Writers Retreat

August 24, 2019 4:16 Saturday, near Lake Kinderhook — or is it Kinderhook Lake? Kind of near Albany.

They flooded the amusement park, so all the rides are underwater. The park was for the kinder, a place to put them while the adults amused themselves at the speakeasies on islands in the lake. After prohibition was repealed there was no need for speakeasies and after World War Two the amusement park was closed. I don’t know if this is true or that I got it right.

New York State, that vast area people from New York City refer to as “Upstate,” is full of mysteries. It was called the Burned Over District, after a wild fire of apocalyptic religious revival swept Western New York in the early 1800s. Joseph Smith received golden tablets from an angel in Panama Rocks near Buffalo. A visionary Iroquois leader named Handsome Lake brought back traditional ways of the Longhouse. Spiritualism also took hold in 19th century New York, with Lily Dale the center for contacting the dead. My mother spoke of Lily Dale with holy dread. Her father was an evangelist and her sister was a child evangelist and she married a man who visited her father because he was called to be a minister and was looking for advice. Papa suggested Dad go to the Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, which is how I happened to be born in Kentucky. My sister was born in Jamestown, New York, during the second world war, I am a baby boomer.

New York is full of mysteries and family histories and graves and a grave waits for me in Chautauqua County in the Southern Tier of the Empire State. The grave at Sunset Hill that holds the ashes of my wife is next to my parents’ graves. My name is already on the grave marker that was finally installed last year, but I haven’t seen it yet.

We thought we were descended from Iroquois because one of the three Weakland brothers who came to America in the 1600s married “an Indian Princess” and the Iroquois inhabited New York. Whether she was royalty or not, we don’t know her name or her tribe, but it might have been the Piscataway, and I’m guessing she was already a Catholic when she met my male ancestor, who was also Catholic. We liked to imagine she was Mohawk, but I doubt she belonged to one of the Six Nations of the Confederation, because she and her husband probably met in Maryland, according to others investigating the family tree. On my mother’s side — English, French, and that unknown tribe. On my father’s side, Swedish.

That’s more than enough family history. What is going on RIGHT NOW?

I’m sitting outside of Eugene and Janet’s house near the lake of Kinderhook, a place with a Dutch name, where a local was selling a 400 year old piece of Dutch furniture for a mere $500 until Janet talked him out of it.

“Take it to the Antiques Roadshow and find out what it is really worth,” she advised.”

What is anything really worth?

I came here with five other people from The City to sit under the trees and write. We are in a writing class. Every summer members of the class come up here to do this. This is my first time on this writing retreat and I pray I am up to the task. So far, as you can see for yourself, it doesn’t look good.

As soon as I was seated in the backseat of the Dodge Caravan the nausea came over me. I’m feeling better now, not good, but better. Is it psychological? I was worried I’d get car sick, so I got carsick? Do I get sick when I even think of leaving The City? It’s hard enough to leave my studio, to leave Brooklyn, and it took about an hour for us to get out of Manhattan and over the George Washington Bridge into the Garden State, the detour you take to get to Upstate New York.

I did not vomit but my stomach was unsettled and my sinuses were unhappy, and are now not as unhappy.

I’m trying to get at what is happening RIGHT NOW.

I am recovering from the drive. A red pickup truck is backing a boat trailer toward the lake. A mourning dove calls and the sounds of insects mix with the sounds of tinnitus, because wherever I go I’m always inside my head.

This notebook I am writing in was made in Vietnam and was distributed by CVS Pharmacy, it says on the back.

“All CVS Pharmacy products are satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.”

It wasn’t my money. Harold gave us these notebooks and if I don’t write something good, better than this, I’ll have to give HIM his money back. 

“Make Today Magical” in silver letters on the purple cover. If it’s not magical, your money back.

I saw a flag in town that was half American and half Confederate. We are in Upstate NY, as I said earlier. My New York ancestors were in the Union Army. The Union Forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah. I was told we won that war (shouting the battle cry of freedom).

I’m sitting closer to the lake now, behind Patty and Ken’s house. It is very cloudy. I was hoping to see the Milky Way tonight. I’ll have to be satisfied with seeing Upstate New York. The lake is 365 acres, I was told.

“I don’t know how acres translate to water,” Patty said. I don’t even know how acres translate to land. I couldn’t tell you the square footage of my studio.

Patty shows me a map of the lake. The lake is a complicated shape.

“I think you have to get out on the lake to see how big it is,” she says to the writers who went on the boat ride. I wasn’t going on a boat ride. I can’t stomach a car ride and I don’t want to vomit into this complicated lake.

I didn’t come to this summer place to get away from home. I’m not staring at this lake because I got tired of staring at the East River. I will never get tired of staring at the East River. I came here to be with these people who write and talk and live their lives.

“Perfect spot to sit and write, huh?”

“It’ll do,” I answer.

Charles, who was also born at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, told us about a man from the Bahamas who came with him to Kentucky and was impressed by all the trees.

“Do people live in trees here?”

That is how it looks here. Like they live in trees. Across the lake is a forest with houses and telephone lines and cars. I am sitting under two big white oak trees. This side must also look like a forest from the other side.

Dean told s about a Native American visitor he had in Manhattan who needed a tree to sit under for his spiritual practice. 

Trees communicate with each other, I’ve heard. They have a communication network, an internet. Do these trees speak to me? If a tree speaks to a deaf man in the forest does it say anything? The other trees hear and they also hear when one falls. I was happy when Ken confirmed that this is a White Oak. “The human name doesn’t mean shit to a tree,” sang Grace Slick at Woodstock, fifty years ago this month.

Far away Amazon rain forests are burning.

This tree is trying to tell me about that, I’d guess.

God becomes the dwelling place we build for ourselves. I’m reading St Teresa of Avila, who likens the mystical experience of prayer to the silkworm who builds a cocoon out of its own substance and then dies and is reborn as a white butterfly.

Ego death, I guess. Transformation. Change your mind, change my mind.

Charles told me about a man he knows who does sweat lodge rituals. He is connected to the Native American Church and, once in a while, when he feels the call, he does a peyote ceremony.

The silk worm eats mulberry leaves. Should I eat peyote buttons?

I’m reading The Interior Castle, by Teresa, because I found a copy among my wife’s books. I don’t think Lori got around to reading it and I wish I was reading it to her.

Our mornings would begin when I’d wake her up at 7 and bring coffee and cereal to bed. After we ate, I’d read to her from a book she selected. I read all of Jane Austen to her and a bunch of Henry James and Ulysses and Moby Dick and Journey to the End of Night and Charles Dickens and Tristram Shandy and a lot of others.

Anyway, last week I started reading The Interior Castle and am developing a crush on Teresa. I am only as far as the fifth dwelling and there are seven dwellings in her literary crystal house of mansions.

Teresa is very personal. She was writing a guide to prayer for nuns and she often expresses doubt about her ability to describe what she wants to describe. There is honesty in her writing. All I knew about her was the Bernini sculpture, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, and I’d read her description of the ecstatic experience depicted, of being speared in the heart by an angel. There have been no such transcendental impalements yet in this book, but there are two more dwelling places to read about before I get to the center of the crystalline castle.

Before I am reduced to a box of ashes, before what remains of me has been burned, before someone puts that box in that grave in Chautauqua County, before then, is Now.

What is happening RIGHT NOW?

Last night they were talking about death and hospice and seeing people die, or not seeing them die, but seeing them dead. I didn’t want to talk about seeing her die and I’m not going to write about it now. I don’t know if I can write honestly about it RIGHT NOW. They were just telling ghost stories, but are the spirits of the dead among us?

Some of my ancestors are buried in Elmira, New York, which is where my mother was born. I want to visit that cemetery again when I drive across New York to see the grave marker that has my name on it next to hers. I don’t know when I’ll feel like driving there, probably never, so I might have to go when I don’t feel like it.

Janet said we could look at the giant heads on our way back. Sixty foot high heads some sculptor made. There is one you can get inside and climb up and look out the eyes like I’m now looking out my eyes from inside my small head.

Harold and Charles are writing. I am writing. Eugene is doing something in the yard with flower pots. Janet is inside. I don’t know if Teresita and Dean are up yet.

I am weaving a cocoon out of ink, I write.

No, that’s no good, I write.

Stop writing about writing, I write.

My late aunt, the child evangelist who grew up to be an adult evangelist, and who died around the time my parents were also dying, had a cottage by Lake Erie in Barcelona, New York and we’d stay there some summers and this place reminds me a little of that place and those people. A chipmunk hurries past. Dean arrives and vapes at the outside table.

Teresa was told to write by her superior. Harold suggested we write and read what we wrote at brunch today. Then we’ll go back to the City and I’ll go back to the studio, to my soul’s true home, and I’ll make some real good pictures and I’ll write something real good that isn’t about writing.

Most of you here at Lake Kinderhook didn’t know that my wife died four years ago this month, 2:30 AM, August 1, 2015. None of you knew her. It took another two years before her sister was able to get to New York so we could bury the ashes together. Jimmy came from Richmond to drive us across the state. Lisa came from Texas. The three of us and our friend Liv were with Lori when she stopped breathing.

Bereavement really isn’t what you expect it to be. You have to become someone else. I didn’t know and I don’t know and this writing I’m doing — I said I wasn’t going to write about writing — but this writing is in hope that I’ll forget what I’m trying to say and say something else, a confession, maybe, something I could tell myself, and then tell you, about being here. Maybe not WHY we’re here, but THAT we’re here together, RIGHT NOW.

 The year I buried the box of ashes is the year I started going to Middle Church, which is where I attend Harold’s writing class. Harold gives us a word to prompt us and sometimes I write something that isn’t bad and that is honest. Harold said that the weekend itself is the prompt and that’s why I’ve written this magical mess, messing up this purple notebook he gave me.

I wish I could take you to the center of a crystalline castle, but I don’t know what to say about that. I want to get to that place I’ve heard about where you see all the suffering, the universal suffering, and you know everything is alright, and as it should be, and I want to write what I can about it, and weave a cocoon of ink to leave behind with the box of ashes when I fly away. 

                                        Harold Slazer

                                        The audience at Lake Kinderhook