Writers, writing, sleeping. A few poems. And don’t forget to vote

Becoming compendium, October 24, 2022

Every day

Go slow now. Take time, feel gratitude, forgive. 
Remember what matters: Spirit, authenticity, justice, words.
Every day: Watch things grow. Live with silence. Reflect.

Colors for the homework, below. Photo by Fran Gardner

It’s always about writing

~Once you start looking, you find crumbs everywhere~

Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies is a massively grand book about many things, well deserving of all the praise and press it’s getting. One of those things it is about, which I didn’t expect, is writing.

In this memoir clothed as fiction, Akhtar remembers the processes of learning to write better and how his mentor taught him to access his dreams. In the sort of dizzying mashup that can be found throughout the book, he and she braid together Freud and Wittgenstein, Whitman and Woolf, Black Elk, the OED, mathematical lattices, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, all in the space of a page and a half. He emerges from all that ferment as a better writer.

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Akhtar says he reads one of Shakespeare’s sonnets every day. That sounded like a great idea, so I randomly choose sonnet 62—and it was exactly what I needed to hear, all about narcissistic self-love.

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount….

Do I have the time to read a Shakespeare sonnet every day? In the context of the fatigue of MS mixed with trying to write, with noticing my friends, reading the occasional book, playing the occasional game of Scrabble. … Maybe not Shakespeare every day. Maybe just a poem. In the morning. Like Gerard Manley Hopkin’s stunning morning poem, “The Windhover”:

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    		dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon …

Or maybe I’ll write one. While Shakespeare is staring in his mirror, contemplating his newfound beauty, I can gather some words like wool and weave them. The result will be lumpy and bumpy and unformed—but that’s where my heart will be for those few golden moments of creation.

Dorvay-vous?

A decade or so ago, when I read about “second sleep” in Robert Moss’s The Secret History of Dreaming (New World Library, 2009), it was a fresh, novel idea. Now, all the big media are full of stories about “segmented sleep”—nights divided into two periods of sleep split by a few hours of wakefulness.

New research has documented many cases in preindustrial Europe of what was called “the watch,” "second sleep,” or, in French, dorveille. I like the term “dorvay,” which Colson Whitehead uses in his novel Harlem Shuffle. His character Ray Carney hears the French word as dorvay, and uses that as his description for his nocturnal rambles as he lays down a plot of revenge.

Segmented sleep is a pattern I recently developed. I’ve found that the middle of the night is an excellent time to write—but also to play endless rounds of gin rummy and a version of Klondike solitaire called Yukon. Sometimes it’s hard to get a grip.

Unlike many insomniacs, I don’t have “monkey mind,” the endless hamster wheel of thoughts, recollections, worries and anxieties that keep others awake. Nope. I go to bed with a clear mind, have a brief chat with the Universe, and drift easily into sleep.

Two or three hours later, I’m wide awake and ready for a few hours of writing, reading and play.

There's a lot of static about sleep hygiene and how important it is to sleep. A new  term, the “glymphatic system,” (coined in 2013 from “glial” brain cells) describes the brain’s version of the lymph system. The idea is that uninterrupted sleep allows the brain to flush out all the accumulated gunk of consciousness, in the same way the lymphatic system flushes wastes from the rest of the body.

That means that one segment of divided sleep has to be sound enough for the brain to flush itself. It’s usually the second sleep, and you may remember dreams from this period better.

We love to analyze sleep. Or take the direct approach. I have a friend who downs an Ambien every night and sleeps blissfully. I’d rather take my chances. Sometimes web surfing on a quiet early morning (I know—sleep hygiene—no electronics) brings me insights that would have eluded my busy daytime mind.

Sleep is a gift of the Universe. But being awake in the night—dorveille, dorvay, second sleep—brings its own gifts. As age and disability overtake me, I'm inclined to unwrap whatever the Universe sends me without much analysis. I know it comes from love.

There are the occasional sleep aids: a small amount of CBD or some muscle relaxant to quell the tendency of my legs to spasm. Mostly, though, I just wait for my body to feel sleepy. Some nights, that just does not happen. I’m up till 4.

Meanwhile, my stuffed chicken insulates me when I place her between me and the cold bars of my hospital bed. The gentle warmth of an old-fashioned red rubber water bottle comforts my core.

I don’t even have to get up to pee. I am not afraid to admit MS has made me incontinent. As a result, I’m all wrapped up for the night. Some things I really can thank the Universe for.   

My friend Pepper the hen.

Small prayer

~Written back when I walked with a green cane~

	O God in your mercy
	Just once let me stumble
	Without cursing the pavement

Longer prayer

~I’ve posted this poem on my blog at www.frangardner.com, but I want to share it again.~

Dear God,
 
Make this the best day.
Let it be the day I love the most
The day I am loved the most
The day I am most just
 
The day I act with the most integrity
            Listen with the clearest ear
            Feel the most joy.
 
Let it be the day of least clutter
            Of thoughts
            Of objects
            Of things
            Of mind
 
Do not shield me from sorrow,
            No, let this be the day of the purest grief,
            The greatest fear 
            The greatest anger
            And the greatest will 
                        To fight
                        To resolve
                        To overcome
                        To accept.
 
Let this be a day when through my will
I am willing
When through my willingness
I am free
 
When I am free
I am forgiven
I forgive
 
When I am loved
I love
 
When I weep
My tears are pure
My heart is cleansed
 
At the end of this day
I offer you my clean heart
My placid mind
My willing spirit
 
Fold them to your bosom
And make the tomorrow the best day, too

At greater length:

~Maggie Stiefvater recommendation~

I wrote my recommendation about Maggie Stiefvater because her mailing list is where I found out about Substack, and because she is one of my favorite writers.

Substack limits the length of a recommendation. This is the longer version.

I’m all about story, but I read Maggie Stiefvater because it’s so much fun trying to figure out how her mind works. She’ll be writing along and suddenly there’s this bomb of an idea.

I just spent more than a year rereading the four books in her Raven series (about high school friends discovering themselves while looking for the burial site of an ancient Welsh king in the Virginia countryside), trying to keep track of characters but mostly kvelling on the occasional casual verbal grenade. Like this response to a request to pick up a cell phone and read a message:

Ronan despised phones above almost every other object in the world.

So it sat there with its eyebrows raised, waiting.

I’m appreciating her synopses of her latest books (the Dreamer trilogy) in Substack because they help me keep the characters and plot straight. I’m still trying to separate her Fairy Market from Rossetti’s Goblin Market. It’s the names.

And this quotation: “When Ronan was young and didn’t know any better, he thought everyone was like him.” I just a few hours ago wrote the same thing—the exact same thing—about myself. Then skimming through Call Down the Hawk, I found the Ronan quote.

Stiefvater is too rich for synchronicity, but there it is, anyway.

Snippet

~A vision to which I return in dreams and reflections~

Here in the northern hemisphere, the cold is coming, a landscape I yearn for, having been born in winter, under the sign of Capricorn.

Fall melts, merges, melds, morphs into winter, and there is snow amid the stalks of the harvest, and a mild, milky sun that grudges through a bank of clouds, not bothering to warm field or forest. Sledges skim, birds skim, each in its particular ether.

A field of broken stalks is all that’s left of fall’s harvest. Between it and the mountains, nature has woven a necklace of scrubby pines, not lovely, broken and stunted—yet all still pointing to God.

Homework: keeping quiet

~Another practice that will change your life~

Quiet is hard. So hard that most people cannot just sit still without stimulation for more than a minute. Still, quiet is worth seeking out. Like writing regularly, sitting in stillness will bring you home to yourself. It will capture you, recast you like the refiner’s fire.

So I encourage you to practice sitting still. Set the timer on your phone if you wish. Five minutes can stretch very long. But, when you are used to it, you will seek to wrap yourself in it like a fluffy comforter.

Consciously relaxing, observing your breath, gently chasing away busy thoughts—you are too busy being unbusy just now—you encounter surprising, meaningful visions.

I most often let myself see a white landscape. The scent of snow, a frozen lake lined with broken brown sedges, like the landscape in the winter snippet above. Or a pine needle-strewn path in a forest, the scent of resin.

Sometimes, while emptying my mind, I concentrate on a color. Turquoise. Salmon. Or two colors together, chocolate and aqua. Or shocking pink and intense medium blue.

This practice, these visions, not forced but leaned into, calm your mind so that the insights your ego has been blocking can come out and bask in the glow of awakened consciousness.

I come away from these few moments refreshed, re-aware. I am not who I was before I stepped away from reality. Possibility hums along my bones.

I hope you, too, will come to yearn for this stepping away, for the freshness that washes the world and links you with the Universe.

Some would call it prayer.

Two colors captured me in a waiting room.

More homework: the important days

~Election Day is Nov. 8. It’s coming right up.~

You must vote. No matter whom you vote for. Vote and then demand that your vote be counted.

Here are two sites where you can find unbiased information about candidates and issues:

Project Vote Smart (now just Vote Smart) was started by Richard Kimball (no, not The Fugitive) in 1992, six years after he lost a bid for U.S. Senate to John McCain in Arizona. It is so relentlessly nonpartisan that each member of its board has to be matched with another member with opposite political leanings. Founding board member included former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford and senators Barry Goldwater and George McGovern.

Vote Smart’s vast database cover everything about every candidate, local to national: Donors, votes, speeches, interest group ratings. Vote Smart sends every politician its Political Courage Test, simple questions about where the candidate stands on certain issues. Most candidates fail; less than 4 percent respond.

Disclosure: I’ve been a donor and volunteer with Vote Smart for many years.

I’m less familiar with Ballotpedia, but others awear by it. It’s not as information rich as Vote Smart, but it has news articles and lots of polling information (as does PollingReport.com). Ballotpedia offers analyses of races and issues, and it can give you a preview of your ballot.