Bearably Unbearably Likewise

Reading to my older boys, only hours to go before Raven arrives back home, and my iPhone beeps with an Twitter text message: a plane crash. Go on reading, superstitious that this means everything is normal, or drop everything and rush to CNN to find out more? Which would you do?

Settling down now to make myself write (I can I must I will I do) (I shall. But no one says shall anymore, or only ironically, playfully. Even if it’s correct. Or not. Prescriptivist or descriptivist? And what if many of the voices in your head are only echoes centuries old?) Do I expend my defiance on language, the ostentatious word, the word that brooks no mincing? Or is defiance a limited resource to be meted out for deeper darkness, myths of monstrous women who have limits to how they love their children, whose love does, in fact know bounds? Or does the defiance of choosing exactly the word that fits not equal a defiance of all the other expectations that Lilliputians use to tie their Gullivers down?

I treat my discomfort with Of Woman Born by returning to my battered copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, turning to the Adrienne Rich I do know, Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. I wonder at the lengthy footnotes the editors see fit to append (really, explaining the Furies?) and how grateful am I to rely more on hyperlinks and less on footnotes? But thinking of footnotes dislodges this, stuck in my head from reading last week, Joseph Brodsky, in the essay about Anna Akhmatova, The Keening Muse:

No one absorbs the past as thorougly as a poet, if only out of fear of inventing the already invented. (This is why, by the way, a poet is so often regarded as being “ahead of his time,” which keeps itself busy rehashing clichés.) So no matter what a poet may plan to say, at the moment of speech he always knows that he inherits the subject. The great literature of the past humbles one not only through its quality but through its topical precedence as well. The reason why a good poet speaks of his grief with restraint is that, as regards grief he is a Wandering Jew…
…If Akhmatova was reticent, it was at least partly because she was carrying the heritage of her predecessors into the art of this century. This obviously was but an homage to them, since it was precisely that heritage which made her this century’s poet. She simply regarded herself, with her raptures and revelations, as a postscript to their message, to what they recorded about their lives.

I’ve been apparently trying to attempt some sort of literary gavage this week, heaps of books are scattered around my room, not returned to shelves, one footnote leaves me chasing down something I read once, like I’m on a literary scavenger hunt, and there’s this dreadful sense of never enough time, that I am always compromising, always sacrificing (today the boys practice the four of them together without me so I can type madly and try not to be late to a dinner reservation with Raven and the members of his new company, that guilt less than the betrayal of not getting the words down). The last few months it seems like I have re-awoken desperate to make up for lost years of reading. Not that I ever really stopped.

I don’t explain the urgency. Except it’s like time and housework, there is no progress bar, no percentage completed, and though the days I have to do it are, like those of everyone on the planet, numbered, I don’t know the number do I? So I proceed along the line, unable to keep all that has passed nor anticipate all this coming, but it this act, this moment, this engagement with this poem, this essay at hand. The trickier implication is that there is nothing to wait for. This is that moment you’ve brought in the mail, realized that nothing in the thin handful of envelopes and flyers is going to change your life, that your life changing has been put off another day, and it’s not even that you necessarily want your life changed, it’s that the anticipatory lift is followed by slow deflation.

But there come times — perhaps this is one of them –
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
– Adrienne Rich, Transcendental Etude

Taking myself seriously seems so terrifying and exposed, even in the relative safety of my blog, I want to be able to hide behind “But of course I don’t take myself that seriously!” but I cannot, I will not. And part of taking myself seriously is being willing to go through awkward stages, the too earnest vulnerability, the experiments that fizzle, the embarrassment of realizing I’m being imitative without even realizing it. Am I reading voraciously so I can be aware of what I am recycling?

What broke this week was this feeling of trying to remain concealed. When we moved to Portland there was this feeling of — at least as far as parenting goes — no longer having to conceal who I am — that other people just didn’t seem all that bothered about how my kids behaved when they were tired, whether they had been breast-fed, cloth-diapered, attachment-parented or home-birthed — which could have been Portland’s relatively laid-back live-and-let-live style, or could be the liberation of my children being a few years older and those decisions not seeming so identity-forming. The only way I could describe what I loved about living here at first was “I don’t feel like I have to wear a mask.” Which may be unfair to the large metropolitan city we lived before, or not. Maybe we just moved to a place where more people were making the same decisions we were because what we really want is communities of conformity. Or maybe you do start internalizing the tight non-smiling smiles, the non-verbal aggressions of people in restaurants and parks, raised eyebrows and back-handed compliments (Well you certainly have, um, energetic children, don’t you?).

How long and painful was the process of learning to conceal my vocabulary after being teased for how I put things? Why did I internalize that, why did difference have to be shame? I mostly remember the pleasure of swearing and shocking people who had categorized me, dismissed me, and getting the glimmer of language’s power. And I mostly don’t say “fuck” in my blog, because… I want to be sensitive and not offend. Because I reserve the saying of it for the people with whom I am close and safe, who know that I will use it for effect and not because I don’t have other ways of saying things. But am I ashamed of saying it? I think people who get too worked up about it are missing a point about the real power of language. The things we feel shame about aren’t always the shameful ones. But concealment seems to keep pointing at shame, and if I want to find a healthy place between repressed prude and libertine, it’s not going to be by feeling like I must be concealed. I don’t think there’s even a word for this state that is neither of the two extremes, about having my energies and powers somehow my own, directed in a channel of my choosing, frank but also sensitive.

I still get a little annoyed when I want to describe something as permission-giving, because I don’t know what I am still doing, with all of this urgency, waiting for permission. Have I gone giving away my power again? But maybe one of the lessons that’s been waiting patiently at the door is not to underestimate the power of any sort of community, that even a raised eyebrow or gentle teasing at a word chose can stand as a stiff rebuke, silence me the next time I go to speak, until I find myself suffocating in a cocoon I’ve had to build in order to insulate myself for my own becoming.

A rush now to get out the door to be on time for dinner with Raven, because his plane wasn’t the one last night that struck a house. There’s a randomness that our lives continue forward while those of some forty or fifty families are utterly different today from yesterday. Somehow it all seems connected, this, the urgency, the need to push on, to risk, to speak, to break silence and burn burkas, to weep for the families of the seven Bahà’ís in Iran on trial for espionage, even though I haven’t enough words to go into how that affects me.