Love Poem to a Horse

Do you remember?

When we rode horseback up the hill at night under the moon and
you rode down again and jumped the fence while I went round
by the gate afraid of the shadows we cast. That barn dance of
a beginning that ended like my car engine, in flames outside a
bar. I blew them out to everyone’s amazement.
After you weren’t there to remember, I still rode. You can’t
remember the first time on the California beach beneath the
cliffs and the overlooking mansions how the horses shied at
the waves and their hoofs sucked down into the wet sand as
the salty wind blew my hair in my face blinding me.
Nor do you remember riding the Morgan mare at an extended
trot long distance with the endurance Arabians for miles all day
after she stepped on my toe. Nor do you remember when I
was so pregnant and raked and hauled the manure as my son
played with it and I just laughed. Nor do you remember
after the baby died when I cried upon the neck of the Morgan
mare under the apple tree as she ate the fallen ones and the
mist turned to rain and the day to night. The time I rode the ridge
alone and looked down at the winking waves off the Pacific
coast is held only in my mind. The last time I saw the Morgan
mare and said goodbye because I was alone with only the boy
and a job and a house and it was just too much for one person
is only my memory. Somehow your riding lessons lasted so
much longer than you, for that I am grateful.
I miss the Morgan mare though she is long dead and you live.

Do You See Me Now? (Book Review ) Choi, Susan. Trust Exercise. Henry Holt, 2019.

Defined by the author as an exercise in dreaming, this winner of the National Book Award, to call this work a novel seems deceptive. That’s what Choi is – deceptive. Posing as love stories so well that the Library of Congress catalogs this work as such, the three sections of this work, the Trust Exercises, require the reader’s trust and their perception beyond the engaging tales Choi offers. Choi requires us to feel the cost of trust betrayed.

Trust Exercise #1 is easy to accept, we fall back into the arms of this story of David and Sarah, young love, first lust, the special drama high school, CAPA. Mr. Kingsley, the drama teacher, may be a little overwritten but we all have known too many of these to dismiss him as false. And, of course, this is a novel, so the reader must believe. The other students, Joelle, Manuel, Pammie, Karen, and Sarah are alive because we believe. “Acting is: fidelity to authentic emotion, under imagined circumstances” (48) and so we trust. But we get jolts (64) of an author’s voice to remind us of “truthful emotions in false circumstances” (66). But readers prefer the story, the beguiling story. In one exercise the students repeat a phrase, with varying emotion, intensity, meaning. So does Choi repeat with growing intensity the tune of youthful Eros until the ‘Month of the English’ and the performance of Candide. Choi repeats the sexual intensity until Sarah’s autonomy is lost in poor decisions, trust crushed, violated by power. Voltaire’s Candide discovering a disappointing, obscene, ugly world, retreats to the farm. Choi presses on.

Trust #2 opens by pulling the mask from the actor with a discussion of character naming. “I” arises and confronts the reader with the author of the first story. Karen, the narrator; Sarah the character. Choi continues mixing and deconstructing her characters within another plot in which, older Sarah takes revenge on Karen by orchestrating a play that maims Martin, the lecherous playwright. “I hadn’t broken the fourth wall for my own satisfaction…” Choi hints, poking the reader to pay attention; this is not just a fun ride. In her play within her play, there is violent revenge.

Trust #3 presents a therapeutic conversation between two “I”s before we rock back into the crib of story with Claire, a new name, “Claire means ‘clear’… (246)”. Candide was a bastard child, so is Claire. At the tribute for dead Robert Lord, a famous playwright, Claire flashes back to her visit to him. Convinced she is seeking the name of her mother, a former student. Lord’s response is to reject her, then lure her to his place and sexually assault her. Clair defends herself, but the reader now knows, maybe. Returning in time to Claire’s exit from Lord’s grand building in their first meeting, the reader realizes why names don’t matter, and do. “What did they name you, sweetheart?” asks Velva, the receptionist gatekeeper, her name a synonym for an exceptionally smooth vulva. (257)

Claire, Karen, Sarah, Joelle, Pammie, Manuel, all the children could carry the same name. As could the abusers. Choi tells who they are. Again and again. Three acts, three convincing stories deconstructed so to lay bare the wounds of youthful trauma, the annihilation of optimism, and rend apart the curtain, the reader’s desire to trust the story, yet keep a safe distance. Published in 1759 Candide was banned but continues to be read. Choi temps us to risk lifting the curtain to full recognition of the cost of emotional trust, to move beyond the story, to come up on the stage. She busts out the trope of the unreliable narrator, the novelty of autofiction, and the dazzle of bright lights to ask: “Are we still recognized if seen by the wrong eyes? (257)” If you see me on the stage, my own stage, am I myself?

Book 10 of Books That Blew Me Away

High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never by Barbara Kingsolver

This has been on my shelf for more years than I care to say. It was published in 1995. I return to it again and again because of the beauty of the language and the vision into the life of a writer traveling the world. And yet one of the most tender stories tells about my two favorite subjects – motorcycles and librarians.  Set in her high school in Kentucky, Kingsolver tells of her intellectual and moral coming of age reading the books of the library in “How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life.” So, my final book ends with the injunction to the reader. “Here today, gone tomorrow. It’s the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory.”

Book 9 of Books that Blew Me Away

Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

There are many reasons we enjoy reading. Sometimes I read because it strips my illusions away. My eyes are cleaned and I see the world anew. This is the story of Bone, a girl stained by the label of “bastard” on her birth certificate. In the midst of the poverty, abuse, and violence, her mother focuses her shame on this label. Bone is raped and beaten by her mother’s boyfriend. Raylene, Bone’s aunt, takes her to raise. As Bone is recovering, her mother comes with the revised birth certificate, asks for forgiveness, and disappears without saying where she will go. Allison writes of the societal oppression in the South, the abject poverty and violence, the aching loneliness of Bone, her anxiety over her sexual identity, the vicious rape, and the bare violence of her life. It took me a while to get over this book. Allow for recovery after reading this. Wipe your eyes and look at a flower. But read it.

Number 8 of books that blew me away

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

As I said, I have returned South. Vance’s about his story about his family’s move from Appalachian Kentucky to Ohio and his eventual graduation from Yale Law School is well written. Along with his personal tale of a family torn by poverty, drugs, violence, and abuse, he quotes studies about the economic and sociological/psychological factors involved. In his grandparent’s exodus from Appalachia and his escape from a life of drugs and social services to the Marines, I hear a familiar trajectory. He loses me when he speaks with academic authority and begins to prescribe for the health of the Appalachia he no longer embraces. He looks back from his position as an investor in a leading venture capital fund and, unfortunately, predicts and prescribes about the elements needed for upward mobility (or escape) in government policy and personal values.  Along the way, he has pissed a lot of people off.

Check out the post in the Bitter Southerner, “A Letter to Our Young Folk”.

Number 7 of books that blew me away

Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy

Home I came to the South and in some ways, it is as if I never left. That is how this book made me feel. I knew some of these folks in my time - hell, I still know some of them. Jacob McNeely of Cashiers, a small North Carolina mountain town, has only one flickering candle left in the window, his high school love, Maggie. Hip deep in the world of meth dealing presided over by his father; Jacob is set to inherit the “family business.” Maggie can see a different life but can Jacob? I have too many friends who could not, who settled for what they had in hand. Dust to dust. I also was privileged to meet the author; I liked him. I encourage you to read the essay in the Bitter Southerner at:

http://bittersoutherner.com/digging-in-the-trash-david-joy/

Book 6 of books that blew me away

Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Pulitzer Prize winner for 2017 (among other awards), Whitehead drew me in and kept me believing in his alternative history novel. Using history, true and altered, and magical realism, he follows two slaves escaping in the 1800’s. I found that the gritty truth of the history of slavery mixed with the magical underground railroad ( a real underground train!) helped to balance my emotional response as a reader. The truth of history is too brutal for hope. Whitehead’s novel allows hope and magic.