I his morning I talked with a good friend of mine, also a writer. She has washed up in California, not feeling at home with where she finds herself, in a tiny apartment in Silicon Valley, marooned on a seedbed of high finance, far from her beloved New Mexico with its endless vistas and gentle optimism bred in the beauty of the land. She hates Silicon Valley, hates the fact that she is unhappy and scared: "It has come to this?" I know how she feels. Her whole life shrunk to the size of the room where she is penned in and trying to put words to the page.
For me, living in New York is a tricky balancing act. Daily, I must leave the cage of my apartment and venture out into the city. Then I must get in, out of the city, back to my apartment nest. The cage/nest contradiction is a constant one. It goes with the
urban terrain. The enchantment of New York is its big dreams. The reality of New York is its small living spaces.
Today I went to briefly visit the town house of a garden designer, a good friend of a good friend. She lives on the ground floor of a brownstone that she owns. Her apartment, with its greenhouse addition at the rear and her garden beyond, has a wildness and beauty to it uncommon in New York. But her floor-through itself is small and dark. Her bedroom fronts onto a crosstown street and her bed is mere feet away from traffic. By being on the ground floor, she gains her garden, but she gains street noise as well—and a view of passing feet. I have always chosen to live high up, looking out over the park or the city from a bird's-eye view, anything not to feel trapped and run to earth. She has chosen to live on the earth, plunging her hands into a patch of dirt so that she knows she owns something, some green spot in all the brick and concrete.
As an artist, so much of my life is determined by the size of my imagination. If I am making something big, and making it daily, I can perhaps live somewhere small. I can sit at a desk that faces a wall and tap words into space and my world is still large enough. When I write my opera about Magellan, in some sense I am Magellan. I am more than my circumstances, more than the cage of my environment. There is a dignity inherent in making art, a filament of largesse and generosity, a connection to something better and brighter than myself. Like the concentration camp victim who scratched butterflies into the walls of his prison, I see that the primacy of the flight of imagination is the freedom that is required. "You do not own me," I am able to say to the walls that enclose me. And yet, I must learn to love my walls.
My friend who is living in California is not really living there. She is doing time, living out her sentence until she can escape again. She has done what I have often and dangerously done—cut herself off from making new connections and friends, made a judgment, and lived miserably within its confines. "These people are not my kind," she has decided, and so she is isolated, a foreigner living amid foreign customs and mores. She may be right about that, but, right or wrong, the decision cuts her off and robs her even of that cherished writer's niche, the observer. If she is too closed down to even risk the exposure of watching, then she is losing the terrain that gives her a writing life in the future: "The years I lived in California ..."
It is difficult to commit to living where we are, how we are. It is difficult and it is necessary. In order to make art, we must first make an artful life, a life rich enough and diverse enough to give us fuel. We must strive to see the beauty in where we are planted, even if we are planted somewhere that feels very foreign to our own nature. In New York, I must work to connect to the parts of the city that feed my imagination and bring me a sense of richness and diversity instead of mere overcrowding and sameness. In California, my friend must work to do the same. If we are not willing to work in this way, we become victims. If we become victims, we first become choiceless and then become voiceless. Our art dries up at the root. We must, as the elders advise us, bloom where we are planted. If we later decide that we must be transplanted, that our roots are not in soil rich enough for our spirits, at least we have tried. We have kept hold of the essential thread of our consciousness, the "I" that gives us the eye to behold.
THE LIFE OF THE
IMAGINATION
Try this: It takes practice to expand our imagination and inhabit a larger life. Certain phrases can stretch our imagination in positive directions. Take pen in hand and explore one such phrase now. Number from 1 to 10, and finish the following phrase as rapidly as possible. Do use the "best" in "the best of all possible worlds."
1. If the best of all possible worlds were reality, I would have a sunny, spacious New York apartment with views.
If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
my plays would be produced in great venues.
If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
I would be thin and fit, running daily.
If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
5. If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
6. If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
7. If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
8. If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
9. If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
10. If the best of all possible worlds were reality,
If the best of all possible worlds were reality, most of us would do things a little differently. We can begin to make the best a reality by doing things a little differently now.
Point Zero
When we are at zero, we have to start somewhere, and perhaps the sanest, best, and surest place to start is with the eye of the beholder. We are in a certain place at a certain time and we feel a certain way about it. Let's start here. That means put the pen to the page and write about the exact moment and place where you find yourself. Take an inventory of what surrounds you and what you feel about that. This is a starting-off place.
I am writing in a wedge-shaped yellow room that looks west across the Hudson River toward America. The yellow of the room is a golden yellow, the color of sunflowers and golden hope. The furniture in this room is rich and substantial: a leather couch and reading chair, a "good" piano, Oriental cabinets and chests and rugs, handsome and well-framed Audubon prints, some well-mounted vintage photographs of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Everything bespeaks permanency and solidity. It is lying. I have this room a few scant months more, and then I will need to find another Manhattan perch, hopefully one that will be better and sunnier than this one, perhaps one with city views that will speak to me of the large community I am a part of. Looking at this room, taking in my feelings about it, I see that I am not nowhere, I am somewhere uncomfortable. This is what writing teaches us. Where we are really. Where we are is often the first clue to who we are.
It takes courage to put ourselves out on the page, but it is better to be in reality than in denial. Reality is a place to start some-thing. Denial is a place where something is already going on that we do not want to see and be a part of even though we are. When most of us say we are zeroed out, we are in fact someplace we can start from, not nowhere at all. The trick, the first trick, lies in admitting exactly where we are.
My friend who is marooned in California is in a place she feels alien to, and that is a place that is relative to other places where she has lived and been more comfortable and more comforted. In other words, her history is a place to stand on, a strand of continuity that can be picked up and examined. She can say, "I liked the Midwest and the Southwest." She is not merely adrift, saying, "I don't like this." She is saying, or able to say, "I don't like this as compared to that." She has not only the place she is now but another place that she can or cannot get back to and that held values that are clues to the values she is missing now.
We do not arrive willy-nilly at point zero. We arrive there a choice at a time, a degree at a time, as we make little or less than we should of a growing discomfort. We get along without what we love the way camels get along without water—not forever, but for a very long time. And then, one day, we are thirsty and what we crave is water, real
water, a pure infusion of something that matches what our body and soul are authentically craving.
When we are at point zero, and in despair, we are at the point of experiment. We must pick ourselves up somehow and we must make ourselves feel better and more comfortable. How can we do that? What do we need? Do we need a phone call to a friend? Do we need to get out of town altogether and go for a good, long
drive? Something will speak to us of the good mother giving us what we crave, and we must listen to that craving and try to act on it. We must gentle our restless heart by saying and meaning, "I am listening to you. I hear your discomfort. I will work with you to change it."
Putting a pen to the page is the beginning of communication. We are writing a letter to our self. We are saying, "This is what I like and this is what I dislike." We are saying, "This is what I hope for." Or "This is what I dream of." We are saying, "This is what I am smack-dab in the middle of, and I do not like it."
Such communication is vital, and it is what we often neglect. Instead of putting our specific lives into black and white where we can see them and do something about them, we leave them vague, unspoken, and unwritten. "Something" is bothering us, but we don't know what it is. We sweep our feelings under the carpet. We turn a deaf ear to our quiet desperation. We are not ready or willing to attend to ourselves, and our souls know this. They are alert to the fact that they are ignored and unhusbanded. Is it any wonder that they are depressed?
And so, the first act of loving kindness is to start from scratch— the scratch of a pen to paper. The filling of blank pages with our specific likes and dislikes, our heartfelt and regretted losses and sacrifices—this is the beginning of being someone and somewhere again. When we ignore ourselves for too long, we become exhausted and weakened from trying to get our own attention. We become disheartened—without a heart. The gentle pulse that we are meant to attend to, the ear-cocked, mothering side of ourselves that listens to a newborn and springs into action on its behalf, must be mustered now to come to our own rescue. But the
rescue begins with the act of writing. Writing is how we "right" our world.
My friend in California does not like the expense of where she is living, where every inch of space has a price tag on it that strikes her as too high. "Imagine, paying two thousand dollars for a one-bedroom apartment," she snorts. She has the money but she resents spending it. She feels she is buying herself a gilded and glorified cage. Back where she likes it, that same two thousand dollars might rent a palatial house or easily cover a mortgage payment. There is something about spending money on a place she doesn't like that strikes her as wasteful and wrong. She is not spending money for something she cherishes. She is spending money lor something for which she has contempt. "This place. There are no real buildings like back in Saint Paul. It is all malls."
A page at a time, a line at a time, we draw the outline of what it is that is paining us. My friend misses the four-square architecture of the Midwest, the honesty she felt in redbrick buildings that would stand up even if the wind huffed and puffed. "The buildings out here are terrible," she wails, talking about the prefab, jerry-rigged, tossed-up lightweight "buildings" that she encounters daily in California. The very building materials strike her as shoddy—as nothing that she can endorse. Now she is getting somewhere. Isn't what is bothering her the idea that she is somehow cosigning a lifestyle that she does not feel is in deep harmony with her own? There is very little wrong with California per se; it is the strike-it-rich pipe dream of Silicon Valley that she is objecting to. The American dream with dollars crunched in its talons.
My friend continued. "I went to dinner with some people the other night and they were nice enough, but afterward, I said to my
partner, 'What do they do?' and my partner said, 'They enjoy their lives.'" She wondered, "Aren't we supposed to do something more than enjoy our lives, aren't we supposed to have made a difference in our passage here?" Now my friend is getting down to brass tacks, getting down to what is really bothering her: a life with no purpose. That is why she feels unmoored in Silicon Valley. She cannot relate to a life where the primary purpose is the making of money and the purchasing of creature comforts. Now that she knows what is bothering her about "them," she can start to ask about herself.
What would give her life a sense of purpose and connection? What commitment can she make to deeper values so that she does not feel that her values are adrift?
When we are building a life from scratch, we must dig a little. We must be like that hen scratching the soil: What goodness is hidden here, just below the surface? We must ask. We ask that question by putting pen to page.
POINT ZERO
Try this: Take a blank sheet of paper. Draw a circle and divide that circle into six wedges. Label the wedges as follows: work, recreation, spirituality, friendship, adventure, physicality. Place a dot in each a wedge indicating your satisfaction in that area. The closer to the outer rim you place the dot, the more satisfied you are. Now connect the dots. Does your life resemble a hexagon of even satisfaction? Or a tarantula of frustration? Choose any area in which you do not have optimum satisfaction. Number from 1 to 10 and list ten small changes you could make in that area.
Attention
I have been writing this little book for just over a month. In the time that I have been writing, the spring trees have filled out to a bouffant fullness. The winters black, line-drawing limbs are covered with fluff. My view of the river is blocked now by my view of the trees. It is almost time to get in the car and drive with the dogs cross-country, out to Taos, where the views stretch a hundred miles across great green sage-clothed plains to purple mountains.
I am eager to make the drive, eager to be where I can see distance again and eager, too, to look at New York from a distance, to see how it feels to look back here from out there. In other words, I am eager to connect the dots, to fill in the puzzle pieces, to keep writing. Every book I undertake is a journey, and it is a journey made from specific point to specific point. For each of us, each and every day is also a journey. A journey that begins with us at a certain point, feeling a certain way, and ends with us being somewhere different and feeling how we feel about that. This is why there is never really a zero point to be at.
"Oh, who cares," we sometimes think at our most blue moments. "I am boring and it is boring and writing about it all is boring too." At times like these we need to imagine that we are writing to someone who listens to us with the rapt attention of a new lover. Someone who wants to discover all there is to know about us, all we think, all we have thought, even all we might soon
think. I believe that there is such a lover with an ear cocked to all of us. That lover, that loving attention, is the Great Creator, who does not find us dull but endlessly interesting.
Attention is an act of connection. We look from where we are to what is all around us. In doing so, we discover where we are at. The "I" that connects becomes the "eye of the beholder." We see something, we notice it, we feel this way or that about it. When we feel we are at zero, we are never at zero. We are at the point of connection, the tiny vanishing point of consciousness where the "I" is born. We are, perhaps, the tiny dot on the "i" before we capitalize it and make something of ourselves.
It isn't easy, at first, getting our perceptions onto the page. We write grudgingly and under half steam, resentfully and uphill. "Who cares" and "This is stupid" are our companion thoughts. We don't want to take the time or trouble to record how it is we felt last night sitting in a community auditorium, listening to chamber music being played by gifted youngsters. We don't want to parse out if the something missing was in the music, in the playing, or in ourselves.
It takes an effort to be clear about things. It is easier and much sadder to be muddy, to never take the time to clarify our thoughts and connect—that word again—to our own perceptions. The act of paying attention is what brings us peace. In meditation we pay attention to the breath or to the imag
e or to the mantra. We con-cntrate on something, and that concentration, that stillness, brings us to the point of knowing that we are all right, that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world—even if we believe in no God and no heaven. The act of concentration is that powerful, that filled with blessings. This is why I say that to begin with, we must connect.
It is an interesting question: "If I found myself and my thoughts interesting, what might I try?" We might discover we have a novel brewing that we have been too shy to unwrap. We might discover that we have a raft of paintings that are going unpainted lest we be "dull." We might discover that we are not putting to the page our one-woman show or our idea for a documentary film. If I were interesting, why, I might try any number of things. Piano lessons for the duration of my fifties, for example. Why not?
Why not? is the question that attention raises. I like this and I don't like that, and why not? I am trying this and I am not trying that, and why not? I could do this or I could do that, and why not? Connection brings us squarely to the issue of choice. There's a bright red post planted in the ground where we are standing. The post is our consciousness. We can go on from here in any number of ways, any number of directions.
From feeling nothing in particular, we have come to feel something very particular. From saying "It's no big deal," we have come to notice the many smaller "deals" we have made with ourselves, chief among them the deal not to take ourselves and our dreams seriously, because, after all, "Who do I think I am?"
That becomes the interesting question when we connect. Who do I think I am? Is that someone the same or different from yesterday? The same or different from my neighbor? Where am I and what do I think about that becomes something worth bothering about? The film that dulled our eyes and our vision and our image of ourselves gets clearer a swipe at a time. Every time we take pen to page we become more ourselves, less something vague and amorphous. We stumble onto our opinions and say, "Aren't you persnickety," but we begin to say it with interest and amusement. We
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