Begin It

February 07, 2019 by Brian Fay in Whatever Else

"Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it.
Action has magic, grace and power in it."
(Goethe, qtd by Dani Shapiro in Devotion, 236-237)

I have begun bgfay.com and have 49 subscribers. I've begun a writer's Twitter account and am getting the hang of providing a service to other writers. I have begun the difficult process of quitting my job before it debilitates me even further than it already has. I'm meeting with two friends to discuss a business idea that felt almost too foolish to say out loud but which, now that I've had the courage to say it, they think is an idea worth exploring.

Nothing is done. Nothing will be done. Not until death. Aiming for done is foolish, dangerous. I'm never done.

That bothers me more than I would like. By now I hoped to have accepted such things. Acceptance is another thing that is never done, damn it. I am always in the process of learning to accept. It all feels like failure but might instead be growth. Slow growth but growth nonetheless. Still, it feels like failing over and over every day of my life.

Having begun, I am finding new ideas. Hundreds of things come up for the blog. I keep finding things I to give on Twitter — not just post but give — because one thing leads to another. Talking about how difficult my job has become, how ill it is making me, has led to possibilities I didn't know before. I thought I was trapped. Beginning releases me. My friends and I have talked for an hour about the business idea. We will talk more and draw up plans.

Action begets actions. Beginning is progress.

I began the morning with slowly realizing my alarm was sounding for a second time. My first decision of the day was to turn it off. The second decision was more challenging: get up despite how tired and anxious I feel or stay in the warm comfort of doing nothing? I chose to get up and began doing it. I began the day.

Beginning, moving into action has left me touched by magic, grace, and power. What else can I do? What else might I begin?

Copying Passages

February 05, 2019 by Brian Fay in Reading, Writing

from Devotion by Dani Shapiro, 159-160

The great yogi B. K. S. Iyngar once wrote, “The moment you say ‘I have got it,’ you have lost everything you had. As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further. Then there is evolution. The moment you say ‘I am satisfied with that,’ that means stagnation has come. That is the end of your learning; you have closed the windows of your intellect. So let me do what I cannot do, not what I can do.”

I was in no danger of self-satisfaction. I had arrived at an understanding of all I could not do, which felt like reaching the edge of the world. Once I realized that the things I had habitually used to prop myself up (the new pair of shoes, the good piece of news, the great review, whatever) were as fleeting as a sugar rush, they lost their luster. I had spent years—my whole life!—taping myself together like so many torn bits of paper, bolstering myself up with ephemera. What was I supposed to use to hold myself together, now they were gone? Oh, what’s that you say? The idea is not to hold myself together at all?

It felt as if another step, and I would free-fall. Another step, and who knew what would happen? There was no stopping, no pausing. Truly, there was no comfort. How long had I been at this? A year? Two? It was no time at all, in the greater scheme of things, and here I was. I had arrived—in the words of Thomas Merton—at an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and apparent chaos. This, Merton believed, was the only point at which faith was possible. But most days, I felt the chaos without the faith.

I had entered the closest thing to a solitary life that was reasonable for me, given both my nature and my circumstances. I spent my days alone. I didn’t answer the phone. I sat at my desk, walked the dogs, got p and stretched, sat back down. I lit a fire in the fireplace, unrolled my mat, practiced yoga. I sat on my zafu and meditated for fifteen minutes, twenty. I went back to my desk. Eventually three o’clock rolled around, or four, and it was time for Jacob to come home from school. I didn’t know how to transition from one to the other: from hermit to mom. From silence to homework. From inwardness to snack-making and Honey, how was your day. I struggled to get inside myself, and then—as if trapped there—I struggled to get back out. (159-160)

I have for many years typed things that other people have written in order to have become part of me. As a kid I typed lyrics on Mom's college typewriter. For years I've typed poetry into the computer. Now it's a chapter of Dani Shapiro's Devotion today). I wanted to remember and have all those lyrics. I needed to be able to keep the poems I had begun to love. And now, more often than not and certainly in the case of the Shapiro quote, I want to take the ideas in and weave them into my DNA. Typing these things, copying them out like some medieval scribe imprints them on me. I am made a better person, someone with more ideas who yearns beyond what I even thought possible.

Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it. (Goethe, qtd in Devotion, 236-237)

In the back of my notebook, working from the last page forward until I meet up with the writing I have done starting from the front and working back, are quotes from the things that I read. I've often thought I should collect all these, type them into my computer, maybe create a database. Of course that would be too much work. It would take away from reading more books, writing more words, being a person in the world. Still, the idea lingers until I remember that I have already copied them down. It is enough. Perhaps I'll return to them but probably not.

Devotion is a book to which I can imagine returning, but I probably won't because I haven't yet read everything she has written. Inside the copy I borrowed from the library was a check out receipt from another patron who on the first of May last year took out three of Shapiro's books. I imagine that person and the image comes to mind easily, looking very much like me or however a person looks when they are seeking something and, holding three books in their hand, feels that they are well on their way, that some kind of understanding is inside those pages. They rush home, find a quiet place, and open to page one.

I can't wait to read Inheritance. I have so much to learn.

Dani Shapiro, Hourglass

January 19, 2019 by Brian Fay in Reading

I can't talk well enough about this book. As with Deborah Levy's The Cost Of Living I just can't speak well beyond, "I love it." Both books are so beautiful, strong, and female that my talk feels like ridiculous mansplaining. However, I wrote Shapiro a letter and for lack of anything better share it here along with quotes I pulled from the book.

Just go read everything by Dani Shapiro, then let's get together to talk. And read Deborah Levy's The Cost Of Living to see if it doesn't change your life.

Dear Ms. Shapiro,

Having just finished Hourglass (and waiting on delivery of Inheritance) I am impressed by the vitality of your book which seemed as I read to become a living thing — a vulnerable, beautiful, graceful, living being. It was of course that the character you created of yourself was so true, but I kept feeling as if the paper book had a beating, anxious heart and I have not been so affected by a memoir in some time.

As someone with a stable job that provides benefits, pays the bills, and builds toward a retirement, I'm strangely envious of the life you described living with your husband, the two of you moving through uncertainty with courage. It's not that you set out to commit some act of bravery; you’ve simply committed to the writing and to a life together. Your book is a testament to bravery. It's not meant as a feel-good tale. No, it's simply true. That's what I admire about it and about you.

That truth is lending me courage to move forward. I'm too am fortunate enough to have a strong spouse who takes care of things. She is so good for me. Twenty four years.

As a teacher, I hear time to time that some student appreciated my class or think of me as having helped them. That's fine but what really matters to me is when a student remembers something they read or wrote that changed them. The best moments are when a student comes back realizing that their trajectory was altered half a degree and over time that has taken them to some new place they would not have otherwise found.

I loved your book and savored the artistry of your sentences. The structure of the book was graceful, intricate, poetic. That's all good, but the big thing is that your book shifted my trajectory. A subtle shift but I feel it for sure. I'm moving toward a new place I can’t yet find on the map, but I'm ready to explore.

Thank you for moving me. I look forward to reading Inheritance and continuing to be influenced by the power of your prose.

Sincerely yours,
Brian G. Fay

Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it happy? Line up these objects of reverence before you, and perhaps by what they are and their sequence, they will yield you a law, the fundamental law of your true self.”

— Neitzsche, qtd in Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass (136)
(My answers: Writing, Music, Loving and Being Loved)

“I have been taken by surprise by the recent events of my life, but this can only be because I have not been alert to the signs that in retrospect intimate their directions. If I could tune in now, the future would be as legible as the past.” — Anne Truitt, qtd in Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass (140)

In crafting a work of fiction, at least in first draft, a writer’s got to have a kind of willful blindness to her own motivations. Why the knock at the door, the chance meeting, the near miss? The writer may not know, even as she proceeds. But when the self—not a fictional character—is the landscape of the story, we can’t afford to be blind to our own themes and the strands weaving through them. And so we must make a map, even aas the ground shifts beneath us.

This is, of course, not only a literary problem. (Hourglass, 33-34)

“You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information. (Hourglass, 127-128)