It is a disjointed memory, attached to impressions. I was fourteen, traveling in France with my family. One day we planned to visit an eighteenth-century country house, I don’t know why. For the architecture, probably. I remember nothing of the tour apart from one detail: sitting on a small table in the entryway was a painted china bowl filled with dried hydrangeas.
I used to host retreats on what is popularly known as “Celtic Spirituality.” I was good at it, largely because I found the whole concept a relief from a particularly patriarchal and oppressive church experience I was caught in. I focused on the seasons and poetry and art and the holiness of the ordinary. We wrote protective prayers and celebrated outdoor Eucharists and memorized Yeats. It was lovely and it felt good and there was a lot of truth and insight in it that I still cherish. But I began to notice a problem.
I have been wrong about almost everything having to do with politics, communal beliefs, and human nature for ten years. I thought at every turn corrective forces, based in values taught in children’s books and elementary school, would mean the demise and disappearance of Donald Trump. I was wrong. Against all my odds he persists, disrupting my status quo, disturbing my sleep, flouting my cherished beliefs. So I went on a search to figure out why.
I’m a reader and a writer. Like so many other readers and writers I love finding connections and themes. Even when I don’t like what I see I still look for meaning. So: today is January 6th, the traditional end of the joyful Christmas season and the anniversary of the upending of our social and political life.
A legend, persisting even now in history books, tells us that when General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, his band played the British folk ballad, “The World Turned Upside Down.” While this may not have happened—there is no record of it until a century after the event—it endures because it feels so appropriate. The British, with their disciplined, trained, uniformed army, had lost to a ragtag bunch of farmers and craftsmen roaming at will in the woods. From their point of view, that just … wasn’t right.
It was 1972. I was newly married, living in the north but traveling south for Christmas, which was a major festival in my family. Through a series of happy accidents, my husband had escaped any danger of being sent to Vietnam so my spirits were high. Vietnam as a specter over my personal life was behind me. I was everything civilians are accused of being: involved only when personally affected. The war was not behind the Vietnamese, but in a selfish betrayal of passions I had only recently held, I was no longer paying much attention.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Narnia is under an enchantment that makes it “always winter and never Christmas,” meaning “always dark and never light,” “always cold and never warm,” “always dormant and never growing,” “always fearful and never hopeful,” “always paralyzed and never creative.”
Most people I urge to write during this time dismiss the idea, or don’t register it as having any relevance to themselves. They aren’t “good enough,” they would say, or they aren’t “writers,”or their story isn’t interesting, or important, etc., etc. No matter how often I would urge, they could not see how whatever small contribution they might make would matter to anyone.
So I decided to make my point using the poem that introduced me to the Irish poet Eavan Boland who writes herself, as a woman, into the tangled historical and mythological history of Ireland.
Over the years I have used this blog space to mess around—with ideas, kinds of writing, connections, seasonal musings. My categories have morphed over time and have held various kinds of writing in a loose organization that makes occasional sense. That changed on the morning of November 6. It has taken me 10 days to pick myself up enough to think of next steps because it is either come up with a new approach or shut the whole thing down.
We need a bigger boat now, because clearly the one we have been rowing is not adequate.
Often on book-reading discussion boards someone will ask about DNF books. Do you have DNF books? What books are DNF for you? Is it even ethical, within the universe of book-reading morality, to DNF a book? Writing is difficult, sacrificial, even bloody, after all. Readers are, in the main, reluctant to disrespect.
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