Occasional Piece, Aug 9

Subject: Occasional Piece, Aug 9
From: Peter T.
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 09:00 AM

A patch of wild grasses and flowers I have been very fond of is being eliminated, and the trucks are already flattening the ground. I have rescued a selection of wildflowers -- field asters, campions, robin-plantains -- and have been pressing them in amateur fashion, in books on my shelves, just as a gesture. I was laying one such flower into a book when it occurred to me that writing in general, and writing in books in particular, is not unlike preserved wildflowers. Descriptions are not the fullblown reality, but a flattened version of it, all the parts there, complete, often delicately preserved, but lacking the meadow, and only brought back to life in memory and imagination. Wildflowers pressed in wildflowers.

But then I think that that is not quite accurate. That poetry at least, and great writing of any kind, is more like taking the flowers and fruits and not pressing them, but transforming them into something rich and new. So poems are more like summer jams and jellies, and the boiling and the canning and the jars, and the sealing and the sweating are versions of the artistic process at work. A row of jams and preserves is like a shelf of fine books, awaiting only the proper moment for their opening.

But I am drawn back to my wildflowers, and it turns out that the book I am pressing a robin-plantain in is a book of psalms in translation. It occurs to me that many of the old people I see these days (I spend a lot of time in nursing homes) are like pressed wildflowers, whose lives have become flattened in the pages of time's book. They tell me stories, that only come alive in sympathetic imagination any more, of times and people long gone. I wonder too if death is like that: that we are pressed into our graves like wildflowers, awaiting the day when God will open the Great Book of Life, and discover us, perhaps half forgotten, lying there, waiting to tell our flattened tales of lives lived in the long ago; reminding even God of lost meadows far away in another time and place.

But we are told differently, if it is to be believed: again, we will not be dessicated wildflowers on that last day, not a mere whisper of a lost meadow, but somehow utterly transformed in our essence into something altogether familiar but altogether new, sweet, and wonderful. A jar of homemade raspberry jam, perhaps?

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 9
From: katlaughing
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 09:54 AM

What a lovely thought and raspberry is my favourite!

I am reading a book of short stories by one of my favourite authors right now, Charles De Lint. His city is always peopled with magic, faeries, dryads, hobs, gemmins and the like, but only visible to those who believe.

In one of them a young woman is shown the stump of a huge old oak tree which has been cut down, merely because someone didn't like the shade it cast on their office.

The conjurer, a magic person, who shows her the tree, explains that it was a Tree of Tales and that it held 10,000 years of stories of the people, folk stories. It made her sad, but she wasn't quite sure why he showed it to her.

She went back the next day, drawn to the stump. As she knelt beside it, she had a visionof the entire tree in all of its glory, shimmering high above her. When she blinked it was gone, but she finally knew what she was to do.

She found a small acorn from the tree and took it home. She carefully put it in a pot with rich, loamy soil, and then she began to tell it stories. She read stories, gathered as many as she could from libraries and elsewhere, finally turning to her friends, then complete strangers for their stories, told to the baby Tree of Tales. As she recounted story after story, real stories as we hear in folk music, the Tree grew and grew. Eventually, she planted it in a special garden dedicated to a poet who had been known for his understanding of the importance of magic and the people's stories.

Even though they are dead and pressed flat, I'd like to think that your flowers and, even the ones I have pressed over the years, do have a remnant of the nature faeries which imbued them with that shimmering glow one can catch out of the corner of an eye, that magic which gave them life. So may it be for ourselvs, too. Mayhap my spirit will spread gossamer wings, glowing with violet light, and flutter about the flowers and such I love so well.

Thanks,

kat

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 9
From: GUEST,appreciative reader
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 05:58 PM

refresh

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 9
From: Jim the Bart
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 06:03 PM

Thanks

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 9
From: Amos
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 06:07 PM

Your pen, like a soft strange voice in court, has the power of seizing up all noise when it speaks; everything that was loud and tawdry and self-serving is arrested, as though struck dead by sunlight, while your special words grab the stalled stage, briefly, and return it to a better life.

Thank you for writing for us, PT...

A

Subject: RE: Occasional Piece, Aug 9
From: wysiwyg
Date: 09 Aug 01 - 06:13 PM

Sigh.... Occasional Peace... whenever you write, Peter. There is none like just you to do it, you know. *G*

When I attend our church's main Sunday AM service (only very rarely these days), and sit out in the pews... or when I attend a funeral in our parish... I sit somewhere different each time, it usually turns out.

While waiting, I often take out and open the blue Book of Common Prayer used in our services, to see the bookplate in front-- which parishioner gave the book, and in whose memory? Is it a new bookplate, or an old, yellowed one? Do I know the family? Are any of them still living? Was this something a present-time, elderly friend of ours gave long ago to remember a beloved parent... or a lost child perhaps, someone they never mention now but whose loss aches beneath their sadly-wise smiles?

I look each time, in hopes that this may give me yet another clue about the cousins they so readily see in each other-- those kinlines still invisible to us interloping "flatlanders" till someone shows their stripe.

Hardi and I... we mingle among them to serve, daily.... to help and to help heal... never knowing just where the hurts may lie, and where the joys, until they speak in trust and allow us a tad closer to their hearts.

In those moments, I have (and observe myself having) reflections that are not so different from your own.

~Susan