Sep 012013
 

Robert Vivian

Robert Vivian, novelist, essayist, dramatist & multiple contributor to NC herewith invents a new form, the dervish essay, which, yes, whirls with energy, mesmerizes with rhythmic repetition, and spins toward the edge of sense in a remarkable display of linguistic panache and wildness.

dg

Here are a couple of dervish essays, a new (or new to me) form that keeps beckoning for some reason. What are dervish essays? I’m still discovering them for myself, but here are some elements I think are emerging to the light of consciousness:

  • They often whirl and spin by anaphora and other forms of repetition;
  • They seem impatient with subjects per se as they assume a oneness with everything they touch upon;
  • The prose energy is ramped up to poetry energy and they are breathless to communicate an essence;
  • They court nonsensicality and are driven by a deep inward music;
  • I don’t know what they’re about, really, or why I am writing them other than a deep contact with Rumi in Turkey;
  • And finally, they seem to want to embrace everything at once and are almost frantic to do so. They’re also quite brief.

—Robert Vivian

 

Crow Ceremony

Crow ceremony in the raw, renewable resources of ongoing dread and decay shining deep into the night in sharp sliver of bone harp the full moon grazes under crow’s feet clutched in fierce possession as morning becomes electric so cousin to fear and wonder, cousin to transformation and holy rays and raven-haired beauty married to awe and crow ceremony the spanning bridge between this life and the next in crow secret, crow kabala no crow shall ever divulge in honor of all earthy rituals made of entrails and visions, shattered glass crow must navigate, step over, give voice to, screech about, deliver in raucous cry washed in sacrifice then parted beak in soundless astonishment on the brink of revelation, and crow ceremony stark custodian of road kill and other leftovers always watching and waiting on wind-blasted highway in deep kinship with desolation’s bone shop and gut cart quaking over medieval streets paved with cobblestones, blood weary, spat upon for ages, crow waiting then hopping then waiting again within ten feet of high-speed traffic centuries hence but coeval to every century that was or will be and crow not subject to the dominion time for after the first death there is no other as I drive north in Michigan and crow ceremony the world over even now in stark re-enactment that does not end and myself and every dream crow meat for devouring and the gristle of someone else’s morrow and there’s something tender to sing about even in these that might brush us with a blue-black feather lighter than a dandelion spore, legendary birds of mythical attention to detail and ravenous for what we discard or run over as we become their foremost fulfillment and each of us their mostly clueless pupils, slow, reluctant learners of great denial they have to instruct again and again and again. And crow ceremony around the corner, on rooftops, power lines, blacktops, and parking lots and crumbling churches, late night radio announcers and their sad monologues over mystical air waves, crow ritual, crow practice in primordial agency, singing the body beyond corporeality as crow tears it asunder in most necessary department, crow swooping down over the eaves of every life and in this rank beauty some strange thing waiting to be born, and were my body any other frailer arc it would sink to the bottom of a gutter to be set upon by rats but rats don’t have wings and thus crow angels, crow watchers with no other claim to hegemony though they do not seek fame or recognition, and my life another crow ceremony and no one to ask about it, no one to consult, no medicine man or guru and crow with me every mile into middle age and something like remorse, faint waft of tragedy growing therein but also tenderness (here again breathing under the soft corners and bleak crowbars on murderers’ row) and also gladness, also fondness and sighing for the things of this world, and some day I shall become the property of crows in transitional space and so crows watching, crows waiting, hard brothers that prey over me with no haste and no waste, no need to even follow for they know where to find me and to find everyone, the whys and wherefores already accomplished in the book of the dead and sonic dimensions of inner speech teetering over into prayer as prey becomes prayer, becomes lament, shadows that protect as if with wings and what they shape and give outline to for there is no delicate option and then I was that thing I thought I would never be, an open wound like a cicatrix on the back of a slave earmarked for affliction, an almost nothing crow ceremony salvaged for me and the whiteness of this page a crow ceremony, the blackness of these typed letters, all the loosed flamingos of the heart that must go down in flames, the grottoes of old buildings, the rickshaws of old sentiments, the black stubble on a homeless man’s beard and the salt and pepper shakers from a diner called Heartbreak. And crow ceremony the piling up of phone books, cinder blocks, rooms where people go to die alone under a ceiling fan that whirls like a broken clock counting demonic time, crow the lines around my tired eyes and crow the bar that gives the thief his most essential tool for stealing, I have traveled to strange places and myself a stranger and I have never understood the mystery called yearning, called great epic desire and ceaseless wanting, and in this same pull toward the holy strange and holy broken there has always been a crow on the periphery just above waiting for it to play out, and if crow carries night in his wings he also carries stars, and if she carries stars then she also carries light, and if he carries light he also carries song, and if she carries song than she also carries wind and breath and the taste of clear water and obsidian stone so there is crow cycle, crow magnetism in the notes of all music, black bird, black bird, black wand of passing magic and terrific fate where the truth must lie hidden in another blade of grass crow will take over many mountains and all the variegated fields and the hearts that set themselves on wanting what they want so much, always beyond their power to name or to have, winged crow in lofty ceremony, carrying every last grain home to an even greater mystery hidden in another night and another day a sore, swollen throat away in siren song that does not end.

 §

 

 Stumble

Stumbled upon the great fire and the great midnight and great column of sunlight shining through a lofty window whose brightness no hand can touch or hold—and stumbled upon all the other elements not listed in the book of the dead, other sere and sweeping contributors to the ever changing beauty of the world, water, wind, dust and root rot, and no time to put them into song or poem so they must be included here in primary utterance given over to gaga mouth, and stumbled upon the great mountains, lakes and rivers, warning song of the redwing blackbird and thistles lamenting their separation from the reed bed in brushing sighs waving beneath the sky, waking in the morning to singing birds also a gentle stumbling and rousing from sleep whose point of departure is listening and dew-eyed wonder, innocence almost, something no one could ever imagine vis-à-vis the astonishing fact of morning whose opposites are doubt and anguish like little knives whittling sticks deep into the night that slowly become strange talismans in the shape of vengeful deities, and stumbling upon I saw a sunset that spoke the name of God in panoramic splendor splashed marveling across the sky, and Father Nebraska, Mother Michigan, the two landscapes I have been given to stumble upon over and over again and the bumble bee stumbling upon the petal of the flower trembling beneath it like a spent lover and we drunks stumbling all the time upon every source of woe and laughter and the caress that sends us home to pillow cases wet with tears and the little girl stumbling on the playground scraping her knee to an audience of blacktop and sand traps though she’s determined not to cry in stoic preparation for lifelong pains to follow, which also cannot be imagined or endured though they must be and they will be somehow some way and this a shotgun blast of tiny miracles jagged as scattered bits of bright pebbles, and stumbling upon a great suitcase with decal stickers from various ports of call and dense and teeming notebooks within tumbling out expressing great desire and yearning, more wonder, more heartache in the form of questions and headlong declarations, “Let me be a window for you, let me be a way to filter light, I want to sing in a bar in gypsy sorrow and whatever has been given me to praise I will again and again in ever renewing vectors of worship, I promise, dear one, dear lover, the one I am going to cherish and adore”—and P.S. Androgyny, P.S. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, P.S. The last time you wrote home it was August and the cicadas were invading the nightshade,” and stumbled upon the single word or gesture that will deliver you to the gates of holiness which are everywhere around opening on rusty hinges so stumbling a way for translucent scales to fall from your eyes like withered corn, and stumbling to trip or miss one’s footing, to stammer caused by great emotion be it tenderness or outrage or to be struck dumb and silent in the face of a great mystery yet another act of stumbling, sudden surcease and roundup, sudden heart-wall collapsing (Can you bless the night by dying? Yes, you can bless the night by dying) and salt to throw on every wound to ramp it up to trumpet strength blaring out all pain, and stumbling upon I had a vision of heaven that included the neon sign of a liquor store and streets strewn with flattened bubble gum like pastel amoebas swimming fecklessly against the tide of late night traffic, the rest of the streets refraining from song until everyone is down in their knees in the gutters, and stumbling in and out of love, stumbling forward, stumbling backward, tripping on a curb and stumbling onto an airplane to Turkey and stumbling when I disembark into the waiting arms of Rumi and stumbling the great mercy and the great forgiveness and the great recognition that weaves sorrow and joy into a hair shirt of incomparable fineness and stumbling I walk through the middle years of my life holding a broken lily not knowing where I’m going and stumbling I dream of a church whose vestibule is shaped like a horse-shoe where all the spirits wait in giddiness before commencing to moan and sing like Keith Jarret at the keyboard and stumbling I see the vast capacity for love in the hearts of the downtrodden, the holy broken and careworn, isolated and alone then I stumble in the doorway of a halfway house upon the great virtue waiting there for me to shroud me in spider webs, which can only be called tenderness though it partakes of gentleness and forbearance in equal amounts, and stumbling I stand with a poet on a dark hill in Vermont as we watch a fox trot by and the poet says to keep going no matter what even if it seems hopeless, and stumbling I see the four horses of the apocalypse grazing in a pasture and they are not fiery-eyed and braying, not blowing smoke from their nostrils like fired canons but switching their tails back and forth with their graceful necks bent to the earth searching for sweet grass to chew on, and stumbling I found I could go over to them and pat those same long necks shaped like peninsulas and all of us, the grass, the breeze and sky, the four horses of the apocalypse and even the earth takes this peaceful hiatus as benediction and meeting place, and an opportunity to look for garlands before we stumble on the rest of the way.

—Robert Vivian

—————————————————

ROBERT VIVIAN’s first book, Cold Snap As Yearning, won the Society of Midland Authors Award in Nonfiction and the Nebraska Center for the Book in 2002. His first novel, The Mover Of Bones, was published in 2006 and is Part I of The Tall Grass Trilogy. The second part of the trilogy was the novel Lamb Bright Saviors; and Part III, Another Burning Kingdom, was published in 2011. His collection of essays, The Least Cricket Of Evening, was also published in 2011. Vivian’s most recent novel, Water And Abandon, appeared in 2012; and he’s just completed another novel, The Long Fall To Dirt Heaven. He also writes plays, over twenty of which have been produced in NYC. Many of his monologues have been published in Best Men’s Stage Monologues and Best Women’s Stage Monologues. His most recent foray into playwriting was an adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts that premiered at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo in 2006. His stories, poems, and essays have been published in Harper’s, Georgia Review, Ecotone, Numéro Cinq, Creative Non!fiction, Glimmer Train, and dozens of others. He is Associate Professor of English at Alma College in Michigan and a member of the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

You can also read Robert Vivian’s earlier contributions to NC, two essays on essays: “Thoughts on the Meditative Essay” and “The Essay as an Open Field” and his play A Little Mysterious Bleeding.

.

.

Nov 032012
 

 

Photo by Kevin Cosgrove.

NC has a special place in its heart (okay, really, the magazine doesn’t have a heart perhaps, but in the editor’s heart) for mixed forms, hybrid forms and old forms gone out of fashion. They don’t teach sermon-writing in the college workshops, but the sermon is a great and ancient nonfiction form (books of sermons used to be bestsellers), and we have published several on this site. This is the first sermon Hilary Mullins ever gave and dates back to 2000 when she lived in Oakland, CA. She now lives in Bethel, VT, and is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program and writes and teaches and washes windows in the summer. Her most recent contribution to NC was an essay on her experiences during Hurricane Irene. This her second sermon on NC. See the first here.

dg

—–

One dervish to another, What was your vision of God’s presence?  — Rumi

I’m no dervish, no Sufi mystic. I’m just a writer. And though like Rumi, I too sometimes conceive of God as a baptism of fire, I find that when I sit down to write, water is the vision that keeps returning to me. I’ve been writing about water my whole life. It’s not my only metaphor, but it may be my most frequent. I’ve written poems about rivers and brooks, about lakes and skating on lakes. I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with the lake back in Vermont I grew up swimming in, the hours and endless hours I spent in that water.

Especially I remember swimming underwater: nosing around submerged parts of trees for the sudden sparkle of a fishing lure, or better yet, pulling myself with wide arm-strokes down the mysterious, green-dark slope where the real depths began.

Experiences like this get under our skin, making a metaphorical sense that sticks with us, informing our lives. Though as a writer, I’m probably more aware than most of the metaphors I use, I think everybody uses them.

And I’m certainly not the only one who thinks this. University of California linguistics professor George Lakoff thinks so too. Lakoff has been championing the importance of metaphor for quite some time now. In a recent book with the delicious title, Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Eugene philosopher Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not a mere matter of the words we use. In fact, they claim that metaphors structure the ways we conceptualize our most fundamental experiences.

And furthermore, they say, reeling in abundant evidence from the cognitive sciences, this metaphorical structuring of meaning is largely unconscious and inescapable, the result of our embodied existence.

Let me give you an example. When we are babies, picked up and held, we learn to associate affection with the actual warmth of embrace. And ever after—so the argument goes—those two things become associated in our minds: we think of affection itself as warm, though literally of course it is not.

This linkage, which occurs in the brain, this conceptualization of affection as warmth, Lakoff and Johnson call a primary metaphor. And we have many, many of these metaphors. Think about it: we talk of happiness in terms of being up, we think of intimacy in terms of closeness, of knowing as seeing, of understanding as grasping.

None of this is literal. For instance, happiness, as an emotion we feel in our body is not actually up or down; it has no location in space that way at all. And yet this is how we think of it and therefore how we experience it: happiness, for us, is up.

One of the implications of metaphor theory—if you find it convincing and I certainly do—is that we are not the transcendent rational creatures we have taken ourselves to be for a very long time. To the contrary, Lakoff and Johnson argue that reason is not a transcendent entity somewhere “out there” like some supernatural deity we can commune with through our rational faculty. They claim instead that what we think of as “reason” is actually  a product of our bodies and the ways that we, these bodies, interact with the world. As a result, our reason is largely metaphorical and imaginative.

As someone well-acquainted with the power of metaphor in my own work, I take this to be good news. For I have long noticed that the introduction of a good metaphor can transform a piece of stagnant writing into something else all together, into something with a pulse, something with movement, direction.

For example: Let’s say I tell you about a period of major transition in my life. Let’s say I list the feelings I had during that time, that I describe to you my resulting indecision and hesitation. There’s nothing wrong with such a retelling of course. I could convey something important this way.

But, let’s say I use an image instead, an image about riding a train. Let’s say that I’m standing in an open doorway on that train, straddling a gap between cars, that I’m gazing down the rattling, serpentine-length of that train, all its doors open, the swaying of its motion along the tracks rocking me gently towards my next destination. Yes, let’s say, held in the belly of that train, I am rocked and carried along.

Something in us perks up when we speak of our experiences this way, something vital in us begins breathing, resonating. This is no small thing, for I believe it brings us closer to where we live, which is another way to talk about the search for meaning in our lives, or if you will, the search for God.

But there’s more that I think metaphor can do. I think it can transform us as well.

Let’s think about the train some more. The fact is though my description of riding that train may be imaginative, my actual choice of the train as a metaphor is not. It’s not that I’m criticizing my originality. No. What I want to point out is that trains, planes, and automobiles are metaphors people frequently reach for when they are speaking of their lives.

I remember when I used to work at a teen center, we often played a board game called Life. On the board, point by point, along a curving, broad path were laid out all the conventional mileage markers of  a life: birth, school, first job, marriage, house, children. And each contestant piloted her or himself along this yellow brick road of expectation in a tiny, plastic car.

Of course, it seemed silly, putzing in plastic through a life like that, but the fact is that that board game was a good mock-up of our culture’s concept of life: which is to say we hold life to be a journey, one complete with itinerary, destinations, and  obstacles to those destinations. This can be a useful way to think of life.

And yet it has its obvious drawbacks as well. For conceiving of our lives this way leads us to make judgments about whether we have at any given point in time made it to the “mileage markers” we or others think are appropriate to that period in our lives. People who are obviously successful when they are young, look good according to this reasoning, while some of us late-bloomers can look pretty lackadaisical.

But this is just one way of looking at things. In other countries, people don’t think this way at all. In other countries, there is no journey—there’s just you, living your life.

Lately, with seven years and counting between my first and still unfinished second novel, some of these other countries are beginning to look pretty appealing.

But maybe I won’t have to move. Maybe I can start with countering the concept here, now, in myself. I think to some extent this is possible. We may not have much choice, ultimately, about whether we experience happy as up or affection as warmth (Lakoff and Johnson contend that we do not), but it is possible, I think, to grapple with some of our culture’s more complex metaphors if we find that, rather than bringing us along in some way, they are holding us back.

Think about the ways we talk about our relationships. Again journey metaphors abound. That is, we tend to think of love as a journey, of lovers as travelers with common destinations or paths. Fact is the little plastic car on the Life game board says it pretty well: we think of our relationships as vehicles on this common journey we undertake together. Sometimes our relationships “spin their wheels”, sometimes they “run out of gas”. Or sometimes they hit a “dead end.”

Haven’t you ever hit a dead end in a relationship? A lot of us have. That is, we’ve thought about it just that way. And so, then, did we decide that the whole thing had been a waste of time? A useless trip? The love-is-a-journey metaphor itself could very well lead us to that conclusion.

But what if we conceived of relationships in a different way? What if, as Lakoff and Johnson have suggested, we think of love as a collaborative work of art? Imagine that. Then ask yourself this: is art ever a waste of time?

And yet though I especially like the notion of collaboration that this metaphor offers, I find myself still wanting to salvage the journey metaphor. I like the motion in this image, the sense of distance traveled. Lately though, my own mileage markers don’t have much to do with the conventional signposts on the Life game board. Instead I find myself marking the miles with lessons learned. Sometimes it’s not even a matter of miles so much as it is the depth I’ve managed to get to, whether by myself or in the company of another. Being in relationship with another person for me is sometimes like going for a swim, an underwater dive.  I want to see how deep we can go. And swimming for me is never a waste of time!

This is why I believe the metaphors we use really do matter. Though it may be true that most of them are engrained and automatic, I still think that if you start nosing around in the ones you use, you can sometimes open up a little light in what might be a pretty dark corner. Or you can just as well notice one that’s always been a taproot for you and make more of it.

Some of you may remember a sermon Rob Hardies gave a few months ago where he argued that for religious liberals, thinking about God metaphorically is the way to go. Well, I for one have started to think of God as a writer.

Now thinking about God as a writer is not necessarily helpful to me on a night when I’m feeling lonely, or on a morning when I have something to do that makes my spirits sink. Lately when I’m feeling that way, I imagine God as a massive live-oak tree, someone I can climb into, a place I can rest.

But when I’m in motion, and wondering what to do next in my life, I like thinking of God as a writer. For as a writer myself, I know how important it is to get in tune with the story I’m writing.

This is not a matter of knowing where the story is going, how it will end, or all of what will occur along the way. Indeed, I find that when I try to force the outcome, the whole thing breaks down, that me and my story get flat-out stuck, going nowhere fast.  I find instead that to do well when I’m writing, a certain sort of surrender is required, a trust that the unfolding story itself will take me where it needs to go. I have to strike a balance, as if I were on a bike. Sometimes it even feels like I’m riding with no hands.

So I like to think of God that way, like me, but at the same time not like me at all. I like to think of God as an author writing the world. And in that writing, he’s present but divinely absent-minded too, somehow manifest but not at all embodied.

God the writer. He writes a world with all us characters in it. All of us. It’s not that he winds this story-world up and lets it go, as if it were a Newtonian script. No, writers have to keep writing to keep their stories going. But as any writer will tell you, those stories have a life of their own, a kind of creative free-will. And I have found recently that things go better with me when I pray to find some way to get in tune with the unfolding story—with my own and with the larger one, the multitudinous one I am just another piece of.

This is no guarantee, of course, that things won’t go wrong, that even terrible things won’t happen to me at some point when I’m living from this point of view. The way I look at it, all the characters in this story—God’s story—have free will. Speaking to this very same point, the writer Virginia Woolf once commented that nothing can be done about a drunk with a bat. Me, I’m not as fatalistic as all that—perhaps because I haven’t  live through WWI and II in England, as Woolf did.

Nonetheless the drunks with bats are still out there, and the fact is that we often fail, for one reason or another to stop them. In the face of such possibilities, we might do well then to pray we’ll be able to duck in time.

But if it just so happens that we are not able to get out of harm’s way, then perhaps that will be the day we call on God the shepherd, God the healer. For I think that when God appears, she comes to us in the form we most need at that time.

Let me give you one more example. I once wrote a story about a bear who appeared to me at nightfall, silently challenging me to follow her up a mountainside. In the story—after some hesitation—I met her challenge and tore up the mountain, trying to catch up to her.

Now imaging God as manifested in this great mother bear had wonderful poetic implications for me. For this goddess could take me into her den, surrounding me there with the embracing warmth of her massive body. She could lick me down like the needy cub I was, she could send me off in the morning, reborn, my old skin shed.

Of course it was just a story. But it was more than that too. For though I never literally saw that bear, she was nonetheless a vision. And though I can’t tell you if that bear was a spirit guide, or a gift from what the Jungian psychologists call the collective unconscious or even just the result of hundreds of thousands of nerve cells firing in my brain, I can tell you that this divinely imaginary bear helped me change my life at a time when I badly needed to begin anew.

One dervish to another, What was your vision of God’s presence?

You may not be a dervish either—I bet you aren’t—and yet I am suggesting this morning that you let yourself become more aware of the ways God comes to you. Pay attention! Let your own visions, your own metaphors bubble up.  Live with them. Notice how they live in you. Notice how they move.

For metaphors aren’t stagnant; they evolve. And it is through this transformative power that they transform us. So if God is your shepherd, leading you beside still waters, take a few minutes to enter that scene. Smell the water, feel the good ground under your feet, and let yourself be led.

Let yourself be led.

We can none of us know where our stories are going. But we can try to live in them more deeply. So if God is fire, throw yourself in a while. Burn a little. But if God is water, take a swim. Dive in, let your head break the surface. Pull yourself down as far as you can go, keeping your eyes open for sudden sparkles in the submerged trees. Let yourself slide down that mysterious green-dark slope. And trust that even in those times when you feel you are drowning, God—the source of your inspiration—will show you how to breathe.

Amen and blessed be.

 — Hilary Mullins

—————————————–

Hilary Mullins lives in Vermont. She supports her writing habit by teaching college and cleaning windows and has been writing sermons for area churches since 2000. Besides her sermons and essays in NC and Vermont’s Seven Days, she has published a YA novel called The Cat Came Back.