Call Me Margaret

I went to Central Park today, looking for inspiration. I hoped that the sunshine and the people and the leaves and the sky and the city at its best would help restore to me some of my lost excitement.

Waiting for the subway I scanned the crowd intently, reaching in my mind to describe each person, hoping that in words I would discover the bliss of successful connection to my surroundings. Yet everything I thought was trite, and not a single person sparked the avenue of a story.

Smashed together on the 6 Train, I eavesdropped and eavespeeked over the shoulders of the tall, duck faced women looking at pictures on a digital camera. Mother and daughter visiting the city, trying to capture it all, discussing the revelrous habits of their various friends. And shockingly enough, the pictures contained artistry, telling me that the woman who took them saw things, still life moments hidden in alleys, the kind that most people overlook entirely. There was something there, yet still I remained uninspired. I was listening out of habit, out of a sense of duty perhaps, but my overloaded soul couldn't feel the thrill of the involuntary window I peered through.

Out of the subway and walking toward the park, I stared down the avenues to the haven at their terminus, brightly-colored foliage growing ever closer as I approached it, framed by buildings and slanted in sunlight. Mimicking the women on the train, I took out my digital camera and attempted to capture the sight. With time and proper care I knew I could frame a perfect shot, lines and angles, colors and textures, blending to a harmony that would say something about that moment. But on the street with the people rushing by, with my backpack making me feel weighted down and awkward, with the fear of being condemned as a tourist, I was too much a coward to stop. I took pictures without pausing, and they did not give me what I sought.

In the park I walked down paths and up stairs, looking at the faces of the people for some who would match my own. None did. I looked at the trees. I looked at the ground. The ground was covered in leaves, huge expanses covered with thick carpet, and I walked across them and thought the words of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my favorite poets.

And after I wandered aimlessly around the meadow feeling alone until I chose a spot at random, and after I lay down on the grass and bent my head over my book, and after I didn't start a conversation with the two British guys who looked down as they walked by and said hello, and after I lost myself in my book for a while, and after I got too cold and decided to leave, I walked again through the worlds of wanwood and thought Gerard Manley Hopkins in my head.

And that is the only inspiration I found today. And it is a cold, backward sort; the kind that leaves me feeling lost. And here I am: but where?

Spring and Fall
to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Still Life in Perpetual Motion

Because I wanted to share this with you:

I walk and walk and walk breathing fast and sharp. The world is one crisp cool leaf-clung wonder spangled red and amber. The wet air fills my lungs with a tangible taste and the gray-blue cloud-dappled sky swallows my fears, lending me its grandeur. How could I hide from a world as large as this? As full of promise and the green living ground that springs back at me under my heels. There is only the earth and the sky and the movement and the music and me, and I know that hope will never be dead, not while the world opens its arms to tell me how little I matter, and how much. And there is water, rippled and creased, holding in it the sky and all its expanse, but deeper still. And where the lily pads gather the moss creeps up soft and a thick slimy cover floats on the dusky surface—there!—behind that rock the frogs hide. The golden brown chips crunch under the toes of my boots and I walk, like a queen, beneath a dark enclosed canopy of stark-stripped twigs woven into an impenetrable archway heralding my approach. It’s quieter here; it could have been a century ago or more, and perhaps it is. My steps echo slower until I reenter the open world and there are people again and I’m heading toward some goal. The sun peeks out for a moment to remind me of its presence and its reflection off the water dazzles my eyes. And then I’m moving, recalling that these boots were not made for walking, with the exquisite ache of each solid step as the hard ground refuses to yield to my worn heels. The air still bites cool, but I feel heat, my own heat, because I am alive, alive, alive—and while that fact is true, and while the mountains wait on the horizon in shady blue silence, and while the fallen leaves dust my loosened hair—I will keep moving forward.

Of Violets and Light

I have just finished E.M. Forster's "A Room With a View." If you have not read it lately, I recommend that you do. It contains all that a book should: Truth, beauty, hope.

Sometimes, a book affects me this way. Making my breath come fast, my cheeks flush, my heart beat, merely from the truth and beauty of it. When I read a book that is truly successful, it touches me, in a physical way—with tears, with a tangible joy; a feeling of soaring, of extending somehow beyond myself, a strange and marvelous connection. It is not the plot that affects me thus—I never cry at the death of a character, rarely rejoice in a long-awaited reunion of lovers. It is the Truths behind the words—it is always the ideas—that affect me in this way. And this is the power of writing: the power of speaking to the soul, a power that is unique.

I dare not hope to harness such a power—this ability is bestowed on infinitely fewer mortals than live to see their names in print—but if I can channel even a small fraction of this gift, even just once in my life, I will have achieved something wonderful; I will have experienced a euphoria unintelligible to those who have never sought it.

In the meantime, I can only bask in the accomplishments of others, awestruck, benefiting immeasurably from their ability to somehow compress Truth and fit it between the slim and physical covers of a magically transcendent tool that I can hold in my hand.