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One of the things I like to do when I get a few moments to myself as I prepare to sleep, besides plotting out stories in my head, is read something short. I don't want it to be too long, because I seem to be incapable of stopping after just one chapter of a novel or another book, and I need its ideas to be relatively self-contained, because otherwise I sit awake thinking of exciting possibilities for how they could be modified, changed, extended. Either way, I stay up thinking or reading till 2 am--or, let's be honest, longer--and though I always count it as time well-spent, I often have to fight off the urge to take a midafternoon nap at the office. Not good.
For pre-sleep reading, I've found very few things better than Lewis Thomas, but my copies of his books are packed away in the attic because I simply don't currently have space for all my books in my room, and I've read them so often I can pratically page through each essay in my memory. (For those of you reading this who haven't heard my Thomas rant or read the books yourself, please ask me sometime to give you my spiel. You'll have the joy of seeing me wax overly enthusiastic, and you get a free book at the end of it).
So lately I've been trying to read other things before bed. For a while I tried magazine articles in computer magazines, but they weren't interesting enough and I'm not quite close enough to the point where I can afford a new laptop to pore over the computer rankings with zeal and fervor.
Then I tried reading poetry, which at first glance fits many of those requirements I stated above.
There is a problem with that, however: I have found that almost all the volumes of poetry I own are excellent examples of the art from favorite poets, but don't make for good bedtime reading.
The 11:30 pm experiment with the first of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, for instance, was disastrous and exemplary. I sat awake, bemoaning not only some of the small essential sadnesses occasionally found in life, but also deeply distressed over the fact that I can hear meter, but have a very hard time crafting it into my own poetry.
Then I went to the bookstore the other day. I got three books. This is unusual, if you know my book-buying habits, but ok: Two of the books, The Enchanted Chocolate-Pot by Wrede and Stevermer, and a translatated volume of Rumi, I had been wanting for over two years, and one was on sale, while the other, Temprament, was a book I had been looking for without being aware of its actual existence until I saw it on the shelf, and bought it without a second thought for purposes of writing-research. (It's a historical analysis of how changes in the tuning system changed the course of Western thought).
So I got home and read some of Rumi's poetry before bed. For those of you who don't know who he was: mystic poet from Afghanistan (and, later, Turkey) who lived in the 13th century AD. I was introduced to his poetry via my martial arts teacher my junior year at college; it's very good stuff. The translation I have is not so great--apparently the original is much more musical--but the essence of the ideas still comes through, and those ideas are so wonderfully large and bright that they take your breath away to read it. Even when those ideas are expressed in the simplest terms.
I think the neatest thing about Rumi's poetry, though, is that, it's productive as beautiful poetry, but it's also productive, for me at least, in the sense of being generative--self-generative may be more accurate, budding like a hydra--of both meditation and more beauty. I went to sleep thinking of and on his poems, and just before I actually slept the first line and title of a poem emerged into my head. I forced myself to remember it through sleeping, as I can sometimes ask or will myself to do, because I knew it needed a little more work in the soup of my brain overnight before I wrote it down.
And when I woke up in the morning there it was as I was brushing my teeth. I think it's fine stuff.
Prayer of the Geologist
Souls, like stones, break along stress lines.
God, find in me a geode.
I've found it very calming.
For pre-sleep reading, I've found very few things better than Lewis Thomas, but my copies of his books are packed away in the attic because I simply don't currently have space for all my books in my room, and I've read them so often I can pratically page through each essay in my memory. (For those of you reading this who haven't heard my Thomas rant or read the books yourself, please ask me sometime to give you my spiel. You'll have the joy of seeing me wax overly enthusiastic, and you get a free book at the end of it).
So lately I've been trying to read other things before bed. For a while I tried magazine articles in computer magazines, but they weren't interesting enough and I'm not quite close enough to the point where I can afford a new laptop to pore over the computer rankings with zeal and fervor.
Then I tried reading poetry, which at first glance fits many of those requirements I stated above.
There is a problem with that, however: I have found that almost all the volumes of poetry I own are excellent examples of the art from favorite poets, but don't make for good bedtime reading.
The 11:30 pm experiment with the first of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, for instance, was disastrous and exemplary. I sat awake, bemoaning not only some of the small essential sadnesses occasionally found in life, but also deeply distressed over the fact that I can hear meter, but have a very hard time crafting it into my own poetry.
Then I went to the bookstore the other day. I got three books. This is unusual, if you know my book-buying habits, but ok: Two of the books, The Enchanted Chocolate-Pot by Wrede and Stevermer, and a translatated volume of Rumi, I had been wanting for over two years, and one was on sale, while the other, Temprament, was a book I had been looking for without being aware of its actual existence until I saw it on the shelf, and bought it without a second thought for purposes of writing-research. (It's a historical analysis of how changes in the tuning system changed the course of Western thought).
So I got home and read some of Rumi's poetry before bed. For those of you who don't know who he was: mystic poet from Afghanistan (and, later, Turkey) who lived in the 13th century AD. I was introduced to his poetry via my martial arts teacher my junior year at college; it's very good stuff. The translation I have is not so great--apparently the original is much more musical--but the essence of the ideas still comes through, and those ideas are so wonderfully large and bright that they take your breath away to read it. Even when those ideas are expressed in the simplest terms.
I think the neatest thing about Rumi's poetry, though, is that, it's productive as beautiful poetry, but it's also productive, for me at least, in the sense of being generative--self-generative may be more accurate, budding like a hydra--of both meditation and more beauty. I went to sleep thinking of and on his poems, and just before I actually slept the first line and title of a poem emerged into my head. I forced myself to remember it through sleeping, as I can sometimes ask or will myself to do, because I knew it needed a little more work in the soup of my brain overnight before I wrote it down.
And when I woke up in the morning there it was as I was brushing my teeth. I think it's fine stuff.
Prayer of the Geologist
Souls, like stones, break along stress lines.
God, find in me a geode.
I've found it very calming.