Phoebe Kate

My two sons are (among many other things) poets and lyricists, philosophers and singers. 

From the archives of my second son, the Arcane Jayer, a sample:

I DESCEND 

I descend into a rift,

a valley filled with a multitude

of porcelain and plaster.

Faces greet me with cold cement lips,

as I sift the dust for any remains.

The sun sets to allow

for the dawn of a new evil.

A frigid, unforgiving rock pile

substitutes for pillows’ comfort

and mattresses’ ease. With the utmost care,

 I force your head into these pillows,

a desolate goodnight under blankets

 of dust and mistrust.

I gaze at the moon from within this canyon;

the trees obscure the certainty of circumstances.

Behind the vagueness of truth we find our plaster casts;

molds that bind and ultimately allow the taking of a life

to be all right.

Bells ring in my head and bring me

back to the utter reality, that life

is nothing more then a snivel

underneath the barren blanket of dust.

Suffocating, we all choke

for the last breath of farewell.

                     ***

–phoebe kate

Now that my children are mostly grown, I’ve made an interesting discovery.  I really do love them.

Don’t get me wrong.  Of course I loved them when they were babies and little kids and bigger kids.  I can say with reasonable certainty that I must have loved them when they were in the Terrible Two’s and the Terrible Teens because they are still alive and I didn’t end up in the psych ward or the state pen.  The feeling of love during all those formative years of theirs, however, was very much overshadowed by a powerful sense of duty, of responsibility like a 24/7/365 toothache that lasted for two-plus decades.  It’s no joke that mothers have eyes in the backs of their heads and extra-sensory powers — they need them.              

Now that they are self-maintaining and self-governing, I finally have the luxury of being conscious of my love for my three children.  I can wallow shamelessly in the warm fuzzies and marvel at what interesting people popped out of the likes of me.

–phoebe kate 

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with
beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
—Don Marquis
(1878-1937, American Humorist, Journalist)

Everybody wants to live forever now.  We resist having an expiration date stamped on our existence.  Though intellectually, we understand that body parts, like the mechanisms of machines, wear out, we still deny the inevitable.

So why do we cling so fiercely to an existence that is not necessarily very satisfying when we have  ostensibly reached the end of our design life?

Did we not find that “happy moment” where we were burned up with beauty?  Do we think that if we hang around longer, we’ll somehow miraculously find it?  Or it will, even more miraculously, find us?

I know a lot of old people. They aren’t very happy, for the most part.  

Their main problem, it seems, is that they haven’t put to rest their old ghosts.  Until they (and we, too) do that, none of us will ever find happiness or peace or whatever it is we seek. 

We are our own jailers.  Only we can set ourselves free.

–phoebe kate 

“All good things come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”

—Norman Maclean (1902-1990, author of A River Runs Through It)

A few years back, I read an interview with much-lionized writer Thom Jones, a frequent fiction contributer to The New Yorker in the 1990s. When asked how long a particular story took him to write and how much he revised it, he replied that he wrote it in an afternoon and no revision was needed because he was at the top of his craft.

Well!  Mr. Jones certainly can’t be accused of being too modest, can he?

I don’t deny the benefits of being a seasoned craftsman.  After a few years of practice, one becomes adept at manipulating language, which admittedly makes the writing process faster and easier.  Our first drafts read pretty damn good and may get published.  We feel like good writers and in a certain sense, we are — just as a carpenter who’s learned to handle his tools well can quickly saw boards evenly and nail them together straight to make a chair or table.  Is it a work of art, though?       

Proficiency with words, however, has very little to do with the creative process, which leads us to write stories that are fully realized and truly unique.  It takes time and patience and thought, and then more time and more patience and a lot of re-thinking and rewriting to explore all the possibilities in our themes and our characters’ psyches. 

It’s hard work, because we’re just beginning to get acquainted with the people we’ve created and the situations they’re in.   It’s a 24/7 job because the right side of our brain can’t be turned off like a computer at the end of the day.  It’s demanding because we can’t write “The End” on the last page (whether it be a 100-word flash fiction or a 500,000-word epic) until we’re damn good and sure it really is — that we’ve gone as far as we can go with our ideas and expressed them in a way nobody else has done before or done better.  

Ursula Le Guin wrote, “It is good to have an end to journey toward.  But it is the journey that matters, in the end.”  It’s awesome to get first drafts published in A-list magazines, but I wonder if authors like Mr. Jones, in truncating the creative process, are missing out on all the real fun of being a writer.

–phoebe kate     

In the interests of objectivity and fair play, I watched the second episode of “Mad Men” last night.  It wasn’t any better than the first.  I give up.

For a literary nutritional supplement to offset the additives, filler and fluff of such shows, I suggest large doses of John Cheever.  He was, hands down, the master of artificial ingredient-free, totally spot-on sagas of mid-20^th century upwardly mobile suburbanites.  He wrote what he knew and lived what he wrote.  His complete collection of short stories is available used from Amazon for as little as $4.99, and it will pump much-needed reality into every fiber of your being. 

Try “The Swimmer.”  A good place to begin, as it may seem vaguely familiar.  It was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster and even if you missed it in 1968 (which you might have through no fault of your own, having not been born yet) you’ve probably caught this cautionary tale of the perils of too much success on AMC or TMC during a sleepless night or a week in bed with the flu.     

Then move on to sampling “The Seaside Houses,” and “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” and “The Death of Justina,” and “The Lowboy,” and “Just Tell Me Who It Was,” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.”  Feel better already, don’t you?

Or, if you’re short of time, just ingest these lines, spoken by a Manhattan yuppie wife in the story, “The Season of Divorce,” published in The New Yorker in 1978.  Her husband finds her inexplicably weeping in the middle of the night and asks why, to which she unexpectedly replies:

“Why do I cry?  I cry because I saw an old woman cuffing a little boy on Third Avenue.  She was drunk.  I can’t get it out of my mind…I cry because my father died when I was twelve and because my mother married a man I detested or thought I detested.  I cry because I had to wear an ugly dress—a hand-me-down dress—to a party twenty years ago and I didn’t have a good time.  I cry because of some unkindness I can’t remember.  I cry because I’m tired and I can’t sleep.”

Modern existential angst, eloquently defined in eight sentences. 

And there’s where well-meaning shows like “Mad Men” fail.  Life really isn’t all about glamour or power or sex or success.  It’s about the mysterious and seemingly bottomless chasm of emptiness inside, and the cup of pain from which we so eagerly drink and drink again, and the scary truth that none of us really knows who or what we want to be when — and if — we grow up.

–phoebe kate