Writing Spaces

Writing a life . . . so often in the past tense.

image:  Miele Tè e Dolce Lavanda

Writing Spaces

The voice of bells, whether their surface or their giving tongue.  Their call to what is holy.  Their conversation with the silence.






image:  Temple Bells, Design Manifest

Coda

In Huna, I've learned, names determine the owner's nature and destiny.  You ask your basic self to talk to you, to tell you what its name is.  In the hush of orange-tree shadow, mine says loki—lake or pool, or what is within.  I'm happy with that, remembering the introspective fishponds.  But then a day or two later another, small but more insistent voice surprises me.  Belle, it says.  And says again, louder, willful as ever.

My own name, then, come claiming me.  The hidden middle.  The name of my father's mother, the name of her daughter, my aunt, the name of the child I was, cherished and safe in lamplight, in Navajo country, the northern Arizona mountains, in first morning, the lighted darkness of journeys' beginnings, with the smell of bacon and the gentle sweetness of honey wrapped all around the spoon as if belonging to it utterly.

I want her back, the innocent being it named.

It embarrassed me much of my life, that unacknowledged name, because it can so easily be taken wrong, be made to mock; because it carries overtones and baggage.  I've refused to let any but my most trusted friends know it.  I've been ashamed of it, as of my too-short bangs and funny teeth and ears that stick out.  It's been down-home when I wanted to be uptown; down south instead of someplace I would rather be.  It's been too soft, I think, too gentle—a vulnerable creature of a more forgiving time.

But I now understand it fits so perfectly, after all.  This keepsake of my father's family, of which I have no others, is first a precious hand-me-down, chosen with love by my parents.  But it's an older legacy as well, a gift—if inadvertent—from another tongue.  It tells of the France I have travelled happily, the language which has opened worlds I couldn't have imagined.  But it's not just any word from French, somehow transmuted to become our own, we fortunate three (like muses or graces), but the single word which tells of what it is I've made my lifelong quest, of what has come to be my vocation, beyond everything:  belle.  What is beautiful.

Or, lovely—the word I use most.  Fine, too.  And calm, of the sea.

La Belle au bois dormant is Sleeping Beauty.  That I've been as well, enchanted in the tangle of branches grown up around me, keeping me apart.

_______

Such beauty there has been, child.  The green-hearted fishponds—remember?  The luscious, revelatory colors of Pierre Bonnard; a tart of windfall apricots burnt gently on the top; a cathedral at first morning, or an ancient stadium above Delphi; a resonant hymn; a black dog with joy in every bone; an herb in a monastic garden:  clary, sage, or rue; words in the spacious slow-paced old Venetian fonts; Puccini on a summer hillside, and, indoors, a little measured Bach; a high bird cage on a lake, and next to it the time-worn lines of an old woman's amused face; stone temples, lines of poetry, black islands; a sheath of milk-white orchids carried out to sea; the ink called sepia; the Paris bridges; a dozen kinds of vongole with delicate transluscent shells; alum crystals forming around string, and pieces of glass angled to catch stars; the caldera of a volcano, underfoot; Ethiopian spices; Aunt Terry's intricate leis; my mother's spirit; seeds, green bark, and silver-backed leaves; an irridescent flurry of peacocks; a single white heron; a secret, a lessening, a way of going forward.

All this is, after all, in me.  Of me.  Inextricable.  Bound by the telling name that defines me, in spite of my early embarrassed squirmings under it.

_______

I had resisted my name; and it came back to me in the silence of Huna.  I felt it in me like a small child standing in a doorway.  Awakened from sleep, trailing a blanket, coming into a lighted, laughing room, full of all the people she loved best.  Wistful, plaintive, forgotten.  The neglected beauty of the sleeping woods, kissed, welcomed back in.

My name is mine again, and everything that is beautiful.

To be worthy of it, and of those others who have trusted me to be—that is my daunting legacy and destiny.

 —Christie

(from "Island of Spirits and Kings")

Writing Spaces

Writing oneself:  the possibilities of being anything you want.

“I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.”
—Kelly Cherry, The Exiled Heart:  A Meditative Autobiography

“I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.” 
—Margaret Atwood, The Tent

image:  She Who Is

Composing the Self

In the photograph a woman entering her middle age sits crosslegged on the ground between two ancient red clay storage jars bigger than she is, her arm affectionately around the swell of one of them.  Though the midday sun is on her she looks cool in a white cotton t-shirt and loose drawstring pants the color and texture of celery seed.   The wrist that’s visible is enlaced in one of those elaborate Greek bracelets which you can buy for about a dollar in any shop on the islands and which leave an intricate dark mark along your skin like a tattoo where the fake gold coating rubs off.  She’s thirty-five, in that photo, but wears it well.  The jars, Minoan pithoi, are some four thousand, and have worn well too—remarkably so, given the number and intensity of earthquakes there on Crete.

            Mar is pleased with the composition.  It shows her just the way she wanted, she thinks.  Amused, defiant, a little ironic.  Accepting who she is, for a change; ready to face her critics head-on.  And the pithoi—the slow speed film has captured them well, grainy and flawed and wonderful.  Their history tangible in them.  She studies the photo in the borrowed London flat just before Christmas, and can’t wait to get back to Crete in January, to find out what will happen to that woman.

—Christie, excerpt from Reading the Stones (first draft)

Writing Spaces

Writing summer . . . from within.





image:  The Beauty of Arts

Composition

Let the words take me, for I am of words alone.

I have tried to be different things and have failed,

losing even the words, losing myself in gibberish.

I have taken stone and ink in hand,

have taken on the satin mask of mime,

have fashioned wings of bone and kite string.

I have taken other bones, and onions, and have made

soup, but no poetry.  Broth is not my medium—

thinner than lifeblood, and only nourishing.

I have taken up the palette knife,

and cut cheese with it:  a red round of gouda

that looked good on the plate but not the page.

And as a watercolor painter finds a bit of marble,

thinks it would be fine to carve a tortured face,

and fails—and thinks because of it he is no artist

after all, so have I tried bending to my purpose

those stuffs that are not mine.  I must run now

and overtake the words before they’re gone:

let them swarm over me, cleaning the bones.

—Christie

(August 1979

Oakland/San Francisco)