On the Fence on a Maine Friday Morning

So already, I'm sitting again in the Orono Public Library, this time on the temporal fence that separates the last day of my three-day Maine writing retreat from the first day of my Massachusetts regular life resumed. Whether or not it should, my mind routinely prepares for what's next, even when it desperately wants to be fully engaged in what's now.

That's why before coming to the library today, I gassed up my car for tomorrow's ride home--and photographed the Stillwater River, which divides Orono into two parts. Rivers, like fences, divide. River water, like time, flows--but sometimes, like time, seems to stand still.

I know that if I lean too far toward tomorrow, I risk squandering today. But if I don't acknowledge the fence, I may miss the chance to make it something other than a divider between a life shaped by others' needs and desires and one shaped by my own. Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820. It may be that integration and division don't need to be antithetical. The challenge is, after all, to feel creative and free even when I'm in Massachusetts being responsible. Maybe I don't need to "resume" my regular life, as I put it in the first sentence of this blog, exactly. Maybe I can live it in a modified but still responsible way. And actually write something now and again.

Of late, I've been thinking a lot about fences. How could I not be, given that Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard contains multiple pieces that focus on the fence on which Matthew Shepard was left to die--and even allows it to speak as an "objective witness" of the oratorio's events?*

Actually, it was Leslea Newman in her October Mourning poetry cycle who first gave voice to that iconic fence so often rendered artistically in publicity for performances of the oratorio. 

Yes, there's "objective witness" courtesy of that fence in the oratorio. But in my opinion, there's important emotion, too. Take, for example, "The Fence (one week later)"--meaning one week after the murder. (I hope you'll listen to it at minute 57:30 in this Interlochen Festival Choir performance.) The text of the poem* is preceded by the following epigraph: "'I have seen people come out here with a pocketknife and take a piece of the fence, like a relic, like an icon.' ̶ Rev. Stephen M. Johnson, Unitarian minister."

I keep still

I stand firm

I hold my ground

while they lay down

flowers and photos

prayers and poems

crystals and candles

sticks and stones

they come in herds

they stand and stare

they sit and sigh

they crouch and cry

some of them touch me

in unexpected ways

without asking permission

and then move on

but I don't mind

being a shrine

is better than being

the scene of the crime 

The first part of the poem definitely offers factual witness: the still fence lists curious human behaviors and artifacts associated with them, neither of which it has been used to seeing or experiencing. The transition to the realm of feeling is accomplished by the ambiguous word "touch": we're asked to wonder if the fence feels physically touched, emotionally moved, or both. An assertion of the fence's integrity follows: those who touch it "in unexpected ways" do so "without asking permission"--in other words, without respecting the fence as a sentient player in the drama. Finally, after a somewhat offhand "I don't mind," the fence expresses a preference for being a place of memorial rather than murder. Such a preference must have some basis in feeling.

There's something about the voice of this fence that I love. It conveys a baffled humility and an acceptance in response to human behaviors that are new and not fully comprehensible to it. I think I sometimes hear myself speaking to myself in that voice a few days after my mother has exhibited a new Alzheimer's-related behavior. The shock and sadness of first observing the behavior dissipates over several days, and is followed by a sad but willing acceptance of the new reality. At that moment of acceptance, I can honestly say to myself, "I don't mind; this is where we are now, and it's not the worst place we could be." Sometimes I surprise myself by managing to climb over a fence into a place that I never imagined setting foot in, let alone coming to inhabit.

So no, I'm not going to carve a chunk out of the wooden table where I'm sitting in the Orono Public Library and take it home with me: somebody else is going to need to sit here tomorrow to do what they must do. But I am bringing home the three blog posts I've written while I've been up here in Maine. The words, like that river water, may not look like they're flowing, but they are. I'd better give them a place to gather and speak. There may well be a good road home, but it's going to have to run through places on both sides of the fence.

* Johnson explained this in an interview with Colorado Public Radio.

** The entire libretto of Considering Matthew Shepard can be found here: https://conspirare.org/wp-content/uploads/CMS-Libretto-LA-June-2018.pdf

At the Orono Public Library

So already, I am writing to you from the Orono Public Library on the second day of my writing retreat. Outside it's 20° under one of those late January hard, cold, blue skies--just stunningly clear and bright; inside it's heater-humming warm and cheerful. 

Every once in a while, you imagine what a designated block of time spent in a particular way might be like; every once in a while the reality of it measures up to the hope of it. So far, my writing retreat has lived up to my hopes for it.

A promise I made myself as this retreat began was that I would write my daily morning pages, as prescribed by Julia Cameron in her various books for aspiring and blocked creatives. I'm bending the rules here by writing today's pages in the form of a blog post and sharing them with all who might read this, but Cameron herself says there's no wrong way to write these pages.

It's not that I haven't read and replied to some emails while I've been up in Maine; it's not that I haven't spoken to my parents or had a chat with the visiting nurse who's about to discharge my dad from her care, given his complete recovery from the pneumonia he had earlier this month. This hasn't been the kind of retreat that has enabled me to leave the whole world behind. But it's definitely let me leave enough of it behind.

Truthfully, I had forgotten what that felt like. It seems like forever since I woke up in the morning and had a day, let alone a series of days, about wishes and aspirations rather than obligations. If in yesterday's blog I wrote about experiencing a sense of homecoming when I read Wordsworth's poetry in early December, today I can honestly say that many miles from home, sitting in quiet libraries under the blank slate of Maine's bright blue winter sky, I am also experiencing a sense of homecoming. 

Maybe writing retreats always need to be about both homecoming and departure, though in what order I don't know. A couple of weeks ago, I went on a weekend visit to another very good friend from college. Thanks to the long, quiet train rides to and from Philadelphia, and much to my relief, I discovered that even if I hadn't been able to write very much since November, I could still read in an engaged way. 

Of course, visiting old friends also always reminds me that I'm not someone who is engaged only in the care of her elderly parents. That's part of why I'm seeing friends for dinner every night during this writing retreat.

The children's story hour is starting on the other side of this library, and there's some melodic, guitar-accompanied singing going on. Everyone knows the song, and it's a great addition to the hum of the nearby heater.

Oh no, they've added drums. I'm enjoying the children's story hour a little less than I was before, but the singing still really is good. The kids are doing great with some complicated rhythms, and they seem to have the words to the songs' many verses down cold. Not to mention the sounds that the animals make.

The songs are over now, at least for a while; I think they're listening to the stories that aren't sung, that are being read or told. 

When I first stopped teaching, I used to go regularly if not often to the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy. Those were the days when I even had time to walk to and from the library, let alone go there for a few hours. Those days seem so long ago. But sitting in Maine public libraries the last couple of days reminds me that the days will come when I will be able to resume that practice.

So what's on the agenda for today? At the very least, reading a short story a friend of mine asked me to read and give her feedback about. And also, reading the morning pages I began writing, not as regularly and religiously as I'd hoped, the day after my mother moved onto the Skilled Nursing floor of her senior living community. 

I mention my mother's move because my lack of writing is so much connected to it:  the challenge of the last few months, besides my parents' various health issues, has been that they're living one floor apart from each other after so many years--it will be seventy years on March 18--of living fully together. It's been a difficult, sad adjustment for both of them, one they've both been needing to make when neither of them is at the top of his/her emotional game.

I don't know what else I might do here today. Write some of the talk I'll be giving in early March about Considering Matthew Shepard? Read another Wordsworth poem? Or some of the poetry of Rachel Hadas, whose work I first encountered in the Scituate Town Library poetry discussion group earlier this month? 

What I do know for sure is that I'll be off to Ellsworth for dinner with another good friend from college days when my library day is over.

What a gift to have time, choice, and space! Not to mention friends.

Lines Composed Many Miles from Tintern Abbey

So already, greetings from the banks of the Wye--or really, greetings from the Bangor Public Library. I'm on the first day of my self-imposed, hopefully productively-self-guided writing retreat.

I've come to Maine not because I've been struggling with writer's block--but because I've been yearning for the space and time to put some thoughts and feelings onto paper. I'm staying with a really good friend from my college days, Margo Lukens, whom I felt very comfortable asking to put me up. My hope is to spend each of my three days doing lots of writing and some reading, and each of my three evenings having dinner with good old friends, Margo and her husband Ken among them.

Last night, as I talked about my retreat plans with Margo, she suggested I think about blogging more frequently but also more briefly than has been my custom. Give yourself permission, she suggested, to publish in-the-moment, less developed, more exploratory posts about your individual thoughts, feeling, and ideas. Margo knows that my current days are generally chopped up, predictably and unpredictably; she also knows that I've had no shortage of writing ideas, even though I've had a shortage of writing time. Her suggestion was a direct response to the writing circumstances I described to her.

Tintern Abbey and Courtyard*

Frankly, her idea didn't sound like "one of the answers" until this morning, when I reread Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13,1798." Why--or Wye--did it suddenly resonate, you ask? For three reasons. Because I hadn't expected to be as deeply moved as I was by this poem that I hadn't read in the last forty years. Because I hadn't expected to come upon certain lines and phrases that for a long time have been helping me speak to myself about the world: "The still sad music of humanity" is one of those phrases. Finally, because I was sitting in the library with my laptop computer inches from my copy of the poem.

But why read "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" again at this moment? At the beginning of December, when the Scituate Town Library poetry discussion group read some Wordsworth, I felt a certain unexpected but reassuring sense of homecoming. The leader of that group, Joyce Wilson, and I decided to read some more Wordsworth. Joyce was interested in Harold Bloom's characterization of Wordsworth as a poet writing in the tradition of biblical prophecy; and since I'd taken a graduate school course on visionary poets, I had just the right book on my shelf--Milton and the Line of Vision, edited by my professor, Joseph Anthony Wittreich--to help us explore this idea together. As Wittreich puts it, visionary poets understand that their readers need to learn "to see not with but through the eye."**

Poetry--especially other people's poetry--has been much on my mind of late, particularly because the two choirs I sing in--the Unicorn Singers and the Broad Cove Chorale--are learning Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard. The oratorio draws much of its text from Leslea Newman's poetry cycle entitled October Mourning. It's my contention that Johnson, Newman, and their collaborators were also writing in the prophetic tradition. 

A fellow Unicorn Singer and I are preparing a talk to be given before our late March performances, so we've been listening to interviews with Craig Hella Johnson. Johnson's motivations for writing his passion oratorio are multiple, but one of them is to create a better world in which we act better, understand one another better, and love more. Prophets are always about creating or restoring the moral order and getting people to act right. But one of the ways to the heart--perhaps always, but especially in this era of proliferating hate crimes--may be through the ear and eye.

So if you've read Wordsworth in the past, and you know this poem has something to do with returning to a beautiful natural place of one's youth and grappling with one's changed relationship with Nature over time, you're probably thinking, what can this possibly have to do with an oratorio about Matthew Shepard?

Simply put, Wordsworth's poem is also much about seeing differently, about developing a new perspective, and even holding multiple perspectives in one's head--in this case, the person I was and still am on some level, and the person I am right now who well understands that younger person and doesn't quite know where all this change will lead.

Wordsworth's youthful self wanted nothing more than to perceive, delight in, and romp among Nature's various elements that, for him, "had no need of a remoter charm,/ . . ., not any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye." Wordsworth's older self, in contrast, sees something more in Nature, senses in it "A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts." He welcomes those thoughts, though they "chasten and subdue" the "dizzy raptures" and "aching joys" of his childhood.

Nature is no longer purely surface and sensory for Wordsworth; neither is he himself. On returning to Tintern Abbey five years later, he recognizes and values his own depth and potential for spirit, even if he isn't totally easy with every aspect of the change he's undergone:

Nor less, I trust,

To . . . ["these beauteous forms"] I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.***

While Wordsworth has many pleasant memories of a favorite childhood spot, he's now interested in writing about the existence of and his relationship to "the burthen of mystery," and then about the much desired experience of transcending one's own physical body to exist as "a living soul." When we're in that calm but profoundly happy soul state, we don't just see what's around us; "We see into the life of things." And that Wordsworth wants to do.

Wordsworth is grappling. And so must we. And I say "we" not just because I'm talking to "All of Us," as one section of Considering Matthew Shepard is entitled. Actually, I'm thinking about Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, to whom he speaks. Seeing and hearing anew, always a challenge, often goes better when there's a trusted companion to share the experience with along the road. I'm looking forward to heading back to Orono in a few minutes, and telling Margo all about my latest blog, written in a few hours at the Bangor Public Library. 

* Blaze, Saffron. “Tintern Abbey and Courtyard.” Wikimedia Commons, 31 May 2011, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tintern_Abbey_and_Courtyard.jpg.

** Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, editor. Milton and the Line of Vision. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.

*** Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,...” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798.