I went to the symphony because my new friends from Boston and Philadelphia went, but I didn’t know how to listen to the music. In the audience I mostly daydreamed and curled the program sheet in my lap; then suddenly the music would be over and we would be clapping. One roommate’s family had a cook; the girl down the hall had a mother who worked as a scientist. She also swam laps every day. I had never heard of a mother doing that. I tried Mexican food; I tried coq au vin. I made a friend from Georgia and she cooked honey-fried chicken, the way they made it in the South. I called my family every week on the phone, each one taking a turn to speak with me. My sister bought two tickets for a Richie Havens concert, she told me, for when I came home to visit. And my parents told me long distance that they were afraid for us to go to the concert, because of blacks rioting around the country.
Ultimately, all this new college atmosphere wasn’t enough to yank me from my roots. I carried my life in Farmingdale within me wherever I went. Personal power could not come from college or an English lit book. It had to come from deep within me. I had to go back and reclaim, transform, what I had inherited at home. Eventually I had to stop running from what I had been given. If I opened to it, loneliness could become singleness; lethargy and boredom would transform into open space. Those tearful, negative feelings could become my teacher. I did not understand this consciously at the time I was in college. I did not know about Tibetan Buddhism then nor what I experienced on that train ride with Kate and her kids so many years later. But if I wanted to survive—no, not just to survive, I wanted glory, I wanted to learn how to grow a rose out of a cement parking lot—I had to digest the blandness and desolation of my childhood and make them mine. I couldn’t run away, even though I tried, because in fact, my roots were all I had. If I didn’t transform that energy, no matter where I went—Washington, D.C., Ann Arbor, Chicago, California, New Mexico—I would still carry it with me. I would walk around like a numb ghost—and for many years I did walk around numb. Writing became my vehicle for transformation, a way to travel out of that nowhere land. And because writing is no fool, it brought me right back in. There was no place else to go, but moving my hand across the page gave me a way to eat my landscape, rather than be eaten by it.
Actually, the suburbs were ideal for developing a life of cloistered aloneness, a monk’s or a writer’s life. The childhood emptiness that lurked just under the wall-to-wall carpeting in our living room haunted me. I had to face it sometime in order to become whole. So I kept going back to emptiness: empty roads in Kansas, empty cafés in Minnesota, the emptiness just as August was about to flush its summer grandeur down the long throat of autumn and what I once loved—roses, purple alfalfa flowers, peaches—were gone again for another interminable amount of time. I kept diving into the material of my childhood, and instead of drowning in it, I found a life saver: swimming with my pen.
The deepest thing writing taught me was that there was nothing to hold on to. Thoughts moved quickly. As a writer, I worked hard to grasp them as they flooded through me, but thoughts moved faster than my hand. And thoughts changed. I made up reality as I went along. Nothing was frozen. I wrote about my past, yet there was no place to find it but within myself. It had dissolved out there in Farmingdale where I remembered it.
I discovered this same experience in a poem by Pablo Neruda:
Inside myself I should find the absent ones,
that smell from the lumberyard;
perhaps the wheat that rippled on the slopes
still goes on growing, but only within me,
and it’s in myself I must travel to find that woman
the rain bore off, and there is no other way.
Nothing can last in any other way.
(“The Wanderer Returned,” in Fully Empowered,
The Noonday Press, 1967)
When I became a writer and wrote my first furtive poem at twenty-four years old, I was free. Suddenly the cramped quarters in our split level at 50 Miller Road became big, an arena to explore, and I did not have to wrestle with the ghosts of anyone else’s desires. No one in my family had ever dreamed of being a writer. This turned out to be a great gift. I’ve seen writing students struggle with their parents’ unfulfilled writing ambitions and seen how they carry the burden of their parents on their backs. I had none of this. For me, writing was just physically tough; pushing that pen across the page was like pushing my body through a frozen snow field, waist high, in order to get to the other side. I didn’t have to live up to anyone else’s projected expectations. Writing was totally new, hard, tremendous, and it stunned my family.
When I became a poet, an unlikely thing in my family, almost a useless thing in American society, my parents were enthusiastic, though I made no money at it. I couldn’t quite understand it, though I was glad. What I realized later was that deep in our Jewish religion and culture was a reverence for psalms, poetry, songs, the written word, and this reverence echoed out through the years when my parents’ daughter began to write. They were happy, with no strings attached. In fact, I think the whole extended family felt a bit of wonder. They especially wanted me to write about them and suddenly exploded with family stories at the dinner table when I visited.
“You know, when I was a boy,” my uncle Mannv began.
“You were a boy?” I echoed back.
“Yes, there were fields in Brooklyn behind our house and horses grazing,” he continued.
“Horses and fields? In Brooklyn?” I said, amazed.
“Yes.” He nodded, pleased he’d gotten my attention. Maybe he’d be in my next story.
But it usually happened that a memory ricocheted in my brain back to me, my childhood, my life. I was a young writer, claiming me, mine, myself.
Plato says that the poet takes a momentary leap from ignorance to knowledge and writes a great poem, but because that insight is not built on a foundation, the poet falls back to ignorance again. The poet himself cannot maintain the height the poem achieved. But, Plato says, the philosopher, because he works slowly at his understanding, builds a foundation, so when he arrives at an epiphany he stays there. There is a structure that holds him up. This is the value of practice, done under all circumstances, epiphany or no epiphany; if an epiphany does come, the philosopher is not tossed away, does not fall down afterward.
Writing was the way I learned about practice. I loved writing enough to be willing to work at it, whatever emotional space I was in. Something became more important than my individual mood. Practice sustained me, rooted me. It gave me an unwavering foundation.
My writing practice had probably been germinating all my life with everything in me and outside of me. This is important to understand. Real, solid growth and education are slow. Look at a tree. We don’t put a seed in the ground and then stick our fingers in the earth and yank up an oak. Everything has its time and is nourished and fed with the rhythms of the sun and moon, the seasons. We are no different, no more special, no less important. We belong on the earth. We grow in the same way as a rock, a snail, a porpoise, or a blade of grass. America has forgotten this. We are full of aggression, speed. We are full of cancer cells, sped up growth. How many people can we kill with one bomb, how fast can we get a hamburger at McDonald’s?
About ten years ago, an elementary school teacher in Minneapolis showed me how a student on a computer could learn to write a haiku. The computer said a haiku was a Japanese poetry form of three lines. It wrote on the screen, “For your first line, pick a season and type it in.” I picked “spring” and typed it in. The teacher stood behind me, nodding approval. “You have written the first line of your haiku. Next type in something concrete about spring; for example, The birds chirp.’ ” I typed in, “The willows are green.”
“Now pick an emotion and express it.” I typed in, “I am sad.” It appeared on the screen: I am sad.
“You have finished your haiku,” the computer said. Then, quickly, the whole genius haiku appeared in front of the enthusiastic teacher a
nd me:
Spring.
The willows are green.
I am sad.
Then the computer said, “Very good. You have just written your first haiku. Let’s try another one. Usually, a haiku has seventeen syllables....”
“Isn’t this marvelous,” the teacher said.
I grinned and stepped away from the machine.
Actually, the haiku I wrote wasn’t awful. I’ve heard worse, but it had no human element. It had nothing to do with me. The real essence of a haiku is the poet’s awakening, and the haiku gives you a small taste of that, like a ripe red berry on the tip of your tongue. Your mind actually experiences a marvelous leap when you hear a haiku, and in the space of that leap you feel awe. Ahh, you say. You get it. The poet transmits her awakening.
There are no quick prescriptions for writing. Writing became mine because I wanted it. I lifted my sleepy head off the desk in public school, smelled Mr. Clemente’s rain out the window, and a seed began to germinate. Something was real and I could touch it, but that rain happened when I was in ninth grade. Look how long it took for me to write my first poem: I was twenty-four years old. I am glad for this slowness. Out of the lethargy, loneliness, and emptiness of suburbia, if I slowed down and noticed, my own teacher, the person within me, had space to emerge. Out of being so lost, the field for practice came forward. I already knew well enough about repetition—block after block of split-levels with wrought-iron banisters and the home buyer’s appealing feature, a sunken living room. A sunken living room? What, was there a flood?
I had everything. I had to wake up to it. Writing taught me this. Hours of chewing at a poem made me digest the real personal facts of my life. And there was nothing that wasn’t worthy of examination. Suddenly, all of Farmingdale became precious ground. I had a chance to examine slowly what was buried in my psyche back there in my family and childhood.
I wrote about taking the Long Island Railroad with my mother when I was home visiting from my freshman year in college. I was feeling bloated with my new sophistication and despairing at the naiveté of my mother, the housewife. We went to the Museum of Modern Art. I would show her the Impressionists. I’d just learned about them in Art Appreciation I. After all, I’d gotten an A on the midterm. My mother and I stood before Monet’s huge painting of water lilies. It was beautiful, more beautiful than the slide my professor showed in class. My mother, who knew nothing of the history of Impressionism, suddenly turned to me. Her eyes were so alive, so magnetic, so black and dancing, she said to me, “Ohhh, Natli, I like this one,” and she took my hand. Her eyes frightened me. She had stepped out of the role of beleaguered wife and mother. I couldn’t rise to her vulnerability in that moment. I looked away and scoffed, “Wait until you see the Picassos.”
I wrote about one day in Mr. DiFrancisco’s ninth-grade American history’ class. It was during the civil rights movement. He read to us aloud from a newspaper article. Somewhere in the South, the Ku Klux Klan had abducted a black man in his twenties. They tied him up on a deserted back road. Then—and here Mr. DiFrancisco choked up. He said, “I can’t read this to you kids.” We pleaded with him. “Okay,” he said, “they cut off his scrotum and plopped it in a paper cup.”
Everything stopped for me in that moment. They what? I gulped. I wasn’t sure if a penis and a scrotum were the same thing, but I knew something terrible, something violent, had been done. And a male’s sexual organ had been mentioned in class.
I took these things to writing practice, tried to make sense of what I carried inside me. Finally, I had a place to express what haunted me.
After I graduated from college, I moved near my boyfriend. He was in graduate school at the University of Michigan. I rented a room from a divorced woman with her three kids, on the second floor of a big rambling house in Ann Arbor, and I sat in the middle of the bed in that room and tried to write. It was different than anything I had experienced before. I was all alone, not lonely. I sat there struggling with my own mind. I put a line down. I crossed it out. I went to the bathroom. I came back, began again, and got excited, couldn’t contain that energy, wanted to get up and pace the room. I coached myself. “Stay with it, Nat. Stay with it.” I made a deeper furrow into my mind. I began concentrating. Time disappeared. I disappeared. I worked on a poem about chocolate. I invoked Ebinger’s Bakery on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, their blackout cake: It transformed into a dark god. It held my entire childhood. I smelled the baking, the garbage in the streets, heard the cash register ring, felt the newsboy on the corner, saw the green container they used to box the cake. This was all coming up from someplace within me. I wrote my first real poem. I had never felt this way before. I looked up. The whole Saturday morning had passed. The shadows of the elms outside my window had shifted to the other side of the yard. This aloneness was good. I was a solitary human being, whole unto myself. This was sacred. It felt so good.
I wanted it bad. I wanted to be a writer. Only in retrospect do I see how badly I wanted it. At the time I wouldn’t dare admit that to myself—it was too scary; I felt too insecure, unsure. It takes great power to say, “I want that,” and great clarity. My desire took a form more like, “Gee, I like those poets I read in college, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Milton, W. B. Yeats.” I don’t even think I thought of them as male. They were writers, that’s all. I didn’t know that the fact that they were from another century, another country, another gender, and that they were all we read, limited my vision, my confidence, my desire. I wasn’t so much intimidated by these male writers as I was unconsciously accepting a structure: Men wrote, women didn’t. It was like someone telling you you can’t walk in snow. You believe them and then one day you put on your rubber boots and go out and pretty soon you have crossed a large field. What opened up the writing world to me was feminism. Women could write! They could walk in snow. You’re kidding! They can? Why I’m a woman! I’ll do it. I never thought there was a rule that women couldn’t; there was just no perception that they could, no vision of possibility.
When I read Erica Jong’s thin volume of poetry, Fruits and Vegetables, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1972 at twenty-four years old, I want to say the world exploded. It didn’t though. I read about sautéing an onion, cutting an eggplant, and a quiet gully opened between the divided rivers in my brain. One river lived my life; the other knew what to do with that life, having a direction, a consciousness. The gully let the waters come together: A connection was made. Erica Jong was writing about my world. At the time I owned a natural foods restaurant called Naked Lunch with three friends. I often spent whole days sautéing onions and cutting up eggplants for ratatouille. I could write about what I lived. I could make conscious, valuable, even deep, my daily life: my walks around the block, my knees, my purchase of toothpaste, the pigeons I saw every morning; on the telephone wire, my teeth, my grandmother, her chicken, her challah, her face, my hands, the men I kissed and didn’t kiss then, the gray sky of Michigan, the subways of New York and my knowledge of the Hudson River. I could use the material of my life for writing; I could write about Brooklyn, just as Yeats wrote about Inverness.
I threw out everything I had learned in literature classes in college, except my love for it. I threw out the techniques I had learned that writers used: simile, metaphor, style, character, tone, rhythm. The truth was I never understood them anyway. They weren’t in my body; they were something Mr. Crane talked about endlessly in a quiet drone. I guess he was a nice man; my dear college best friend Carol, another literature major, liked him, so I kept signing up with her for his courses. We ate those caramel chocolates called turtles in class, passed them to each other, and I liked that. It was enough for me to come and sit next to Carol with her crooked front tooth.
I daydreamed in all the classes, and as we walked into finals in June I grabbed Carol’s arm: “What is satire?” Her mouth fell open. Satire was the subject of the entire semester. I had heard not one word of Mr. Crane’s lectures. I remember only the dusty cadence of his voice
, my heavy eyelids, the gray windowpanes and scruffy black linoleum-tiled floor. “Marry me,” I’d sometimes whisper to myself. I have no idea what I meant by that. I wasn’t in love with anyone. It was just a motto my mother must have given me or a secret marriage I wanted with literature.
That twenty-fourth year I wrote tentative poems about lilacs, time, love, light, and dark. I threw in quotes by Thomas Wolfe, “Oh, ghost come back to me, not into life, but into magic where we will never die.” I’d write these poems lying on my side on my bed, my left hand holding up my head, and read them aloud over and over to myself. I was digesting my own voice. I coined phrases: “In order to write you must have confidence in your own experience, that it is rich enough to write about.” I had to believe in my mother, my grilled cheese sandwich, opening the refrigerator, the way I felt about night and shoulders and sidewalks. My life began to become a vast field of significant value. The other phrase I repeated was, “You must trust your own mind.” I became aware that writing was based on words, that they came out of my mind, and that I had to trust what I thought, felt, and saw. I could not be afraid that I was insignificant, or stupid—or, I could be afraid, but I had to speak anyway.
I read slowly through The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Out of that thick, dense book one line remains for me, and that line was worth the entire reading. “In order to create you have to be deeply rooted in the society.” She said this to show why white males, rather than women or minorities, were in the forefront of art. She gave me the key to creative energy in that line, “To be deeply rooted in the society.” To write I had to have my fist deep in my life—in my pain, my joy, my culture, my generation. In other words, I had to be alive. I couldn’t be shut away in the kitchen or the bedroom. I couldn’t protect myself from money, or cars, or politics. Writing is the willingness to see. I had to be willing to look. Coca-Cola was in my poems, cigarettes, beer, not because I used any of these—at the time I was a vegetarian discovering health foods—but because they were in the landscape around me. I didn’t want to turn from anything because of fear or loathing. In other words—and I didn’t know this then, I know it now—I was slowly, slowly nurturing in me a place of quiet detachment, a place where I could look at everything without judgment, without good or bad, just putting it down on the page.
Long Quiet Highway Page 4
