Tangents, shadows, an Irish well
Ever consider naming your car?
Check in
Here are three words to consider this week.
Truth Beauty Shame
Quick! What did you think when you saw those words together?
Two grand concepts and a withered one? A trinity with a broken leg?
Which is the most powerful of these three words?
Think about them, write about them, discuss them with your barber. Welcome new ideas into your cosmos.
Tangents
Now, let’s move from three sturdy words to obscurity. To indirectness.
I’ve written about this before, but it’s so important: Aiming one idea at another from an oblique angle causes a collision that fuses the two into an indelible image.
This is the essence of creativity: a new thought, image, feeling, raises from the chaos of the crash, the butterfly from the chrysalis.
Thus does the shadow illumine the sunlight. It’s a paradox, a koan.
A slash runs through it
This is the way I make meaning or cultivate creativity: I envision a slash running from the lower right to the upper left, like the shadow in this picture.
That slash is the oblique idea, the outlier that slams into your original premise, and the result exceeds the sum of the parts.
Indirectness has come to me with age. When I was young, I was direct and scientific, my thoughts careful but sterile.
Now I take the roundabout route, coming to a concept or an experience from a fresh direction. And that, as Robert Frost wrote, has made all the difference.
Lao Tzu expounded on this obscurity in his Tao Te Ching, Le Guin translation:
My words are easy to understand, so easy to follow, and yet nobody in the world understands or follows them. Words come from an ancestry; deeds from a mastery: when these are unknown, so am I. In my obscurity is my value. That’s why the wise wear their jade under common clothes.
This is the paradox: When things are viewed indirectly, they are discerned more clearly than if they were confronted head-on. You may have noticed that squinting at an object can make it appear in a new light.
Shadows, too
I will be writing more over time about hidden things, the facets of experience and being that, uncovered, make our lives so much richer.
Another image
My power chair was sold to me by the husband of a woman who died at Rose Schnitzer Manor. She had ALS, and left this world far too soon. She was a wonderful woman, warm and cheerful, bringing light and reflecting the best of us back at us.
I don’t live in this chair, but I use it a lot. As I’ve written, it has made it very easy for me to ride public transit. It’s almost as if I could drive now.
When the woman’s husband, John Newbury, heard that Robert’s last name is Jaffe, he recalled that he had painted a scene in Jaffe Park in Aspen, Colo.
A lovely, peaceful landscape. Very Becoming.
It is a bittersweet remembrance, as well, of his wife. John often hears her spirit singing in the call of the red-winged blackbird.
A visit to a well
My sister Catherine and her wife, Anne, who live in Cork, Ireland, once had a vacation hideout, a mobile (pronounced with a long “I” in the Irish way). It was perched on a cliff in County Kerry with a view of the roiling Atlantic.
The drive to the mobile passes through the village of Ballyvourney, where the lads (as the ladies style themselves) showed me a site dedicated to Saint Gobnait.
Saint who? This sixth -century figure is the patron of bees and ironworkers (there is evidence of an ancient ironworks near the well). Her feast day is February 11.
Siofra Geoghegan, a sort of Gobnait groupie, wrote on a website that’s no longer available:
Gobnait (pronounced GAWB-net) is known for her care of the sick. One story tells how she kept the plague out of Ballyvourney by designating it consecrated ground. She had a strong relationship with bees and used the properties of honey in the treatment of illness and healing of wounds. Her name is the Irish equivalent of the Hebrew name Deborah, which means "Honey Bee."
Gobnait is also the Irish version of Abigail.
Visitors often leave gifts for Gobnait. Things like rosary beads and bits of clothing, jewelry, baby teeth, friendship bracelets.
One year, I placed a beaded necklace among the offering that hang from an iron framework under the huge tree that overshadows the well. It wasn’t rosary beads, just something made by a child from seed beads and sequins, but I valued it. I liked the idea of sacrificing it to an Irish saint, so I brought it from the States to Ballyvourney.
Patience
She sat like Patience on a monument
Smiling at grief.
—Shakespeare, Twelfth NightPatience may be next to saintliness, but it is a trait seldom seen in our hectic days.
We fume as the customer ahead of us in the checkout line fiddles with the change. We multitask. We lay on the horn when the light changes and the car ahead doesn’t budge. We want what we want—and we want it now.
Patience is a gift
One of the many blessings—really!—of multiple sclerosis has been that it forces me to be patient.
It takes a long time for me to do some things that other folks accomplish unthinkingly. It’s been a quarter-century since I strode across a room or danced in the kitchen. Other things can’t be done at all.
But patience perseveres. Sigh and move on.
Patience is the gift that allows me to take time, move more slowly, notice things. And noticing is a great gift of the Universe. Beauty, pattern, texture, obliqueness, synchronicity—all are enhanced by noticing.
Which is the product of patience.
Patience
Oh, how hard the waiting, Trying to stay under, beneath, Holding my breath, Breathing evenly. Too much, too soon. Wait, wait till it’s ready. Swim beneath, down, deep, Put a cap on that well. Drink a toast to St. Gobnait, Toss the cup down after. The game Patience is also Solitaire, The cards flip over one by one. The game, life, no other name; The days flip over one by one. The man I loved was not so linear. At the outset, protecting myself, I would curl away from him As the shaving curls in the fire, The hedgehog curls at the touch, The sea anemone wraps its fronds tight. Sensitive. Patience protects the raw wound, The tender nerve. Hold off until you’re ready, Until Life says, “Go along now.” Card by card Flip through the deck. Only stop and consider When you turn up The card called Patience.
Name that car
Do you name your possessions? If you think this question is idiotic, you can just skip the section. I'm not crazy about the concept myself.
However, some of my possessions do have names.
A few of them have been cars.
After one of my daughters totaled Seafoam, the Honda Accord of that color, I acquired a BMW 320i. I could afford this “luxury” car because it, too, had been totaled, then expertly rebuilt by Russian mechanics who were friends of my daughter’s.
I named this white car Siegfried Otto (yes, it’s a pun) von Beemer, also known as Der Putt-Putt. That being a mouthful, I just called him Ziggy. Poor Ziggy had to go a few years later because he had a manual shift and I could no longer use a clutch because of my weakened left leg.
So much for the snobbery of knowing how to use old-fashioned car technology.
I didn’t have the heart to name any of Ziggy’s successors, even the stalwart green Subaru Outback that I’ve had for a decade. Robert wants to call it Fran Jr. Maybe. At least it’s not Francine.
The state car of Oregon
Robert named one car of his, a black ’65 Volvo sedan he bought in New York City decades ago. He remembers taking the subway to Queens to pick it up. He called it Joe Bovino, after the man he bought it from.
He later owned a boxy maroon Volvo. In the 80s and 90s, those sturdy Volvos were everywhere, the unofficial state car of Oregon. They were supplanted in that role by the ubiquitous Subaru Outback.
I’m not around cars much, so I can’t say what the most popular car is out there now. Anybody?
Bye-bye, Big Brute
My friend and former colleague Janet Cleaveland recently said good-bye to her long-suffering Volvo.
So long, 1989 740 Volvo wagon, affectionately known as “Big Brute.” You served me well. (After all, we racked up 488,166 miles.) You’re going to an auction for the nice people at OPB. I walked away from two crashes over the years with no injuries. You hauled kids, refrigerators (yes!), a washing machine, dogs and groceries. You made several trips to Ashland with my pals. You never left me by the side of the road. I can’t say that I will miss you at this point, but you are a piece of Cleaveland family history. We bought you in 1992 with 32K in miles. Thanks for the adventures.
Computer names
My computer network has a name, Juniper, a bow to a daughter’s love of the Oregon high desert. My old desktop was Jasper, and my laptop is Jasperette. The phone is Junior, and if I named the tablet, I can’t remember what.
Trees and other natural objects
I’ve tried naming the trees outside my window, but the names didn’t stick. The icon, the totem, was Ulm, the stately cedar outside my first apartment at Rose Schnitzer Manor. From my new window, I can see Ulm’s feathery top over the roofline opposite.
On my walker walks in my old neighborhood, I named many of the trees: The Old Soldier, Mr. Elm, Guardian.
One last item
Should I name my new power chair? Because it’s big and dark, almost threatening, I’m inclined to Sparafucile, the villain in Verdi’s opera Rigoletto. It would also be a good name for a black cat.
I thought of using the nickname Sparcy for Sparafucile, but if it’s pronounced with a hard “c” it comes out “Sparky,” which might not be the name you would want to use for your electric chair.
Okay, maybe Sarastro, a dark character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute who turns out to be a good guy after all.
As for why I think of a car or the power chair as males, I couldn’t say.
Check out
This poem was written by a young woman, the granddaughter of a friend, named Hannah. It is really good.
The First Draft
This is only my first draft. We have a lot in common, we are messy and sloppy, all over the place and full of potential. But it’s okay. Because we will learn and grow. Revise and rethink. Until we become perfect. But not perfect perfect, Perfectly us. Perfectly me. Perfectly hannah. After all, this is only my first draft.
Goal for June
How did you do this month with the concept of “it’s not about me”? I shared some of my efforts and struggles to rein in my monumental ego. Tell me about yours.
Moving on to July
The simple goal for July is “walk every day.”
The weather is good for walking in July. If it’s going to be a hot day, walk early in the day or in the evening. Twilight is magical, a perfect time to walk in silence, communing with yourself. Put away the earbuds just for today. Listen to the birds. You might hear a red-winged blackbird.
Let’s talk
After I post this newsletter, I intend to enable a Substack function called “chat,” wherein subscribers (paid and free) can share thoughts and reactions.
Chat should be easier and more intimate that comments, though I will always welcome those.
For instance, chat would be a place to share your success with “it’s not about me,” or whether you name inanimate objects that fall into your orbit.
In addition to this note, expect a brief notification in your email that chat is turned on. It’s a one-time annoyance.
Sign me up, Scotty
Speaking of subscribers, I value all of you. It’s especially heartening that so many read what I write week after week. I am so grateful it feels funny to point out that it’s nice to be paid for my writing.
So, please consider upgrading to “paid.”
Thank you.
And until then:
Be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes.—30—
I had a bike in college i named Ginny after Virginia Woolf and we call our Skoda “Peppe” because she has better pickup than our old car. We named our kitchen witch “Esmeralda “ (Esme for short). Who is St Gobnitz?