Living with Loss

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art, change, childhood, creativity, Crystal Payton, fiction, historical fiction, history, lakes, Leland Payton, literature, memory, Osage, Quincy, writing

A while back I shared a guest post from Dean Robertson about “home” – her recollections of her childhood home, leaving it, and returning years later. Since then that meditation has returned to me on occasion as I work on my next book.

The third book that I have set in the same river valley takes place about twenty years after This Old World‘s end. Some of the characters are still there, some are gone, and new ones have arrived. I’ve been thinking about the complicated emotions we experience when we see a place – our place – occupied by someone else.

Whenever I travel to Quincy, I like to drive by our old house on North 22nd Street, the house my daughter grew up in. For a while it was an unpleasant experience, as the house fell into disrepair (seeing its occupant appear in the police report was the low point). But now it has a new owner, bright shutters, newly planted flowers. So the drive-by is a cheerful one once again.

Still, it’s not my house any more. And even the most dutiful of owners is not me. So even positive change involves loss.

These thoughts were prompted today by the folks over at Damming the Osage, who posted a poem written by a gentleman not of my acquaintance, Rod Cameron of Raytown, Mo. It’s a lovely poem, followed by a reminiscence, of himself and his neighbors losing their land to the building of a reservoir. It’s a darn fine poem. Take a read.

What can we do with loss? Loss is built into our existence. Some losses are inevitable, but others (like the loss in the poem) are not, and we fight like devils to prevent them. In G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, a character says, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.” Perhaps that aphorism can be reversed as well. When we lose something, we owe it to ourselves to learn from it – or at least to make it into a poem worth reading.

And so I return to the last few chapters of my novel-in-progress, thinking about my characters and their losses and their learning.

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Parallel Universes

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art, childhood, creativity, fiction, imagination, memory, universes

I’m not learned enough in the sciences to genuinely understand the concept of “parallel universes” as put forth in theoretical physics, but I read enough in the popular scientific media to appreciate it. It occurs to me that we all live in parallel universes.

Let me call them the “chronoverse” and the “neuroverse.” The chronoverse is the world of brute reality, of time and space as we ordinarily experience them. Time moves on. We age. We live in one place, and then another. And then we die and are gone.

But the neuroverse is the universe created by the firing of our synapses and the electrochemical processes of our brains (thus the “neuro”). The neuroverse is the world of imagination and desire, memory and possibility, the hypothetical and the fantastic. In the neuroverse, I live here in Columbia, but I also live in Quincy, and in my childhood homes. In the neuroverse, I am a child and also a great-grandfather. My parents are living, and my grandparents and great-grandparents, and all my ancestors and descendants, because as I think of them, they are created in those neurochemical sparks.

The chronoverse is unforgiving and linear. The neuroverse is plastic and pluripotential. In the chronoverse, I know who I am and what I’m capable of, but in the neuroverse, these questions are always open, a prospect that is both exciting and scary.

It’s tempting to say that the one is “real” and the other is not, but what is real? What I perceive through the ordinary senses comes to me through neurological filters as well, and is similarly edited before I experience it as normal. Practicality and experience keep me in the chronoverse most of the time, functioning like a regular person. The longing for other lives, for realities beyond what is currently within my grasp, draws me to the neuroverse again and again.

As a fiction writer,  I spend a lot of time in my neuroverse. I have lived in the 19th Century for many years now and feel quite at home there. But I think all of us live in our neuroverses a lot. We dream, we fear, we imagine, we remember, we project. All of these states create alternate universes for us to visit, some desirable, some not. Whenever I am creating a scene in a novel, or thinking of a loved one who is not physically present, I am there in my neuroverse just as much as if I were there in “real life.” It’s just happening in a universe that others cannot perceive.

“Home” – Guest Post from Dean Robertson

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blogs, change, childhood, Dean Robertson, Faulkner, Georgia, home, memory, ostst, St. Benedict, writing

From Dean Robertson, whose book Looking for Lydia, Looking for God I reviewed last month:

Home

A few weeks ago a friend and I walked to the Chinese restaurant near my co-op and brought back steaming cartons of vegetable lo mein, fried rice, two Spring rolls, and my favorite—roasted broccoli (enough to save for lunch the next day). The order—white cartons stacked neatly in a large white bag—of course included small packets of soy sauce and several fortune cookies.

I always look forward to the slight crunch and sweetness of fortune cookies after the salty Chinese food, but the two I grabbed that day were stale. I was on the verge of throwing them out, along with their predictions for my future, when the edge of a slip of paper caught my eye. It read:

“You will find luck when you go home.”

That piece of paper, greasy at one corner, wrinkled from its near-miss with the garbage, is taped to the door of my kitchen cabinet.

 “I know that our relationship to those places we inhabit and leave and for which we search is the informing metaphor of the spiritual life in any tradition and is, in fact, the governing reality in our lives; the spirit of place is in our bones” (Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, 116-117).

I grew up in the South, in the hills of North Georgia, and so—even more than most—I have that bone-deep sense of belonging to a place, of that physical bond with land. In his small novel, The Unvanquished, William Faulkner describes the forced and hasty departure from home of two boys, with their grandmother, just ahead of Sherman’s army on its March to the Sea. They take along basic provisions—and bags of soil from the plantation.

One morning about twenty years ago, one of my cousins and I drove out to the land where I grew up. We were going to see the log house my parents built which neither of us had seen since I left for college at seventeen.

After the house was built, Mother and Daddy carefully cleared narrow paths into the woods and down the steep hill between the house and the “patio,” a structure made entirely of mortar and large stones from the creek bank. On the day my cousin and I were there, all those paths were completely grown over; there wasn’t a trace of them. We sat for a few minutes, looking with a kind of hopelessness at the uninterrupted woods, seeing no possibility for navigation.

I glanced back and stepped out of the car. I walked cautiously, but without hesitation, across the overgrown yard and onto the path that led by twists and turns through a quarter acre of dense trees and underbrush to the edge of Cedar Creek. Those stones and trees, that path, buried in thick vines and roots and many seasons of leaves, are my bones.The skeleton of that land is my skeleton. I never faltered. My cousin followed. We sat by the creek for more than an hour without speaking.

There is a reason that all those houses and apartments and rooms over all those decades never quite satisfied my search for home. Not one of them, even the wonderful co-op, in the wonderful walking neighborhood where I live now, ever will be home.

Home is not a place, not a location, neither house nor woods nor hills nor any ocean. Home is, as Esther de Waal writes in her 1984 book, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict, a sense of being “earthed;” it is the Biblical concept of stability or steadfastness.

Of Metropolitan Anthony, “a monk and a bishop,” she says only,

“He has found his centre of gravity; he is wholly inside himself. This is the stability of the heart.”

Home, the particularity of place, is significant because it points always to something beyond itself.

It points to home.

A hymn whose name and provenance I have forgotten includes this line:

“We are all God’s children; the journey is our home.”

And, finally, this road to our real home can never be easy. Benedict writes in his Rule of the novice monk:

“‘Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry’ says the opening sentence, and the novice is to be left knocking at the door for four or five days. He is then warned about ‘the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God’ If he promises perseverance in his stability after two months. . .If he still stands firm. . .he is taken back. . .and is tested again after six months, and then again four months later.”

Looking for Lydia, Looking for God is also available on Amazon.com.

 

The Sign and the Commons

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childhood, commons, farming, Garrett Hardin, human nature, individualism, Ozarks, rural

When I was a kid, the German Community (where my mother and father grew up) had a huge signpost at the crossroads indicating the direction to each farm. I don’t know who put up the signpost, but I would guess that the Wiegensteins might have been involved, as their place was near the crossroads. It might also have been a Brewen.

Anyway, when we moved out to Reynolds County, my dad duplicated that effort, putting up a post at the fork in the road showing which way to go to each family’s house and how far it would be. When a new family moved in, or an old family moved out, he would saw up a new pine board and paint the name or take down the old sign. When age forced them off the farm, I took down his sign and have kept it ever since. Recently I freshened up the paint with the help of my daughter, and I plan to hang it as a decoration and a memory.

We hear frequent mention these days of the “tragedy of the commons,” a term used in Garrett Hardin’s famous environmental article about the hazards of unregulated common use of such things as air, water, and so forth. And we see examples of the tragedy of the commons everywhere. Yesterday I drove to St. Louis on Interstate 70, the main artery of the state, a highway which is is dreadful repair because our legislators cannot summon up the political will to fund its proper upkeep — not because they don’t recognize the need to improve it, but because their individual self-interest (getting reelected by avoiding the “he voted to raise taxes” canard) outweighs in their mind the general good that would be gained by pulling up their socks and raising the money to fix it.

But the commons — and a proper appreciation of the commons — is also a blessing. It all depends on how you view it. Nobody made a rule that a signpost be created; someone just did it. Someone with an understanding that taking time and effort to promote the general welfare (now where have I heard those words before?) is in itself a value.

Nowadays we spend a lot of time talking about individual freedom; recently I chatted with a visitor from another country, a businessman, who told me with a chuckle, “You Americans will buy anything with the word ‘freedom’ attached to it.” The underside of freedom is selfishness and the tragedy of the commons. The blessing of the commons comes from the recognition that we are all in this together, that our own individual choices have wide impact, and that we make decisions thinking about others as well as about ourselves.

Wood-Splitting

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childhood, human nature, indirection, memory, nature, rural

We’ve been burning more wood in the fireplace this winter than last, thanks to some colder temperatures, and have now reached that moment when the woodpile is down to those unwieldy chunks that I’ve been avoiding for a year and a half because they’re too heavy to carry in or they won’t burn well. So yesterday I took my wedges and splitting maul out to the pile for some splitting time.

Wood-splitting was one of my chores as a boy, although we used a double-bitted ax instead of a maul, and of course when doing an outdoor chore I am always reminded of my father, who passed away eight years ago this past week. He would have been horrified at the poor condition of my maul and wedges — I’ve not sharpened them in years — and would no doubt have reminded me that a poorly-kept tool doubles not only the amount of effort needed for a job, but the chances of an accident. But I labored on, recalling also Thoreau’s remark about how firewood warms a person more than once.

The natural world and its processes are easy targets for moralizing — isn’t that what writers have been doing since Roman times? But I’ll throw in a few observations about wood-splitting anyway.

It’s not so much the force but the accuracy of the blow that counts. That being said, even a well-aimed blow that doesn’t have enough power behind it won’t split the wood. You have to set your feet, figure your distance, then just swing from over your head with confidence that you’ll hit where you’re aiming. Half-hearted over-the-shoulder swings never work.

To preserve your back, stop every so often and pretend to inspect the woodpile. This task actually helps, because you can clean up your workspace and avoid stumbling over split pieces.

Never try to split through a knot. You end up frustrating yourself and chopping off weird-shaped chunks from a piece of wood that stubbornly remains too large. Turn the wood and split around the knot instead.

Thus Endeth the Sermon of the Wood-Splitter. And oh yes, I need to go to the blade sharpening shop down the street.