I had fun with my National Poetry Month offering, the poem "Intake Interview," and was amazed at how many people tried to answer more than one or two of those largely unanswerable questions.
For me, one of the pleasures of poetry is mulling it over for a while. This may be strange to those who know me because I'm so often a list-maker--write it down, do it, cross it off, forge ahead. Maybe I like poetry because it's the one place in my life where I don't feel I have to answer all the questions right away.
Here are some questions that are lovely to contemplate, by Mary Oliver. The poem is entitled Some Questions You Might Ask:
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?
One question certainly does lead to another. These particular questions are some I've always wondered about. How can people make pronouncements about animals not having souls? It's fun the way this poet takes that question almost (one might argue) to absurdity by including plants and even stones. The questions become, for me at least, questions about what we see, and how far we can see into someone or something.
How much of me is what I look like? (In my case, not much. My intellectual life is somewhat disengaged from my physical existence. I can run in my dreams.) Can you remember a time you became aware that there was more to someone than met the eye?
Showing posts with label Mary Oliver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mary Oliver. Show all posts
Monday, April 26, 2010
Friday, November 13, 2009
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
When I got to the part of having the flu where I could open my eyes for a bit, I lay in bed and read some children's books. The first one was Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian because I've been seeing recommendations of it everywhere and my friend the Lass particularly wanted me to read it.
Despite having grown up hearing stories from great-aunts and great-grandmothers about "our Indian blood" (in the south, this was often an attempt to gloss over "our African blood") and having been raised in a midwest city next to Trail of Tears State Park, where the Cherokee Princess Otahki died, I've never gotten particularly interested in Native American culture, aside from what everyone learns in school or from reading Mary Oliver and Louise Erdrich. I know just enough to be amused when I find out that a friend's child is in a school band called the "Marching Braves." And I'm always bemused to read about instances of prejudice against "Indians," which is a main feature of Alexie's book.
It seems that in the American west, there must actually be some prejudice, especially concerning reservations and casinos. To try to understand that, I found myself thinking about moving to Middletown, Rhode Island in the 1980's, when I remember encountering a kind of prejudice I'd never even heard of--against the Portuguese. The Portuguese?! At first it struck me that these folks had whirled a globe and chosen someone to pick on at random. Then I began to see some of the tensions between people whose families were brought to the area to fish or a living, and people who came to the area for other, often less desperate, reasons. It still seems strange to me, but if I close my eyes and squint a little I can see some of why it might have started.
The interesting part of this book, for me, is not how downtrodden the main character, Junior, is, or even how he deals with adversity. It's how he refuses to see through the narrow lenses offered him by the "Indian world" or the "White world." Although I'm not a fan of cartoon illustrations in general, I did like one picture with the caption "boys can hold hands until they turn nine." It seems to me the opinion of an extraordinarily gentle--perhaps extraordinarily hard-headed--boy; when I ask 19-year-old college students how long boys can hold hands, they generally tell me that it's not allowed after the age of 6, when the boys go to first grade.
Especially after reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, featuring a British schoolboy who gets special powers from a 50-year-old school book, I don't sympathize with Junior's anger when he gets a geometry book that's 30 years old and belonged to his mother. If it was a History book, maybe I'd understand, but geometry hasn't changed that much in the past century. Yet this is the perceived "unfairness" that gets Junior out of the reservation school and into a nearby small-town public school where the children learn more. One of Junior's new classmates is a "genius farm boy" named Gordy, who tells him to look at the small high school library (3,412 books) and consider that "if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish." When Junior asks what his point is, Gordy elaborates: "the world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know." What redeems Junior as a character, at least for me, is that he's eager to learn. He befriends people who at first seem "racist" to him, and he learns enough about himself to start showing his best side to people, rather than always pushing them away.
Perhaps because this is a book for children, the type of Indian Junior identifies with is not well delineated. He tells stories like this one:
"Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.
Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones.
Gay people were seen as magical, too.
I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.
Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!
My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.
'Jeez,' she said. "Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?'
Of course ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.
Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.
But not my grandmother.
She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know?"
This story, with its unspecified "kinds" of "Indians" reminds me of the response a friend of mine once got when he correctly identified the home country of a visiting student as Cameroon. The student was so grateful to be recognized that he blurted out "most Americans...you think that all of Africa is one small village!" Rather than "the Spokane Tribe," which is mentioned, most of Junior's musings seem to be about generic "Indians" as if all Native Americans were from one small tribe.
In the part of the midwest where I grew up, a game children sometimes play is reciting how many different countries their ancestors came from, and the child who can remember the longest list without being suspected of making them up on the spot wins. I wasn't terribly good at the game; usually only getting in three or four from my mother's side and the same from my father's. How good would you be at this game?
Despite having grown up hearing stories from great-aunts and great-grandmothers about "our Indian blood" (in the south, this was often an attempt to gloss over "our African blood") and having been raised in a midwest city next to Trail of Tears State Park, where the Cherokee Princess Otahki died, I've never gotten particularly interested in Native American culture, aside from what everyone learns in school or from reading Mary Oliver and Louise Erdrich. I know just enough to be amused when I find out that a friend's child is in a school band called the "Marching Braves." And I'm always bemused to read about instances of prejudice against "Indians," which is a main feature of Alexie's book.
It seems that in the American west, there must actually be some prejudice, especially concerning reservations and casinos. To try to understand that, I found myself thinking about moving to Middletown, Rhode Island in the 1980's, when I remember encountering a kind of prejudice I'd never even heard of--against the Portuguese. The Portuguese?! At first it struck me that these folks had whirled a globe and chosen someone to pick on at random. Then I began to see some of the tensions between people whose families were brought to the area to fish or a living, and people who came to the area for other, often less desperate, reasons. It still seems strange to me, but if I close my eyes and squint a little I can see some of why it might have started.
The interesting part of this book, for me, is not how downtrodden the main character, Junior, is, or even how he deals with adversity. It's how he refuses to see through the narrow lenses offered him by the "Indian world" or the "White world." Although I'm not a fan of cartoon illustrations in general, I did like one picture with the caption "boys can hold hands until they turn nine." It seems to me the opinion of an extraordinarily gentle--perhaps extraordinarily hard-headed--boy; when I ask 19-year-old college students how long boys can hold hands, they generally tell me that it's not allowed after the age of 6, when the boys go to first grade.
Especially after reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, featuring a British schoolboy who gets special powers from a 50-year-old school book, I don't sympathize with Junior's anger when he gets a geometry book that's 30 years old and belonged to his mother. If it was a History book, maybe I'd understand, but geometry hasn't changed that much in the past century. Yet this is the perceived "unfairness" that gets Junior out of the reservation school and into a nearby small-town public school where the children learn more. One of Junior's new classmates is a "genius farm boy" named Gordy, who tells him to look at the small high school library (3,412 books) and consider that "if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish." When Junior asks what his point is, Gordy elaborates: "the world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know." What redeems Junior as a character, at least for me, is that he's eager to learn. He befriends people who at first seem "racist" to him, and he learns enough about himself to start showing his best side to people, rather than always pushing them away.
Perhaps because this is a book for children, the type of Indian Junior identifies with is not well delineated. He tells stories like this one:
"Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.
Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones.
Gay people were seen as magical, too.
I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.
Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!
My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.
'Jeez,' she said. "Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?'
Of course ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.
Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.
But not my grandmother.
She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know?"
This story, with its unspecified "kinds" of "Indians" reminds me of the response a friend of mine once got when he correctly identified the home country of a visiting student as Cameroon. The student was so grateful to be recognized that he blurted out "most Americans...you think that all of Africa is one small village!" Rather than "the Spokane Tribe," which is mentioned, most of Junior's musings seem to be about generic "Indians" as if all Native Americans were from one small tribe.
In the part of the midwest where I grew up, a game children sometimes play is reciting how many different countries their ancestors came from, and the child who can remember the longest list without being suspected of making them up on the spot wins. I wasn't terribly good at the game; usually only getting in three or four from my mother's side and the same from my father's. How good would you be at this game?
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Summer Day
This has felt like the year without a summer, to me. It's been too cold and rainy to go swimming on each of the three days we had a long enough uninterrupted span of time to do it. Both my kids will be at the high school this fall, so they had to schedule a summer gym class and now we're on to band and soccer practice before school starts (way too early) on August 21.
Part of the reason our schedule has been so relentless is that Walker, who is 13, is having "growing pains," and it's affected his soccer game and therefore our lives. I took him to see a sports medicine doctor in June, who prescribed physical therapy. Yesterday the initial course was finished, but we had to schedule another, because his pain when he runs has persisted, despite exercises and stretching. The physical therapist thinks that his patellar tendonitis (bones grow first and then muscles, ligaments and tendons have to catch up, so the tendon that goes over the kneecap can get over-stretched and irritated) has improved, but now he has pain right where the ligaments and tendons attach to the kneecap, which means the growth plates can be affected. That sounds scary to me, but so does telling a 13-year-old boy that he can't play sports for the next few years.
Doctors and therapists say he can play, but that it would be good for him to rest the knee for "a month or so." He's done that for several months since the pain started to affect his ability to run last April, and it hasn't yet made the inflammation go away. Also he's not likely to stop growing anytime soon (we're a tall family, and he's at the very start of the typical male growth pattern). So what can we do? Last night he went to the first of daily 3-hour practices for the high school soccer team, of which he will be the youngest member. At the end, everyone had to run a mile, except for Walker, who was allowed to run only 1/4 of a mile "so he wouldn't tear anything in his knee," the team captain said to him. He came home in pain, had aspirin and three applications of ice, and got up limping stiffly this morning.
So you see why I'm scheduling hour-long therapy appointments for him until school starts, despite the way it makes the rest of the summer all about driving around town and showing up for appointments on time.
I'm paying attention to where everyone has to be when during the day and wondering what else I should have done during the night, like the speaker in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day":
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Having no chance to be "idle and blessed," I'm still second-guessing "what I have been doing all day." Don't most mothers? Isn't it almost too much sometimes to have to plan not only what you're going to do with your own "wild and precious life," but also how much you can allow others to do with theirs and still keep them safe and whole to decide for themselves later?
Part of the reason our schedule has been so relentless is that Walker, who is 13, is having "growing pains," and it's affected his soccer game and therefore our lives. I took him to see a sports medicine doctor in June, who prescribed physical therapy. Yesterday the initial course was finished, but we had to schedule another, because his pain when he runs has persisted, despite exercises and stretching. The physical therapist thinks that his patellar tendonitis (bones grow first and then muscles, ligaments and tendons have to catch up, so the tendon that goes over the kneecap can get over-stretched and irritated) has improved, but now he has pain right where the ligaments and tendons attach to the kneecap, which means the growth plates can be affected. That sounds scary to me, but so does telling a 13-year-old boy that he can't play sports for the next few years.
Doctors and therapists say he can play, but that it would be good for him to rest the knee for "a month or so." He's done that for several months since the pain started to affect his ability to run last April, and it hasn't yet made the inflammation go away. Also he's not likely to stop growing anytime soon (we're a tall family, and he's at the very start of the typical male growth pattern). So what can we do? Last night he went to the first of daily 3-hour practices for the high school soccer team, of which he will be the youngest member. At the end, everyone had to run a mile, except for Walker, who was allowed to run only 1/4 of a mile "so he wouldn't tear anything in his knee," the team captain said to him. He came home in pain, had aspirin and three applications of ice, and got up limping stiffly this morning.
So you see why I'm scheduling hour-long therapy appointments for him until school starts, despite the way it makes the rest of the summer all about driving around town and showing up for appointments on time.
I'm paying attention to where everyone has to be when during the day and wondering what else I should have done during the night, like the speaker in Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day":
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Having no chance to be "idle and blessed," I'm still second-guessing "what I have been doing all day." Don't most mothers? Isn't it almost too much sometimes to have to plan not only what you're going to do with your own "wild and precious life," but also how much you can allow others to do with theirs and still keep them safe and whole to decide for themselves later?
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