A Night on the River

Allen and I spent last night in the boat on the Maumee River. We started at Rossford in the late afternoon and then putted up to Toledo. After my Ohio River Journey last year I have a new appreciation for all rivers. The BGSU Monitor recently did a piece about me. If you're interested, you can find it here. In the article I talk a little bit about the river and what it means to me.

I took a few photos. On the top is a photo of graffiti. I've always been intrigued by graffiti. I like thinking of the psychological underpinnings of these markings. Last year on the Ohio, Allen and I took the tour of the West Virginia State Penn., and my favorite part was looking at the graffiti on the cell walls. Graffiti is a way of establishing one's existence and perhaps one's mortality. In a sense, it's not so different from what I do when I write poems or stories. Graffiti can sometimes be quite beautiful. Every time I pass the "East Side" graffiti, I enjoy looking at the zany lettering. It seems so "sixties." It's true that graffiti often gets a bad name because of gangs and because it sometimes defaces truly beautiful things. However, I think the impulse to create it is here to stay, and I wouldn't want it to be everywhere prohibited.

The afternoon was beautiful with temperatures in the low eighties and low humidity. We spent a cool night, covering ourselves with our sleeping bags. In the second photo, you see our Boston Terrier, Buddha, riding on Allen's lap. I love taking photos of this dog. He is so sweet and well-behaved. Behind Buddha is Toledo. I took a Toledo sunset photo that turned out quite well and I almost posted it, but then it seemed too predictable, a sunset. I could picture people glancing at it and saying, "Oh, a sunset." Sunset photos are so prevalent that our ability to appreciate them has definitely become diminished.

We awoke this morning to light rain--this rain wasn't predicted until afternoon and we'd planned to be back home before it ever started. But there's no predicting the weather. We waited a while, watched a huge grain-laden boat pass, and watched as thin filaments of lightening streaked across the sky. Finally, fearing wind and stronger rain, we got underway. We'd planned to walk up to Big Boy's in town for a hearty breakfast, but we didn't get to, and we were too wet to stop on the way home. Now, after a long, hot bath while reading some poems by Hayden Carruth, I'm dressed and ready for that breakfast. We are practically on our way out the door now. As far as writing goes, I've been working on an older story and I think it is mostly finished. After being away from it for a good while, I realized I was trying to accomplish too much in a single story, and I streamlined it. I went through it a couple of times on the computer and then printed a hard copy. Then I hand-edited that. Next, I made the changes on the computer. Sometime later today I hope to make another hard copy for editing. I'm still not making the rounds as usual on the Internet. It seems to pull me out of my writing zone.

The next days are supposed to be rainy, but it will be cool and comfy. Nice writing weather, I think!

The Unknown Bird

Painting by Chagall
In my previous entry, I revealed what I look for in a muse: courage, strength, and kindness. I want to be courageous and strong, and kind. I seek others who display these characteristics, for they give me strength. A poem by Edward Thomas called "The Unknown Bird" speaks to me of what it is like to hear the muse. Thomas writes:




Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. ...



Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far off--
...
as if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and some-
times
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. ...

Listening to the muse is a deeply mysterious process, not unlike prayer. I see now the muse is the way inward, the part of the self that respects art. The muse doesn't judge. It only loves.

Beauty Slays Me

I am just checking in briefly to say that I am okay and enjoying my break from blogging. My new computer arrived three days ago and I've been busy getting it set up and getting to know my way around the new digs. The new computer with its speed and great memory capacity gives me a sense of freedom, and I've been running with that.

However, all is not perfect. I had fooled myself into thinking I was going to be able to run with my book as soon as all responsibilities were over at work, but that hasn't been the case. What I have ended up doing is reading a lot of poetry and going through my notes to shape poems of my own which I hope, in turn, will point me toward a narrative. I was so pleased with the poems I wrote that I sent two to little magazines for consideration.

Enough of that, though. I want to write something about beauty.

On the night of May 8th, after I'd done my last blog entry for a while, I watched the film Harold and Maude again. I've seen this film many times and at different points in my life. Harold and Maude is about an unlikely romance. If you've never seen Harold and Maude, then you should, and that's all I'll say about that.

Watching Harold and Maude on May 8, I noticed what Maude says about beauty, and I was struck suddenly by how easy it is lose our ability to recognize beauty. It is so easy to become blunted.

In Harold and Maude, Maude watches seagulls with Harold. Watching the gulls, Maude tells Harold of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish soldier wrongfully incarcerated on Devil's Island who as a child felt amazement when he first encountered what he thought were the most fantastical birds. Later, Maude says, Dreyfus realized the birds he'd thought were so magical were "only seagulls."

I remember as a child seeing what I thought were the most fantastical flowers. They were orange and tropical and nearly as tall as I was. I told my mother I thought the flowers were pretty (she loved flowers) and she said they were only daylilies, a very common flower which she thought of as nothing more than a weed. I remember the feeling of disappointment that shot through my chest, a feeling that I was being torn apart. Through the years, I've noticed that feeling and have come to associate with it the encroachment of banality, which I want to fight.

This is the challenge of life: to keep one's initial wonderment and ability to see the beauty around us.

I think this was part of my reason for extricating myself from the Internet for a time. I'm not finished with my quest yet to rediscover wonderment and beauty.

Don't you just long to be slain by beauty?

I'll close with a poem about beauty written by Chaucer. Let's say I am reading it tonight and thinking of the "You" in the poem as a muse. What do you look for in a muse? If my muse is a person, I look for one who is courageous, strong, and kind. And one who can slay me with his or her beauty, one who can help me to see beauty, wherever it resides:


Rondel of Merciless Beauty

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Only your word will heal the injury
To my hurt heart, while yet the wound is clean -
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene.

Upon my word, I tell you faithfully
Through life and after death you are my queen;
For with my death the whole truth shall be seen.
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Taking a Break from the Internet

Allen holds a baby raccoon he found under the lawnmower in the barn. It has since been returned to its mother and is safe from our cats and dog, domesticated but wild creatures that love to tear apart baby creatures like this. In the background sits Blue Girl. Allen's been getting the boat ready for a new summer of adventure. (Not anything long and involved like last year, though.)


Spring. It's time to reconnect with the earth and the living things of the earth. Everywhere around us are birds and baby animals.

For the next week, or two, or three, I'll be taking a break from the Internet. It's time for me to be outside a bit and remember that I'm an animal, too. And it's time for me to get into my dreamworld, my writing zone. The Internet can be addictive; I need to break some old routines.

Classes are officially over today (I turned in my last set of final grades), and now I need to turn my attention to my creative life. First, I need to organize my work space. I need to organize my writing room, as well as the main rooms of the house just outside my writing room door. I'm taking over a total of 3 rooms to accommodate what I need to get accomplished this summer: a serious first draft of my next book. I have many books related to my topic, notes, note cards, and rough drafts that need to be situated. I also need to organize my computer files.

I will be getting another computer in the next few days, and I'll need to take some time getting it ready. Two years ago, I got a new Dell laptop and retired my 10 year old IBM. I'm happy with the Dell. I got the smallest laptop they had at the time, and I never expected it to take the place of a full-sized desktop unit. The screen and keyboard are tiny. Long hours of hunching over this little device take a toll on the back and neck muscles. I'd wanted the laptop because I wanted to experiment with making my writing experience more mobile, less tied to one place, but I don't disconnect the laptop from the Internet, mouse, and printer very much. The last time, in fact, was when I took the laptop on my Ohio River Journey. When I get the desktop unit, my little Dell can truly go with me anywhere, and I'm looking forward to that.

I've been using the laptop as my only computer because I couldn't yet afford the computer I wanted: a super-fast dual core Dell I can use to edit digital movies, and store all my photos and music.

I can afford the computer now; rather the money now sits in the bank and that's how we choose to spend it.

So you won't be seeing much of me for the next few days. I'll be settling into my writing zone so I can get some creative work done!

Nick Drake

Photo: Nick Drake


I've started a new blog called "Reflective Teaching." It's mainly for myself, so I didn't enable it to accept comments. I want to keep track of my thoughts about teaching for at least two semesters. We'll see where it goes from there. Once in a while, I will share some of the entries from "Reflective Teaching" on this blog. The purpose of the "Reflective Teaching" blog is to help me work out some of my feelings about how my teaching and my creative life are related. Below is the first entry:


The great and mighty go their way unchecked. All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account-- Ursula K.LeGuin

This is my first entry in this Reflective Teaching blog. The blog is inspired by several discussion sessions I attended at Bowling Green State University. I attended the sessions because for a long time my creative life and my teaching life felt like separate things. I told the group that if I wasn't able to resolve this, I would have to quit teaching.

The group was sympathetic. And simply through the act of expressing my dilemma out loud, I began to feel better. I began to think I might be able to find a solution to my feelings of being stilted and at an intellectual and spiritual dead end.

I've been teaching since 1985, a little more than twenty years. I know people do get burned out from teaching, but I believe it doesn't have to be this way. Shouldn't teaching energize us? Energize our creative lives?

It is Saturday, and the last day of class for Spring Semester 2006 was yesterday. I'm listening Nick Drake CDs. A few weeks ago, a young man in my Native American Literature class gave me a CD he burned for me. It has some of his favorite music on it: including "River Man" by Nick Drake.

Listening to "River Man" for the first time, I could understand why my student was so attracted to Drake's music. When I looked up information on Nick Drake, an artist I'd never heard of, I saw his music described as being "Autumnal." Although Nick Drake was young when he made his albums and young when he died, he did, indeed, have an Autumnal spirit. Drake was wise; his music sloughs off the garish leaves and becomes something simple and stark. Drake lived his life deep inside his spirit.

Now, listening to Nick Drake on my stereo, I think of my student leaving class late Thursday afternoon past, wearing the same dark pair of sunglasses as when he'd given his reading in front the class just days before. My student had read his own haunting prose about his struggles with clinical depression, which Nick Drake also had.

I was out in the hallway because the students were finishing up a test and then doing the end of term course evaluations. We stood there, my student and I, saying our good-byes. I thanked him for sharing his music with me and told him I'd ordered Nick Drake CDs and looked forward to receiving them.

My student said, "An English Professor shared Nick Drake with me. It makes me feel good that I can complete the circle by passing Drake on to somebody new." His eyes were hidden by the glasses, which disappointed me, because I enjoy seeing his thoughtful eyes, but I understood. He'd been keeping late nights studying, doing his final projects, and perhaps struggling with his inner demons, too. He told me he was "Beat," and his eyes must have shown it.

Throughout the semester, as we were discussing the literature, this student would laugh quietly and nod his head: he obviously identified strongly with the themes in the pieces we read, especially the theme of the struggle for survival.

Listening to Nick Drake now, I identify with his acceptance of the ephemeral condition of our lives:

Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound.
It can never flourish
'til its stock is in the ground ...
Life is but a memory
Happened long ago
Theatre full of sadness
For a long forgotten show
Seems so easy
just to let it go on by
'til you stop and wonder
Why you never wondered why
Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light...

The lines, You find the darkness can / Give the brightest light remind me of what Viktor Frankl said of survival and the Holocaust experience: What is to give light must endure burning.

When I think of my student standing there in his sunglasses in that darkened hallway of University Hall on the campus of Bowling Green State university, I think of Frankl, of burning. My student is a survivor; he is burning to survive.