Faint Sounds of Victory

The draft has left the building.

Last week I got the full draft of my dissertation boxed up and out of here, which was a big milestone. Although I face revisions over the next few months, I can now truthfully say the worst is behind me. When I started the blog two years ago, I said I wanted to have fun with the dissertation, and that I doubted anything good would come of it if I didn't have fun.

So, was it fun?

Well . . . parts of it were sort of fun, but not fun like a day at the beach or at King's Island. It was more like the fun you experience at the end of a run, when you feel good about what you just did but don't really want to go back and do it again.

When I was in the middle of my coursework, I sometimes imagined that writing the dissertation would be a luxury since I would "just" be concentrating on one project instead of juggling a class schedule and a job. The truth of the matter is that being in school was easier in some ways, namely because of the built-in deadlines, the regular trips to our beautiful campus, and the camaraderie of classmates. The end of that sustained contact with my cohort left me in a lonely spot, isolated at home with my books, like a female version of St. Jerome with a Starbucks card and a laptop.

In such a situation, it's easy to doubt yourself and wonder if you'll ever find a way to pull together all the disparate information you've been gathering into some kind of coherent whole, much less write the elegant and persuasive manuscript of your dreams. The more you read, the more you feel you need to read. You imagine someone poking holes in all your arguments and wonder if you'll be able to get through the defense without resort to smelling salts. 

I hear stories from friends about life events derailing their research, and I'm grateful that at least I've got it all down on paper. A year ago, I was exhausted after writing the first two chapters. I just had to let it stew for a while while I traveled and cleared my head, thinking of the best way to get from Madison to St. Louis, or where to eat dinner my first night in Seattle, or whether to stay in a bed and breakfast or a hotel in New Orleans. Then, when I did start writing again, I had to fight my way tooth and nail out of the bog of Chapter 3, an epic struggle that makes me think I now understand how Jacob felt after wrestling the angel.

Was it that intimidatingly masterful book on the labyrinth and the Middle Ages that threw me? The remoteness of the period? My relative lack of expertise in medieval studies? Looking back now, I think it may have been a needling feeling that there was something I needed to unearth, a basic way in which I disagreed with some of the conclusions I was reading, which hadn't come to the surface yet. Eventually, it was an immense relief just to recognize that I disagreed with one of my experts and could stand my ground on it.

The fun parts of the dissertation came fleetingly, when an idea would occur to me in midstream, like the way The Woman in White showed up in Chapter 5 and Bruce Springsteen materialized in Chapter 7. I mean, seriously, who would have ever thought of Bruce Springsteen ending up in someone's dissertation on labyrinths? (He's in there because of Tunnel of Love.) I also had the pleasure of not only writing about A Midsummer Night's Dream but finding research that supported my decision to put it in Chapter 4.

When I finished the proposal, someone asked me if I didn't feel a sense of accomplishment. I said that I couldn't really relax because I knew how much more I needed to do to improve it. I have a similar feeling now, knowing where the shortcomings are and the places that could use a bit more work. It's hard to know when to stop with such a big project, but eventually you run up against that ticking clock, and it forces you, willy-nilly, to let go.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a parent, watching that little one toddle off to school for the first time, convinced that he's way too young to be out there in the world. As you watch, considering calling him back for one more hug, he disappears into the building without a backward glance, and the door closes behind him. You're left on the sidewalk, waving vacantly at an empty schoolyard, wondering how in the world you got there so soon.

The Lovesick Pigeon and Other Stories

I was in St. Louis for a few days and spent my time going to the zoo (three different days), visiting the Butterfly House (a long drive from my hotel but worth it), and strolling through the Missouri Botanical Garden (gorgeous). You might say I was under the spell of both Artemis and Aphrodite; wild animals are sacred to Artemis, but gardens, with all of their flowers and cultivated beauty, have a strong whiff of Aphrodite.

At the zoo, I was especially drawn to the bears, the big cats, and the birds. The St. Louis Zoo has an extraordinary group of animals, from insects to large carnivores. It was the latter that had the greatest pull on me, and this zoo was an especially good place to see them up close and active, and even to make eye contact with them. Of course, even with its carefully created habitats, a zoo is a man-made environment, and the humans and animals gaze at one another across barriers.

While it was great to get so close to the animals, I wondered what they thought about their confines. In return for being well cared for and safe, the animals have been removed from their natural homes and have pretty constricted ranges. I agree with Wordsworth that "their thoughts I cannot measure," but it seemed to me that I saw a spectrum of attitudes, from contentment, to restlessness, to curiosity.

With no real danger involved for either me or the animals, I was free to enjoy their beauty. One thing I noticed is that when an animal looks at you (especially if it's capable
of killing you) you really feel you've been looked at. The birds were the most interactive and seemingly most interested in their admirers. Most of the bears and large cats showed what looked like only a casual interest in visitors. The tiger was an exception; as she roved back and forth across her territory, she seemed to take a keen interest in the zoo train that stopped periodically directly across from her.

In the bird house, many of the inhabitants made eye contact, vocalized, and even flew to the front of their enclosures when people walked by. There were many "exotic" species I had never heard of, exhibiting a great variety of colors, sizes, plumage, and behaviors. I had the strange idea that one fellow, a Victoria Crowned Pigeon, was trying to tell me something. There was something very purposeful in the way he dipped his head and extended his tail feathers over and over again. I don't know much about pigeons, but to me, it looked like a courtship dance, and after researching the situation on the Internet, I found out I was right. (The only thing I can say is "Wow!")

Although the grounds of the zoo are lush and garden-like, they're really the backdrop for the main attraction. In a botanical garden, the plants are the showcase, and outside of the Huntington Gardens in California, the Missouri Botanical Garden is the most spectacular one I've seen. It has everything from a tropical garden inside a geodesic dome to a Japanese garden to a maze, with enough color to knock your eyes out and a number of art works, fountains, and buildings incorporated into the grounds.

Except for a few herbs I grew on a windowsill, I've never had a garden of my own, but I love being in them. A garden falls under the purview of Aphrodite (in its beauty and luxuriance), Apollo (in its engineering and layout), and even Artemis (in the birds and other wild creatures that are present). To me a garden is a meeting place of natural forms and human creativity in which both are shown to their full advantage.

A wilderness is beautiful without any gentling influence, and a city is a controlled environment in which much of our connection to wild nature is muted (which is not to say that cities can't be beautiful; they often are). The plumage of a parrot deep in the jungle is breathtaking, but so is a gracefully engineered bridge or the St. Louis arch.
 

I'm still thinking about the web of life, with all its beauties and dangers. To me it seems just as much of a mistake to sentimentalize nature as it is to think we control it. Nature is mosquitoes as well as butterflies; it's cancer cells, bacteria, and parasites as well as flowering trees, roses, and baby animals. The verse in Genesis in which God tells man "to fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28) has been criticized for its anthropocentric attitude, but I think there's another way to look at it. Human consciousness lets us reflect on the world and our place in it. It gives us the ability to understand nature and work with it without necessarily accepting all the suffering that's part of the natural order.

Maybe humans and the natural world are locked together in a symbiotic relationship that's meant to be mutually sustaining (even when it isn't). I saw a film today, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in which one specialist was asked about the significance of the ancient paintings, possibly as old as 32,000 years, that came to light in France in 1994. He said they were an artifact of the special human capacity for symbol-making, mythology, and poetry, the artistic impulse that reflects and also creates much beauty in the world.

Interestingly, in these works, among the very earliest of all known paintings, the subject is almost always animals -- horses, deer, rhinos, lions, bison -- which shows that people have been reflecting on the processes of life all around them for eons. Maybe the ability to bear witness to these processes and to create art out of our imaginations and the raw materials of nature is the reason we're here. 

Man vs. Nature in Orange County

I heard a thousand blended notes,

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What man has made of man.

-- William Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law–

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

I am on vacation here in Southern California, an escapee from the cold and stormy May weather at home. Staying in the South Bay has been a revelation. Since I'm close to coastal Orange County, I've spent several days exploring beach towns south of L.A.: Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Corona del Mar, Laguna Beach. While it might appear that I've had nothing more on my mind than a determination to eat my way through all the gelato shops within a hundred-mile radius, my brain hasn't been entirely idle.

The skies are blue, the waves are pounding and picturesque, and the sunshine is wonderfully clarifying, but there is still a mystery I can't wrap my mind around. What's brought this to a head is some close encounters with nature that I've had over the last few days, but I've been thinking about it for some time. The question is basically this: Is nature essentially sound and are human beings the problem, or is nature brutal and unfeeling and is human civilization an improvement over the vagaries of a dog-eat-dog universe?

I realize philosophers, theologians, and poets (among others) have pondered this question for centuries, and it's unlikely I can solve it in a few days spent idling by the ocean. Joseph Campbell said that the entire reason mythology came into being was that humans needed to make sense of a world in which "eat or be eaten" was the harsh and unalterable essence of things. That perfect cheeseburger I had last night at In-N-Out Burger was an illustration of that rule in action; the cattle I saw running from the noise of the train as I made my way westward last week elicited a stab of sympathy from me, but it didn't stop me from enjoying the cheeseburger.

Sometimes when I hear people talk about unwinding in the beauty of nature, I wonder if they are looking at the same thing I am. I know what it is to be awed; this afternoon, I was on a boat surrounded by a large pod of dolphins -- I'm talking hundreds of dolphins, swimming with their characteristic grace out toward open sea and slicing through the water underneath the boat in what looked like play. The prototypical dolphin for me has always been Flipper, a good-natured and kindly creature who was loyal and helpful to his human friends when he wasn't teasing them with his antics.

Recently, Flipper's image took a serious hit for me when I read about how dolphins sometimes attack porpoises by ramming them until they die of internal injuries. There are also instances of attacks on their own young as well as attacks on humans. I thought about this while watching the dolphins leap around the boat. Of course, we haven't treated dolphins that well either. How many of them have died unnecessarily in nets when fishermen who weren't even interested in dolphins as prey caught them indiscriminately along with the rest of their haul?

Do you want to know what I was thinking while out on that boat, watching the dolphins frolic and enjoying the feeling of the waves rolling under my feet? I was thinking how glad I was of the human ingenuity that created the boat I was on. The waters off Southern California are picture postcard beautiful when you're looking at them from the deck of a boat, but I couldn't help but think of all the predator and prey scenarios playing out underneath that beguiling surface.

Not that things are that much better on land. Take the grizzly bear I saw in Yellowstone on my first visit to the park several years ago. Spotting that bear was the highlight of my trip and the beginning of a special interest I've taken in grizzlies since then. But what was the bear doing when I saw it? Well, actually, it was feeding on a baby elk. Of course, human sprawl has hemmed the bears in so much that they, fearsome claws and all, are the beleaguered ones. I remember being horrified to hear the way some people in Idaho talked about the bears as if they were vermin. But how would I feel if I were a settler in pioneer days -- when bears were plentiful -- whose child had been killed by a bear? I feel sure I wouldn't be tacking pictures of grizzlies up on my refrigerator with magnets.

Yesterday I took a long walk near sunset in an ecological reserve renowned for its birds. At first, most of the birds were too far away for me to see them well. Ironically, the best part of the walk came near the end, when I was following a trail right next to Highway 1. A startling flash of snowy white on my left turned out to be an egret, standing in the shallows at the edge of the marsh. He tolerated my presence for half a minute or so before flying off. When I came upon him again several minutes later, picking his way through the reeds at water's edge, it was like a gift to be given a second look at such a beautiful bird.

The sight was breathtaking. At the same time, I have to admit to a few seconds of uneasiness when I noticed a group of shore birds flying toward me. Uneasiness as in, "Am I about to experience a re-enactment of The Birds?" I recently read that ravens and crows can recognize faces and apparently don't forget grudges -- not that I've given the birds of Orange County any reason to be mad at me in particular. Yet there I was, walking next to a highway that hemmed in the reserve that is there to protect the birds, in the presence of oil or gas wells jugging away in the background, pulling the fuel out of the earth that powers the machines of the humans who were whizzing by a few yards away.

My own rental car was in the reserve's parking lot, where any sharp-eyed bird could easily pick it out. If the birds did decide to take their frustrations out on someone, I would have been an easy target, and instead of enjoying a pensive walk might have ended up fending off beaks and claws.

Despite all of these dark thoughts, I admit to enjoying the beauty of pelicans in flight, the colors of butterfly wings, the streamlined grace of dolphins, the power and grandeur of the grizzly bear, and many other things I've been fortunate to see. One thing I can say about all of the aforementioned is that they have never lied to me, or stolen from me, or broken my heart to suit themselves. Maybe that's one reason, despite nature's harshness, that it continues to be so compelling. It is something wholly other than human and open for our contemplation when we get a little tired of the human scene.

Watercolor Sunday

For just another lazy Sunday, this was a pretty nice one. I may never figure out why a gray sky in May doesn't bother me the same way an identical sky would in January. It wasn't even warm today; it was cold enough to require a heavy sweatshirt or a jacket. It's also been alarming to hear about the flooding all these storms have caused along the Mississippi and the fact that so many people are in danger of losing their homes.

We're lucky. Around here, the main effect I've noticed from the rain is how lushly green everything is. It's a treat just to rest your eyes on the spring leaves or the neatly mown grass in someone's yard. That alone is probably one thing that makes the spring rain different from the winter rain -- all that green is evidence of life running riot, shooting through branches and twigs until it bursts out the ends in a luxuriance of leaves and pushes up through the dirt in an extravagant carpet of grass.

Most of the trees have finished their flowering (which takes place in April), though I've seen dogwoods and a few others that still have blossoms. I always enjoy the show of color during that first flowering, when the redbuds and the weeping cherries are so delicately beautiful you can hardly believe it. This year, I'm entranced by all of this May greenery and am wondering why I used to find it a little anticlimactic after the more varied palette of early spring.

I went to Starbucks this afternoon for my half-price Frappuccino and some reading, which seemed the perfect activity for a rainy afternoon. Instead, I found myself at a window seat, keeping an eye on the rain and watching other people as they came and went. There was a cheerfulness in the air, an absence of urgency, and something zen about the whole enterprise. Even though I sat for two hours with my chin propped in my hand, looking out the window, I was not a bit sad. I was like a house cat who has found the perfect perch. Whatever the human equivalent of purring is, that's what I was doing.

I went for a walk afterwards and felt like I had stepped into a watercolor painting; it was a little bit like that part in Mary Poppins where Mary, Bert, Jane, and Michael pop into the painting on the sidewalk for a whimsical jaunt. Because I was in absolutely no hurry to go anywhere or do anything, I had time to notice all sorts of little things; a curved white bridge in someone's garden; a yellow door in a gray stone house; a robin alight on a metal chair presiding like a throne on a front lawn (something like The Anecdote of the Jar: "The jar was round upon the ground / And tall and of a port in air. / It took dominion everywhere."); a tree where not the flowers but the leaves were pink.

If someone were to say it doesn't sound like I accomplished much today, I would say that's not true. I did the dishes and spent five minutes mopping the floors after dinner. What else do you want? Why spoil a perfectly beautiful afternoon with too much productivity? If you were to say it doesn't seem like you're thinking too hard about your dissertation, I would say it's true that I wasn't thinking hard about it, but it occurred to me just now that the whole afternoon unfolded like a meditative walk in a labyrinth. No stress and no hurry, just looking, sipping, and meandering. No concern about where to go and no real possibility of taking a wrong turn.

If it were possible to put this afternoon in a bottle, I would save it for the next time I'm feeling cranky or irritable, then spray some lightly behind my ears. It would come out smelling like violets and rain; the label would feature pink roses awash in raindrops and mist. If it had a soundtrack, it would be a combination of Mozart and light jazz with a little Randy Newman thrown in. And it would taste like chocolate caramels with a touch of sea salt, the soft kind of caramel that swirls when you sink your teeth into it.

The Mystery of Chapter 3

I dreamed last night about rainbows -- or at least, two ends of one. I was distracted in the dream by some drama I can't remember, and suddenly I looked up to see a faint glimmer of watery color off at the distant horizon. Following it with my eye, I saw the bare suggestion of the entire arc across a vast expanse of sky. The two ends were the most distinct part, and there appeared to be a rainbow within a rainbow. I'm not sure what I felt other than a mild frustration at not being able to see the whole thing more completely.

It may be all the stormy weather we've had recently that suggested this image to my sleeping brain. I remember looking at the sky the other day and thinking conditions seemed right for a rainbow, though all I saw were some scraps of clouds. When I lived in Florida as a little girl, I saw a lot of vivid rainbows; I remember one in particular that I happened to see through the rear window of our family car when we were returning home from the grocery store one evening. It was enormous and very bright, and something about the fact that it was behind us, boldly transforming a rainy sky into something breathtaking behind our backs, has made me remember it all this time.

I remember watching the vision slowly fade and feeling very wistful. That's when my mother told me about the pot of gold you would find if you could only get to the end of the rainbow before it disappeared. That story filled me with the pure and intense yearning you only feel for things that are slightly out of reach. Sometime soon after that I found a picture book featuring a group of children who were chasing the rainbow in pursuit of that very same gold. It had lovely illustrations of the ever elusive rainbow and the plucky children, always arriving a little too late.

Years later, I see a similarity between this emotion and the plight of the unfortunates in Dante's Purgatorio who spend their days contemplating ripe, glistening fruit and sparkling water that have been strategically placed just outside their grasp. (These people were being punished for gluttony, according to Dante. If Purgatory turns out to be real, the tree that blocks my path will most likely dangle Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs and Chocolate Ecstasy ice cream cones.)

Come to think of it, this pursuit of the rainbow is also very similar to the story of the Holy Grail, which appears as a sudden, piercingly sweet vision of loveliness floating above the heads of the court at Camelot. It glides about provocatively before disappearing as suddenly as it came, leaving everyone dazed and creating a delicious unrest among the knights, who are now filled with an overpowering longing to seek it to the ends of the earth.

I'm getting ready to work on the third chapter of my dissertation, which deals in part with the Grail Quest as a labyrinthine journey. Dante will be in there, too. Since finishing my proposal in December, I've left the dissertation strictly alone, waiting for the right opening to find my way back in. In the last week or two, I've noticed my energy for the project returning. For some reason, Chapter 3 has seemed daunting, and the whole idea of the labyrinth in the Middle Ages almost too weighty and complex to think about. That's actually a little strange considering how I love the Grail story and am intrigued by Dante's geography. Certainly writing Chapters 1 and 2 depleted my resources, but in all the months since finishing I haven't felt the slightest urge to jump into Chapter 3 -- none at all until now.

It could be that something is slightly off in the way I approached the first two chapters, and I have gotten off the path a little. It could also be that there is something in this chapter that is too difficult tackle head on. I've been approaching this as an intellectual problem when it is of course more than that (every dissertation is, I think). That could be the reason for dreaming about rainbows on the eve of picking things up again.

Ordinarily I don't like to talk about what I'm working on while I'm doing it, so this kind of self revelation is unusual. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to write a dissertation (an idea that probably occurs to very few people, actually), now you know the truth: scholars are often just as clueless as everyone else.

On the other hand, it could be a lot of fun to unravel The Mystery of Chapter 3. If I were writing a Nancy Drew book, that's what I would call this. Maybe Nancy Drew (another favorite from my childhood) is a good model for the duration of the effort. As I recall, she always got her answers, and didn't stop until she did.

Taking a Break

"Wordplay" is on temporary hiatus while I concentrate on my dissertation proposal. Thanks for visiting my blog!

Threshold Guardians

I'm at the point where I have read and absorbed pages and pages of words and have a whole forest of ideas in my head. I have culled arguments from papers I've written, taken notes on Virgil and Pliny, drunk chai lattes and mocha frappuccinos, stared into space, daydreamed, listened to the blues, considered buying a new mascara, and mopped my kitchen floor.

I have passed through the much scarier (and prolonged) period of just standing at the edge of the woods, staring at what appeared to be an impenetrable tangle. You start to push your way in, and you see that what appeared to be solid actually opens up a little, showing a passage where there didn't seem to be one.

It's like that instant in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when pushing through an ordinary wardrobe full of coats with a seemingly solid back suddenly leads to another world, or in Through the Looking Glass, when Alice climbs through the mirror and finds herself in another country. You could also compare it to that moment in the Harry Potter books when, in order to get to Hogwarts, the kids have to run as hard as they can with a luggage trolley at a seemingly solid wall. Writing is like that.

No matter how long I write, or what kind of writing I do, I usually feel inadequate at the beginning. I've found that (solvitur ambulando) it's best to keep putting one foot in front of the other; progress is progress, including mistakes, and things start to take on a rhythm of their own if you just move. What seems like stumbling turns into something more graceful and patterned as long as you keep going. Think you're going to sound like Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg address? Forget it, at this stage. You have let go of your dignity and just scramble.

I recognize my delay tactics -- a sudden need to look at the Soft Surroundings web site, to check prices on silk comforters, and to watch a video of the cat that adopted a baby squirrel -- for what they are. They all express a reluctance to take a run at that hard place in case this time there really isn't a way through and I end up with bruises and scratches on my face. Or, more likely, there is a way, but it requires a lot of hard digging. Other people have explored writing (and reading) as processes of initiation, but this is actually my first time to realize that it applies to me, too.

Crossing the threshold is a liminal moment in any adventure, the signal that you've committed yourself. Fears are like the demons in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Wrathful guardians, hungry ghosts, and hell beings may be just the projections of your own mind, but they still have flaming mouths and talons like razors. The minute you show them you mean business, though, they will simmer down and let you by -- they might even turn into a bouquet of flowers or an angel bearing that pale green sweater from Soft Surroundings. They are actually on your side, even if they do have ten heads.