Home Is

"I wish we could stay here forever."

~ Anonymous

Hmmm. Wonder who wrote that? Wonder where 'here' is? Wonder who 'we' are? Are they lovers, an old married couple - who could also be lovers, when you think about it, and they must have been lovers once or they wouldn't have gotten married. Are they more than a couple, say, a family? All the same sex or a mixture? The same age or far apart in years? Something else puzzles me about these seven words, but I can't quite figure it out.

This was the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,

Cramped on nothing. Black

Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding

With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,

Whitened by the faces of the drowned.

Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks —-

Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.

The sea cannons into their ear, but they don't budge.

Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

~ From "Finisterre," Sylvia Plath

This is definitely Plath-like. She had a mouth full of words and combined them like one combines random fabrics in slow-stitching. She embroiders very well, using words, I must say. How can you take something old, ugly, hard, and unmoving and make something so beautiful out of it? That happens with scraps of fabric, with old doilies and moth-eaten lace, but even with those things, which are objects, the result is a mystery. Maybe there is some secret ingredient? I have a cookbook about secret ingredients and what happens when we use them. This excerpt from Plath's poem reminds me a bit of that, of cooking - please don't think about the end of her life and the oven she used, please! - and I think this cook is extraordinarily skilled at serving up poemplates that might not be to everyone's taste, but are, to mine.

There's something else that concerns me with this poem: its title. Not the fact that it's Latinate, because the writer herself has translated Finisterre into Land's End, albeit without capital letters. It seems as if there should be only one land's end in the world, that it should be unique. Yet that's not the case. I know the state of Maine has one, and I know a place called Galicia has one, which they call Fisterra. I am reluctant to accept any end of land as Galician, because I've been there and can picture it in my mind's eye. We probably all read poetry or even fiction through our own personal lenses, so I feel it's justified for me to see Fisterra in this case. Why does the sense of the ending of the land bring a feeling of foreboding, a fear of going off the deep edge? Shouldn't it create a sense of freedom, of not being tied down to the earth, but instead being able to fly? The water seems perilous, I suppose. What we can't see can, in fact, hurt us.

The Pedigree of Honey

Does not concern the Bee--

A Clover, any time, to him

Is Aristocracy.

~ Emily Dickinson

Emily can go from dark to light in a minute. This time she's light, and playful, despite leaving a moral lesson flitting about like a ghost among the wordstones. Thou shalt not be - nor bee, haha - arrogant, because the bee can make its golden treasure from the simplest flower. This time I'm reminded of the artists, who are often more scrapbookers, who are attracted like bees to honey to art supplies sources. They buy every gadget and color imaginable and use them to make things that look like they've come off an assembly line in a far-off country. Such a lack of creativity, and so wasteful. I think of all the poison and plastic we insert into the environment; I cringe. 

Using scraps, whose fancier term is orts, can be demanding, but not everything needs to be new in order to be worn and loved. Sometimes the older things (and persons) get, the more lovable they become. Plus, new fabrics are just that: new, meaning naked of emotion on the part of the observer/purchaser. On the contrary, every bit of fabric I pick up that has come from a place far away, like my mother's or my grandmother's house, or from my friends in Galicia, is heavy with the weight of things done or said, streets walked, rain collected in pockets, tears shed. Those are far lovelier, are more resistant to fading and tearing, fraying and wrinkling. Even if there's a velvet or two among them, soft as the back of a bee, they are not arrogant. They understand there is a rite of passage and they have been through it. I understand, too, and will always prefer clover, or dandelion, to stretchy polyester.

I like this bee. It could become a good friend, but only if I believe that.

I was doing my usual procrastinating. I'm quite good at it, actually, especially when I'm supposed to be doing something as uncreative as taking the car for a tune-up, doing a load of laundry, or mowing the lawn. Even dusting can be a chore when we're not in the mood. Paying bills is just as bad, although we know it has to be done and sometimes we can do it electronically, so there's no need to stand in line at the post office to purchase a stamp. I've tried to see grocery shopping as creative, but never do so successfully, because my mind's back with the words, on paper or on screen, it doesn't matter as long as I can access them via sight or sound. If it weren't for a well-functioning appetite, I would consider living on air, carefully chewing and swallowing the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, the odes to food by Pablo Neruda, or even the slightly tacky Mexican novel, Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel. I find sustenance in the episodes of Gordon Ramsey's various cooking series - watching is enough to satisfy hunger - and really only want as bed companions cats and books. I never get late-night cravings.

Writers are my friends, or at least 95% of them are. The rest are bad at what they do, which is why we can't be friends. They need to do right by what they work with: sounds, syntax, sensuality, historical memory, all of this. They can't waste their time or mine, and I'm ever so grateful at having found many who fit the bill. But what do I mean by that? Well, I'm not sure, but there are just some things we read that haunt us, cling to us, penetrate us through some corporal orifice, shroud us in them, wrap their arms around us, caress our cheeks... Do I need to go on? No, of course not, and I don't want to run the risk of those authors who find a character or plot they love and just repackage it endlessly. I'm a bit more eclectic in that sense. I relate to more than one type of writing, in more than one language, and am fine with my divergent tastes. As divergent as the two roads in a yellow wood in Robert Frost's poem. 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Yes, yes, I can still recite a lot of this poem, like I can others by Edgar Allan Poe, like I can a few by Rosalía de Castro, by Xohana Torres, by Manoel-Antonio. By T.S. Eliot, my adored Mary Oliver, all of them accompanied by images from films based on literary movements or the lives of writers, on Stephen King - my hero - and, now, on Tanith Lee. (You might not have seen that one coming, but it's the truth.) 

I keep trying to divert my attention, my eyes, my mind and my heart (oh shades of Poe mon amour) by listening to music or jogging or, when necessary, paying my taxes. I keep trying and, unlike Frost's character, the road keeps circling back, never having diverged at all. 

You see, I like it here, and they, you, like having me, I'm convinced of it. I know why, too. Because even when I try to leave, I never really do. There's the Land of Distraction, the Land of Obligation, the Land of Take Care of Me or Die. (The last case may be associated with my cats, I confess.) And there's that other Land, Land's End, the place where I always end up, always land on my feet. It's Wonder Land - spelled this way, with two words instead of one, to distinguish from the one that belonged to Alice, whose space I respect. 

The Wonder Land I'm referring to is my personal Fisterra or Finisterre. It's by definition - mine, only mine - not a jumping off spot from terra firme, nor a catapulting spot into the frightening blue unknown. If there is any sinking to be done, it'll be by choice, but not by suicide, like the main character in Kate Chopin's The Awakening or in one of Virginia Woolf's novels. I do, in fact, think rocks may hold grudges as Sylvia suggests, so I generally steer clear of them.

I doubt that I'm alone here; there must be others like me, and I am reminded of Emma Pedreira's book Oslibrosquehaienmin, The Books Inside Me. The Books I Hold Within. The Books That Make Me Who I Am. The books, books, and more books, all made up of words, whether we read them or listen to them, touch them with our hands, our loving fingers, or peer at them begrudgingly on a screen because it was the only way to access them or to access them right away. Immediate gratification, as sensual as it gets, I'd say.

My dream? To be able to forget all the Lands in my life (except for the one with cats) and sail on Emily's frigate (which is a book, as you will know, if you've read the poem) and come to the end, which is not a place at all, nor a country, not even a county. The end that was once my beginning and took me everywhere, absolutely everywhere, that I've been in my life. Because of it, I've lived a never-ending story that had no place anywhere except time; it has forever been home.

"I wish we could stay here forever."

~ K.