Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje, here, discusses Amil's Ghost, but also discusses Sri Lanka, his life, his career, writing and poetry.

May Readings

I've got quite a few books on my bedside table. I'm making scattered attempts at reading: Capote's In Cold Blood, Sudye Cauthen's Southern Comfort, James Olney's Memory & Narrative, Emma Goldman's Anarchy & Other Essays, His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Science of Being and Art of Living, and Eckhart Tolle's The New Earth. One would think I'd concentrate on planning my summer class (Introduction to Creative Writing) but there's always time for that the day before the class begins. Well, I've taught it so many times.

Here's my latest thought about rearranging my memoir manuscript: it opens in Sopchoppy, Florida where I'm sitting by a fire I've built after a day of pulling weeds. Some friends are over and they're visiting me at my new place where I'm living in a tent behind my boyfriend's cabin. We get to talking and my mind wanders...back to my life in Pahokee, then to my life in New York, but always back to the present where I'm thinking about books, politics, communities, culture, art, etc and I'm living so sparingly: taking baths by candlelight from water in a bucket, walking to the outhouse to use the bathroom, squatting to take a pee, growing a garden, fighting weeds, nurturing a pond, learning home remedies, eating wild blackberries, and taking my dog for a long walk every night. I'm also writing this book in my tent. So I'm thinking about my life and how I got here. My 13 year old daughter sleeps beside me in the tent, and I'm struck with how my ideals are screwing up her life.

a Pablo Neruda poem

In The Night

In the night we shall go in,
we shall go in to steal
a flowering, flowering branch.

We shall climb over the wall
in the darkness of the alien garden,
two shadows in the shadow.

Winter is not yet gone,
and the apple tree appears
suddenly changed into
a fragment of cascade stars.

In the night we shall go in
up to its trembling firmament,
and your hands, your little hands
and mine will steal the stars.

And silently to our house
in the night and the shadow,
perfume's silent step,
and with starry feet,
the clear body of spring.

Some Literary Blogs & Current Readings/Sightings

Blogger Jessa Crispin has done a great job of creating an interesting book-lovers blog at BookSlut.

But if you dislike the corporate ads and you need to attach and trust a literary critic, I highly recommend Laila Lalami's blog because she's personal, plus you can see a photo of her writing space. I like that. Maybe I'll add one of those here.

Me? I've recently reread Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal and caught myself wondering how satire might be used to get out of Iraq: a proposal to nuke the Middle East until it's one big hole in the ground? (I'm kidding.)

Saw the movie Byron today. British Jonney Lee Miller does a terrific job as the tortured, pleasurist poet who receives more than his share of society's disdain. My only gripe was not giving Mary Shelley and the famous horror-story challenge more of a place in Byron's life. Oh well. I do have new sympathy for Lord Byron. Now I want to revisit the movie Pandemonium about Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth as I'm having trouble remembering which came first: the radical Byron gang or the Coleridge trio (plus Dorothy Wordsworth).

Next on my agenda: Alexander Pope's mock-heroic poem "The Rape of the Lock." Also still reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose which is a misleading title since it mostly focuses on a thorough understanding of the ego, but then, I'm not finished yet.

Doris Lessing Speaks (Nobel Prize Acceptance)

Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?"

But the essential question is: "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

The Last Night That She Lived

The last night that she lived,
It was a common night,
Except the dying; this to us
Made nature different.

We noticed smallest things,—
Things overlooked before,
By this great light upon our minds
Italicized, as 'twere.

That other could exist
While she must finish quite,
A jealousy for her arose
So nearly infinite.

We waited while she passed;
It was a narrow time,
Too jostled were our souls to speak,
At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot;
Then lightly as a reed
Bent to the water, shivered scarce,
Consented, and was dead.

And we, we placed the hair,
And drew the head erect;
And then an awful leisure was,
Our faith to regulate.

Emily Dickinson

Achebe Reminds Me

Re-reading Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" reminds me of how indelicate, fool-hearted, sometimes-evil, sometimes-cruel and ignornant, and sometimes-well-meaning Westernizing the native lands of America and Africa has been. It is easy with hindsight to see all the wrong ways European Christianity was introduced to Africa and all the obvious misunderstandings that took place, but having just discussed these things in my literature class, I'd like to move on to a more local and selfish concern about the nature of progress. Please forgive the huge leap from something so serious as the destruction of a people's culture to my own musings about progress in my home.

We cannot stop progress, right? But could we agree that some things, we've gotten right and don't need to improve. For instance, clean air can't really get any better, can it? We need clean air and water, right? That's pretty simple. I really like fresh food, homemade bread, home-cooked meals. We can improve the recipes, but there's a limit to how many machines we need in the kitchen. My friends know that I don't like dishwashers. It's not because I don't like the convenience, it's that I like to have a relationship with my plates and glasses. Oh, look at you laughing. Washing dishes is meditative, too. It's also an excuse to do work with friends or family when they come over for a meal. Just like taking the lawn mower apart might be an excuse for two men to stand around in an oily garage chatting. And, I like using cloth towels to wipe up spills instead of using paper towels. I wish I had time to grow my own food. There's nothing more delicious than the freshly harvested.

I like my p.c. Don't take away the internet, but Word Perfect was Perfect a few downgrades ago. The cell phone is ok (though I wonder if we might've been better off without it). But I don't need it to double as an entertainment device, calendar, or funky transformer.

Movies are great and becoming more incredible, but you still can't beat the experience of a live performance. And, that's just it isn't it? It's about our experiences. I want to be more alive and awake, not less. Sometimes, allowing machines to do things for us takes away the hassle and the pleasure all at once. Sometimes we don't see the pleasure behind the task.

I've been driving through south Georgia witnessing rolling white fields of cotton being harvested into huge square containers. I'm sure cotton pickers are happy to find other work besides the blistering, painful work of picking cotton, but there's something about the mechanical nature of growing something that gives and gives, sending in a machine every season to strip the bushes of their cotton bols. Does a farmer have any reason to walk through his fields any more? What about to write a poem? What about to experience the wind and the smell of his cotton. Hail, to the organic farmer who is setting things right again, who understands what parts of progress to adapt and what parts nature had already figured out.

Then, there's the postal service. I love getting mail. Ok, it's nice that Fed Ex exists as well, but that's all we need. It's perfect. Please don't change anything. Except maybe let's change the transportation (planes and automobiles) from oil guzzlers to something solar or wind powered.

Achebe also reminds me of how the Europeans once had a native, pagan culture before the Romans brought Christianity to Europe and forced a new religion on a people who were living close to the earth and celebrating its seasons. Those Romans, like the European Christians, took their new religion to a people and condemned the old religion and traditional culture. It labeled the native gods as Satanic. The Romans claimed that worshipping the native gods and performing native rituals was heresy. They introduced misogyny to Western civilization, claiming that women who understood herbal remedies, midwives, were witches, and that they needed to be burned alive. They loosened an hysterical holocaust killing and torturing millions of women for practicing their traditional ways.

It is often said that victims become vicitimizers. It seems somehow that this has been true in this larger sense of cultural domination. From Rome to Europe to Africa. That makes me wonder about Rome, but I'll save that for another post.