Author: HEATHER KING

  • THIS IS MY LETTER TO THE WORLD…

    THIS IS MY LETTER TO THE WORLD…

    Back in January of this year, when I gave, sold, or lent out most of my stuff, moved out of my apartment, and went on the road, people kept saying, “Oh, you should keep a blog! You should let everyone know where you are!” But the truth is I didn’t particularly care if people knew where I was. I didn’t feel moved to chart my progress, geographical or spiritual.

    Not only did I not feel moved to start a blog, for most of the 6 months I was gone, I didn’t even have internet access in the various rooms where I stayed. I liked this. For the most part, I enjoyed walking to the coffee shop or the local library to check my email, my dwindling bank account, the occasional headline.

    It’s a very good thing to learn that you can get along, for awhile at least, without the world, and that the world can get along without you. I had a cell phone with 1000 monthly minutes. That was plenty. That provided more than enough communication with the world. I communicated with the people around me. I regarded the birds, and the trees. I communed with the Psalms. I wrote in my journal.

    A blog is not a journal, or maybe I should say not my blog, nor my journal. My journal is private. It’s also meandering, unpolished, often mean-spirited, and messy. I can’t have an experience if simultaneously with the experience I’m recording it. As it’s happening, life is dull or uncomfortable or distasteful or exciting or sorrowing or joyful, but emotions, by their very nature, are such that you’re not aware as you’re experiencing them. You disappear and come back to yourself later and realize: Oh. That was a moment.

    That why—the insistence upon asking, the responsibility of groping for an answer—is the heart’s call of the writer. To process experience inwardly, to see unexpected connections and glory and poetry and how that relates to all of humanity takes work and intention and patience and a kind of continual pruning of the will. To just say Here’s a moment and here’s a moment and here’s the next moment and here’s the thought or image or whim that just popped into my head is not to be in the present, it’s to be in the stasis of hell.

    It’s to be Narcissus, perpetually gazing at his own image in a world too busy to look because everyone is looking at his or own image.I’m at least as much of an attention junkie as the next person. Since I’ve been back, I’ve updated my website, my amazon profile, my wikepedia entry, my FB profile. I, who have always been resolutely anti-blog (because I am a purist; I am a professional, doncha know), have started (obviously) a blog.

    I’m interested to see how it unfolds, what I’ll learn. In two weeks, I’ve already realized: Oh okay, this is like everything else. It’s not going to make you famous. It’s not going to gain you a big “following.” It’s work and if you look at it in any other way than that it’s a gift then the blog won’t be any good, it won’t be you, and you’re going to be burdened by the fact that it’s work and pissed that no-one’s paying attention. In fact, one of the main reasons I started a blog at all was because I have so many unpublished essays, reflections, and snippets of ideas I figured: Why not start just giving them away!

    In order to find ourselves, we have to lose ourselves. We have to hold the tension between carving out the solitude and silence we need for our work and our obligation, if any, to promote the work. We have to live in the absurdity of wanting to be noticed and publicly reflecting on the fact that we are being noticed—or not. We have to devote everything we have to creating excellent art, and have faith that if it’s supposed to find its way to the World, it will…

  • THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD–AND IT IS THIS ONE…

    THERE IS ANOTHER WORLD–AND IT IS THIS ONE…

    Only recently did it dawn on me that I had never slept in another bed in LA besides my own. I’d been married for a long time, and then I wasn’t married. I’d slept in a lot of places just outside LA: Valyermo, Montecito, San Diego, Lompoc, Palm Springs, Anza Borrego, Joshua Tree, Desert Hot Springs, sometimes in tents.

    But though I’d lived in LA for 20 years, I had never, once, slept at another’s house or in another’s bed.

    Last January, I gave up my apartment in Koreatown and went on the road. Now I’m back and “in transition.” Now I’ve slept in the charming, nook-like library of my friend Julia’s massive Bronson Canyon Craftsman (glass-fronted bookshelves, green velvet curtain for a door). I’ve slept on a blow-up air mattress on the living room floor of my friend Lisa’s apartment in the Fairfax District. Lisa owns Flounce, an Echo Park vintage clothing store, and her apartment is overflowing with buttons, bakelite, onyx, tiaras, compacts, shoes, gloves, feathered hats, tortoiseshell, amber, odd bits of fabric, Rosalind Russell suits, shantung chemises, and old perfume bottles.

    I spent my whole time there snooping through her drawers. What is this?, I asked at one point, holding up what looked to be a tattered strip of old beaded lace/tattered dust ruffle/Tallulah Bankhead’s dog leash. “It’s a dickie! she cried, snatching it protectively from my dangling finger and arranging it coquettishly around her neck. “Isn’t it adorable?” And on her–for you have to meet Lisa–it was.

    Now I’m sleeping for five weeks in a big second-floor apartment on the corner of Fountain and Vista in West Hollywood. The bedroom’s in back but I prefer sleeping on the couch. I like to see the people playing tennis under the sodium lights in Plummer Park.

    I like to hear the cars and the voices floating up from the street. I spent six months in places where the sounds at night were of wind rustling through the trees, and birds, and coyotes killing their prey; places where there was no streetlife, no traffic.  It took awhile, but I got homesick for LA.

    One place I’m not homesick for is my old apartment, which I was afraid I would be as I’d lived there so long. It’s been good to see LA from some different windows. Gazing out this one, I think of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the Gulf Coast of Texas, and Appalachia, and all the beautiful, crazy things I saw and experienced. The long days of silence. The nights on other beds, looking up at the stars.

    The fullness of every moment, no matter how hard or painful, that no-one will ever know because the words don’t exist. We’re going to die, and no-one will ever know how full our hearts were, how much we loved.

    “When in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto,” wrote Bashō, and happy as I am to be back, now I’m homesick for those places, too.

    Soon I’ll move. And this is going to be a window I never thought I’d be looking out of. Because I’m now poised for a journey I NEVER thought I’d take.

    As of September 1st–I’m going to have a roommate.

    LISA, ADORABILITY NOTWITHSTANDING, IS NOT GOING TO BE MY ROOMMATE
  • EVERYONE’S SO FAT

    EVERYONE’S SO FAT

    L.A. is the last place I ever thought I’d end up. Though I’d never felt particularly at home in New England, back in 1990 L.A. seemed more of an idea—a really bad idea—than an actual place. My older brother Allen, who’d been a building contractor in Manhattan Beach for 20 years, seemed to bear out my worst suspicions. Whenever he came back East to visit, he went around in his Bugatti shades and hundred-dollar haircut saying, “Everything’s so small! Everyone’s so fat!”

    What a snob, I used to think.

    As it turned out, Allen was the main reason my husband Tim and I ended up moving to L.A.At the time, we were living on Boston’s North Shore, Tim was a carpenter, and I was trying to work up the courage to 1) start using the law degree I’d earned in an alcoholic blackout; 2) start writing; 3) start over. When we got married in 1988, Allen gave us week-long round-trip tickets to L.A. as a wedding present. (more…)

  • YOU MUST PUT ON THE NEW WOMAN!!

    YOU MUST PUT ON THE NEW WOMAN!!

    When I first started praying the Divine Office, it took me months to realize that every Friday morning we prayed Psalm 51. With my track record, I had no trouble at all getting behind “In guilt I was born/a sinner was I conceived,” and after another several months, I also realized that before Psalm 51 every Friday was “Your inmost being must be renewed. You must put on the new man.” (Ephesians 4: 23-24)

    I thought of “the new man” yesterday when I was uploading images on my laptop. I, for one, tend to get stuck for decades uploading the same dismal images into my psychic hard drive: the time, 13 years old, when I forgot my Oratorical Contest speech and stood frozen like a deer-in-headlights in front of the entire population of North Hampton, New Hampshire. The moment when the guy-I-adored-who-didn’t-adore-me remarked, apropos of my shattered, hemorrhaging heart, “What’s the matter, havencha ever been rejected  before?

    I think Christ, in his infinite tenderness, knew all about our tendency, when we are emotionally devastated, to think there is something wrong with us: that we weren’t good enough, that we didn’t measure up. Christ, with his infinite knowledge of the human heart,  knew that we tend to be blocked, and then act badly, out of shame and guilt. Kafka’s The Trial rings so true because on some level we sense that we are always being judged for an unknown offense that we’re not sure we committed.

    The Misfit, the protagonist of the Flannery O’Connor short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” voices this same dilemma in a different way: our existential loneliness is so excruciatingly painful that we can’t help feeling we’re being punished to an extent that goes far beyond our “crimes”–no matter how bad they were. So even after our track record starts to improve, we tend to think the painful things that happen in life are somehow our fault. Over and over again, because it seems to make sense, we upload the old image.

    I think the function of prayer is to very slowly change that. After a long, and seemingly unrewarded, and more or less unswerving, doggedly persistent effort we get a tiny glimpse of the possibility of starting to upload a new image. We start to see that we actually have some control over the image of ourselves and the world that we carry secretly around, and mull over, and harbor, and base our decisions and lives upon. We start to dare to believe that we are loved, and have been all along, in spite of our brokenness.

    We start to see Christ was crucified not because he saw that we we were bad, but because he saw that we were lost.

     

  • FAST, PRAY, LOVE

    FAST, PRAY, LOVE

    Reading of the legions of 30-something gals who are signing on for Bali after reading Eat, Pray, Love, all I can think is that any spiritual seeker worth his or her salt has undertaken a journey so full of failure, hardship, and disappointment that no-one would want to follow it. Does anyone really want to follow in the footsteps of Simone Weil, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Christ?

    I can’t think of anything creepier than someone trying to literally re-trace the path of another, hoping for the same “happy ending” result. Tip: There are no happy endings. Carve out your own path. Undertake your own desert journey.

    Catherine de Hueck Doherty was a Russian whose journey as an émigré in exile took her to Canada where she founded Madonna House, worked with the poor, and wrote prolifically. In Poustinia: Christian Spirituality of the East for Western Man, she speaks of the difficulty of community life and observes:

    “As you know only too well, the divisions, arguments, and power plays that take place at meetings witness to the fragmentation of humanity. By your presence in love, you have to witness to how much time is wasted, how much selfishness is going on, how much greed there is for power, attention, and recognition…If by prayer you have received food from God, you should be able…to give the oil of tenderness and the wine of compassion, first to each other, and then to everyone you meet. All this is done silently, in the secret places of your hearts.

    An incident from the life of [co-founder of the lay Catholic Worker movement] Dorothy Day expresses well what I am trying to say here. Dorothy went to Rome during the [Vatican] Council. Several years later when I met her in Rome I asked her what she did during the time the Council was in session. She said she had simply taken a room in the poor quarter of the city, and for ten days she fasted and bread and water and prayed for the Council. That was all she did! Then she returned to New York the way she had come—on a freight boat! Maybe this was the reason why the Council was so successful. In the eyes of God, who knows?”

  • BELLS FROM THE DEEP

    BELLS FROM THE DEEP

    Werner Herzog has a touch of megalomania, and was not ENTIRELY sympathetic to Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man–but I love his notion of “ecstatic truth.”

    Bells from the Deep is his 1993 “documentary” about Russian mysticism.

    Here’s his description of one scene: “I wanted to get shots of pilgrims crawling around on the ice trying to catch a glimpse of the lost city, but as there were no pilgrims around I hired two drunks from the next town and put them on the ice. One of them has his face right on the ice and looks like he is in very deep meditation. The accountant’s truth: he was completely drunk and fell asleep, and we had to wake him at the end of the take.”

    A former drunk myself, I have always believed the blackout to be a crude form of mystical union. I have come to prefer being (mostly) awake. But being awake is not for the faint of heart. In fact, a drunk, trying to imitate a pilgrim searching for the lost city of Kitezh, being shot by Werner Herzog, to create a film I am going to watch, alone,  from a darkened Hollywood apartment, embodies almost more ecstatic truth than I can handle… 

     

  • WELCOME TO MY WORLD

    WELCOME TO MY WORLD

    For 17 years I wandered around the Koreatown section of L.A., weeping, praying, contemplating, complaining. Growing and regressing. Having breakthroughs and breakdowns. Years during which I stayed sober, gave up my job as a lawyer, converted to Catholicism, started to write.

    Last January I sold or lent out most of my furniture, gave up my beautiful apartment–hardwood floors, crown moldings–and set out in my ’96 Celica convertible on a cross-country sabbatical/odyssey/retreat. I have always had a teensy bit of a hermit/nun complex, so thought the movement would be toward more asceticism; a further paring down. Instead I learned that I  missed food, clothes, money, and my smart, funny friends. I missed Vietnamese noodles, the insanely great Goodwill stores, the public library (surely one of the greatest institutions civilization has yet produced), the whole holy-hell paradox of this city where so many of us dreamers of the golden dream end up. (more…)