OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Words Fail

September 17th, 2008

Some mornings I sit down to my morning pages hoping that I will end up with a beautifully coherent set of words which can be neatly transcribed into a blog entry and bam, one stone, two birds, and more time to spend arranging dinosaur stickers with Rainer. This was such a hopeful morning, but alas I have only this loosely connected set of thoughts.

1) In a phone call wherein she tried to school me in the basics of music theory, my sister patiently explained that music has a vertical component, harmony, and a horizontal component, melody, which delighted me. I had never heard it put that way before. Of course days later, background characters having some conversation that was completely incidental to the plot and main characters of some movie or television show I was watching mentioned the EXACT same thing. And it occurred to me yesterday that when you read, the movement, the denotation, the story told is quite horizontal, while the intangible evocations, the cannotations are vertical. And that hyperlinks and footnotes and Couplandian sidebars stand in for more exact cannotation, for the secret language of best friends. And this thought also makes me happy.

2) I had just had this idea and written it down as I finished morning pages yesterday, just in time to go pick up the boys from the school. Which means it was one of those kinds of days where nothing seems to happen in the time or order you think it ought to, only I experienced the grace of not being all that worked up about what I had or hadn’t gotten done. And I walked with Rainer to pick up brothers from the school and we passed a house where someone just moved in and heard happy little kid noises from inside and there was a beautiful old Underwood on a table on the porch and that just seemed like a sign. By the time I got to the schoolyard gates I was musing on how vivid colors were and how full of possibility the universe is, and barely restraining myself from shaking the shoulders of people I met and saying “Doesn’t it just amaze you all that is contained in just a few cubic feet of human being? Don’t you just marvel at what it is that 20 square feet of skin can hold?” Which I will admit would have come across as quite manic, even though I still think these are amazing things to contemplate, but I contained myself and held to just smiling and people smiled back, and I got a hug from my first grader. And I asked him if he had his homework notebook, and he didn’t so the two of us ran in to his classroom to retrieve it, and then, there it was, the look in the teacher’s eyes as she asked if I could stick around for a minute so she could talk to me. And hearing about the rough day, the licking and kissing and kicking he’d been engaged in and the way he shuts down when she tells him he cannot do these things, it was this deflation, this realization that I am defensively clutching his homework notebook against my chest and I forced myself to mumble but of course such behavior isn’t acceptable and what could I do to help support her and end this behavior… And of all the sacrifices of motherhood, the sacrifice of a buoyant mood is a small one, and maybe if I had already been in a dark place this would have been much harder, but still…

3) I am caught, however, on this sense of containment, of the permeable membrane between inside of us and outside of us, that words and gestures can traverse, however imperfectly. I am still turning over Laura Miller’s words about “rigorous, imaginative compassion” to conjure inner life and “subdue loneliness” in her Salon piece on David Foster Wallace. How having been saved by words when trapped in pits of reflexive self-loathing becomes commission to reach out when I have moments replete with hope and a sense of the universe’s abundance. I was advised not long ago to close the computer and spend time off-line, that the internet can be evil, and I suppose it is a lonely place when it seems all promise of connection and still you strangle, cut off. And yet in these days of carefully balanced time by myself and time with my four year old and crayons and paper and dress-up and playdough and puzzles, the balance of writing for myself and the almost collaborative joy of getting comments and leaving comments on blogs, the balance of reading old favorite books and reading the raw experiences of real people separated only by a few circuits and wires, subduing loneliness seems like a genuine possibility.

4) I still struggle to come up with an adequate answer to a comment left by Isiah on a February blog entry on external validation suggesting that external validation really is not a need and one should try to get over it, that to experience such a need is to experience oneself as lacking. To my surprise, a search on that term led first of all to a site where people are supporting each other, apparently unironically, in trying to get over their need for external validation. Which has me wondering if I use the terms “need” or “external validation” in at all the same way. Because I know that theoretically I would be okay taking a vow of silence and living monastically without common reassurances (and actually, I am not convinced that I wouldn’t perceive external validations in that situation, I was fascinated at the idea that a friend’s experience of a silent retreat included a sense of interacting even without words) but I fail to understand the desirability of it. And I can easily imagine an unhealthy relationship to any sort of e.v., relying constantly on other people to tell us we are okay, but on the other hand, with our interwoven lives, having a voice break through from outside of our heads when we trip into solipsistic hopelessness doesn’t seem like a matter of “should” or “shouldn’t” but more a matter of the small ways we go about saving each other. I don’t have a lot of room right now for should, working on can and do, will and won’t. I think what I was calling external validation is the resonance of experience, the dismantling of solipsism, the joy of recognition.

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