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St. Sebastian, Holes, and Choreography

What a weekend! Sao Sebastiao, as I saw him in Guimaraes on my birthday, continues to smile in my bones. Swan Isle Press, in Chicago, sent me (at Christopher’s instigation, I’m sure) Christopher’s book about Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca—entitled wonderfully, Sebastian’s Arrows. Christopher writes tenderly that for Dali and Lorca, St. Sebastian was “a symbol of poetry,” of “the poet’s vulnerability,” “deliriously content with his punctured state.” The book arrived Thursday and took me more deeply into St. Sebastian’s territory: transcendent bliss, despite the “punctured state,” despite the “holes,” no: because of the holes. Once again my head spins from so much evenement, from the conjunction of ironies, miracles, and large and small joys.

Friday night I announced the Midnight Special, the new journal of prisoners’ writing, on The Prison Show. Saturday I joined Ruth’s five kids and some of their spouses to celebrate her 80th birthday by joining her on the Alzheimer’s 6K walk. Ruth’s daughter Beverly lent me Richard Russo’s hilarious novel about worn-out academics, Straight Man, which fuels my desire to exit laughing. (Russo writes that winning honors at the little college where his protagonist teaches is “like winning a shit-eating contest.”)

Hurricane Paul made it impossible for the film crew to continue its work at San Blas, so (astonishing!) Paula came back to Houston for an unexpected few days. We went again to The Station Museum. This time we were able to look at all the work, take time with it, know it, feel it. There’s a seventy-four minute video that tells the story of the murders in agonizing detail. The parents of the girls, fathers and mothers, are right there on videotape: in grief, in anger, in dignity. The poems by Marjorie Agosin (accent over the i) are even more wonderful than I realized, and I copied some of them. Paula said what I needed to hear, and I was finally able to hear it. Tonight I even had a long and delightful phone call with Pho Kate, my friend who has continued on her path with SuCo Dieu Thien.

Two of Marjorie Agosin’s poems—copied from the walls of the gallery:

Memory is the only witness that
Remembers the women of Juarez
Now statues,
Scattered bones,
Heads and little ears.
There lie the remains of the women of Juarez
Who have left behind their spirits and lives
Their steps on the sand
Their moans on my hands that engrave
Their names in these words
That are a prayer, a supplication.
—-

And another one:

She crosses the borders
With her jeans
And white shirt
She fears the departure
The fortune tellers of the town
Assure her of happiness,
The young girl crosses the borders
She fears
The strangers in the roads.
The young girl dreams about Nogal
The fig tree
The madness of Nopal
In the distance, her mother bids her farewell
With the branches of holy leaves.

The girl traveler
Crosses the border
And no longer recognizes herself.
They obliged her to be another
To modulate other gestures
Other voices
And in the return home
She cannot find herself
She recognizes no one
And no one recognizes her.

After the gallery, Paula and I were tired of so much feeling. I had cried, moved by the work, by the stories and poems, by the names of the women, by the absences, by the spaces where those women’s lives were. The holes. We got into my car. The plan was to get dinner, but we weren’t hungry and I couldn’t face Houston traffic. I pulled into a gravel lot a block from the gallery, and we sat with the windows down, brushing away mosquitoes, talking in the dusk near the roar of an expressway, at least not assaulted by music and voices in yet another public place. I wanted to memorize Paula’s words. I came away with phrases etched like scrimshaw on my bones: “You can’t choose not to be an artist if it’s who you are.” “You have the skills already—you’ve been writing all your life. The work is not who you are. It’s bigger than who you are.” “You’re about to have the freedom—at last—to do what you came to do.” I worried that I’m too old, it’s too late. In my fifties I could have been a late bloomer, but now? She: “Is that what your culture tells you?” I laughed. Yes. That’s what it is. A cultural fiction. I was about to give up my power yet again.

I have this bizarre lack of memory—as if each moment in my life is the first, as if I have no history, as if the four books, the one-woman shows, and the god-knows-how-many articles and stories and poems don’t exist, as if every day I wake up with amnesia. I’ve been honing my craft for more than fifty years. I was thinking that perhaps I would have time to write, if the community I join allows me some free time…. But suddenly, with Paula’s eyes beside mine, it seems stupid to leave that to fate. I must go into the new life knowing what to ask for. I can say that I need some hours every day to write. I will say that. Paula said four. I mused with her, “Can I stop with four?” I get greedy; I become obsessed, I don’t want to stop, burn myself to an ash. Rather, that is what I have done, trying to squeeze time for writing into a life of making a living, grading papers, and supporting children. “Like every artist,” Paula laughed. But if I’m in a community with some structure, if I have the strength of the community to keep me centered, and then if I have hours free: what will it be like to have no papers to grade, ever again? What will it be like? I can’t imagine. Perhaps I won’t have to burn myself to an ash in order to say what I want to say. Perhaps, like Pema Chodron, I can learn to put the work down and take care of my body and then return to the work and find it hasn’t evaporated.

Paula reminds me that I can swing between the poles of allowing and directing, yielding and choosing, accepting and creating. Circumstance and choice. That dance. The ground is given, like circumstance, but the choreography is mine. It has taken me sixty-two years to earn the freedom to write; this is no time to give up, to be a wimp like Richard Russo’s English professor, hilariously filled with vague disappointment, going soft, exhilarated by the possibility of a car wreck to shake things up. Russo’s novel is good, coming now, letting me laugh at piles of papers to grade (I got two sets done this weekend, amid everything else).

One of Paula’s main subjects is absence. She photographs what is not there. She photographs spaces where something or someone was. She photographs what the walls remember, what the stones remember, the shapes of what has passed or been left behind. She holds the past in the present moment, which is exactly what meditation does. Time past is always contained in time present. There’s no escape, if we are brave enough to face every moment in our lives: none of it ever goes away. The empty spaces, the holes, the punctures are part of who we end up being. It’s so clear. Will I wake up a month from now, having forgotten it again? It feels so important to remember this time.



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