Failing and Flying

February 25, 2010

In my attempt to write more often I went to the Brown Bag at San Diego Writers, Ink on Tuesday with Ted.

Brown Bag is a 1 hour drop in writing session downtown at the organization where Ted and I teach. It’s from noon to one so we often get folks coming in on their lunch break.

One of the prompts was:

Write what was broken (though I guess you could have read or heard it as Right what was broken, huh?)

I’ve decided that whenever I do these Brown Bags, and this is my second time going, i’m going to follow the prompt but apply it to my novel. So, I wrote about what was broken in this character in my book.

Here’s the first sentence I wrote for that prompt:

It was as if my world had cracked, broken open so that everything and everyone and every moment of that summer had spilled out in front of me.

Not the greatest sentence, but it was a terrific exercise, really. And I’m finding much joy in that I’m able to steal moments like this to write .

Then Tuesday night I heard this amazing poem on The Writer’s Almanac, written by Jack Gilbert. I especially love the last line. And I’m always drawn to the Icarus myth (for a fantastic short story inspired by the Icarus myth read Gabriel Brownstein’s “Musé de Beaux Arts” from his completely compelling story collection, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, which I had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form when I worked at a publishing house –that eventually purchased the book).

Icarus by Hendrik Gotzius

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

“Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven. (c) Alfred A. Knopf, 2005 .