Migraine Interlude

Good nighty night, ladies and jets -- I mean, gents. I am so good happy to speak to you this day on the change purse of the Headache People. In Washington. From the tingly part to the shame labyrinth -- I can make it a migraine for you. That is to say, I can help you get migraine too.

Remember that book about the guy who was really really smart, so smart he could see the cells in the flowers? And then he got really dumb again, so dumb he forgot his name was Algernon? No wait -- Charles. Algie was the mouse, right? Anyway, it's like that.

Or like have you ever tried to sleep over at your cousin's or aunt's or roommate's place on one of those blow-up thingies down low on the ground close to a big spiderweb, and then in the morning you are on the hardness in a sinking sinkhole with covers choking you? That's it too.

Maybe you are going up in a log ride and your tummy is already boiling from the cotton candy you shouldn't have eaten for breakfast, but up you go, chunkity chunk chunk -- and you know you aren't going to die, but it seems like you might, only the chunkers under you chunk out and you slide down the back side of the flume, not going the right way, so maybe you do die. That's what happens to your thinking parts. Not just your thinking parts, but the whole bowling ball up there, and your jugular vessel is the chunking machine.

Does that make sense? I had some powderpoint slides but I can't get this thing to work, so you'll have to follow me through the frabjous part.

Good! Now is the question asking time. Hello there! Hmm. Mmm hmmm. I'm nodding. Yow, that smarts. Excuse me -- see that long green thingy over there, off stage, the one with the pillows and the hard bits on the end? Is that clean enough to lie down on or what?

By Request

Comments have been streaming in (Can't see them? Make sure you have your preferences set to "View Invisible Comments.") about how William Blake's picture of Cronos eating his children is not a very nice "summer vacation" picture for the blog. Cronos seemed like a good idea at the time, and it isn't always the crazed daddy I identify with. But onto other seasons! This season I've been digging up new material. Cemeteries in the North Country, it turns out, are treasure troves of Victorian names, and some of them are real howlers.


Apparently some families had a real poetic gift for choosing evocative names, and I'm sure they knew very well the provenance of the names they chose, internet or no internet. Even in temperance-friendly northern New York, you just have to let your kids be their own people.

Modern-day children with funky names are a great help in spotting the real treasures.


But some of the stones in these tiny rural cemeteries are so old, the names have long been obscured by lichens and mosses, as if the dead are so fashionably ensconced in the afterlife they no longer need the living to care for them.


Whoops! On closer inspection, this gravestone belongs to my Grandma Guthrie, who is alive and well and always did believe in planning ahead. You wouldn't want your children messing around with your final resting place. In their grief, they might get uppity ideas.

The Muse?

Literary inspiration does exist, only it isn't the divine gift you read about. The muse isn't a comely nymph with classical features, nor even an immortal roller skating babe (before the Classics, there was Xanadu).

Here are some of the things I did yesterday to work myself into a literary state of mind: sort a stack of mail two feet high, pay bills, write a letter about property taxes, pick up groceries, organize tools, throw away garden seeds "Packed for 2005", wash dishes, help with a report on "America the Beautiful" and change three filthy HEPA prefilters. Sound inspiring? Once the kids were in bed I did some light stretching while dipping into an excellent book about health by Andrew Weil.

And then, KABOOM, the clouds parted and I had a genuine Literary Thought. It was a thought in the shape of a poem, something to do with what Andrew Weil was saying about Venus and Saturn, about the balance between the generative, feminine Aphrodite and the destructive, masculine Cronos (devourer of his own children).
I couldn't remember the last time I'd been able to see an idea for a poem, but there was no time to stop, as I was galloping ahead. My novel was on the horizon -- the chapter I've been working on in fits and starts, the scene that still needs some strong glue to hold it together, and the deadline looming next month. I had two good ideas about things to add -- no, make that three ideas! -- and in a moment I had blasted right past making notes and was writing actual dialog. Not just dialog, but funny dialog! I could not be stopped.

It was in the middle of the hilarious, scene-clinching conversation that I realized the left side of my head was cracking open like a volcanic fissure and that I mildly wanted to throw up. I leaped off the page where I was writing and started scribbling down observations on the back of another sheet. Migraine was dawning. How did it happen? Did I think so hard I tweaked my brain? Did the neural pathways required for literary thought happen to be the same ones prone to swelling? Did writing increase circulation in the grey matter so rapidly it caused a short circuit?

I dragged myself to the medicine cabinet and then got back into bed with my notebook. Before I collapsed on the pillow I had finished the dialog, outlined the next book review I have to do, and made two pages of notes on important plot questions for the second half of my novel -- which surprisingly had a lot to do with the book for the review. What an amazing coincidence.

My husband turned out to be the only person thinking clearly. When he came in to bed, he listened patiently to my chatter for ten minutes before observing, in his calm way, that literary thoughts are not the cause of the migraine, they are one of the symptoms. "It's just part of the manic lead-up," he said, before turning off the light.

My delusions of grandeur went hissing off into the darkness like a leaky balloon. This was not inspiration -- this was prodrome. The lack of blood to the brain was producing literary thoughts, not the reverse. Were they real ideas? Would they still be there, on the page, when I recovered from the migraine (and the side effects of the medication)?

Eric put in his two cents. "You have to take what you can get," he said, and was asleep in thirty seconds.

Marietta Holley: The Song

Do you know the low feeling, about a third of the way through a big project (a novel, say -- or a wallpapering job, or a knitted sweater), when the pile of glittering good intentions with which you began your effort seems to be sifting down into nothing and your stamina is at a low ebb? I've been trying to unstick myself from such a moment. I've been reading Marietta Holley's own words, and getting up my enthusiasm to know more about the suffrage movement and what exactly Susan B. Anthony said and when. Today, in my noodling, I found "The Ballad of Marietta Holley", courtesy of the students at South Jefferson Central High, in Adams:

"Oh Marietta, I need to know you.
Oh Marietta, why don't I know you?
I would have thought they would have told me of you in school.
Oh Marietta, I need to find you."

Can you believe it? They read my mind. Click here to see the affecting video, complete with photographs from the Watertown Historical Society. You may not need your hankie, but I sure did.

Relics, Archives, Memorabilia & Souvenirs

BEFORE

When the clutter is knee deep on the ground, when the books are in laundry baskets because there is no room for them in the bookcase, when the file drawers are so jammed with relics from the pre-digital age they bend and warp and can't be closed, it's time for a purge.

At first glance it would seem that a mess is a problem related to space, but upon closer inspection it turns out that the real issue is time. The books are straightforward -- even books read in the past are timeless -- but scratch the surface and there are time bombs and worm holes of every description lurking in the piles. The high-school yearbooks are expected, and the photo albums, and the baby books (Poppy's, Effie's, and mine). The college papers have been filed neatly away, at least, and the decades of journals line up in an aesthetically pleasing manner, but what about the rest of the stuff -- the old letters, the notebooks full of miscellany, the postcards from every museum in Europe? Then it gets tough -- what about the unfinished poems, the dead novels, the aborted dissertation in its own accordion file, the fan I slept with every night as a child, the carousel of slides from my mother's teenage years, the Victorian coin purse my great-grandmother gave me, her note still inside? The only proof that my past really happened is here in this house. Without the memorabilia, even I might forget I was ever a roller-skating preteen in Austin, Texas, or a California hippie graduate student. My eyes might glaze over and I might begin to believe I have never been anything but a mother of two in a big house, watching the clock and wondering where the little one's ballet clothes are.

WHERE ARE THE PURPLE SOCKS?

When the past begins to infiltrate the present, though, it's dangerous-- there is more past than present, and more every minute. Tidbits from the past filter to the surface and impede the flow of time in a forward direction. Today when I wanted to put on earrings I first had to tug a filmy piece of purple rayon off the pair I wanted, and I had to waste time thinking, "This is a purple sock belonging to the toy incarnation of Donny Osmond, circa 1976. Yes, I remember watching 'The Donny and Marie Show' and doing somersaults around the living room with my brother, and those were good times, and I'm sort of glad I saved the Donny and Marie playset, and I'm sort of glad I let the kids play with it, although I wish I could use this brain power to reflect on the Elizabeth Gaskell biography I'm reading -- not to mention to get myself dressed on time -- instead of worrying that I'm forgetting the past or failing to find the interesting kernel in it by not making hay out of the whole Donny and Marie thing."

What kind of archive would set the mind at rest? Wouldn't it be great to have a closet full of industrial-strength storage boxes, stacked and labeled in bland, unemotional codes like the materials in a library vault? Reminiscing would require white cotton gloves and a blank table, and could only go on until dinner time, when the box would be have to be repacked and returned to a high shelf.

My own TV and Russian literature-inflected past -- indeed, my whole family's past (the distant daguerreotype past, and the recent baby-photo past) -- is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There is history to be reckoned with. There is an infinite wealth of times past I don't even know about yet -- my memory can't be jogged, but must be stocked. If I'm not tripping over my old toe shoes on the stairs, I can be watching time pass on a bigger scale, welcoming past time into the memory banks, which are airy and full of room.

Did I mention that I'm writing a historical novel?

AFTER

Grandpa Watson

Here is a daguerreotype image of the Reverend William Watson, young and roguish, with his cheeks faintly colorized by the photographer's brush. He is my great-great-great grandfather, father of the Samantha look-alike (Mary Watson Mahaffy) pictured below, born in Northiam England in November of 1823, died in Ilion, New York in 1898. I've always considered the horde of loot he left his descendants to be my prime material -- he left scores of sermons, diaries, letters, pictures, books, and personal effects to the family. We have his false teeth. We have his flute, his worthless mining stock certificates, his speech on abolition, his diary from the voyage to America in 1851. We have his wooden crate full of serious works of history and Bible scholarship -- it has sat in the Brick House relatively undisturbed for more than a hundred years. It makes a good nightstand in the tiny bedroom my grandpa dubbed "The Watson Wing."

My parents made some serious headway into the material when my dad had the cockamamie idea of trying to earn an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas in the mid-seventies. He started a thesis on Grandpa Watson. He discovered many of the Watson papers in the attic of the Brick House, where my great-grandmother was using Grandpa Watson's trunk as a step up into the crawl space. He and my mom visited Grandpa Watson's grave in Ilion, and found his old parish across the pond in Northiam, which had been converted to a kitchen boutique. My mom worked on sorting the papers and typing up some of the diaries in an early word processor (not compatible with modern data, unfortunately). Life intervened -- it was too much to finish an M.A. when there were two kids to raise. There was no time to keep up with Grandpa Watson, although Dad did make use of his sermons from time to time. One Sunday he dressed up as Grandpa Watson and delivered a hearty dose of Victorian Methodist fire-and-brimstone from the pulpit. (Dad is an Episcopalian, by the way -- a big departure, as Anglicanism was one of the things Grandpa Watson railed against. One letter he kept in his papers is a reprimand from another clergyman, chastising Grandpa Watson for using an invitation to give a funeral prayer at another church as a platform to criticize that church's lack of grounding in the Bible. I assume the offended clergyman was an Episcopalian.)

I am safeguarding most of the papers in my study now, where mice are less likely to get at them then at the Brick House. Suddenly they are very relevant to all the things I am thinking and writing about. Temperance, that quixotic political movement that seemed so important then, is one topic Grandpa Watson can help me sort out. After the Civil War, when the country no longer needed him to speak out about the evils of slavery, Grandpa Watson turned his attention to the scourge of drink. He felt it his moral duty to get involved with temperance, and he struggled in his conscience with the references to wine in the Bible. He entered into correspondence with an old mentor in England on the subject of Biblical drinking, and his mentor dipped back into Biblical Greek and Hebrew to show that, in fact, when Jesus says wine, he probably does mean fermented grape juice.


This sermon, actually an address to the Methodist District Meeting at Fulton in 1871, does not show any doubt on the matter of temperance. It begins, "Drunkenness in the Scriptures is Classed with the grosser Crimes, and no one who is adicted to it can be fit for refined or elevated society -- or enjoy the favor of God in this Life -- or go to Heaven when they die."


Oh, the courage of conviction! I know I can use this.

Revelations

I taxed my brain and my circulation this morning by following a twisty trail of questions deep into the internet. I knew I wanted to write a scene about Marietta Holley thinking religious thoughts with her Victorian brain as she sits through a service at the Adams Baptist Church in October of 1882. What was the Baptist lectionary for that year? It took a great many handsprings to formulate that question in the right way, and a great many more to locate the lectionary and to decide that Baptists probably used the same cycle of Bible readings that other protestant churches did at that time, even though, theologically speaking, they didn’t have to. I looked into the tenets of the Baptist church; I peered under the hood of several nineteenth-century Baptist hymnals. I counted ahead from Easter Sunday in 1882 (April 9, in case you were wondering), through the long weeks of “ordinary time” that finish out the church year before it begins again with Advent. I looked at some bizarre readings from Daniel for one Sunday in October, and then I decided I would make it All Saints Sunday instead, the first Sunday of November. I looked up the appropriate reading for that day – “Wis. 3.” Okay, Wisdom. A quick look revealed that “Wisdom” was not in the Old Testament in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible I have on my desk, and, briefly, I panicked. I can only remember the first few books of the Bible from the song I memorized in junior high at my best friend’s Vacation Bible School at the Baptist church (“Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, something, something . . .”). Maybe “Wisdom” got a new name after the King James version? Google held my hand through the panic – imagine how long these conundrums took to resolve in the olden days – and soon was reminded that Wisdom is a book of the Apocrypha.

I found “Wisdom of Solomon” in the Table of Contents. I flipped. I opened the page to chapter 3, and there was a post-it note in my Dad’s handwriting sticking up from the top of the page – only one of two such flags in my agnostic Bible. Someone (possibly me – the note has “SLOW” written in big letters in my writing at the bottom) read this passage at a funeral. Probably it was my Grandpa Guthrie’s funeral. The text begins, “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be an affliction, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.”

Enter Marietta Holley, spiritualism, Victorian grief. I got the message from the beyond as loudly and clearly as if she had rapped on the bottom of my desk.

Photo: Adams Village Baptist Church, Adams, New York