Essay I published some years ago also complaining re elite grocery stores! but also the gifts of the simple life. I also realized that part of the reason I miss New England is that I miss the sun and its clarity. When it's oppressively cloudy here I have a mind picture of driving by cornfields in early spring near Rumford, Maine and a lovely empty house with a gingerbread porch over to the right by a stream. I always think of that thin bright sun.
THE GIFT BY ANN CONWAY I lie in a sunny meadow, listening to the fledglings concealed in tangles of vetch. High above the tall grasses, light shifts through the uppermost boughs of ash and birch. I also hear the nearby whine of 295. Everyone wants Maine in high summer, which I do not begrudge. After almost forty on-and-off years here, I’ve come to comprehend Maine’s singular allure at about the same time that I understood what it offers an artist. It’s a cliché to say that natural beauty and isolation are the draws for artists associated with Maine. There’s truth in this. But Maine is also about relationships, which provide relief from the commodity culture that increasingly defines our personal and creative lives. Recently I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which explores the traditional sense of creativity as a transformative process predicated on relationships. Hyde quotes from Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider”: the soul reaches out for love, to “catch and form a link, a bridge, a connection.” This relational, rather than transactional, view of art is at variance with the demands of a market economy: the world of platforms, expensive boxed “creativity kits,” blog posts chiding poets for not being sufficiently extroverted and sales-oriented. In fairness, if art is a gift that must move outward, as The Gift posits, perhaps marketing is now essential to ensure its movement. But this should be done with care, for if art is not an offering, it can become a throwaway product like any other. Luckily, for all Maine’s reputation as a mind- your-own-business kind of place, it is filled with memory and concerned with linkages between people and generations. A glance at the well- kept Civil War monuments on every common shows this. Maine artists know history too, often in the context of artistic lineage. I think of Gardiner’s Edwin Arlington Robinson as an artistic “soul friend”; the Gaelic word is “anamchara.” Robinson’s house stands nearby, the neighborhood so unchanged that I can imagine running into him on walks—and how I wish I could meet this brilliant, reclusive, kind man. As in Robinson’s day, Maine is full of small communities where the gift relationship is alive and well. Seeing you stuck in the driveway, guys stop by and plow you out, then take off without a word. Neighbors give you things: coffeecakes, valentines, vintage handkerchiefs for quilting. You give back vegetables from the garden, perennials. Generally, these are gifts out of need, not out of wealth. The elderly widow who loses her daughter to cancer delivers an armload of rhubarb a week after the funeral. The cashiers at the market smile and joke more than the harried employees of gourmet food stores in larger cities. Not having much, Mainers share what is intangible. One is left satisfied by the small, lovely gift of the everyday, not always wanting more, which strangely, despite the sumptuousness, often occurs at the beautiful food store. That’s what the commodity culture demands, the endless, impossible search for something better. You come down to essence here. You lean into Maine, not vice versa. This brings humility, a great gift in a culture where self-aggrandizement is presented as an ultimate virtue. Settling in as a person and an artist requires the ability to listen and learn and for that, humility is necessary. Before I got serious about writing, I danced around it. I obsessed. But I didn’t write. However, I walk by the river each morning. One day, waving at pickups on their way to work, I suddenly thought, in the Maine way: a plumber plumbs, a roofer roofs. A writer writes. So that is what I do. Writing sometimes feels as perilous and intractable as a long winter, but Maine has taught me that’s survivable. So I begin alone at 4:30 in the morning, just after Tommy, across the street, screeches off to work. The house is cold; the work, arduous, although occasionally, things change and I feel carried along readily, as if I am taking dictation. When finished, I will send it into the world. As I have learned to in Maine, I will pass on another small, profligate gift.
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Unlike everyone else in the world, i don't like Trader Joe's. i always find it and Whole Foods to be desperate places. No one looks happy despite how lovely the food, all the choices.
I wanted another plant (my weakness), however, so i went down to the north Hills. The TJ's there was jammed and again, every one looked driven and miserable. I did get a plant and some daffodils, but felt teary on the way out of the hideous little mall parking lot. On the way in a woman in a small new car had swerved toward me as I think she wanted to make left turn in front of me rather than wait a nanosecond. As if she had to win. It seemed for moment like everything wrong wrong wrong with our culture. All i could think of was Mass, where I uncooly usually am on Sunday morninthe great quiet. I also thought about Elizabeth Strouts's' "Olive, Again" which is all about Maine. I'm reading it now. I'd never return to the town I lived in, but reading about Maine--the February light, the color on the tops of trees, its smells, sounds like the peepers, its great quiet and great dark--I sure missed it this morning. Maine, where you notice things as you're sort of outside the culture. I miss all I'm missing. “The great illusion of our culture is that what we confess to is who we are.”
-Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City, which is a wonderful book Blanketing snow. Or at least a light blanketing snow. In the early morning there was a bit of the silence snow encompasses. naturally I think of Joyce's "The Dead", snow falling on all the living and all the dead.
In Maine one becomes accustomed to sparseness and the experience of snow is like that. Because i learned a lot about the natural world, in winter I knew there were all kinds of creatures beneath the snow, living under the icy crust. It made one realize how alive the world is, pulsating. A sense that we seem to be losing. I loved the animal ghosts of Maine, the evidence of deer everywhere in the morning, the tracks packed all over the yard, which was a kind of V shape with ravines on either side. Below, there was a brook, beyond a high hill. It was a discombobulating landscape that stretched, ravine after ravine, hill after hill, for about a mile beyond. I lived on its boundary for years, walked and gathered chanterelles there, but I always got lost. When I found my back door again, the landscape seemed crazy and jumbled. I always thought if the past when I had that sense, since Gardiner was the summer location of the Abanaki, a handsome and cordial tribe whose land was stolen by British merchants, the Great Proprietors, including the Gardiner's, still much admired in that feudal kingdom of a town. People thought of themselves as liberal, but in all the historical posters in downtown displays oriented toward reviving the place, there was nary a mention of the Indians who'd been there for 2,000 years. There were cellar holes everywhere too. I once had very weird experience with a massive tree that had a hole in its trunk. History shadowed the town everywhere. The deer came but I never saw them. Here one sees deer all the time, people think of them almost as pets. But I have learned not to sentimentalize wildlife. I like the expansiveness of Pittsburgh, the diversity too, very much. But I miss the clarity of northern New England, the cold and the old guys in their fishing shacks on the Kennebec. The glow of their roaring stoves on starry winter nights. Memory. |
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May 2024
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