Eve Marko and I have begun a dialogue about friendship, trust, creativity, blogs, writing and the power of words to heal and give us voice and strength, especially in difficult times. Eve’s husband, the well-known Zen teacher and writer Bernie Glassman, suffered a stroke two months ago, and she is working hard to understand the new realities of her life.
I asked if I could help, I offered to help her use her blog and her writing gifts – she is also a Zen teacher and writes fiction and non-fiction books, but said she had no time to write now. I suggested she did not have enough time to not write, and that thought send her up to Cambridge for a wonderful and engaging lunch and visit to our farm.
Our dialogue is underway, Eve began writing about our meeting on her very excellent blog, evemarko.com. I could tell right away that Eve was surprised by me. A classically-trained Jewish intellectual (and a bit of a literary snoot) who grew up in New York and now lives in the Berkshires, she suspected, I think, that I was the same. She is friends with some big literary lions, I am not one of them.
I think a great measure of friendship is how the first encounters feel. You either get one another or you don’t. We did, we sorted it out quickly.
Eve brought a container of Whitefish salad from Zabar’s delicatessen in New York and I gather it’s quite famous but I had never heard of it and didn’t know what it was. She was surprised by my lack of response but accepting, as Buddhists tend to be. My friend Scott Carrino, who runs the cafe we were dining in, came over and nearly fell over at the sight of the container, he said this was his favorite food in all the world.
Somewhat ungratefully (I just thought it was a container of salad) , I said “Gee, Scott ought to have this,” and she agreed, surprised, she said. “I thought you were a New Yorker.” I have lived in New York several times in my life, I have never been to Zabar’s or any other Jewish delicatessen, I do not yet know what whitefish salad is. Scott, who is not Jewish, loves it.
I suppose I misjudged Eve as well. I was much drawn to her warmth and honesty, we became good friends in a flash. I just fell in love with her. I knew of her passion for Buddhism, and I guess I also expected something somewhat different. She is a dynamo, powerful and intensely creative. We are, at the core, much alike.
Eve also has some fear and prejudice about blogs.
I have encountered this for some years now, literary writers generally detest blogs, they see them as part of the erosion of civilization that has destroyed the cultural parameters of writing in recent years. The idea of sharing their lives is often anathema, and so is too much of a dialogue with readers. Literary book writers consider chats with readers on Facebook the equivalent of dancing naked in Times Square for money.
Eve assumed I was a famous and wildly successful author who wrote on my blog as a sideline. She was flabbergasted by my bankruptcy.
I told her my blog was not a sideline, it was the main event for me, the focal point of my writing and creativity. I assured her that I was not famous enough to be immune from the travails of the world. She struggled with this, I think. I am neither famous nor wildly successful, nor am I a literary snob. I do not agonize over every word, I have no interest in what the New York Times is or isn’t saying about books and I don’t care if they ever reprint a word I have written. I have an interactive relationship with my readers that absolutely horrifies many traditional authors but has been very good for me.
Eve would love to spend time at Yaddo, the literary retreat in Saratoga Springs, I would not. I don’t need to have people bring me food while I write in protected isolation deep in the woods. I do not ever wish to be that needy or fragile, although I am respectful of people who do.
Eve has a 20th century idea of a book. New York Times And New Yorker reviews, genteel gatherings, readings in classy books stories, writing polished and polished over years and published in paper form. I’ve done that kind of writing, my writing world has changed, along with the world around me. I told her it’s very simple. Do we wish to be dinosaurs or not? Do we wish to be relevant? To matter?
Our readers have gone online. We can follow them there, or we can turn to dust and bitch about the old days.
When I first began my blog, my publicist nearly vomited, he cautioned me not to write too often or nobody would buy my books. He said my photos reminded him of Hallmark cards. My editor never once looked at my blog, it had no importance to him. It has evolved into something I never imagined. In her blog post today, Eve shared her most basic questions about my suggestion that she turn to her blog to share her experience with her husband’s illness.
“Does writing happen only by locking yourself inside a room, leaving the world – and your readers – outside? Or can writing also happen interactively, in cahoots with a community, where you put things out into the world, etc?”
And what about craftmanship?, she asks. “I’m not brilliant or fast.” What if her writing isn’t polished, she worries? And finally, she said, “my biggest question: Isn’t it self-centered to write about yourself several times a week? I mean, who wants to know? Who cares about the details of your day-to-day? Isn’t it – here’s the big word – NARCISSTIC?.”
Writing happens anywhere the writer writes. In a room, on a computer, with a pen and pencil in the woods, in an attic or a basement. Writing is not defined by material form, but by the imagination, drive and craft of the writer. And whether the work is read. God never wrote that a book must only be in one form. Once books were on stone tablets, then on paypyrus, then on paper. Now on paper still, and in the ether, on blogs, websites, devices that hold 1,000 different books. They are all books to me.
It is not for me to say what a book must be or to define the only way to write, Chairman Mao had that one right, let a hundred flowers bloom. I just want to be a writer. I can’t control the universe. I’m sure a Zen teacher knew that before I did.
As you can see from Eve’s blog, her craftsmanship is quite fine, more polished than mine will ever be, even more than I would wish mine to be. I love the natural, informal, somewhat raw form of the blog. It reflects the real world as well as the imagined one. She has absorbed the self-doubts and neuroses of the literary and intellectual world, in which people are taught that writing is a painful and sacred drama, a nightmarish travail that is possible only for the very chosen few to do well.
A writer is anyone who says he or she is a writer, writing is whatever they produce. The people and marketplace will decide what happens next, that is not in our control. Eve’s long and loving life with her husband has been challenged, and for now at least, shattered by a serious stroke. Everything about her life has changed, especially her assumptions, and she is trying to reclaim it in a way that is healing for them both. If that is not something people would care to know about, then I am a poor judge of story-telling. And I am not a poor judge of story-telling, that is what I do.
As for narcissism, this one strikes close to home as I write about myself seven days a week and more than once a day. I share much, if not all of my life. Narcissism is defined as a disorder in which a person has an inflated sense of self-importance. I write about myself, I have written five memoirs as well as my blog posts, I was in therapy for many years, and no therapist ever suggested I suffered from an inflated sense of self-importance. In fact, I was treated for many years for disorders stemming from a sense of shame, self-loathing and very low self-esteem. I suffered several different kinds of abuse as a child, and required years of treatment in order to live normally.
People who wet their beds until they graduate high school are not generally endowed with a high sense of themselves.
I see my blog as a memoir, as my great work, as a living book, albeit a new kind of book written and transmitted in a new form and read in a new way. Creativity is about change, not stasis, and we all have to ask ourselves if we feel our stories are important. Or not. Eve’s story is important, and I think she knows that, or we would not have had that terrific lunch together. She would not have connected with Maria so powerfully or loved Red so much. She would not be struggling so thoughtfully to figure out how to live her life in the face of great shock and difficulty.
Literature is rich with people telling their stories. Was Joan Didion narcissistic when she wrote about the death of her husband? Was Patti Smith? Are Frank McCourt, Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, Isak Dinesen, Maya Angelous narcissists because they wrote so powerfully and beautifully about their lives and struggles and hard-won lessons.
If so, I am happy to take on the title.
And was Christian Wimans, the brilliant author of Bright Abyss the book Eve gave me as a gift narcissistic when he wrote after being diagnosed with incurable cancer: “There are moments in every life when one is overwhelmed – in a positive sense, thought there may very well be suffering – by reality; or more accurately, overwhelmed by reality spilling its boundaries. It can happen when you fall in love or, after the early nullifying horror abates a bit, when the world returns sharper and starker after a dire diagnosis.” Or when your husband has a stroke.
When we first communicated, Eve suggested she was overwhelmed. Even in her first post, her writing suggests something else, even in just two days. A strong, perceptive and loving human perceiving something in reality that she had not perceived before. She does have time to write if she chooses, and it will do her and everyone who reads it some good.
