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Post by christina61 on Oct 14, 2008 17:53:01 GMT 2
Here's a bit of Sarton on gardening to begin our journaling. Post anything you've written in response, please, so that all may enjoy and maybe a running commentary will spread like ivy across the miles.
I will post a quote from Audre Lorde the next time.
One of the passions Celine shared with my mother was the passion for gardening. Her own garden in Belgium slowly created over forty years, is a series of bosks and bowers and long allees, of perennial borders and unexpected formal squares that one may come upon around a hedge; it contains a small orchard where the grass is kept cut under the trees, a pond for the ducks, a potager exactly like a child's drawing, so neat it is. Her garden is a poem, haunted still by her poet-husband. "I see it now, an illuminated page. The assiduous monk in his joy did not spare Costly vermillion and gold, nor the rich sage. He painted a garden as haunting as aprayer, Where children rest still in a long revery. Stay, precious light, on the snow-white peony!" If I evoke it here, it is because I have just come upon a snapshot taken of Celine with me in what was to become my garden. Celine is seated on a hideous pile of rubble and loose rocks with some ragged bushes behind her, and I stand at her side, smiling the smile of the triumphant owner of the Paradise! She never questioned what I saw in my mind's eye, and eagerly shared in the vision of "what might be" one day. She did more; she set to work at once with the old gardener's expertise, her beautiful small hands grasing a spade with a strength I could not command, and began to dig up and prepare one of the beds in front of the house. These were choked by weeds and a mixture of orange day lilies, and pink, old-fashioned moss roses. Celine agreed with me that they did not go together, and we decided there and then to put the day lilies somewhere else. By the end of the morning I had been provided with a beautifully neat and deeply dug bed.
May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, 1968
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Post by christina61 on Nov 2, 2008 22:52:42 GMT 2
I have always envied May Sarton's ability during her lifetime to seemingly write about everything in her life: friends, politics, poetry, her childhood, her parents, her garden, animal companions, her partner Judy. I once had the opportunity to work in forty-year old flower beds when I was much younger and could actually bend my knees forever - now it seems - to do so. When I lived a rural solitary life, I read Sarton and reveled in how she could put down roots as a woman alone for much of her life and pay the bills, too. Putting down roots isn't something I have been able to do until much later in my own life. Sarton may have written her journals for public consumption, but what journals she wrote!!!
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Post by lisajean on Nov 3, 2008 15:22:45 GMT 2
I love May Sarton. Her journals are inspirational and whenever I dip into one I vow to write in mine everyday. Alas, that is not my style. I am a catch as, catch can, kind of journaler. That said, I do mine them for gold--or copper anyway.
I found a fingerprint in a library book I was reading and I noted it in my journal. Here is the poem that resulted from that entry:
Let’s Use Magnets to Hang this Drawing on the Refrigerator
There is a fingerprint in the book of poems I am reading. Not a dirty print but one engraved in the paper. I run my finger over it and feel the ridges. How long the reader must have held open the place, reading and rereading a poem that to me, is nothing special. Certainly the book contains others which are much better. But, maybe he was just holding his place while watching children walk by on the street outside the library, or listening to his seven year old daughter tell about the boy who pulled her hair on the bus ride to the museum to see the bones of a dinosaur, which she assures him was very big, but not scary at all.
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Post by christina61 on Nov 3, 2008 17:14:48 GMT 2
Finding that fingerprint in a book and then writing in your journal and eventually writing the poem about doing so, is a good connection in terms of the journal process, too. Our journal entries - daily or not - are like that fingerprint in a way, and the discovery inherent in the process may lead to more information, etc. just as a fingerprint can in terms of the legal world as well. I don't want to stretch the metaphor too far, though, because of the "criminal" connection to fingerprints in our society. I really like how your poem imagines how the fingerprint got there.
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Post by katebb on Nov 8, 2008 15:45:03 GMT 2
I've gobbled down most of Sarton's journals. She wrote them for publication; as I recall, she commented somewhere that there was a key distinction between the public and private journal. Thoughts?
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Post by christina61 on Nov 8, 2008 18:14:32 GMT 2
Yes, it was amazing that there was an audience for her journals so early on I think. She did write for publication; she was a writer who made a living at it and early on. I know that when I wrote my journals over these decades I never really considered an audience for them entire, but that I would pull out this poem, that line, idea, essay, short story, etc. and hopefully those could be published. When I was preparing my 30 years of journal for shipment to the U of M/Bentley Collection, I made certain to read each one and mark spots I may have initially missed in my first go-through after completing a journal for any soil rich enough to merit more work to bring something to fruition. I did occasionally quail at the thought that anyone would read what I had written otherwise but then quelled my fears. Of whom am I to be afraid? That's where Audre Lorde's wisdom helped. "Your silence will not protect you," is her oft-quoted phrase. She lived a passionately political life as a writer and a poet and left some very big footsteps to attempt to follow, but her candor and deep wit were to be emulated, however faulty the attempt on my part to do so.
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Post by tawhite on Nov 13, 2008 4:16:09 GMT 2
The links between gardening, journaling and silence -- and the question of private vs public -- seems to encompass much of May Sarton to me. I read her many moons ago and felt that she was an exceedingly private person, someone who was reticent even in those journals. Apparently, she lived a closeted life with her partner, up until her death, and then "came out" (though Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing was enough to convince me). I can envision her, clipping flowers, maintaining this active silence, and then writing her "journals." I have the feeling that Sarton used the journal form mostly as a means of publication. There was some resentment involved with her father, who was a scientist (I think) and well-published, and overshadowing Sarton's publishing attempts, as well as thwarting her identity. I often imagine that she had an entirely separate set of private journals that never saw publication.
And speaking of multiple journals... what about Anais Nin? Do we want to bring her up here?
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Post by christina61 on Nov 13, 2008 16:38:17 GMT 2
Oh, please do bring Nin into the mix. I have never read enough of her writings but was fascinated by her unique voice when I did.
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Post by tawhite on Nov 15, 2008 20:00:14 GMT 2
Oh, please do bring Nin into the mix. I have never read enough of her writings but was fascinated by her unique voice when I did. I'm not a great fan of Nin's writing. But her use of multiple journals might add a dimension to this conversation. During her life, she kept two (or more) journals, in part to deceive her husband, while she kept secret lovers and a second husband. Nin would go back and alter her journals. The effect was that she created a fiction of her life, and presented it as the reality of her life! Was this ethical, honest? Does it matter since the journals were created by a fiction writer, whose primary intention was to fabricate? Was this an empowering activity for Nin? Was she the creator of her own life - as it would be "revealed" in her publications and as her life would be revealed posthumously through the journals? Or was she a fraud? These are the kinds of questions that fascinate me when thinking of Non and her journal writing.
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Post by tawhite on Nov 15, 2008 20:02:08 GMT 2
oops -- that should be "Nin" though I suppose "Non" is also appropriate.
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Post by christina61 on Nov 16, 2008 17:48:46 GMT 2
I can't imagine going back and altering journals. Doing so, I think, creates another entity, but I am not sure what to call it. I had forgotten how Nin did that and now I am thinking that was probably off-putting to me at the time - 3 decades ago - though I was aware that many women were quite enamoured of Nin. Around that time I discovered Monique Wittig, who was writing that when facing memoir one should simply invent when memory is elusive as to the particular "facts". I didn't actually like that advice either. I believe that is where Lorde's work in autobiography/memoir might prove useful at least in terms of terminology. Biomythography seems to cover a lot of ground.
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