I Did It My Way: A Picaresque Riff on the Ars Poetica
Part One, The New Moon Pluto in Aquarius Edition
Picaresque:
A type of fiction dealing with the episodic adventures of a usually roguish protagonist.
Picaresque novels contain seven essential elements. These are: first-person narrator, protagonist is of a lower social class, protagonist makes immoral choices which border on criminality, minimal character development, little to no plot, literary realism, and satire.
Famous examples include Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
Riff:
noun—a short repeated phrase in popular music and jazz, typically used as an introduction or refrain in a song.
Famous example: Keith Richards’ opening guitar part on “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones.
verb—a rapid energetic often improvised verbal outpouring, especially one that is part of a comic performance.
Famous example: comedian Richard Pryor.
Famous example of noun and verb combined: Post A Love Supreme sax solos by John Coltrane.
Ars Poetica:
A poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing. A meditation on poetry using the forms and techniques of a poem.
Famous example: Horace Ars Poetic (but who reads Horace these days?)
Famous Possibly Relevant Example: “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara. (Does anyone read Frank O’Hara these days?)
Hopefully Relevant Example: This essay, which while not written in as a poem, is a meditation, in riff form, on the misadventures of the author, immoral choices and all (hopefully not bordering too close to the criminal and not completely lacking character development, though I’m not attached to the tyranny of plot, have limited use for realism unless it’s magical and satire only when it’s cloaked in compassion and pointed first at myself).
Book One: In which we meet our lazy heroine sleeping in late halfway up a mountain.
The rain woke me. Time to get up? Nah. I nestled deeper into my nest tucked under the eaves of the A-frame and enjoyed the pitter-patter, glad it wasn’t mynah birds stomping on the roof or rats trying to burrow their way to raid my pantry. Since I last lived here in 2021, the nest has been upgraded from a double bed with the give of a plank, to a plush King, so it was a relief to have an excuse to sleep in. Usually, I feel I have to vault out of the nest on days off like a baby murre to drive down the hill for a swim in Honaunau Bay. Not that it’s an obligation, but part of me still isn’t used to the fact that I can go swimming every day, not just for the few brief months of a Block Island summer, when even then the water is never as warm as it is here, even on a winter day. Without frigid winters and howling winters to keep me in bed, I am going to have to learn how to relax in a different way.
Even the greatest delights can become routine, right? A sad fact and one I resolve not to get the best of me, though I am not so good at resolutions, something I was discussing yesterday with my mentor Ke’oni Hanalei. Why wasn’t I good at sticking to routines, doing the breath work, the yoga, the ceremonies, when I knew they would shift my energy and bring me closer to the person I want to be?
Ke’oni and I teased some threads out between us regarding my inability to stick to routine, and the conclusion was not what I expected. I was expecting to uncover some deep vein of self-hatred stemming from some newly discovered trauma that was causing me to still self-sabotage, but no, when Ke’oni reminded me, as a writer, I am a master archivist who specializes in sharing my process, I realized there was no hidden trauma, at least not today. Instead, I was being invited to establish my standards. What are the things that matter to me? Beyond protocols or whatever someone says I should be doing because of my age, class, race, or economic status?
Sharing my struggles is something that matters, not just in writing. I’ve always been open in sharing my self doubt and vulnerabilities, and kicked myself a bunch of times because it opens me up to people who want to lord it over someone by being the one with the answer that will solve my problems, which I never asked for, thank you, especially when the advice is a vapid spiritual bypass that would probably get me Instagram followers and workshop attendees because then I’d sound like an authority. Worse, sharing my promise so openly also opens me up to not being seen clearly, which used to really bother me to the point I seethed inside, though it’s better now since I care less about what people think of me. (Thank you, menopause.) Also, I realized being vulnerable doesn’t mean I’m weak and has its own kind of authority.
Once, a friend who made a living as an intuitive told me that my path was to learn things as I went when I lamented to her about my blocked third eye. She was presenting this as a positive trait, but I heard I was destined to blunder blind through life, unacknowledged for my psychic powers (I was convinced I was supposed to be having visions), and unacknowledged by the masses and certainly not financially rewarded by them. And I did want acclaim, because it was better to be special than just an ordinary human seeing only what I was presented with by the visible spectrum, right?
I don’t go to as many share circles as I used to, and if I do I’m often fine with just listening. I even decline invitations for extended eye contact (known in these circles as soul-gazing. Cringe—IYKYK) and don’t care if people think I’m afraid of intimacy.
I guess my psychic friend was right. My path has been revealed to me as I walked it, to riff on Machado. (Traveler, the path is made by walking.) And I’ve come to see my relative blindness as a gift. As a writer, it makes me relatable. Hopefully my readers can experience my process and receive something from it—inspiration, comfort, a good laugh. Even if it’s at me, not with me, that’s ok. I was delighted last week when a reader of Piko told me she thought I was funny, not the kind of feedback I got when I was writing oracular poetry that floated in the ether and potentially even scared people I was going to drive my car into a stonewall when I left the poetry reading.
Truth is, I’m at my best when I’m funny. I’m not trying to hide behind a false authority. Any authority I do have is because I share my process anyway. I’m an expert at riding waves and willing to have my belly scraped on the beach.
Which brings me to the other factor Ke’oni and I discussed when I was wondering why I can’t stick to a routine—calendar reform—probably not where you thought this essay was going and maybe something not at all on your radar, but it’s very loud in my Ars Poetica at the moment. The need for a new way of measuring time is something I’ve been aware of for at least 30 years, you might even call it a vision, which maybe I’ve had more than I realized. I just thought I was being me, riding my bike because I enjoyed it when everyone else drove a car because they could get where they wanted to go quicker and wouldn’t arrive sweaty.
My inability to stick to a routine, to follow protocols, may actually be where we are all going as humanity shifts into the Age of Aquarius, or whatever you want to call it. Your choice, but there’s no denying we are on the precipice of a quantum leap—maybe we’ve even leaped already and don’t know it—which is why I, Jennifer Lighty, 56 years old with the wrinkles to prove it, don’t feel any age really because I’ve always done my best to pretty much do what I want without regard to age-appropriate standards presented by society who wants us to line up and check off the boxes in a certain order. (I had a good example in my grandmother who wore wore leather pants in her 70s and only stopped, most likely, when she became too infirm to choose her own clothes.)
Even astrology, relied on heavily by the global spiritual community, expects us to go through things at a certain time, and while I did go through a life shift in my late 20s that could have been the influence of my Saturn return, I settled on Block Island year-round, not got married, which meant I didn’t have to have a mid-life crisis around age 42 when my Uranus return came round. Yeah, my life did take unexpected directions at that age, but they didn’t involve having to divorce the person I’d married at 30 because society told me it was time to check that box. My point is, we may be moving into an experience of time where we are all designing our own calendars according to varying factors that could range from our body’s whims or needs to our soul’s destiny, if you believe in that sort of thing—by that I mean destiny and the soul. I’m up in the air about both as I get older, more skeptical in a good way. Maybe we don’t have to have a purpose or a destiny. Maybe we just have to show up every day and serve life in however it presents itself to us, and hopefully enjoy the process, even when it’s sad or a struggle. Bonus, for when it’s a delight, but that’s not the point. I’m not sure what’s supposed to be happening to me according to the stars, but I do know I am settling into being able to hold multiple perspectives and emotions, and that I don’t feel as much that I need to save the world or anyone in it. If I have an imperative, it’s keep sharing my process. If that impulse goes away, I’ll do my best to stop, though like I said, I’m not good at resolutions.
Back in bed I realize I could still swim in the rain. I think about all I could be missing. Maybe the dolphins are there, maybe I’ll see an octopus. I should get up. I’m lazy. What’s the matter with me? I decide to get vertical slowly, go downstairs to see what the geckos are up to on the lanai. They stake each out all day. I can’t tell if they’re playing or are serious, but I’ve never seen one kill another. They just drop a tail and slip between the deck planks.
Downstairs, I open the curtains over the sliders to reveal the glorious view of bougainvillea just over the lanai railing, and Two-Step down below—but wait—Two-Step isn’t there. The cool temperatures brought by the rain have kissed the warm ocean, creating fog that has risen up the mountain to the edge of my lanai. When I turn around, the view heading up the mountain is clear. Below me, anything could come out of the fog, these words, a new look on life.
Where does the fog begin and end exactly? Without full sight, the world has become smaller and larger. I settle into the sling-back chair I’ve carted to three homes so far, my favorite spot for reading or day-dreaming, knowing the parched grass beneath me is soothed by the water saturated air. The red ti plants all around the house glisten. I found out this week they are a sign a witch or sorcerer lives on the premises. When I told the property owner, himself steeped in Hawaiian tradition, he nodded in agreement. You know what sorcerers are, right? he asked.
“Tell me,” I took the bait. He loved puns so I knew one was coming.
“Source-erers. We get our knowledge from source.”
“Your best pun ever!” I told him, and I meant it. It was true and funny. I walked inside feeling better about myself. Even if I couldn’t see myself clearly, the red ti plants could.
The property owner, my Sorcerer compadre, went back to fixing the rotted stairs to the community bathroom used by the Air BnB guests. I kept wondering why he didn’t replace the rotten wood with that plastic imitation wood that wouldn’t fall victim to mildew and termites, but then I remembered reading in a book by Martín Prechtel, of how the Guatemalan villagers with whom he lived for years would purposely design their homes to fall apart. When one needed repairs, or even to be rebuilt completely, the villagers would come together and build a new house, repairing and rebuilding their community along the way. This made me see the stick shacks tucked between concrete dwellings on the back streets of Tulum and Bacalar, where I’d lived for a time, in a new way. I’d always thought the people in them were too poor to have a concrete house, when maybe they were stubbornly sticking to the old ways, knowing the concrete would muffle the sounds of their neighbors crooning to their babies, chatting over a cook fire, making love, playing music, isolating them from what made them real humans, not the plastic ones pumped out by the industrial machine where everyone is supposed to be an authority and influencer and never have questions or wrinkles and glow on Instagram. Even though everyone uses filters to make themselves look like 23 year old sirens and fairies, it’s easy to forget, at least for me who falls under enchantments easily, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. How can I cast spells if I haven’t been spellbound myself? It’s all about the process, witches.
Certain books I read when I was young were such powerful enchantments they obliterated the “real” world. I can still feel the sheer terror I experienced reading Tolkien’s Return of the King at age nine. I was Anne of Green Gables when I read L.M. Montgomery’s books at age 10, and the dread of Will Stanton in The Dark is Rising possessed me completely. The dark was rising right outside my bedroom. I experienced words as the powerful spells they are, a power that has faded over time, which makes me sad. William Blake captured it so well”
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour
Remember that feeling? I hope you felt it, too, that it’s not just me longing to be ensorcelled. Maybe it’s not possible now that I’m an adult, at least not without psychedelics, which makes me even sadder. I want to repair that part of me that’s given its attention to the soul-sucking trance of social media (at least I’m not on Tik Tok) and rebuild myself as a woman in touch again with child-like wonder. Where is the village to help me?
Social media is a trance, at least for me. I could delete the apps. Why am I continuing to participate in something that is causing me to harm myself? By that I mean the constant comparing myself to others I perceive as successful. Maybe those people are more succesful and confident than me because they are more dedicated. Maybe that’s where their confidence comes from. They could also be extroverted ham con-artists, but why should that matter? It really has nothing to do with me. The only reason I am upset by them is because I feel like I’m not living up to my potential. This is a perfect opportunity for you to tell me I create my own reality if you need to boost your confidence. You could also advise me to eye-gaze and break on through to the other side, but you dear reader, are not going to do that, are you, because if you’ve made it this far as I vault from rock to rock along the cliff-edge you are the kind of person who appreciates a good story and doesn’t need to see it end with an answer that leaves no room for imaginative leaps.
I have an ex-boyfriend, an astonishing artist. He was constantly drawing to the point where it got annoying. One time we were in a Pizza Hut in New Hampshire. He was doing the usual, sketching on a napkin. I asked him to stop and be present with me. Now he was a bit of a jester, so when I tell you he looked up from the napkin and told me, deadly serious, that asking him to stop drawing was the same as asking him to stop living, I knew our relationship was really over, not because he had cheated on me a bunch of times, but because I didn’t want to be with someone who couldn’t hold a conversation and was more interested in making art than anything else, and he wouldn’t want to be with me for the same reasons in reverse.
“Don’t you feel like you’ll explode if you don’t write as soon as you get up in the morning?” he asked me once. “Not really,” I replied, meaning not at all. The first thing I wanted in the morning was coffee.
I wanted to be a writer, had always wanted to since I first learned to read in 1st grade, and I even would have said it was the driving force in my life behind the scenes, but it was not the first thing I wanted to do, or sometimes ever wanted to do. Maybe it’s the difference between writing and painting. Writing is more cerebral, painting more physical. If you want to be comprehensible, writing requires thinking, which can be exhausting. A painter can just splatter paint like Jackson Pollock and people are blown away and think they are seeing the Big Bang.
Actually, that’s kind of how I started out as a writer, splattering images on the page I drew down from above my head that had nothing to do with my actual life. On Earth, I had a job, bills to pay, dreary things that I didn’t want to think about. What kind of oracle has to buy their food at the grocery store? Shouldn’t people be making offerings of wine and honey at the door of my temple?
Turns out nobody was interested in my poetic pronouncements. Some who heard them were bored, some confused, some thought I was crazy. Eventually I realized I needed to integrate or “hang it up, Jack,” as my grandfather used to say. Being an oracle wasn’t getting me anywhere interesting, even to my own taste.
The integration began through working with the poet Fran Quinn, who could see me better than I could see myself. “You want to communicate with people,” he told me in one of our sessions. At the time I was very frustrated because I hadn’t finished a poem in five years, which is a long time when you’re used to being a channel, having the words flow easily.
“Isn’t that what I’m doing?” I replied.
“No,” he informed me. “Everything you write is a few feet above your head. Stop writing in the voice of the oracle. Come down to Earth.”
I came down. It was painful. I stopped thinking the story of the Little Mermaid was romantic. (The original version, not the Disney, the one where she gives up her fins and voice to get her chance to woo the prince and doesn’t get him, and dies and turns into seafoam, only to be granted a soul that rises to heaven because of her suffering.)
I finished a poem, then finished a bunch more that turned into a chapbook I wrote very quickly, Breaking Up With the Moon, once the code had been cracked. What do you know, being on Earth wasn't so bad. People actually wanted to listen to me. I let Cassandra rest in peace, made room for other myths to contact me.
Looping back to that perennially sketching boyfriend who, like Pinocchio, couldn’t tell a lie, at least where art was concerned, I have to admit I was envious of his talent and drive. He loved painting so much it mattered more than anything else, was willing to make sacrifices, and even though I became one of those sacrifices, I got it. I wanted to be that driven, too, not to achieve and be successful, but to add something of great beauty to the world that inspired people, moving them to tears or wonder the way the books I loved most had moved me. That was my true motivation and still is, which is probably why I’m not famous, although every now and then an artist’s love merges with the desires of her time and she is rewarded with acclaim and riches, though that’s usually not good for the art, so I really don’t want to be that rich—just a little, enough to quite being a massage therapist, rent a nice place and take a trip to Moorea to swim with humpback whales.
More often that’s not the case, artists are not rewarded. Most of us have day jobs or dilute their creations in order to satisfy commercial tastes. These are times when people don’t care about beauty like they used to, especially the complex beauty I am drawn to create that often includes great sorrow (the Japanese consider this the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement and even have a name for it, mono no aware, which means beauty and sadness. I was born in Japan and often wonder if this concept seeped in through my pores as I slept in my crib in the house in Tokorozawa with a view of Mt. Fuji so often depicted by the great Japanese wood-block artists like Hokusai, whose work “The Feminine Wave” appears on the cover of my book Piko), but that doesn’t matter. I write now because I love it, because, like my ex, I have to, and I enjoy it. Writing this essay is my idea of a fun day.
Once, in one of the most raw moments of our relationship, when I was accusing him of being a liar after I discovered he was cheating on me, he shot back at me: “You’re a liar, too.”
“I’m not a liar!” I insisted, but he was right, only I wasn’t lying about cheating on him, I was lying about cheating on myself. I knew it was true as soon as he spoke these words:
“You lie about how great you are.”
Some of you may be rolling your eyes thinking this guy’s a gaslighting narcissist (they are always so charming, aren’t they?), but it was true. Like Fran, the ex could see me better than I could see myself. There was a reason we were together, probably lots of them, but could one of them be that we were equally creative, mirrors for each other who could have inspired each other through joy instead of pain if we hadn’t been so young—but ah, that’s another story, and it doesn’t matter, because we got what we needed from each other (If you try sometimes…The Stones sang), or at least I did. We never had a reconciliation where we were able to acknowledge how our coming together had transformed us, something I longed for for many years. We don’t always get to be characters in the stories we want to be in. Sometimes the stories boot us out and tell us to find our own story and stop relying on them for a happy ending. Sometimes the stories say, “Stop trying to force us into being who you want us to be.” In other words, get on with your own life even if you never get closure. Write that book instead of wishing you were a painter.
I discovered that worlds lived inside my pen and keyboard same as they did inside my ex’s paintbrush. All I needed to do was believe I was worthy to create them, or even if I couldn’t believe, to just create them anyway because who cares if the artist is worthy of the vision he receives? And could it even be the tension between the two—the beauty and power of the vision channeled through a lying, cheating human—that is most inspiring? Creativity is not just for the supposedly worthy. Remember what Mary Oliver said in her famous poem “Wild Geese.” You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
I’m a rebel so I have a problem with the imperial “you” found so often in spiritual poems (Don’t tell me what I should do or feel Rumi), but I think Mary’s right, and I like where we end up at the conclusion of “Wild Geese.” The you—not good, unrepentant, takes their place in the “family of things.”
We don’t have to get down on our knees and repent in order to receive a vision. We just have to be ourselves, which admittedly has been hard under the Gregorian Calendar and capitalism, but that’s shifting. Keep tuning into your own calendar, friends, follow your own stream whenever you can. The river is waiting and could change direction quick as a pole shift. Be afraid if you need to. Be suspicious when anyone tells you what to do. Don’t have faith. Abide in your own knowing. Where does the river always end up? The ocean. I know some rivers, dried up due to climate change or dammed, look like they don’t make it, but they do. All the water on Earth is already here and isn’t going anywhere. It’s just changing forms. Look up the clouds and dance for the rain.
With age, I have recognized my ex’s position was extreme and possibly immature (he was only 26), especially if one has a family. It’s a position more easily attainable by men who generally don’t share household and childcare duties equally with women. In truth, during our time together I provided us with shelter through working as a caretaker and I don’t remember him exactly rolling in dough, though we ate a lot of bread and filled our gas tank $5 at a time. I do remember he didn’t lift a finger to clean. In fact, I had to follow him around wiping paint from his fingers off the walls and banisters of the house I was charged with keeping immaculate. I am not blaming him. Those were my choices, just pointing out, to myself most importantly, that we have choices, and also not to beat yourself up for the choices you did make that maybe weren’t in your best interest. Love is a mysterious thing and a great teacher. It’s not about being comfortable or practical at all. It’s about breaking your house down so the village can come in and help you rebuild. Each time, even if the house’s footprint stays the same, the house is stronger until eventually it’s the dwelling place of a real human.
We haven’t talked in many years, but I’ve seen his paintings. They are filled with many colors of the emotional spectrum: delight, awe, wonder, loneliness, intimacy, tenderness, magic, longing. From what I’ve seen, anger is missing. Horror and despair. Some might say this is a sign of being in a delusional fantasy, the world’s in such a state, but not me. In this time when the whole Earth is poisoned, creatures going extinct, humans dying of cancer, we need antidotes. Beauty matters, Everyone’s vision is particular to themselves, even the delusional ones. I can still love them, and maybe even love them more for what they leave out, for that’s where vulnerability enters, and vulnerability, as I’ve learned, makes room for tenderness, something this self-destructing world needs more than anything.
Maybe my ex could have painted his magnificent paintings and still made small talk at Pizza Hut now and then, I don’t know. Maybe other subjects would have wandered onto his canvases if he did, like bombed cities and dead children in the street. Or maybe he just didn’t want to make small talk with me. I don’t care. I’m happy to report my life did not become parenthetical statement to a great male artist. I became my own prophecy.
One thing he said has stuck with me, that an artist was never satisfied because he was always compelled about the next thing he was going to create. (At 26!) This seemed true at the time, and I accepted it as a fact of my life. As a human driven to create, I was never going to be satisfied.
I didn’t realize until yesterday that there was another option. While maybe I couldn’t satisfy all of me, there was a part that could be satisfied, my uhāne, my inner masculine in ‘Olelo Hawai’i. This came up in my session with Ke’oni when he asked me how it felt when I completed a project. Without having to think much I said, “I don’t know what that feels like. I just move onto the next thing.”
“Your uhāne needs you to celebrate the completions,” Ke’oni said, “Otherwise you can’t archive the process and you yourself don’t know how you did what you did. Other people may know because they are reading about it, but you don’t learn the lesson so you keep circling back in your own life to the same things even if your work changes the lives of others.”
Boom! (Above quote is a bit of a paraphrase by the way.)
We all have an ‘uhāne and ‘unihipili, an inner masculine and feminine. ((Jung termed them the animus and anima.) The ‘uhāne is the hero of our lives. He is meant to take action, to carry out the instructions of the leader, the feminine, our ‘unihipili. If we don’t tell him a project he’s begun is complete he will, ever so valiantly, keep trying to complete it. Which is why I drove down to the Pu’uhonua tonight with a copy of Piko and walked through the gap in the Great Wall and held my book above the two little ponds which inspired its inception and announced:
“Look what you did. You made this beautiful and powerful book, ‘uhāne. He ku’u Pau. It is accomplished.”
I placed the book on the bridge between the two ponds, which I came to see as the corpus callosum between the two ponds that represented the left and right brain hemispheres and took this picture:
I’m still going to be compelled by the next creation, this is a picaresque after all, but hopefully from now on I won’t be repeating the same mistakes because my ‘uhane has been celebrated. He knows he did what I asked him to. The book is published and in the world. “Anything else is a bonus,” Ke’oni told me, meaning acclaim, which I admitted I wanted. But that desire has diminished so much over the years even without my acknowledging what I’ve completed, I know it will continue to abate, which doesn't mean I don’t want you to read my book, and let’s keep it real here, totally love it and wildly praise me, so go ahead if you want, especially online. That might help book sales, which would be really great because I would have more time to create, which I’m going to do anyway because it’s my destiny. There, I said it. And maybe I even have soul, though I don’t mean the kind that lives on after the body. I mean the kind that knows how to get down and shake, the kind of soul that puts you in a trance and possesses your body and suddenly you find you’ve got a straight line to the divine yourself and he sounds like James Brown or Aretha Franklin.
Shake your money maker! Shake your money maker!
R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
Just make sure you do it your way.
(Sock it to me, sock it to. me, sock it to me)
Conclusion (of sorts)
A picaresque is characterized by not having much of a plot, which you might find frustrating. You might also, like me, find it expands your perception of time not to have a beginning, middle or an end. It’s rather fun to meander. However, I do want to leave you satisfied enough to want to come back for more, so I offer this little story as a conclusion to your heroine’s misadventures.
For those who’ve read Piko, you'll know the significance of me saying I drove down the hill tonight blasting “Sympathy for the Devil” from my iPhone perched on the passenger seat of the same Honda Fit that carried me down the hill to the park for the 21-day ceremony I recount in the book. For those who haven’t here are some links to purchase the book where you can circle back to the stories within this story recounted here today. Of course, there will be more stories. Stay tuned. Of course, I’ll be doing it my way. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, after all, not that I’m listening to anything anyone is telling me about anything, but can’t you feel it in the air? The times, they are a changing.
Have a listen, remember, laugh:
Links to Piko: A Return to the Dreaming
Buy on Amazon with free shipping
Buy on Bookshop and support local bookstores
"Jennifer Lighty is the real thing and has done us a great service with Piko. A modern woman working intuitively to contact mythic ground. Her language is fresh and imaginative, her intention five fathoms deep. I'm so glad she exists, and that she has turned some of her life's work into a gift that we can cradle in our hands and feel the benefit." -Martin Shaw, author of Bardskull
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light