Day 5: Barbara Kingsolver, Joan Didion, Dilruba Ahmed
Continuing the reading challenge of one short story, essay and poem each day, focusing on non-dude writers this month.
HELP: please send me recommendations for poets, particularly women poets you like, I don't own many anthologies and I distrust what is popular on the internet. breadwinneryaxley@gmail.com
Story: Barbara Kingsolver - Covered Bridges
A fairly simple story where a couple tries to decide on whether to have a child or not. What makes this worth reading is how there is nothing dark or cynical about the story. It is full of radiant love and humanity.
I read this five years ago while recovering from a mental breakdown and had forgotten everything about it except that I had found it beautiful, and that I wanted to share it with my brother who had just gotten married.
Returning to it now, I found that I had dog-eared the page of this scene:
As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with color and the intensity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The important thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was gut rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved the space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.
I read so many affecting scenes of suffering and despair, but rarely one of perfect happiness. So I am glad I resonated with this in the past and still resonate with it now.
Essay: Joan Didion - Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream
This essay (article?) is the tonal opposite of the previous one. Didion's voice here is one of pessimism and nihilistic detachment. A fairly uninteresting murder case is reported as if she were a 1930s hardboiled detective with a God's-eye view of not just the murder at hand, but the entire rotting utopia of 1960s Los Angeles.
I can definitely see where Bret Easton Ellis learned his style; Didion's way of writing, drained of all serotonin, is quite intoxicating, but I don't really know what she's wanting to say other than "the American Dream is a dud" which any American writer of the past hundred years would tell you.
I liked her novel Play It As It Lays (kind of), but I think Nathanael West in 30s did the Hollywood Pessimism thing with so much more originality. But I guess the fact that this is a non-fiction piece and is pretty cool.
Poem: Dilruba Ahmed - Phase One
I thought this poem was beautiful, the speaker repeating the simple, direct refrain "I forgive you". On my first reading, I thought this poem would be merely twee and "quirky", the listed transgressions so minor, but by the end, the poem becomes something very powerful:
Whether the speaker is talking to a partner, friend, parent or herself, it doesn't quite matter. What is the real subject of the poem is the freeing nature of both forgiveness and self-forgiveness.
Hatred for oneself is as bad as hatred for others, for anyone who hates themself is in no position to love. For the last year I have been struggling with a lacerating self-hatred of my past and present selves, a distaste for my self that keeps me from planning for the future and wishing I had not been born.
But when I find a picture of myself as a child, or something nice I had made or done long ago, or even today, finding the dog-eared page in the stort from above, I soften my judgements on myself a bit.
I have also found some salvation in various books on Buddhism, a philosophy centered on non-harm, kindness, compassion and forgiveness as the remedies and preventatives for suffering.
"To forgive or not to forgive is the choice of being free or not" - Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Looking back at my notebook of dharma teachings, I think I need to get back on the wagon again, keep myself thinking n acting right.