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Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

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The Pieta & the Writer’s Palette, Redux

22 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, My Writing, Short Story, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

art, creativity, painting, short story, the unconscious, visual art, writing, writing process

A_capriccio_of_architectural_ruins_with_a_seascape_beyond,_oil_on_canvas_painting_by_Leonardo_Coccorante

It’s been said that for writers the blank page is our canvas and words our paint.

But I don’t think so.

Images and ideas are the paint, words the loaded brush, and sentences our brushstrokes. The mind and imagination of both writer and reader is the blank canvas.

Nothing is there on the page—mere white space, black ink strokes. Yet in the act of reading the mind becomes awash in colors, images, ideas, emotions. Like magic. What the reader draws upon is not only the writer’s words and images, but the reader’s as well, his memories and associations. Our reader co-creates with us.

What both the writer and reader draw upon, as do all visual artists, are all the images and associations from our own lives as well as all those who came before us and left their imprints upon our imaginations, through books and artwork and film and advertising. Scraps of overheard conversation, images of bloodshed and atrocities on nightly broadcasts. Scenes drifting by a train window, songs played upon the radio, sounds of playground laughter. Faraway land and cultures and wilderness areas glimpsed in our travels or from magazines or TV documentaries.

We draw upon myths and legends, iconic images and personal histories passed on from one generation to the next, spanning back to the beginning of life, perhaps, if we do indeed carry within our genes memories of primeval birthing. All these images and association stored in our personal or collective unconscious.

What interests me in all this is the creative process. How we dip our brushes into this swirling palette, and bring out more on our loaded brushes than what we had intended or even realized at first glance. And yet our work is the richer for it.

Here’s an example of a scene I created without being fully aware of its implications until in the midst of the writing, and moments afterwards. This is from “Tamara in Her Garden.”

I was eleven years old when the house burned down one night. Burned clean to the ground. Nothing left but heaps of ashes and twisted metal folded among the stone foundation. Sifting through the silt and rubble, firemen found the charred remains of my father, who had died in bed, and the broken bones of fifteen young men, boys really, buried beneath the house.

They found me crouched in the garden, dress torn and singed, eyes so wide, they said, it was as if the fire had burned off my eyelids and I would never sleep again.

What I remember most about that night now is the way my Aunt Rose held me afterward, drew me to her lap and rocked me. I was tall for my age, taller than Aunt Rose by then, but she held me nonetheless. Gathered me up, all the odd and bony parts of me, the long thin back and stooped shoulders, the heavy head. Folding herself over, stroking and holding, rocking me like a baby, like I was part of her lost self. And I, spilling over her yet holding too–tightly, tight. And thinking with open eyes: She knew. She knew, too.

Now when I remember, and remember how she held me, I am reminded of ancient Italy. Of towering cypress pressed against an Aegean sky. Of sun-drenched doorways and crumbling stoops. Of Michelangelo’s Pieta, cool and smooth in a cool, dark hall, the Son’s body spilling half naked across the Mother’s lap as she held him. Holding and spilling. Holding and spilling. Remembering places I’ve never yet always been.

As I was creating the image of the child being held by the Aunt, I began to realize I’d seen this before—it was a deeply familiar, iconic image, steeped in religious, artistic, and maternal associations. The Pieta was already part of my palette.

Michelangelo-pieta
I didn’t realize until after I had written the words that drawing upon this iconic image was thus imbuing the scene with a sense of suffering and sacrifice, of sin and redemption, of death and the hope of resurrection.

Realizing this, it became part of the story. The protagonist herself realizes the implication and draws upon images of beauty and decay, life and death, art and darkness, all washing together but impossible to hold without spilling. She draws upon places we’ve all been, or know, figuratively, without perhaps having been there ourselves.

The phrase “remembering places I’ve been and never been” is particularly potent because it captures for me some deep truth—that humans, particularly with our exposure to film and art and news, are exposed to places, scenes, people, cultures, that become part of our world view, our memories and associations, without ever actually having “been” there.

Which brings us back to the original point of this post: The paint we dip our brushes into is so much more deep and vast than any of the creators who came before us had. Along with our individual experiences come experiences filtered through the minds and imaginations of others, framed by their cameras, their perceptions, their agendas, their images—but it all becomes part of our consciousness, gets missed in with the personal, and recreated into our works.

Art that inspires us becomes part of our subconscious, our memories and association, part of that “paint” swirling around in our minds upon which we draw when we “paint” with words. The Pieta was already there, already steeped in associations, already all-ready for me to draw upon when seeking the perfect image for this particular scene of a wounded child being drawn to the lap of her maternal aunt to be comforted, the child herself being “too big”, her wound too devastating, for the Aunt to hold, so spilling past her, unable to hold it all, to even grasp it all, all that her niece had suffered, and so spilling beyond the aunt’s ability to comfort, hold, heal.

And yet the act of attempting to do just that—that despite the enormity of the task, its impossibility, its futility, the attempt in itself becomes a kind of absolution, a love beyond love, a sacramental act, that touches the child more tenderly than anything else might have.

I think in writing this, I have touched upon, unawares, a realization, that this is something I seek again and again in my writing to capture, articulate. The impossibility of healing, comforting, redeeming, forgiving, witnessing, the sorrow and hurt of this world as it unfolds in each of our lives, and yet the absolute necessity to attempt to do so, for just the attempt itself—the whole-hearted, deep-throated, full-bent attempt—is enough. The attempt despite no hope of succeeding, is precisely what’s needed, and will suffice.

If we live a million years, we can do no more, nor less, than that.

We are so much deeper and wider and richer than we will ever know, so much more than our personal histories can account for, and we might never know it but from these percolations bubbling up from the deep Unconscious, or those deliberate dippings below the surface.

Lending our pens to that which writes us.

[I wrote this post several years ago before I began painting myself. Now I find it more true than ever. Even for painting, my “brush” is dipped into the deep unconscious before I ever put a stroke on paper or canvas]

 

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Selling My Babies. Where’s the Joy?

29 Thursday May 2014

Posted by deborahbrasket in Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Short Story, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 30 Comments

Tags

fiction, Humor, literary journals, publication, rejection, short story, submission process, writing, writing for publication, writing process

Wikipedia Commons Mother_and_Child_-_Mary_CassattIt’s never the full-blown joy I expect when a short story is accepted for publication.

Even when the acceptance letter exceeds my wildest hope, like this last one:

“I’m stunned into dumbstruck awe by your piece, which I finished mere minutes ago. That’s how much time it took me to accept this, in the fervent hope that it has not been taken by another journal.”

“Stunned!” “Dumbstruck!” “Awe!”

I should be feasting on those words for weeks. I should be doing cartwheels down the hall. I should be. But I’m not.

I’m so used to opening my emails and finding a “thanks, no thanks” response to my submissions that acceptance and praise come with a jolt. Disbelief, even: Is this a joke?

Then a flood of conflicting emotions descend. Gratitude comes first, with relief tripping at her heels.

“Finally!” I think, gazing sternly at this wayward child of mine: “Took your sweet time getting that proposal, didn’t you girl? I thought you might be a spinster forever. I was ready to banish you to the dark corner of a bottom drawer. Boy, did you luck out!”

Eventually a giddy glee and an I-told-you-so sense of vindication take hold as I rush to tell my husband. Genuine happiness beams when I call my daughter, text my son. Bashful pride sneaks in when I post the event on Facebook or Twitter.

But I do all this in a hurry, because I know it won’t last. If I don’t grab it on the fly, I’ll lose it altogether. For the elation is rapidly deteriorating into an edgy uneasiness. A prick of panic. And gut-wrenching remorse when I realize: She’s gone! Out of my control. What have I done?

This is how the submission process works for me:

Rejection, rejection, rejection (repeat, ad nauseam)
Then whammy! Acceptance! Giddy glee! (Yay me!)
Followed by panic. Deflation. Despair.

So what’s wrong with me? Where’s the joy?

Well, I’ve given it some thought and think I’ve figured it out. It’s such a cliché, I almost hate to tell you, but here it is: She’s my baby. She’s leaving the nest.

Ready or not, she’s out there. Like it or not, I’m responsible for her.

The problem is: She’s never been well-behaved. I tried, but I couldn’t tame her completely. She was a “darling” that wouldn’t be killed. Now she’s on the loose. And O My God! What will people think when they get a good gander at her!

Did I push her out the door too soon? Should I have given her another rewrite? Or, did I sell her too cheap? Did she deserve more than what she got?

Should I have waited for a more prestigious, more adoring, more (fill in the blank) suitor?

How will she fare in his hands? Will he show her off? Twirl her around? Tell her she’s pretty?

Will anyone other than he actually read her? Or will he hide her away in some dusty warehouse, or send her to some virtual outpost where she’ll fade away in utter obscurity and ignominy?

Would she have been better off left in the drawer?

It’s about this time that I pull up her up on my computer screen and give her another read.

Yikes! This is awful! She’s a complete mess! What can I do? Withdraw her? Demand a divorce? Use a pseudonym?

Can I spruce her up in a hurry? Fresh lipstick, maybe? A new dress? At least straighten her hem, for God’s sake! She’s not ready for this. And neither am I, it appears.

The really sad thing is: She’s just a short story!

What will I do when my pride and joy, my novel, goes? Is this why I labor so long? Revise so endlessly? To keep her at home where she’s safe and warm and well-loved? Why strive to make her perfect only to lose her in the end?

It’s not like I can’t take rejection. I’ve become numb to rejection: “Oh, you again. What else is new?”

I read through a standard reject and taste a mild bitterness, a dash of sadness, sometimes a whiff of distain—what’s wrong with these idiots!

If there’s a bit of encouragement in the rejection letter, the taste is bittersweet.

If the encouragement is profuse or specific, I’m delighted. I call my daughter: “They really liked my story! The one they rejected. Isn’t that wonderful?”

So why am I not overblown with joy by high praise and acceptance?

Isn’t this what it’s all about? Publication? Praise? Recognition by my peers? The juried consensus that this story deserves to be read? Otherwise, why write?

But all I feel after the initial sugar high wears off is: Loss. Remorse. Resignation.

Félix_Emile-Jean_Vallotton_-_Woman_Writing_in_an_Interior_-_Google_Art_ProjectSo back to work I go.

Butt in seat, open a new vein, let the words flow out.

I immerse myself in the writing. Let it wash over me. Carry me away.

And that’s when I find it. What I’ve been seeking all along.

Full-blown joy!

It’s right where I left it: In the writing.

 

 

 

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“Us, Ancient” – A Short Love Story

07 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Fiction, Love, My Writing, Short Story

≈ 38 Comments

Tags

Aging, Flash Fiction, Growing Old Together, Love, Love Story, Marriage, short stories, short story

SLa Gitana at sail close-up1Us, Ancient
by Deborah J. Brasket

You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.

My husband tells me not to worry. He still sees me perfect.

“What? When you shut your eyes?”

“Well, I don’t have to shut them.”

“I’m just saying . . . .” he says, when I give him that look.

He tries.

But I know what he means, this man who is fast turning into his father the older he grows. And his father! That scrawny, bald-headed buzzard was never much to look at, even when we met. Certainly nothing like his son, who I’m telling you, was hot enough to burn rubber back then.

But that’s not how I see him now. Not as his father, and not as he Infinitywas when we first said I do.

There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore.

That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering somewhere around the body maybe. But more outside than in. And him, too. This man I married.

Star_birth_in_Messier_83_(captured_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope)What I see now is not a body, but a being. A living, thinking, breathing being who just happens to fit perfectly into my arms. Someone I want to grow old with. And not just “till-death-do-you-part” old. But old. As in ancient.

Man-in-the-moon old. Mountains melting into the sea, old. Earth spinning off its axis, old.

Starships dodging dark holes, novae bursting into newness. . . . you see what I mean.

Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe, old. That’s how I see us.Delfini curiosi

This short story first appeared, in a slightly different version, in Drunk Monkeys in October 2013.  You can read it online HERE.

Here’s another short story I wrote:

“13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, And the Moment After”

And here’s a true-life love story:

Celebrating Lasting Love

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13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Family, Fiction, Short Story, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 50 Comments

Tags

Caretakers, death, dying, fiction, Flash Fiction, Mother's death, short story, writing, writing process

IMG_3022 (3)This is the title of a short story I wrote that was published in the Fall Issue of Cobalt Review. I’ve copied it below. It’s very short.

It came together when I was working on a blog post about Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite poets. His “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” was on my mind while I was reading Paul Harding’s Tinkers.

Harding’s novel about a man on his deathbed looking back at his own and his father’s life reads almost like a prose poem at times, written in short, lyrical vignettes. I was reminded of my own mother’s death, which I remember as a succession of brief, intensely vivid scenes.

I first wrote of this experience in my blog post “The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry.” I wondered how the story would unfold if modeled after Steven’s poem. This is the result of that experiment. While based on personal experience, it is fictionalized. I’d be very interested in hearing what you think.

13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After

By Deborah J. Brasket

I
She streaks past me naked in the dark hall. Light from the bathroom flashes upon her face, her thin shoulders, her sharp knees. Her head turns toward me, her dark eyes angry stabs. As if daring me to see her, stop her, help her. Or demanding I don’t.

I struggle up from the cot where I’ve been sleeping. Through the open doorway, she’s a slice of bright light, slumped on the toilet, the white tiles gleaming behind her.

She kicks the door shut in my face.

II
Late June she’s diagnosed. October first gone. Mid-August her strength rallies.

“I don’t think I’m dying after all,” she tells me. “They got it all wrong. As usual.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says.
“Like what?”
“Like that.”

III
The plums lie where they fall in the tall grass. I pass them on my way to the dumpster, where I toss plastic bags filled with fouled Depends, empty syringes, and morphine bottles.

On the way back to her apartment I gather up a few plums, passing over the ones pecked by birds, or burst open from the fall, or too soft to hold together, carefully selecting those with bright tight skins.

“Where did you get those? Did you pick them?”
“No, they were on the ground.”
“Garbage. Throw them out.”

“Garbage,” she insists. Her foot hits the lever, opening the trash can as I try to push past her.

When she’s not looking I fish them out and wash them in cold water. I place them in a bowl in the refrigerator next to the bottles of Ensure and pediatric water that she won’t touch.

When she’s asleep I take one out and press the cold, purple flesh against my lips, biting through the taut, tart skin to the soft, sweet meat beneath. Sucking up the juices.

IV
“Come here. I want you to sit on my lap.”
“No, Mama. I’m too heavy. I’ll hurt you.”
“Come, I want to hold you, like I used to.” She pats her lap.

Her hands are all bone now, her nails long and yellow. Her pajama bottoms are so loose there’s almost no leg to sit on. I balance on the edge of the recliner and she pulls my head down to her chest.

“There now,” she says, “there now.”

I feel like I’m lying on glass. Like any second I’ll break through. Like the long sharp shards of her body holding me up are giving way, and I’m being torn to pieces in her arms.

V
“She says you stole her car.” The social worker from hospice sits on the couch with a pad and pen in her hand. She’s new. They’re always new. We’ve had this conversation before.

“It’s in the shop. The clutch went out, remember Mama?”
“You can’t have it. Bring it back.”
“You don’t need it. Besides you can’t drive.”
“Anna can drive me, can’t you Anna?”

Across from the social worker sits Anna, slumped on the hearth, biting her thumbnail. I sit facing my mother. We are like four points on the compass, holding up our respective ends.

“That’s not Anna’s job, to drive you.”
“I know what you’re doing,” she tells me between clenched teeth.
“What am I doing?”
“You know what you’re doing!”

Her fury flashes across the room in brilliant streaks, passing over Anna’s bent head, the social worker’s busy pen. It hits me full in the face. I do not flinch.

VI
In spring the wild turkeys wander down from the hillsides and graze in the meadow behind our home. Sometimes they come into our yard and stand before the glass doors. Raising their wings and flapping furiously, they butt their hard beaks against the glass. Attacking what they take as another.

VII
She’s moving in slow motion, inching across the room in her walker. Her sharp shoulders are hunched, her wide mouth drooped, her once silver hair yellow and dull. Dark eyes burn in sunken sockets.

Slowly her face turns toward me, her fierce, bitter-bright eyes fixed on mine.

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she says.

VIII
I kneel at her knees weeping. Her hands lightly pat my head.

When I look up her eyes are closed and she looks so peaceful. Her body sinks deep into the soft cushions steeped in her own scent. The wings of the chair, the arms and the legs, rise up around her, the sharp edges of her face and body sunk in softness.

If I could I would let her, cocooned like that, sink deep beneath the shade of the plum trees outside her window. Sink into the earth just like that.

The tight bitter skin broken through. All the sweet juices let loose.

IX
The ground squirrels are popping up everywhere, their long tunnels weaving through the roots of the old oaks, loosening the soil that anchors them to the slopes. We fear they will eventually cause the trees to tumble and the hillside holding up our home collapse.

So we feed them poison, sprinkling it around the trees and along the squirrel-dug furrows, as if sowing seed. It’s the same stuff found in the Warfarin my husband takes to keep his blood thin and clot-free.

Sometimes I imagine them out there beneath the oak trees in the moonlight, the squirrels running in slow motion through dark tunnels while the blood running through their veins grows thinner and thinner. The light in their brains grows brighter and brighter until they finally explode, like stars, in a burst of white light.

X
She sits on the edge of the bed hunched over, letting me do what I will. The lamplight spills over our bent heads, catching the sheen on the tight skin of her calves.

I hold her bare foot in my hand and rub lotion into the dry skin, messaging the soft soles and the rough edges of her toes. I spread the thick lotion up her thin ankles and over the sheen of her legs where it soon disappears. I pour on more and more.

Her skin is so thirsty. There’s no end to the thirst.

XI
I listen to her breathing in the dark from my cot in the next room. I hold my breath each time hers stops, waiting, listening. Sometimes minutes seem to pass before the rattle starts up again. Each time it’s longer and longer. Soon the minutes will turn to hours, the hours to days, then weeks, years.

How long can you hold your breath before your heart bursts?

XII
I touch her hair, her cheek, before they wheel her into the room where she’s cremated. I wait while she turns to ashes.

XIII
It’s too dark to see when I hear the deer scream. There’s only the sound of thundering hooves and that long terrifying cry passing from one end of the meadow to the other, before crashing down a ravine.

It ends abruptly, as if a knife had sliced its throat.

I see the deer often in my dreams, screaming past me in the dark, slowly turning her head toward me. Fixing her fierce, bitter-bright eyes on mine.

I do not turn away. I let her drink and drink.

First published in Cobalt Review, Issue 9, Fall 2013, in a slightly modified version.

(Forgive me if this has shown up twice in your reader)

Related articles
  • “13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After” (deborahbrasket.wordpress.com)

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The Joy of Aging

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Creative Nonfiction, Deep Ecology, Human Consciousness, Science, Short Story, Spirituality, Universe

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Aging, Growing old, inspiration, Joy, New York Times, Oliver Sack, short story

Das_Stufenalter_der_Frau_c1900 clearer picOliver Sacks wrote a piece for the New York Times last month called “The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding!)”. It ended with this:

“My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

While I am still a long ways from 80, I’m beginning to feel this way more and more too. If this is aging, I hope it never ends!

I just finished a short story on this subject–my first flash fiction, 300 words! It’s called “Us, Ancient.” I can’t share much here because I’m sending it out to some journals and they frown on that sort of thing. But excerpts, I understand, are fine.

So here’s the first and last lines. See if you can guess what comes in the middle.

Beginning

Isle du Pins cropped“You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.”

Ending

“Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe . . . That’s how I see us.”

I’m not sure what it is about “the universe” I find so inspiring. I’m not alone. Humans have gazed at the stars in awe and wonder since the beginning of time. Perhaps, like me, they feel some strange kinship. They say we’re made of star-dust, after all.

I’ve always felt that’s why I have such an affinity for the sea. Seventy percent of our bodies are water. And that’s where life on earth all began, in the sea. Each human as well begins its life in the womb surrounded by a type of sea water. Amniotic fluid is salty.

They say that the molecules, cells, and even DNA of our bodies have a type of memory. Might that memory carry traces of its beginning at the dawn of time? I like to think so. I’m not sure how else to explain the feeling of deep empathy with the ocean and the night sky–as if I know them well, as if we are old friends, as if once I was rocked to sleep in their arms. As if I’m not done with them yet, and we are only partly parted. Something of me remains in them still.

This is what aging does, I guess. Allows us to slip the reins of reason and rationality into poetic license. I write elsewhere:

“There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore. That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering, maybe, around the body. But more outside than in.”

115766587_75aefa9480 photo by Naotakum Creative CommonsI feel that way more and more, as if this body that has contained me all these years is slowly evaporating, and I’m becoming freer to be what I always was but never quite realized. A poet called it “mostly Love, now.” Mostly joy works too.

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Lightness of Being, Unbearable and Otherwise

20 Monday May 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Human Consciousness, Memoir, My Writing, Short Story, Spirituality, Writing

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

human consciousness, Milan Kundera, Philosophy, short story, Unbearable Lightness of Being, writing

IMG_2729I fell in love with the title of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” before I ever read the book. The phrase seemed to identify something I had long felt but never put into words—a sense of being lightly tethered to the “real.”  While at first it was experienced as something negative, later it morphed into a much more positive feeling.

Even as a child, there always seemed to be some disconnect between “me” and the world around me. It was more than a sense of shyness, or not fitting in, or being different. It was more like a hyper awareness, or extreme self-consciousness—as if I stood outside myself, watching myself as I moved through the world and interacted with others. Other people seemed to live in the moment, embedded in experience. I always felt somewhat removed, disconnected, as if I floated above experience and not in it.

coulds Sky-2 wikicommonsI don’t know now if this was a continuous feeling, or something that I felt so deeply and strangely at different times growing up that I identified with the feeling—of not being quite grounded in “reality,” the reality that others seemed to experience and take for granted.

I wrote about the experience in a short story called “Fine and Shimmering” which referred to the tenuous thread that tied Sheri (the main character) to the real and kept her grounded.

It was curious, this sense of separation she felt whenever she tried to blend in with a crowd, of always rising to the surface, alien and exposed, the way oil will when mixed with water. All her life Sheri had struggled with this lack of gravity and the need to be grounded in something more substantial than herself. Even in high school simple things eluded her, set her apart. How to walk, how to talk, how to laugh out loud.

Later she describes it this way:

[S]he felt unusually light-headed, as if she and her body, always out of sync, had reached some new height of disjunction. Once when Sheri had read a book on astral-projection she was startled to learn of that shimmering silver cord that supposedly tied the astral body to the solid one. What startled her was the awful realization that all her life she had been attached to reality by a similar, tenuous thread, let out so far that she seemed to float above experience, never in it. She had always to be so careful, to move so still, so as not to break that fine thread.

IMG_2712Like Sheri, I felt I was in the world but not of it, tied to it but floating above it. Like watching a film where I was a character in the story, so there was always two of us, the watcher (distant and removed—the “real” me) and the watched, the character I was playing as events unfolded (the actor, the role-player, the “pretend” me).

This could have evolved from being a quiet child who was a keen observer of life. As an observer, you are always once removed from the things observed. There is always a distance between you and those you are watching, or the events as they are unfolding. This experience is disconcerting, to say the least. It‘s like trying to carry on a phone conversation while hearing the echo of your own voice. Like living in an echo chamber. Or feedback loop.

I could never figure out if this was a characteristic peculiar to me, or if others felt the same way. Do we all live in this echo chamber, this constant feedback loop? Or only me and a few other odd ducks? I still don’t know. Either way, it was experienced as something undesirable, something that set me a part, and created a distance between me and the “immediate,” “the real,” an “authentic” self.

IMG_3301Looking back, in some ways, it’s not surprising I felt this way, disconnected from the world– it’s a wonder we all do not. After all, we come into this world understanding that our time here is brief and tentative—any moment we can be torn from it through a fatal accident or tragedy or disease or violent event. And even if we have the good fortune to live a very long time, when the end comes, we realize what a brief moment in time it actually was.

We also come to see that this “I” we identify with is constantly changing. We are not the same “I” as an infant as we are as a teen or a parent or an elder. And any manner of things can change us or warp us or shape us along the way. Our identity is tentative and temporary at best.

And where is this “I” located? In our personal history? The labels that identify us? The many hats and roles we play in life? Does it reside in our heads? Our hearts? Our bodies? Does this “I” stop where our skin ends? Or does it move within and without us, like our breath? Does what I see, hear, feel, become part of me in the act of holding them in my thoughts, becoming part of my mind, my brain, my experience, my memory? Do observer and observed become one? Two parts of one indivisible experience?

Is it a wonder I felt lightly tethered to the “real,” to this human experience where “I” am constantly changing and impossible to pin down or separate into a distinct entity?

Sheri experienced this “unbearable lightness of being” as something oppressive that she rebels against. In the end though she learns all that’s needed to be free is to let go:

To take that fine and shimmering thread between sharp teeth and snip it clean through. To drift aimlessly, like the merest wisp of cloud, a lingering trace of dawn, upon an otherwise immaculate sky. Awaiting that final dispersal, into the blue.

Sheri experienced “letting go” as drifting off into an unencumbered void.  Mine was quite different.

reflection 800px-Taleghan-lake wikicommonsWhen I finally learned to “let go” it was truly liberating. It was letting go of a sense of “twoness” and embracing “not-two.”

When that wall of “otherness” disappeared, I felt deeply connected to this ephemeral world. I felt a lightness of being that is “unbearable” only in the sense of being too sweet, too rich, too beautiful “to bear.” And so I didn’t try to hold onto it. I just let it wash though me.

I’ll write more about this in another post.

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“When Things Go Missing,” Piecing the Puzzle Together

05 Sunday May 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Addiction, Fiction, My Writing, Short Story, Writing

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Addiction, Families, fiction, Online Writing, Relationships, short story, Short Story Month, writing

ReadingShort stories are getting a lot of love lately. May has been proclaimed National Short Story Month. Others have dubbed 2013 as the “Year of the Short Story”. Either way, for those who write short stories or love to read them, this is a reason to celebrate.

So I was pleased when my short story “When Things Go Missing” was published in the newest issue of Unchartered Frontier, an online literary journal. The story is actually an excerpt from a novel that I’m writing. Here’s the synopsis.

One day Fran heads toward the grocery store and keeps on going till she reaches the tip of South America. Meanwhile she leaves behind an empty hole in the lives of her family, an insecure daughter trying to cope with the rigors of graduate school and lackluster love life, a son strung out on heroin, filled with self-pity and rage, and a husband who plots her course across the continent with push pins on a map as he pays her credit card bills. How they cope with her mysterious disappearance and the cryptic phone messages and photographs she sends them, as well as rediscover each other and forge new relationships in her absence, creates the heart of this novel.

Auguste_Rodin-The_Prodigal_Son-Ny_Carlsberg_Glyptotek

The Prodigal Son by Rodin

The novel is written from the perspectives of three main characters, the daughter Kay, the son Cal, and the husband. The short story is Cal’s first chapter (adapted to stand-alone). His story is particularly difficult to write (and perhaps read) because many readers will not find him sympathetic at the beginning. For others who have experience with addiction, ADHD, or love-hate parental relationships, his story may be painful and heartbreaking, and might hit a little too close to home.

But for those who love a good “prodigal son” story, or like rooting for the underdog–cheering for Rocky Balboa when he ran up those stairs, or rooting for Bradley Cooper’s character in the recent film Silver Linings Playbook—I’m hoping they will cut Cal a bit of slack.

A lot of things are missing or perceived missing in Cal’s life, as the title “When Things Go Missing” indicates. It’s interesting how so much of who we are is shaped by the things missing or absent in our lives–as much as, or more so perhaps, than what’s actually there. The whole premise of the novel is how the mother’s absence shapes the lives of those left behind, as well as how they come to “re-see” her in light of her absence.

Silver-Linings-Playbook-Image-03

From the film Silver Linings Playbook

But it’s also about how we struggle to make sense of our lives, struggle to piece things together when so much seems missing.  Especially since how often these puzzles are pieced together from scraps of memories, misperceptions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, misinformation, as well as our own prejudices and preferences, which often blind us to what actually is. Those missing pieces come to shape how we see each other as much as what’s actually there. In some ways, none of us are really what we are perceived to be by others. We are all the unreliable narrators of our own stories.

The miracle, perhaps, is how we connect at all. How despite all that would seem to conspire to keep us apart, we come together nonetheless.

If this sort of thing interests you, you can read “When Things Go Missing” online in Chartered Frontier. You can also download the journal for free in a number of forms.

Here’s the opening of the story to get you started:

Cal stands on the front stoop of his parent’s home with a cold breeze swirling around him, liking the damp chill seeping into his skin, goosing it up. The sun is almost gone, a faint, dull glow smeared along the horizon. Dusk settles like ashes over the neighborhood rooftops. He watches his sister backing her Volvo down the driveway, heading off to Northridge or Norwalk or wherever the hell she’s living these days. She’d come home looking for a little comfort since mom had gone missing. Fat chance of that. But he’s sorry now that she’s gone, sorry he hadn’t at least said he loved her, or asked her for a loan, and missing her even before she disappears around the corner. He takes a long last drag on his cigarette, squeezes the tip, and drops what’s left into his shirt pocket to save for later.

It feels weird walking into his parents’ house without knocking, even though he’d grown up here, been living here since his last stint in county jail, and off and on over the past ten years. He’s acutely conscious that this is not his home and never really had been, not even when he was a kid. He sucks on the fact like a sore tooth, teasing it, testing it with his tongue. It’s like he’d been born homeless. Like from the day he was born they were all just waiting for him to move out again. The thought fills him with a strange sense of satisfaction: Cal didn’t need a home. Didn’t need anything, anyone. Ever.

I hope a few of you will take the time to read this and let me know what you think. It would mean a lot.

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  • May Is Short Story Month! (recordedbooksblog.com)

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Writing – A Leap of Faith

26 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by deborahbrasket in My Writing, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

creativity, fiction, leap of faith, literature, risk taking, short story, writing, writing process

Writing, or any creative endeavor, to some extent is a leap of faith and a huge personal risk.  Faith that what you have to offer others will be worth the time it takes to read your work, and will add something of value to their lives. And the risk, of course, that you will fail in this attempt, that the work you take such pleasure in creating, and spend so much time and effort on, will not be read, or have the effect on the reader as you had hoped.

So why take that leap, that risk?  Interestingly, I found some clues for why we write in an early draft of one of my short stories, “Tamara in Her Garden”.  It’s because of where we are leaping and why.  Here are those clues:

There is an old Taoist saying: Things are created out of their innermost intuition. I see myself that way, a creation of my own intuition. I pick and choose among the rubble of my life, the memory, dreams and fantasies that please or surprise, and so create myself. Not so much a thing of beauty but of bone and balance, voluptuously detailed and ever changing. I would not complete myself if I could.

Later on in the same story I write:

Justin thinks of this garden as my asylum . . . . A place of refuge where I sequester myself from reality. I do not see it as such. I see my garden as highly invigorating and precarious, teeming with raw necessity, a microcosm of all the life and beauty, decay and death, that ever was. I stand in my round garden as if standing upon the edge of a precipice, poised for flight. Not to escape, but to delve more deeply. 

In some strange way, I am everything I have ever known.  I am my father.  And my Aunt Rose too.

When we write, it’s as if we are leaping off the edge of a precipice, of life as we live it on the surface, and diving into the unknown, into our innermost intuitions and the half-forgotten memories, dreams, and fantasies that please or surprise, haunt or terrorize us. In some ways, we are diving into the collective unconscious–everyone and everything we have ever known or heard of or read about going back to that time and space in reality or imagination where the morning stars first sang together.

We do it to ferret out and piece together our own song, a more complete and comprehensive understanding of ourselves, our world, and each other–to discover what’s missing, fill in the gaps, piece together what’s puzzling, bind what’s broken, complete what’s been left undone or unspoken, reclaim what’s been lost or forgotten.  We do so to find and follow the threads that weave it all back into some meaningful whole.  We do it even while knowing that nothing is ever really completed, but continually evolves. This open-endedness is what makes it all so highly invigorating and precarious.  Seeking that “something more” . . . .

I imagine we read for the same reason we write, to delve more deeply into life, the known and unknown parts of ourselves and our world, seeking the “something more” that lies ever so tantalizingly just out of reach, and might perhaps be grasped or at least fingered ever so lightly and stirringly in the next book or poem or essay we read.

Emily Dickinson once wrote: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”  Franz Kafka said: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? . . . . A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”  That’s why I read, to experience that. And I write for the same reason.

Another excerpt from “Tamara in Her Garden”:

Sometimes I feel there is scant difference between a thing imagined and the actual event. In the passage of time, each is rendered mere memory, mere sensory image stored in the mind, anyway. What then separates the one from the other? All of one’s life, all of the long and homely details spun out across time are rolled up neatly, in the end, in one’s mind . . . . So what difference is there between an actual event that occurred with careless inattention and a thing imagined in meticulous detail? What is more concrete:  the forgotten fact or the fiction seared forever in one’s mind?

Fiction that is “seared forever” in our minds is something that has deeply touched us, that rings true, and usually, in some important or moving way, adds to a deeper or more complete understanding of the world and each other.  Fiction in this way is sometimes more real, truer, than fact. What poet Wallace Stevens called “the supreme fiction.”

Before I began writing today, I had only a vague sense of what I would say, in explaining why I write, and I had no idea the story “Tamara in Her Garden” had anything to say on that subject. 

Until I wrote this, I was not consciously aware that the garden “teeming with raw necessity” could be seen as a symbol for the ground, the environment, out of which the creative act emerges and healing takes place. 

Perhaps that’s the simplest way to look at why we write and why we read, to heal what ails us, to make whole.  Even when we write or read for entertainment or escape, to leave the drudgery or stress or ordinariness of our daily lives, to transport ourselves to some other more interesting or exciting world beyond ourselves and our immediate concerns, perhaps even this is an effort to heal what ails us, if only in bringing some enjoyment into our lives.  For what’s more healing or soul-satisfying than the experiencing of joy?

This is why I make that leap of faith, take that risk, in writing, because regardless of the outcome, whether read or not, published or not, the act of writing itself, the pursuit of that “something more,” is so immensely enjoyable.  And joy wants sharing.

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After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.

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