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The Void and Story

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

One of the more harrowing experiences I had recently was offering up testimony in a county courthouse. In a large, wood-panelled room with no windows, separated from the landscape I know and love – my children and the dark-green mountains where I live, the world of singing crickets and flower petals easily frost-bit, the sky sprawled infinitely overhead, I was asked to give my story.

What’s in each of our own, unique stories, anyway? Breath, thought, memory: words from my larynx spun from the slender bends of my ribcage. To return to David Hinton’s Experience again, while speaking I realized how keenly our stories are presence surrounded by absence. Into this unknown world, I told my story of fear and love, my presence filling that space. In this 21st-century American world, we’re accustomed to defining ourselves in terms of our acquisitions: degrees we hold, a dwelling, occupation, the clothing we choose each day, political beliefs we cherish, whether we raise our own meat and vegetables or buy boxed foodstuffs at Price Chopper. Pushed up the against the razor’s edge of the void – through illness or a turn of misfortune we’ll all experience – we’re left with only a body created from carbon and calcium, and the immaterial thread of our story.

Our stories, always imperfectly told, are not a reflection or mirror of who we are. The stories are who we are. Hand-in-hand with telling our stories is that persistency of doubt. Is this true? Is my story worth telling? For a writer: why write, anyway? The answer, perhaps, may be as simple and raw-edged as this: because at our hearts, we are but the conjoining of body and story. In the face of the void that courthouse morning, my story hooked into strangers’ stories, as my story now weaves into yours, and yours winds into others.

In Chinese with its empty grammar, Absence appears as the space surrounding the ideograms, and ideograms emerge from that empty source exactly like Presence’s ten thousand things – a fact emphasized in the pictographic nature of ideograms, and no doubt the ultimate reason for that pictographic nature. Indeed, the ideograms are themselves infused with that emptiness, as they are images composed of lines and voids, Presence and Absence…

David Hinton, Experience: A Story

 

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Elm Street, Montpelier, Vermont

On the Cusp

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The raucousness of Vermont summer simmers down in September. The songbirds are long finished with their mating season, and our main company these days is the constant sizzle of crickets.

As if she sensed the quietness, too, my 11-year-old and I played cribbage after school, drinking lemonade with the kitchen windows wide open and eating tomatoes. My kid’s favorite snack these days are tomatoes, juicily ripe, still warm from the vine. Before bed tonight, she stood on the balcony, the curve of moon hidden in an apple tree.

Summer’s nearly shot all its splendor out. What’s growing in the garden has hit its threshold, except for some greens and the squash still fattening under the cover of its vines.

It’s a poignant time in many ways, with the days shortening rapidly, but the afternoons steamy enough to swim. I always consider September full of many things: back to schoolbooks but still digging in the dirt, the tempo winding down, the wild beauty of autumn’s song just around the bend.

Dry cheerful cricket
chirping, keeps
the autumn gay…
Contemptuous of frost

– Bashō

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Craftsbury Common, Vermont

 

Dissolution

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

My dad, the physicist, had a phrase when I was growing up: this is a high entropy day, kids. Generally, this involved car repairs, a busted hot water heater which happened surprisingly frequently in my childhood home, cracked roof valleys, or any other number of household calamities.

Entropy is an apt word for my existence these days, as – in addition to my broken washing machine – I’m breaking apart a business I spent the bulk of my adult life building, sending physical pieces to this nice couple, that retired gentleman, and so on. Here, again, is that theme of creation and destruction braiding together: any gardener knows growth and decay are not opposites but different bends of the same process, always coming and going, ceaselessly.

And so, in my pre-dawn reading these days of Chinese poetry, I’m evolving to know on a deeper and more biting level that literature is as real as the mound of scrap metal my daughters and I moved today: that poetry is essential precisely because it reflects that universal experience of dissolution and rebirth, the immutability and inevitably of change. More than anything else, I’m reading this poetry because it pulses with the same pounding heartbeat of ceaseless desire that – in varying tones and intensity – links us all.

Vast and deep, everything and everywhere: existence is alive somehow  – magically, mysteriously, inexplicably alive. Nothing holds still…. nowhere does it appear so directly or dramatically as in the twisting and tumbling form of dragon. Fear and revered as the awesome force of change, of life itself, dragon is China’s mythological embodiment of the ten thousand things tumbling through their traceless transformations. Small as a silkworm and vast as all heaven and earth, dragon descends into deep waters in autumn, where it hibernates until spring, when its reawakening manifests the return of life to earth.

– David Hinton, Existence: A Story

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Hardwick, Vermont

 

Why I Like Kids

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m at a point in my life where I’m often more surrounded by kids than adults; fortunately, some of my kids’ friends are sweet, some witty, and all far more entertaining than annoying – a feature which goes a very long way with me, regardless of child or grownup.

I was thinking of this again when the neighbor boy stopped by on his bike today and cheerfully helped move a load of scrap metal. But what I was really thinking about was David Hinton’s book Existence I was reading extremely early this morning. When I asked the kids to pry open up a door in the sugarhouse that was seriously nailed shut, they said, Oh yeah, and scavenged around for a crowbar and maul. They accomplished the task, but, more precisely, they accomplished the task with gusto, and then each ate a Klondike bar, my younger daughter’s new culinary find. Who knew you could buy a six-pack of Klondike bars at the Hardwick Village Market? My daughter knew.

Maybe one of the reasons I enjoy these kids so much (besides their inherent lovableness) is that kids are often, hands down, better people than adults. Braver, certainly more honest, and generally right there. Reading David Hinton made me realize children are far nearer to Chinese sages, too.

…China’s ancient sages assumed that this immediate experience of empty awareness was the beginning place, that dwelling here in the beginning, free of thought and identity, is where we are most fundamentally ourselves, and also where deep insight in the nature of consciousness and reality logically begins….you can begin at the beginning anytime, anywhere. A simple room, for instance, morning sunlight through windows lighting the floor; a sidewalk cafe, empty wine glass on the table, trees rustling in a slight breeze, sunlit passersby; a routine walk through a park, late-autumn trees bare, rain clattering in fallen leaves.

– David Hinton, Experience

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Molly on a photography shoot, Craftsbury Common, Vermont

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flowering Knotweed

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Biking in Stowe this afternoon, my daughter and I passed enormously large thickets of Japanese knotweed, blooming with tiny, delicate flowers – an invasive I studiously avoid. No knotweed rooting on my terrain!

I was reminded of a line from Sophocles my father mentioned this summer: Nothing great enters the life of mortals without a curse. Biking fast to keep up with my 11-year-old, darting around tykes on training wheels and a contingency of strollers, I thought of that phrase’s inverse. I’ve always been particularly annoyed by the adage to squeeze lemons into lemonade, as if an impromptu tea party solves anything, but might a curse also have a slender thread of goodness?

Poor Japanese knotweed: so maligned and despised in my Vermont world. In a profusion of flowers, I bent near and inhaled its sweet fragrance, the petals trembling with pollinators.

Poverty’s child –
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.

– Matsu Bashō

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Stowe, Vermont

 

Raising Daughters: Heroine V. Princess

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

Sometimes I think, what a raw deal my daughters have, with a writer for a mother. The writers I know don’t check out and take days off. Writers are likely to be trying to read your to-do list you’re holding while waiting in the grocery check-out line.

But then there’s this: Ann Patchett in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage tells how, when she dragged herself back to her mother’s house after the collapse of her marriage, her mother insisted that, yes, indeed, Ann was yet the heroine in her life’s story. Although I never use the heroine word with my daughters, I’m keenly aware I’m raising them as heroines and not as princesses. The difference is distinct.

While clearly I want to stave off the wolves of hunger and cold at our door, I’ve never intended to garner ermine cloaks or a palace for my girls. I’d prefer for the girls to know themselves neither in need of saving by prince charming, or required to save that somewhat dubious character, either.

As a teenager, I read a great deal of Joseph Campbell, and I’ve returned repeatedly to Campbell’s hero quest. I remind myself at moments of keen doubt – what am I doing as a parent, anyway? who let me lead this drama? – that doubt is a key element of any heroine’s path. Embrace, and move eagerly on to the next phase.

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.

– Joseph Campbell

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