Beside Strange Waters

On [Not] Writing

2025-05-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

It’s been over a month since I sat down with the intention to write seriously. I’ve been overcommitted, struggling to learn the music for my violin recital and for the cantata at church. Instead of writing and publishing my work, I’ve been making art, or crocheting, or even cleaning the house.

I feel empty and dry. This morning I tried to read a poem by Louise Glück, but it was too subtle for a quick reading and I’m tired. Oh God, I am so tired. I’ve been sleeping at least six hours a night – which is a lot for me – but for some reason it isn’t enough.

Today I brought my coffee upstairs, cleaned the glass on the French doors, and wrote about not writing. Because sometimes, what I need most is to see the sky clearly. To be honest with myself. To sit down, pick up a pen, and begin.

Photo: Guian Bolisay (Instant Vantage)

2023-07-19T11:45:00.004-07:00

This was a really fun workshop to teach, so I'm posting my handout and lesson plan here.

Read the poems and try your hand at writing a bop or a tanka. Or teach the workshop yourself, if you like. The materials are here for you to use.

Link to Handout

Link to Lesson Plan

Crossing the Great Divide

2023-07-06T09:51:00.001-07:00

Editing and revision may be the bane of a writer’s existence. Ted Kooser wrote:

“Revision, and I mean extensive revision, is the key to transforming a mediocre poem into a work that can touch and even alter a reader’s heart. It’s the biggest part of the poet’s job description. I’ve published hundreds of poems, most of them less than twenty lines in length, and people are always surprised to learn that I might take a single short poem through twenty, or thirty, or even forty versions before I think it’s finished” (The Poetry Home Repair Manual 16).

He reminds us to be patient:

“Don’t worry that the process of revision seems slow. The writer’s tools were developed early - paper, pen, and ink; a watchful eye; an open heart - and good writing is still the patient handiwork of those simple tools. A poet who makes only one really fine poem during his life gives far more to the world that the poet who publishes twenty books of mediocre verse” (ibid. 148).

Why should we bother to work so hard, for so little reward? Kenneth Koch in his discussion of “poetry language” concludes by saying:

"The last inclination of the poetry language I'll mention - though there are more - is specifically addressed to making whatever is said into a work of art. Without this one, of course, you may be writing, but you're not writing poetry" (Making Your Own Days 69).

Is it fair to argue that one must intend to make art in order to write poetry at all? Koch’s insistence on intentionality is really a statement about the importance of the writer’s craft. He knows that the best poets don't just write down any old thing; rather, they shape and craft and revise, and that we separate ourselves from the writing in order to have some objectivity about it as a work of art.

Without craft and revision, our poems remain stuck in the realm of mere precious self-expression.

I mean precious in both senses: precious in that it is valuable to the writer, and precious in the older sense of being affected and overwritten. Self-expression is self-affirmation and self-discovery; it's one of the reasons we love to write. But if we stop there, it's self-expression, not art.

Painters will step back from the canvas and look at it from across the room or in a mirror. They understand that we need distance between ourselves and our creations in order to see the “whole picture” and understand what is working or isn’t working, and what we need to do next.

Painters also study craft: they learn to draw, to mix colors, to use the right pencil or brush to get certain effects. They learn about structure and composition. They study the works of other artists.

Inexperienced poets may not realize that, like visual artists, they need to master the tools of their craft. They may be content with poetry as a means of self-expression, and see no value in the discipline of poetry as an art form.

For me, writing poetry is a kind of spiritual discipline which gives shape and meaning to my life. I want my poetry to be a work of art that will mean something to others as well, and give them a moment of thoughtful pleasure - because life is made up of moments, and good moments are essential to a good life.

Never Give Me a Security Clearance!

2023-07-03T10:26:00.001-07:00

Seriously.

I attempted this writing prompt from Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days:

________________________ but I never told anyone

[repeat as necessary to create the poem]

I sat with pencil in hand, staring at the blank page for a long time before realizing that I've told everything to someone at least once. Sometimes to my closest friends, sometimes to my husband or only to my journal.

Sometimes I’ve talked to strangers with the confidence that we'll never meet again and so can tell each other almost anything.

Maybe I live a virtuous life, or perhaps I have no sense of propriety. I seem to have an irrational compulsion to share and to connect, which may explain why I love writing poetry.

On paper, one can imagine connections from a safe distance, speaking freely and unconstrained by the obligations of true intimacy or real-life relationships.

Paper is a safer space than one might at first imagine. One can lie freely and say it's in the service of one's art. Readers cannot reliably sort out fact from fiction.

Or perhaps in this age of vitriolic divisiveness, the written word is more dangerous to its creator than anyone could possibly imagine. In a less rabid era, Kenneth Koch said, "One expects to be forgiven for what one tells if it's a good poem" (ibid 68). That feels less true for writers today.

It won't stop me from living my life unfiltered.

And since my secret life is non-existent, I have only this blog post - no poem.

Give Kenneth Koch’s prompt a try, and let me know how it turns out. I hope you have good secrets to share, or that you're a better liar than I am and create a poem that tells a hidden truth.

***

Photo Credite: Nma7k3, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Trade-Offs of Travel

2023-07-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

Painted Desert, Arizona
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

Last summer I took a 30-day cross-country road trip. Because diesel fuel was so expensive, I left the motor home and took my Toyota van. I stayed mostly in the cheapest Kampgrounds of America cabins - the ones without plumbing - or with relatives. For the cabins, I brought my own bedding, a minimal camp kitchen, a folding table and a chair. To avoid midnight treks across the campground, I bought a portable toilet, complete with plastic bags and chemicals to absorb moisture and odor.

I thought that I might miss home-cooked meals, my own bed, or watching TV and crafting in the evenings. I also expected to miss my husband, dogs and friends more than I actually did. Since I had no one to talk to, I listened to music and audio books. However, I soon discovered that I needed to be careful because I was liable to miss my exit while listening to exciting passages. After getting lost in a wilderness area with no cell signal and no GPS, I decided to hit the pause button more often.

Garden of the Gods, IL
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

My father always told me, “Look out the window. You don’t know if you’ll ever come this way again.” So I planned my itinerary to include points of interest, knowing that every day could be my last chance to see them. I loved meeting new people and seeing new places every day.

Unfortunately, my husband grew up with a different kind of father, a pedal-to-the-metal driver who wanted to reach his final destination as soon as possible. They cannot see the journey as its own reward, and it’s difficult to persuade my DH to pull over for an unplanned stop.

My solo travel is leisurely and more spontaneous. Perhaps that's why I didn't long to be with my husband while on the road.

Cave-In-Rock State Park, IL
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

What I missed most, to my surprise, was my comfy chair. My lower back had quite a few complaints about long days of driving, despite the memory-foam cushion I bought for the trip. At the end of the day, I wanted to lean back in my recliner in front of the TV. Sitting in a camp chair wasn't the same, even if I could pop open a cold soda or a craft beer and watch YouTubes on my tablet, and my body knew the difference.

The other thing I really missed was having a refrigerator like the one in the motorhome. It was annoying to drain the cooler and buy ice every morning. Also, I couldn't shop ahead and keep the food cold for several days. Instead, I had to find a grocery store, and neighborhood grocery stores are rarely close to the interstate. Walmart Supercenters and small-town grocers became my go-to's, but sometimes all I could find was a convenience store, aisle after aisle of processed snack foods with not a fruit or vegetable in sight.

Have you ever taken a long trip? What was the most unexpected thing you missed when you were away from home?

The Open Road
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

Precariously Perched But Holding

2023-06-30T10:14:00.001-07:00

Chiricahua National Monument

Travel opens the heart, invites one to take photos and write a travelogue. So recently we loaded up the motorhome and drove to the Chiricahua National Monument. It's supposed to be a wonderland of rocks and I had never been there. Surely this novel landscape would inspire me to write something interesting.

Well, the Chiricahua Mountains are indeed a wonderland of rocks, but I found myself staring, wondering what to say about a static, rocky landscape so hot that even the insects were silent. It didn't inspire me the way lakes and rivers do; it didn't steal my heart and invite me in as the ocean does. So what could I write about this forbidding, ancient place?

Yes, once there was movement and great upheaval – a volcano so hot it created rhyolite tuff, a fine-grained rock composed of quartz and potassium feldspar, lava flung up from a twelve-mile caldera in a vast pyroclastic eruption. Even today, Hollywood with all its special effects could not begin to re-imagine the magnificence of that cataclysm.

The lava hardened as it cooled and twenty-seven million years later, the stone has weathered and fissured. Water, wind and time have sculpted a land of spectacular towers. Massive and angular, undoubtedly holy, they are so completely themselves that I have nothing to add.

This is slot canyon country, with slumps and a natural bridge that no human can cross. The mountains are fancifully adorned with pinnacles and spires and perfectly balanced rocks that someday must fall to the power of water and wind and time.

If elements of this landscape were to move real-time, I would not want to see it. I need those rocks to stay there, balanced just so on their impossibly tiny bases, believing that if I were to come back in another twenty-seven million years, there'd still be something to see.

Musing on Truth and Lying

2023-06-26T10:25:00.001-07:00

The task of the poet is to invent lies in the service of speaking truth, which is of course, deeply paradoxical. However, this is the fate, not just of poets, but of every human alive: to attempt to articulate that which cannot be fully known or articulated.

Kenneth Koch understood this tendency of poets to "have the feeling of knowing things that may be unknowable" and as a consequence, to "make grand pronouncements." He wrote:

Something close to lying is pretending to know more than one does know, or possibly could know, and/or pretending to have more power than one has or could possibly have. The impulse to so pretend may be highly emotional (Making Your Own Days 66).

Job caught a glimpse of the Infinite when God appeared to him in the whirlwind. He cried out, "I declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know"(NASB). His immediate response was to repent in dust and ashes, and ask God for instruction.

The character of Job may have repented of his words, but the author of the book did not. Confronted by an existential crisis, the author created a masterful series of poems exploring the causes of horrific, seemingly random events and our responses to them.

Thus we see that the poet's response is almost always to write another poem. That works for us as poets, perhaps because our work is tied to strong, genuine emotions and because we are trying to discover the truth, not obscure it.

In contrast, language used to deceive and manipulate others is the bread and butter of politicians, what George Orwell called "doublespeak" in 1984. Men and women addicted to power cannot perceive or speak truth; instead, they engineer photo ops and sound-bytes for the poisonous theater of the absurd.

Paul, in 1 Timothy, complained about men who wanted to be teachers of the law yet who "did not understand either what they were saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions" (NASB). Caught up in their own rhetoric, these men - like some modern teachers and politicians - had forgotten that their proper goal was teaching people to "love from a pure heart." Lying to themselves and others, they lost their way, and the result then (as now) was divisiveness and hatred.

Proverbs 15:33 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (NASB). Whatever your concept of God and the universe, it's good to begin by acknowledging that you are small and the world around you immense, astonishing, and too wonderful for any of us to fully categorize, define or explain. Kafka said it beautifully:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet (Goodreads)

Thus we come to the writing of poetry, and the articulation of impossible truth.

My Current Writing Routine

2023-06-21T10:18:00.002-07:00

If you’re a writer, you know that your writing routines and schedule change over time. What works for you today may not work tomorrow. Or you come across an idea in a book about writing, or a friend mentions what she does, and you think, “Hey, I ought to try that.” If the experiment helps, you incorporate that new thing into your writing life.

Last January, Melissa and Dave of Journey Sixty6 hosted an online writing workshop about writing rituals, which got me thinking about how I might make my writing time more creative and more productive. Their idea was to use something sensory, rewarding, specific and repetitive to get your writer brain started every day.

is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

My rewarding sensory cue is to bring my tablet and my cup of coffee to a comfy chair where I can see trees and the sky. Then I start my daily writing routine:

Copy three quotes or interesting phrases onto small pieces of cardstock and put them in the “Magic Cauldron” (an old metal box with astonishing powers) as inspiration for future poems.
Read a poem. At the moment, I’m reading The Best American Poetry 2022, but it could be any book or magazine with poems in it. Alberto Rios always told us to “prime the pump” and he was right - when I’m not reading poetry, I’m not writing poetry either.
Attempt to respond to the poem in some way. If I’m still feeling uninspired, I read from a book on the writer’s craft. At the moment, it’s Kennth Koch’s Making Your Own Days.
Attempt to write a poem. If I’m still uninspired, I shake up the Magic Cauldron, pick three random quotes and try again.
If I still can’t write a poem, I free write for ten minutes or go to my desk to revise something. Generally, at this point, I have generated some text of some sort, and feel pretty good about my morning, but if the Muse was elsewhere, that’s okay too. I’ve enjoyed my coffee and fired up lots of neurons. My soul has been nourished on sky and leaves moving in the wind.

Nobody can write a good poem every day. Heck, no one can even write a mediocre poem every day. But writing isn’t just about publication. It’s also a spiritual practice.

The important thing is to show up, and listen.

To show up.

So that’s what I do.

Words of Encouragement to Read During Hard Times

2023-01-31T16:28:00.004-08:00

I wrote this for me, but maybe these words will encourage you too.

You really are smart and capable, even when you don’t feel that this is true. And people are capable of changing. If you don’t like the way something is going, it’s okay to try something different.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but you don’t have to like something to get it done or to like the end result. Being unhappy or tired or bored in the middle is often part of the process. Suck it up and deal with it.

Finally, be kind to yourself in hard times. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has bad moods and bad days, everyone experiences failures on the way to success. It’s okay not to know how to do something and it’s okay to mess up while you’re figuring it out.

The wonderful thing is that we get through hard times. Hard times don’t last forever.

In the end, everything will be okay. Really.

Looking for that silver lining—Creativity during a global pandemic

2022-02-07T11:32:00.001-08:00

What was it like being creative during the last two years, as COVID-19 upended our lives?

Clouds over Miami by Lonny Paul

Being creative was easy at first. With the lockdowns, my schedule opened up and I finally had time to work on some projects.

Then I had to go out to shop and be back in the world, before vaccines were available. Stress! Just getting groceries exhausted me so much that I could do nothing else for the rest of the day.

"Stressed College
Student" by CollegeDegrees360

My mother used to say, when she had to do something hard or that she really hated, “I just kept slogging away at it.” That’s how life has felt recently. Every day has been like slogging through mud, pulling one foot out and taking everything one miserable step at a time.

What did I do during the pandemic when we couldn’t have live music rehearsals? I was cut off from my musical friends and from my violin teacher. My early music group, the Strong Oak Consort, tried rehearsing on Skype, but we couldn’t play as an ensemble. One person would play their part, everyone else would mute and try to play along. It didn’t work very well.

Then we decided to record a Christmas album using free software on the Internet. With soundtrap.com, we were able to do multi-track recording remotely. Being able to complete that project felt great.

I also attempted NaNoWriMo, and started writing a horror novel set in a fictionalized version of Bisbee, Arizona. Maybe writing horror was a way of getting out all that negativity.

The last two years have been a time of lower productivity for me, but I did my best to stay connected with my creative community and kept going as well as I could. Overall, it wasn’t a bad time in terms of creativity. I learned that I could function with fewer commitments and demands on my time. I learned to use my time at home more efficiently. I’ve found inner resources I didn’t realize I had.

I wouldn’t go through this again voluntarily, and I can’t wait for it to be “over” (whatever that may mean). People used to say, “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” and “Every cloud has a silver lining.” That may be a bit clichéd, but in my case, it has been true. I’m glad that I had some positive outcomes in what has been a very difficult time for the world.

"Happy Ending" by Chrismatos

Swedish Death-Cleaning End-of-Year Update

2021-12-23T10:40:00.002-08:00

This was on my closet door for 16 months!!!

Reading 50 books didn't go so well. I only managed to finish 18 books during 2021. Some of them were library books or ebooks, and I think I only gave away one or two of the books that I owned.

On the other hand, I finally discarded or donated 1,000 things. After listening to a TED Talk in July of 2020, I was inspired to get rid of 1,000 things because, as Liz Wright said, it would change my life.

Click here to watch Liz Wright's TED Talk.

I am happy to report that it actually did change my life significantly for the better.

I didn't put a lot of energy into Marie-Kondo-style tidying and decluttering, but one of the surprising benefits of having this goal was that I bought way less stuff because, you know, it would be more work to discard or donate it later on. Every purchase became more deliberate and I ended up with fewer projects to complete and fewer books to read someday.

A second surprising benefit was less stress, because the pile of things I needed to do or deal with wasn't constantly growing/growing exponentially.

Liz Wright was correct: Get rid of 1,000 things, and you will change your life for the better!

Swedish Death Cleaning Begins

2021-01-24T09:06:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've become more aware of my own mortality. Maybe it's COVID, maybe it's the birth year on the driver's license. Whatever the cause, I've realized that it's time to start my Swedish Death Cleaning. Last July, I set the ambitious goal of getting rid of 1,000 items by December 31st (it didn't happen), and this year, my first-quarter Game Changer is to finish getting rid of 1,000 objects.

That means I need to discard, donate or give away six items every single day for three months. Yikes!

In order to facilitate the Death Cleaning Process, I've decided to read a book every week for the entire year. Maybe I'll keep a few books, if they're extraordinary. More likely, they will begin their one-way journey to a new home via Bookman's or the local library bookstore.

Link to Little, Brown

LET'S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS by David Sedaris

It's the first book on my 50-book list. In 2013, I heard an interview with David Sedaris on NPR and knew then that I wanted to read Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. But you know how it is when you're driving – you think you'll remember; you always forget. A few years later, I was on an Aggressor liveaboard, shuffling through the cabinet of ragged bodice-rippers and nearly new bestsellers when I discovered Sedaris's book.

If you're a scuba diver, you know that a liveaboard vacation consists of three activities: you dive, you eat and you sleep. Any spare moments are spent at the laptop poring over underwater photos or sunning yourself sleepily on the deck. Before bed, maybe you'll spend a few minutes sipping wine and marveling at the stars while moonlit waves lap gently against the side of the boat. Reading is reserved for tedious hours in the cramped little island terminal or for the long flight home.

So when we're packing for our return flight, those of us who love the scent and feel of real paper head for the galley to rummage through the shelf of abandoned books. We unload the edifying classics we meant to read but didn't; we return the trashy novels we borrowed the first day and finished during the week; and we comb through the stacks hoping for an undiscovered gem. I found my treasure wedged between a thick Tom Clancy knock-off and a self-help book, hidden behind an entire first row of more popular tomes: David Sedaris's first edition of Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. Of course I took it with me to read on the airplane.

But you know how it is when you're flying. You'll think you'll read, then decide to watch a movie instead. Or you drift off, book open in your lap, and open your eyes to find the stewardess collecting last-minute trash. You tuck in a corner of a napkin, snap the book shut and stuff it in your carry-on just before landing. Then the book sits unread on your shelf for a few more years.

So it was with David Sedaris's Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls.

Just the wind?

2021-01-18T10:19:00.001-08:00

In Colossians 3, Paul admonishes us to set our mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. That's problematic, because no human is able to directly perceive the things above. Our senses are filled with things that are on earth, and our brains are exquisitely attuned to pleasure. Life here consumes our attention and our affections.

But why shouldn't our lives here be worthy of our full attention? We can't see or clearly imagine the things above. We would be hard-pressed to even name them, although if Paul asked me to make a list, Jesus and God the Father would be right at the top, along with angels hovering in a throne room. I can't picture those angels, however. With their bizarre configurations of eyes and wings, Old Testament angels don't resemble humans. Perhaps it would be easier to meditate on abstractions like faith, hope, and love or to visualize the saints who have gone before.

What's here with me now is a cup of steaming coffee, with cream and sugar. A half-eaten bag of Dorito corn chips, irresistibly crunchy and delicious. A fresh breeze lifting the edges of the curtain at my window. The memory of a doe, heavy with this year's unborn fawn, nosing through the grass outside my gate in search of acorns. A nondescript little flycatcher bouncing along cheerily through the weeds. The sound of a dog barking in the distance.

The wind swaying through the limbs of the junipers outside may be reminiscent of the movement of the Holy Ghost (that's how Jesus would have seen it) but as nearly as I can tell for now, the wind is simply the wind.

Photo: "deer - Newport News Va." by watts_photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Can Sophie of the Unsellables Save the World?

2020-12-31T08:08:00.003-08:00

Sophie Allsop, Host of the Unsellables

Yesterday was weird because I wanted very much to stay on task and be productive but it was really hard. Every little thing took tremendous effort.

I suspect this struggle is due to situational depression, caused by the behavior of people who continue to contest the election, the bungled vaccine roll-out, and the general awfulness of life right now. It didn't help that my long-awaited dental appointment was canceled because two people in the office tested positive for COVID.

I had hoped that there would be more people vaccinated by now, and that we'd be progressing towards our new normal, whatever that might be. Instead we're in the middle of a cluster-fuck with more transmissible variants of the virus emerging. Thank you, Donald Trump.

But anger and grief don't actually serve us well in a crisis, do they? On TV, emotions motivate the hero to take decisive and successful action. In real life, emotional turmoil just seems to cause decision paralysis or bad choices.

Hoarding: Buried Alive disappeared from Prime Video for a few days, and in the time that it was missing, I started watching The Unsellables on YouTube. My husband hates reality TV but I like it – there's a predictable structure which always has a positive outcome (at least in the shows I watch). Sophie the real estate expert looks at the outside of the unsold house, says, "The problem must be inside, and I'm going to find out what it is." She walks through the house and comes up with solutions, which her team then implements, and hey, the house is either sold or they expect it will sell soon. Everyone's happy.

The other thing I love about that show right now is that everybody appears to be doing normal things in a normal economy. Nobody is unemployed, nobody is sick, nobody is wearing masks. It's life the way it used to be, a happy little glimpse of the past where families work together to make change happen and success is possible.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Pandemic Sophie to guide us to a happier ending? I don't think Joe Biden and his team will be able to function as our guides, not because they are incompetent, but because they will face fierce opposition from people who don't understand science or the necessity of working together to save lives. It's Proud Boys and conspiracy theorists and short-sighted Republicans who stand in the way of the next administration, not peeling wallpaper or purple paint on the walls.

Ecclesiastes 2:26 says that God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy to people who are good in His sight. Right now, we desperately need all three, and perseverance to get us through the next few months.

The End of Shelley and "The Indian Serenade"

2020-10-22T11:56:00.002-07:00

Seriously, I am done. I have accumulated an embarrassingly large stack of notes about this poem, and have written my own ghazal; it is time to move on. But first, let me share with some highlights about Percy Bysshe Shelley and his famous poem.

Not everybody liked this poem (I wonder why?):

The absence of concrete imagery in 'The Indian Serenade' has been adversely criticized. The poem's natural world verges on the impalpable: the soft winds, vague perfumes, song of the nightingale, the invisible inaudible stream, faint, die, fall, just as the serenader does in his half-waking ecstasy. It is as if he had awakened from dreams of his lady into a world even more dream-like and indistinct (Park 11).

"In certain critical circles, 'The Indian Serenade' seems to have attained an eminence second only to Kilmer's 'Trees' as a favorite whipping poem" (Levin 305). The New Critics in particular condemned the line, "I die, I faint, I fail" for its "vagueness of description and the direct statement of feeling in poetry" (Abrams and Harpham) – they, as Spock himself might have done, much preferred the Vulcan purity of the objective correlative to all that sloppy, vague emotional verbiage.

Honestly, I can't much say that I blame them. But some critics liked it better, notably Richard Levin, who called it "a mighty cosmic drama of birth, death, and resurrection through which 'love' works in the universe, informing the round of the seasons and man's early pilgrimage" (306). I suppose if one is familiar with Shelley's sources, it is possible to read the poem as "the destruction of the world through an extreme of passion... expressed in a form borrowed from translations of Eastern poetry" (Park 12); however, to the general reader, such an interpretation seems more like a flight of fantasy rather than a rational explication of the poem itself.

Other critics object to the speaker of the poem, having identified the voice as belonging to a man, even though the poem appears to have been published in 1819 with the title "The Indian Girl's Song" (Nilchian 222). B.A. Park was especially derogatory about the supposedly male speaker's supposed lack of character:

Shelley’s Indian serenader is often criticised as a sentimentalist, making a blubbering parade of his probably insincere emotions before the reading public, instead of restraining them as a gentleman should, and taking a manly attitude toward his misfortunes. He is a buffoonish beggar, making a theatrical play for our sympathies, but despicably unaware of the ironies inherent in his attitudes, a creature of self-pity and self-delusion. And Shelley himself is by implication made to share in these opprobriums; he must have known that no one ever really has such feelings, or literally dies of love, or ought to carry on in this way (8).

However, if one reads the poem as a Sufi love poem with a feminine speaker, the effect is far less objectionable. "The Indian Serenade" accurately expresses the experience of "the figurative death [which] is one of the highest states in the Sufi quest for love and involves the dissolution of the self in the other" (Nilchian 238).

The speaker in this poem has a strong "desire to lose self in order to become one with" the beloved (Nilchian 222) and, given the societal expectations regarding women of the time, this may have been a truly revolutionary female speaker: a woman who wakens from a dream with sexual overtones and ventures out alone into the night to seek her lover. That she fails in her quest may be a sharper criticism of the epoch than of the Indian lady herself.

Shelley associated with strong women and early feminists. He admired and was strongly influenced by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Shelley married her daughter, Mary, who is now remembered as the Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein. He was a proponent of free love, and would not have been put off by a woman capable of embracing her own sexuality and acting independently on the basis of her own needs and desires. By choosing a speaker outside of his own culture and using ancient motifs, he redirects the reader's expectations and reduces objections to the Indian girl's attitudes and behaviors without diluting his own message of powerful Romantic feeling and freedom.

Now that I have a better understanding of the context of this poem, I find it more admirable than it first appears. It's been a wonderful journey of exploration for me; now I am ready to move on.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Indepedence, KY: Cengage Learning, 2008.

Levin, Richard. “Shelley’s ‘Indian Serenade’: A Re-Evaluation.” College English. 24:4, Jan 1963. Pp. 305-307. [JSTOR]

Nilchian, Elham. “Shelley’s Quest for Persian Love.” The Comparatist. Vol. 40 Oct 2016, pp 222-244. [JSTOR]

Park, B.A. “The Indian Elements of the ’Indian Serenade.’ Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol 10, Winter 1961. pp. 8-12. [JSTOR]

Poetry Foundation. “Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/percy-bysshe-shelley.

Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: Cultural Appropriation, or Cross Pollination? (1)

2020-08-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

In the 1800s, Percy Bysshe Shelley found inspiration for his famous poem, “The Indian Serenade,” in Middle Eastern poetry. There was actually a movement or school of poetry known as the English Orientalists, whose work Shelley greatly admired.

The Turkish Patrol, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French)

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436116

To Europeans, the Middle East was a mysterious place. Until Napoleon’s army occupied Egypt in 1801, not many Europeans had actually been to the Middle East (Meagher). Even after 1801, many creatives were inspired, not by real-life visits to this exotic destination, but by artwork and descriptions provided by others. (Meagher).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the artwork created by the Orientalists was biased in favor of European culture and against Middle Eastern peoples and their cultures. In fact, it was so biased that today, some have defined Orientalism as a form of racism:

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous (Arab American National Museum).

Given that some artists deliberately created “propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule” (Meagher), it’s not surprising that there were exaggerations and distortions; nor is it surprising that many Europeans readily accepted this interpretation of Middle Eastern culture. It fit handily into their preconceived notions, reinforced their Eurocentric world view and justified the exploitation of those nations.

Nevertheless, many British Orientalists studied Middle Eastern culture with a more open mind, and genuinely admired the literature and artwork of these exciting foreign places.

Works Cited

Meagher, Jennifer. “Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/euor/hd_euor.htm (October 2004).

Arab American National Museum. “What Is Orientalism?” What Is Orientalism? | Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, Arab American National Museum, 2011, arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism.

A Serenade Inspired by a Song - But Which Song?

2020-08-15T16:37:00.003-07:00

You might think that if a famous poem were inspired by a song, literary critics or music historians might have a clue, but in the instance of "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, that is not actually the case. What we have instead are competing theories. You can pick your favorite.

B.A. Park believes that Shelley was inspired by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (who wrote the lyrics to the now-famous “Minstrel Boy”) to write lyrics for an Indian melody:

“The habit appears to have been introduced by Thomas Moore of composing poems to fit wordless or foreign popular melodies, with his Irish Melodies of 1807-1828, and his National Airs of 1819-1828. Shelley’s poem appears to have been written to such a wordless tune from India, played for him by a friend” (9).

Chauncey B. Tinker thought that he had discovered a different source for the same poem:

“The love-song is associated with Miss Sophia Stacey, a young lady whose the Shelleys met in the last months of the poet’s life. She used to sing to Shelley, an experience which always moved him to an intensity of passion and not infrequently to the composition of verses. One recalls Jane Williams and her singing to the accompaniment of a guitar, which awakened sentiments of the most intense delight in the poet’s heart. ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ may very well have come into existence as the text for some air sung to him by Sophia, though of this there is no proof” (71).

However, Tinker does not believe that “the loved one” of the poem is Miss Stacey (71).

A third theory is that the poem may have originated during a contest between two now-famous poets:

...perhaps (as Trelawny testified in a manuscript now at John Murray's) to use in a competition with Byron, in which each was to compose lyrics to be sung to an Indian or Arabic melody. But whether Shelley recomposed from memory--or else pretended to compose for the first time--a poem that he had already used to impress Stacey, either to demonstrate his poetic facility vis-a-vis Byron, or to express his feelings for Jane Williams, we are faced with judgments of his motives (Reiman).

Judgments aside, Jessica K. Quillin gives us the most Romantic and compelling narrative:

“…the prosodic arrangement of ‘An Indian Serenade’ fits into the general scheme of Mozart’s music for ‘Ah perdona, al primo affetto,’ revealing the possibility that Shelley wrote the lyric with the melody or at least the words of the aria in mind. In any event, the correspondences between ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ and Mozart’s aria reveal the extent to which music formed part of Shelley’s conception of poetic form toward the end of his life. This theory is lent further support in light of Reiman and O’Neill’s hypothesis that Shelley had the fair copy manuscript of ‘An Indian Serenade’ containing the lines from Mozart with him when his boat, the Don Juan, sank off the coast of Viargeggio” (NP).

What could be more appropriate than a Romantic poet dying with both Mozart and a fair copy of a love poem in his possession during a fatal storm that sinks his boat and takes his life? Even if this turns out not to be true, it's a great origin myth and I want the movie rights!

WORKS CITED

Park, B.A. “The Indian Elements of the ’Indian Serenade.’ Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol 10, Winter 1961. pp. 8-12. [JSTOR]

Quillin, Jessica K. Sheely and the Music-Poetics of Romanticism. Abingdon-on_Thames, UK: Routledge, 2016.

Reiman, Donald H. “Shelley Comes of Age: His Early Poems as an Editorial Experience,” Romantic Circles. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/earlyshelley/reiman/reiman.html

Tinker, Chauncey B. “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. pp. 70-72 (JSTOR).

Reflections on "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1)

2020-08-04T12:52:00.001-07:00

The Indian Serenade

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me—who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream—
The Champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale’s complaint,
It dies upon her heart;—
As I must on thine,
Oh! beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;—
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, c. 1817

My initial impulse was to dismiss this poem as overwrought and ridiculous. However, after completing some research on Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem, I realized there was more to it than I had initially thought.

I discovered that the poem had a history, not merely as a Romantic love poem, but also as song lyrics. Arthur Farwell published a setting of this poem in 1899 (https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186954/). Apparently, there were many versions of this poem set to music: one author remarked: “Mid-Victorian composers tumbled over one another to set Shelley to music…. Choral settings are abundant...” (Evans 594).

Curiously enough, it was once even popular among college students at Yale: “ “The final splendour of Shelley’s serenade is that it easily wedded to music, and serves the purpose of expressing and releasing the passion in a lover’s heart. So far as I am aware, it is the only poem of Shelley’s that ever became a well-known song. I recall its popularity in the singing at the fence on the old campus, when boys in their early twenties sang it with an emotion which could hardly have arisen from the beauty of the poetry in which is is couched, and who dis- / covered to their surprise that it was the production one of the greatest lyricists in English or any other language. The air sung at the fence was written by F.B. Tourtellot….” (Tinker 71,72).

Even today, there are versions of it on YouTube, such as this contemporary one:

Works Cited

Evans, Edwin, ed. Musical News and Herald. London: Publishing Office, 1992.

Tinker, Chauncey B. “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. Pp. 70-72 (JSTOR),

Make It Your Personal Destiny

2020-04-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

Hannah Arendt, the philisopher who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, survived Nazism primarily because she fled to Czechoslovakia in 1933. She was a woman who knew how to read the handwriting on the wall.

After WWII, she "told a television interviewer... that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into 'personal destiny' was another" (Bakewell 95).

Today, most of us know that the coronavirus is dangerous, yet whenever I go into town, I see people not wearing masks. They haven't yet made protecting themselves and others part of their own "personal destiny."

https://ensia.com/features/flood-survivors-victims-organize-for-change/

Similarly, people living near coastlines are generally aware of sea level rise, yet many have chosen to stay in these areas, raising their houses a dozen feet without realizing that someday flooded streets and dysfunctional sewers may make their homes uninhabitable. Perhaps, like the citizens of Tokyo once did, they plan to use a boat to travel to work, school, and shopping. Or perhaps they believe that their local government's mitigation efforts will be enough. A strategic response to climate change is not yet part of their personal destinies either.

Research has shown us that humans are terrible at calculating long-term risks. We really, really want rewards now, even if we'd get better outcomes by being patient or denying ourselves in the short term. We overestimate immediate threats and underestimate less obvious dangers. We trust our anecdotal accounts and our friends' experiences over statistics.

The United States is at a crossroads. We can choose to rush into re-opening the economy without sufficient coronavirus testing for a short-term benefit of getting people back to work more quickly at the risk of long-term detriments:

new waves of the disease
widespread illness
prolonged recovery and post-infection quarantines that reduce productivity
high numbers of deaths
unpredictable, prolonged school and business closures when employees become infected
high cost of cleaning and disinfecting before re-opening every time someone gets sick

Likewise, we can continue to emit greenhouse gases, and gain the short-term benefits of continuing to live comfortably for a while as:

our cities flood
our homes become worthless
farm land turns to salt marsh
hurricanes and tornadoes destroy homes and lives
floods cause late planting and crop failure
fires ravage the hotter, drier regions of every continent

Or we can choose to plan for a future in which cities and farms continue to thrive, sustainable economies expand instead of contracting, and we do not die in great numbers from political upheaval, famine, or disease.

It's one thing to know what's dangerous. It's another to act before it's too late.

What's your personal destiny? What's the destiny of your nation?

WORKS CITED

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Cafe. New York: Other Press, 2016.

Foy, George Michaelsen. "Humans Can't Plan Long-Term and Here's Why." Psychology Today. 25 June 2018. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shut-and-listen/201806/humans-cant-plan-long-term-and-heres-why>

King, Dr. Matthew Wilburn. "How Brain Biases Prevent Climate Action." BBC. <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190304-human-evolution-means-we-can-tackle-climate-change>

One Bit at a Time: My Isolated Brain!

2020-03-29T16:15:00.001-07:00

My volunteer potato plant

Yesterday I spent most of the day working in the yard. I was actually planted something - a potato that came up volunteer in the compost. I had intended to plant a sweet potato from the grocery store, but when I started to screen the compost, I found this guy. Sometime last year, I tossed an old potato into the bin and buried it. Over the winter, that forgotten potato sprouted and struggled up through several inches of dirt to reach the light.

In the midst of a global pandemic, it seems wrong to kill anything so determined to make a life for itself. So I planted it instead.

It’s obvious, BTW, that we are going to run out of garden soil rather quickly. No way is there enough compost to start a large garden. But that is definitely not today’s issue. My real problem is my distracted brain.

Every day, I’m scatterbrained and emotional, and I struggle to complete any task. Admittedly, there would be something truly wrong with me if I felt happy right now in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. The U.S. if facing a highly contagious pandemic with inadequate medical supplies, no known treatments, thousands of deaths and a global recession – I’d be a monster if I were fine with all that. Nevertheless I would like to be a little more fine than I currently am.

The primary way I’m functioning right now (when I'm not "misery scrolling" on Facebook or reading and re-reading the latest news) is by “bitting.” A bit is the smallest unit of information processed by a computer, either a zero or a one. Bits are usually grouped into larger units called bytes. Bitting is taking things one very tiny piece at a time.

This is how it looks in my life: People are dying, I’m terrified for everyone around me (including myself). What can I do? Okay, there's a lot of laundry sitting around. Maybe I can match three pairs of socks. Great, I did that. Now I can fold two tee-shirts. What’s the next little thing I can do? Eventually the stack of laundry disappears.

It would be way more efficient if I could manage larger data packets right now, but my mind is not in the kind of a place. I’m happy just to be moving forward, a millimeter or two at a time. And to be healthy, at a moment when so many are literally struggling for their lives.

Where do you go to find yourself?

2020-01-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

How do you define your identity as a human being? Is it a matter of gender, or of being a certain age? Having a particular profession? Are you defined by your actions and achievements? Your family and friends? Their expectations, or your own dreams?

At church Sunday, the topic was baptism, and the text was Matthew’s account of John baptizing Jesus. Reverend Renée said that Jesus didn’t need to be baptized, because He had a perfect relationship with the Father and He had no sin; therefore Jesus had no need for repentance. However, by coming to the river with those who were looking for healing, renewal and grace, Jesus participated with them in their pain and their need, and in so doing, discovered who He was. Reverend Renée hypothesized that without the baptism, there might have been no ministry, no atonement, and no resurrection.

I like her idea that “we discover who we are in community.” That’s definitely true of creative people, which is why I need the Writers Coffeehouse, the Huachuca Arts Association open studio, the monthly open mic reading at Broxton’s and my critique groups. I don’t just learn craft there; I also learn who I am.

But I don't want to be like Ernest Hemingway, with his self-destructive impulses and his inability to continue living when he could no longer write. I cannot simply define myself as a writer, or an artist; I am more than what I do, or how well I do it.

Sunday, we came, one by one, but also as a congregation, to dip our fingers into a bowl of water and choose a glass pebble. "Remember your baptism, Tina" Reverend Renée said, and I picked a smooth, blood-red piece of glass that was practically glowing in the sunlight.

"Put this where you can see it," she told us all. And I have, because I want to remember that I am part of something much larger than myself, and that we are all figuring things out together. I am loved, and I do not have to walk alone.

Buy your own glass gems <https://www.amazon.com/Miracolors-Colors-Fillers-12-19mm-Approx/dp/B00OPN5IZU>

Time Tracking Tools for Writers - Getting Started

2019-01-28T12:33:00.001-08:00

You know you need to keep better track of your time, but how can you do it easily, without spending a lot of money?

Many software companies offer a brief free trial, followed by a monthly fee or subscription. If you are making enough money on your writing to justify an expense of $60 or more per year, go for it. If you're just starting out, or if you are a poet like me, you might prefer something a little less pricey. You can always upgrade after you make the New York Times Bestseller List.

I personally use Caato, a free time tracker that lets me know how much time I'm spending on each writing task. I can enter the times manually, or I can let it keep track of my work time down to the second.

If you were to enlarge this screen shot, you'd see that so far this year, I've spent an inordinate amount of time clearing my desk - which seems low-level but I've gotten really tired of not having room to work, so this really is a first-quarter priority for me.

Another embarrassing insight is that I've spent a lot of time on "NOS" (not otherwise specified) tasks, so in February I'll be watching that category closely, to make sure I'm really using my time well, and not just puttering about at my desk. It's pretty easy to avoid the hard work of writing by playing at it, and I'm always prone to falling into rabbit holes.

If you don't use a Mac or if you also use mobile platforms, Caato won't be the best choice for you. Fortunately, there are a myriad of options out there for every computer, tablet, phone and gadget imaginable. Here's a link to a really useful list from appadvice.com.

Another possibility is Clockify, a free "simple time tracker and timesheet app that lets you and your team track work hours on projects." With Clockify you can use a timer or a spreadsheet to keep track of your time on tasks and projects, and it sounds like it has some nice reporting functions. Because it has team capabilities, you can use it for bigger projects like an co-edited anthology, group blog, or small magazine. Paired with a free "collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards" like Trello, you could get a lot done.

If you're a KISS kind of person and want to keep it really simple, try using a weekly "time card" spreadsheet. I've created a free Google worksheet you can download here.

Whichever method you choose, a time tracker can improve your productivity and enable you to make the most of the writing time you have. Leave a comment - let us know what you do and how well works for you.

Time Tracking Tools for Writers - Why?

2019-01-25T10:30:00.000-08:00

Effective time management skills may seem more appropriate for a Fortune 500 executive than a freelance writer, but creative people may need good time management tools and habits more than anybody else on the planet.

Think about it - we are busy, creative people with obsessive tendencies who are interested in everything, who may fixate on a new idea or task and forget everything else or who may be distracted by almost anything in our environment. Most of us have to write in odd moments while holding a full-time job and/or raising a family.

To make things worse, we're writing in a constantly changing environment, with markets that are evolving and an industry that provides less editing and marketing support to writers. We have to take on many of the promotional and marketing tasks which were previously handled for us by publishers.

Oh, and did I mention that many of us are novices, beginners who are on the steep part of the learning curve, where every task seems to take more time than we expected, and we experience more failures than successes, whether we're writing a first novel, self-publishing the first book of poems, or just stumbling through the revision process? Even established writers have to be lifelong learners who are constantly experimenting and trying something new in order to keep their writing fresh or to keep up with changes in the market.

If you can't manage your time effectively, how on earth are you going to get your writing done? You need tools and skills.

CREDITS - Artwork

"Man Typing" by wesd440. <https://openclipart.org/detail/220395/Man-Typing>
"busy busy busy" by cactuscowboy <https://openclipart.org/detail/290725/busy-busy-busy>

Konmari'ing the Government?

2019-01-15T11:59:00.001-08:00

I started watching "Tidying Up" on Netflix and was instantly enchanted. Soon I found myself tidying the bedroom and scouring local stores in search of affordable little boxes to better organize my dresser drawers.

My much tidier drawer (You'd really be impressed if you had seen it before)

Then I noticed a strange phenomenon on Facebook. My female friends are posting about how they Konmaried a closet; photos of beds covered in mountains of clothing are all over Instagram; news articles talk about how donations have increased over last January and consignment stores are overwhelmed, not with customers but with would-be sellers looking to get rid of their stuff. Online, Marie Kondo's lovely boxes are sold out. DIY-er's are posting instructions on how to turn cereal boxes into drawer organizers.

Hmm.....

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-marie-kondo-netflix-inspired-tidy-1.4971414

Our government's in a mess. Ordinary citizens are powerless to fix it. We can write letters, we can march in protest, but we cannot re-open the government. Our president and Mitch McConnell seem deaf to our pleas.

Why not go tidy a drawer? Or if you're furloughed, why not try to sell your stuff to make your mortgage payment?

When the Konmari movement hits the federal government, one of two things will happen:

We'll look at our President, and decide he no longer sparks joy.

The Republicans who want small government will think that it's time to shutter some agencies.

I have a problem with that second scenario. Our government must do what we as individuals cannot, such as ensuring food safety, inspecting bridges, and controlling the spread of infectious diseases. Making sure airplanes are inspected and safe to fly. Oh, yeah, and securing our borders. I almost forgot about that one.

At this point, I wouldn't mind Konmari'ing a few politicians. But services that keep us alive? Not so much.

I can't take this anymore. I need to go tidy a bookshelf or something.

Did I cause that to happen? IDK what to do, I'm so ashamed..... Aargh!

2019-01-09T09:28:00.000-08:00

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others

I picked up this book from the "Take One, Leave One" bookshelf at Anthony’s Key Resort in Roatan. Curiously, there were few light-hearted romances, murder mysteries, or suspenseful thrillers. Most of the books left there were quite serious, as if dozens of guests had hoped to finish a great work of literature while lying on a hammock - or perhaps dozens of them completed their reading and donated the books so others could become enlightened as well.

At any rate, when I finished my Michael Crichton thriller, I rifled through stacks of intimidatingly serious novels, and eventually settled on two books dealing with love and death - one about the death of a parent, and the other about the death of a former lover. Not what I had planned to think about during vacation, but it worked.

Now, two months later, I have completed my own reading journey, and made it to the end of The Blood of Others. I am more than ready to pass that book on to another reader!

I’m not sure what to say about Simone de Beauvoir’s novel, except that if it was turned into my writer’s group in manuscript form, we would NOT have called it “a brilliant, electrifying novel” as the New York Times did. We would have torn it to shreds for violating every principle of contemporary writing practice and typography, including:

the confusing lack of white space between scenes
abrupt transitions from one time period to another, with no indication that anything had changed
inexplicable shifts in point of view from third- to first-person
interminable interior monologues, etc.

Apparently, French writers feel no need to make concessions to their reading audience. If you want to make sense of this novel, or comprehend the work of a French literary theorist like Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault, you must be prepared to work at it.

Did I struggle with de Beauvoir's text because I am an American reader who does not comprehend the French mindset? It is because my nation wase not defeated and occupied by the Germans in World War II, and so we have no idea what desperate choices other people must face?

Or are we uncomfortable with the free and endless play of words and signs proposed by postmodernists like Derrida? Unlike de Beauvoir in 1948, today we are writing in a world in which genre hopping, genre blending, and literary mash-ups are the norm. Even concepts of gender, which were once thought to be biologically determined and fixed, are now fluid.

A recurrent theme in de Beauvoir’s novel is the degree to which one should accept responsibility for the lives and choices of others. Should one should feel guilty about influencing others, if their choices turn out to be detrimental? Does my existence deprive others of basic necessities like food or even life? Should I eat roasted potatoes if it causes someone else to starve? Is Angus beef or cavier worse than a French fry?

What about a person's response to Fascism? Jean wondered if it was right to fight for his freedom if it caused his friends to die. When the Nazis shot innocents as reprisal for sabotage, Jean's sense of guilt increased proportionally.

As you may have guessed by now, there is a lot of existential crisis, self-doubt and even self-loathing in a novel which promised to be about love.

I guess I struggle with existential guilt too, as if I have to somehow justify my own existence every day. For a year or two, I read Max Ehrmann's poem, “Desiderata” every morning as kind of an antidote to negative thinking. During the day, I would tell myself,

https://www.wallpapers.net/tree-stars

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

Honestly, after reading The Blood of Others and listening to Jean go on about his guilt for page after page after page, I wanted to smack him and tell him to get over it. Which, oddly enough, is my reaction to my own habitual and foundationless sense of culpability

This desire to smack myself reminds me of other lines from “Desiderata”:

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

and

And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Yeah, well, in between existential crises, I do strive to be cheerful and happy. Despite everything we’ve done to it, this is still a beautiful world, and I have the incredible good fortune to be alive and to experience some of that beauty.