field notes:

1.17.2004

The herring are in, bringing glad tidings. Thousands of birds mass off our shore, too full to startle at my arrival on the beach. The sea surface ripples with herring chased to the sky-edge by fish below. Seals float the tidal currents, gliding by like aging ballerinas: graceful vaudevillians. Even the heron under the pier has ceased fishing, this abundance goes against his serious nature.

The sea and sky are painted in mute tones that center on grey. As I sit on the sand and watch, more colors arise in the scene, as if my eyes are an aperture, letting in more light over time. This saturated plate will stay with me, captured with light and time as memory.

Cormorants fly from west to east in small daily migration as the sunset deepens. The day loses light but I, camera, expose the fading day to more light, and as night falls I see more and more of what's true. The apparent gives way to the real.

My dog is with me, as always. She lies on the sand, watching the birds, listening to their calls and cries, smelling the gentle evenings' approach. She's happy just to be near me, to feel the sand on her belly, the aftertaste of forbidden roe on her rough palate.

A feeling rises in me to match the day's ecstatic eclipse. I remember: it fills my belly, surprises me both with its return and its familiarity. In losing it I'd also forgotten that I'd had it, like a magic spell meant to keep me in the dark. Somehow, this fragile fullness of spirit returns. Who am I to turn away?

posted by Lisa Thompson on 12:00 PM link |

1.13.2004

This next quoted material follows up yesterday's post. This is Kim Stafford writing about his father, William Stafford:

As my father once wrote, in a fragment that later became an essay:

If you begin to believe what others say about you, you become like a compass that listens to the hunches of the pilot. You may be good company, but you are useless as a compass--I mean a poet.

In contrast to the compass too easily persuaded is my father's direct way--the writer of "inevitable" poems, the ones most congruent with the self. He wrote in his daily writing, "We are surrounded by brilliant people who don't do much." I find this strangely consoling: I do not need to be brilliant by anyone's standard, but I do need to be fiercely alert to my own contribution. (A voice in a dream explained this to me: "When others don't understand you, you must be clear with yourself about your own purpose.") About this clarity, my father wrote, "The last star will not know how small it is" (Daily Writing, 21 December 1968). The authentic act of writing is more about clarity than magnitude. This kind of writing I call being "scribe to the prophet." The prophet may be any quiet voice near me--a child, a cloud, a river, an idea in the air. I write it down.

--Early Morning: Remembering My Father

posted by Lisa Thompson on 6:26 AM link |

1.12.2004

I was away this weekend, celebrating my Mother's 70th birthday and soaking up baby rays and seventy degree sunshine in southern California. I'm reading a biography of William Stafford, oft-quoted poet of these pages. It's called Early Morning: Remembering My Father by his son, Kim Stafford. It's beautifully crafted and makes me love William Stafford even more. He was a conscientous objector in WWII, exiled to a camp for CO's. He lived his life according to principles of pacifism, raised his kids that way. It's fascinating to read about the quiet gentle force of his personality and ways. This book is unusual in that it's both a biography of the father and an autobiography of the son, as Kim Stafford writes about how his father's ways and words affected his upbringing. The family was a place where the ideals of pacifism were practiced and nurtured--the children didn't fight amongst each other; and the parents didn't raise their voices in anger--to fight was to fail.

W. Stafford writes in Down in My Heart, "a war is a time of rest for a pacifist; the war itself is an incident, a lost battle in itself; it is just a part of those cheatings, bluffings, maneuverings, which we have got to stay out of all the time." The biography makes me curious about the later lives and achievements of some of his contemporaries from those camps: Brother Antonius (William Everson), Glen Coffield, Adrian Wilson, Kermit Sheets. Kim Stafford says their contributions were less important than others at the camps who spread out and contributed to higher education, the arts, the treatment of the mentally ill, and international relations.

I'm excited by the talk of pacifism as a way of life, a way of thinking. It jibes with some ideas I've had, and with my nature.

Meanwhile, in my family's unpacific story, 33 of my mother's people bonded over fondue tables, communally dipped forked foodfuls in boiling stock, cheese or chocolate, shouted across steaming pots of laughter and remembrance, wine glasses and voices raised in joy that another of their tribe had made it to 70; and in hope that they would all live to see another year.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:45 AM link |