Melting as it Writes

I think, all of a sudden, I'm afraid to blog. I've been thinking a lot, lately, about writing---what makes good writing, what the point is behind it, my own dedication to it. Plus there was a strange comment I got, from a complete stranger, hinting at the inanity and thoughtlessness of my blog---not the cruel sort of thoughtlessness, just the rambling, stupid, pointless kind. I think I'll save my response to that comment for another day when I'm feeling more snarky. So, today's entry is me just taking a deep breath and trying not to be afraid, trying not to worry about inanity, trying to talk myself into believing my ideas carry any weight.

But, ironically, I'm writing about a topic most people don't think even once about: home canning. Personal preparedness and provident living are a big deal in Utah culture. Many families can food, from peaches to salsa to green beans. I grew up in a canning household. As late summer rolled around, we'd can beans, tomatoes, salsa, and beets. Sometimes we did peaches and, one remarkable  fall, apples with cinnamon for pies. Once we bottled pinto beans and honestly, I don't think any refried beans have lived up to them ever since. These are some of my strongest childhood memories, perhaps because they are so sensory: the kitchen, stifling hot, with its moist air and whistling pressure cooker; sliding the papery skin of the green beans through my hands into jars; piled into bushel baskets, the fresh, dusty tomatoes had a scent that still makes me think of marigolds. And then there was the burning process of making fresh salsa, the onion tears and stinging jalapeno fingertips. I can't say I really enjoyed canning, although I wonder if my older sisters' complaints tainted my experience. What I remember most clearly, even more sharply than those sensory images, is the best part of canning: writing the date on the top of the hot jar lids with a crayon and feeling the oily slip as the crayon melted as it wrote.

Of course, canning as a child taught me many things, perseverance, the value of good, hard work, the way that summer can come sliding out of a jar in the middle of coldest February. But the lessons must have not sunk in too deeply, because, although I make a fairly delicious raspberry-peach freezer jam, I confess: I am not a canner.

I did try. Back before Kendell and I had kids, I dutifully put up green beans and salsa and jams sealed with wax. I bought Mason jars by the boxful; I had lovely white shelves filled with transparent colored jars. I lined up the bottles, admired my work---and closed the storage room door. We never ate a bite.

For years, I've felt thoroughly guilty about my failure as a Home Canning Priestess. I didn't feel I was living up to all that was expected of me. I'd failed, obviously, at self reliance, because I rely on Del Monte for my peaches, S&W for my tomatoes, and Costco for my salsa. It felt like a personal failure, added to the pile of all the other things I don't do so well. In a way, this failure came out of selfishness. Honestly, I'd rather wander through a forest in late summer than swelter in my kitchen. I'd rather read a book than stuff beans in a jar. And, despite what I know about how much healthier freshly-canned food is, I'd really rather just take the lazy route and buy canned goods at the grocery store.

But it also comes from a place of self doubt. I think home canning requires an extraordinary amount of self confidence. An amount I, honestly, don't possess. I don't feel confident in my ability to preserve fruits and vegetables so that no one ends up with botulism in the process. I think everyone would be happier if I could suddenly morph into that Home Canning Priestess, because she is so capable. Not only can she bottle tomatoes, salsa, peaches, pears, apples, and even pinto beans, she does everything else well, too. Really, Home Canning Priestess is only one of her nick names. Her true title is Homemaking Goddess. Oh, if only I could be that woman, the one whose home is always clean and organized, whose laundry is always finished, who doesn't have fingerprints on her walls or a disorganized garage or crumbs in the baby's car seat. She cleans out her garbage can once a week after the garbage truck dumps it, she never serves tater-tot casserole, and home canning? All in a day's work.

But then I taught a lesson, a few months ago, about being self reliant, and this idea stuck with me. President Kimball taught that self reliance is a combination of "the husbanding of our resources, the wise planning of financial matters, full provision for personal health, and adequate preparation for education and career development, giving appropriate attention to home food production and storage as well as the development of emotional resiliency." I encouraged a lot of discussion about that last bit: the development of emotional resiliency. I realized that, for me, self reliance is never going to come from standing in front of a pressure cooker or running tomatoes through a juicer. It will only come when I finally am able to develop that emotional resiliency---part of which, in my mind, has to do with living without the burden of unnecessary guilt.

A few weeks ago, while we reorganized our household, I pulled all those canning bottles out of my storage room. Most of them were empty, anyway, and taking up precious storage space. I ran the thirteen-year-old salsa down the garbage disposal. The beans, too. I gave all my empty jars to a friend down the street who does can. As I did this, I thought about emotional resiliency, how unnecessary guilt has this way of making me emotionally brittle, like a frozen rubber band. Maybe canning isn't only about being self reliant, I thought. Maybe it's also a symbol, a thing that illustrates the kind of person we are. What type of Goddess can I really become? It is starting to be enough for me to just say: I will never be the Homemaking Goddess. The contemporary Demeter is a mask I try to wear, but it will never fit me comfortably. I have to believe that God loves me for who I am and not for how successfully I wear masks. Instead, I found myself coming back, over and over, to that memory of my childhood self, writing in purple crayon that melted as it wrote. Canning will never be a work I am able to lose myself in. But hopefully, the works I can melt into will be enough.

A Quick Quote, A Short Entry

Thinking a lot, this week. About relationships, about creativity, about writing, about thinking. Processing things, but not ready to put them into words yet. So, in the spirit of adding something to my blog, a quick quote from Story of the Day:

There are days I drop words of comfort on myself like falling rain & remember it is enough to be taken care of by myself.

Happy Friday to you!

Impromptu Hike

Last Friday afternoon found me wasting copious amounts of time at summit post, a website with hiking routes that finally gave me the names (and routes) of several places I've wanted to hike. Saturday morning found me, inspired by the website, hastily flinging together two Camelbacks so that Jakey and I could hike Big Baldy. Baldy is a triangular-shaped hill on the south-west face of Timp; when you summit, you reach 8750 in elevation and the view of Timp is supposed to be fabulous.

A storm was threatening, and Jake had a soccer game at 3:00, so we only had a few hours. The first leg of the hike takes you through the Great Blue Gate, a canyon surrounded by towering limestone cliffs:

This canyon was fairly steep, but gorgeous---some of the trees had turned, but not all, so the contrast of red and green made the colors more vivid. The trail takes you along the side of the canyon (rather than the bottom), and as the slope fell away from us on one side, I started to fill up with that euphoric feeling, a sort of vertigo that only comes on a steep mountain angle. Jake especially liked this spot where we climbed over a series of natural stone steps. He was amazed that mountains can set themselves up like stairs!

At the top of the canyon, there's a wide grassy meadow. We stopped there for a breather and some snacks, and then promptly started off on the wrong trail. The meadow is full of trail heads, it seems. The trail we started off with lead us up the side of a hill, into a forest full of red oaks. A mountain biker coming down the trail startled us---in fact, we startled him, too! He told us that the trail we were on would get us, eventually, to the top of Baldy, but it took a circular, much longer route. So we back tracked. Here we are before we turned around (it is HARD to take one of those turn-your-camera-to-face-you pictures with a DSLR!):

Got on the right trail and then turned left where we should have turned right. That next wrong turn just felt like the wrong direction to me, so we turned around after five minutes or so, and found the right trail. Well, sort of. You can take the ridge trail to go right up the side (the right side):

or you can take a longer, less steep route that curls around the side to the back of Baldy, and then summit that way. I wanted to take the ridge route, because of that coming storm and the impending soccer game, but I couldn't ever find the trail. So up we went. The less steep route, however, turned out to be steep enough, and eventually the trail beat us. We were both exhausted and our quads were quivery. Plus it was sprinkling. So we turned around before we reached the summit, determined to come back in the spring and make it to the top!

I'm always surprised, when I hike, at how different things look coming down. What I noticed on our way down was how the hillsides were woven with red, making a texture that is undeniably autumn:

And also this view as we headed back down the last canyon:

For me, there's nothing more peaceful---in a soul-renewing sort of way---than a good long hike in the mountains. Hiking, for me, isn't really about getting to the top of something (although I feel driven, now, to make it to the top of Baldy). It isn't about besting a mountain. It's about being there, in the presence of something so ancient and powerful and realizing how small and insignificant I am, how temporary my problems in the grand vista of the world. It's about being surrounded by something that humans can't create, feeling how vulnerable and valuable it all is. And I'm grateful that Jakey's always willing to come along for the hike and see it all with me. I hope when he's grown and I'm gone, he'll remember hiking with me.

Did Your Cashier Greet You Today?

When it was finally my turn to have my purchases rung up at Walmart today, I focused on something relatively new. On the electronic pad where you sign your name after sliding your credit card, they've added questions. I think my Walmart has had this for about six months or so, but today it caught my attention. "Did your cashier greet you?" was my question today, and the incongruity between that question and my cashier must be why I'm still thinking about this. I mean, who thinks up these questions? Who do they benefit? Does someone analyze the results and it is only through that analysis that they are able to discover that no, the store wasn't clean today? And what idiot wrote the other question in steady rotation this way: "Was your store clean?"(Alas, this is no essay question; your only options are YES, NO, and IGNORE, which is probably lucky for the ten customers waiting in line behind me.) My store? Whose misguided marketing sense included possessive pronouns in that question? I'm sure they use "your" to create a feeling of store loyalty, thus increasing how much I am willing to spend there. Are my shopping habits really that easy to manipulate? Sure, Walmart. You've hooked me with your five-cents-cheaper-per-container Yoplait, with the enormous Propels for only a buck, for keeping your Gerber chicken sticks at .99 when all the other stores upped the price to $1.09. Brilliant. You've got me, but if you ask me about my store one more time, you might just lose me. Because trust me: if this really were my store? It would be run entirely different.

So, for entertainment value and to educate whichever Walmart bigwig is reading my blog (lol), here are some questions you might ask instead (phrased ever-so-conveniently to work with that YES/NO/IGNORE option you've set up):

1. While in the parking lot today, did you thump your steering wheel in frustration at the parking lot design which allows for seven out of approximately 89 million cars to park close enough to the store that hiking gear is not required?
2. While in the lobby of the store and attempting to strap your toddler into the cart, did you gnash your teeth at the electronic Barney ride?
3. Were you able to find a single cart with a functional seat belt?
4. Were you at all bothered by the excruciating slowness of your deli employees?
5. Did you find it frustrating to discover 15 people in line at the fabric cutting table and only one of your employees working there?
6. Were you surprised that when your fabric-cutting employee paged for assistance EIGHT times, no one came to help her?
7. Were you nearly overcome with weeping at the front of your store when you saw that although there are twenty cashier stands, only #7 and #15 were open?
8. Did you begin to think murderous thoughts about the 18 people in front of you in line and/or consider giving your toddler up for adoption during your wait in line?
9. Did your cashier manage to achieve the perfect "friendliness" balance, between out-and-out hostility and fairly creepy interest in your purchases?
10. Was your cashier slower than the deli employees?
11. Do you ever feel dirty and ashamed for shopping at your Walmart, thus supporting conglomerates instead of your local, smaller stores?
12. After shopping at your Walmart today, will you feel entitled to eating all the donuts you bought simply because you survived shopping?

There---don't you think those are more effective questions? That THOSE questions would really help that guy analyzing the answers to make some real changes? What would your questions be?

Book Note: The Burn Journals

Last week, my sister Suzette stopped by my house for a quick visit. I was eating lunch at the kitchen table while Kaleb was napping---eating and reading, one of my favorite combinations. (Don't you think food and books go well together?) She asked what I'd been reading, and as I gave her the plot summary of The Burn Journals, her eyebrows went up. "Why in the world would you want to read a story like that?" she asked. And I didn't really have an answer---why did I feel compelled to read this non-fiction account of a 14-year-old boy, Brent Runyon, who tried to commit suicide by lighting himself on fire?

Now that I've finished it, I have a better understanding of why I went to the effort I did to read this book (asked the librarian to order it for me, then waited patiently on the hold list until it was my turn). It partly has to do with my current adolescent-lit obsession. If I go back to the classroom, I want to be more knowledgeable about books to recommend to my students. It partly has to do with my own history of depression and suicidal impulses in adolescence. It has to do with me wanting to understand more about adolescent boys, since Jake'll be one of those eventually---soon, in fact---and then Nathan will be following on his heels. But I think the thing that pulled me towards this book was the desire to see how Brent survived his experience. It has everything to do with that landscape.

What surprised me about the book was how much I recognized and remembered the emotional flatness that lead up to Brent's suicide attempt. He's been depressed for awhile, I think, and maybe that's what led to the spark of the matter: he lit a gym locker on fire, and the administration knows he did it. This conversation between him and his best friend is so telling:

"What are you going to do?" he says.
"I don't know," I say.
"Are you going to turn yourself in?"
"No."
"You're not?"
"No."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to kill myself."
"You are?"
"Yeah."
"But how will they know that it was you and not me?"
"I don't know.I guess I'll write a note saying I did it."
"You will? Okay."
He gets up and starts to walk away and then calls out, "Hey. Thanks."

Cognitively, it's as if he doesn't fully understand the repercussions; obviously his friend doesn't. He goes through school on that last day giving away some of his treasured things, and he tells a girl at her locker, casually, that he's going to light himself on fire. He tells his brother about the spark of the issue. And then he simply walks into his house, locks himself in the bathroom, and lights himself on fire.

But the suicide attempt, itself, dominate the book. The focus is on how he recuperates, both physically and emotionally, after the experience. He goes from this boy caught in that darkness which is a strange mix of feeling a very painful nothingness, to someone who seems to be fully himself---still sarcastic and funny, still a little bit angry, but accepting of life. "I start playing the drums on the table," he writes, "pounding out a hip-hop beat. OK, so I can use my hands, arms, and legs. I can think. I can walk. I can talk. I'm fifteen. I'm alive. Life's pretty good." He comes to realize one of the keys to fighting depression: looking for and being grateful for what is pretty good in life. In a way, that sounds trite, Pollyanna-esque. But it's also true. Thinking about just those sentences made me realize why I'd wanted to read the book---the landscape you find yourself in after a suicide attempt is a unique place. In some ways, it doesn't matter what the landscape is like, because everything is a surprise: so this is what I get to see because I survived. In other ways, it matters more than anything.

As I read, I kept thinking would I recommend this book to a teenager? A depressed teenager? And of course thinking of myself in my difficult years. On one hand, someone who is bent on hurting himself is a collector of painful ideas, and I wouldn't want to plant this one. On the other hand, the process Brent goes through to find a sense of peace in his life is a powerful one. It's not a movie-like experience, with the one scene in the psychologist's office that's a break through moment. Instead it is a process, something that continues to happen. (The "about the author" note at the back of my copy says that "Brent's hope in writing this book was that . . . he could explain---if only to himself---the hows and whys of his depression and his recovery, and finally put it to rest.") The post-suicide landscape is where he will walk for the rest of his days, but I think the suicide itself becomes like a mountain in the distance that you walk away from; slowly it loses its dominance in the landscape.

on Fantasy

This morning, after Haley'd left for school and Kendell for work, and Nathan was still sleeping, Jake and Kaleb and I ate breakfast together. Over hot, buttery Eggos and syrup, Jake told me he was sad because he finished his book last night. I had to laugh in agreement over this, and I love that he gets it: reading is always a tug; you're anxious to find out how the story ends but you also don't want it to end because, well, then it's over. He told me all about the book, called The Warm Place, as he ate. As I listened to his retelling, I couldn't help but focus more on how happy reading that book had made him, which made me think of a conversation Kendell and I had recently.

I've used my (tiny) bits of free time over the past few days to read a fantasy novel, Beguilement, that Molly recommended on her blog. It was a fast, easy read---a good story, lots of romance; fairly fluffy but in between painting and moving furniture and rearranging rooms, a fluffy read's a good thing. Now, you have to understand that Kendell is not a reader. I've known him since 1991 and in all that time, he's read one novel, Huck Finn, for his English class. He doesn't surf Amazon or enjoy going to the bookstore or think that the library is its own brand of sacred place. He doesn't like books. This used to really bother me, as I couldn't fathom a world without books. For myself I still can't, but I've come to accept that his world view just doesn't including reading, but he's still a decent human being. He just doesn't get the reading thing, and frankly it annoys him to see me tucking into a book if there's something more productive I could be doing (things like laundry and cleaning the kitchen). When he saw that I was reading a fantasy novel, he asked me (we'll skip the rolled eyes and sarcasm, shall we?) why a grown woman would spend time reading something impossible, insinuating, of course, that fantasy is only for children.

While I didn't really defend myself---either you get the reading thing or you don't, and after 16 years I know enough to just avoid that argument---I have been thinking about his question. Why is it that adults are drawn to fantasy? I know lots of people, even some English teachers, who think that adult readers should read adult fiction. Important, difficult books that challenge your perspectives and make you think about issues. You know---real stuff that really happens to real people. The disconnect I see is that every novel is a made-up world with made-up experiences. Why does it matter if the made-up experiences happen in, say, Seattle, or if they happen in Middle Earth? Because any novel, in my mind, is successful at creating something "real" if the characters experience something we can relate to.

I've also been reading, off and on, some essays by Le Guin (I apparently can't get enough of her lately). There is one I've read several times that applies directly to Kendell's question. I think she gets it exactly right when she says that

those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.

Fantasy works for everyone---adults included---because it connects us to the "language of the night," which is, of course, dreams; dreams connect us to the "intuitions and perceptions of the unconscious." Archetype, in other words, and all the power those symbols hold. Of course, you find archetype in non-fantasy works, too, which brings me to the way I'd answer Kendell (if I thought he'd really listen).

Why fantasy? Why not? Sure, fantasy is a little different from mainstream fiction. But placing characters into a made-up world doesn't make the book immature. It makes it powerful because it connects us back to our imaginations and to the primal, darkest parts of ourselves. In some ways, it is easier to see human emotion, catharsis, and knowledge when it's placed against the foreign backdrop of magic and impossible landscapes. If a writer has a truth to tell, and is successful at telling it, the genre only adds to the pleasure of reading the book; it doesn't take away from that truth.

And besides, there's still that pleasure you get from reading, the pleasure so apparent in Jakey this morning. I think part of the reason why adults like fantasy is because it brings us back, a little bit, to how it felt to read as a child. When you could read all afternoon because you'd done your jobs that morning, when you could lose yourself in the story without worrying about all the things we worry about now. Which is why, despite Kendell's lack of understanding, I'll still continue reading fantasy.

I'm Exhausted

In the past week we have:

• Painted two bedrooms (nearly all white, save for one blue wall in the boys' room. The guy in the paint section at Home Depot taught us The Official Painting Secret for getting a clean line where color meets white, and I must say, it looks gorgeous.)
• Painted the master bath (including the ceiling, which was the arduous task that fell to me while Kendell painted that blue wall; I've been begging for shoulder massages ever since.)
• Installed a new light fixture in the bathroom (begone, ye old and ugly wooden bar light! Welcome, ye new and gorgeous antique nickel swirly light!)
• Had a garage sale (some of my baby items went to very good homes, I am happy to say; others will be going to my niece's home in a few weeks. If you know me you know I was alternately dripping tears and pressing on stoically while this shedding of baby items went down.)
• Moved Jake into the old computer room, moved Kaleb into Nathan's room, moved the computer room into Kaleb's old room (well...I'm still working on that last move; I'm surrounded by tottering towers of scrapbooking stuff as I type.)
• Had the carpets cleaned (which in our house translates into moving every single piece of furniture out of the carpeted rooms and into the kitchen---does everyone do that? I've carried two beds, three dressers, two bookshelves, three end tables, and two fat chairs down the hall twice, and I am utterly tired of moving things. Last night, my kitchen looked like this: 
• Cleaned out the linen closet (although this happened on a bad day, when I was completely out of energy and wanted to do nothing but sit on my bed eating ice cream and watching America's Next Top Model reruns, so that little project was more like "start cleaning out linen closet, then get overwhelmed by all the non-linen-y stuff in it, and just shove everything back in." Alas, there were no ANTM reruns on, but there was ice cream in the fridge.)
• Dejunked closets, bookshelves, under-the-bed, cupboards, and drawers (oh, and let's not forget the tiny space between the arms and the seats of those fat chairs, a space I had previously not known existed and so had never cleaned since I got the chairs in 1997-ish. Imagine my surprise when we lifted one of them and it jingled! I found pencils, pens, puzzle pieces, innumerable candy wrappers, small Legos, one panda, one monkey, one shark tooth, and 37 cents. Plus I bruised my hand squeezing it into that small space.)
• Emptied the Dyson seven times (since I've vacuumed every nook, cranny, corner and shelf in this entire house.)
• Argued at least 27 times (Kendell and I literally always have different opinions about decorating and/or arranging furniture, and don't get me started on the disparity of our tastes in art, please, or you'll understand why in our entire house we have a grand total of two framed pictures.)
• Put the crib away (remember that weepy/stoic thing? Oh, yes. I can hardly stand it, so I'm standing it by not thinking about it much.)
• Started Kaleb getting used to sleeping in his big boy bed in the room he shares with Nathan (last night was his first night, and Nathan told me this morning that Kaleb kept saying, "are you OK, Nathan?" which is the sweetest way of saying "I'm fairly freaked out about all the changes happening in my usually-fairly-stable world but to cover it all up I'm going to check up on you.)
• Laundered every single stitch of bedding in this entire house (of course I know this opens me up to the threat of the stomach flu! I am already preparing.)
• Discovered that under someone's bed is a great place to store the extra leaf for our kitchen table (when I could have saved myself the agony of the leaf just hanging out in the corner of the old office.)
• Finally put away the Christmas tree (don't get any weird ideas---it was in its box; I'm not so crazy that I keep my tree up all year! We got a new tree last Christmas but I never managed to take the other one to D.I., so the closet space for Christmas trees was woefully lacking.)
• Got rid of about 47 gagillion pounds of garbage and recycled tons of paper (because I spent one entire afternoon wading through twelve years of check carbons.)

Did I mention I'm tired? I still have a ton left to do---need to put the boys' bookshelves back together, reorganize the storage room (which has been temporarily dubbed "that damned stuff-sack" by Kendell), try to figure out how to organize my scrapbooking stuff (note to self: when moving the scrapbooking stuff, it is best to do it when one's husband is out of the house, as moving it tends to alert him to how much stuff there really is), get Kendell to hang up the Pottery Barn shelving thingabobby I bought way back in January for an amazing clearance price, figure out a new way to store/sort/organize magazines, make a trip to Target to buy a few plastic bins and, while I'm at it, I've got a wild hair to sort through all the toys in the toy room, because with all this reorganization, I still haven't found the missing Cars cars---but Doc, new Mater, yellow Ramone, and Boost have to be somewhere, right?

At least I do know they're not shoved into the crack in the front-room chairs.

Blog Entry in Three Words:

I HATE PAINTING.

Fall Arrives

Our summer heat has lingered, even though the mountains are turning red; at 5:23 p.m. yesterday, it was 99 degrees. "I wish it would cool off," Haley told me, "so I could wear my new jacket." I'm ready, too, for cooler days, for sweatshirt weather. For the way the sky opens up as my trees drop leaves, for putting the outdoors to bed. For autumn hikes.

Yesterday, I think fall finally arrived. Wind blew it in, huge gusts that knocked over garbage cans and tore branches from trees. 7:15 p.m. found us outside in the wind storm that reminded me of ocean waves, relentless and totally uncontrollable, cutting a few branches from one of our trees because they were banging on a window. Holding the ladder for Kendell, I watched the trees move in the wind. They are wild, flexible giants, rooted in their spots but wanting to fly. I thought I'd take some photos, but just as I went inside for my camera, a few raindrops fell, and then the torrent came. You could see it swooping down our street; it hit us like a wave, fierce pebbles of water.

The power went out, and we spent the rest of the night by candlelight, eating cheese-and-cracker sandwiches for dinner and watching the lightning. We slept with the windows open, something we never do, breathing in that scent of rain and clean air which is my favorite fragrance. To me, that scent is fruit for the psyche, refreshing and healthy, a natural sort of peacefulness. I woke at 2:19 to find my face wet; it was raining in waves again, enough to get me wet through the window screen.

This morning, Haley wore her new jacket to school, finally. There are bits of trees all over our street. Jake found a hummingbird in the garage, flying frantically at the closed window; it landed over and over again on his outstretched hands, exhausted, but would flit away as soon as he tried to walk. Finally I helped him cup his hands gently over the bird, and he walked outside, under the trees. The bird hesitated for a moment and then sprinted away, back to the cosmos where all the other hummingbirds hang. Jake was exhilarated; he declared it a better story than the one about his stitches to write about during Writing Time at school today. The morning routine had its usual bumps, searches for socks and backpacks and a new band aid or two, bumps that feel like part of the routine already.

I think the wind blew summer away, and the rain washed all the heat from the air, and fall is finally here.

Book Note: Gifts and Voices

Back when I was teaching, I bought a lot of books. I think I had a crate coming from Amazon about twice a month. I ordered collections of essays, of short stories, of poetry, books about teaching, books about writing, books about teaching writing. And novels---novels I thought my 10th and 12th graders would relate to, so that on the off chance someone asked me what to read, I'd be ready to recommend something good. Of course, when your life is so swallowed up by a job, there's not much time for reading, so most of these books are still in my to-be-read-soon pile (actually, they're in two enormous to-be-read-soon boxes). A few months ago, I pulled a couple of books from the boxes; one I'd forgotten about completely, Ursula K. Le Guin's Gifts. Le Guin is one of my favorite writers; I like her because while she writes fantasy, there's nothing smarmy or maudlin or overwritten about her work. Her writing is often called "spare;" she achieves emotional connections without using a lot of emotional words.

Once I finally started reading it (two years after I'd bought it!), I thoroughly enjoyed it. The premise of the book (which is the first in a series about a civilization bumped up between an ocean and a desert): a small village in the mountains, peopled by families who each have a genetic "gift;" one family can communicate with animals, for example; another can maim people with a glance. The protagonist's family's gift is the power to unmake, or turn an object into a pile of nothing. Orrec (the protagonist) struggles with discovering his unmaking power, which for him seems to be an all-or-nothing kind of thing, learning in the end the true nature of his power. One of the reviews of Gifts says that the novel is "a brilliant exploration of the power and responsibility of gifts," which is a fairly inane declaration. I think it's a brilliant exploration of the process of discovering a true self, the identity which, when you finally recognize and accept, is the one that will be most fulfilling. I also like what the book does with the process of making stories; in a way it is a sort of meta fictional novel. One of my favorite quotes:

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. . . . Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.

I think I respond to that so strongly because I've often thought---why can't life be like a novel? Why can't it feel like there is a point we're working towards, a time of change or defining experience? It is only when we look backwards at our lives that we are able to see the plot; there have been many times I'd like to be able to flip to the end of the "book" to see how it all turns out because the experiencing of it, surrounded in uncertainty, is occasionally more than I can deal with sanely. Like that quote (which has lingered at the edge of my thought since I underlined it in my book), Gifts will stay with you and make you think.

As will Voices, the second book in the series. Orrec plays a key role in this book, but he's not the main protagonist; that is Memer, an orphan who lives with a crippled man in a society overtaken by the Alds, foreigners who believe that books, written words, and reading are physical manifestations of evil. The crippled man Memer lives with is called the Waylord; he used to hold a powerful position in the society, before the invaders came, and the home where he lived---Oracle House---was once an important building, a combination of public library and university. Now, all the remaining books, the ones not destroyed by the Alds, are hidden there, and only Memer and the Waylord know how to enter the room and read.

I think I liked this book even better than Gifts, because it presents such intriguing ideas. To live in a society where reading is forbidden seems unbearable to me, more cruel, in a way, than the other indignities the people suffer. Taking away books is, in essence, taking away history and creativity, leaving a much smaller society. There is also the concept of books as an evil, which is something that does happen in our world---think about the banned books list, or writers in other countries who are exiled or executed for their writing, or the judgment people place on certain books, the close-mindedness that can't see past such "flaws" as swearing or intimacy in a book and thus fails to see the goodness in it.

In the end of the novel (without giving much of the plot away!), we discover that for this society, books aren't only stories written down; they are literally a place for discovering how to live. In a less literal sense, I find that true of many books; I think one of the powers of reading is that it lets you see possibilities and alternatives and by seeing them, you are made more aware of outlooks different from your own. That awareness helps you, I think, become a better and more intelligent person. Even fantasy can do this; as Memer explains after reading a fantasy in her forbidden library, "I knew the Tales were stories not history, but they gave me truths I needed and wanted: about courage, friendship, loyalty to the death." Without books, or perspectives become more narrowed, until we are only inside our own heads. I like the multiplicities reading gives me.

A few other quotes I liked:

"'Heathen' is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know."

"If he can write, and read, and follow his own heart in silence, he's a happy man."

"I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. So those words---love, honor, freedom---are degraded from their true sense. Then people may come to hold them in contempt as meaningless, and poets must struggle to give them back their truth."

"The oracle was not giving orders but just the opposite: inviting thought. Asking us to bring thought to mystery."

My copy of Voices, which is really the library's copy, is overdue by a week (things like soccer games and hives and dog bites and dates kept getting in the way of returning the books). But it's definitely worth the .70 fine. Honestly? The next time I buy something from Amazon, it'll find its way into my cart. Which might be soon, since Powers, the third book in the series, all 512 pages of it, started shipping just last Saturday.