The Red Book


Last week I went into Malaprops with my daughter. We had some time to browse prior to a reading I was doing at Posana. I bought some Moleskins for a workshop group for the following day, some pens. I bought my daughter a pair of journals, one for her and one for a friend. I was paying for it all when I saw it. The Red Book.


The secret book by Carl Gustav Jung, sealed away in a chilly Swiss bank for a century and now sitting before in all its red immense glory, beckoning to me. Not saying "buy me, buy me, buy me" (though I knew I would) but rather "open me, open me, open me."


Let me tell you a thing about me and books.


When I took a group of my boy students (as their teacher at a boys' boarding school) to go see the Dead Sea Scrolls in Charlotte five years ago, by the time I exited the exhibit, they'd all found new girlfriends and had bought them sodas. I had spent that long looking--no: gazing--into the strange cases built to house them, complete with low lights on timed dimmer switches so the paper bears the weight of light, and sight, for only seconds at a time. I swear I wanted to see every stroke of whatever language they were written in. Not that I could read it, but I know there's power in the word, and there's greater power in words written in that metastate of illumination.


"What are you?" I whispered to them, under my breath, but no low enough for the Rabbi standing near me to hear, close his eyes and nod very slowly in agreement with my awe.


I don't take these matters lightly.


So, there was the Red Book. "Please," I said, unable to complete the request. And within a moment, this enormous book was under my hands. I touched it first, much in the way I touch a horse as I move alongside its enormous body, toward its face, careful not to startle it, careful to let it know I"m here.


I opened it. . .


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC: A POEM MADE OF 90 ABBA SONG TITLES

Image
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC A POEM WITH 90 TITLES OF ABBA SONGS It's because now my life's as good as an ABBA song. --Muriel’s Wedding Because Love is all there is in this SUMMER NIGHT CITY , Because no one is CASSANDRA on THE DAY BEFORE YOU CAME , Because If it wasn't for the nights, we think that we could take it, Because we expect HAPPY HAWAII and get a MUSICIAN with FUNKY FEET ,  Because THAT’S ME , in the car where the ABBA CD blares strobe light satisfaction, rearview mirror turns mirror ball.  Because I enter a WINNER-TAKES-IT-ALL as the low bass line of ABBA subverts my bottom line, Because  my history falls from the shelf because it's WATERLOO , I couldn't escape if I wanted to, Because we DANCE WHILE THE MUSIC GOES ON in the heart's dopamine disco, Because CHIQUITITA , I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Because I turn that music on and I forget  everything. Because I am 8 again, arms out spinning Disco innocence in
Read more

Teaching Creative Nonfiction in Pandemic

Three weeks into my own, two week's into my daughter's isolation, I am teaching a class on Creative Nonfiction. We are nine weeks into the semester. Over Spring Break, everything in the world changed. The students "returned" tonight. I have been teaching in class in Zoom basically since I was told about Zoom. For me, it was the perfect solution to what then were my life's problems. I hated traffic. Zoom. I am deaf and require hearing aids, and listening in rooms of people is impossible. Zoom. I like to teach without interruptions. Zoom. Also, because I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina, often some students can't make it to class. They would Zoom. Some nights, none of us could come to class. We Zoomed. All of us. And that was the end of teaching in a classroom. I still carried the slight stigma of being an "online professor." It held a similar stink that "online dating" used to before everybody did it. It wasn't a "
Read more

Emailing Mother Theresa: On Losing the Art of Gazing

Image
I sent my first email in 1996. My boyfriend at the time had a computer, and the computer had internet. He sent emails all the time. When I was working on a project with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) to develop a salivary ferning microscope that was cost-efficient enough to be distributed to impoverished women in India and Africa, I was asked for my email address. My boyfriend said I could use his.  One afternoon, my colleague at PATH forwarded an email from Mother Theresa. She was giving PATH her approval of the device. Once you get an email from Mother Theresa, there isn't much else to anticipate (Note to the 20000 senders of emails I've received since: you understand). The project got tanked along the way, despite my patchwork re-design that involved a cardboard kaleidescope from a child's birthday party and a 50x magnifying glass. I waited another two years to get my own email address, and another two passed before I started to actually &qu
Read more