Gold Leaf Fixations

As writers, I think we cycle through various fixations. At different points of my life, I have been obsessed with silent film stars, describing snow, the personal effects of dead people, and medieval tapestries. The list goes on... Currently, I can't stop myself from Googling images and clips of classical ballet dancers. Curiosity feeds my art, even when there will be no pointe shoes in what I'm writing now, and only a little snow. Sick, sniffly, and cranky today, I combed through my own writerly archives and found these quite ancient poems. They brought me right back to my medieval portraiture/gold women fixation of seven years ago. I had just traveled to Europe that summer, and saw the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in person. I loved those arch, stiff figures, and the symbolically mysterious cornucopia of creatures fixed at awkward angles around the maidens. Back in Seattle, I was cutting apart an old calendar of Botticelli's most famous paintings, and his flaxen-haired maidens painted centuries later called me back right away to the tapestries. Those same blonde maidens with the same faces, cast again and again as Madonnas and Venuses and Muses. I guess I'm still a little in love with them. Anyway, these two ekphrastastic (new word!) poems came directly from two of those uber-famous works. I post them here because, truth be told, I never was a very good poet, and this is really the only venue informal enough to share them. Also, they are oooolllldddd. Don't judge.

After Botticelli’s Birth of Venus

I am the bone white Venus.

I cut my feet when I walked to shore;

I wore clothes that were not my own

but my breasts glinted as pearls

inside my raiments.

The children came to touch my skin.

It wouldn’t be hidden

but glowed.

You are a body of fireflies!

They exclaimed.

My hair looped around the room like the rings of Saturn

and I spit seawater onto my plate.

Excuse her for she has just been born

they said in embarrassment.

I did not know the language yet

and my old tongue fled quickly,

twisted away like gilded fish.

They could not tell I wept

thought my tears a remnant of my salted womb

like the drippings from my limbs,

bursting into bloom on the plank wood floor.

Bless us!

they clamored.

I gurgled words I knew to them, uncomprehending;

the nymphs stole in at the sound and stole cheeses from

the bell dumb crowd

as I rang and rang them with a sound like whale calls.

That wicked baby who has dogged me flew in,

pinched my nipple.

I was dreaming of the shell, tongue-pink

my kelp body, drifting

insensate

just another unfound treasure in the deep

and now diminished, diminishing

trawled out and flaking light

like the most common catch,

Caught.

After Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat

Oh mother of the milky skin cry the angels.

There, I shall write in your book, pageboy;

you are prettier than girls.

The corona of my baby cuts into my breast,

my fingers slide over the slick seeds of the pomegranate.

Your wrists are lilies cry the angels.

My baby is fat and transfixed and heavy;

my skin is taut over my forehead.

I can feel the angels rotating my crown like a poker traced ‘ore my scalp

ear to ear.

Your hair golds like wheat cry the angels.

Your face is beautiful and fine like a shell.

I want them to waft this baby, this weight, away;

my robes stripped off

and float aimless like a star

unknown, unheralded, unflaxed with gold,

empty as I was born.

(all images: Wikipedia)

Self-Education

Excavating some old journals, I found these entries from Past Kirsten:

Wednesday, 6-22-94 (11 years old)

Today at Kidzart Camp we acted out the passageway of death in Greek Mythology.  I got really interested so I went to the library and checked out a book about all the Greek Gods, Goddesses and mortal heroes.  So far my favorites have all been goddesses or women.  Here are some of them: Artemis, Athena, Cassandra, Demeter, Hera (and two more I can't remember).  A lot of the goddesses + women were helpless, but these women were smart and often beat men.

Thursday, 5-11-95 (12 years old)

I have been writing every day for a week today.  Today was pretty regular.  I have also decided not to be so studious.  I am not saying that I'll never do my homework or anything like that.  I'll still try to get A's and good grades on tests but just to be more loose and not feel pressured to do schoolwork all the time.  I desperately want a pair of brown or forest green or white or dark blue corduroys.  I also need a bra that doesn't always show the straps.  Socks too!

Friday, 5-12-95

I can't wait until Monday because we get to go on our band trip.  The day we've been promised for so long is finally coming near.  I am going to bring my discman and have a seat by myself since I'm not much of a talker on road trips.  I have had a pretty good day.  Nicole is spending the night tonight.  In fact my day has been pretty exciting today.  More in other journals.  (Because I actually had six at the time.)

Friday, 12-22-95

Dear Signifa (I had now named the diary),

Only 3 more days till Christmas!  I know I'm being a bit materialist but I think everyone is in a small way.  Today I read a lot of Emily of New Moon.  It's a very sweet and good book.  We went to a friend's house which was sort of fun (being completely honest.)  I stayed up till 12:00 watching a movie about a dysfunctional family and I got a new book from Caroline, The Scarlet Letter.  I can already tell that I'm going to love it!  Each phrase drips with beautiful, rich words and it seems to be an inhuman struggle with pain and suffering which always appeals to me!  Ciao!

***

While visiting beautiful Doe Bay Resort on Orcas Island a month ago, I took a George Eliot biography from the leave-a-book, take-a-book shelf.  Now two days into an immersion and reconnection with one of my favorite novelists--especially from my formative years--I have enjoyed the portions I've devoured thus far regarding Eliot's youth.  Painfully gifted, exceedingly self-critical, and yet immensely motivated to win approval (and love), I think her story might ring a few bells of recognition for most of us adults that grew up as bookish, shy, and awkward children.  I know it certainly does for me!

I include most of of these old diary entries of mine simply because they make me laugh, but I was also surprised, on looking through some of my old journals and papers (being a prodigious diarist at the time) at how--alongside the predictably hilarious laments about acne and sixth grade crushes--I was clearly preoccupied with my school success and fledgling intellectual endeavors , holding myself to a rigid standard of excellence.  Of course this makes sense, as at the time I was a plain and oft-teased girl without the charms of bubblyness and prettiness that usually endear little girls to adults and peers.  I was too tall and had little to no interest in sports or other rowdy games.  Any extant picture from that time has been shoved into the deepest, darkest drawer of my old desk, so you'll just have to take my word for it: picture a stork with a pot belly, bowl cut, braces, and huge round glasses.  Banded together with the few friends I had (all of whom were also bookish, and remain close friends to this day), I found that the one thing I could do was schoolwork.  I loved to read (of course), and alongside this, I had an ambitious streak, and found that mastering schoolwork was the sole route available to me for distinguishing myself and winning praise.  Because, oh yes, like anyone, I loved praise.  I was not in it merely for the joy of learning.  It surprises me to find diary entries dating back to the 4th grade in which I recorded staying up until nearly midnight in order to study and complete assignments.  Fourth grade!  Apparently, I have been working on those procrastination and cramming skills for a very long time.

Reading itself, however, was an enduring joy.  I remember clearly the summer I spent obsessed with the Greek myths.  At my insistence, Dad took me to the local library, where I checked out a ponderous cloth-bound volume entitled A Dictionary to All Greek and Roman Mythologies.  I turned page after page of myths, laboriously cross-referencing the goddesses and heroes mentioned with the appendix in the back.  I encountered a lot of "Rapes" in this endeavor.  The Rape of Proserpine.  The Rape of Leta.  Huh, I thought at the time, but in all these pictures it just looks like someone's picking a woman up and carrying her around.  (I hadn't really figured out the illustrations or statuary depictions yet.)  I penned a little skit about being a messenger from the Underworld and wrote many small poems from the point of view of gods and goddesses.  In other words, I was in total adolescent nerd heaven.

I also remember how the early classics I read completely walloped me, especially the Brontes.  I loved Jane Eyre so much, I felt she might be a literary stand-in for myself.  I related especially to her feelings of mousiness, smallness, and inhibition.  At the same time, her radical bravery and demand for egalitarian love inspired me, and gave me hope that despite what I felt to be my unlovable exterior, my inner worth might someday be discovered.  I would surmise that any young person reading such a book at such an age might have similarly powerful feelings of identification with the young narrator.  Indeed, the novel is most enjoyable to read as a young person, in my opinion.  This set off a programme that continued through my early college years of "serious" fiction and poetry reading.  Interested only in what the Canon deemed the Classics, I scanned lists with titles such as "100 Best Books of the 20th Century" and "100 Greatest Novels," starred the books that looked interesting, and then read them one by one as my pleasure reading, or on summer holidays.  For a long time, I turned up my nose at contemporary, and most American literature, preferring instead to plod through a random selection of world literature greats.  Thank goodness, too!

Kathryn Hughes' biography of Eliot does bring to mind colors of my own girlhood and self-education in literature.  Eliot's self-education is a whole other marvel in erudition and intellectual rigor, so mine pales considerably in comparison, as does my intellect, of course.  A George Eliot is only born once or twice a century.  However, reacquainting myself with her august, looming presence over English literature, and over my own influences as a writer, I realize that in my childhood efforts, Eliot was just the sort of person I sought to copy.  More so than any writer, even writers whose works have moved me equally, and on a more adult footing, Eliot, the Brontes, and Austen were my original authorial heroines.  They were the first authors who affirmed for me that even someone obscure, plain (because I remained obsessed with this self-fashioning for many years), and even unpleasant could become "great" and be remembered for years to come.  And, I should mention, reading of the young Eliot, I am reminded of how arrogant and often priggish I could be as a girl--inflating my sense of self-importance in accordance with my belief that only great people could understand a soul such as my own.  That self is certainly the most painful to remember now that I have entered a well-adjusted adulthood and have long been reconciled to my own limits of intellect and influence.  As I said, there can only be one or two Eliots, and luckily, after about the age of 14, I cooled down a bit with my pumped up self-opinion and became a more pleasant, social, and (interestingly) less obsessive person.

Still, I have been interested in revisiting this long-buried childhood self because it was this same stubborn girl that chose writing as her metier at the age of six and insisted through the twenty-three intervening years that this was the thing--the thing I was destined to do.  I suppose, after all this time, that I am still invested in believing that girl.  I have to be.  This year I'm supposed to be doing the thing for real, for keeps.  I am starting to say it, more and more.  "I am a writer."  I have doubted myself many times, especially through my unfocused and pleasure-loving twenties, but here I am, alone, away from most of my friends and the urban center I've called home for six years.  I'm sitting here in my parents' house, sequestered with a book and journal and computer, and I am writing.  Painfully, and sometimes joyfully, I am doing the thing.  Ironic, isn't it, how our younger selves are so foolhardy and yet so full of fierce belief?  If I had given young me the (totally true) spiel about how hard it is to be published these days and how the state of publishing is perilous and how it's so hard to find time to write, she would have looked back at me, blinking behind those gigantic wireframes, and said So?  You just have to do it.  Her blind, arrogant, and foolish belief is, in many ways, exactly what I need.

From the Annals of Rentals Past

From an email written to a past landlord:

10/27/07

Hello,

The past couple of days, I've been noticing an unpleasant smell in the living room area. I couldn't figure out what it was, since there's nothing in there but the usual things, but I think I may have figured it out. It seems like there might have been an animal underneath the house that died and that's what the smell must be--it's a familiar one, and only really strong in one part of the room. Anyway, I don't know if there's anything that can really be done except wait for it to go away, but I wanted to let you know that I do think there have been some kind of animals beneath the house. Occasionally, I've heard loud scratching/hissing coming from underneath the bathroom tub. Did previous residents ever mention this? Well, I know that's a bit unsavory, but thought you might like to be aware.

Thanks a lot and hope you are having a nice weekend.

Kirsten Rue