A Good Story Dies a Noble Death

Just minutes ago, I finished reading Inheritance, the latest book by Christopher Paolini and the last of the series.  I enjoyed it very much, though I wouldn’t say it’s among my very favorite books.  Still, upon finishing the series, I felt a kind of desolation that I usually do when I come to the end of a good story.  It’s a feeling of satisfaction mixed with a strange weight of loss, and neither side is entirely good or bad. 

Those of us who are readers—and even many of us who are not—understand this feeling.  We all spend so much mental and emotional energy devoted to stories, whether they come from books, movies, or even what happens out in the world.  One of the profound questions of human experience is what will happen next?  It’s an integral part of why we read books, why we play games, why we watch the news.  The anticipation and curiosity of not knowing is painful, and yet oddly exhilarating.

For me, this feeling of anticipation is strongest between installments of the stories I read.  I can’t even count the number of stories in which I am currently entangled.  Kristen Britain’s Green Rider series, Patricia Rayburn’s Siren, Clive Barker’s Abarat, and P.C. and Kristin Cast’s Dark Night books are those that sit on my shelf now; there are others, I know.  As a writer, being positioned in this web of uncertainty is marvelous, because it opens so many dozens of possibilities to me.  Where does the main character fall at the end of the story?  How will she cope with the new difficulties and hurts given to her?  What new characters have yet to be revealed?  Questions like these have to be answered, and I tend to write out various answers myself, which generates new ideas and infinite possibilities.

When a series ends, the definitive answers have come, and all the other possibilities die away.  Some of my speculations I save as new stories; others are simply no longer feasible and must be forgotten.  This is part of the sorrow I feel when finishing a story.  The rest comes from the simple fact that I have to withdraw the part of my consciousness from the world in which it has lived.  Using Inheritance as my example, Alagaesia is now closed to me, and while I can go back and visit—and I’m certain I will: I’m a chronic re-reader—it will never have the same vibrancy and life that it once did.  But no story would be any good without its ending.  It is what makes the story worthwhile.  So I will nurse the bittersweet loss of a story for a little while longer, and then find another to open new worlds. 

Out of Ruination

“To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.”  Oscar Wilde

Much of my poetry comes out of ruin.  I wouldn’t say that my self is ruined, of course.  I’m too young, and too fortunate, to have the privilege of calling myself ruined.  But I firmly believe that every human being can find unhappiness in their own way, no matter how bright their lives may be.  The smallest things can leave gaping wounds in the soul, and often it is out of those withered parts that the most beautiful art springs.  Too often, it's from there that my art comes, beautiful or not.

I couldn’t say why.  Maybe it’s because ugliness in ourselves inspires us to seek loveliness.  Maybe it’s because we appreciate the loveliness more after having slogged through some dark and unpleasant part of our lives.  Maybe it’s just a small and despairing part of ourselves that still wants to leave something beautiful behind. 

Oscar Wilde would have known about ruination.  All his life he carried with him a lock of hair in an envelope, a remnant of the sister who died suddenly at age ten.  He was arrested for loving a man, and the subsequent imprisonment cost him his family.  The last years of his life were spent wandering, his creativity lost to him.  But now, that very suffering has made him into an icon.  I have heard more about the man himself than about his work—many of my fellows at this marvelous school of mine seem to hold him as a hero.  And one of my loveliest memories is that of visiting Wilde’s grave in Paris, the statue over his tomb covered in admiring and loving graffiti.  My favorite?  The simple message, “My dearest Oscar: We are winning.”

So I understand what Wilde meant when he said this.  I believe—I have to believe—that even the darkest parts of one’s life can lead to and even create something beautiful.  Be it poetry, art, dance, theatre, or just a greater appreciation of the good in life, I believe that in the end it is worth it.  It is an honor.

My Intuition Knows Something I Don't Know

Every Monday, I have a voice lesson.  Sometimes I spend more time talking in this lesson than I do singing, but it’s always enjoyable.  Today my teacher told me something that surprised me.  We were talking about how it feels to be the one in charge of a situation, and how strange that feeling can be the first few times you get it.  I mentioned how I had found myself in charge of several situations recently.  “Oh, well,” my teacher said, “you have a rather commanding presence, so I’m not surprised.”

Huh?  Commanding presence?  Me?  I’m five feet tall with a baby face, so I’m certainly not physically intimidating in any way.  And I usually consider myself to be rather shy, especially with strangers.  So—commanding?  Not quite the adjective I would choose. 

The idea of “presence” is intriguing to me, though, and I like the thought that I have one, whatever type of presence it might be.  How does one go about having a presence, though?  Not everyone has one; not everyone makes an immediate impression without saying a word.  There’s a girl in my choir who has a very cheerful presence—she makes me smile whenever she walks into the room.  I had a high school teacher who had a very intimidating presence.  He terrified me, though I was one of the best in his class.  Then there are people who just put me off—a repellant presence? 

It all comes out of intuition, our “sixth sense.”  Somehow we learn to judge people by tiny signals that our subconscious mind reads.  Some of it is probably in the physical—the way someone carries herself, or the expressions they use.  But there’s more to it than that.  What is it that makes us able to decide at a glance whether someone is trustworthy, or whether we respect that person, or whether we want to have their company?  It’s a mystery to me.

If I had to choose, I’d say I wanted a “soothing” or “welcoming” presence.  I suppose, though, that having a commanding presence isn’t a bad thing.  It might make up a bit for my lack of confidence (or inches).  Then again, maybe my commanding presence itself rises out of an unconscious confidence that I never knew I had.  I hope so, sometimes.  I need all the help I can get.

Dealbreaker Books

When I say the word “dealbreaker”, pretty much everyone who might be reading this will know what I mean.  The “deal” in question is a relationship, and a dealbreaker is something, some habit or action or opinion in one’s significant other that is simply not to be borne.  For me, not being considerate would be a dealbreaker.  Not liking dogs—probably a dealbreaker.  Chewing tobacco is an immediate dealbreaker.

This morning, I read an article about literary dealbreakers.  These are books which, in the words of the author, “so deeply resonate with your soul that if a potential partner finds them [laughable], any meeting of minds (or body) is all but impossible.”  Now, this may be pushing it a bit far in the grand scheme of things, and there will be those who find the very idea of this laughable.  But I’m a believer in dealbreaker books.  It makes me wonder which books I would consider dealbreakers.  The ones that spring immediately to mind are as follows:

—The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.  Classics, and there is so much fodder for discussion and conversation in here, which is good, as I imagine my soulmate will enjoy intellectual discussion as much as I do.

—the Harry Potter series, for the simple reason that if I’m with someone who doesn’t like Harry Potter, clearly someone delivered the wrong man to my front door.

—Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy, particularly the first two, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger,  These were the first books I read by McCaffrey, beginning a life-long kind of adoration.  They combined passion and love of music, a fantastical world with excitement and danger, and themes of breaking off from what holds you back and forging your own path doing what you love. 

—various Shakespeare plays, especially Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Tempest, As You Like It, and Othello.  If I’m with someone who doesn’t like Shakespeare, how can I expect him to take me to see it?  But he should dislike the same ones I dislike, namely All’s Well That End’s Well (which does not end particularly well in my opinion) and Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Most of my choices are classics which almost go without saying, but once I found out my partner’s opinion of them, for better or worse I wouldn’t forget.  Books form an essential core of my life, and anyone who would like to share that life with me would have to share my books as well.  (Not taking care of books would be another dealbreaker, especially if they were my books.)  I don’t mean that the poor man would have to agree with me on everything—that would get dull.  But he would have to respect and understand my opinions, and have his own to offer in return.  After all, isn’t respect and understanding vital in the life of any relationship?  

Think Before Speaking--Wondering about Words

I love words.  I wouldn’t be an English major if I didn’t.  I love to form sentences, I love to learn new vocabulary, and I love to use words in new and interesting ways.  I love people who have good grammar, and I love jokes about people who have bad grammar.  But even to me, it’s slightly bewildering just how many words there are in the world.

Take a look around you.  Where do you see words?  In my dorm room, there are words on the postcards pinned to my door, words on my water bottle and my tube of lotion, words on the note that reminds me to floss my teeth, stupid.  There are thousands upon thousands of words on the bookshelf behind me.  Words on my printer, printed on my window, even in my clothes, sheets, and towels.

It wasn’t always this way.  Today an admission of illiteracy is a shocking announcement.  Even two hundred years ago, though, the majority of the world didn’t know how to read.  It was reserved for the elite, for those who could afford to send their children to school.  Looking further back, we come across entire cultures who didn’t feel the need for a written language.  Their histories and legends came down to the next generation by word of mouth, and it seemed to work well enough.

Now, I’m not saying that I wish it were still that way.  English major, remember?  I just think it’s strange how much things have changed.  Words have become something completely different from what they once were for us.  All they are, really, are symbols, lines and spaces that represent something else.  But try to look at a word now and see only that, the symbols that make it up.  You can’t, can you?  Your brain automatically makes something else out of it.  It’s nearly impossible for us, now, not to read something that we come across.  It happens that quickly and easily.

Sometimes I do look at words and realize just how funny-looking they are.  How does this make sense, I wonder?  What is the connection that my brain makes between the black etch marks that make out the word lesson and make me think of my conducting class, singing, dull repetitive homework assignments, and Lewis Carroll, all in one?  This is what language does for us.  It’s wonderful, but very strange.  

Then again, there are many things in life that are. 

VML--Mom

Last year, my mother wrote me a letter that has been sitting on my desk ever since, awaiting my attention.  I kept it because there was a line that struck me, one that inspired me to write.  Today I finally got the chance to write the poem I've been wanting to write.  I include it here: it's no masterpiece, but I'm always glad to have something in words that was once only a vague idea.  Isn't that the ultimate goal of the writer?

Anticlimactic

For my mother’s birthday,

my father drove her up to a lovely restaurant—

a two-hour drive to find any establishment

that could be called “lovely”—

for a special dinner.

In that place, on that night

there was to be a presentation of wild birds

rescued from the wild, stern-eyed owls

and restless prey-seekers,

and a red-tailed hawk to be released

back into the wild from whence she came.

This last was the primary draw, I believe.

When writing to me about it later,

my mother deemed the event “cool,

even if it was a bit anticlimactic.

She just flew away.”

Were I that lucky once-captive,

I would have found meaning in that flight.

Having lived long years—a vast percentage

of her life—in captivity, wing feathers

brushing cages and human skin, in that moment

she lifted free of the supporting arm,

touching nothing but wind, higher than she had ever

dared to go before, only to look down

and see no one summoning her,

no one waiting for her return.

To see only farewells in human eyes.

Was there fear or contentment in her heart?

My mother and father, watching,

had no way to tell.  After all,

she just flew away.

Back in the Days of Bad Poetry

There is an annual poetry contest sponsored by Hollins, the Nancy Thorp Memorial contest.  Every year high school students from all around the country send in entries—some because their English teachers require it, but still—and Hollins undergraduate and graduate students serve as the judges.  This year, I was one of them.

It was a humorous experience for me, and an eye-opener, because at one point I was one of those high school students.  I remembered writing that quality of poetry, though at the time I was unaware of how very bad it was.  There’s a tendency at that age to be very overdramatic, to be angry at the entire world and to spill angst across the page.  Yes, there were many examples of teenage angst, and we laughed at many of them.  I mean, “tsunami of grief”?  Really?

But even as I laughed, I was struck by how many there were and how similar they sounded.  More fascinating was how familiar the tone of these poems was: almost exactly the same as some of the poetry I myself used to write as a teenager.  Poetry about being alone, being stuck in the darkness...I wrote that sort of thing at one time.  It seems the high school experience is much the same wherever you are.  What makes it so?  I suppose it must be that in large groups, teenagers begin to look the same.  They form the same groups, the same rules for themselves.

After the fact, we tend to roll our eyes and laugh, but I remember those years and how they were for me.  High school was a pretty miserable existence.  I was too smart for my own good, and much too shy.  It made me unapproachable, and so my social life flatlined for years.  In a world that demands social interaction, it made things difficult for me.  I wanted people to see something special in me and acknowledge it.  What I didn’t learn until later was that I had to do something in order to show that something-special, and with the doing comes a kind of self-acknowledgement that renders mass admiration unnecessary.

Now, I had left my angst-poetry behind by the time I reached tenth grade, but that feeling came back several times throughout high school.  I write this now in the hopes that I will come back to it later, when that feeling is harder to remember.  It is the kind of thing at which adults roll their eyes, but I hope that even while I laugh, there is a bit of understanding and sympathy underlying.  Silly though they seem, those hurts, those fears that you discover at that age are real, and there’s no way to escape them except to fight through on your own.