Still Haven't Run Out Of Ink

There's a thing called a six-word memoir made popular by Smith Magazine. It originates from a six-word story often attributed to Hemingway that probably wasn't written by him:

For sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.

When I show this to students, they laugh at such a short story. I give them a moment, sometimes saying the story three, four times getting them past their laughter, and they find that it's a tragedy, the kind they can't quite understand yet. As a father, it gets me just a little every time.

The six-word memoirs are poetic, the good ones anyway. I have kids write some and most of them find that one six-word memoir leads to another and another and another. One kid filled five sheets of notebook paper with them. The first three pages weren't really memoirs but then she found the poetry of it and her last couple pages were something special.

I've written a few hundred of them, but this one pretty much sums me up:

Still haven't run out of ink.

I write with fountain pens and have a glass bottle of ink from I refill my pens every third day or so. Then I go on writing. I seem always to keep writing.

For years I ended blog posts with the words write on, a good ending and a way to push myself forward.

These last two weeks I have written a lot. One of my students asked if I run out of ideas, things to write and say. I smiled. It does seem like we would have a limited number of pages within us, but my limit is based on how many I choose to write before I die. He wanted a better answer than that, though, so I told him something like this:

Writing begets writing. One idea creates two more. It's like a nuclear reaction in which splitting one atom releases two particles that split two more nuclei that each release two more particles. And on and on.

I told him that writing about the book I had finished reading led to an idea about Dad which led to thinking about my car which got me to thinking of my turntable and records all of which led to a childhood memory that got me thinking of how my younger daughter wants to buy every book she sees. And on and on.

Yo, he said. That shit's crazy. I write ten words and I'm like done.

I smiled and said, you might be surprised what happens if you keep the pen moving.

We have family in town so I won't be able to write much today though I have half a dozen things ready to write. I'll make notes so as to remember. Later, when I check how much ink is left in my pen, I'll know I've got more ink in the bottle. I still haven't run out of ink. I don't think I ever will.

Stephen Kuusisto's Have Dog, Will Travel

A book about a blind man getting his first guide-dog? Why was I picking this up. It was on the Rapid Reads shelf at Petit Library and I had picked it up each of the last three times I had visited. Something about the cover, the title, the idea was grabbing me, but I resisted thinking it a light book while I was in the mood for something heavier. Something in that fourth time picking it up got me. Maybe it was Billy Collins' blurb, but probably it was me finally giving in to my instincts.

It was not a light book. Nor was it too heavy. It weighed in just right.

Kuusisto is a poet and writes prose like one. It is good prose with the occasional moments of poetic intrigue. A sentence is phrased in an odd way. Maybe it's broken, a fragment but placed just so. Whatever he has done, it works here and he led me through the story surely and firmly. A book about a blind man getting his first guide-dog? Hardly. It was the story of a man bonding with a partner, falling in love, becoming an independent man, alluding to the forces that had shaped him, and accepting grace. It is, simply put, a good book.

A few choice lines, but only a few. I found that I was reading more than harvesting. I was too involved in the story to stop and take note.

It seemed I had three problems. I was sad. I had to learn how to walk in a larger world. And I had to trust I could do this. (16)

There's an old Zen adage: if you want to get across the river, get across. (17)

Andy Warhol said: "As soon as you stop wanting something you get it." (23)

I'm hoping that these three work out for me. I'm sad at my job and need to learn how to go back out into the world of uncertainty. For that getting across, I just need to get across. And while I believe that I might get what I need when I stop wanting it, I also believe that working is true wanting and that work will get me there.

...my job is to dare to be in the world. (175)

Okay, that line has reshaped my life just a bit. Or maybe it has altered my trajectory by a tenth of a degree. Either way, I'm grateful for it.

Modesty is a requirement if you're walking a long way. (229)

This is a Zen koan. I'll be thinking about it for years.

I've ordered the rest of his prose from the library and will then move to his poetry. Maybe I might even write him a note since he lives right around the corner. I'm in proximity to good writers. How great is that?

Ready For Oliver Sacks

I've been looking for a way into reading Oliver Sacks.

When his last essays were published in The New York Times I was still learning to live with the sudden, abrupt death of my father. I knew that Sacks had been diagnosed, sentenced really, and that his death was imminent. My father's death was so recent, as if it was still happening again and again, I couldn't imagine delving into the last days of another man. There's a line in Hayden Carruth's great and wise poem "Regarding Chainsaws" that expressed all this better than I can:

...About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died.

My father had come apart and that was more than I could stand. Then Oliver Sacks was diagnosed, and then he died. His auto-biography On The Move came out and I heard all about it but couldn't get myself to read it. Through proximity on the calendar, his life and death had become too connected with the life and too soon death of my father.

All my life I've been around death. Dad was a funeral director and when I was ten he bought the funeral home in which I mostly grew up. That is, I spent most of my childhood there and I mostly, but not totally, grew up. The dead lay in their boxes in the funeral home which was connected by three separate doors to our house. The living were there too, both my family and the families of those who had lost their mother, father, and God help us their children. I helped Dad in the funeral home and sometimes closed the lids on the caskets before they were taken to the cemetery and buried or to the crematorium and incinerated.

That contact provided me with far less understanding of death than might be expected. I accepted the logic of it, but death lives mostly beyond the bounds of logic. My only real experience with the fullness of death was when, as a young man, I held my dog while the veterinarian put her down. It took far too long for her breathing to stop and her eyes never did close. Only when the vet said that she was gone did I allow myself to break down, staring into her brown eyes. Even then it was a halting and broken kind of grief that didn't heal me. It left me wanting, needing really, some way to get through.

When my father died, I never really cried or got to any release of all that terrible pressure, much as I tried. Grief didn't consume me so much as rise up around my body like a black fog, an almost liquid through which I found it difficult but not impossible to move. I wanted it to be worse. I wanted to break down, but grief didn't disable me other than when I was alone at Wegmans. There, for some reason, I pushed the cart haphazardly, walking across the whole store to frozen foods for one item, remembering something I needed to get in produce all the way back. I walked the length and breadth of that store in a tunneled fog, the periphery of my vision lost, my way forward clouded. It was as if Wegmans was a kind of purgatory.

It became the space where I was no longer in a world without my father but neither was I gone from the world of my wife, children, and family. I was between. For months I visited Wegmans by myself to be lost there for an hour, crossing and recrossing the store as if looking for something or mapping it for some kind of crossing. I visited Dad. I wondered about the nature of life. I bought bananas, frozen pizza, and six-packs of beer.

It's been almost a year since Wegmans has felt like anything but a grocery store. It has been three and a half years since my father died. It's just three years since Oliver Sacks died, and today I borrowed a slim library book containing four of his essays. Gratitude it is called and I am grateful for having read it, for still thinking of my father dearly but no longer with such a burden of sorrow and loss, and for the idea that I may finally be ready to hear more from Oliver Sacks. I'm ready to hear what he might have to tell me about living, a business in which I'm still occupied even as he and Dad have moved on from that into what I can't even begin to imagine.

Nearness Of A Dictionary

An earlier version of this piece appeared on Medium in September 2016. I also published another piece about dictionaries. It's a topic from which I can't seem to stay away.

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Clear space on your desk and set an open dictionary there. Your writing life will improve immediately. At my writing desk in the the basement a dictionary lies open in front of me. I write by hand or type on a laptop or typewriter with that dictionary open to whatever word I last consulted. The dictionary, open at your desk, unavoidable, will change your writing life for the better.

Maybe you worry that page turning and searching will take time away from writing. Wouldn't it be better to just Google definitions?

Yes, using the dictionary takes time away from tapping keys and pushing a pen, but that’s good. Taking time for Facebook is bad. Looking through the dictionary has me thinking of words, finding new words, and returns me to words I've forgotten. I looked up sanguine to be sure that it described how I felt about the neighbor’s tree falling through our fence into the yard, and the definition helped shape the next few hundred words I wrote.

Browsing a record shop, I inefficiently flip through albums A to Z. Brushes with other records suggest new music and lead me into serendipity. Looking for one album, I find so many more.

Asking my phone to “define sanguine” brings up the definition and history in 0.40 seconds but only for that one word. In my dictionary sanguine is the last word on page 1041 which begins with sand, continues through sandalwood, sandhi, sandjack, sangfroid, sanguinaria, before ending at sanguine. Looking for page 1041, I passed saleroom, salt, and Samaritan and thought about the Good Samaritan, remembered a Slate.com article about salt in food, and wondered what the hell a saleroom is. None of that relates to how I felt about the fallen tree and crushed fence but had me feeling writerly. All because of the nearness of the dictionary.

I put a dot next to sanguine and every other word I look up curious when I'll return to that page. The dots amuse me when I find them again. I wonder what I was thinking and writing when I looked up that word. Occasionally, I look up a word I've previously dotted, the meaning having escaped me. I reread, add a second dot, and leave the dictionary open to that page as I go back to writing.

Leaving it open encourages my habit of using the dictionary. A closed dictionary likely remains closed. An open dictionary is a writer's friend and aid. It is also a little bit magical.

Using the dictionary is slow. Like handwriting, it makes words physical, slower than digital impulses. It has me taking time with the words.

Which dictionary you use doesn’t matter much so long as it lies open near your desk. Mom got me this Webster’s for college, so that’s what I use. Maybe your Mom gave it to you or some professor required one for class. If you lack a dictionary, they can be had cheap at a used book store, garage sale, or library book sale. Ask friends who don't write if you can have theirs.

Get a dictionary. Place it open on your writing desk where you will be unable to avoid it. Look up sanguine or maybe saleroom. Read the definitions. Put a dot next to it. Survey the words near it. And enjoy your improved writing life.