Theodora Goss

I’ve been so busy lately that it’s been difficult to keep up with blog posts. And I’m particularly tired tonight. So I thought that instead of trying to write something, I would post a poem I wrote a long time ago, “By Tidal Pools.” I’m posting this one because several days ago I posted “Circe” by H.D., and this is another Circe poem. Now, I am not H.D., nor was meant to be. But reading her poem reminded me of my own, which originally appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, back in 2001, the year I went to Clarion.

By Tidal Pools

At first she watched in case he should return,
By tidal pools where iridescent snails,
Tyrian and cochineal, crawled about,
Saltwater glistening on their subtle shells.

“He was like you,” she’d whisper, kneeling down,
One knee, and then another, on wet rock.
“Like you he wore his house upon his back,
Carrying Ithaca.” She would lean out

Over a tidal pool’s now-shadowed depths
And see, below, the snails, their shells gone dull,
Above them her reflection, dull as well.
Eventually her knees would cramp and ache.

She’d stand and each ridged whorl would glow again,
A demonstration of the dyer’s art.
Where she had knelt, her dress clung to her shins.
She’d whisper then, “Does he lie on some shore

Where snails leave glistening tracks upon his eyes,
Or has he found his home?” She’d turn and walk
Over the rocks while wavelets lapped her feet,
Wondering when the sea had grown so cold.

My Circe is less an enchantress than a woman walking by the seashore, thinking of all the things that have happened, wondering what will happen. Things are so busy, still. But I’d like to write poetry again, when I have the time. And the concentration.

I found an image for this poem too, but it’s not really a painting of Circe. It’s really Miranda, by John William Waterhouse. But I think this is what my Circe looks like.

I have always found sanctuaries. Once, I lived in a house that had a sort of closet under the stairs. No one used it, no one went into it at all – except me. I created a sort of place for myself there, with cushions and books.

Places in the forest behind the house were sanctuaries. Particularly where a stream ran by the roots of a large tree, and there was a sort of island where we used to play Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson. Putting acorns on leaves for food.

A sanctuary is any place where you can rest. Any place where you can feel at peace with yourself and the world. It’s a place where you breathe a sign of relief.

People can be sanctuaries too, I think. There are people with whom you can sit back, say to yourself “Yes, this.”

I’m writing about sanctuaries because this is such a busy time, and that’s exactly what I need: a sanctuary. A place where I can put down my head, rest for a while.

But I don’t think I’m going to get one, not a real one, in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. So I’m going to create one inside my head, imagine one. The imagined sanctuaries are sometimes the most useful, because they cost nothing and are fully portable. You can be walking along a busy road, hurrying somewhere, and suddenly you’re thinking:

A cottage by the sea, and the sound of the waves, and at night lighting a fire to warm yourself. And a mug of tea, and perhaps a friend and conversation. Or no conversation. And the sound of the waves all night, and the gulls in the morning.

Books are sometimes sanctuaries (again, portable). Even poems I find in random places can take me away, for a little while. Tonight, I found Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” and that’s a sort of sanctuary in verse. It goes like this:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

People can be sanctuaries, and places can be sanctuaries, and the whole natural world can be a kind of sanctuary, a place where we can rest, where we can feel at peace.  I started by writing that I find sanctuaries, but I think the truth is that I create them, whether in my head or in my life.  Or sometimes even in my writing.

At the Great Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary (some time ago, but memories can be sanctuaries too):

Because I turned in my dissertation shortly before classes started, I didn’t have much time to prepare. So this weekend I’ve been doing what I usually do before the semester starts, the initial planning and preparing. I’m slowly getting caught up. I’m still very tired, but hoping to recover in the next few weeks.

Today I planned for Monday, re-reading “The Great God Pan” (which is the story we’ll be starting with). And I read through the first writing assignment, in which I heard my students’ voices for the first time. Each semester I realized why I do this – because I genuinely love teaching, love the transformation that college students go through, particularly in the first year when they begin to discover themselves. Who they are, what they want, apart from what they’ve been told all their lives. (By their voices, I meant of course their writing voices – I’ve already heard their actual voices, since I always get them talking on the first day, so that the class is a genuine discussion throughout the semester.)

I’ve never once regretted leaving $100,000 a year and wearing suits and drafting contracts to do this. There’s such satisfaction in doing what you love and know you’re good at. What you’re meant to do. I’m still a writer first, but who I am as a writer is woven into who I am as a teacher, and my teaching helps me understand my writing. I think of myself as one of the fortunate ones of the earth in part because I have the ability to do what I love, all the things I love, and integrate them into a whole. It’s required sacrifices along the way, but doesn’t anything worthwhile?

I still have quite a lot of work to do tonight, so I’m going to post two videos that you might like, by The Band Perry. I like the first one because of the Lady of Shalott imagery, of course. But there’s also a sort of brightness and freshness to the music, an originality to it that I like a lot. It sounds individual, not manufactured. It has a quality to it that I’d like to capture in my writing.

The second video is more recent, but again I like the images, the aesthetic. (All right, the clothes. I like the clothes.) And it’s intensely romantic, and of course that’s good, right? “I don’t want the whole world, the sun, the moon and all their light . . .”  And all that.

Oh, and I want to walk around in a field like that, with tall grass and a stream running through it, in a gypsy skirt.  (Which brings us back to the clothes, doesn’t it? As always.)  With a man in a top hat who can pull a flower out of my hair . . .

Earlier this week, after I turned in the copies of my dissertation, we all went to Helen’s in Concord. I had a Patty Melt, which is a burger with onions and swiss on rye, and sweet potato fries. A lot of food, for me, but I was starving. While we were eating, a woman with gray hair sat down at a table nearby, within view of ours. When we were done, Ophelia and I walked toward the door. Kendrick was still back at the table, leaving a tip. When he caught up with us, he said, “That woman who was sitting close to us asked me if you were a dancer. I told her that you had taken dance classes. She said, ‘Tell her to go back to dancing. I can tell she misses it.'”

I said, “You know what just happened, right? One of the Fates came down to have dinner at Helen’s.” When one of the Fates tells you to do something, you’d better do it. So I’m going to take dance classes again. Or at least try – I’m not sure yet whether it will work with my schedule. But yesterday I took out my ballet shoes.  (I know, it’s silly to photograph them on a table.  But I was in the middle of cleaning, and it was an available space.)

Luckily, they’re almost brand new, just a little worn. (The previous pair was in tatters when I bought this one.) I also found my footless tights and the wrap skirts I usually wear for classes. But I couldn’t find any leotards. What in the world happened to them? I think I must simply have worn them out. So today I went to Patterson’s to buy new ones. The store was filled with girls trying on ballet shoes for the new semester, doing pliés and relevés at a barre.

To be honest, I’m a little intimidated every time I start dancing again. When I was a child, I stopped taking ballet before going en pointe, and since then I’ve only done it for exercise. I always envy the girls who took it all through their teenage years, who are far more graceful than I will ever be. But I can’t think of anything that challenges me physically the way ballet does. I suppose that’s why I take it. It’s the same impulse that makes me want to learn classical Greek.

(Can I mention that there is nothing like shopping for leotards to make you realize exactly how unfit you’ve become? Or I’ve become, in this instance, unfortunately.)

The Boston Ballet School has a studio about a half-hour drive away. I think I’ll take lessons there, rather than in the city, although I love the main studio downtown. It has classes that are called Beginner, Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced. The Advanced classes are for current or former professional dancers, which is a level I’ll never achieve, of course. So really there are three levels for me. I’ll need to go back to the Beginner classes, to start with. It’s been too long since I’ve danced. When I tried on my ballet shoes, I realized just how much I’ve lost: those strange things ballet develops, like muscles under the foot and flexibility bending the foot. I remember how it used to feel, to move each muscle separately, to have that sort of control. I don’t have that anymore.

So this is an experiment, to see if I can still do it. If I can dance again.

In the afternoon, I went to Concord, to one of the antiques shops there. I bought a Meakin transferware pitcher ($18).

I also bought a silverplate serving fork with one of my favorite patterns on it ($12).

And then I drove back to the house and began to prepare for winter. I can already feel a chill in the air, especially at night. So I put creamy flannel sheets on my bed, replaced the fan with a heater. But I’m not doing the things I usually do, planting bulbs for instance. This is a transitional period, so instead I’m preparing for the transition, however and whenever it comes. Sorting through books. Making sure I have what I need, giving away what I don’t. I think that’s a good thing to do, in autumn, which is a transitional season anyway.

I’m looking forward to dancing again – literally and metaphorically.

I’m so tired.  I can’t write anything today, so I will give you a poem.  It’s a love poem, about a woman who could have any man, but longed for one. (The sly Odysseus, of course.) This is “Circe” by H.D.

It was easy enough
to bend them to my wish,
it was easy enough
to alter them with a touch,
but you
adrift on the great sea,
how shall I call you back?

Cedar and white ash,
rock-cedar and sand plants
and tamarisk
red cedar and white cedar
and black cedar from the inmost forest,
fragrance upon fragrance
and all of my sea-magic is for nought.

It was easy enough –
a thought called them
from the sharp edges of the earth;
they prayed for a touch,
they cried for the sight of my face,
they entreated me
till in pity
I turned each to his own self.

Panther and panther,
then a black leopard
follows close –
black panther and red
and a great hound,
a god-like beast,
cut the sand in a clear ring
and shut me from the earth,
and cover the sea-sound
with their throats,
and the sea-roar with their own barks
and bellowing and snarls,
and the sea-stars
and the swirl of the sand,
and the rock-tamarisk
and the wind resonance –
but not your voice.

It is easy enough to call men
from the edges of the earth.
It is easy enough to summon them to my feet
with a thought –
it is beautiful to see the tall panther
and the sleek deer-hounds
circle in the dark.
It is easy enough
to make cedar and white ash fumes
into palaces
and to cover the sea-caves
with ivory and onyx.

But I would give up
rock-fringes of coral
and the inmost chamber
of my island palace
and my own gifts
and the whole region
of my power and magic
for your glance.

And this is my favorite image of Circe, as a sort of alchemist.  A transmuter of things – and people. By John William Waterhouse, of course.

No more status reports. There’s no more status to report. I’m done.

It’s a nice feeling.

That’s what I experienced today. For the last few days I’d been rushing around, trying to make sure I knew where to go, what to do and say for the start of the semester. So even after the dissertation was handed in, I was a bit frantic. But today I didn’t teach, and I just stayed home planning the semester. Doing work for later. And for the first time in three years, I didn’t have a dissertation to write. Oh, I have plenty of work that I’ll need to focus on soon. But that one enormous project was not hanging over my head. I felt almost light-headed from the sensation of it.

I’m still in that strange state where I don’t quite know what to write, still adjusting to life post-dissertation. So I’m going to give you more quotations from the wonderful Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing.

Bradbury lists some of his favorite writers, including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas. And he writes,

“Think of all these names and you think of big or little, but nonetheless important, zests, appetites, hungers. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvasses. These are the children of the gods. They knew fun in their work. No matter if creation came hard here and there along the way, or what illnesses and tragedies touched their most private lives. The important things are those passed down to us from their hands and minds and these are full to bursting with animal vigor and intellectual vitality. Their hatreds and despairs were reported with a kind of love.”

I love that last line, because I think that is what we do with our experiences, as writers: we take both the good and the bad of our lives and turn them into art, and in doing so we show a kind of love, because you have to love something to write about it, even if it’s hunger and cold and despair. Writers are alchemists. They turn the base metal of ordinary life into gold.

What Bradbury is talking about here is writing with a kind of zest and enjoyment for writing and for life, and I agree with that. Writing can be hard, but if it’s not something we enjoy doing, something we sit down to eagerly, we wouldn’t do it.

He continues:

“What has all this to do with writing the short story in our times?

“Only this: if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is – excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.”

I think that’s a useful thing for me, in particular, to keep in mind. Because I work in a field where we are told to pay attention to the market, to what’s going on commercially, what’s popular now. But if I pay too much attention, I won’t be paying attention to the stories inside my head, the stories that genuinely come from me or through me (however they come). Vincent Van Gogh paid attention to the images inside his head, and they came out of him, and they were magnificent even if no one recognized them at the time. And no, I don’t particularly want to end up like Van Gogh, but I do want to create things that are individual, that are recognizably mine. And that are worth creating for their own sake, even if no one reads them (although of course I want them to).

A final word from Bradbury:

“I have come up with a new simile to describe myself lately. It can be yours.

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.

“After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

“Now, it’s your turn. Jump!”

Which seems like an excellent way to end a blog post.

Today was the first day of teaching. Since it was cold and raining, I opted for jeans and a twinset. I don’t know why, but under the glare of fluorescent lights, I always look as though I’m not a human being but some sort of plastic doll.

I’m still very tired today, so I’m just going to say that Ghosts by Gaslight is finally available. It includes my story “Christopher Raven.” Here’s the terrific cover:

And here is the table of contents:

“The Iron Shroud” by James Morrow
“Music, When Soft Voices Die” by Peter S. Beagle
“The Shaddowwes Box” by Terry Dowling
“The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder As Experienced by Sir Magnus Holmes and Almost-Doctor Susan Shrike” by Garth Nix
“Why I Was Hanged” by Gene Wolfe
“The Proving of Smollett Standforth” by Margo Lanagan
“The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star” by Sean Williams
“Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar” by Robert Silverberg
“The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons” by John Langan
“Face to Face” by John Harwood
“Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism” by Richard Harland
“The Grave Reflection” by Marly Youmans
“Christopher Raven” by Theodora Goss
“Rose Street Attractors” by Lucius Shepard
“Blackwood’s Baby” by Laird Barron
“Mysteries of the Old Quarter” by Paul Park
“The Summer Palace” by Jeffrey Ford

I’m sure I’ll recover from dissertation-writing soon. Right? In the meantime, I think I just need plenty of rest, and healthy food, and exercise. Pushups starting tonight! And downward dogs. And downward dogs into pushups. And back.