.

No more blistering inferno, gone the dazzling sun; we've left the chemist's lab, we dare not even glance at the crucible wherein our hearts could fuse (and alchemy is so out of style). Sunglasses are our most popular accessory—can I get SPF 3000 for my heart?

I'd forgotten I used to write like this sometimes. I still remember the physical and emotional sensations of writing this: the focus and single-mindedness; the high, thin, thrumming thread of energy stretching from my self to the page. I wonder if I can do this again—think and write for just the joy of it.

letters I have not written

Dear C,

Thank you for sending me your teaching philosophy and within mere minutes of my request! I promised you a letter back in March (March! How has this year flown!) and now you've moved and I no longer have your address. And even though I have not kept my word, if you've held it against me, I haven't known. Thank you.
—k

Dear J,

You are a radiant angel for sending me your teaching statement and for offering dozens of comments on several versions of my own teaching statement and CV. You've always been such an excellent editor of my work, and you've always made it easy for me to send ugly raw stuff your way. I promised you a letter as a reward and I am so sorry for not having done so. However unspoken, my gratitude and admiration have been very real.
—k

Dear S,

How is it that I have not sent any response to the gorgeous card you sent me on the occasion of the new year? Oh, I am ashamed! It seems it has been quite a year for both of us—the evidence of social media would suggest there is a new love in your life? I am so happy for you, friend. I am so excited for you. I'd love to hear more. And tell me more about how your family is doing. I have been praying for all of you.
—k
 
Dear J,

However far apart we live and however different the shapes of our lives, I am so glad that we are still in touch and that I still can call you friend. I told you some months ago that I wanted to get to know grown-up you better than I do. I still do! I admit, I do let myself feel intimidated by my friends who are partnered and have children—I always worry that I am intruding. More shamefully—I see my life as so utterly decadent and selfish by comparison. You must so arrange your life that loving and caring for other people is always your first priority. I don't do that and nothing pushes me to do so, and so I judge myself in order to save you the trouble. I am sorry for that. I will trust you more. And thank you for your prayers recently. That has been so nice. 
—k

Dear M,

Whenever I think of you, I delight in your friendship. You are so generous with your affection and with your forgiveness and still your standards are high and admirable. I admire you. So why is it I put off writing to you? Foolish me! But still lucky me because I will get to see you again soon and we will get to catch up and laugh—every time I see you, my face hurts for hours from all the laughter we share. I am so glad you return to Chicago a few times each year. Looking forward to laughing with you soon— 
—k