There is much conversation, concern, and pontification about poetry on the page and poetry on the stage. I keep wanting to discuss this in terms of "the page vs. the stage," but I don't think it needs to be a competitive dynamic. I continue to talk with many people about the varying realities of poetry:  page, stage, online venues, large publishers, indie publishers, scrawls on walls. I believe art (in any form) doesn't need to exist in an either/or context. It's all very dynamic. And that just might be why I previously asked Steve Kowit to include Judy Jordan's "A Taste for Falling" and Anis  Mojgani's' "baptize" in the Editor's Choice section of Perigee's 25th issue.

Judy Jordan holds two MFA degrees, has taught at multiple universities, was first published by Louisiana State University Press, and has won many awards from the "establishment." Is she a "mainstream"  poet? An "academic" poet? (Learn more about Jordan at www.poets.org.)

Anis Mojgani is a two-time National Poetry Slam Individual Champion and has found print success with Write Bloody Press, an independent publishing house founded by Derrick Brown, another talented writer and performer. Is Mojgani solely a "stage poet"?  (Listen to some of Mojgani's performance pieces at www.myspace.com/anismojgani/.)

Jordan and Mojgani are worlds apart in their style and focus, but when they speak about poetry or read/perform their own work, people listen—intently.

I often find myself in conversations about what I call The Church of Poetry—especially in the context of page and stage.  And sometimes I spend too much time online searching for current dialogue on the issue, which is how I found a promotional video for Write Bloody's Junkyard Ghost Revival tour last year. Here's some insight:

Anis Mojgani: "Slam poetry is any poem that someone feels they want to share in the arena of the Poetry Slam." 

Derrick Brown: "Slam poetry is not a genre of poetry that we do. We do poetry and sometimes we perform at Slams."

Buddy Wakefield: "Tonight was just us hanging out and doing what we love to do with poetry." 

We should listen to these poetic talents. They are emerging as revolutionaries. The Beats, redux.  They travel the world nearly year-round to share their poems and stimulate this exact discussion. (To learn more about Write Bloody poets, check out www.writebloody.com.)

I would describe the Poetry Slams I've experienced as events, opportunities, competitions. I don't think there is a "poetry slam genre."  But one thing I like about Poetry Slams is that anybody can participate.  Show up, sign up, and get up on stage. They are democratic, grassroots events.

At an all-ages BEtheCAUSE Poetry Slam last summer, we had a nine-year-old boy, Joshua, sign up. The winner of his round, Jackie, earned a 26.5; Joshua earned 26 points for his short, yet well-read poem. Jackie went on to win the Slam that night. Our very young poet nearly knocked out the night's winner (who is only seventeen years old herself).

I love the potential at any given Slam. But that potential can manifest as negative just as quickly as it can manifest as positive. I also dislike that anybody can participate (and speak what they want). An impromptu rant can share the stage with a poem that has been slowly crafted over years. Too often people garner high scores from Poetry Slam judges simply because of delivery (or worse) cursing, nasty images, incendiary comments without purpose (beyond high-score hopes). Sorry, but dropping the F Bomb in your last line shouldn't be the reason you earn a winning score.

Writing poetry is not about performing—and performing is not about writing poetry.   A performance can be poetic; poetics can be performance. But different types of poetry should be allowed to blend, blur. Can't a more "mainstream" or even "academic" poet share her work on stage at a Poetry Slam? Can't a performing poet get published in "mainstream" or "academic" journals—or better yet, get a book deal?

In last February's issue of Poetry, you'll find eight manifestos about poetry sure to make you reevaluate your perspective on the craft. In the introduction to his manifesto, "The New Perform-A-Form: A Page Vs. Stage Alliance," Thomas Sayers Ellis offers his slant:

The performance body, via breathing and gesture, dramatizes form. It makes it theater. It makes it action. It makes it living, alive, as in "get live," as in "all the way live," as in lyric. The idea body, via text and thought, flattens form. It makes it fixed. It makes it language. It makes it literature, an imagined living, as in artifice. The work of the performance body is not without craft, control, or form. It is not lowly. The work of the idea body is not without attitude, improvisation, or flow. It is not closed. A perform–a–form occurs when the idea body and the performance body, frustrated by their own segregated aesthetic boundaries, seek to crossroads with one another. This coupling, though detrimental to aspects of their individual traditions, will repair and continue the living word. (view its entirety at www.poetryfoundation.org)

Lance Newman, poet and Associate Professor at Westminster University in Utah, explains his perspective on stage poetry:  "Slam is usually about succinct and moving lyrical statements that have a sharp edge and a direct, personal voice. Most poetry on the page is more concerned with elevated thoughts recorded in artful phrases or with abstractly patterned language. The audiences are looking for different things."  Amen. I think most poets who earn high scores in or win Poetry Slams use a very personal voice that expresses autobiographical moments. I also believe that those successful performances which are not personal usually consist of language that discusses sensitive, controversial, current issues. Politics are often included. "Hot button" topics that breed intense debate are used.

When asked what makes a poem stage-worthy, Newman simply responds with, "Sharp, punchy lines that crack in the air like lightning." Amen. You need to keep your audience's attention, right?

Marsha Howard, Coordinator of Poetry in the Branches at Poet's House in New York City, answers the same question by explaining that effective poems on the stage "are meant to go out into the air with the energy of a performance, not to sit on the page and be read closely."  Amen. Audiences attending Poetry Slams or events like the Write Bloody revival tours (they wrapped up their Elephant Engine High Dive Revival tour in November) don't want to be confused by extremely elevated abstract thoughts or language. And I'm not suggesting that these audiences don't think or aren't capable of such critical, creative thinking—but nobody is going to look up a new word during the performance.  When one sits in a quiet room, however, to slowly read a carefully crafted poem, words see the light of day. Dictionaries are pulled. Memories and web sites searched. Maybe this discussion all boils down to audience and purpose.

Ellis's idea of the page and stage marriage made me think about how important poetry still is in our world and how significant it can be for the next generation of poets finding their voices, which led to me dig up an excerpt from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's book Poetry As Insurgent Art that can be found at www.poets.org.  Please consider:

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.

Marsha Howard offers some more insight:  "Poetry always matters because it responds to universal truths and the human condition—whatever that is at any given time in one's personal life or in the life of the world."  I think we can also agree that there will always be what can be discussed as that universal human condition—regardless what style or form of poetry we write or appreciate. Howard also expresses that the "more complex and frightening our world becomes, the more uncertain we are of our place in it, the more we need poetry."  Amen. Her statement, of course, can be extended to include other forms of art as well.

Poets, writers, and those who promote the literary arts find themselves having to negotiate identifications, categories, definitions, rationales, reasons, styles, and forms. But I hope that most of us can agree that poetry is important—for differing (even antithetical reasons) but important for the generations competing and collaborating right now.

Stage poetry and page poetry are equally important—are equally needed. "Poetry matters more than ever," Newman adds. "There's more poetry in the world than ever before, and poetry has a bigger and more diverse audience than ever in human history."  Poetry is being written, read, performed, and experienced in places it was never found in five, ten, fifteen years ago. Competitions, television shows, podcasts, blogs, books, journals, CDs, wikis, tweets, and events continue to spread The Church of Poetry.

Marsha Howard continues her slant by explaining that regardless the poet's style, form, or purpose, the poem should "convey some important truth in a way that can only be conveyed in the compressed language of poetry."  She continues by asking, "Does it do all this using interesting, surprising language, imagery, sound?" 

Lance Newman is excited about the fact that "There's more interesting poetry than any one person could ever engage with in a meaningful way. Of course, there's no longer an Eliotic gang of poets to whom everyone knows. But that's a great thing. It means poetry belongs to the people in a way it never has before."  Amen and hallelujah.

Let's make this a conversation we can all learn from. Let's walk through our minds. Say something.

The first study John Mood wrote about Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (1975), is still in print and is the second largest selling Rilke book in the English-speaking world. The year 2007 brought us Mood's Rilke on Death and Other Oddities. And now we have his A New Reading of Rilke's "Elegies," a work that will serve to keep Rilke's enduring popularity alive.

Mood's books on Rilke are not written only for scholars in a scholarly language. Quite the contrary. His unadorned style makes his books accessible to any layman who cares about literature and/or poetry. A clue to Mood's approach to his subjects can be found in the title of his study on James Joyce: "Ulysses" For Everyone, Or How To Skip Reading It The First Time. For those who just want to know the nuts and bolts of Joyce's forbidding book, Mood's playful exuberance is made to order.

He brings much of that same exuberance to A New Reading of Rilke's "Elegies." Mood's academic background (PhD in Religion and Philosophy, professor at Ball State before he retired) never gets in the way of his expressed purpose: to show us how beautiful and magical Rilke's poetry actually is, even when it is absorbed now and then with the subject of death. In part, A New Reading becomes Mood's personal meditation on death using Rilke as his guide, his Virgil, his Beatrice.

It is well known that Death is a dominant theme in much of Rilke's work. He says in an essay, "How is it possible to live when … the elements of this life are utterly incomprehensible to us? If we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision and impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist? ... Life and Death: they are one, at core entwined." He tells us that we must "learn to die ... all of life is in that."  In an early chapter of Mood's new book, we are given several pages of Rilke's reflections regarding death and our need to come to terms with the inescapable fact that all life is in some sense a preparation for the end that awaits us. Rilke closes his deliberations with a reminder that we are far from alone, we "lovers and transformers" take note that "All the worlds of the universe are plunging into the invisible." And:

Being-here is much, and all this here,
which disappears so, seems to need us and strangely
concerns us. Us, the most disappearing. Once
each, only once. Once and no more.

The repetition of Once takes on more and more existential weight as Mood illustrates the influence and "staying power" of Rilke, whose once on this earth was far from ephemeral. The point being, of course, that because of the works he left us, Rilke is still alive. At least "spiritually."

Following his thought-provoking, even moody, introduction, Mood switches gears and begins lightheartedly listing various areas of art that have felt Rilke's influence, beginning with "pop" art itself. "The pop Rilke"?  Well, yes, sort of: "As for Rilke genuinely in American pop culture, one is quite surprised at how often he does pop up, as it were, once one begins looking around." Indeed, Mood's list of Rilke references in nearly every art and even in some sciences is staggering. Some brief examples from the book may give the reader an idea of the eclectic nature of Mood's choices:

Making the point that Rilke's poetry is quoted in numerous publications "of lesser or greater popularity," Mood begins with ASTRONOMY, specifically the periodical Astronomy, circulation 100,000. Rilke's poem about the planet Venus setting at dusk appeared in the magazine in December, 1981.

SURFING: ... A wave, long-gone now/ seemed to lift itself just for you (from The First Elegy). In The First Waves, a book about surfing by Drew Kampion, there is a prose passage from a letter by Rilke.

PROSE:  Among other writers, Mood lists lines by and references to Rilke in works by J.D. Salinger. Ken Bruen, Carlos Castaneda, Ted Bishop and Haven Kimmel who wrote a New York Times Bestseller called A Girl Named Zippy, which quotes Rilke at length.

SEX: Mood claims that the reason his first book on Rilke is still in print after nearly 35 years is because it emphasizes sexual love in Rilke's prose and poetry. Perhaps there is something to such a notion? Mood believes so. He says: "After a while, it became clear that these responses fell into two categories—which I shall call "nasty sex," and "new age sex." He gives some examples of where such categories of sex are found in the works of several writers connected to Rilke in one way or another.

MOVIES: Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was a Rilke reader? Neither did I. But the director of one of her movies saw Monroe reading Rilke's famous Letters to a Young Poet and couldn't believe his eyes. Truth is MM haunted bookstores and was very well read, according to John Mood. Woody Allen is a Rilke fan and has used lines from his poetry in a number of his movies. Other than Woody Allen there are at least seven movies which include lines or references to Rilke. Mood lists them and gives specific examples. In all, the movie category provides some of the book's most lavish illustrations. I found it especially enlightening to learn that Whoopi Goldberg refers to Rilke at length in Sister Act 2. Her character says that her mother "gave me this book ... Letters to a Young Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke. A fabulous writer." She quotes the lines that all Rilke followers know in one translation or another: "Don't ask me about being a writer. If when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing, then you're a writer." In Woody Allen's Another Woman, Gena Rowlands quotes perhaps Rilke's most famous line of all—"You must change your life." In Awakenings a voice over quotes Rilke's "Panther" to great effect given that the story is about a mental patient who is catatonic, his lively mind locked up, so to speak, inside his own head:

His gaze from staring through the bars
has grown so weary that it can take in nothing more
For him it is as though there were a thousand bars ...
[His] great will stands paralyzed ...

And the lists can go on and on. Mood brings in Rock Music, more astronomy, the universe, imaginative metaphors, botany, more sex, humor, heroes; ultimately, ending his reading with concise, insightful summaries of each of the ten elegies in Rilke's 860-line Duinese Elegies. It's quite a performance. Mood's vast knowledge about Rilke and those works where nearly "every embrace seems to promise/ eternity" is as sure-handed and intimate and rich and reader-friendly as any book about a poet and his poetry ever gets. A New Reading of Rilke's "Elegies" is a gift: an investigation that gives us even more evidence as to why Rainer Maria Rilke continues to endure.

It is not for me to enumerate Jack Myers's many accomplishments as a poet and teacher in his far too short sixty-eight years. But I would like to say something, if I may, about what he meant to me;  though peripheral to his life, I was greatly affected by having known him.

Among the many people it was my privilege and pleasure to know at Vermont College in the 1980s, first as a student, later as a teacher, Jack Myers remains prominent in my memory, despite that I had not seen him for nearly twenty years when I learned last month that he had died. Because I was not a poetry student, I could not have him as a mentor, but he was as giving as a mentor nonetheless, gave of his wisdom, read some of my manuscripts, offered advice, encouragement, and friendship. With his kind, gentle and witty manner and with the power of his language, of his poetry, Jack had a large effect on people.

About twenty-five years ago, I asked Jack to inscribe a book of his poems for my dear sister who was having a hard time of it—a copy of As Long As You're Happy — and Jack wrote on the flyleaf, "Dear Joan—Tom tells me you're feeling blue.  Take one of these poems with a glass of wine every hour, and if you don't feel better in the morning, call me. Affectionately, Jack." Despite the fact that Joan never actually met Jack, that made enough of an impression on her that when I told her on the phone that Jack had passed away, her voice caught, and I could hear she was near tears. Jack had that effect on people—even a casual meeting with him was a treasure in memory. When you had a conversation with him, you felt that he was focused one hundred percent on you even if you were only really a peripheral friend, as I was.

He wrote an inscription in a copy of one of his books for me: "In celebration of how we meet modestly and care for the special way the space around us forms smooth and gentle moments ... "  What a privilege it seemed and seems to me that Jack would take the time and effort to form those words, which precisely expressed how I felt about him.

"As I get older," he wrote in a letter to me once, "decency and warmth seem all ... "  Which were the things Jack had in great quantity and quality, what he radiated:  decency and warmth. I recall once admiring The Longman Dictionary & Handbook of Poetry which Jack wrote with Michael Simms, and a couple of weeks later it arrived in the mail to me, in Copenhagen, a heavy, expensive book which probably cost a fortune to send, with Jack's inscription: "Dear Tom—I don't have the word 'colleague' in here but I don't have to look it up—just look over at you ... " It's a wonderful book and, over twenty years later, I still use it in my teaching and recommend it to my students.

That's how Jack was. A close friend from my Vermont days, Paul Casey, told me the other day, "You had to be careful about asking Jack for something because whatever it was, he'd give it to you. He'd give you his right arm if you asked."

That's how Jack was to the people who had the good fortune to meet him. And his wit was by no means lacking in any manner of implement; I've no doubt that if he wanted, his words could cut so clean and deep that a person wouldn't know, as the saying goes, his head was no longer attached until he tried to shake it.  But Jack didn't want to do that. He was like a strong guy who didn't want to hurt anyone. He valued decency and warmth and generosity and that was what he exuded.

These words are focused on Jack as a person through the eyes of someone who knew him for a few years and dared think of him as a friend. I haven't said a word yet about his poetry and his many poetic accomplishments, which included a period as the Poet Laureate of Texas; others will recite those honors.

 One of the high points for me, however — and no doubt for many others as well—at each of the dozen or more Vermont College residencies I attended was Jack's public reading. His readings were at once so laid back—one almost suspected him of getting up at five in the morning to have that laid back look in time for his reading—yet emanated such power that his lines etched themselves into one's memory.  

When I think of Jack, there are at least a couple of dozen lines of his poems that have taken up permanent residence in my sensibilities, and the beauty is that I can hear Jack's voice delivering them, see his at once gentle and penetrating gaze as he spoke them. But the following four seem especially right at this time:

"I want to blow out the sun and drift awhile,
for sometimes darkness is a mirror
you can walk into and, turning around,
light up the world."

You did that, Jack.

At the beginning of November, I had the privilege of being invited to Birmingham, Alabama, for five days to read and speak at five colleges and universities in and around the city. I had never been to Birmingham and knew little about it other than that it had been a bastion of resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and '60s, so much so that it earned the pejorative nickname "Bombingham."  

The city was built upon the industry of coal mines and steel mills. Coal miners learn how to handle dynamite, and white supremacists in this city used that proficiency to express their views on the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 ruling that segregation was contrary to the law of the land of the United States—i.e., the Constitution. There were bombings of the residences of black families and of the churches where they worshipped. In September 1963, a bomb was detonated during Sunday services in the 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four young girls.

What followed was an intensification of the peaceful passive resistance and civil disobedience on the part of African-American citizens and "outside agitators" (like Martin Luther King) and an ever-more violent response from the racist white citizenry who wanted Birmingham's blacks to remain "separate and unequal"—using substandard facilities, attending substandard schools, living in substandard housing, being paid less for the same work, being denied their right as citizens to vote and subjected to daily demonstrations of their inferior status as human beings.

Any American who grew up in the 1950s and '60s, as I did, is familiar with the headlines of the time, and most of us are profoundly grateful to the black and white civil rights activists who had the courage to put the safety of their bodies on the line against high-pressure fire hoses, clubs, dogs, and bombs. If these brave men and women had not protested, nothing would have changed, but in order to protest, they had to be willing to face beatings and humiliations and even death.

Eventually, incredibly, things did change. In 1973, the first black mayor of Birmingham was elected—the father of one of the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

During my visit to Birmingham, I had a free morning and took a walk along South 20th Street to North 17th to visit the Civil Rights Institute that has been established there. The Institute is across from the church which is itself catty-corner to Kelly Ingram Park where the police and firemen and Klan members used to line up to "respond" to the peaceful freedom marches arranged from the church.

Kelly Ingram Park now memorializes the struggle that these courageous men and women enacted to claim the rights that were theirs and had been denied them for hundreds of years. Arriving before the Institute museum opened, I strolled through the park, along its Freedom Walk, which is dotted with sculptures commemorating the struggle. At one point, you walk through a door in a wrought-iron wall to face the ugly nozzles of two wrought-iron fire hoses which have blasted a young black man to his knees. Further on you  thread through a narrow passage of leaping bare-fanged dogs—you almost expect to hear their snarling, to smell their breath, feel their fangs in your flesh. Still farther, a wrought-iron policeman with a dog, straining against its leash, is grabbing a young black man by his shirt front.

I am not the weepy type—I guess I am a typical American man or maybe I shouldn't make assumptions; it's just a long long time since I shed tears—but at that point, my eyes unexpectedly filled and my lips began to tremble. If anyone had spoken to me, I would have broken down.

It was a beautiful autumn morning, sunny, in the low 70s, and I found a shady bench to sit on, lit a cigar, and waited for my emotions to settle. A black man in his forties strolled by and asked how I was doing.

"Fine," I said, swallowing what I felt. "How are you doing?"

"Not so good," he said. "I'm hungry."

Confused, I asked, "Can I help you in some way?"

"It would help if I had something to eat."

This is not the way it was supposed to happen. I had a vaguely surreal feeling—as if I'd been diving deep among rugged beauty only to have a well-mannered shark appear. The man only said he was hungry, I told myself, but I was old enough to know when I was being hustled, even if expertly. This is hallowed ground, I thought. This is not a place for hustling.

Nonetheless I told him I could give him a couple of dollars if that would help, and he said, "Two or three dollars would help a little."   I heard him trying to up the take and decided not to let him. I plucked out the two singles I knew were in my left pocket and forked them over, arguing with myself to give him a ten—what did it matter?  But this was hallowed ground—not a place to encourage hustling.

"God bless you, brother," he said, taking the bills and stuffing them into his own pocket.

"God bless you, too."

"Thank you, brother," he said and continued across the park, turning back to wave from the other side.

How sorrowful it seemed that the symbols of strength and courage and pride around us and my deep emotional response to them should have concluded with an act of panhandling—albeit a delicately executed one.  That even now, nearly fifty years after the beginning of the end of the subjugation of a segment of our fellow countrymen merely because of the color of their skin, at a moment of edification over the courage and pride that reversed that subjugation, that an adult black man should have to ask—or chose to ask—a white man for pity and charity. Still, I was not sorry to give him those couple of dollars, to hear him call me brother—something black men do not often call white men.

Then I remembered another incident, forty years before, in another park—Saint Nicholas Park in Harlem—which I was walking through on my way to college one cold winter day in 1968—when another black man had threatened me to give him money, and I gave him all I had in my wallet—two dollars. Now I was sitting in a park in Birmingham, Alabama, with an abundance of money in my wallet and had chosen to give this man two dollars.  I wondered if the sum I had decided on to give him was unconsciously influenced by that memory.

It occurred to me then that I might have spoken with the man who told me he was hungry, might have asked about his life, while another instinct advised me that you can't chat with a hustler. The man was here looking to exploit the sentiments he knew were roused in hearts such as mine by these surroundings.

Nothing is perfect, I thought. Nothing is simple.  

And I crossed the street to go into the Civil Rights Museum. In the museum, a black woman about my own age, with a kind friendly smile and very short white hair greeted me and asked where I was from. She told me a little bit about her life—she had lived in Queens, like me, and then in Chicago, and then had returned to Alabama and now she worked as a volunteer here in the museum. She wished me a good visit, and I went inside and began to roam among the exhibits of photographs of slave markets and models of school rooms and a recording was playing of Martin Luther King making a speech and there were photographs of him and of Ku Klux Klan meetings and of a unknown black man hanging from a tree, and you think of Billie Holiday and "Strange Fruit."

And as you walk on, every single exhibit and photograph makes you think of someone— you think of John Coltrane and of the Temptations, of Charlie Parker, and your throat is thick again, your mouth is trembling. You think of Mary Wells and James Baldwin and how the kids you grew up with used to call you Tom X because you wouldn't say the ugly word "nigger". And you think of Gladys Knight and Duke Ellington and Amiri Baraka and Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and you think of poor dead Johnny Ace and Big Mama Thornton and Huey Piano Smith and of John Coltrane again and the Cleftones and the Drifters and Fats Domino (and you remember the woman at work in 1962 who, when a Fats Domino record came on the radio, said, "That nigger is driving a Cadillac from what white kids pay for his records!" and you had always thought she was a nice person but could never look at her again), and you think of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and the Paragons and the Jesters and Martha Reeves.

Then you think of Babara Lewis and how she sang "Hello Stranger," which was a dream that saved your life back in 1963 when you were so unhappy, the same fucking year that those despicable rotten bastards blew up a church and four little girls, and you've got to get outside because you are going to break down.  You haven't cried since you were a child—no since your father died, 45 years ago. Decades of dammed up tears are threatening to burst out and this could not be a good thing. You need to get outside, all the tears locked inside of you all those goddamned decades of your life as a so-called man are going to flood.

You burst out the door so fast into the lobby that the kind black woman who spoke to you before must think you have to use the bathroom because she hurries over and tells you with quiet concern where the men's room is, but you only whisper back, "Thank you thank you," and you're out the door, leaning against a pillar, feeling more sorrow than you can bear pressing down upon you, but you know that the sorrow is not yours. Your sorrow was not the sorrow of oppression or injustice, or maybe it was and you just did not know it; maybe all of this sorrow you feel now is the sorrow that is part of the history of this country and all of the people who have ever lived here. Yes, you see that now, so clearly.

You take a long slow breath deep into your lungs and then for want of anything else to do you light a cigarillo, and you want desperately to apologize to someone for all the years of unspeakable horror and cruelty.

Originally Published in OPEN PAGE

For a writer who wipes out the human race in both her most recent novels, Margaret Atwood is remarkably jolly in person. A featured author at Miami Book Fair International in November, she all but bubbled with sly wit and good cheer.

Speaking to a near sellout audience, Atwood said people ask why she would write—and why they should read— a novel like The Year of the Flood, in which almost everyone in the world is killed by a bio-engineered plague.

"First, there are jokes in it," Atwood said. "Second, it's only a book. You can close the covers and keep the future in the book. Don't let it out."

As Atwood told Connie Ogle in an excellent advance profile in the Miami Herald, "You don't write books if you're totally pessimistic. If you're totally pessimistic, you don't believe in the possibilities of human communication."

A tiny woman one week shy of her 70th birthday, Atwood commanded the stage with a rare combination of humor and gravitas. She talked about her "green" book tour in support of The Year of the Flood, her experience as a newly minted blogger and Twitter user, why her books aren't science fiction and her work for bird conservation and the importance of drinking only organic, shade-grown coffee.

Atwood read selections from The Year of the Flood, one each for the two female point-of-view characters, among the very few survivors of the pandemic. To everyone's delight, she also sang one of the 14 hymns included in the book, written by Atwood (an accomplished poet), for the God's Gardeners, a neo-religious group trying to find a way to survive in a ravaged world. Atwood's singing voice, let the record show, won't cause Celine Dion, a fellow Canadian, any sleepless nights, but is nonetheless delicate and charming.

During the question-and-answer period, Atwood was asked her feelings on the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel published in the U.K., which she won for her first futuristic novel, The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian feminist novel published in 1987. This enabled her to address a minor literary controversy over why she insists her novels set in the future are not sci-fi.

"I was very pleased to receive the Arthur C. Clarke Award," Atwood said. "Some people erroneously believe I do not approve of science fiction."

On the contrary, Atwood said, she remembers the Golden Age of sci fi, which was the '30s and '40s. She read 1984 when it first came out in 1949. She read Curt Siodmak's cautionary Donovan's Brain when she was 12. "I've seen all the Lord of the Rings movies, and I can tell you the exact moment when you can see an orc wearing a wrist watch."

Declaring a deep appreciation for Ursula K. Le Guinn, among other sci-fi authors, Atwood said labeling her dystopian novels "sci fi" is a matter of false advertising. To her mind, a science fiction novel, "if not set in a galaxy far, far away, should at least have alien beings visiting earth in tin cans."

In other words, her futuristic novels, which Atwood calls "speculative fiction," do not have the elements she thinks true sci-fi requires. Instead, they are near-future projections of the use or misuse of technological or social trends already in existence.

I've long been amused and bemused by Atwood's arguments. Her very narrow definition of science fiction would exclude such bona fide sci-fi writers as Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert J. Sawyer, Philip K. Dick, and even Golden Age grandmasters like Isaac Asimov, whose "Three Laws of Robotics," devised in novels and short stories he wrote in the 1950s, are being taken very seriously by robot designers today.

I concluded, without thinking less of Atwood's books, that she was indulging in literary snobbery: She's a serious literary writer– a Man Booker Prize winner for heaven's sake!—and therefore could not be capable of writing something so down market as science fiction.

After recently reading two troubling essays on genetic engineering—the theme of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood—I've come to rethink the matter. One from The New Yorker and one from The New York Review of Books, both essays mostly extol the new paradise the world is shortly to become, thanks to scientists now able to wrest control of evolution from natural selection.

If you think that's a world you'd like, then don't bother reading Atwood. But if the prospect of forests of trees with black leaves (to more efficiently capture solar energy) or scientists "improving" on the design of the human body does not appeal to you, then Atwood is a writer you'll want to read.

None of the horrors in her two latest novels, Atwood has said again and again, is beyond the technology scientists already have today. While I still don't agree with her distinction between sci-fi and speculative fiction, I get the point now.

I'm not as optimistic as Atwood about whether that future, rushing toward us at a pace similar to the digital revolution of the past 30 years, can be kept within the covers of a book. But, like most of the thousand or so book lovers present at her reading in November, I raised my hand and took a pledge to drink only shade-grown organic coffee.

Maybe we can start by saving Atwood's beloved songbirds.

I'm walking along a river. It's swollen with spring runoff, and as I'm wading through flooded riverbank grass I look ahead to a crowd of people clustered at the side of a bridge. I get closer, and I see that they're looking at a body wrapped around one of the bridge pilings.  When I get to the crowd I ask who has drowned, and somebody tells me it's Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway looks awful. Fish have eaten his nose off and his flesh has the clean translucence of death-by-washing. His eyes have turned to black oil behind lids not quite shut. He's wearing a khaki safari suit, and it's growing green moss where the current isn't hitting it, and waving long skeins of thread where it is. His feet are bare and broken, missing toes and trailing tendons. As I watch, a cheek falls open, exposing teeth, and the current pulls it off and downstream.

Hemingway grins at me. I am unable to look away. For a moment I don't know if the assessing gaze belongs to me or to him.

Then I look around in the crowd, look back at Hemingway, and say to everybody, "Well, he looks like he's got at least one more book in him."

Then I wake up, terrified but laughing, because what I've said is funny to a writer who has watched the posthumous production of books out of Hemingway's wastebasket.

I get out of bed and wrap myself in a robe. The image of the drowned man stays with me even as I understand that some voice within me can make a joke about anything, no matter how filled with grief, no matter how grotesque, no matter how filled with horror. I turn the kitchen light on and go to the kitchen sink to get a glass of water and a couple of ibuprofen, and my face reflected in the dark kitchen window now looks like a skull. I grin at myself in recognition. "Well, it looks like you've got at least one more book in you," I say.

And then I go back in the bedroom and go back to sleep and if I dream again of Hemingway, I don't know it in the morning. By mid-morning my thinking is crowded with words and I don't remember the nightmare until I wonder, in the midst of reading a story by a talented young student, where talent and youth come from. Then the nightmare image is given back to me and I remember how I dealt with it with words and how once the words were there I could gaze at the image without being taken into those black eyes and that grinning, half-decayed head.

I should have learned to play the guitar/I should have learned/ to bang them drums. Because then I could have been in a punk-rock band called the Dead Hemingways, and when we came out on stage and folks were going crazy in front of the stage, we would have taken out our fly rods and whipped the audience with them, whipped them good, really good, so that at the end of the evening, if the music had been head-banging enough and our wrist action skilled enough somebody would have broken the bonds of body, would have broken on through to the other side to where the real dead Hemingways, the suicidal quintet of Ernest and his grand-daughter Margaux and his father and his brother and his sister, whip themselves with their own fly rods, like medieval penitents. I think that's what they're doing, and if they are it's good reason to look at what you do for fun in this life because everything we do here is mirrored on the other side. You don't have to know too many working writers or suicides to know that the other side is alive, and exists in simultaneous counterpoint to our daylit world.

So how did we get here? A few minutes into a talk that's supposed to be on the craft of writing, we're in a vaster and darker place, ruled over by a grim authoritarian Lord and his half-time cthonic queen Persephone, who now that she's gotten acclimated,  kind of likes being queen of  the dead. In residence here are Hemingway and Yeats and T.S. Eliot and Pablo Neruda and Dostoyevsky and Zelda Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Baudelaire and John Berryman and Dickens and Twain and a host of others. And they've all got one more book in them.

When the Greek hero Hercules visited Hades, the shades of the dead clustered around him, begging him for his blood.  With a drop of living blood they could gain substance and go back to the world and revenge themselves upon their enemies. Hercules refused them, understanding that if he gave one drop of blood he would end up sucked dry by the brooding, obsessive, vengeance-seeking shades who thickened the air around him. If Hercules hadn't visited the warrior section of Hades, but had instead gone to the writer's section, he no doubt would have been asked for blood so that a multitude of unfinished manuscripts could be completed.

I think that Hades and its host of images—not all of them ghosts, as even the furniture there has stories for us—Hades has a special place in the life of writers. And it's not just because we can sometimes see the words on the wall above our writing table that read Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.

 It's because writers more or less constantly mediate between language and the unsourceable nightmare—that's the nightmare that can't be traced to professorial anxieties about having forgotten to teach a class this semester and it's time to write the exam for your students. It doesn't trace to childhood trauma, or the death of a loved one or the monster movie you just saw. It instead comes into your sleep from an inhuman dark world. It fills completely the screen of your mind and you wake up throwing words at it in order to name the unnamable and bring narration to something that exists outside of time. One definition of storytelling is that it's bringing time and a name to the unbearable image.

Writing is a kind of dreaming while armed with language, and when you write you're subject to the same invasion from the inhuman, the same necessity to name and date the unnamable and undateable and thereby save yourself, as you are when you're having a nightmare.

You can save yourself because image and language are not even close to the same thing, although it's tempting to think so when we see a phrase like "flower in the crannied wall." Those words create a picture in our mind, but also an illusion that words are pictures.

Words aren't pictures. Words are words—when they're not the thick beige paint with which desperate writers obscure image when the image threatens to overwhelm.

Not-so-desperate writers reverse the process. They reduce language and sometimes destroy it—destroy language—to travel toward a risky and uncomfortable place:  the one where holes in the language let us walk toward those shapes we cannot grasp and toward those things which, if they grasp us, can be the end of us.

In practical terms, that's one of the reasons that if you cut a story's first draft by 25%, it will become better, more exciting, and smarter. It will have more meaning to your reader than it did in its self-indulgent fullness, and much of that increase of meaning is the increase of risk and the decrease in the amount of thick beige paint.

Working with language to explain a scene in cinematic fullness is a process that attenuates rather than concentrates meaning. Destroying language, as any blue-pencil-wielding editor knows, doesn't just concentrate meaning but in a sense makes it possible. It's why a good editor is both the writer's worst enemy and best friend. For those of us who lack a Maxwell Perkins, that worst enemy and best friend have to reside in our own skull, and we hope that they exchange ambassadors.

Language by itself is insubstantial—like shades in Hades—but if given a drop of its own blood, it can suddenly act in the world. Language intact is insubstantial, but wounded, it can gain heft and power.

It should be clear that deliberately crafted word-pictures are not what I'm talking about here. You can play with language and images are sometimes the result. Careers have been consciously constructed out of word-play. Gertrude Stein did well with phrases like Tender Buttons, but those whimsically connected words are not what make her a dangerous and powerful writer. What makes her a dangerous and powerful writer is her ability to use repetition and incongruity to destroy language, to knock a hole in the playground fence, and to beckon us outside, to where the dark shapes lurk.

I'm making some assumptions here that are not universal among those of us who write or teach writing. The largest of these assumptions is that the image is the world and language exists in some external relation to it, or put another way, image is primary and language is secondary. A good many language theorists believe that language exists to the exclusion of everything else—language is reality—and as long as they can stay sequestered inside university English departments, very little will cause them to question that world view.

 But I've always been fond of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones, threatened by a master swordsman and martial artist, pulls out a pistol and shoots him dead.  That's a refutation of those philosophers of language—and the Matrix movies—who say that without language, we wouldn't be able to think, wouldn't be conscious, wouldn't be able to live in a reality because outside of language there is only dark and mute electrochemical reaction. Indiana Jones's pistol gives the lie to all those decades of close combat training and mental discipline, and to all those Ph.D.s in literature.

The uncomfortable conclusion here is that the world is true and language is false. But all of us who have struggled to put the truth into words know that language has to be tricked into telling the truth and into reconnecting with the image that gave rise to it. Turned away from image, language will lie by comfortable omission. As writers, that's one of the paths open to us, and not many of us can resist the temptation to take it.

When I was teaching freshman comp I would give an assignment the first day of class:  write me your one-page autobiography. It was a way of assessing who was a good writer and who was not, and who was thoughtful and at least a little bit self-conscious as a college freshman—and who was not. But it was also a way of showing students that language has a relationship to truth but never is truth.

 "You can't tell the truth about yourself in one page," I would say, when I handed the papers back, and I'd demonstrate this truth by having them read their papers aloud for a small amount of easy credit in the class. Some of them wouldn't read those pages for any amount of offered credit, because they were in effect introducing themselves to their peers with the same words they had chosen to introduce themselves to their professor.

They had lied. They had used language well as foundation makeup, the base layer for a false image of themselves that was designed to get an A in freshman comp.

Such lying is not restricted to students. Look at what those of us who teach at the college level have done with our vitas, our academic papers, our syllabi, and our committee reports. You can make a life of those things. You can use them to build an image for yourself but it will eventually go feral and eat your soul.

You can still live without a soul.  But in place of a soul you will have a mortgage and car payments and a portfolio and tenure evaluations.

But I hope what I'm doing with the language right now shows a different relationship to language, one that preserves a writer's soul, even if it involves blowing a hole in the language playground's fence and going out to see the lurking things.

If the world is true and language less so, language needs to be subverted if you're doing your job as a writer.

For those of you who are beginning to write, and for many of you who have been writing for years, these may be discouraging words. Giving over a huge part of your life to language—becoming a writer—requires faith in language. But becoming a good writer requires that that faith not be naïve. A faith based on the idea that language cannot be true may not look like faith at all, but if it's backed up an awareness that language is our only defense against the power of the image, it will be foxhole faith, the strongest, least naïve, and best kind of faith of all.

I'm the Writer-at-Large for the College of Idaho, a small liberal-arts college in Caldwell, Idaho, thirty miles outside of Boise. My duties involve talking to high school students and one early morning last May I got caught in a freeway traffic jam between Caldwell and Boise and came to a dead stop on I-84 about ten miles from the nearest Boise exit. I listened to NPR, switched to an oldies station, checked my watch and saw that I would still be on time if traffic re-started in a half-hour or so, because I had planned on this traffic jam. I switched back to NPR, listened to the same program I had a half-hour earlier, and wished I'd bought a paper. Then I started looking at the cars around me and the people in them.

Image imposed itself on my vision.  Instead of seeing stuck commuters in Boise, Idaho, I saw the Terminator post-holocaust freeway scene, where miles of stalled and burned cars are filled with fleshless human skeletons. There on I-84, without a movie theater for miles, I looked around me and saw no one who wasn't dead.

If you think this is just crazy, remember that the George Romero movie Day of the Dead  used actual footage from shopping mall security cameras when they needed flesh-eating zombie crowd scenes. "Why are they here?" asks one of the few living characters in the film, watching the scenes on video monitors in the mall's control center. "Instinct. Memory," replies another. "This was an important place in their lives."

I got to Timberline High School on time. Things went well until I took a question from a student asking why he should give up his freedom and go to college. It's a good question, if you're a senior in high school with ten days to go until graduation. Sometimes being Writer-at-Large and talking to these audiences is tough duty.

But it was the wrong question to ask a Writer-at-Large suffering from Interstate Terminator Movie hallucinations.

"Freedom?" I asked him. "Freedom?"  And then I told about the traffic jam and all the dead people I had seen and that probably there wasn't any way to avoid being dead in a car someday in the middle of a bunch of other dead people who, like all of the human power units in the Matrix, just think they're alive.

I was getting fast and loose with my movie references, but the sad thing is they all knew what I was talking about. They'd all seen the movies and when I brought up the images, I could look out at a bunch of fresh young faces and see the shock of recognition, the shock coming when they saw that an adult could think about things this way instead of giving them a pep talk about being at the threshold of a wonderful adventure.

They knew all this stuff already.  It's a pretty heavy thing to know when you're seventeen, especially when you're not so good with the language that you can construct narratives in the face of the images a terrorist movie director serves up.

"Go to college," I said. "Maybe you can put off death for another four years."

Of course there are other reasons to go to college, and of course other reasons to get an MFA—although putting off death isn't a bad reason to get an MFA. A number of people in this MFA program are in it to save their lives, and that's a better reason to be here than wanting to become a successful and published writer. It's good if you can do both, but first things first.

But when I talk to people about the value of an MFA, I try to explain the difficulty of becoming a good writer without instruction. I say that if you are really talented and choose to go it alone, without the benefit of techniques and experience of all of the thousands of writers who have gone before you, for a long time you're going to write like Grandma Moses paints.

 A philosophical way to put this is that if you write, it's better to be an existentialist instead of a logical positivist because the existentialist has learned from the sad history of human aspiration the impossibility and absurdity of the task of writing and does it anyway for the sake of the continuous creation of magnificent failure.

The logical positivist thinks that his experience, once transformed into artifacts of language, will lead to an epilogue that places those artifacts in the world and places the world in time. The loose ends all get tied up, and they're a little kinky—they like being tied up. But then the logical positivist gets discouraged and bitter when the loose ends want to switch places with him. The work gets finished but the world it was supposed to change remains as claustrophobic and as inhuman and as messy as ever.

Most of us start writing is as logical positivists. Most of us who teach writing have become existentialists. We can help you through this process.

So here's what I'm thinking, based on the experiences I've just talked about and others that have happened to me in front of the blinking cursor: 

1. The image is primary and language secondary.

2. The image is true and language is false comfort and insulation.

3. The active subversion of language—paradox, absurd metaphor, savage editing, the slaughter of darlings, irony that approaches nihilism—these need to be in writer's toolkit. It's easy to say that you need to be a writer first and then put on another hat and become your own editor, but I've found that they coexist simultaneously and uneasily while I'm writing. I find I'm trying to destroy and create at the same time, in order to get closer to the image.

4. But without the falseness of language to soften, ameliorate, attenuate and give story to the unbidden image, that image would destroy us. Think again of the image of the drowned Hemingway. Without words, it has the power to become witness to its own witness—in a horribly real sense, to trade places with the dreamer. But with a narrative to go along with it, a riverbank to walk and a crowd to talk to, a spring flood and a bridge, it becomes possible to live and laugh in its presence.

5. Obviously I'm not using false in its usual sense of a counter to truth, beauty, and goodness. I'm using it in the sense that there are lies that make it possible to live, fictions that make it possible to heal and to laugh.

But, you ask, what about the good images? What about the image of the little girl in a field of flowers playing with a puppy that doesn't have the mushroom cloud rising in the background? What about images of the divine, not the demonic? Don't even images with a demonic quality that makes it hard to live in their presence, also have a divine quality that makes it hard to live without them?

You do ask those questions, just not in those words, every time you get an image stuck in your head that starts to generate a story or a poem or an essay. But it's not for nothing that the Islamic world seeks to destroy the image, because images really do compete with Allah for pride of place in human existence.

I don't know enough about the Islamic taboo against image to go very far in this direction, but it is interesting that terrorists espousing a religion that is uncomfortable with the human image have given us the eternal burned-in-to-the-frontal-lobes image—for them and for us—of people jumping from World Trade Center towers. It suggests that behind all human endeavor stands the image, and no matter how we try to suppress it for reasons divine or reasons demonic, the image will find its way into our world.

Let's play with another image, one that's supposed to be a little more benign.

If you go to the Museum Mares in Barcelona, you will find a collection of carved wooden figures of the crucified Christ. They range in age from four hundred to a thousand years. The crosses they were attached to have crumbled with the churches that held them.

There are fifty or so of them, hanging on the bare walls of the Museum, but their cumulative effect is one of incalculable suffering rendered in loving and patient detail. In spite of the centuries they span, you can imagine them as the product of a single obsessed artist. All bear the marks of the scourge, the lacerations of the crown of thorns, the bent shoulders that carried cross to Calvary, and streaming blood turned black with age. The spear wound is under each right breast, a bleeding hole that signifies no ghost occupies the premises. What is left is human husk, broken and battered.

When I flew out of Boise, Idaho to visit Barcelona a few years ago, the Boise media were caught up with a political controversy about a huge blue neon cross that has stood on a tableland above Boise since the 1950s. When civil libertarians pointed out the cross stood on State of Idaho land and thereby violated the separation of church and state, state and local officials arranged a quick and legally suspect land transfer to the Boise Jaycees, who had put up the cross in the first place. I had made an easy judgment about the matter: if you're going to put up a giant neon sign for a religion that says you shouldn't steal, you probably shouldn't acquire the land it's on in a back-door public land swindle.

In the Museum Mares, however, the Christ images began to unravel my comfortable conclusion about the neon cross.  It came to me that Christianity is far more than an attractive bargain made with God where you can follow a few simple rules and gain in return eternal life. It's a religion that has at its deep center death-by-torture and unbearable loss. Its focus is not on the next world but on what is missing in this one.  The artists who rendered the body of Christ were not focused on resurrection.  Instead, they seemed intent on representing dead flesh in its deadest possible form.

Their literal message—that little is left after the god is gone—is negatively but powerfully evocative of the divine, so much so that it occurred to me that Christianity in Europe a thousand years ago and the civic religion represented by Boise's cross have little in common.  But a thousand years is plenty of time to get off message. All Moses had to do was go for a short hike and his people started worshipping a golden calf.

When you remove Christ from the cross and turn it into a giant night-light, you're making radical changes in what and why you worship. Pastors in Boise churches promise light and eternity and heaven without much thought given to their drawbacks. The light so great it blinds, the immortal Sibyl who prays for death, and the failure of artists like Dante or Bosch to invent heavens anywhere near as interesting as their hells are not talked about in Boise churches. In fact, you'll likely hear nothing to suggest that life in heaven isn't a lot like an endless summer in the mountains of Idaho, but without the tourists. The light has been reduced to a weak and comforting glow, one that protects against the dark but doesn't interfere with sleep.

So it's fair to note that the neon-blue cross above Boise could be, without modification, an advertisement for a medical insurance company. Believe in our program and you won't have to die, is the message, and that is pretty much what they will tell you upon your being admitted to a cancer or cardiac ward. The buildings in Boise most like the great Catalan cathedrals, with similar collections of talismans, relics, high priests, acolytes, and sinners, are the two great hospitals, St. Luke's and St. Alphonsus.

Sins have become diseases, cures absolutions. The prayers in Boise hospitals are far more fervent than the ones in the Boise churches, and our most sincere hosanna is Thank God I'm Insured. Perdition comes when you can't get on the list for a transplant.

Lost in this vision of things is the enormous transforming reality of death. It has been transformed into an unpleasant but short surgical procedure that delivers you intact to the hereafter.

The Spanish artists who were carving holes in the sides of their Christ-images had a different idea. They showed their god violently involved with mortality. A cross without its crucifix numbs us not only to that violence but also numbs us to the stunning idea of a god choosing to become mortal. There's nothing there to counteract the desire of mortals to become gods.

But it's no accident that the stock characters in contemporary religious drama are the faithless priest, the priestlike physician, the pious politician, the greedy revivalist, and the born-again hypocrite. It's not accident that you can recognize their powerful spirits even as you search in vain for their souls.

Soul and spirit are used interchangeably in Boise's religion. But they are opposites of a sort. There are remnants of this opposition in our language, and if you look at their traditional associations you can see it. Image, of course, tends toward soul, and word toward spirit. But here are some other associations:

Spirit is male, soul is female.

Spirit is sky, soul is earth.

Spirit: mortification of the flesh. Soul: flesh.

Spirit: high hopes. Soul: deep dreams.

Spirit: mind. Soul: heart.

Spirit: Bach. Soul: Barry White

Spirit: neon. Soul: blood.

Spirit: consensus reality, zeitgeist. Soul: individual experience, the Gesthemane moment.

Spirit: health. Soul: suffering.

Spirit: wealth. Soul: charity.

Spirit: form. Soul: content.

Spirit: faith. Soul: mystery.

These are dualities central to our bitterest cultural battles, but they are inextricably linked with one another.  They lose meaning in the absence of the other. You can win the battle, only to have the victory lose all meaning. Just ask Newt Gingrich.

As a contemporary American writer, you are part of a culture—exemplified by the New Western communities of Boise and Ketchum—that has given so much weight to the spirit that the lives of the people in that culture are threatened by the empty and the meaningless.

Your compensatory task as an artist can be characterized as soul-work. So you need approach not just the terrifying nightmare image, but the female within yourself—even females in our culture need to get in touch with the female within themselves—the earth, your flesh, your dreams, your heart, your terrifying inner Barry White, blood, your own Gesthemane moments, your charity and your mystery. That approach will give power to your writing and, with luck, begin to fill a terrible vacuum in the starved souls of the people who read your words.

And you should avoid becoming the powerful and insured inner male who flies through the sky to make distant business deals, who affects classical music and Jesus-mediated life-extension, who invests in the stock market and real estate, who ignores his feelings, who mortifies his flesh at the gym and who has an aversion to all bodily fluids except good clean sweat, and who, when he uses the word love at all, pronounces it as a one-syllable word.

What this poor inner man—and he also exists in all of us who have grown up in this culture, regardless of gender—what this poor inner guy has done is place his faith far in the direction of language and spirit, and religious formalities, and wealth, and sees them all as a way to escape death.

But if I look at the Jesus of Barcelona, I see an image that doesn't inspire respect for those things. He does inspire respect for suffering, for human interaction, for human life in its own right, and for the sacrament of death. He asks us to look again at the Kingdom of God and eternity, and notes that they're within our grasp if we could but see them. He reminds us that the original beginning for Christianity lay in the divine wanting to become becoming mortal flesh and not the flesh becoming immortal.

That's where a single image can lead you if you use language as a tool to approach it rather than as a tool to obscure it. So choose the images you approach carefully, and the words you use to approach them even more carefully.

So back to Hemingway, who occupies the place of Jesus in the minds of many writers. Usually these writers are male, and not anywhere near 61 years old, and what they're attracted to is not Hemingway's writing but Hemingway's image: the adventurer, lover and scorner of unapproachable and unscornable women, the Death is My Analgesic guy who killed charging water buffalo and got in fistfights with Orson Welles and Wallace Stevens and anybody else who dared challenge him and went to bull-fights because he wanted to get to the bare bones of death, the lover and scorner of Death itself, the lover and scorner of lesser men.

Scorn is pretty important to the image that wrecked Hemingway. I'd guess that if you're headed for suicide, scorn for the things you love will be a big part of you. But it's not a huge leap at this point to say scorn for the merely human is inherent to image.

In Central Idaho we see a lot of 25-year-old guys with little Toyota pickups with kayaks strapped to their shells and backpacks and fly rods and climbing gear inside,  and behind the front seat copies of Hemingway's collected stories and The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea. They also have a leather-bound journal or a laptop, because they're writers, or planning on being writers, or think they're writers even though the pages of the book remain blank, or worse, full of self-pity and scorn for the things they once loved.

But they don't see themselves as writers because they have figured out what it is in their experience that is worth writing about. They're writers because Ernest Hemingway created an image that is eating them for breakfast, and its imperatives have become their imperatives. Its face has become their faces.

I can say this because when I was twenty-five the only thing that kept me from being one of the guys I describe is that I didn't have a Toyota pickup. If I hadn't escaped that image I never would have become a writer, never would have discovered that the really important work is care and feeding of a soul, would have never discovered that I had a soul to care for and feed, and would never have discovered that writing is one of the good and strong ways you can do that.

That's as close as I can come to saying that Hemingway's image destroyed him and it would have destroyed me if as a writer I hadn't begun to negotiate with it—with the terror it inspired and the scorn it had for my life—by twisting and turning and playing with the language in order to come to terms with it and finally get free of it. That's as close as I can come to dream interpretation.

Okay, I'll admit it. The apartment on Kansas Street was not the most beautiful place on earth—in fact it was downright ugly—but it was mine and I loved it.

I wasn't always so fond of this place. The morning the landlord handed me the keys is not a pleasant memory in my mind. He had been too cheap to give the walls a fresh coat of paint and on the ceiling above the chair where the previous tenant, a Polish veteran, had apparently sat smoking every day, there was a brownish stain and on another wall, the faint outline of a crucifix which must have hung there for years. I still remember the nauseating feeling I got as I inspected the soiled carpet, the discolored walls, the smelly refrigerator, and the crusty bathroom tile. In the kitchen cupboards the Pole had left several dozen cans of food from the nineteen-sixties with a note that read: Didn't want to throw these out in case you might want them -Leon. Right, I thought, because I liked to eat decades-old food out of cans with labels so ancient I couldn't even read them. In the guest bedroom I found a gigantic desk floating in the middle of the room with a note. This one read: Hope you can use this. Too big to take out –Leon. And next to his name a smiley face. I was furious. It wasn't even a nice desk—it was made of compressed particle board, and he had probably purchased it the same year he bought the canned food.

But my favorite memory of that day has to be that of my sister calling hysterically from the bathroom, "Ewww! Get over here, you've got to see this!" She stood plugging her nose as she pointed to a pair of pants thrown on the floor. "What? What is it?" I asked as I bent down to pick them up. "Stop! Don't touch them," she shouted in a nasal voice, holding me back. "They're full of crap!" It seemed the Pole had had a stomach problem—perhaps from eating sixties canned food. I gagged with disgust and fear. Fear of what I had gotten myself into. What was I thinking? I had left the comfort of my parents' home to come live in this rat hole. Yet I didn't have a choice. The time had come to leave the nest and I could only afford so much. So I swallowed my fears and faced the day.

Armed with tongs, gloves and an old t-shirt as a face mask, my sister removed Leon's pants, sealed them in a thick plastic bag, and tossed them out. Over the next several days, the pile in the dumpster grew high with discarded garbage and the broken-down parts of the giant desk, along with clumps of brittle linoleum which we had feverishly removed from the bathroom and kitchen floors. For hours I watched the carpet cleaners suck years of brown filth from deep down in the fibers of the carpet while my parents graciously took turns painting over the yellow-stained walls. In time, most traces of Leon were gone. But even then, I never walked on the carpet without wearing flip-flops. When I bathed I made sure never to touch the sides of the tub. And when I opened the refrigerator I always held my breath.

It wasn't until early one morning, months after I had moved in, that I caught myself walking barefoot to the bathroom. I thought I would jump from disgust, but surprisingly I was fine. The carpet felt okay under my bare feet. In fact it felt pleasant, cozy, just like the one back home. The apartment on Kansas Street had long since ceased being Leon's place. It was mine.