When I was growing up we had two magazine subscriptions in my house: Reader's Digest and Arizona Highways. We were not a literary family; yet, my mother, who was just a country girl, had been a student with perfect spelling, perfect penmanship, and perfect attendance. She had memorized perfectly, poem after poem after sing-song poem:
Shoot if you must this old gray head,
but spare our country's flag!
she would bellow dramatically, her right arm waving above her head. She sang it seriously and with such passion I was sure that if she ever saw someone threaten to shoot Old Glory, she would happily re-direct a rifle to her heart and die a martyr to the red white and blue.
The gingham dog and the calico cat,
she'd begin and a weird light would spark in her eye. To my mother a poem was a workout: every poetic idea had a gesture to accompany it. I was only six myself, but I could see how she must have looked at my age, reciting it in the parlor on Sunday for company.
Half past twelve and what do you think!
Not one of them had slept a wink!
Her pointer finger was wagging in the air, and she was winking and rocking. It was a little embarrassing to see her bald effort at elocution, but I couldn't take my eyes off of her. Her store of corny pone was always full:
Oatspeasbeans and barley grow
Oatspeasbeans and barley grow
or
Would you rather be a colonel with an eagle on his shoulder
or a private with a chicken on his knee?
Then her words would singsong here and singsong there, and they still do.
Writing begins in my body and ends up in your head. How do you ever think up all those things? someone asked once after a poetry reading. I don't think it all up. Thinking comes later. First, I have to hear it. Don't play what you know, Miles Davis advised young musicians, play what you hear.
But even before I hear it, I have to feel it start and stop and start again. Robert Hass writes that "rhythm has direct access to the unconscious; because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power." I hear the powerful thing and it makes me feel something.
It makes me wiggle and want to move towards the paper and pencil. It's not an emotion that has a name: not sad, bad, mad or glad. The urge to move is more neutral, both voluntary and involuntary. The trick is to get that far and then get out of the way. Follow it to the first words. Then follow it right into the field.
It's a place. The words come into the body like a lump or a bump or a bad case of the mumps, but they also come around the periphery of the field of consciousness, what Joy Harjo calls the "field of miracles." The words are hiding near dreams.
I often sense I am lying in that field in the morning. I believe I know without looking how many of my cats are still on my bed. I say all three cats are on the bed, then I see that one of them is not. She is sitting over there by the glass door licking her front paw. You can be wrong in the field; in fact that is an important part of it -- you are encouraged to make mistakes. In this field of the periphery it's right to be wrong. Here you are looking up between the cracks in the world from your spying station. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to stay there quietly in the light where they can see you and just watch them in the shadows: images form; sounds come forth. Do nothing, and a message will arrive. You have the rest of your life. We are all waiting to die. Anyway, Lorca says that's where the poet's true fight is.
As a child I sometimes wished my mother could go to school too. She seemed to like it so much. She was especially excited when we were assigned compositions. She would traipse up the attic stairs and emerge with one or two volumes from the dusty corpse of an encyclopedia she stored up there. The books were dated 1908. The only thing I'd ever seen that old was a dime my grandmother showed me once. Somehow Mother would always find something useful in the old books, and I'd wipe the Formica table clean after dinner, pull out the red plastic chairs, and we'd set to work. This went on for the first few years of grade school. She would practically write my compositions herself, and I would feel guilty turning them in as if they were my own. Finally I had to put my foota stop to it.
The composition was a biography of Susan B. Anthony. I took scissors to the encyclopedia and cut a picture of Miss Anthony in the shape of an oval so it would look like the cameo at the throat of her high-necked white shirt. I pasted it on the cover of my composition, and using a Sheaffer's washable blue ink pen, I began my final draft. With great concentration I copied the roughd draft proudly one by one. By the time I came to the final paragraph, I was falling in love with my own writing. I was lost in the scene that described Miss Anthony as an old woman, delivering a speech on the stage -- something about justice and equality. She was standing alone at a podium in a shawl, looking "frail," it said. "Frail"? The word "frail" was inserted in the earlier draft in my mother's neat hand. It was not my word. I had no idea what "frail" meant. But the paragraph was so beautiful, and I didn't know a better word, and I didn't want to call my mother's attention to the moral dilemma I now was in, since she had put me in it. So I learned the compromises writers make, copied the word "frail," and finished the job. I was ashamed because it was a fraud. The next time she got that "Let-me help-you-with-your-homework" sparkle in her eye, I turned her down.
"Oh, now you're so smart you don't need my help. It's ‘Mother-please-I'd-rather-do-it-myself!’ is it?" she replied, mimicking the television commercial that featured the impatient teen-age girl fronting-off her mother. "Just like when you were little and wouldn't hold my hand crossing the street!" she continued, going off somewhere in the wind without me.
I could hear something calling me from out in the field. Something else was starting to die. It would take many years of waiting before I could tolerate this ongoing tension between what was calling me and the dying me.
The problem is that as soon as we start to wait attentively for the sound, the image, or the beat, our minds start to spin somewhere else. We forget to remember to keep waiting. We lose our concentration, and the inchoate sounds of poetry become the drone of the shopping list. Shifting images that resonate in timelessness become of the familiar pages of the Day-timer full of lists of planned activities jotted down next to the numbers we assign to time.
This is what takes us away from art -- not the need for money, or for uninterrupted time, or for the right teacher, or for a publishing contract (These do have important effects all their own.) Forgetfulness steals us away from the paper and pencil that betray their art. The mind is looking for something to do, anything at all. So you give it the shopping lists and the calendar. You control it with no better effect than you control your mind. Write it on your prayer flag, my friend: Remember!
My father was a music teacher. I could listen to the lessons from the top of the basement stairs. His student's clarinet played slowly and deliberately while his loud deep voice intoned the beat:
Baaa/BaBa Ba
Baaa/BaBa Ba
Baaaaa!
The bass line of my writing today was born in that basement. The treble was trained by television.
During the years I was in high school, my father was teaching himself to play the flute. He was a union man--a working musician. Art and beauty were good -- very good. So were good wages and reasonable hours. He would work at night. During the day he would teach students, attend union meetings, have dinner with us, then nap in front of the TV until it was time to get ready for work again. With a schedule like that he had no time to practice the flute, so he played during commercials. He kept the instrument primed laid across the mantel. Dinah Shore would start singing about Chevrolets, and he'd switch off the sound, pick up the silver tube, run a few scales, check his embouchure in the mirror, adjust the position of his fingers and elbows, and finish all the variations in several keys before the horses and guns appeared again on the screen. Then he'd settle back down in his chair from where Bart Maverick and Ben Cartwright were his kind of guys.
What keeps me from writing is a certain weakness of the mind and a little dread. Trepidation. I recoil from the mystery with a lingering sense still stored in my body that writing is not a legitimate way to live. In this matrix of generating material, I have to get out of the way of my life, so that I can truly have my life. Otherwise, I forget my intention to write in the field and instead fill my days with items from "the list," all those obligations frozen in time. I could die, I fear, and never complete them. In the field of the imagination all of this makes perfectly good sense--just like shamanism or infinity or the dual nature of light. In the field, time melts, but you must be brave.
From the time I was ten or eleven I felt that something was terribly wrong. I polished my saddle shoes nightly, and had my homework ready on time. My mother stood on the speckled linoleum and ironed my blouses long past the age when I could have done it myself. Now I think she kept doing it to keep her sanity in those years when she was so unhappy and we couldn't talk or do anything about it. The shirts were clean and bright and carries so much promise. In those days I'd rush home from a friend's house in the cool dark morning of winter with a growing sense of disaster at home. But ther was no obvious disaster. She'd be watching television and waiting. Or ironing and waiting.
Always waiting.
My first short story was about a lonely little girl in a park with an imaginary playmate and a mother in a mental hospital. She was really a very angry little girl. I entitled the story in code: "Step on a Crack." Since everyone knew the rest of that verse, my outcry was complete. We could pretend the story was fiction, and since I never said my mother was crazy, I without fault.
Meanwhile my father kept playing his sax: a one and a two and I love Paris in the Springtime, I love Paris in the Fall. Because he was a music teacher, he knew about the importance of practice -- that as long as you put in your time, your star would climb. You'd improve; you had to. His body, as much as his mind, was learning to play the flute. My body does the writing and my mind takes the hits. Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls, says the key to any success is being in continuous motion -- repetitive drills that train the player on an experiential level to develop an intuitive feel for the connection between their own movements and the other players. Anyone who is open and receptive can have the ball in this place of total and profound relaxation.
It's the field again.
For example, whatever made me write about my father fitting music practice into his schedule? You think I sat down and tried to think up a good example to persuade you to squeeze writing in between Cosby and Star-Trek? No way. I don't have that kind of control. I just was sitting here typing and feeling relaxed watching the cursor move across the screen, and I started hearing my father's voice -- Ba/BaBa/Ba -- and I could see his right shoe tapping, and the next thing I'm telling you about how he was a teacher and then about how he learned to play the flute. I had no idea I was going there anymore than I knew I was going to describe my moral dilemma with my mother over the word "frail," and pages later tell you about her frailty. My point is that I didn't do it. The words did it. I just followed along.
My mother died this year. She slowly lost her mind. Her brain responded to the interrupted flow of oxygen with little bursts of electrical charge that zapped first her memory, then her energy, and finally her life.
The day before she died I visited her. She was all dressed up and her fine white hair was fixed. She slumped down in her wing back chair. One side of her mouth drooped and she couldn't talk. She could make sounds, but her eyes were red and strained, flicking around her mind, searching for the word that would unlock the door to the world of words again.
I wasn't sure she understood the words I spoke, so I sat on the floor at her feet by the chair, and I wrote her a few:
Your name is Peggy.
You are my mother.
I love you.
You will feel better soon.
I handed her the little notebook as if to ask her the check my spelling. She turned it this way and that. I started to take it back to read it aloud to her, but she snapped it away from me with all her strength. She kept turning the words this way and that, over and over, until finally, exhausted, she surrendered back into the chair. She looked so frail I believed she would be dead soon.
Later that night my sister and I helped her into her bed. She was agitated, pulling her nightgown off, her underpants too. She wanted to be naked. So she curled up on her side, pale and soft between the white sheets. She was the shape of a scoop, a slice of the moon, the line of an egg. We pulled up the sheet to cover her in the dim room and she pulled it right down, hard, squeezing the palm of her protective hand down in there between her legs.
Ten years before this, waiting outside of the hospital room where my father would die, my mother and I sat in silence. We were tired from the on-going strain of it all. She turned to me and said: “He told me to meet him at the pass. I could hardly hear him at all, so I leaned over to put my ear right over his lips.
“Meet me at the pass,” he said, “Come alone.”
In the field of reverie I am wise and wordless. The urge toward words is small and moves quietly, simultaneously with all else that cannot be named. The urge widens my world. In the field of ghosts I dream of my grown children as if they were six and eight years old. I contact another galaxy where my father's foot is under the kitchen table, tapping the back beat; and my mother is out there with him, winking and wagging her finger in his direction. She picks up the iron and pushes words back and forth across the board. She is preparing it for me. She is ironing a clean white shirt.