a story i’ll always laugh to…

quirky, smart, and unexpected comedy always gets me. humor where have you gone?

“I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it. We said it that it was good novel but not a great one, that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. We laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.”

Woody Allen

the story i’ll always cry to…

We’re taught about themes and motifs in literature, and about symbolism as that first pair tend to bleed into and dance with the latter term. I learned to locate these in stories, and learned early on that I had a natural knack for locating them, as if I had always been interested in finding symbols, expounding upon them and decoding their meaning. Though I’m still not very good at cracking the New York Times Crossword Puzzle themes.

Later, in a short story writing class, we were told “Don’t.” by our teacher, a bright , young writer and MFA graduate from some university in the Pacific Northwest. He had a way of directing the focus to the movement of the story. Whether taught or implied, I was finally aware that a study of theme and meaning or a focus on symbolism in both reading and writing, sometimes neglects a good story, its movement, its telling, for the sake of its parts. And while parables and fables as much as they teach us are constructed with their meaning in mind, which is fine for parables and fables, but perhaps not for good literature.

But I can’t help it.

Today I feel like am at the bottom of a dogpile, and the voices converging only to weigh on top of me are delivering the same thing, one resounding theme. As often as its repeated and as macabre as it literally is, the book I just read, and the movies I’ve just seen are all talking about the reigning theme of our short and vulnerable lives. Death. But more than just death. Life from death.

It started with Henri Nouwen from his Life of the Beloved:

“Yes, there is such a thing as a good death, We ourselves are responsible for the way we die. We have to choose between clinging to life in such a way that death becomes nothing but a failure, or letting go of life in freedom so that we can be given to others as a source of hope. This is a crucial choice and we have to “work” on that choice every day of our lives. Death does not have to be our final failure, or final defeat in the struggle of life, our unavoidable fate. If our deepest human desire is, indeed, to give ourselves to others, then we can make our death into a final gift. It is a so wonderful to see how fruitful death is when it is a free gift. “

Then The Fountain, a visually tantalizing and at times odd odyssey spanning space and time into a man’s quest to preserve life by curing death and disease, just as his wife is greeting both with a final peace, trusting that life and new creation can actually stem from death.

“Death is the road to awe,” chimes the Mayan mythology repeated through the film.

And finally the movie Stranger Than Fiction, which after the other two became the pebble that broke the damn, and had me bawling near its conclusion.

Simultaneously I wished that it was the story that I could’ve written in the way that songwriters hear songs they know they’ve wanted to write, but knew they couldn’t have written better than the musician who actually did.

“Why did you change the ending?” the professor asks of the tragedy writer who lets her all-too-aware character off of his fate of death, sacrificing a better ending.

“If the man does know he’s going to die and dies anyway, dies willingly, knowing he can stop it…then…I mean…isn’t that the type of man you want to keep alive?”

Is it a great leap to believe that Nouwan’s counsel and the two movies, as clever and as well told as they are, are retellings of that most memorable story already written?

When told well the Gospel with its truth to hear, truth to believe and truth to live by, brings me to tears, for its act of love, its hope for love and for its promise of the open space to live. To live now and to live forever, even through death.

the giveness of rejection.

While it’s fresh in my head, before the pessimist is shot dead:

The working title of my most recent imagined book dawned on me in the shower. It will be called Book of Rejections. Nothing as original as you might imagine. There’s a collection of poems in one of my bags titled Book of My Nights. Though the possessive ‘my’ has absolutely everything to do with the pitiful topic of personal rejection, and everything to do with that whiny and small beginning — meaning my life, my thoughts, in that moment, my moment in the shower, I’m quite certain ‘my’ has nothing to do with it any longer. And I’m nearly certain that the whiny and small source isn’t quite as diminutive as you might imagine it. But you can decide. Indulge me and my recent fascination over an inability to have individual ownership over rejection. It’s a slippery thing just as much as it is a slippery word, because I’m not certain it can be solely possessed, in its very clever essence. Maybe some expert in semantics will straighten me out, but let her or him hear me out first. Rejection itself is both given just as it is received. In as much as mine to give it is your’s to receive. My rejection of you is exactly that. But it is in fact is your rejection that I have given. And so rejection is ours. I reject and you are rejected. I can have my own imagination. But my own rejection? Is that my act of rejecting or is that my receipt of someone’s rejecting of me? It seems in the very process, in the very gift and cleverness of the word, it is too much to be held by one party, it is immediately held by both. Rejection is ours. It is ours in this way and it is ours in that other way, in the way that it is common to us, humanity, accompanying us, all of us, as does breath, as does death.

Breakup. That’s it. Breakup. I should only have to write it and you would understand. And just as it has very direct connotations regarding a relationship’s end, couldn’t it be just as easily any instant whether permanent or temporary where someone is dismissed from someone or something with either direct or inferred disapproval. Has anyone not suffered a breakup? Rejection is ours because it is universal. We know all the best breakup songs. We can sing them, we could’ve — and probably did, write them. So why not a book? A Book of Rejections. Ours. Our self-rejections, as Nouwen so keenly observes as the deepest of threats, and rejections born from rivalry and arrogance, if they are not all the same.

But then there is the rejection of Him, the One wholly other than us, for whom we had no other recourse but to reject, if we believe at all in our participation of that one complete rejection of the innocent victim. Whose rejection is wholly other than our own in that is perhaps shared in one way, but perhaps an end in another, or a beginning, or both. A rejection to end all rejection. A rejection to occupy it, nullify it and swallow it, if you will, in some impossible turn of events. It’s an incomplete thought that because it was experienced and completed by the One, the possibility of it in the end being experienced by us again is eliminated. But however little or however cryptic this chasing thought is, that is exactly what it will remain, or intends to remain, as I believe it right now.

But I wonder if we could somehow give our rejections to one another in that wholly different way. Till they are nullified. Precisely because they are shared…a book of rejections.

new words

intensemeter, disrestful, normaler.

H left Monday morning, in one of those airport scenes.

when you fly a lot, you tend to navigate airports with a cool head. it’s all business. and the novices to the security routines and the zig zaggers who cut you off with their bodies and their carry-ons in tow cease to be people. instead they become mere obstacles.

but if you draw your pace down at any airport you’re sure to witness real people parting with real tears and long goodbyes, or whole welcoming parties standing in great anticipation ready to throw their arms around returning loved ones. they’re airport scenes, and they inspire in even the most callous of us travelers secret wishes to have someone grip you one or even two final times before you have to go… or create a hope that someone you love is waiting for you off the concourse, wanting nothing more then to embrace you and delight in your return.

H left in tears early Monday morning. We hugged and hugged and hugged again. And I waited until she made it through her security check and out beyond my sight.

ever since work has been life. i’m waiting for it to get normaler. but i’ve been waiting on and off for a while.

i can’t stop thinking about a harley sportster i drove by this weekend. me, a harley, goggles and mexico. a quite right combination. or is it combinazione, h? the first and last motorcycle i drove was my dad’s green kawasaki. my motorcycle diary that night could have read: i found the green hornet to be too heavy a machine. decided my huffy suits me just fine.