Transformation: I achieve perspective and self-realization in writing a story and a poem

by James B. Thompson

I would like an astrologer to take a good look at progressions on my chart. In the past few weeks I've cracked two icebergs, two seeming impenetrables of my life. One concerns my mother's incessant and vainglorious illness; the other, less "major arcana" in intensity is about a comment a high school teacher wrote on an essay. Though it, too, is a clue into all that was happening and has happened.

In both cases I'll start with the inroad, the fissure, the spark, the aha!

Case 1, being Mom. Last night I re-edited a short story I've been submitting to journals for a while (I thought it was completed and it was). One publisher I'm interested in specified submissions be 3,000 words, so I decided to scrape off 150 words, or at least explore the possibility, and that meant a  careful close read.

The story is odd, no doubt about that. I posted a long rejection note here a few months ago concerning that very story and have received similar comments. As I reread I realized how dense and perhaps troubling the story is, and in my chipping away the 150 words, chose to at least slightly modify the story's Flannery O'Connor-like desire for expiation and mystery.  The protagonist, an adult woman, witnessed her mother's violent death and since then coped, lived a life of coping, was frozen, scrambling, searching.

And it so it hit, last night, me that while my own mother was inflicting herself with a slow Christian Science death, twenty years in the development phase and then another ten years once she (finally) allowed herself to be operated on, I would occasionally wonder, What is the effect on me?

There was no answer I could see, never an answer, all those years, although I never doubted the impact was huge.  So as Jean Maria Schwartz (the character) seeks to set the world in order, she reveals an eerie religiosity, a desire to be like St. Peter, deciding who goes where. She has never forgotten what she saw and neither have I. There is no end to the past's effect but once some understanding is attained the possibility of healing, which is transformation, appears. When I wrote the story I was so pleased it wasn't about me but more than most of my fiction it was.

Case 2.  I'd mentioned my favorite high school English teacher to a high school friend (now on Facebook, of course), and soon thereafter wrote a poem which starts with an imagined death from extreme circumstances, with a slight perspective on the afterlife as it relates to "my" family. And I ambled in my poeming to talk of this English teacher who once scribbled, "But what if I say I love you" on an essay. I didn't begin writing the poem with any thought of him.

Cynical as I was I never once considered his comment strange or "improper"--and it wasn't.  What I realized, finally, in creating the poem was that my teacher saw something amiss.  He'd met my parents more than once (I was in his class when I was a Freshman and then in his honors class Senior year).  He knew. He knew there was weirdness and some meanness at home.  He saw me five days a week .  And he was trying to help.

The story in question and the poem in question are far from being sentimental. Far far far.  But that I should understand so much about myself in so short a time--and this is what I do, think--is significant and, I hope, a signal of various events and actions and friends now in my life.

Writing isn't therapy and therapy is just a word and a fairly stupid one.  But for those of us in the ultimate self-realization fellowship (no play on wonderful Paramahansa Yogananda and his Fellowship). This kind of understanding is worth the price of admission (to life, being human). At least it is for me.

p.s. I am going to write a note to that editor who rejected the story. I may owe him an apology.

A Teaching Moment on Racism? I wish. The word. Flannery. N.

It was a comic (weird comic) (dark comic) sight. Good liberal New York Episcopalians using the n-word.

It transpired when author Brad Gooch lectured on Flannery O'Connor, some months before publication of his biography, Flannery, A Life of Flannery O'Connor. This was at the same church  I wrote about in my post on R.S. Thomas. Enough about me.

I am not sure how it came up but quite reasonably Gooch was called on to explain Flannery's use of a word we find repugnant and were trained to find repugnant. The solid folk were appalled and Gooch suggested Flannery O'Connor, a southerner, was mirroring the south of her time. There was talk back and forth, nothing surprising or new. And suddenly some line was crossed.

No. Not a line. Not crossed. A taboo was obliterated. People felt free, liberated, to use the n-word, not about anyone specifically, mind you, but in discussing the stories of O'Connor we'd read, I heard sweet ladies with skin fair enough to have a lifetime of fine SPF-rich cream preserve its ivory hue spouting the n-word. And with gusto.

And getting off on it like kids who say fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. (This was not a crowd to say fuck.) Perhaps if we were discussing Henry Miller, these same ladies and gents might in a final session start sputtering the legion terms kind and abrasive describing genitalia and male and female and female and male and male joinings.

In that scenario we'd end up giggling because cunt and cock and such, said by nicely clothed white people in a meeting room of a progressive NYC church would be funny, ludicrous, a displacement and therefore silly. 

But it was the n-word.

I still wonder what was really happening. Not one of those people would use the n-word in proximity of a person of color, nor would they teach hate. I'm sure of that. But implicit conditioning of race, class and gender are among the best teachers around.  And we hear the word as booming lyric in rap and hip hop. And white people (I'm one) are our own version of a boy in a bubble. Some black people might say it's white privilege though I believe use of "privilege" gives away power. It s what it is?

I'm not judging so much as "just saying" and part of what I'm just saying is it was not the most comfortable moment of my life.  I did not use the n-word, but my life has not been all-white. (I enjoy not-all-white privilege.) And that staying conscious of such moments is one way forward to the true promises of a decent religion, those rewards being compassion, kindness, redemption.

I'm Writing Faster: The Force That Won't Take No for an Answer

If you are reading this, I will have found it.  An image of the speed of light, the illustration, however quirky, of my writing faster.

I may have mentioned this before, but it hasn't stopped. If my experience can get anyone out of writing doldrums I'm willing to repeat myself. Fiction, is what this pertains to, short stories.  In the past I had trouble ending fiction. I struggled to for the "perfect" solution so "the end" was earned. I was pretty insecure, too.

Sometime in a late-winter haze I read Maxine Chernoff's Some of Her Friends That Year: New & Selected Stories (Coffee House Press).  (Which is back on library shelves so I can't be more specific; it's not, however, the specificity of naming any one story but the aha that matters here.)

I remember being upset with her.  She ended that story too soon. (I said to myself).  And it works! (I added.)  And so I realized I could leave my stories "open" in the way a poem is left "open."  Leave them wanting more. Or maybe I was simply ready to realize.

This year I've written five (5) new short stories and started the sixth yesterday.  The first five are "go's." They work, although are not finished.  This year line-ups of authors' names have returned come to me from my vigorous and loving reading qua devouring books in my teens and twenties:  John Cheever, Isaac Singer, Flannery O'Connor, F. Scott Fitzgeral, Isaac Babel, Peter Taylor; many others but all from, say, twenty and thirty years ago.  I can't know their exact influence but I know they are my foundation. 

The End.