Bread and Roses
< strike>Sometimes it seems like No, see, the internal editor chokes. Why all of these weak constructions, why do I start ideas with this wimpy introductions, why is it so hard to find a voice that is strong, declarative, decisive? In a moment of masochism I submitted the text of my NaNoWriMo novel to www.wordle.net and generating a cloud of words, like this one for the blog, where the words I use most frequently are the largest, so I could cringe in horror at the size of “maybe” “like” “seemed” “very” “really”"maybe” “still” “something” “anything.”
Is the steering away from unqualified declaratives a symptom, or a courtesy, is it a philosophy, a hesitancy to stake a claim that the universe IS a certain way? I was reading about rewilding and encountered a claim that the language we use is symptomatic of civilization’s unhealthy relation to the natural world, advocating the use of “English prime” that avoids using any form the verb to be. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, advocating the elimination of civilization, but I respect a willingness to examine how we say things, that it may matter as much as what we are saying. Am I an equivocator, or is it a courtesy trying not to exclude others’ point of view? Is it a reverence for ideas as living things that change, grow and evolve, so I try not to constrain them too much, because I am so delighted when they come back to me modified, when I get to see them take on a life of their own? So why do I still cringe at how wimpy my writing will sound to me?
So the struggle for voice that is neither indecisive nor officious is part of the blog silence. Another part, I think is that Raven’s traveling has begun to seem unending, and the time I was supposed to get off for good behavior, going to Dallas to visit Jenny, got cancelled when he had to go to the emergency room with a kidney stone hours before I was supposed to get on an airplane. And sometimes being the only parent is fine, and sometimes I cannot summon the energy to make everything that needs to happen, I withdraw rather than subject the kids to my grumpiness, I zoom back and forth between self-pity and guilt at not being able to do it all by myself so quickly that I only get glimpses of the reality that lies between them as I go sailing by, a terrain, I imagine, where this is difficult but not unmanageable and there are, doubtless, sources of help if I could figure out what to ask for, whom to ask. I know not to compare insides and outsides but the one voice tells me there are plenty of instances out there of people with REAL problems, the other points out the übermoms who raise multiple children while cooking meals from food they’ve grown themselves and write about it eloquently.
The other thing with the blog silence, and not being sure what I want to say publicly about my life is I have an idea of different people who might read the blog, and what I might say if one asked how I was doing is utterly different than if it were another of them. I think I am a different person in response to different people in my life, until I wonder if role isn’t stronger than personality. Which makes me feel fraudulent and inauthentic. But how do I talk about the Baha’í stuff in my life in a way that doesn’t alienate those who don’t share those premises? Or talk about the writing struggles for people who don’t write, the parenting struggles for people who don’t have kids? Which, yeah, even I find ridiculous. You don’t write just for people who are in the same situation as you because — well, who WOULD read this? But it feels like a struggle to be authentic when who I am seems context dependent. Which is the act? What language do I dream in? Is it a matter of glimpsing the truth as I swing between the different roles? Is this all because I am a Pisces? (or not?)
So I am back wandering the tedious laybrinths of self. Self as matter, with a cool state where it holds form and volume, a fluid state where its volume is fixed but it takes the form of its container, a gaseous state where it takes on both form and volume of container? Self as venn diagram, the little intensely colored spot at the intersection of all the spheres that I particpate in. The self I once thought was partitioned in response to all of the different places I would belong in a day, between school, work, family, friends — but that has remained so firmly partitioned that it seems like those partitions would remain if I did in fact withdraw to my bedroom closet for the remainder of my life. Self as double agent, passing between parts of my life that seem to be in conflict. Only it’s the agent whose ultimate goal is the reconciliation of the different roles, the elimination of conflict.
There is reconciliation. A friend sent me the lyrics to the protest song, Bread and Roses, telling me I deserved the roses:
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!
it helps to think that I am not the first to struggle to balance the domestic details and the need for meaning and beauty, a struggle that leaves me feeling divided against myself.
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Right now bread is winning over roses: I see that I need to wrestle the image to fit within the blog, but my children need dinner more. Sighing.
uh! Thank god you’re writing again! I’m going to have to say no NaNoWriMo next year if it leads to this much blog recovery time (because I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve been at the airport more often this month than you’ve been in your studio I bet).
All right. First things first. Fuck the “übermoms.” Yeah, you read that right. Fuck ‘em. I can’t even use the term “übermom” without sarcasm and incredulity entering my voice. Who the hell do they think they are, anyway, calling themselves “übermoms”? Claiming they are the only ones leading “authentic lives”. Puh-leeze. Über grandiose, perhaps. And you know what, they are not doing it all because it’s not fucking possible to do it all. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and when you’re waking up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows and the goats, something has to give.
phew. I feel better now.
Your voice rocks, girl! I think you’ve got that magic magnifying class trained on a few words so that they are all that you are seeing. Those few words are not the sum of your writing. Your voice is powerful, and you don’t need unqualified declaratives to make it that way. If I myself was a writer, I could tell you this more eloquently. Alas, I am stuck with my own silly voice.
I’m so glad you’re back. Please don’t make me go so long without another post again. (Because, you know, it’s all about me.)
ps. I just noticed that “cock” made it into your word cloud. Right there under Aristotle. (Don’t you fucking LOVE wordle?) Have I not made it to the juicy parts in the book yet? What kind of an owner’s manual is this?
Seriously? This wordle is on http://www.oleoptene.com. I do a site search on “cock” wondering — and get hits on various entries where I don’t see it — seriously, not a word I can remember using… always, always, I think of Raven’s grandmother reading. Is there spam tagging going on I can’t even see? Is it the link to cockahoop blog? Mysterious.
oh dear… maybe I shouldn’t say f**king so much? Sorry. I think it must have been a long week. I can usually tell by how much profanity escapes audibly through my lips.
Doesn’t bother me in the slightest… since I NEVER utter such things . No, it just sounds like you’re more confident and assertive than I am. Someday I’ll blog about my history with “bad” words, that it was such fun to shock people (also may have been factor with the first attempts at cigarettes) because I had such a straight-laced image. And how I am fascinated about the victimlessness of the crime of using “fucking” but how being able to elaborate on that philosophically doesn’t get my kids invited back on a second playdate…
Other fun combos:
DISAGREE KIDS
AQUINAS MAKING BIRD GO (despite okay)
BEST HOPE (read) FRIENDS
And Aristotle is not infrequently a total cock; so, hey, out of the mouth of Wordle.
I only wandered over here to 1) exult in a oven-fresh, cinnamon-scented post, and 2) alert us all that Cary Tennis has wise advice in re: the Zadie Smiths (or, the multiple-child-homeschooling-locavore-knit-their-own-yogurt [fictitious] übermoms), whose official name is apparently “status anxiety.”
http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2008/12/04/status_anxiety/
Although in the past I’ve enjoyed “Since You Asked” only mildly, I must admit that the more Vicodin and Percoset Cary takes, the more interesting I find his column.
“Is the steering away from unqualified declaratives a symptom, or a courtesy, is it a philosophy, a hesitancy to stake a claim that the universe IS a certain way?”
All I can say is that when I read papers from first-year college students who don’t yet know how to use qualified language, the results are jarring if not downright appalling and/or boneheaded. I judge them to be so, of course, almost certainly because I myself am firmly wedged in the sewer-opening to middle-class status-reifying academic discourse. But I don’t think they do it to be bohemian or anti-establishment; I think they do it because they’ve been completely underexposed to any literary tradition, and they think it’s fine to pop out with dramatic talking-head-influenced statements like “Feminists don’t have a sense of humor.”
What am I saying? I forgot.
I’m saying there are choices. Most of us made our choices before we even knew there were choices to be made. (“Man, I let the terrorists win so long ago.”) As writers, though, no rest for the wicked; always we get to disinter the choices and try to remember why we made them and if they are doing what we want them to do and/or if what we think we want to do is what they really want us to do, and who’s driving this damn car anyway, with its stupid headlights that only see ten feet in front of us at a time.
There is great strength in equivocation, and she who doubts it shall be bonked over the head with Woolf and Nabokov and Proust until she subsides, dizzy and ambivalent.
There is also great strength in brevity. The single confident statement after the pages and pages of convoluted, tortuous, subordinate clauses. The power of the sentence fragment to punch you in your chest, now that you’ve let your guard down because of all those elaborate soothing “maybe”s and “seem”s.
This is all just a fancier way of saying you get bread AND you get roses. Masochism is as (more) necessary to the world as (than) Norman Mailer. And don’t you FUCKING forget it.
(It might be fun [translation: wretchedly, abominably, teeth-grittingly difficult!] to write something very short, super-short, maybe just a single paragraph, using nothing but unqualified blunt-object declaratives or imperatives. Just to see how much you hate it. Natalie Goldberg would suggest writing this while wearing lipstick or some sassy red/purple headgear or sitting in a café or something, since it’s basically the literary equivalent of trying on a new persona. I would suggest punching out Natalie Goldberg first, if she’s around. That would give you the necessary chutzpah, I believe.) Oh and one more thing:
There is nothing wrong with you.
OMG, paragraphs 3 & 4 largely comprise the meta-non-blogging I mentioned to you im message the other day, but said far better than I would have said/did say it. Thank you for that. Now I don’t have to explain it, because i can just say to you, “That’s what i meant.” It also largely explains why I am so gol-darned wordy.
I also know about the KNOWING not to compare, yet somehow doing it anyway, and how it’s never a good result. Sometimes I just come back to, “Maybe I *should* be able to do XYZ better/more efficiently/better dressed-&-accessorized/fill in the blank, but it is what it is.” For some reason, I feel let off the hook with that semblance of self-acceptance or tee-niney grain of lovingkindness toward myself. But sometimes that is far harder when you are exposed to people with 4 kids and manage to, oh, write fucking NOVELS IN ONE FUCKING MONTH or MAKE FUCKING DESIGNER MOTHER FUCKING TRUFFLES AND ORNAMENTS AND CHARMS and still COOK without needing to make regular and large-sum deposits to even ONE child’s Savings for Therapy Fund!!! (Yes, there were MULTIPLE exclamation points there and LOTS OF CAPS, TOO! Because I AM…. The Unblogger.
Oh, and I just saw the last line of the comment above mine, which I reiterate: There is nothing wrong with you. And if there is, then were are all pretty screwed anyway, so then it doesn’t really matter, huh?
“it helps to think that I am not the first to struggle to balance the domestic details and the need for meaning and beauty, a struggle that leaves me feeling divided against myself.”
Flaubert comes to mind. A consummate wordsmith, Flaubert’s mother criticized him that his love for sentences had dried up his heart. Honestly, meaning and beauty are important, but they can be all consuming, embrace the division.
I do not think the love of sentences can dry up a heart. Quite the opposite. Perhaps his mother was too delicate to say, his incessant self-regard. We have no more of her sentences, so do not know.
It comes only in allowing ourselves to be consumed. Just my deux centimes.
(But then I am barren, and so perhaps wizened in more ways than one.)
middle path! middle path!
“The only way out is through.” (Frost) The middle path is for life, not literature. (And not for hijacking commenters on Mara’s blog. ;o)
Sentences are preliterate and pagan in their imperative to be. Like infants, who also know no middle way.
for the unreliable narrator since the blog is being funny with comments
“I am admittedly way too stroppy about this, because nursing manufactured beauty in the face of history’s indifference to its existence is what I do. I suspect Patrick and I are agreeing whilst using different language to describe our apparent disagreement (since that’s all a dispute ever is anyway). But Mara, please feel free to kick us off.
)
“Women writers haven’t enjoyed the luxury of finding “balance” in the same way that Flaubert might have (or anyway his mother thought he should). Infants visceral and ephemeral demand attention and we decide again and again where to give it—not as zero-sum game, right, but as process, as continual redress, correcting imbalances even as we create new ones. We all do this, whether we write or breathe—we all exist in flux every time we decide to be alone for a time or be with our families. It moves.
“So that’s why I think Flaubert’s mum was being petulant and/or boneheaded, at least in that report of her. Service is not subtractive but additional. This goes whether we serve language or progeny, or both, our hope in both cases: to be survived. And I do not think that pouring your soul into either or both or neither, would make anyone mean-spirited or poor of heart.
“I think he probably just forgot her birthday.”
And my response:
I feel slightly guilty now for not participating more in the discussion there, because I love it, I just sit back in quiet awe. Because maybe this is all I ever blog about: how do I attend to the infants visceral and ephemeral and remain true to both, to self. And Flaubert’s mother may sit in my head (or sleep next to me) angry when I do choose the word babies over the flesh babies, accusing me of self-indulgence, and maybe among the muscles I’ve been working to develop in the practices of morning pages and blog is the one to sit her down and say, “look, old lady, shut up, my heart is mine to feed and grow as I must, and sometimes the love of the sentence is what gives me the strength to wash another sinkful of dishes. My love for my second child didn’t diminish my love for my first, but you all must learn to sometimes allow for me not to attend to your needs the moment you voice them.”
I am sure this post must speak to any artist who has had to balance life and making art. I keep thinking the last sentence of your post, a “struggle that leaves me feeling divided against myself” because it is so real. Unless you are Gauguin and wander off into the world and forsake family and the desire to maintain some semblance of order and reason in your life, the dishes will still have to get done, the diapers changed, the bills paid. My earlier comment was aimed at the way the these two different parts of our lives have the meanest way of intruding themselves on one another, and that we should embrace each rather than let them try to destroy the other, but as I think more about this I began to realize that I am in fact, more Jeckel/Hyde about art and life and that I do almost everything I can to keep them as far apart from one another as possible, (one wife, one mistress perhaps?) That the moments for my insanity come not in being overwhelmed by children or a love of cadmium red, but that when I HAVE TO get that cadmium red out of the tube right NOW! and the babies diaper hasn’t been changed there is a bit of a coin toss as to whether child or canvas will win. Fortunately for me, I have a very understanding and loving wife who supports the red.
you can avoid kidney stones by drinking lots of liquid.’-.