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Epiphany Magazine - epiphmag.com Issue 12
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Epiphany Magazine - epiphmag.com
LODI MEDITATION
by
Maj-Britt Johnson
The first time I went down to the Lodi DMV, to take the New Jersey driver's license test, it didn't occur to me to study. What could be so different about the traffic rules in New Jersey from Virginia, where I had lived for the past seven years? I know this stuff, I've been driving for decades. Traffic signs are the same from coast to coast, what's to know? I asked myself. I sniffed at the rack of pudgy, square, little informational booklets prominently placed right inside the front door, and decided to make a project out of reading the faces of the DMV clerks instead.
Lodi is in the heart of what you might call the "Soprano Section" of New Jersey, as in the HBO Mafia Sopranos, not the Metropolitan Opera sopranos who were more likely to be living in upper Bergen County, where I was living, temporarily. Here in Lodi I was in the real New Jersey, possibly the most diverse state in the union. We who sat in the orange, plastic chairs, waiting for our passes to freedom, were from everywhere, and spoke dozens of different languages. But after a short time I realized what we all had in common was a desperate need to please the clerks who sat on stools, looking out at us, from behind bullet proof glass.
Because the glass was also virtually sound proof we had to lower our heads and speak through a small oval opening in the glass, very loudly, meaning everyone could know our business, which worried me, being what you might call a private person. I watched as speakers of Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, Yiddish struggled to understand the clerks, whose voices sounded like people chatting around a pool, when you're listening from underwater, even when they spoke loudly, which many of them did. Except when they spoke too softly. It was hard to decide which they might be enjoying more, being rude or passive aggressive.
They have to be forgiven their attitudes, I tried to convince myself, watching the clerks faces. How interesting can it be to say the same things over and over?
"I don't care how long you've been waiting I need three documents.
I don't care how many miles you had to drive I need three documents.
I don't care if your GREAT grandmother was born here I need three documents.
I said three documents.
Get out of my line, can't you see how many other people are waiting? What? Ya think you're more special than the rest of them out there?"
Whenever the dialogue reached that point, maybe every fifth or sixth person, the crowd emitted a low growl, self-righteously, as if they weren't likely to be the next candidate for scorn. The victim slumped, turned, eyes cast down on the floor, nursing some old wound, perhaps from a childhood playground incident, re-stimulated by this act of public shaming. The clerks would then cut their eyes at each other, and a look of self-satisfaction slithered like the shadow of a snake over the row of faces. It was very hard to love them.
Because I was a minister I was always coming up with little spiritual practices to help me love people. Unlike these clerks, I was expected to be the Nice Person in the Room at all times. This was difficult for me. Daily. Yet I had recently set a goal for myself to love all beings, no exceptions. I told myself, as hour succeeded hour at the Lodi DMV, that this was not a wasted afternoon, it would be good spiritual practice.
After a couple of hours I had discerned something I could admire about these civil servants. It was their essential stillness. A stillness that somehow lay at the ground of their being, despite their episodic histrionics. With a boredom-induced sense of awe I realized this was the same quality I had witnessed in bank tellers, some retail clerks, and many Starbucks baristas, though without the overlay of malice. I completely envied these clerks what appeared to be an utter lack of anxiety. They could be rude, bellicose even, but they were profoundly "centered" people. Facing eternally long lines they had no illusion that if they sped up they would get more done. Peering out at the anxious congregation before them, knowing that there would always be more people pressing down upon them than they could ever possibly serve well, they simply worked apace, enjoying the camaraderie with their colleagues in the trenches. The numbers would continue to turn over on the L.E.D. display, the line would always be there, and so would their jobs. So why hurry? Why worry? I was, in the midst of the infamous, frenetic, East Coast culture, witnessing the most basic of spiritual practices, the Acceptance Of The Now.
I envy them, I said to myself. Me, I always feel overwhelmed by the fact that the line never ends, that the work will never be done, that by the time the fifteenth person come through the line I'm ready to snap.
When my number was called up yonder I shuffled forward, relieved that the LED was calling me to #4, the most taciturn clerk, not #5 the most bellicose. I was also smugly grateful I had carefully read the DMV website before driving all the way down here, and had therefore known to bring three proof of residency documents, which I had been compulsively checking and re-checking, every fifteen minutes.
"Over there." The clerk who had verified my three documents directed me to a man in uniform, who took me to a cubicle in a windowless gray room, to sit in front of a computer screen. As I have already mentioned, I had not bothered to study for the test.
How many inches do you have to leave between you and the curb, or you and a fire hydrant? 15? 16? 24? How should I know? Does one inch make that much of a difference? I can't believe this! There were dozens of such cosmically irrelevant, hair splitting, how many angels on the head of a pin type questions. Needless to say, I failed.
Chastened, I took one of the friendly little instructional books back to North Bergen County. I figured I need study only those sections that I now knew, having taken the test, were the necessary ones.
My second visit took place on October 31st. Halloween. This time I sat in a different section of the room, behind a large Russian speaking man, hoping none of the clerks would recognize me as a returnee. But I stole a glance at them from around the large man's back. Every last one of them, five women, and one man, was dressed up as a witch. Black traffic cones were balanced on their heads, some of their faces were painted green, others sported hairy moles, one had a long bumpy chin, perhaps made out of papier-mache. I moved over a seat, the better to study them.
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Again I had hours to engage in meditation. I realized these clerks had been transformed somehow, as a group, and not just superficially. What is it? I asked myself. What is different about the energy back there today? Irrepressible, that's it. The thin veneer of malice I had witnessed during my previous, pre-Halloween, visit had been lifted. It was as if it was the malice that had been the mask all along. A lightness of spirit rippled down the line of clerks. They looked like a pew full of teenagers working hard to act cool in a church service, but always on the verge of cracking up. These clerks knew very well what kind of reputation they had in New Jersey, and this holiday was allowing them to embrace it, to own it, even to glory in it.
And then, I "got it." What I had seen the last time I was here was only a surface rudeness! In Virginia a surface politeness had been required of a DMV clerk. And underneath that, no doubt lurked the shadow selves, the witches, the demons of all those polite southern women. Here a playful rudeness was the social norm, the coping mechanism. How could I have forgotten this! I was once a New Yorker myself!
During the second hour I meditated on a new question: Which is a more evolved collective cultural response to the inevitable stresses of life in human community? Surface rudeness? Or surface politeness? And which is more likely to keep the species intact?
Then I was punted into the gray computer cubicle for the second time.
Whaaaat? I screamed inside my head, as a Bronx sales clerk from the shop where my mother used to buy her hosiery rose up and completely took over my brain. I should actually know the answer to these dumb-ass questions? How many weeks does a married woman have after her marriage to inform the DMV of a name change? Are you friggin' kidding me! Who the hell cares! What a sexist question!
Apparently those witches had the power to change the categories on the computer screen into an infinite number of permutations and combinations of traffic factoids. There was no finite set of categories. This test was all new territory.
I failed by one question. One!
"It couldn't be. Please show me what I got wrong," I said with polite, restrained, intensity to the clerk who gave me the news.
She laughed and economized her own energy with a simple, "No can do."
"By just one answer?" I screamed, out loud, in my car, as I headed up the New Jersey Turnpike. Then I remembered my mother had once called to warn me that a person could be arrested for screaming in her car. "It once happened to Dory Previn," she said, "she wrote a song about it."
But where would that have happened? Minnesota maybe? Iowa? This was New Jersey. "No f-ing way!" I screamed at my windshield as loudly as possible. "I studied that book, I memorized it! It's not possible I flunked!"
When I drove down to the DMV in Lodi, for the third time, I was ready. I had memorized every fact in that ugly-ass, fat-assed, chunky, overly-detailed tome. Unable to admit to anyone on the church staff that I had flunked not once, but twice, I had told the office manager I was going to a meeting on the other side of New Jersey, so I'd be away all day.
I took a number, and sat, again in a new section of the room, again scanning the row of clerks. Back in their civvies. Back in their masks of bored disdain for the cowed crowd. I was out of love with them. This time I had brought a book to read. A novel. To which I gave my complete, mindful, attention until I was called in to the gray room.
When I finished the test, a clerk, one I haven't bothered to mention before, but she was there, each time, sitting at the little desk near the picture-taking machine, bawled out my name really loudly. I walked over to her, wary of her eyes, which were feral with glee.
"You passed," she said.
"Uh, yeah," I said, cautiously. "I know."
"This time." She added.
Oh my God, I thought, she has a record right there on that screen of how many times I flunked. And she thinks it's funny.
And then she couldn't help herself. She tried to contain it, but the same joy I had admired in her sisters, the witches serving at the front on Halloween, spilled out of her and over to another clerk nearby.
"And you passed by only one," she said. The other clerk began to cackle too.
All those hours of spiritual practice went right out the window. "No f#%$ing way!" I yelled. It just popped out of me. I felt like I'd run a red light, and then I started speeding. "No way! By only one answer? No way! I studied that book. I knew so much more than last time, I knew so much more than just one more thing. That can't be right! Show me which one I missed!"
"Look here," the clerk snapped, and pointed to the bottom right of the camera, where there was a big sign that said, "LOOK HERE."
The other clerks in the room, there were probably only three or four, but it sounded like dozens, were now a cackling coven.
"Look here!" The clerk said it again, all business now. And then, speaking slowly, as her voice slid back into indifference, her attention already shifting over to the next person in line, she said, "And you might want to close your mouth."
I had to live with that picture she took of me for the next five years. It was not a pretty sight.
BIO: I am a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and have had a residency at Hedgebrook Writer's colony, Whidbey Island Washington, have attended the Iowa Summer Writer's Festival, taken writing classes at the 92nd street Y in NYC, and am in a writer's group with the author Nancy Peacock. I have only recently begun to send out my work. I hope this classifies me as an "emerging writer."
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Morals Learned from a Galaxy Far, Far Away
by
Zandra Castillo
I enjoy reading Bible-based theme books to my 5-year-old son. Raising him to live by good moral standards is very important to me. They say that if we, as parents, don't teach our children values then the media will teach them what we don't want them to learn. So, every night I read to him about different Bible characters like David, Job, Abraham, and so on. I make sure that he not only listens to these stories but also learns the morals behind these lessons. After a few weeks had passed, I decided to ask him questions about the lessons to see if he retained anything. I was anticipating feeling the pride of a parent whose child gives evidence of treasuring the goodness of what the Bible teaches us. I asked my son, "Who is Noah?" He responded, "He is the little green guy with the big ears who fights with a light-saber".
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The Cliché: A Defense
by
Dennis Vannatta
Clichés get a bum rap. I myself have been a career-long cliché basher. The good word that I give to my writing students, with the same certainty and solemnity as Moses delivering the tablets, is that Clichés 1) are by definition unoriginal, hence contribute to unoriginal writing; 2) are enervated through age and overuse; and 3) inhibit rather than facilitate thinking. The first two points, I argue, are self-evident; they are the obvious nature of the beast. It is the third point that I pound home. Due consideration of issue, theme, character - whatever is being addressed - stops when we encounter the cliché, at which point we substitute some received notion, not the author's notion but some other author's notion, probably a whole string of earlier authors, in fact, marching along to the same tired tune. I can make a hell of a case for that third point; the problem is I'm not altogether sure I believe it. I'm not so sure I believe the first two, either.
I'm certainly not saying we should fill our writing with clichés. There are a lot of bad clichés out there. We know the guilty parties, and shun them we should. But there are also clichés that can be effective and affective communicators, and in the proper circumstances they can enliven our writing and speech1.
Let's begin by admitting that clichés are so tempting because they are - or at least were in their "younger days" - so good. I'm not a big fan of Homer's "rosy-fingered dawn," to be honest; on the other hand, what three-word description of the ocean could be more lovely and evocative than Homer's "wine-dark sea"? Would I use it in a poem or story? Of course not, but not because it's lost any of its power but because, well, you don't steal from God. Another image from Homer, warriors having "bitten the dust,"2 has, I think, lost its potency over the millennia. Picture, though, what the image actually describes: a warrior, surprised by a spear through the back, falls face first onto the hot, dusty plains of Troy, mouth agape in his howling. The "Cliché" is ghastly, wrenching, and perfect. Today we toss a just-emptied Bud Light over our shoulder and sigh, "Another dead soldier bites the dust," and, yes, Homer's phrase has been diminished through overuse. But even that still-ongoing diminishment is testament to the awful vividness of the original.
But, you ask, which side of the case are you arguing? Shouldn't your conclusion, from the "bites the dust" example, be that once-apt imagery becomes sapped of strength over time or at least useless to us in our own writing ("wine-dark sea")? Well, yes, I've admitted that such is often the case with clichés. But not always. And I'm not primarily concerned with literary clichés here. T. S. Eliot furnished the evidence of his "theft" of other author's words, in his voluminous footnotes to "The Waste Land." Most of us, though, try to avoid using another's writer's language, no matter how much we might admire it.
My principal interest here is with what one might call "clichés in the public domain." These "public" clichés are part of everyday discourse. They either develop as language itself develops (a point that I'll return to), or their origins are, to all but etymologists, lost. "Rosy-fingered dawn" is well known enough that even Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) in the movie version of The Thin Red Line cites it - in the original Greek, too! - but I doubt that one person in a thousand would give Homer credit for "bites the dust." The cliché now is in the public domain; therefore, we still use it in everyday discourse.
The more public Clichés become, the harder they are to avoid. Sometimes, they're less to be avoided than embraced. This is especially the case, I think, when there's a "folk," or colloquial, derivation to the cliché. Brrrr, it's cold out today. How cold is it? It's "as old as a well-digger's prick." Or, to give the distaff side their due, it's "cold as a witch's tit." clichés? Absolutely. I've heard them all my life. Stale, lifeless? Quick, all you writers out there, complete the phrase, "It's as cold as _______________________" with something better, more vivid. Give up? Of course you do. The phrases remain wonderfully apt, and funny, no matter how often we hear them.
Would I use those particular phrases in all varieties of writing where the degree of coldness had to be communicated? Of course not. But no phrase/image is universally applicable. Determining precisely when to use a particular type of wording is part of the writer's craft. Formal expository writing is probably the most cliché-resistant (but also the most resistant to colorful writing of all sorts). Persuasive writing, on the other hand, is the whore of discourse; it uses whatever works, and what works is often the cliché. This is especially true in politics where reducing one's opponent to an unexamined yet nevertheless accepted phrase is a time-honored shortcut to victory. Democrats are not simply liberals but are "tax and spend" liberals. The phrase trips off the tongue so facilely - has tripped off so many tongues so facilely for so many years now - that it's difficult for some people (read: Republicans) to think liberal without automatically appending the compound adjectives. Do they bear up to critical examination? Who cares?, the rhetorician would say. It takes no longer to pull the lever in a polling booth than to say, Tax and spend. Bravo, the political cliché!
While my focus here is primarily on creative writing and not politics, I think the point is still well-taken: in politics or creative writing, whatever works, works. In creative writing it is not only sometimes permissible to use clichés but desirable, indeed, is virtually mandatory. One obvious instance is in dialogue, whether in drama or fiction (or, for that matter, poetry, although my guess is that poets, even more than their prose-oriented colleagues, generally make it their business to avoid clichés). Jonathan Swift used the phrase "raining cats and dogs" as early as 1738 (A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation). I'm willing to bet that Swift was using a phrase that he had heard in everyday speech all his life - was using a cliché, in other words, and using it not despite but because of the fact that it would be familiar to his audience. I could be wrong, of course. Maybe Swift did invent the phrase himself, and if so, I'm quite happy to give him full credit for it. But my point remains the same: by now "raining cats and dogs" is common parlance (is a cliché) and could still be used without blushing by any writer to impart an impression of mundane reality to a character's speech. If I were writing a story set in the Ozark foothills, where I grew up, I probably would have my character remark that it was raining "like a cow pissing on a flat rock" because that's the phrase we used in those parts. A cliché, true, but a wonderful one (better, if I may be so bold, than the Dean's "raining cats and dogs").
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A writer simply cannot compose realistic dialogue without using clichés and shouldn't even try. This is especially true in reference to profanity. I'll spare my reader (and editor) some of the more colorful examples, but I do want to make the point that we are so habituated to clichéd profanity that it is out of our hands. We have no choice in the matter. I can have a character, to express disgust or disagreement, say "bull shit" or "horse shit" or even "bat shit," but I can't have him say "frog shit" or "vulture shit" or, strangely enough, "man shit." Why? Because no one says those things. They are not clichés; therefore we may not use them effectively in realistic dialogue.
The conclusion that one can - and sometimes must - use clichés in realistic dialogue extends to first-person narratives in general. If our narrator is a Depression-era Mississippian, it would only be natural, and realistic, for him to use clichés familiar to Depression-era Mississippians. The same can also apply to the third-person-limited point of view although the situation here is more complex. The third-limited voice, and the language used to communicate its impressions, does not have to echo the language choices of the character in question. The third-limited voice may be speaking at an ironic distance from the character, for instance, while still registering that character's thoughts and impressions. But the more closely one associates the third-limited perspective with the character's own, the more natural it is for that voice to indulge in the same clichés available to the character.
I want to emphasize that I'm not saying that clichés in general are a good thing and we should use them indiscriminately. Clearly, clichés can, and probably most of the time do, result in bad writing. But they can also be used quite effectively. As interesting to me as the concept of the effective cliché is the realization that - try to eliminate them as we may, inveigh against them until we're hoarse - we simply cannot avoid them.
The issue may be less literary than linguistic. A cliché, at its most ingrained into our thinking, may be a phrase that's in the process of turning into a different unit of language for which linguists do not have a label. Two rival armies battling over a city (let's say) simultaneously agree to cease hostilities for an indeterminate time. What sort of truce has descended over the city? An "uneasy truce," of course. There's no logical reason that the truce has to be "uneasy." It could as well be "uncomfortable" or, if one were in an alliterative mode, a "tense truce." But it never is. The truce is inevitably "uneasy." If it's very, very cold, it's "bitterly" cold even though bitter has no more to do with coldness than loud does. A person who dies of a terrible heart attack has suffered, always, a "massive" heart attack. It's difficult for us even to think of this particular kind of truce as anything other than uneasy, this degree of cold as anything other than bitter, a fatal heart attack as anything other than massive. When the cliché has arrived at such a point, it seems to me it has in effect become, in that language-processing corner of our minds, a noun in precisely the same sense that hotplate and superstructure are nouns, only our spelling hasn't caught on to the fact yet. Still, I suspect that many an editor would flag "uneasy truce" etc. as clichés and ask that something fresher be substituted. But why? The phases do what any noun does: they communicate instantly, clearly a distinct concept. Not one reader/auditor in a thousand would mistake their meaning. In actuality they're no longer a clichés they're simply vocabulary.
Yes yes, let's fight the good fight against tired language, against ineffective clichés, but fight the battles that should be and can be won. Fundamentally, we use clichés in our speech and writing because we think in clichés. Familiar language is more natural to our thinking than fresh language and may ultimately be more powerful.
The wife of a good friend of mine was mugged on a parking lot. My friend, apoplectic with rage and bitterness, said, "Just give me five minutes alone with the guy. That's all I ask." It's never four minutes or six minutes or fifteen minutes but, inevitably, five minutes. And whatever will happen in that five minutes will not transpire in front of witnesses, even those - the wife, for instance - who might hugely enjoy watching the perpetrator get what's coming to him. It's always carried out "alone."
My friend, in fact, is a writer, and a damn good one. He's also a teacher of writing. I'm sure he exhorts his students to avoid cliché like the seven plagues of Egypt (cliché? - I don't care!). Still, in a moment of great, genuine emotion, when he was so angry he could barely find words, the words he did find comprised a hoary old cliché (itself a cliché, clichés being inevitably "hoary"). Did the "tired" language render the sentiment null or lifeless? Not to me. It struck me powerfully because I knew it came from some place deep and fundamental in him, a place where language and sentiment co-exist, a place beyond the reach of the editor's arched eyebrow and red pen. And I have the feeling he took comfort - small comfort, no doubt, yet comfort nonetheless - from the familiar phrase.
Used aptly, used naturally, in full consciousness of their well-earned place in our linguistic heritage, clichés can not only be effective communicators but can make our speech and writing colorful, energized, and realistic. Indeed, we must learn to use them well because we certainly can't avoid them. No use fighting city hall on this one, friends. Case closed.
Notes
1When I conceived this essay, my original intent was to address writing only, specifically creative writing. It is now obvious to me, however, that especially in reference to the cliché we cannot always, as we shall see, separate speech from writing.
2The exact form of the Homer clichés depends, of course, upon the translator. "Rosy-fingered dawn" and "wine-dark sea" are found, frequently, in both The Iliad and The Odyssey. "Bites the dust," so far as I'm able to determine, is found only in The Iliad.
BIO:
I have published creative nonfiction in ANTIOCH REVIEW, RIVER OAK REVIEW, and elsewhere and fiction in BOULVARD, RIVER STYXX, PUSHCART XV, and many other journals and anthologies. My most recent collection, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS: STORIES, is from Livingston Press.
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Call Me Crazy
by
Acamea L Deadwiler
I moved to Las Vegas not looking for anything in particular, but perhaps secretly hoping that some things would find me. Coming from where I'm from, you don't walk away from a $45,000 a year job. Coming from where I'm from, once you've been hired at U.S. Steel you have officially "arrived."
Born and raised in the poorest, most crime-riddled region of Northwest Indiana, I assumed that having nice things must equal happiness. There were some families that still managed to thrive in this environment, but mine was not one of them. My ultimate goal became putting myself in position to obtain these things. I hadn't really planned much aside from "go to college and get a good job".
Not to take anything away from my plan at all, both were excellent goals - especially in a community where they are achieved by so few. However, much to my surprise, accomplishing these things did not satisfy me. I loved my car but driving around in my Lexus did not make me feel content. I cherished my nice, spacious apartment in a good neighborhood, but coming home to it, empty, felt like something was missing. I was proud of my Bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice but I was working in accounting and had little interest in either field.
I was pleased with myself. Proud that I had a degree, a coveted career, and the ability to get whatever I wanted within reason. I felt like a success in life. I did have a sense of accomplishment for what I had done, but a sense of accomplishment was not enough. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to actually enjoy what I did for a living. I wanted to come home to a place filled with not only flat-screen TVs and vaulted ceilings, but with love.
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Don't get me wrong, I enjoy having nice things but I also enjoy feeling inspired. I enjoy the feeling of freedom. I enjoy the creative rush that I get when a story idea comes to me. I enjoy buying Christmas gifts for underprivileged children and having the opportunity to volunteer my time for a good cause. I enjoy all of these things... Why should I have to choose?
As grateful as I was for my job, by continuing to work at U.S. Steel and staying in my hometown, I was choosing. I was choosing nice things over all of the other aforementioned pleasures available in life, and then some. It was not even as if I was making millions of dollars. (I may have stayed for that!) But, this was an industrial town with not much else going on. By remaining here, I was remaining in a place where true romance, excitement and variety seemed to constantly elude me. I was remaining in a job that offered no sense of fulfillment, and left little time to pursue much else.
I had hit a ceiling. Feeling as though I had accomplished all that I could here, I knew that it was time to move on. So, now here I am in Vegas, attempting to have it all. Applying for jobs but secretly hoping that I don't get them so that I can continue to focus on my writing career. Which, coming from where I'm from would be considered crazy. Feets don't fail me now!
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Epiphany Magazine - epiphmag.com Issue 12
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Call for submissions Epiphany Magazine, epiphmag.com, welcomes submissions of Poetry, Prose, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Creative Non-fiction, Artwork, Photos and reviews. Please visit our Submission Guidelines page and email submissions to: submissions@epiphmag.com.
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