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Whale Bones

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Vermont’s state fossil is the Charlotte Whale, a whale skeleton unearthed in a farmer’s field over 150 years ago. The skeleton is not Moby Dick-sized, a detail I should have researched before visiting with my 11-year-old daughter. Almost immediately, I realized I was in for Act 2 of the Hope Diamond. (That little thing is the largest diamond on the planet?)

The reality is, the whale skeleton is about as cool as cool can be, hand-wired together and displayed in UVM’s Perkins Museum; admission free. My children and I walked in, took a self-tour, and left without seeing a living soul. 11,00o years ago, these beauties were swimming right where we ate ice cream on a sunny June afternoon.

To an 11-year-old, five years spans an eternity; 11,000 years is imaginary. The number may  mean little, but the whale – enamored of or not – this child is unlikely to forget.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee!

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

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Photo by Molly S.

Revision: Made by Hand

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

I’m revising both a book and my knitting these days, yanking apart for the fourth time the same skein of yarn. At some not-too-distant unraveling, this lovely yarn may disintegrate. Isn’t revision one of the great beauties of knitting? Unlike in my own life, I can re-do, refashion, re-envision. That’s a gift in writing, too, that the writer cannot use in her own life.

I keep returning to that Aristotelian word teleology from my undergraduate philosophy days. What is the purpose of this ball of yarn? How can I aid that lovely azure linen to achieve its intended purpose? What is the purpose of the book I’m writing, and how do all these pieces within help achieve that end?

Here’s the faith aspect: I’ll find the proper gauge and use for this yarn. The writing will clear. And what cannot be undone in a human life is an intrinsic part of the whole.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy “To Be of Use”

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Shelburne, Vermont

Girls Under the Influence of Moonlight

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

The moonlight shone mightily last night. My daughter and her friend made a bed beside the large living room window and lay watching firefires through the screen. They were hot, satiated after a day of soccer and lake swimming, roasting marshmallows outside over a fire.

In the evening, a breeze flipped the leaves upside down, a sure sign of a rainstorm coming in. Reading The Little Red Chairs upstairs with the windows and balcony door open wide, the frogs and owls sang. I listened for the little girls to quiet, but they kept whispering, and I heard them laughing as they played cards by flashlight. Later, they ran up the stairs, enormously excited as the teenage sister had snagged a mouse in the live trap, and could they, please, they begged, hands folded beneath their chins, drive the mouse down the road to find a new house in a field?

We were at that point in the night where I wasn’t sure whether anyone would sleep at all, but the night was so magically alive, just brilliant with moonbeams, and the little girls were so excited at this mouse adventure, that the older sister of course took them along, too. Why not?

Later, when the thunderstorm broke, I walked around the house with the lightning flashing, the girls curled motionlessly in sleep, and I quietly closed the windows over their pillows. In the morning, sleepy-eyed, wrapped in the blankets against the cool after-storm temperature, they didn’t recall a drop of that midnight storm.

…The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies….
– Amy Lowell, “The Garden By Moonlight”

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Summer Song

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On this first day of summer, my daughters and I swam in Caspian Lake, the cold and beautifully clear water where we’ve swum for years. The earliest, this far north in Vermont, that I’ve swam there has been April, a month where the ice sometimes still knocks up against the shore. The latest was a sunny first of October, and that evening I knew I was pregnant with my second child.

Everyone must have their sacred spaces on this earth. Here’s one of mine, singing eternally the melody of the changing sky, water or ice, some measure of wind, and the children – happy, happy, happy, to be there. Yeah.

Juana sang softly an ancient song that had only three notes and yet endless variety of interval. And this was part of the family song too. It was all part. Sometimes it rose to an aching chord that caught the throat, saying this is safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole.

– John Steinbeck, The Pearl

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photo by Molly S./Greensboro, Vermont

Writing Dialogue

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There’s this odd word gnomon in James Joyce’s story “The Sisters” which is used in the mathematical manner: it’s a way of knowing a physical void by what is visible. That returns to that notion of understanding ourselves as creatures of change: not full and certainly not complete.

A writer once pointed out to me the gnomon is a way of writing dialogue, too. Truest dialogue always reflects the sub-story of what we’re not saying. We live in worlds of stories we create: the spoken story we share, and then all those winding sub-stories beneath.

Isn’t that partly what makes us so infuriating to each other at times, and, conversely, also so intoxicatingly fascinating? Behold, then, the strawberries, the nasturtiums, sun rising through a scrim of fog, the Milky Way arching through the black of a moonless night – this exquisite world we inhabit – and us, with our endless stories…. essence of our humanity.

 If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

–Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

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first berries from our garden

The Earth Herself

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In the garden, on this chilly, almost autumn-esque day, I pulled lettuce from a fattening line, admiring the myriad green. So much of writing is spinning the stuff of language into this three-dimensional world we inhabit. Our world is so amazingly complex, jammed ceaselessly with variations of color and light, that language at times seems a poor descriptor.

I always remind myself, begin at the beginning, with the very first word. Setting aside my basket of lovely leaves, my fingers crumbled dirt into my palm. Dirt? Or the earth itself, but a few grains of this celestial, spinning orb? Or Thomas Wolfe’s “loamy soil”? Or is this broken sod? Tenacious clay?

I held the handful near my face: black earth, lavish enough to devour.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air–these things will never change.

– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

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Woodbury, Vermont