Estelle Ana Baca

Category: Prose

Catch-all category for short stories, etc.

  • More or less…

    As of today, April 15th, there are only forty days left to May 25th, my due date, or the metric by which all my medical caregivers concur that my daughter will be fully developed and ready to take her first independent breath… give or take a few days. We can only be so precise when it comes to the business of babies, in which all processes seem to be dictated by a brand of quantum uncertainty, leading me to idly muse if quantum uncertainty applies macrocosmically to all tiny, promising things.

    Forty days—and more specifically, forty days and nights—is a curious phrase and is actually not meant to be taken literally. The number forty has various mystical connotations in Semitic cultures, which is why it appears so frequently within texts originating from the Middle East. It’s a number that indicates significant substance when applied to mundane, concrete things, for its true connotation is meant to be applied symbolically so that it’s a kin of own English idiom a lot. If you doubt this, you’ve never been the only adult in a room with about forty teenagers, or had to scale wall that’s about forty feet tall, or had to figure out how you could possibly transport an order of approximately forty customized coffees from Starbucks. So when you’re reading The Arabian Nights—all 1,001 of them, a larger numerical idiom from the culture that gave us Algebra—Ali Baba didn’t cross forty thieves, but he crossed a lot of them, which most would agree is more than he would have ever wanted after him and far more than enough to be very, very worried about his health.

    What I can report about my own health is that while I have received clean marks from all the midwives, I have indeed reached the point in my pregnancy in which I’m weary of the nipping exhaustion, the utter failure of sophisticated mental and physical dexterity, the inability to breathe deeply, the persistent ache that tends to tap you on the shoulder when your attentions have been drawn to another ache somewhere on your person. Part of me is ready to reclaim my body as my own, but on the other hand, I am so grateful for and in love with all the biological cues my daughter gives me regularly—from peanut butter cravings to raging thirst—that I will miss them dearly when I can’t meet her needs telepathically and so immediately.

    Nevertheless, forty days remain until that magical date arrives. Yet as I have no idea when my body and my daughter’s body will work together to make her birth possible, forty days to me is as nebulous as the Semitic idiom. However, I cannot delude myself into thinking that I have a lot of time between now and then.

    Until later, whenever that is.

    If you’d like to read more about the symbolism behind forty, click here.

    ♥ EAB

    P.S. For those of you who don’t have a looming date ahead, that May 25th is forty days off also means that there are thirty-eight days left until Memorial Day/Bank Holiday weekend in the US and UK. It’s also exactly forty-three days to Manhattanhenge, and not much longer to many other summery things. Now that you have been warned, you have ample time to wash those white pants you’ve been storing in the closet since September. Cheers!

  • (a sunflower by any other name)

    I’m getting married in October, and among the millions of decisions I have to make between now and the hour of my wedding, I also have to make a decision about whether to change my name.

    ::siiiiiigh::

    I’m a self-identifying feminist—and a vitriol-spitting, fire-breathing one of late, given this Hobby Lobby disgrace—and I have never wanted to change my name. It was what I was born with, I’ve carried it around with me for almost thirty-eight years, and it suits me: Estelle Ana Baca.

    I already navigate a steady stream of appellation ambiguity. First of all, my name at birth was Estelle Anne Baca, but my dad wanted to call me Ana, thus initiating the childhood ritual of correcting everyone who saw my legal name and addressed me by names that seemed too mature (Estelle) and too pristine (Anne) for my childhood spirit (Ana). Consequently, everyone I met before I reached age 21 knows me as Ana.

    When I moved to New York at 21, I wondered what it would be like if I stopped correcting everyone when they inspected my IDs. I felt like a grown woman, which meant I finally felt powerful enough to carry around the weight of an unusual, old name, and I started introducing myself to people as Estelle. And always Estelle, never Stella—my aunt’s variant, plus I grooooan at Streetcar exhortations—and never Estella—that Dickensian form belonged to my grandmother and not me. Just Estelle, as Sartre preferred it.

    Therefore, in most circumstances I cling to my full name as I have come to embrace it: Estelle Ana Baca. I identify as Estelle and as Ana. I answer to both. I refer to myself as both, and while I really have no preference, I do mandate that if given a choice when meeting me, that acquaintances subsequently refer to me as the name with which I introduced myself. See, Ana-people switching to Estelle-people makes it too tough for me to keep straight, and I look like an idiot when it looks like I don’t know my own name.

    I’ve never been the kind of woman who idly perused wedding magazines to find the perfect dress before I even had landed the perfect man, or who knew the carat size of the diamond she was going to have on her engagement ring—and for the record, J gave me a pale green sapphire—and so the thought of testing out my name with someone else’s surname appended to Estelle Ana always sounded absurd. My name is my name. Even when faced with the same situation years ago, I never changed my name. Why would I?

    Life, however, has a sense of humor, and in the way that some people port around with them an air of nonchalance or a rapier-sharp wit, I have a knack for attracting unusual circumstances that require verbose explanations whenever possible. My husband-to-be’s surname is C de Baca, which is a contraction of Cabeza de Baca, meaning head of the cow. (And yes, you’ve teased it out correctly, my surname means cow in old Spanish.) Unless you’re from New Mexico, you’ve probably never heard of such a name. Many assume that the C is a middle initial and incorrectly prune it down to de Baca, which is as much of misnomer as referring to him as my leaner, meaner, all-inclusive-eyeballs-to-entrails-of-the-whole-cow Baca. He is constantly and ever explaining his name to anyone and everyone who isn’t from New Mexico.

    Since we started dating, people outside of our home state of New Mexico started wondering if we were already married—Wow, that was quick!—or if we were related—Game of Thrones is fiction, thank you!—based upon the similarity of our surnames. In fact, many remarked, “At least you don’t have to change your name if you two get married!”

    But here we are, and there is a decision to be made because my fiancé would really prefer it if I took his name after we’re married.

    JMC: Why be the whole cow when you can be just the head?
    EAB: But if it’s got only the head, it’s got no heart. And no spine and no guts and no asshole, and they’re important, too.

    Yes, our conversations have actually included the above dialogue in our negotiation. Part of it is silliness, but it’s also because we’re dealing with an all-or-nothing type situation. Given the nature of our similar surnames, it’s hard to find a compromise. We can’t really hyphenate. In fact, utilizing traditional Spanish naming customs, my surname becomes a curiously palindromic Baca (Sánchez) de C de Baca, and any future offspring’s apellidos are C de Baca Baca, which sounds undoubtedly redundant. I have a hard enough time with my first names that introducing a stutter feels masochistic. I’ve suggested that perhaps we both change our names to de Baca, which my husband-to-be perceives as a genealogic decapitation.

    I’ve asked a few women who changed their name after marriage, and the answer is typically rooted in instilling a sense of family unity. My bridesmaid of honor recounted that her chain of reason for taking her husband’s surname culminated in the notion that she wanted for them to have a common appellation, like a team name, that they both could get behind. I can’t argue with that at all. It makes sense to me to have a family name. I fully promote the idea of our children taking their father’s full surname regardless of my own surname.

    From my own perspective, the sense of family unity is already built-in when given the widespread assumption afforded by our similar surnames, but my groom doesn’t see it that way. His name is frequently mutilated when folks aim for consistency and opt for Baca over C de Baca. Just as I am sensitive to the fact that my name is my name as it is, and stripping me of Ana is just as insufferable as is stripping me of Estelle, so I can see why one might lose their head over such repeated confusion.

    As for my issues with changing my name, most of them are rooted in the notion that I disagree with the assumption that I should be the only one who should consider it. We live in a society that is patently patriarchal despite our efforts, so of course it still falls upon the purported mutability of women to alter their monograms after marriage. I’ve never really been warm to the idea of hyphenation because they generally feel clunky, and many of the women of my generation who grew up with hyphenated names were quick to dispose of them when they got married. And as for clunky names, one of the reasons I am still unconvinced about changing my name is that Estelle Ana C de Baca has so many pieces that it reads more like an encoded pentatonic musical scale than a monogram.

    Therefore, dear friends, what does one do? Your advice is appreciated. Do I hold fast to my convictions, or do I sentence myself to still more explanation when it comes to the nature of my name? What would you do if you were in my shoes?

    UPDATE! July 8, 2014, 10:52 am EDT

    Since I wrote this yesterday and opened it up to discussion here and on Facebook, I’ve gathered some fantastic great perspectives from married (and sometimes divorced) friends who have had to make a choice. In writing about it and discussing it, I’ve come to realize that it’s not so much my surname that I’m connected to but more my given names than anything else, and opting for one or the other to complement a complicated surname is what gives me pause. No matter how you look at it, the pentagonal, agglutinating structure of EACdb is a mouthful, esp. when I’ve embraced the wobbly simplicity of EAB over the last thirty-eight years.

    This thread also sparked a few private conversations in regard to family legacy. Baca isn’t a common name, but C de Baca doesn’t even register in databases on account of its rarity. That in itself is a huge argument for its preservation and promotion.

    Yet, while it doesn’t seem like a big deal to just add C de to my existing surname, it is. Think of how different theism becomes when you add the a- and transform it into atheism.

    Nevertheless, transformation isn’t something to be feared if it yields an improvement.

    …right?

  • Introits

    A great while ago, I had the great honor of lecturing about the introit at an undergraduate fiction seminar. As I am presently distracting myself from what I ought to be doing, this is a quick summary of what I spoke about.

    For those not in the know with one of the technical terms for it, the introit of a novel is the opening line or paragraph. It’s where an author presents his/her most outstanding programming code. We remember the good ones are because they contain everything you need to know about comes next in the narrative. Some are burned into cultural consciousness because they are so effective, like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “Call me Ishmael,” remains immortal, and still another golden oldie is “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

    Let’s examine a few examples of an effective introit.

    Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

    Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

    What makes it work?
    1. We know that this is going to be a first-person narrative, and, more importantly, that he (or she!) is an intelligent and articulate narrator. Expect gymnastic and playful prose.
    2. We know that whoever Lolita is, he was obsessed with her, and therefore might not be a reliable narrator. When he says he loves her, watch out.
    3. Further to this, when he refers to her as his sin, we know that there is something illicit about this relationship that the narrator has with Lolita. This is an invitation to read on in order to find out why.

    Virginia Woolf, Orlando

    He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

    1. Why would we doubt his sex, given the use of the masculine pronoun, unless we were told that there was something questionable about it? Stay tuned for an explanation about why gender roles can be mutable.
    2. The rest of the sentence lends itself to the fantastic and an antiquated sense of the exotic, and the narrative ahead doesn’t disappoint.

    Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

    In later years, holding forth to an interview or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal.

    1. We know that Sam Clay created comic books, is respected and famous, is from Brooklyn and always had a taste for larger than life heroes.
    2. The use of more elevated sentence structure, as well as the citation of Angoulême, can indicate that the narrator wants for the reader to take comic books and things like larger-than-life heroes seriously. You could also argue that the narrator is deliberately setting up a pastiche of elevated concepts and wants to bring them down to a more universally accessible level.

    What are some introits that could be better?

    Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

    “You’ve got to be kidding me,” the bouncer said, folding his arms across his massive chest. He stared down at the boy in the red zip-up jacket and shook his shaved head. “You can’t bring that thing in here.”

    The problem is that it lacks specificity. There’s no indication as to where the story is going to go, or even what kind of story it is. It could be set anywhere, and it could be any manner of story ahead of you. It’s just description of the characters, and it’s entirely superficial.

    How could you revise this? Looking at the rest of the page, here’s something more effective.

    “I’ve told you a thousand times, kid. No stakes allowed.” The bouncer turned away and distractedly minded the sparse stubble on his balding head. He spat and added, “I don’t give a damn if it’s part of your costume.”

    Now you know 1. there’s a kid trying to get into a bar; 2. it might be Halloween; 3. the bouncer’s completely uninterested, even contemptuous of the kid; 4. the kid is always trying to get into this bar with wooden stakes; and 5. the kid is dressed like a vampire hunter. We know that some kind of paranormal creatures will be involved, so keep reading for that.

    George P. Pelecanos, The Double

    Tom Petersen sat tall behind his desk. He wore tailored jeans, zippered boots, an aquamarine Ben Sherman shirt, and an aquamarine tie bearing large white polka dots. His blond hair was carefully disheveled. His hands were folded in his lap.

    While this one superficially seems specific, it really isn’t. There are a lot of adjectives — which, to be fair, is evocative of noir crime fiction — but there’s no indication as to why they’re necessary. It’s essentially ineffective because it lacks momentum and a distinct voice, and it doesn’t properly prepare the reader for what comes next. Perhaps if there were something in the last sentence to indicate why his hands were folded in his lap — such as “His hands were folded in his lap, waiting.” or “He struggled to keep his hands folded in his lap.” — then we’d have somewhere to go.

    But isn’t that just noir? Here’s an effective counterexample.

    Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

    Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

    The payoff in this one comes in the last line of the paragraph: He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. This provides narrative momentum because we know that, whoever Samuel Spade is, his semblance to the Prince of Darkness will be key. Perfect noir set up, where no one is innocent.

    So — how do you construct one?

    Every writer will develop his/her own process for finding the right introit, but usually it comes after the completion of a first draft. There are many reasons for this, but a couple would be that 1. you need to have a solid, consistent (or purposely inconsistent) voice ready to put to the page, and 2. you need to have the narrative assembled, so that you can encode clues within your introit.

    The beginning is your hook, and regardless of how many wicked, quotable lines you throw into the meat of your text, the reader will never get to them if you don’t provide them with clues of what to expect. We live in a world in which there are more and more books published every year, and you can’t afford to let a lackluster introit put readers off your manuscript. I’ll admit that when I see a poorly constructed introit, I seldom continue reading on because I know that it’s highly unlikely that I’ll see any manner of skill in the pages that follow.

    I struggle with introits. I still persecute myself regularly for every last opening I’ve created because I still feel they could be better and sharper. Should I ever get to the point in which I feel I’ve got a solid grasp it in my own work, I’ll let you know.

    But how will you know when you have it? Because once you’ve written it, you probably won’t want to stop yourself from reading what comes next.

    For further reading, Stephen King recently spoke with Joe Fassler about his favorites in an article that appeared in The Atlantic. It’s a highly recommended master class on the introit.

    ♥ EAB

  • Philanthropist.

    I might not get around to it later, so before I get carried off by the whirlwind that’s the end of December, may all the yous out there have a happy and healthy holiday, whatever you celebrate. And Happy 2014!

    On to business: anyone who’s had an extended conversation with me about fiction writing knows that short stories aren’t my preferred medium, as long form fiction and short form poetry are my preferred weapons of choice. That does not mean, however, that I haven’t written them here or there. Not long before I made the transition (transformation?) from writer of literary fiction to writer of genre fiction, I’d started amassing material for a collection of short stories. (It was the summer of ’09, I think.) The concept I’d had in mind wasn’t engaging enough for me to stick with it, but I did knock out a few stories that were useful literary exercises. I’m presently reconsidering the medium, given that two totally unrelated friends in the last week have sent me their short stories for review. Go figure. 

    Without further pomp or circumstance, here’s one of those exercises. I call it

    “Philanthropist.”

    Oceanus Procellarum:

    I. (Mare Nubium)

    “Dad…what’s a philanthropist?”

    II. (Mare Nectaris)

    She had completely forgotten about the map until the smell pulls the memory—all of it—out of an old file cabinet in her mind.  She mimics the action within, and with her thumb and forefinger, she pinches the corner of the map and eases it from a casing that isn’t its contemporary, taking care not to drag the edges against the stiffness of the manila envelope.

    She spreads the map out on the desk, pushing some of the stray papers out of the way and onto the floor.  A passing impulse to pick them up seizes her, but she ignores it and dives, back straight and toes pointed.

    III. (Mare Vaporum)

    “It’s my birthday, that’s why,” Tessie says, her reason trumping his protest.

    “Fine.”  Lino agrees grudgingly, and he scoots over to the passenger side of the truck.  “But I get to wear the motorcycle helmet.  You can wear Dad’s helmet.”

    “Fine.”  Tessie tightens the chinstrap of the helmet and then climbs into the driver’s side of the truck.  She checks her watch and says, “Blastoff in t-minus five minutes and counting down.  Lieutenant Colonel Lino, are all your systems go?”

    Lino fiddles with the radio, adjusting the dials with great concentration. “Aye, Captain Tessie.”

    Tessie fastens her seatbelt and declares, “I’m not a Captain.  I outrank you if I’m flying the ship.”

    “You outrank me if you’re in the Navy, retard.”

    “I’m gonna tell Dad you called me a retard on my birthday.”

    “Whatever, retard.  Not like a girl could fly a spaceship anyway.”

    “Girls can too fly spaceships.”

    “Not in this galaxy, retard.”

    Tessie feels the tension rising in her neck as she struggles with angry tears.  She knows Lino won’t let her live it down if she starts crying.

    IV. (Mare Tranquillitatis)

    Mrs. Fleming looks up from her lunch and calls for attention over the hum of the children in the classroom.  “Tessie?  Are you ready for your Show and Tell?”

    Tessie smiles widely and nods.

    “Please come front and center then.”  Tessie stands and walks slowly to the front of the classroom.  She catches Angie’s eyes as she passes her desk, and Angie gives her a bright grin for encouragement.  “Boys and girls, you need to give your full attention to Tessie.”

    Tessie doesn’t like standing and talking in front of the class, so she decides to look right at Angie and pretend like she’s just talking to her and Mrs. Fleming.

    “What did you bring in?”

    “It’s a rock.  It’s…it’s my favorite rock in the whole wide world.”

    “Why is it your favorite?”  Mrs. Fleming is nice, and her gentle calm eases Tessie into explaining.

    “I found it on my grandpa’s property.  My brother Lino and I were playing bakery, and I found this one.  I think it looks kinda like one of those donuts with strawberry filling on the inside, and after we stopped playing bakery with it, I put it in the rock tumbler at Grandpa’s house to get all shiny.”  Tessie proudly holds it up for the class to see.  The kids in the front of the class strain to look at it.

    “Would you like to pass it around so the other boys and girls can see it?”

    Tessie looks right at Bobby, who looks like he wants to chuck the rock right out the window.  She sets her gaze to Angie, who nods furiously from her desk.  Tessie looks to Bobby again, and then she decides to hand it over to Marcos on the other side of the room to pass it around first.

    Marcos holds up the rock to the afternoon light coming through the windows, appreciating the deep red vein of sediment separating the quartz on either side of the rock.  “It does kinda look like a donut!  Or maybe a burger,” he says aloud.  Behind him, Ricky pokes him in the back and says, “Don’t hog it!  Lemme see it!”

    Mrs. Fleming says, “Can you tell us more about your rock?”

    Tessie watches Ricky hold it up to the light.  “When I grow up, I’m going to be an astronaut and go to the Moon.  And when I come home from the Moon with a real moonrock from the Sea of Tranquillity, I’m going to put it in my mansion right next to my favorite rock.”

    V. (Mare Humorum)

    “Stop calling me a retard, you asshole!”

    Lino’s eyes widen, and he stifles a triumphant chuckle.  “I’m so telling Mom you called me an asshole, RETARD!”

    “Go ahead and tell Mom!  You know she’ll be too tired to do anything!”

    “Then I’ll tell Dad.”

    Tessie wants to stop the tears, but she can’t.  “Why are you being so mean to me on my birthday?”

    Lino’s face betrays his internal division: part of him wants to keep needling her, but the greater part has enough sympathy for her on her birthday.  “I’m sorry, ok?  Can we just go back to playing spaceship?”

    Tessie’s red, hurt eyes stare through him.

    Lino says, “I’m really sorry.  You can be Admiral of the Galaxy if you want.  Ok Admiral Tessie?”

    Tessie fiddles with the seatbelt, making sure it’s taut and prepared for spaceflight.

    VI.  (Mare Foecunditatis)

    Tessie nervously eyes all the other children leaving the classroom.  She’s certain that she did something wrong—Mrs. Fleming wouldn’t have asked her to stay after school otherwise—but she can’t think of what she could have done.  She cleaned up all the paper from her collage and even helped Krissy clean up her share, too.  She helped put all the bottles of rubber cement back in the cupboard and even took a note to Mrs. Orozco across the hall.  She just can’t put her finger on what she could have done wrong.

    “Are you ok, Tessie?  You look really upset.”  Mrs. Fleming rummages through a box, pulling out a map that she unfolds on the table at the front of the room.

    “I just don’t know what I did wrong to stay after school.  Whatever I did, I’m sorry I did it, even though I didn’t know what I did.”

    “Oh, Tessie!  I’m sorry!  You didn’t do anything wrong.  You’re always so well-behaved.  I just wanted to give you something.  Come here and take a look.”

    Tessie picks up her bookbag and walks to Mrs. Fleming.  Her present is stretched out across the most of the table.

    “Do you know what this is?” Mrs. Fleming asks.

    Tessie looks to the legend on the map, and it reads The Moon.  “It’s a moon map, right?”

    “It is!  I’m throwing out a bunch of old things, and I thought you might like to have it.”

    Staying after class has never been better, Tessie thinks.  “Really?  I can have it?”

    “Yes you can!  Can you find the Sea of Tranquillity on it?”

    Tessie scans the darker portions of the map, and she finds it’s there, one of the darker patches near the middle of the map.  “Yes!  It’s right there!”

    “You’ll need this map for when you get to the Moon.  So if you’re stuck in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity, you can sail back to the Sea of Fertility through this strait right here.”

    “It’s not really a sea, Mrs. Fleming.  It’s just a different color of sand.”

    Mrs. Fleming chuckles and says, “No, it’s not.”  She looks a little embarrassed for a moment.  “Sorry.  You’re absolutely right about that.”

    VII.  (Mare Imbrium)

    Tessie checks her watch and looks at the second hand tick past the twelve.  “T-minus one-minute to blastoff.  All systems looking good, Lieutenant Colonel Lino?”

    “Aye, Admiral Tessie.”

    “And our navigation systems?”

    “Oh no!  I forgot the map!”  Lino looks disgusted with himself.  “I’ll run inside and get it.”  Lino pulls off his helmet and tosses it on the floor to run inside.

    Tessie shouts after Lino, as he runs back into the house.  “Hurry Lieutenant Colonel Lino!  If we have to delay the blastoff, it’ll all be on your head!”

    Tessie stares at the dials of her dad’s pickup truck, and she mentally assigns a task to each of the dials.  The odometer becomes the distance from Earth, and the speedometer is rechristened the altimeter.  She meditates on the fuel gauge and decides that its function should remain the same.

    Lino jumps back in the truck.  “Navigation systems in place, Cap—I mean—Admiral Tessie.”

    “Glad you could join us, Lieutenant Colonel Lino.”  Tessie looks at her watch.  “Blastoff in t-minus…ten…  Nine…  Eight…  Seven…”

    Tessie’s excitement seems to be propelling her forward.  She starts to wonder if this is what spaceflight is really like.  She’s even able to imagine the outside moving outside the truck.

    “Six…  Five…  Four… ”

    Tessie pauses for a moment.  Something’s wrong.  A flash in her peripheral vision agrees with the feeling that something’s wrong.

    “TESSIE!!!  WE’RE MOVING!!!”

    The truck is moving.  It’s slowly picking up speed as it follows the natural decline of the street.

    Tessie panics astheworldstartswhizzingpast.  She screams.

    “PUT ON THE BRAKE!!!” Lino screams.

    Tessie pulls herself back to look at Lino and hear his reason.  She sinks down in the seat, trying to push on the brake with both of her feet, but her legs won’t reach.  They’re too short, and she’s too small.  “I CAN’T REACH!!!”

    “PUT ON THE EMERGENCY BRAKE!!!”

    The neighbor’s truck at the bottom of the hill grows closer and closer.

    Tessie finds the emergency brake, but she can’t put her foot on it with enough pressure to make it work.  It’s just as difficult a pedal as the regular brake.

    She doesn’t see it happen.  She just hears a gigantic, loud crash.

    VIII. (Mare Crisium)

    There’s no birthday cake.  There probably won’t be any at all.  Dad said they were going for birthday ice cream instead of birthday cake after dinner, but that was hours ago.

    Tessie decides to risk opening the door to see what Dad’s doing.  She puts her hand on the knob, and very carefully—silently!—turns the knob clockwise, and when it goes no further, she slowly pulls it toward her.  It opens without creaking, and she carefully turns the knob counterclock wise, and when it stops again, the lock’s tongue sticks out at her again.

    She peers out of a sliver-thin crack in the door.  She can just see into the kitchen.  Dad’s sitting at the table.  He’s got his head in his hands.  Tessie wonders if he’s been sitting like that since he got off the phone a few minutes ago.

    There’s a loud crack, and she looks to the source.  Mom’s come out of her room.  Panic floods into the spaces she has left in her head for thoughts.

    Lucky day.  Luuuuuuucky day.  Mom waddles past the door, supporting herself with her arm on the fridge when she gets into the kitchen.

    Dad doesn’t seem to notice.

    “What’s your fucking problem?” Mom says.

    “We’ve got a kid with a concussion and a hospital bill we can’t afford.  And we don’t have the truck anymore,” Dad replies, rubbing his eyes.  “I’d consider those big fucking problems.”

    Mom sits down at the table.  “You should have punished them.”

    Dad looks up at her.  “I sent them to bed without supper.  I think Lino’s been punished enough.  Not much else I can do.  It’s not like I can hit them up for the money.”

    “Ask Joey for an advance.”

    “Joey’s not gonna give me an advance because he advanced me last month, and the month before that—”

    Mom interrupts with, “You don’t have to rub it in.”

    “—and the month before that, and even the month before that.  In fact, I have no way of getting to work now.  I’ll have to see if Doug can pick me up on his way in and pay him for gas until we can afford to fix it.”

    Mom just stares at Dad for a while.

    “You’re rubbing it in,” she says.

    “What on earth am I rubbing in?  Can you tell me?”

    Mom snorts and says, “You’re going to accuse me that I wasn’t there for my kids.”

    Dad says, “Did I say that?”

    “You were thinking it.  Just because I didn’t take Lino to the emergency room with you and Tessie and Old Man Lawton you seem to think—”

    “I never said that.  We had to take Lino because he needed stitches—”

    “—that I’m some monster of a mother who wasn’t paying attention—”

    “—and we owe Dean Lawton a lot of thanks for taking us in his car because Lino’s cut was pretty bad.”

    “—and you just think you’re the greatest father in the world because—”

    “We have to wake him up every hour to make sure he’s ok because he’s got a concussion.”  Dad gets up from the table to get to the fridge.

    “—you make me feel like shit all the time.”  Mom sits back in her chair, and she has to grab the sides of the table to steady herself.

    Dad says, “This conversation is over.  You know I can’t stand talking to you when you’re like this.”

    “You don’t talk to me at all anymore.”

    Dad doesn’t answer her.  He just stares at the open fridge.

    “I’m drunk all the time because I married you.”

    “Maybe you should go back to bed, Dora.”

    “I’m staying right here.”

    Dad turns back to look at Mom, and he asks, “Did you even wish her a happy birthday?”

    Tessie turns the knob counterclockwise, and the tongue retreats into the door.  Mom never remembers her birthday anyway.

    IX.  (Mare Frigoris)

    Mom and Dad’s bedroom door is closed again.  Lino must be ok.

    Mrs. Fleming uses the word famished to describe how she feels when she’s really, really hungry.  That’s how Tessie feels right now.  Completely famished.

    She can’t sleep.  Part of it is from being completely famished, and the other part comes from feeling completely horrible that she and Lino wrecked Dad’s truck and that Lino got hurt in the process.  She’ll never play astronaut again. Never.  Never ever ever.

    Now that Dad’s gone back to bed, she can risk it.  Her plan is simple: into the kitchen—silently!—and over to the cabinet.  If the cabinet doesn’t stick, she’ll be in luck, and then she can get the out the crackers and a can of juice.  Then she can run back into her room and, hopefully, go to sleep.

    She turns—silently!—the knob and steps out of her room.  The floor cooperates and doesn’t squeak when she steps into the kitchen.  The lamp over the sink in the kitchen makes everything look as if it’s inside a grayish-greenish fish tank. The floor is barely visible, and Tessie tiptoes, ever so carefully, to the cabinets.

    Tessie crouches down to the cabinet at her knees, and she carefully—silently!—pulls the cabinet door toward her.  It lets out a small pop that sounds like the loudest boom in the world.

    She stops for a minute to listen, holding her breath tightly in her chest.  Quiet.  More quiet.  She lets out her breath and stares at the cabinet.  Crackers.  Juice.  She reaches for them silently, and her hands close—

    A loud pop interrupts her.  Louder than the other pops she’s heard.  Dad and Mom’s door crashes open against the wall.

    Ohnoohnoohnoohno.

    Tessie has to make a decision.  She looks at the open cabinet.  If Dad sees her here, open cabinet and all, she’s in superbigtrouble.  It’s not like she’s going to the bathroom.

    “What are you doing down there?” Mom asks.

    Tessie’s mind freezes for a second, and when its ice shatters, she decides to start an explanation that she’ll just figure out when she gets to the middle of it.  “I was just—”

    “Hand me the crackers, will you?” Mom says.

    Tessie stops explaining, and she obeys.  Mom grabs the package and takes out a stack of them.

    “Here,” Mom says, handing the package back to her.

    Tessie stares at her, waiting for the punishment to come.  She knows she’s in trouble.  Knows it.  Mom’s just trying to figure out what to say.

    Mom says, at last, “Why are you up anyway?  Go back to bed.”

    Tessie feels like another crash has just happened: relief that she’s not in trouble crashes into a sense that she feels like she should get in trouble, like she deserves to be in more trouble for being out of bed when she’s been sent to bed without supper.

    A few seconds later, Tessie turns her back to her and starts to walk back to her room.  Mom’s voice stops her with, “That’s right.  What the hell were you doing in the truck when you crashed it?”

    Tessie turns back to her Mom.  Mom’s got a cigarette lit, and the red-orange of the burning end glows brighter when she draws on it.  The end’s light brightens her face for a second, and her eyes seem more disappointed than ever before.  The answer Mom’s waiting for forms slowly.  “We… we were just playing astronauts.”

    Mom lets out a long, slow chuckle, and the smoke creeps out of the sides of her mouth in small clouds.  “That’s pretty funny.  As if either of you is gonna be a philanthropist.  Go to bed.”

    The glowing end of the cigarette separates from the cigarette, and it falls on the table.  It glows for a second, and then it goes out.

    Tessie walks slowly back into her bedroom.  She would like to ask Mom what she means, but Mom’s clearly not up to it.  Mom’s just really tired tonight.

    X.  (Mare Serenitatis)

    Her index finger traces over the hole in the map.  The edges of the hole are a deep brown from where the cigarette cherry fell on it.  The burn eliminated part of a word, so that it reads Sea of ————y.  The final letter Y doesn’t help, for there are a few that end in Y, and she can’t remember the names of all the lunar seas anymore.  She forgot them all a great long while ago.

    There’s another dark stain: Lino’s blood.  There was so much blood.

    She and Lino were so very small.  So small.  So very small with big dreams.

    Taking one last look at the map, she folds it back into its compact form and stuffs it back into the envelope.  Without a second look, she tosses it into the pile of things to throw out.

    Teresa grabs another stack of documents to sort through.  She narrows her very big eyes that look out of her very big self, coldly examining the records of her very small dreams.

    ♥ EAB

  • BYE 2013: Best Year Ever listings (+ a brief #MoG update)

    It’s been a slow process, but I’ve been able to gather the extent of my literary losses following the untimely dispatching of my hard drive in October. It could’ve been way worse, but here was the damage: I lost the first drafts and doodlings of my most recent poems, the redrafting I’d accomplished in August of Ministers of Grace Book 2: Virtues & Occultations, and an embarrassing number of photographs that never made it to Instagram. Somehow I’ve been able to sleep at night. I’m not entirely devastated by the loss off the headway that I’d made on Book 2, as it wasn’t substantial, and I still have the copious notes I’d made to expand the text into something that adheres to the series as a whole.

    This past Saturday (11/30) was the fourth anniversary of Sage Holloway and the Ministers of Grace universe taking up a whole complex of houses in my head. Sage and I have been talking about getting back into Book 2 again. She’s got some ideas as to how she and Merula can kick more tail than they did in the first draft. Of course, we’re going to have to carve out some time for that. Ever since grad school ten years ago, I’ve discovered that the holidays are the worst time for trying to get anything writerly done. In fact, during the first draft, I had to take a break one-third of the way in because Christmas hit, and I resumed work after New Year’s in order to complete it by 1/20/10. I have no expectations for being massively productive over the holidays, as I’ve just moved yet again (but hopefully for the last time for a long time, really and truly and mercifully, after eight times in eight months), but if I do manage to get in some serious writing time, you can count me among the pleasantly surprised this holiday season. If not, know that writing a few times a week is going to make it to my assembly of do-this-in-2014 imperatives.

    And on a side note, I have been trying to get Cherubim & Seraphim added to the iBookstore, but the review process is taking a shocking amount of time. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available for sale there.

    One of the things that I regularly engage in over the holidays is listing my favorite things that I experienced over the course of the year and sharing them among a set of interested parties. As this year was a particularly expansive year – one in which I was on the receiving end of so many generous blessings – I’m feeling similarly generous. Please find below my top fives sometimes moar, sometimes less of the Best Year Ever.

    ♥ EAB

    films – cinema excursions
    1. Pacific Rim – I’d had no idea that this film was about kaiju, and the surprise was so welcome that I squealed in the cinema when I found out. Guillermo del Toro always pulls together fantastic things, and this is no exception.
    2. Fruitvale Station – A harrowing film about the shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland at the Fruitvale BART station back on New Year’s Eve 2008/9. You’ll cry at least part of your face off, but it’s worth it.
    3. Man of Steel – I’d never found the Superman mythology compelling until I saw this film. I know the reviews were mixed on this one, but I loved it.
    4. Evil Dead – I was heavily skeptical about this, given my love for the original Evil Dead trilogy and the musical, but it was actually scary.
    5. The Conjuring – Great little horror flick about the Warrens. Love it.
    6. Catching Fire – While I had serious issues with the engineering within The Hunger Games trilogy, I do think that the cinematic version of this tale can be saved. That Susanne Collins isn’t the primary writer on the screenplays means that it might actually be done right.
    honorable mentions
    1. Three Days of the Condor – There were a few films (often based on books!) from the 1970s that prophesied a time when corporations would rule the world, politicians would be powerless to those who manage their pursestrings, intelligence agencies would run amok without legislative oversight and the government’s assassination program would target innocents. Sidney Pollack helmed this one and cast his pal Robert Redford as the beleaguered lead in this often overlooked gem.
    2. One of the amaaaazing things about being back in New York is getting to see screenings of classic films at IFC and the Sunshine Cinema. I got to see a couple of my favorites this year: The Shining and Poltergeist. Seeing the full frame of The Shining on the big screen was particularly impressive, as all previous video releases were all in the 4:3 aspect ratio. (I can’t attest to BluRay editions, though.)

    b-films
    1. The Room
    2. The Room
    3. The Room – While it might seem absurd to name a film thrice, it’s because The Room is an unforgettable film, so much so that I believe that chanting it has to summon some terrible Beetlejuice-like creature with even worse hair and an indecipherable accent. It is rightly referred to as the Citizen Kane of bad films. While I adore the laughably regrettable and regrettably laughable missteps that comprise The Room as it is endured within the comfort of one’s own home, it pales to the interactive experience that one finds at a midnight cult showing. If there’s one by you and you’ve already partaken in The Room’s hideousness, go now or forever use your plastic spoons sensibly.
    4. Samurai Cop – If you were obsessed with Lethal Weapon photo stills and unillustrated martial arts how-to books and had never actually seen a film in your whole goddamn life, this would be the movie you’d make. It is a counterintuitive mess featuring a migrating wig and a scene-stealing police captain.
    5. Sharknado – I gave into the hype, and it was pretty funny. The sheer concept of it is SyFy gold.

    tv
    1. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – Joss Whedon (et al, as the case is), as brilliant as he is, has a hard time starting a serialized story. For example, Buffy the film wasn’t as good, and neither were the first few episodes of the tv series, but after it hit a stride a few episodes in, it was outstanding. The same thing went with Angel. And Firefly. In other words, you kinda have to weather that rough start to get to the gold. After a few episodes, I can confidently state that I’m hooked although I admittedly wasn’t convinced at first.
    2. Game of Thrones – This show is so damn good I can’t take it. #redwedding. That’s all.
    3. House of Cards – When I got my Netflix back – yay! – the first suggestion they made was this, and I binged. Brilliantly done.
    4. Law & Order – I watched all of it – all twenty seasons, every last episode in reverse order – during the winter while I was creating the final version of my book. It was a Benjamin Button experience, watching Sam Waterston age backwards until Michael Moriarty laid him to rest after cradling his infantine head and, too, aged backwards. This show became a standard for anthological cop/law tv, I miss it, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. FYI: S. Epatha Merkerson does not age. The only change she ever makes is her wardrobe.
    5. South Park – They’re still doing it, and they’re still killing it.
    Perennial favorites still include Psych, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report.

    miscellaneous streamables
    1. Life of Pi – I still don’t like narratives about writers writing, but it’s such a beautiful film, so much so that I can even forgive the weird writer guy for looking so checked out every time he was on camera.
    2. Scott Pilgrim – I don’t know why I missed this one, but I’m glad I righted this wrong. Speaking of Michael Cera…
    3. This Is the End.
    4. The Dark Knight Returns, Parts I & II – Part II was released this year, and it was just as wicked as the previous installment.
    5. The Bletchley Circle – A surprising little British miniseries about a group of female codebreakers from Bletchley tracking down a serial killer in the ’50s.

    music
    1. Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork – I love these guys, and they’re back. The tracks in which Dave Grohl is on drums are transcendental.
    2. Wye Oak – Civilian – Singer Jenn Wasner has a husky frankness in her voice, like she’s letting you – and only you – in on a secret.
    3. Metz – METZ – Death by Audio, the music venue in Williamsburg, contains an innate falsehood in its name. The truth is that there are many other things that can kill you there, from the deterioration of the structural integrity of the warehouse in which it’s located, to the electrical system, and back again to the complete lack of temperature control therein. The only thing that won’t kill you is the music, but it is probable – and only probable and not due to one’s assertions on theology – that if you do die due to the collapse of a support beam while rocking out, you might be en route to heaven. When I caught Metz there in August ’12, the experience was such that I know that I will never, ever be as hot as I was in that venue after the power had failed and the indoor temperature soared well over 110 degrees. Nevertheless, I was so impressed by the band that they’ve been on my radar ever since, even though I only really dove into this album this summer.
    4. The M Machine – Metropolis I and Metropolis II – If you like electronica, start with “The Palace” on Metropolis II. You should be totally in love by the time you hit “Tiny Anthem.”
    5. Stevie Wonder – Innervisions – The day after I flew into LGA and moved back to NYC, I had brunch at Grey Dog in Chelsea, and “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” came on, after Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” played, and it was an apropos welcome home. This album was consequently on heavy rotation in the weeks that followed my return, and I recommend y’all revisit it, too.

    books/comics
    1. Brian K. Vaughan – Y: The Last Man – This is a phenomenal graphic novel series about a world in which all males on the planet have been wiped out by some mysterious illness save a 20-something human named Yorick and his monkey Ampersand. It’s an incredible critique on society as well as the underdeveloped state of feminism. I’ve been talking about this since I binged on all ten volumes over Memorial Day weekend.
    2. Stephen King – Doctor Sleep – I’m a King apologist, so while this is flawed, it was great to reconnect with Danny Torrance and feel some of the terror that King can convey in prose.
    3. Michael Lewis – The Big Short – Great little narrative explaining some of the WTF that precipitated the financial crisis of ’08.
    4. Victor Cha – The Impossible State – This is a comprehensive, alarming and unforgettable book about the sweeping sovereign dysfunction that is North Korea.
    5. John Burnside – The Devil’s Footprints – I love the darkly charming voice in this novel.
    honorable mention
    T.S. Eliot – “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets – It was a religious experience when I read Four Quartets a couple of years ago. I had the treat of making my way to Gloucester this year, where I was able to sit near the ocean and experience the atmosphere that surrounds the actual Dry Salvages, the rock formation just off the coast. The whole time, I had phrases from this portion of “The Dry Salvages” ringing through my ears:

    For most of us, there is only the unattended
    Moment, the moment in and out of time,
    The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
    The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
    Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
    That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
    While the music lasts.

    live things/shows etc
    1. Rain Room at MoMA – By far one of the coolest installations ever. It was worth the wait to get in, because everything inside is prismatic and cool (temperature-wise, quite welcome in June) and beautiful.
    2. Magritte show at MoMA – I fell in love with Magritte’s clouds when I was visiting MoMA in June for the Rain Room. If you’re into surrealists, I highly recommend this show, esp. as it includes a number of private collection pieces that are stunning to behold with your own eyes.
    3. Book of Mormon – Have you ever laughed so hard that you (basically) black out? I laughed until my sides hurt, I thought I was going to puke, and until my brain shut off because it was just too damn funny. Save up your pennies over the course of six months and see this. It’s worth it.
    4. The Colbert Report on September 5, 2013 – Not only do you get to see Stephen Colbert out of character, you get to feel his energy. He’s an awesome presence on a stage. Plus I was on camera shouting, KILL THESE KITTENS!!!
    5. CitiField – Another great thing about being back in NYC is seeing the Mets play. Hellsyeah.

    web & apps
    Trust me and clicky-clicky:
    1. Texts from Star Trek: The Next Generation
    2. This has to be the angriest customer service call ever
    3. Pretty things: My Modern Met
    4. Moar pretty things: Petapixel

    miscellany
    1. I released a book, which was a massive life accomplishment. It’s the first in a trilogy called Ministers of Grace, and forgive me, but this is my shameless plug for it if you haven’t read it already. You can read all about it here: http://ministersofgrace.com.
    2. I also did some blogging about my time at ———-. Of course, it’s not at all about ———-. Not at all: http://copyclerking.tumblr.com/
    3. I am an addict and I must be put down because I can put down a half-dozen donuts from The Cinnamon Snail and still function normally. Best damn food truck in the world, I tell ya!
    4. At the start of this year, I made the following vow:

    Dear 2013,
    While you’re in charge, I vow to pursue expansion, discipline, and transformation with all the ferocity I can muster. I refuse to be limited by my expectations or perceptions.
    Love, EAB

    It wasn’t always easy, but I made this vow my mission. This has truly been one of the best years of my life, if not the best year so far.

    Here’s looking forward to doing it again in ’14.

  • Taking Risks

    In 2012, I found myself in a situation in which I either had to embrace change and transformation, or return to stagnation and somehow discover contentment in a situation that wasn’t working for me anymore. I definitely didn’t feel ready for change and transformation when they came to me, but I knew that if I didn’t allow them to lead me where I needed to go, I would regret it forever. Still, I had to get over being completely terrified of the great unknown that was ahead of me, but I subdued my fears and went for it, opening myself up to where life was ready to lead me. Unfortunately I had to wade through some terribly rank sewage when things didn’t work out, but I also had some amazing, incredible experiences that I can count among the best days of my life. In spite of everything, I learned more about myself, about love and about life than I thought I was capable of absorbing over the course of a year, and I feel like I’m a much better person because of it albeit still nursing wounds at the moment.

    So the next time you think you’re not ready for something, know that it’s just your fear trying to keep you from transforming into someone better than you are at that very moment. You are ready. But if you convince yourself that you aren’t, you’ll never realize how brilliant and resourceful and strong you are until you go for it.

    My wish for everyone who comes across this post either today, on New Year’s Eve, or at any other point in the future is that you all take risks and live the life you’ve always wanted to live. Start small if you have to and work up to bigger ones. Identify your priorities and do everything necessary to see that you meet them. Say what you’ve got primed on your tongue. Do what you’ve always wanted to do. Don’t hesitate. Live without regrets.

    I promise to remember this as I go forward into 2013. Happy New Year!

    ♥ EAB

  • Kinship: On Joy & Pain, on Agony & Anguish

    For Bill, who proposed the idea, and Simba, who asked specifically…

    I.

    One of the fundamental perplexities of life is that joy and pain have such an intimate kinship with each other. On the surface, it would seem that their paths operate as strict geometric parallels, stretching out into infinity without ever meeting. Yet there is always a point at which the lines are redrawn just prior to some unforeseen railroad-like switch, where we discover that we have travelled onto the opposite path, and it is at that point in which we must either immerse ourselves within joy or somehow endure the pain until we encounter another switch that puts us back on the other side.

    The consolation when confronted with pain is that nothing lasts forever, be it through analgesic, better fortune or death. The converse principle on the smiling obverse of that coin is that joy, like pain, doesn’t last forever either, be it through injury, worse fortune or death. The hard reality for the living is that change and time supply the music in our dance through life, and when they unite in silence is at our final change of state, when time as we know it in this existence runs out, and we meet death. Some might argue that the dead have it easier. However, if you’re averse to the mere concept of permanent stasis, bear in mind that the dead have left this life, a life that is fundamentally composed of alternating currents of joy and pain. You could just as easily intuit that because they know no pain, they know no joy, either, which just might mean that Heaven is a very boring place indeed.

    There seem to be many more words available to describe pain than there are to describe joy, perhaps because when we are experiencing joy, we have little instinctive desire to document it (save through the modern phenomenon of photography that provides its own one thousand-word description, but that, too, can fall by the wayside). We tend to do whatever is necessary within that moment to savor it and perhaps prolong it.

    Joy is most often derived from a shared experience. If you were to honestly consider all the best moments of your life, there was most likely at least one other person with you at those moments of unmitigated elation, and unless you are the rare, ever-categorizing sort, you most likely didn’t interrupt the shared moment to quantify and qualify it while in the rapturous company of others. We are at our very core social creatures who extract so much from our experiences through others. If you doubt that, you should reconsider the fear of being alone, for it is a force of nature that should never be underestimated.

    Pain, however, is part of that long dark night of the soul, which is most likely why we have so many more words for it. We have a need to document it in order to understand it, alleviate it and hopefully avoid it in the future. There are words that try to identify with another’s pain, such as sympathy, empathy and apathy, all derived from the Ancient Greek word pathos (πάθος) meaning “suffering.” When we are sympathetic (sym- meaning with), we try to duplicate another’s suffering without necessarily having a frame of reference for it; when we are empathetic (em- meaning in), we try to relate to a similar moment in our lives when we experienced similar suffering; and when we are apathetic (a- meaning without), we are so numbed so as to be removed from feeling anything. All of these are sharp vocalizations of the inherent truth of the situation, which is that pain is always unique and cannot ever be experienced in the same way or at the same time by two different and discrete people. There’s the chance that we might bond with someone who is living through a similar brand of pain and derive some small consolation (joy?) from that palsied connection, but it’s woefully misguided to assume that there is perhaps some comparative measure for another’s pain, adding further isolation to the experience. Pain is intrinsically lonely, regardless of how much we might try to help another through it, and although each experience is unique, we approximate it somehow through the vocabulary afforded us that describes pain.

    II.

    Two words come to mind when describing extreme sensations of pain: agony and anguish. Strangely enough, one of these words is encoded with hope.

    Anguish comes from the Latin noun angustia, meaning “difficulties, trials.” This connotation serves as an abstraction for its alternate definition of “narrowness,” and it in turn came from the adjective angustus which specifically meant “narrow” or “not spacious.” When we think of anguish, we’re propelled into the loftier hells of the mind, for it is divorced from physicality. If it does have any physicality, anguish comes with imagery of the hands-wringing intellectual contemplation of the unpredictability of a situation. It is descriptive of the limitations caused by pain and subsequently over any control we might have upon it. Will this pain, these difficulties, this claustrophobic state last until the end of my life? If so, how much more pain must I endure? And if not, how long until the hurt is gone? The answer is never immediately available, which is the root of anguish, the myopic perspective of being unable to perceive the temporary nature of pain.

    Agony arrived in Britain via Ancient Greece from the words agonia (ἀγωνία), meaning “emulation, competition, struggle” and agon (ἀγών), “contest.” The word stems from conditions that are inherently physical, and when we are suffering through immeasurable physical pain, we are said to be in agony. Agony, however, is often associated with a strictly metaphysical context, for it is used within Christianity to describe Christ’s inner torment in the Garden of Gethsemane. When faced with his own impending death and ultimate self-sacrifice, Christ’s confrontation with his internal fear is considered agony.

    One could say that there are two wrestling matches with angels demonstrating a more literal context of agony within the Bible: the first is the physical struggle between Jacob and the angel within the Book of Genesis, and the second the more metaphysical event of Christ wrestling a figurative Angel of Doubt while in the Garden as recounted in the Gospels. Both are contests from which a victor is meant to rise above the fray. Just as with any life or death struggle that any of us encounter, whether it manifests physically or otherwise, our survival instinct motivates us to vanquish our opponent. (It’s rare that such pervasive despair would grip someone within the throes of such a struggle, causing them to seek defeat and death.) It is in this relentless pursuit of victory that we discover the deeply hidden sea of hope within the word agony. The triumph over an opponent and liberation from pain are rewards within themselves, and on the other side of successfully enduring agony is the promise of joy that demonstrates our strength, our resolve, our victory. Outlasting agony is joy in itself.

    III.

    Not that this is wisdom that comes easily. Most often, it’s when we survive a brush with death that we appreciate life most, and similarly it’s through triumphing over pain that we are able to cherish joy within the moment for all its subtleties. It’s not always the case, though, for as we make our way through this world, we acquire aching wounds that use their power to spin the coin of life along its edge, leaving us hanging in the balance while we wait for the coin to settle on the stoic resolve of one side or the beaming laughter of the other. It’s in this uncertain state, the only true state there is, that we appreciate that all those lines that separate joy and pain are irrevocably blurred, and their seemingly parallel paths are illusory at their worst and a matter of perspective at best. In the ideal, the removal of pain results in joy and vice versa. But life rarely allows such purity, which clues us in to a profound esoteric knowledge that joy and pain are most likely expressions of the same great thing, and they come from some mysterious place that we mortals cannot know, where the gods and the dead sing in praise of the grand purpose behind enduring pain and cherishing joy.

    Nevertheless, we the living arrive at the same question over and over again: it is worth it, this agonizing struggle, this anguished moment?

    Only time will tell.

  • There are no rules.

    It always perplexes me that many writers feel the need to establish rules for writing. Some of them are useful, like those from Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman. Others are ridiculous, and you can identify your own personal bugbear from the more ludicrous ones compiled by The Guardian here and here. I find it amazing that purists are still insisting that writing on a computer without internet access is the only path to tread. The internet is an indispensable tool when you use it wisely, just like a computer (not just a solitaire/minesweeper machine) or a thesaurus (not just a doorstop) or a pen (not just a nervous chew toy). Dollars to donuts, I’m sure there was a rule by some other esteemed writer who posited, “Never write on a typewriter, for only writing actual words on actual paper gives you the proper sense of rhythm.”

    The truth of the matter is that if a writer imposes a set of rules for writing upon you, he or she is ignoring the beautiful, subtle mathematics behind the art, and trust me, they’re there. These subtle machinations are expressed within the language of relativity and dictate that each writer’s experience and writing experience is unique and unto itself. Do yourself a favor and remember that cribbing off another writer’s set of rules for creation is rather like borrowing someone else’s internal checklist for what s/he desires in a lifepartnersoulmate. A great part of writing is falling in love, be it with your story, your language, your catharsis, or whatever it is that brings you to put words down. You’ll never fall in love if you follow someone else’s rules, because try as you might, you’ll never be able to fool the gods of chemistry.

    The best advice I’ve ever gotten was to read the first letter in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. If any of it makes sense to you, then trust me when I say that it’s only a matter of time before you recognize and understand that there are no rules.

    ♥ EAB

    P.S. Speaking of writing, I’ve got news coming over the next few days. Stay tuned.

  • The Bell Jar: A Suicide Note?

    Here’s the first in my new blog series I’m calling Visitations, in which I blog about an extended stay with a book that I really should have read by now. I’d also like to offer the caveat that this review/critical analysis is spoiler heavy.

    George Pollucci’s appearance within The Bell Jar is a flicker within the pyre of Sylvia Plath’s only novel: he’s the would-be suicide who appears prior to the series of suicide attempts perpetrated by Plath’s narrator and alter ego Esther Greenwood. Pollucci is talked down from the ledge of a seven-story building, and after reading the documentation of the event in the local newspaper, Esther remarks

    I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci’s face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and whatever it was just might be written on his face.[1]

    The inscrutable message writ on his face is similar to (but ought not to be confused with) that otherworldly wisdom present in an image of someone’s final moments of existence, just before life and perhaps the soul are about to peel away from the body and leave it in perpetual stillness. Still more confounding are the faces of suicides, where a storm of nerve is gathering, and it is inevitably one that, they hope, will soon yield to the eternal peace that they seek.

    In The Art of Suicide, author Ron M. Brown asserts that most of the mythical suicides of the ancient Greco-Roman world, such as Ajax, Phaedra and Dido, are depicted with “the body portrayed intact, and what is chiefly shown is intent, rather than the deed itself.”[2] Intent, if taken to its more motivational connotations, is what is paramount when it comes to suicides. They who succeed cannot report to us those final thoughts, and those of us who confront the great why that suicides leave behind are left to foggy, unsolvable labyrinths of intent, searching for meaning among what they conceivably believed was meaningless in the end.

    What tends to affect us most about suicides is that their deaths arrive with the essence of the preventable. The ancient Greeks perceived hanging as a distasteful form of suicide – which acquired further infamy in Western culture through Judas’ suicide after the dawn of Christianity[3] – because the act itself placed an irrevocable space between the earth and the suicide, leaving her dangling in the heavens and unable to return to the earth from which she had come.[4] This otherworldly space acquires a different symbolic meaning when taken with its effect upon suicide’s survivors, for they often feel the need to become a retroactively applying and life-sustaining bridge between heaven and the earth and reconnect her to the world. This essence of the preventable confronts us and makes us realize that our futility rests not in what we could’ve done or said to stay her hand, but in how we might have made ourselves available to listen to and alleviate the perhaps imperceptible pain that pushed her over the edge.

    There is a cultural etiquette for suicides, primarily in that they are expected to leave a note and supply a quiet echo of their intent, even though many suicides do not.[5] Those who do leave notes often explain their pain, apologize or, such as in the case of Mitchell Heisman, who left a 1,904-page suicide note,[6] protest society and the very nature of life itself. Many have argued that The Bell Jar is a suicide note and assign it the distinction of a slow farewell. It was written during the last year of Plath’s life and released the month before she gassed herself in her kitchen, and it recounts her own numerous suicide attempts through the translucency of fiction. However, the novel’s intentional nakedness echoes in the decades after her death as a quest for even the tiniest morsel of meaning among the meaningless.

    Esther begins her journey through madness with the execution of the Rosenbergs, with all its gruesome imagery, and lays down a steady beat of images and observations that fuse with the counterpoint of mortality and its perpetual decay. Her story is a Bildungsroman penned by a young author at heart – full of naïveté and premature, unearned knowledge that lacks experience – albeit a nastier brand of it, for it is less the becoming of self as it is unbecoming on account of the self, the act of shattering oneself into a thousand, mirrored pieces and trying to survive the process of becoming whole again without bleeding to death. The world itself is too much for her: smells and sounds are too human and fetid and alive, and films in Technicolor are too bright. She is surrounded by those who are in a perpetual state of reduction: from the young women also in the employ of Ladies’ Day magazine who are trying to lose a few pounds, to her Chemistry professor Mr. Manzi, who abbreviates the beauty of the natural world and its elements into equations and the shorthand of the Periodic Table. After she is rejected from the summer writing course on which she had set her heart, her future dissolves, and her entire world becomes inverted and distorted as if viewed from within a bell jar. In recounting one of her sickest, most defeated moments, Esther relates an episode from her time in the hospital after one of her many suicide attempts:

    “I can’t sleep.”

    They interrupted me. “But the nurse says you slept last night.” I looked around the crescent of fresh, strange faces.

    “I can’t read.” I raised my voice. “I can’t eat.” It occurred to me I’d been eating ravenously ever since I came to.[7]

    This manner of inversion continues within the novel: whereas Esther began with a brutal description of the electrocution of Rosenbergs, the path away from and back to her sanity and salvation lies in electroconvulsive therapy, as it was first misapplied by the poor Dr. Gordon and then properly administered by the good Dr. Nolan. Plath is, above all else, a poet, and this symbolic inversion is demonstrative her poet’s exploration of the oppression of the self and the self’s unstable, mad perceptions on the path to putting herself back together again.

    Plath’s fellow poet and suicide Anne Sexton wrote, “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”[8] Poetry is, on many levels, beauty and sensuality rising through the structure of language. The Bell Jar is nothing if not intrinsically poetic, and to fill a narrative with such poetry demonstrates the author’s battle against succumbing to the chaos, the void, the numbness and the silence of death. Plath’s novel is a testament to hope, that there is a remedy available to right the cosmic misunderstanding that drove her to want to end her life in the first place.

    Within the first few pages of The Bell Jar, Esther writes

    I got such a kick out of all those free gifts showering on to us. For a long time afterward I hid them away, but later, when I was all right again, I brought them out, and I still have them around the house. I use the lipsticks now and then, and last week, I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with.[9]

    The key to understanding The Bell Jar is that Esther has survived and even gone on to become a mother to a child. The novel is hardly a suicide note but a record of surviving the flames of one’s own personal hell in order to be reborn, for in the beginning, Esther establishes a clear intent to relocate joy among seemingly small, insignificant things and live despite a seeming prevalence of meaninglessness. Taken superficially, the look on Pollucci’s face that captures Esther’s attention might be interpreted as the look of someone about to confront mortality and embrace the meaninglessness of life, but the message she receives from him is quite different. The Bell Jar is a protraction of Pollucci’s look: the curiosity that urges one to continue on the quest for meaning rather than slip away.

    The tragedy of her triumph is that it wasn’t enough. Plath continued writing until the days before her death, and if one is searching for that final look before she stepped into the void beyond us, one only needs to read the poems in Ariel to glimpse the literary fatigue and unwavering intent in the eyes. None of us will ever know how The Bell Jar would have been received had Plath rediscovered her own curiosity, as it is impossible to separate it from her sad end. Even though the novel suggests otherwise, its darker moments ring as a recurring moment of futility for the observer who follows the desperate, determined intentions of Esther Greenwood through to the final action of Sylvia Plath, where we wonder if anyone could have been a bridge that united heaven and earth and saved her.

    References

    1 Plath, Sylvia (1971). The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row. p. 152. ISBN 0-06-017490-0.
    2 Brown, Ron (2001). The Art of Suicide. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. p. 33. ISBN 1-86189-105-9.
    3 Zweig, Ben (February 29, 2012). “The Despair and Suicide of Judas in Medieval Art.” Retrieved September 15, 2012.
    4 Brown, p. 45.
    5 Shioiri, T., Nishimura, A., Akazawa, K., Abe, R., Nushida, H., Ueno, Y., Kojika-Maruyama, M. and Someya, T. (2005). “Incidence of note-leaving remains constant despite increasing suicide rates.” Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 59: 226–228. doi: 10.1111/j.1440-1819.2005.01364.x. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
    6 The Huffington Post (September 24, 2010). “Man Who Killed Himself On Harvard’s Campus Left 1,904-Page Note.” The Huffington Post. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
    7 Plath, p. 198.
    8 Simon, John (December 1991). “Connoisseur of madness, addict of suicide: On Anne Sexton.” The New Criterion. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
    9 Plath, p. 4.

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