[S]he has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.
-- Ernest Hemingway
It's drizzling outside in the night as I begin to write this. Undoubtedly exme would've had something poetic to say about that; she conveyed a sense of time and place better than almost anyone I've ever read. She loved to write in the middle of the night, too; so many of her posts had 3-something-a.m. time stamps.
She was the best writer on Daily Kos. And a helluva good person. I miss her terribly.
I'll never forget the moment I met her: I had arrived in Austin for Netroots Nation 3 in the summer of 2008, and was headed toward the convention hall after watching several minutes of a small rally in the open lot in front of the Hyatt. Dripping with sweat in the July midday heat, I looked forward to the delicious shock of air conditioning awaiting me inside the convention center across the street. As I was about to pull open the first set of doors to the center, I glanced at the woman standing just to the right of the doors and, in that awkward way well-known to any veteran of YearlyKos/Netroots Nation, looked down at the convention name tag she wore. Even before I saw the name on it, though, something told me that this was, in fact, the person I had been most excited about seeing that weekend.
We hugged - a hot, sweaty hug. A hug of two old friends who had never met.
And then we talked.
I came to know exme through her writing on Daily Kos. That was one wonderful facet of her gift - that one could come to know her through her writing. She always wrote from her heart. Her best pieces were always intensely personal reflections - reflections which at the same time gave context and depth to the the political realities they expressed. Exme understood to her core that the personal was always, always political - and no one ever negotiated that human path joining the two with such little apparent effort and to such artful effect. Like the cancer that took her from us, the gift that she had for stringing words together was exceedingly rare, and at the core of it was her heart.
Once I discovered exme's work, I quickly became her biggest fan. I would gush effusively about her writing. She was polite enough to return the favor, for her part, but of course exme was being kind and generous; I was being merely honest.
It got to the point with me that I once left the following comment in one of her diaries:
Always a pleasure
reading your writing, ex.
Please next time, write about paint drying - I want to test my hypothesis about your prose; i.e., that you can make anything seem poetic.
I should not have been surprised when a few days later she did just that -
Watching Paint Dry
- and, as only she could do, managed to tie together the mundane with the profound -
I painted for three days. I was finished with the job on September 10, 2001, late at night. When my spouse came home late that night, my painting went over like a lead balloon. How could I do such a thing without discussing it with him? . . .
When I read or discuss or debate the NSA program on wiretapping, especially with any Republicans (it doesn't happen often because I can't stomach it), I am always carried back to 2001 and the destruction of safety. I am appalled at what people will do and say when they act badly even with what they call out as the best of intentions, on the basis of what they think is right. When trust is lost, whether it is in the government or a loved one or a friend, there is damage to the heart's threshold that is never repaired.
In my time here at DKos, I have only twice burned a diary of my own to pimp someone else's. Both times it was for a diary that exmearden had written. The first was for On the street where you live, Haifa Street, and it remains my favorite of her works. Here's an excerpt, and as you read it, I would invite you to be conscious: savor it, sip it, swirl the words and the pictures they evoke around in your mind for a bit, let them breathe, before swallowing them -
They trekked to Babylon from here, and in Babylon, they traveled down a street named Aibur-shabu, "The enemy shall never pass". Do you remember Babylon? Layers of mankind, civilization, wonders of irrigation in a dry and desolate landscape, great Kings, great warriors, fading Caliphs, dying youth, beautiful women, slaves and captives, architecture beyond credulity and missing in time. Babylon . . .
A caravan returns to Baghdad, a world away. This caravan rolls up the Boulevard where dreams cannot survive. It is a sand-beige caravan of rolling Humvees and up-armored Bradleys with weapons in the hands of men who have no eyes. This land is old. Why are they here? Does memory serve, were Ottomans sane once? Occupiers have gone mad in Baghdad. The landscape has not changed this phenomenon. This land between the two cities, between two rivers, should be a busy land, a market-driven land, not a desert wash of blood and sand and death . . .
Millions have walked these roads, ghosts birthed from the violent womb of human history. Mongols, Persians, Greeks, Romans, infidels, Janissaries, Ottomans, Safavid, Bedouin, Sumerian, Assyrian, Jews, Christians. Shadows. How can this modern caravan compete with what the shadows on this street of death know from lessons taught for centuries? Our weapons and armor are toothpicks against the voices of the old gods that echo in alleys sprayed with religious fervor and sectarian hate. Here, too, "the enemy shall never pass".
My second diary sacrifice was for It's a wonderful life. An excerpt:
Driving home from work overwhelms me if I let it . . .
I see the hills ahead, the residential 'burbs, the hills like big rocks covered in alternating green and drying moss that's flowered, and the flowers are dying now and the flowers are the houses dotted densely in the drying moss, on the drying hills, on the circular streets and the dead-end cul-de-sacs and the dead-end streets that end in gullies and ravines packed with aging split level houses covered in Louisiana-Pacific replacement siding and under-insulated walls. The dead-end streets that end in what was once forest and daylighted occasional streams and where cougars roamed. Sometimes they still roam and an echo of Troy scents the odd territory of my mind in how we layer generation onto generation, civilization on civilization and cover up that original rich topsoil with barkdust and think that suburbs always existed and there was no forest for the trees, and the only trees we understand now are the artful Japanese maples with the spindly, lacelike leaves of crimson red . . .
And then, as she always made them do, her words flowed on just as naturally as can be - "Of course that's where she was going," you found yourself thinking - like a river making its way from the beautiful, ice-fed, mysterious peaks down to the gritty, overused, tapped-out lowlands - this being a political blog, after all, and all politics being personal, and if anyone could write about the personal, it was exme:
What does change mean to you, really? Is it only a timely meme? How can I believe you want change when you've been working these years in the very same body with elected members who have continued the obfuscation, or the collaboration, or who have simply nodded at the crimes in the corner and rushed on by. Where do I find the evidence of your voice, your power, your actions under that dome in Washington in the recent years? Why is your tenor different now on the campaign trail than the meeker voice that has no echo, no compelling historical resonance in the Senate? Or the State House? Or on myriad investigative committees? You say "Move on. There's nothing to see here."
Why should we believe that change means the same thing to you that it does to us, to the thousands and millions who live in dying flower-like split-level houses on moss-like hills and in suburban gullies and cul-de-sacs?
Do you think we're not paying attention, that we don't hear? That there is something about this process that we don't understand?
Do you think the words spilling from your lips weigh more than the evidence of our lives?
We drying flowers of houses on moss hills, we thousands, we millions.
We voters.
- and as I said in a comment on that one -
(Like George Bailey, you have touched more people than you can know.)
I've never really had a blog crush. Except maybe for exme, and her writing. I'm pretty sure she shared the feeling. Heh - one time she left a comment in one of my diaries a week after it published and had scrolled down my "Diary" page. She thought I'd never see it.
I did.
heh. This comment actually in reply to an earlier (0+ / 0-)
movie diary of yours. The one where you mention you've never sat through Seven Samurai.
you'll never see this comment, likely, but I think I love you (grin).
most of your movies you list are on the top secret, not so neatly tattoed and inscribed with invisible ink list imprinted on the back of my hand.
However, you gotta see Seven Samurai all the way through. And then you need to track down the over nine hour marathon classic by Masaki Kobayashi - The Human Condition. It culminates in one of the most incredible samurai fighting scenes ever, on a beach, at sunset I believe. Toshiro Mifune was one of the stars; the other star was the opposing master swordsman who was hauntingly beautiful and knew it and that was part of his on screen character - the knowledge of his own beauty and skill and how he manipulated his public presence was masterfully done.
Really. I'm not kidding. I'm recommending a nine hour film. (actually, it's in three separate serial movies).
Ah, well. In another life, oh .
I'm also a sucker for Fred Astaire films. ciao!
I never, ever told her that I saw it.
And I know that someday, when I rent that Kobayashi movie, and sit through all nine hours of it, I'll think of exme and the gift that she is. And she'll be watching it with me and having a good laugh at it all.
From Step in Time, she closed with this:
Not all things dark are grim.
None of us gets out of here alive, but exme got out of here more alive than anyone I have known. Her writing was some of the most powerful and poetic I have ever read. Her prose transported me, showing me places in the world and places in her heart and places in time that I otherwise never would have visited. She wrote with humility and humor and passion and anger and compassion and a perspective that must be the perspective that angels have.
She is starlight now, in all of us, unbound by this earth.
What a great view of the Perseids she will have.
I miss her.
