Wisdom from Jennifer Lynch and Mary Oliver

A new movie directed by Jennifer Lynch, “Surveillance,” is coming out this week. Her last film was, as they say, “a disappointment.” It was released when she was 24; now she’s 40. In an interview by Dennis Lim in the LAT on May 22, she said, “If there’s one gift I’ve been given from both my parents…it’s the idea that you make the work you want to make—the joy is in the making. Once it’s done, you let it go, and you move on.” I like the idea of the joy in the making process; it’s similar to writing where the vision and the attempt to capture it in words, either on the first try or through re-visioning it, is where the joy lies. The submission/rejection dance is the diffucult part. For the joyful experiences to continue, getting the writing published is important. I read Red Bird, a book of poetry by Mary Oliver, over the weekend. I’m not sure she struggles any longer to get her work published, now that she’s a well known poet. But if she does, I am profoundly thankful that she persists. Such a connection to natural beauty threatened, to the wisdom of nature, to people’s halting efforts to find joy in each other, is (as Master Card would say) priceless.

Starry, Starry Night

One of the pleasures of living in Southern California is the close proximity of the desert. Camping overnight a Joshua Tree makes you aware of stars as you can never be inside of Los Angeles. The clear, dry sky shows vast numbers of lights, ranging from tiny twinkles that you cannot be sure exist to sparklers of red, blue, and white tint that no one could miss. The Milky Way is a lot like spilled milk on such a night, connected across the sky, but spilling out of bounds and then shrinking back to a narrower path. You can’t help thinking yourself along it, the yellow brick road in the sky. It doesn’t look like stars at all, they are too numerous, too diffuse. Constellations are easier to see than in LA, but draped with mysterious sweeps of light or smaller, dimmer stars.

The first thing a new desert camper must exclaim is “Wow, there are so many stars.” After staring up for a while, the next exclamation is “They’re moving.” Yes, and no. They are moving but what we’re seeing is the changing perspective on them as the earth rotates. You don’t notice that in LA because the sky is so big and the stars so few that you can’t stand to keep watching long enough to see them “move” at all.

Have you had an experience in which the stars suddenly come into your consciousness, camping in the desert or going out to the car and looking up?

Seeing with Writing

I’ve recently read an article in the New York Times about a photographer named Lee Friedlander. An exhibition of his photographs is about to begin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was struck by a comment he made in the introduction to the exhibition, “The photographs of these places are a hint, just a blink at a piece of the real world. At most, an aphrodisiac.” I’d like to think we can write about nature that way, at our best. The whole experience slips through our grasp, but there is a wisp of the experience, a whiff of nature’s perfume, left on our fingers.