This essay originally appeared as a takeover for my dear friend Leonor Mamanna’s newsletter, Leave it to Leonor, a brilliant weekly dose of smart thinking, culture recommendations, arty things and more, which always starts out with the phrase, “This week I’m thinking about…” She just celebrated her seventh (SEVENTH!) year of sending it out every single Thursday without fail. It’s rude, really. You should subscribe.
This week I’m thinking about my favorite four-letter word.
Let me cut to the chase and disappoint you right away: my favorite four-letter word is “some.”
I get that it doesn’t merit a lot of attention at first glance, this seemingly bland little nugget that shape-shifts without fanfare from a limiting quantifier–as in “some ideas”–to an indefinite plural pronoun–“I asked her for ideas and she emailed me some”–to an adjective conferring emphasis on a singular noun–“whoa, that was some idea she sent”–and yes: to a non-count pronoun used as a cheeky but wholesome-enough euphemism for sex.
But the particular usage I can’t get out of my head these days lives way over in deep word-nerd territory, so common we barely register its existence, yet–when I stop to think about it, which I do probably way too often–is weighted in my mind with this electric, almost magical appeal. I’m thinking about the adjectival form of “some” that acts like a sneaky grammatical slipknot to confer on the noun it describes both that noun’s precise specificity and the simultaneous sense that it can’t be specified at all.
I can’t get this particular form of “some” out of my head right now because the summer has flown by absurdly fast and even though I’m holding onto it for dear life I’m also involuntarily thinking about the start of the school year (still a nervy mixture of exhilaration and anxiety, even after twenty years in the classroom) and there’s a passage from Mary Oliver’s book Blue Pastures that I always give my eighth graders on the first day of school as a touchstone for our work together—usually presented bluntly as a cold open before I’ve even properly introduced myself or outlined the themes of the class—and among the passage’s many virtues: the word “some” shows up in precisely the slippery, paradoxical way that I love.
Here’s the text:
“I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.”
I mean… whew.
It’s a banger.
My first encounter with this text was hearing it read out loud at the end of a yoga class in the early aughts. I was new to yoga then, snarkily skeptical of anything that I thought smacked of Self-Help or Healing in the way that only someone in the most desperate need of both can be. I basically had to be dragged onto the mat by an earnest friend I taught with in the South Bronx who could see that my life was slowly spiraling toward disaster–new teacher getting her ass kicked daily, drinking too much, art practice on indefinite pause, marriage starting to flail. Anyway, I remember lying limp and wrung-out in Savasana in one of my first-ever classes, probably also hungover, face magenta, heart pounding in my sweaty ears, as the teacher carefully and quietly read the passage. The words rang through me like a gong and I remember thinking “fuck… fuck… FUCK…” as a string of realizations hit me with escalating intensity: I was going to have to get my shit together. And start making things again. And change my life.
At that point I had no way of knowing that this would first mean transitioning from teaching English to directing theater with my students (all while my marriage imploded then improbably rose from the ashes over the next few years with three babies in tow). And then that the creative programs my colleagues and I made at that same school in the Bronx would give way to us co-founding a brand new arts-based school where I’d wind up designing an interdisciplinary class using creativity to explore everything from history and climate justice to fractals and Black feminist thought. And finally that teaching this class would lead me full-circle back to my own artistic practice with new clarity and purpose. And maybe most surprisingly of all: that this little chunk of text by Mary Oliver would sit squarely at the intersection of all of it.
But that’s what happened. And so now I keep the passage pinned on my studio wall, and every September my students and I deep-dive into it. At this point I have it memorized, and by the end of the school year so does each class of kids. Even so, each time I revisit it I still find new things to obsess over.
Here’s a sampling of the latest:
For starters, shout-out to the way the whole thing launches on such a dark, emo note. “Stubborn stumps of shame?” CHECK. “Grief that remains unsolvable after all the years?” CHECK, CHECK. “A bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and light feet?” CHECK times fafillion. The kids like this part too. Nothing like a mini-litany of acknowledged fuckery as a first-day welcome for adolescents who are inheriting a dumpster fire of a planet and can immediately sniff out adults lamely peddling whimsy or toxic positivity.
I’m also moved to my bones by this notion of the “summoning world,” which Oliver suggests can bring relief from suffering even in the face of intractable shittiness, not because it’s all sunshine and rainbows but because it’s concretely more interesting than bitterness or anger. And the idea that the antidote to despair isn’t happiness but curiosity strikes a deep chord in me, too, mostly because there’s nothing that says you can’t be curious and sad at the same time. Honestly, what a fucking relief.
Then–swoon–we get to the part about work, “and within that work, a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into”--and thank god for these next five words because this was the only fragment I remembered after hauling my sweaty awestruck ass home from that yoga class to hit the dial-up and frantically search Netscape for the passsage’s source: “some shapely heat-retaining form.” It always takes my students a beat to figure out what she’s talking about here. Every group of kids grapples with the text differently, but the a-ha moment when they crack the code and realize that the phrase “shapely heat-retaining form” is Oliver’s sly way of pointing at Art always sends the same jolt of energy rippling through the room.
That’s when I nudge them to notice the word that comes right before: our humble friend “some.” And granted, this is discerning shit for day-one of eighth grade, but if the kids are down we go full mad scientist, experimenting with swapped-in alternatives to “some” to see how they change the meaning—and what we discover goes right to the root, I think, of why art-making can sometimes feel so scary, and why it can also be so transformative.
Check it out:
If Oliver had used “a” instead of “some”–”a shapely heat-retaining form”--we’d probably get the idea that when it comes to making art, any old random form will do. The kids immediately call bullshit on this. Teenagers are hardwired to value the particulars of their emotional lives and they get that art comes from a yearning to create something specific enough to embody our own precise thoughts and sensations, which–even though we know they’re probably universal bla bla blah–in the moment feel like ours and ours alone.
On the other side of the coin, if she’d traded “some” for “the” to bring us “the shapely heat-retaining form,” we’d likely assume that there’s only one perfect form that could possibly be summoned in each creative moment–the ideal expression that already exists which you can either replicate perfectly and get “right” or not replicate perfectly and get “wrong.” The kids know intuitively that this isn’t true either, that the whole point of art is to coax something into the world that’s never existed before, and that–wildly enough–no one knows exactly what it actually looks like or feels like yet, least of all you. Which means there can’t be a right or wrong way to do it. Gah!
And so with “a” and “the” eliminated, we’re left with Oliver’s humming, sublime “some,” now revealed as the passage’s grammatical MVP and secret center of gravity. Those four little letters evoke the urgency of the artist’s longing to create something singular and specific while simultaneously bowing to the expansive unknown, the feeling of mystery and wonder it holds, the unwillingness of the muse to be looked at directly in the eyes. Yeeesh! Oh, and here’s some extra-next-level shit: the derivation of the word “some” traces back to the Sanskrit “sama,” which translates as both “any” and “every.”
It’s precisely this discomfort, I think–this unwieldy effort artists have to constantly make to wobble on the knife’s edge and embody the “any” and the “every” at the same time, this longing to call forth something achingly specific that can’t yet be specified—that can make the creative process feel so brutal sometimes (and also, of course, so euphoric.)
Point is, I teach this class mostly because I want to pass along the lesson I wish I’d learned earlier: that being an artist has way less to do with talent than with learning to tolerate discomfort, to practice feeling off-balance and unmoored on purpose, with both reverence for the alchemical properties at the outer edges of our comfort zones and willingness to call in support when we’re out of our depths.
And that brings us to the cosmic wallop of Oliver’s second-to-last line, which, not coincidentally, is the same message I needed to hear lying wrecked on the floor of that yoga studio twenty years ago. Which is that even when the creative process feels seismic and wrenching and uncomfortable, and even if we don’t yet feel like we have a community of creative friends to lean on, we’re never really in it alone. Because when we gather the courage to open ourselves as creative channels in our art and our lives, we align with our natural birthright, “just as the gods or nature or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe.” Whew, lord.
The passage could end there. Like give this woman her Pulitzer and let’s all go have a beer. But the last line is the real kicker, and Oliver winds up and lets it fly: “Having chosen to claim my life,” she says, “I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.”
And with that, we arrive at personal confession time:
In the spirit of claiming my life, I almost didn’t go back to the classroom this year. Twenty years felt like a nice round number. And teaching–while nourishing and inspiring–can also be depleting and exhausting and–given the big picture leanings of our current culture–not always exactly the sexiest gig. As much as I love our school, I’d gotten myself good and ready for a hard pivot to full-time art-making this fall.
But it’s a funny thing. The tug of this work on me is bizarrely strong. And no matter how I might sometimes resist it or convince myself it’s getting in the way of my artistic path–it’s increasingly clear to me that teaching is actually foundational to my creative practice—an essential part of the “some” I was meant to summon in this lifetime.
So I found a compromise. I’m joining with a beloved colleague to co-teach the class. I’ll have more time in the studio and still get to nerd out heavy with the kids.
I think it’s gonna be some year.
*
This week in reading. . .
Just finished My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing by poet Carl Phillips. Alovely read. Bonus: perfect slim hardcover with a striking, minimalist cover. Perfect gift for your creative humans.
This week in listening. . .
Some albums I’ve been playing straight through in the studio this week:
Journey Inwards by LTJ Bukem reeeeally taking me back down a spiral to my early 2000’s jungle/ drum-n-bass days. Scoured YouTube and found his 1996 double CD mixes Logical Progressions CD 1 and CD 2. Truly what the inside of my head sounded like at the turn of the millennium.
Spirits by New Zealand jazz collective The Circling Sun: a Sun Ra/ Alice Coltrane energy mixed with Latin rhythms and a pinch of Khruangbin vibes. Perfect to paint or write or cook or lie down and do absolutely nothing to.
A Light for Attracting Attention by The Smile, Radiohead spin-off collective with Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood doing all their usual things plus Tom Skinner on drums. Saw them at Forest Hills at the start of the summer, insanely good.
In other news, the new Carly Rae Jepsen album The Loveliest Time is GREAT. We will not be taking questions at this time.
This week in TV. . .
I’m not a big TV watcher but I forgot to download podcasts for our flight to Nashville last week where EQ and I went to celebrate our anniversary–(hi EQ!)--so I started mindlessly half-watching Hijack over his shoulder with closed captions and got so sucked in that I made him burn through the rest of it with me once we landed. (We did other fun things in Nashville too... Highly recommend Robert’s for late night live music, Listening Room and Backstage Nashville to hear songwriters perform and talk about their process, and Hatch Show Print for amazing letterpress and vintage posters.)
This week in movies. . .
Finally saw Fire of Love. Poignant, strange and singularly beautiful. Would absolutely rock one of those silver jumpsuits.
This week in artsy stuff and photo things. . .
Revising the unit on fractals and the Golden Ratio for my class just now had me re-watching this hypnotic video by John Edmark, who makes these incredible strobe animated bloom sculptures which he talks about here.
This week in a newsletter. . .
Freer Form by Shira Erlichman. Generous, smart, makes you wanna gulp big lungfuls of air and savor smells and think about things and make stuff.
Kate