Sunday, December 4, 2005

Anne Lamott and the Parable of the Carpet Guy I love Anne Lamott.  R knows this, and she has accepted it.  I love Anne Lamott the way you love your minister, the way I love the minister who brought me to tears the first time I stepped into his - my - church.  I love her - I want to call her Annie - the way you would love an older, wiser sister, although probably one who had either gone into the monastery or owned a house with a rock garden in the backyard.  Annie wrote a column for Salon today, and I just finished reading it, the tears glistening in the corners of my eyes. It's as good as going to church sometimes.  She is the only person I can believe who actually tries to do that "love thy enemy as thyself" stuff.  She doesn't always succeed, but it's the trying that is so magical to observe.  I have several books of hers on my shelf, including her writing manual Bird by Bird.  She writes about writing in the same way she writes about death, or life, or barbecues.  I don't want to denigrate her by describing her philosophy, but I love the way she goes back, time and again, to the idea of letting go.   You would think that I was talking about God here, but her attitude toward writing is almost identical.  (Writing - let go of your illusions of perfection and just let it happen.  Your first drafts will suck.  Let them.  Write your shitty first draft, get it out of your system, and them move from there.  Take small steps.  Be honest.  Don't try to do much at once.  This is important work and takes much time and effort, so don't exhaust yourself trying to do it all in one fell swoop.   Sounds something like a philosophy, no?) I read Annie's loving rants on the Talking Points Memo Cafe website, and loved them.  She saw politics through the prism of her own broken heart, and nailed things beautifully.  It was Annie who first compared (slyly) Bush's wobbly Iraq policy to an alcoholic who was going to stay in denial until he finally hit the bottom.  That was back in June:  before Scooter's indictment, before Murtha's move, before Iraq started gently asking if we remembered where we had parked our car so we could get the hell out of its house, and before former Prime Minister Allawi was chased out of a mosque by stones and shoes and tried to call it an assassination attempt instead of what it was, a redress of grievances.  ...my very wise friend Gil says-and Gil has been sober since before God-that there are three stages in the disease: fun, fun and trouble, and trouble.  Fun, for the White House, was the fall of Baghdad and Mission Accomplished. Fun and Trouble held, up until a month or so ago: you had huge body counts, grave global dismay, etc, but you also had the elections here and in Iraq, with all that courage and the purple fingertips. Now? Well, I don't see where the fun is anymore:  I think we are now leaving the fun and trouble stage. She got it.  She just nailed it, and she did it without becoming mean.  She pities Bush for his own tragic bewilderment.  She hates him, and then kicks herself for having hatred in her heart.  Annie to me is so much more authentic than the people who profess to have found the way to a clean and virtuous life.  Annie tries to stay on the path toward decency, and sometimes slips, and sees when she slips and tries to straighten herself back out.   She's honest.  She is candid:  hatred and anger and schadenfreude are all fun, yes, and sure, they feel good, but they're not the way life should be lived.  8:54:13 PM     Speak up!  []