(Howell Creek Radio address for April 21, 2012 -- ) The Good Wrong ================= Monday morning was windy, and wildly cold. I awoke at around sunrise and crept downstairs in a fog of mind. It was one of those rare days, beautifully green and beautifully cold. The clouds outside the kitchen window were skimming pretty low, and something was swirling in their windy wake that was not quite rain, not quite snow -- swirling raindrops, maybe, or splashing snowflakes. I usually do not have time to write except in the mornings, so the earlier I can get up, the more time I will have to write, and the less of a brain I will have to write with. It often feels like a mistake to even try. But often, if I make it out of bed, the sight of the weather outside the kitchen window as I grind my coffee beans often stirs some thought in me, which blows uselessly in an eddy for awhile before settling back down to nothing. * * * Trixie loves a well-sewn pillow the way I adore a well-crafted typeface. I may pride myself on my web design chops, or on my margins and my kerning , but I've come to understand that the way she puts together a room is like graphic design in three dimensions -- four if you count the way time has of changing the light in the room. While sowing an ornament on one of her pillows this week, Trixie laid it out exactly according to the Golden Ratio, completely by eye and intuition, nicely dividing a 21-inch space into proportions of 8 and 13 inches -- a trick that any decent graphic designer would be proud to duplicate. In her own way and in her own medium, she creates the effect described by the poet[^1]: > "Yet modest ornament with use combined > Attracts the eye to excercise the mind." What is more, she assembles her designs on a rather thin allowance of resources, making several trips to the fabric store, coupons and sale flyers in hand, to rummage through bolts of fabric, badly juxtaposed, crammed on high and low shelves in bad flourescent lighting, looking for the magic combination of three or four patterns that will match each other, _and_ visually tie together our unlikely crew of secondhand furniture -- and still seem striking, pleasant and original in their own right. She was flummoxed to find, after one such trip, that one of her fabrics had changed colors during the trip home. In the pale, wan lighting at S. R. Harris the accent color had undeniably been an olive green, but in our living room it showed itself a tweedy, tawdry brown. There followed several minutes of squinting and anxiety before we finally decided it couldn't work and we'd need to drive out again. * * * For my part, I have been spending a lot of spare time serving as the editor for someone else's book. John G. had the good sense to hire me as a second set of eyes, and I had temerity to tell myself it wouldn't take very long, and that it would be easy to make his deadlines. I am at least fortunate, though, in that my client seems to take a humble aspect, and to view the manuscripts he sends me the way I, as an editor, _must_ view them: as nothing more nor less than raw material, to be boiled and slagged and scummed until it yields, we hope, something worth looking at. So then, the evenings of the week would find us filling up the cutting floor with scraps of fabric and mixed metaphors: Trixie measuring, cutting and sewing, me wading through the first edit of another man's creation. I was sitting at my desk, where the more I pressed the manuscript, the more it fractured and cracked, until gaping fissures of red ink filled the pages. He had to have gone over this and reworked it several times before he sent it to me, I thought, and yet it was extremely . It would be easy to grow proud -- it usually is when you are employed in finding someone else's mistakes -- but it occurred to me that I never bothered to hire someone to edit my own work. How much of my own painfully crafted output of the last decade would really be worth looking at, if a really objective mind were to lean as heavily on all of it as I am leaning on this thing? Meanwhile, behind me, twice -- three times, perhaps? -- Trixie sewed the whole pillow case shut with the zipper zipped all the way and the pull on the inside. These kinds of mistakes are the great kind that are always good for a laugh and a kiss, but she did have to rip the stitches out every time, reach inside and open the zipper, and sew the thing back shut again. * * * We have been attending weekly dance lessons. My background has given me no experience in moving my feet, arms and body to a rhythm, so the lessons have not been easy. When the instructor tells the group "follow these steps," I and my partner do well. When she says "now do the first steps followed by these new steps," and when she plays the music and counts the starting beat for us, I and my partner do well. But when she plays some music I never heard before and says "Now dance the steps in any order you like," the result I produce would be best described as "a succession of mistakes." Nonetheless, Trixie enjoys dancing, and I have a great hope when I'm be able to lead her out onto the floor with confidence and skill, it will be fun for me too. So although it feels more to me like a flawed workout than like a symphony of movement at this point, I am determined to keep trying. Meanwhile that editing is not done. Somehow that needs to be finished in time for our trip up north. I need to finish this podcast in time for Saturday. Those branches I cleared out from the lilacs on the north side a few weeks ago are still sitting in a pile in the backyard, doubtless killing the fragile new grass beneath. And the tub surround needs to be tiled, the garage cleaned out, the car washed and Trixie's Canadian tax return filed before the 30th. * * * Shunryu Suzuki wrote that > "When we reflect on what are doing in our everyday life, we are always ashamed of ourselves. One of my students wrote to me saying,'You sent me a calendar, and I am trying to follow the good mottoes which appear on each page. But the year has hardly begun, and already I have failed!' Dogen-zenji said, _'Shoshaku jushaku.'_ _Shaku_ generally means 'mistake' or 'wrong.' _Shoshaku jushaku_ means 'to succeed wrong with wrong,' or one continuous mistake. According to Dogen, one continuous mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master's life could be said to be so many years of _shoshaku jushaku_. This means so many years of one single-minded effort. > > "We say, 'A good father is not a good father.' Do you understand? One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. One who thinks he is one of the worst husbands may be a good one if he is always trying to be a good husband with a single-hearted effort."[^2] Perhaps these little problems of ours _are_ just the scuffs and bruises of an eight-year old playing in a vacant lot -- small and quickly forgotten, in the greater scheme of things -- but if they keep us humble, they serve their purpose. > Like faithful oxen through the chalk > With dragging tails of history walk > Soon confuse the compass and the cross. > Carefully and cursively we fill our traveling diaries with loss. > > -- Dry the River, _History Book_ * * * Synopsis: ----------- Radio address for April 21, 2012, in which our quiet, straightforward life keeps me humble by being too much to keep up with, and I hope it will always be that way. Music cues are [_Wading Deep Water_][1] by Crooked Still; [_Romance: I Know a Little Forest_][2] by Jake Schepps; [_The Daily Grind_][3] by Anne Dudley; and [_History Book_][4] by Dry the River. [^1]: From _Epistle to a Friend_ by Samuel Rogers, first published in 1798. I first came across this part of the poem when I found it quoted in the 1842 book _Cottage Residences_ by A.J. Downing, who is considered to be "the Father of American Landscape Architecture." The four lines of the poem including this couplet are featured as a kind of motto on our website's "About" section (where I misattributed it to A. J. Downing for many years). [^2]: _Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind_ by Shunryu Suzuki [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004FBHZBW/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B004FBHZBW "Still Crooked album (affiliate link)" [2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005O9B14G/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005O9B14G "An Evening in the Village album (affiliate link)" [3]: http://www.annedudley.co.uk/Default.aspx?page=29&node=42 "Anne Dudley Discography: The World of Jeeves and Wooster" [4]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007R9K9NU/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B007R9K9NU "Shallow Bed album(affiliate link)"