Adaptive Creativity and "Camel Toe" a short short from Upon Waking

Lately I've been writing these short short vignettes (Woolf called them "sketches) from my dreams. The "Longing" post is an example of one of these; I plan on compiling them all under the title Upon Waking, because they are written when the dream is fresh, after I have just opened my eyes. Surprisingly these pieces come out nearly whole. This genre is new to me, and I didn't think I had the type of brain to write them. I'm more equipped mentally for the long haul and weaving long yarns of prose. But I've learned that my creativity is adaptive; as a mother and a professor, I don't have the luxury of delving into long pieces. In fact, sadly, I have hardly any time to write at all. But I can manage 10 or 15 minutes upon waking, before the kids barge into our room wanting bweakfast. And I feel somewhat creatively satiated, knowing that I at least tried to get something down, and reassured that my mind can still dwell in a creative space, albeit a brusque one.

Here's a very short piece called "Camel Toe."

Camel Toe

She is a Vegas dancer in a corporate cafeteria dressed like an angel. Her chest is crisscrossed in diamonds and her bodysuit is nylon nude. She regards a man on his knees--Rob Lowe--who is in a comic role, begging some upright gentleman to take pity on him. If there is a laugh track, it's subtle or perhaps understood. The angel takes the arm of the upright gentleman and the two walk away; her wings nearly take out the Exit sign over the doorway while people go about their business, unfazed. There is more laughter. I turn to a second observer who could be my husband. "You can see her camel toe," I say. "Is that allowed?"

Longing (Upon Waking)

We were there, my brother and I, hiding in the basement of the healer's house. I longed for her private sacristy--the singing bowl, burning sage, and prayer to the four directions--I longed for a sacred kind of calm, but I knew she was depleted and needed respite. Even healers need to sleep.

By hanging around waiting, we had gotten stuck, afraid to ask for the door, afraid to cause a disturbance, have them think we were stealing, or worse. I had just washed the baby in the commode, and we lingered somewhere near the furnace, behind a door, peering at the healer's husband in his easy chair as he watched television, his Bob Ross hair flying off his head, his feet up. At some point it became dark, and we could hear the husband's soft snoring. When the house was still, we tried a door that led to a stairway and out to the front hall. Here we opened a second door into the night.

In a leafless tree, an owl spread its wings; he was white with brown specs on his breast and had yellow eyes that looked down into one's own nakedness. He was fierce but elegant, soft but stern, and his wings took up most of that southern sky. We stepped out, free, and he flew up into the night, his giant head adjusting like the moon.

***

"Some people just get stuck inside you." This is what I told a student regarding his obsession with a high school classmate. I don't know whether it's ego or love or just unfinished business, to tell you the truth. I'm talking about longing like I still long for you. It's been some twenty or so years now, and I grapple with your mystery. Why do people get stuck inside us? You once admitted we had a bond (you were reaching to run your fingers over my faux leather biker jacket when you said it) but I doubt the bond tugs at you like it tugs at me. You were trained early on to not let such things get to you.

But there was that time, years after we broke up and after you broke up with her that I knew you would walk through my front door. We had just moved in to that dingy apartment in Brighton, and I was standing in the foyer looking at the painted grain of the wood and I said to myself, he's going to be here at some point. And then you were. You called me up to return a book of poems, and you picked me up and we went out for dinner. Your hair was cut and you were wearing a ring. I don't remember anything about the ring, only that it was there, on your hand, some gem, and I thought perhaps she had given it to you. You had transformed into a man and yet you still lacked some facial hair; there would be parts of you that would be forever boy. I wanted to make a good impression upon you, but this was impossible. You had already made up your mind to move to LA and besides who would want a woman still dripping fresh with longing and need? She's as desirable as a wet piece of laundry.

Is this the part I need to rectify? Your opinion of me? How I see me through your eyes?

***

There was a stairway to the third floor apartment, and I ran up and down it for exercise. I thought perhaps you were watching me. You were playing a game on the fields below; it was some kind of timed obstacle course. I saw you during your run; you hurled yourself over the finish line, and I thought, yes, I do that too, hurl myself at things.

I found out eventually that you and your wife were our new neighbors. While you were at work I befriended her, and we planned to have breakfast, despite the fact that she could barely speak my language. Was I just trying to get to you? Get on your good side? When you finally came home, you arrived dressed only in a towel. I hadn't seen you in years and then, suddenly, there you were, dripping wet, the hairs on your chest, wet, wet. You glanced at me and then started talking to another writer in the room about how you had connections. The longing inside me throbbed. "I'm doing this to myself," I said. It's a wonder turned sour, a conditioning, of sorts, for real life.

There May Be Openings

There May Be Openings

There may be openings,
though I spend my life
banging at the door
there may be openings
at my head perhaps
or in the floor.
You subtle god rising
tucked away in some bud
some stone, some afterthought
you dangle, you plunge
you live your life
underneath my tongue

A thirsted, distant entity
yet intimate
lies within me
a hatchling crying out
to sustenance
to embrace and dance,
to chance

Flip a coin of mood and
I am staring at you darkly
and you don't move an inch
I cup your riddle
in my hands and sit, investigate
meditate
wait
for a petal to release
for a scent, some sound

but what I don't know
unfolds behind me,
around me, blossoming,
harkening
in petals and sounds abound

Breaking Glass

I place my shards
     at your feet
is what I hear when I pick
    at broken glass in the dirt


Perhaps placed is not
    right for the vandal
doesn't care
    where the shards land or
whether they puncture a paw
or file into a foot

    In fact, the vandal doesn't care
for anything at all
   when that bottle busts--

evidence of
   something intimate ignored
or forsaken, something that rises
  amidst glowing faces
round a ravishing fire

Damn it all to hell

the shards convey
  whether in the woods or

at sea (broken over
   the bow of a boat? shattered
over the jetty's jutted edges?)
  dusty and misty
collectible and collected.

How ironic--this now dulled
   mad dash at the world
for its own careless ways
    sits innocuous in a dish

    the focal point in some
stranger's living room.

A Glimpse of My Life

I felt it this morning-- a something Sunday, a kind of ease. Rest, meditate and the muse whispers. It was possible, I thought, as I walked the white-washed road to the woods with my dog. We entered the dark, cool woods, entanglement of branches, smatterings of green. I perched on my rock and framed by a tree was a great egret, a picture of grace with its soft curves and softer plumage. Across the tidal river, the cars glided along the road. I got up from my rock, looked for her; I'm always looking for her. I may never see any of them again.

We hike up through the blues. The foxes must've eaten all of them. A boat sent a wake across the river; small waves splashed on the shore. A vixen had left her mark right in the middle of the trail. "This is mine," it said. I walked down a path that had every shape of mystery and myth. Where were they all, the totem beasts? Buried in the piles of mulch they dumped on the edge of the playground? Sleeping in their dens between the rocks? They say the fishers hang out in the trees, but I have yet to see one up there. We have seen the northern flickers scampering through the wood, their white patch like a star ascending in the dark. We passed an opened door and there was singing. If there were only some shade I may have stayed a bit. I headed back home to clean, to do everything that is expected of me. To do everything I expect of myself.

Cool Confidence

I think of the monarch butterfly in its jeweled sheath, transforming. Is this process rushed? Does she slide out with half a wing? No, she dangles elegantly until the sheath is torn. She waits silently in transformation, is patient about her tender wings. The sheath shrivels and is whisked away. In that moment just before flight, she is certain; she is confident. This is the characteristic of a genesis un-rushed--confidence. A cool confidence is valuable to an artist. A cool, mindful confidence is everything.

The butterfly tests her paper wings. The eye of the wing is awake. One moment to wave, another to lift, up, up, up.

She looks down and sees the world.

Letter from the Editor: Taking the Namby-Pamby Out of Compassion

Taking the Namby-Pamby Out of Compassion

I found the essay “Keep Your Compassion, Give Me Your Madness” (NYTimes, June 20, 1987) while doing research on compassion in literature and I felt like I struck gold. In it, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard wonders “whether it isn’t oxymoronic for a novel to be brilliant and compassionate at the same time” and “whether compassion isn’t just another form of writer’s block.” Finally, he claims there’s something “sticky, pious, or namby-pamby about the word.”

There it is in print, namby-pamby, further evidence of how compassion, often mistaken for pity or sentimentality, gets a bad rap. Broyard wants characters “to survive on the strength of their deviousness and stubborn wrongheadedness.” That’s what makes a novel brilliant according to him, because after all, novels are a form of “sadomasochism” anyway.

Huh.

Broyard provides no examples of the namby-pamby, compassionate novels of which he speaks and abruptly shifts his essay into a review of a non-fiction book about the neurotic utopian socialist, Charles Fourier (Charles Fourier: A Visionary in His World, University of California Press, 1987) who sought to construct a society based upon human pleasure and “passionate attraction.”

This essay/book review provoked a reader to write a letter to the editor titled “Compassion in the Novel” (NYTimes, August 1, 1987). The reader chastises Broyard for not giving evidence to prove his point, as any college freshman knows to do. That reader was bestselling author and National Book Award winner John Irving.

Irving refutes Broyard with the classics, concrete examples like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and specifically the character Levin, who believes life has meaning by the power of goodness he puts into it. Levin’s relationship with the peasant people who live on his land is exemplary in the novel: it shows the interconnectedness of humanity, which in the good, translates to compassion. I would like to add to Irving’s list the Grapes of Wrath: who doesn’t remember that last scene where Rose of Sharon, after having lost her baby, nurses the half-starved man back to life? Or in Ethan Frome when the hypochondriac misanthrope Zeena changes her tune and devotes her life to caring for the crippled Mattie and Ethan? In these beacons of literature, compassion has a sort of power and is anything but namby-pamby.

In the summer edition of The Compassion Anthology we are including “The Cloak” a classic itself, by Nikolai Gogol. Fyodor Dostoevsky said of the short story, “We all come out from Gogol’s overcoat” speaking here of Gogol’s influence on Russian literature and literature in general. The story is timeless in its premise of lack of compassion and how a society will be “haunted” by remorse when the powers-that-be don’t do the right thing. We have contemporary examples in Michael Brown and other black men killed by police; these men may not have been as innocent as Akakiy Akakievitch, but they certainly did not deserve the fate that befell them.

Also included here are works by Janel Houton, whose colorful paintings lend awareness to endangered species living among us; Mikele Rauch’s paintings of compassion and healing after violence; Don Cooper’s photographic collage of Mother Teresa (the icon of compassion) amidst the destitute in India; Cansu Bulgu’s “Eye of Oneness” that portrays how, in the stillness of the self, unity and compassion show up; Laura Foley’s poetry based on her fearless plunge into “compassion predicaments”; and Marina Cantacuzino’s reflection on the complex nature of forgiveness.

I hope you find these works and the others published here inspiring and evidence that art, too, can touch this innate power in us all.

 www.compassionanthology.com