Verbal Construction

St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers: "Edit! For the love of Christ."

One of my mentors often said, “In writing, nothing is wasted.” She’d remind me of this after explaining why dozens of pages of my writing were useless except for perhaps one little scene. Painful. But I learned two valuable things.

1. People who provide honest, thorough, unflattering analysis of your writing are hard to come by, and they’re a godsend.

As my mentor put it: “If you want to be a better writer, you have to learn how to smell your own crap.” Also, it helps to have someone in your life who cares enough to alert you to your crap — on and off the page.

2. She was right that nothing is wasted in writing. The effort to write, re-write, delete, abandon, re-visit, and re-work a manuscript is all part of the process. Nothing is wasted, even if you end up cutting five times as much as you ever show to anyone for critique.

She used to say that writing is like making a reduction sauce. You take all the drippings,  add a few good ingredients, then simmer and simmer and simmer until just a tiny taste is an explosion of flavor.

Or, as one of my friends once said, “Fat wordcounts don’t impress me. Say what you need to say and don’t waste my effing time.”

Just reminding myself of these principles as I muddle along with my assignments and looming deadlines. Saintly prayer for writers here.

Holy decoupage.

When I was at the Catacombs of San Callisto I saw a rosary with tiny pictures of popes, saints, Mary, and Jesus decoupaged onto the beads. I loved its kitschy sincerity. So I bought it. I’ve been relearning how to pray it.

At first I balked at saying the prayers because — wow — I forgot how obsessed they are with glorifying the concept of a male deity. Also, praise of Mary is phrased as a diss of all other women. WTF? I tried rephrasing everything on the fly, and then tried my own rewritten prayers for a while. But it seemed like cheating. If I want to discover the value of praying the rosary as currently prescribed by the Catholic Church, I have to try it straight-up in good faith.

Plus, to paraphrase Mary Daly, changing the sexist/oppressive slant of religion is a lot more complicated than merely substituting gender-neutral nouns for male-centric nouns, or swapping a reified God for a reified Buddha (or Goddess, for that matter.) And it’s not as if I’m trying to revolutionize Catholicism or anything.

While praying the rosary you’re supposed to meditate on the mysteries, or significant purported events in the lives of Mary and Jesus. The point, apparently, is to somehow imitate the life of Christ to become worthy of his sacrifice. I’m trying. But I find myself meditating more on the mysteries from the point of view of Mary, the woman who made it all possible. I imagine how Mary might have felt seeing her child (anyone’s child) scourged at the pillar, for example. Seems to me, if you identify primarily with Mary in all the mysteries, it’s a whole different religion.

So this is research. Somehow. For some project that hasn’t taken shape yet. Substantial progress seems unlikely any time soon.

Vivien Leigh, 1958

My recent stumbling toward Saint Gemma Galgani has actually led me somewhere. Several years ago, I worked at a hospital founded in the late 1800s as a tuberculosis sanitarium. It was an unmistakably eerie  place at times. I had one uncanny experience that I consider a brush with a ghost. I won’t go into it except to say that it happened in the maze of underground tunnels beneath the medical campus. Spooky.

As a result, I became fascinated with cultural lore surrounding TB and TB sufferers during the pre-antibiotic era. On my list of perpetually neglected projects is: “Something about tuberculosis.”

Around that time, I became interested in Vivien Leigh, who suffered from TB for many years before it killed her. Leigh also suffered from delirious madness. I’m completely medically unqualified to even suggest this, but I insist that Leigh’s madness was a symptom of her TB.

I was intrigued to learn that my dear Saint Gemma (yes, she’s now my dear) also suffered from TB. She “overcame” spinal TB early in life and died at age 25 from pulmonary TB.

I wonder to what extent the mystical experiences of saints can be attributed to delirium caused by an infection such as TB: alternating periods of stupor and euphoria, hallucinations, lack of appetite and thirst, seemingly demonic attacks, and profuse amounts of blood. I wonder not because I want to discount the possibility of the supernatural but because I’d like to understand how something supernatural might manifest in the human body in a way that would appear to have no material cause.

So, three of my passionate interests are beginning to converge: Mysticism, tuberculosis, and beautiful, complicated, tragic women.