Kingsolver & Solnit: Save Something

Inadvertent leaf fall,
right on the top of my Americano!

I love these twin quotes
from Kingsolver & Solnit:

“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love."

Rebecca Solnit (b 1961)
From "A piece for all hard times"

Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable.

But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. If you feel crushed by unkindness today, it’s a time for grieving, reaching out to loved ones, noticing one bright color somewhere in the day. Remembering what there is to love. Starting with the immediate, the place and people we can tend ourselves, and make safe. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Because there are so many of us to do it.

And we are all still here today, exactly as we were yesterday. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse.

Barbara Kingsolver (b 1955)
posted and shared a year ago,
the day after the 2024 presidential election.
True again this year, as we regain some hope
hope with the first quarter - term elections.

~ 2025 ~

Whenever we go to England in the autumn,
we find a recent harvest of fruit.

~ 2016 / 2017 ~

P.S.
Remember what Rose tells Finn in The Last Jedi:
"That’s how we’re gonna win.
Not fighting what we hate,
but saving what we love."

More Kingsolver: QK ~ FN ~ KL
More Solnit: FN ~ KL

Ellie Reading and Rearranging

Earlier this month, Ellie came up with her own plan
of removing a shelf - length of books & stacking them
all as high as she could reach on top of Gerry's desk.

My friend Len wrote:

"Wonderful photograph capturing the concentration and joy of rearranging books (with the hint of dangerous adventure!). I remember when Leah was first able to crawl around and reach for items on the shelves. We had to keep the bottom shelves tightly packed or she pulled them down on her head. But perhaps this was an early forecast of the great pleasure she has still rearranging books and shelves."

For her project, Ellie picked the section of cookbooks that overlap with autobiography. Here she is, placing Michael Pollan's Food Rules on top of Nora Ephron's Heartburn.

When she picked up Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a copy of this poem fell out. I forgot that I had stuck it in there -- no doubt, "for future reference" -- several years ago. Unfortunately, many of the things I store away "for future reference" end up lost forever; but luckily, this one has made its way back to me.

Hope; An Owner's Manual

Look, you might as well know, this thing
is going to take endless repair: rubber bands,
crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse.
Nineteenth century novels. Heartstrings, sunrise:
all of these are useful. Also, feathers.

To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand
on an incline, where everything looks possible;
on the line you drew yourself. Or in
the grocery line, making faces at a toddler
secretly, over his mother's shoulder.
You might have to pop the clutch and run
past all the evidence. Past everyone who is
laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don't
want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go,
passing time, passing strange. Don't pass this up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off.
Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing
in the bank, you'll still want to take the express.
Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping
in the shade of your future. Pay at the window.
Pass your hope like a bad check.
You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.

by Barbara Kingsolver
from "How to be Hopeful"
her commencement address at Duke University
Durham, North Carolina, May 11, 2008.
Published online by Duke Today

Also included in Kingsolver's poetry collection:
How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

*********************

See also:
Leonard Orr's poem: "Desperate Times."
Risk and hope are so much alike, after all.

&

A Year of Ellie Reading
@Kitti's Book List
“Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows
she can read printed words. . . . From that time on,
the world was hers for the reading”!

from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith

********************

&

Reading Charm
@Kitti's Book List
"What an astonishing thing a book is. . . .
proof that humans are capable of working magic"!

from Cosmos
by Carl Sagan

Poems for Moving Day

"Goodbye, beautiful empty house . . .
Walls we painted, shelves we built, floors we polished . . . "
[By "we" I mean Gerry!]
Starting Out
Suddenly your life is packed away
in boxes and the present
is no longer home
again. You think
I must never leave
any of this. You feel
like a great historical epic,
capturing every moment around
you: the turning of keys, the entering
into rooms, your hand resting comfortably
on the light switch.

And then you are going,
the faces of your friends growing small
as they wave in the rearview mirror,
the sign at the city limits saying
COME BACK SOON

********

Then you are past stopping.
You would like to think you know
where you're going --
the map marked, the road clear.
But how will you know
when you get there?
the signs all blank
on this side, the roads narrowed
to a fine black line
behind you.

It may be you will never see any of this
again, coming suddenly bright
on the dark edges
of sleep. or perhaps in the early
morning hours of some future room you will sit down
to write all this and find
it is the letter from home you've been waiting for.

Joyce Barlow, American Poet
poem from The Chariton Review,
Fall 1977 (vol 3 no 2)

Since first reading Joyce Barlow's poem in 1977, I have never failed to feel like "a great historical epic" whenever the occasion calls for such; and I was delighted, more recently, by the similarity of Barbara Kingsolver's sentiment:

Away went our little family,
like rats leaping off the burning ship.
It hurt to think about everything at once:
our friends, our desert, old home, new home.
We felt giddy and tragic
as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go market
on the outside edge of Tuscon.
Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up,
of course, and buy snacks for the road.
Barbara Kingsolver
from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
p. 2 (emphasis added)

For more poems about packing up and leaving, see
"Moving Day"
yesterday's new post on
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

Hope Like a Bad Check

Available at Amazon & Target

A poem for graduation time . . .

Hope; An Owner's Manual

Look, you might as well know, this thing
is going to take endless repair: rubber bands,
crazy glue, tapioca, the square of the hypotenuse.
Nineteenth century novels. Heartstrings, sunrise:
all of these are useful. Also, feathers. [emphasis added]

To keep it humming, sometimes you have to stand
on an incline, where everything looks possible;
on the line you drew yourself. Or in
the grocery line, making faces at a toddler
secretly, over his mother's shoulder.

You might have to pop the clutch and run
past all the evidence. Past everyone who is
laughing or praying for you. Definitely you don't
want to go directly to jail, but still, here you go,
passing time, passing strange. Don't pass this up.

In the worst of times, you will have to pass it off.
Park it and fly by the seat of your pants. With nothing
in the bank, you'll still want to take the express.
Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse that are sleeping
in the shade of your future. Pay at the window.
Pass your hope like a bad check.
You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.

by Barbara Kingsolver
from "How to be Hopeful"
her commencement address at Duke University
Durham, North Carolina, May 11, 2008.
Published online by Duke Today

Also included in Kingsolver's poetry collection:
How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

And this one by Emily Dickinson goes along with it:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
(poem #314)

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm-
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

~Emily Dickinson
See also: "Hope is a Strange Invention"
& commentary by Duo Dickinson
& "This World is Not Conclusion"

And for additional good luck:
"Feather Bag, Stick Bag"

In the Spirit of the Graduation Season!

Puttin' On The Style!

Check out:
KITTI CARRIKER: A FORTNIGHTLY LITERARY BLOG OF CONNECTION & COINCIDENCE
www.kitticarriker.blogspot.com





. . . and you'll notice that my latest Fortnightly post is about one of my favorite songs from the movie Agnes Browne, really one of my favorite songs from anywhere: Laura Smith's rendition of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean." Another tune from the Agnes Browne soundtrack that always give me a chuckle is "Puttin' on the Style" (The Fleadh Cowboys / Lonnie Donegan version):

"Sweet sixteen goes to church just to see the boys
Laughs and screams and giggles at every little noise
Turns her face a little, and turns her head awhile
But everybody knows she's only puttin' on the style

Oh, puttin' on the agony, puttin' on the style
That's what all the young folks are doing all the while
And as I look around me I sometimes have to smile
Seeing all the young folks puttin' on the style"

Anyone who knows me very well knows that I'm not much of one for "puttin on the agony" (No whalebone, please! Heels, rarely. Contact lenses and mascara, only for photo ops). I'm more like Barbara Kingsolver who writes that she leans "toward dresses that make contact with the body (if at all) only on the shiatsu accu-pressure points" (from "Life Without Go-Go Boots," special feature essay in the Lands' End catalog, Spring 1990).

For the picture above, I was definitely in violation of the Kingsolver principle. Though it may not show, I was absolutely SQUEEZED into that dress like a mermaid. I truly felt like Scarlett O'Hara being laced up when I sucked in to have my zipper done. Yikes! I knew that I was in for a long night of puttin' on the agony, puttin' on the style!

Photography tip: You'll notice that by wearing black and standing real close to one's dinner date (also dressed in black), one's individual girth measurement becomes indeterminate! Ha!

Here we are on our way to see Tony Bennett:











And my friend Victoria Amador with Tony!
Talk about PUTTIN' ON THE STYLE!

How to Keep on Hoping

"GIRL WITH RED BALLOON: THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE"
BY CONTEMPORARY BRITISH GRAFFITI ARTIST BANKSY
". . .the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. . . . Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides."
by Barbara Kingsolver
from her novel Animal Dreams (224, 299)
So how to keep hoping? How to figure out what to hope for? How to keep from selling out to the general churlishness?

Send answers soon!

FOR SOME ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON HOPE
SEE TODAY'S NEW POST
ON THE FORTNIGHTLY KITTI CARRIKER
MY LITERARY BLOG OF CONNECTION & COINCIDENCE

Day of the Dead

Sunnyside Cemetery on Thanksgiving Day 2007
Caney, Kansas
In Barbara Kingsolver's sad but magical novel Animal Dreams, the narrator, Codi Noline, joins the people of Grace, Arizona, for "the town's biggest holiday, the Day of All Souls." They walk together to the cemetery to weed and tend the family graves, decorate with marigolds, and enjoy the traditional skull-shaped candies with the children:

"It was the bittersweet Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, democratic follow-up to the Catholic celebration of All Hallows. Some people had business with the saints on November 1, and so went to mass, but on November 2, everybody had business at the graveyard." (158 - 59)

Whenever November 2nd and May 30th roll around, I always wish I lived nearer to the cemeteries where most of my loved ones and ancestors are buried so that I too could pay a visit and decorate the graves in the time - honored fashion. When I was growing up, months and months might pass between visits to our grandparents, but we never missed Thanksgiving or Memorial Day weekend.

No matter what the weather, on Memorial Day we spent a good part of the day at the cemetery, attending various ceremonies and speeches in honor of the Veterans and the War Dead; placing wreathes and potted plants; sometimes even planting flowers that would bloom throughout the summer. Nobody really says "Decoration Day" anymore, but that's what I remember calling it when I was small -- because we decorated! If I was lucky enough to spend a week or two of summer vacation with my grandparents, we spent the evenings one of two ways -- sitting on the porch or taking a walk to Sunnyside Cemetery. Those were happy times for me, tagging along, picking stray flowers, and listening to the old stories about those at rest there.

At Thanksgiving, when the cemetery was bare and empty -- no parades, podiums or bands; very few visitors, very few flowers -- even then we didn't miss the opportunity to wander from grave to grave, paying our respects. I guess that was our Midwestern way of observing All Souls -- just three or four weeks late.

These days, I live only a few blocks from the nearest local cemetery and can spend a reflective hour there anytime, thinking of the old days, reading the names of strangers, but it's not quite the same. As Codi says:

"More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own." (165)

*******************
And this from Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree: "It's both happy and sad. It's all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it's almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but that's no mind, they're THERE. It's like holding hands at a séance with your friends, but some of the friends gone."
(118 - 19)