Archive for September, 2009
September 28th, 2009
One more thing you notice when you drag yourself to the journal every morning on waking is that while every day has been endowed with a standard number of hours, the number of words that you need to capture the twenty four hours since the last time you picked up the pen is highly variable.
Some days it’s as though the pen cannot keep up with the words in my head, some days there’s a lot of staring into space, adjusting, fidgeting. And I try to figure out the difference, that the easiest or maybe simply the most joyful is the connection of things that becomes a new idea to me, or a recognition of some thought as an old idea in a new form. Some days there are emotions to be worked through, things that when I felt them I might not even have been able to identify exactly because my feelings like to wear masks and I tend to have to take off one after another to get at what exactly what I felt. It turns out righteous indignation is indeed rare, and fear doesn’t like to be recognized at all. But I don’t suppose that this is the bulk of the journal either. Stalling for time I catalogue sounds, dogs and birds and the neighbors’ fountain, rustles of leaves, and the heaving sighs of busses at the stop a few houses down the street. So is the different between a fast three pages and a slow three pages only the level of detail?
I should never run out of words, I suppose if it is so, because there is always more detail to cover. Only it starts sounding like an English 101 paper attempt to bulk up the word count, the inventory of items on my desk, the tedious recounting of things that don’t change, feel as if they will never change, houses passed walking Rainer to school with Christmas lights out in September or already fully decorated for Halloween, interesting plants I don’t know the names of, what I heard on the radio, what I read before falling asleep, the weather, the annoyance of power tools buzzing and the behavior of people parking on our street in front of my house, details that don’t mean much to me, watchfulness without any real object.
And I think what I try to make my way to, however slowly is that the factor in the number of words for a day may not be detail but attention. Minus a sensory deprivation take, can one not assume rough parity among days for the number of details present? Or that details are mines which this casual habit of three pages a day is in no danger of stripping bare, that the presence of details is, as a matter of functioning, emotional truth, if not mathematically accurately, infinite. Or that fractal-like, the closer one looks at a detail, the more detail there is to it?
I try not to go all tree-falling-in-the-woods-with-no-audience but what is a detail unlit by attention? Can attention create details?
I hold my pen posed above the paper, thinking, one second, two, three, it plunges back down, onward, leaving the messy trail.
And it’s not that every detail has equal weight. Time is a detail, but a tyrannical one. The amber translucency of the honey in a jar on my desk from doctoring tea for my sore throat is a more pleasing detail, less startling, less interesting — everyone knows the color of honey, I have no new take on describing it. I want a detail that is unexpected. Deviant.
I play as if I could create a taxonomy of details, the idiosyncratic, the personal, the universal, the artificial, the red herring, the negligible, the trite, the repetitive, the sensory (could I invent an abstract detail? what about something statistical that you do not perhaps experience directly?
And where does my attention go on the days when I struggle to put a single word more down? Is the attention vested in a day any less fixed than the hours? Or do I hide it from myself when my attention is spent on envy and covetousness and feelings of deep inadequacy, the days when I suspect I am a better friend when my friends are having a hard time than when everything is going well? Days when I get that seventh grade feeling that the rest of the world is having a much better time, having a party to which I am not invited?
September 20th, 2009
Mara Leah Collins hears the thumping tail of expectation beating hopefully every time she opens email or Facebook.
Mara Leah Collins is vaguely disappointed but cannot name what it was she was hoping for.
Mara Leah Collins thanks you for playing.
Mara Leah Collins is disturbed at her tendency to compose Facebook updates throughout the day, the clever completions to “Mara Leah Collins…”
And I attempt not to bore you or myself with another exploration of my complicated feelings about social media though, yesterday I resisted the urge to put links on Facebook to the two radio stories — On the Media ran back-to-back stories on the first American Internet addiction treatment center and on a documentary about a guy who correctly guessed where the Internet was going, how our usage would increase, but also who cracked up attempting to life his life entirely exhibitionistically on-line. The filmmaker urges us all to hold something back.
The update on my first week of having Rainer in school is that it slowly dawned on me that the number of things I have to get done each day, the loads of laundry, the meals, the running and emptying and reloading and running again of the dishwasher, has not diminished at all, and if I have ambitions for Getting Something Done while the house is quiet, I must be strict with myself about using the Internet, which will take as much time as I will feed it, but sometimes doesn’t leave me feeling any more deeply connected. Which, I don’t know what I mean by deeply connected, but I think it has to do with thoughts that don’t fit neatly into 140 characters.
For instance.
September 20 is my half-birthday, the earth as far as it gets from the position it was in relative to the sun when I was born. Not that the solar system has ever returned to the place it was when I was born. Not that I think my mind really does well trying to grasp absolute cosmic distances or place as something fixed. I am pleased my desk is right where it was yesterday.
But if you think about it yesterday is all relative too. On day to hold a washing of sheets, a bringing myself out to write, too much time on Facebook, even. Yesterday as a spin of earth on its axis in addition to its moving nearly another degree on the arc of the ellipse it travels around the sun, which is traveling its own lonely cosmic path out from the center, the dance going on even when we cannot hear the beat. Yesterday the first rehearsal of the season for Aodán and Xander’s orchestras, Raven patiently chauffeuring while I got on the elliptical and listened to podcasts.
Yesterday was crowned with dinner with friends, but its vividest moment from today was when I squeezed out some time to read James Wood’s How Fiction Works and paced the house looking for a quiet place to read, with Raven working upstairs and the younger boys playing video games in the living room, so I sat at first against the wool by the back door, coats and backpacks hanging from hooks around my head, but eventually sprawled on my stomach in front of the book, reading about use of detail, and Flaubertian tricks of taking in details that couldn’t all be happening at the same time by one person, the encompassing repeated actions of women yawning and street sweepers sweeping, dirty children fallin and crying, and the discussion of ’significant’ details and the ones that lounge about for mere verisimilitude, citing some Roland Barthes.
At this point I lay bathed in an ocean of details, the reflected boundary line between trees and sky in the rainwater on the porch boards as I looked out the cat door, water filling the tarnished copper bowl fireplace with the charred wood in it starting to float, puddles on the cushions of the seats on the chairs, chips in the painted floor of the hall, fresh new skin growing where blistered skin peels off between my thumb and forefinger, souvenirs of last weekend’s yardwork. And at the same time, I am pricked by the need to whip out the iPhone and add Barthes to my goodreads reading list. And also a few other books run into in other places, discussions I habitually lurk at the edge of, wary of contention and being overly-sucked-in.
And when I finished reading Wood and went upstairs, opened the computer — there in my blog feeds pops out, from a friend of a friend’s blog Barthes again, lovely, copied into my journal. And I remember another Barthes link from a friend’s Facebook page a week ago. Mercury in retrograde, or whatever. Last week I wondered if I was being haunted by John Keats.
If I look up from reading and writing I get discouraged by all that I do not know, the unread canon, the knowledge that there is no catching up. And I suppose that, absent a systematic approach, one really can do worse than to trust the serendipities that thrust the same name in one’s face three times in an hour. Yesterday evening at dinner with friends, I’m telling her how Wood’s discussion of ‘free indirect style’ helped me understand something that was wrong with what I was writing, and I suddenly remember her husband was an English major, and I blush that things seem like big revelations to me that he can take with an “of course” attitude (not that he is ever anything but gentle and courteous, it’s all me and I feel so underqualified).
But before the conversation moves on there’s this moment of talking about having always read for pleasure, without paying particular attention to how things are put together and how they work, I have sometimes a fear that a newfound attention and knowledge will diminish the pleasure, like knowing how a magician’s tricks work. No, no, we agree, knowledge of what a writer is doing in a passage can only enhance our appreciation. But I think about it more today. What if it were like having perfect pitch and suddenly finding poor or merely out-of-tune performances intolerable? I remember a stage in playing violin when my own insecurity made me listen mostly for other people’s mistakes. But my listening seems to have grown again more generous, perhaps from the daily work with the boys, and I find I have more of an appreciation for other players exactly where they are at. I don’t know to what degree a magnanimous appreciation is based in knowledge, in disposition, or in willingness to be generous. In any case, I hope I am read generously, kindly. I rely upon it.
September 14th, 2009
In my head is a long list of the various purposes a blog can serve: updating people who care about the things going on in one’s life, keeping a record of one’s thoughts and feelings in a more searchable version than the towering stack of notebooks, a way of curating the life of the mind, keeping a place open for drawn-out conversations with friends whom one might not have the opportunity to have many in-person conversations, practice with putting one’s more polished writing out for the scrutiny of others. I think my blog has taken turns with each of these, but the dormant blog is none of these, right? And the irony is that it is a positively received entry that sometimes scares me into silence because I imagine the next thing I write will be so disappointing in comparison.
Still. I summon the patience with myself to put to it once more, not apologetic, not even with pure presumptuous gratitude that anyone is still listening, but with the courage to reclaim the blog because I do still need it.
I walked Rainer to school for his second day of kindergarten this morning. Friday the parents of kindergartners seemed terribly marked, I described a cloud of anxiety hovering over all our heads, but maybe it was just that only the parents of kindergartners were walking their kids in to class on Friday. I count on my fingers, four preschools, five elementary schools — we’ve done being the new kid thing a lot now, and you would think it would be getting easier.
I didn’t cry until we were almost to the car Friday morning, and Raven quizzed me on what it was — the end of an era? worry about him? anxiety about the quiet in the house? And each of those a little — I miss all of my kids’ baby selves, I still will fold one of Rainer’s shirts and marvel that it is like a miniature of a full-sized human being shirt because I interact with him as a person and don’t always register the smallness of the package that full-sized will and personality come in, if that makes any sense. And not being there to speak for him, to help make sure he is understood, because it still requires a little work to understand him sometimes, the baby speech belying the startlingly clear mind he has. There’s guilt that I am not quite sure in the confusion of adults and children which adult is the teacher, but I trust that with time it will be made clear — the thing that matters is he is comfortable and happy saying goodbye, happy to see me when I pick him up, even if he doesn’t have a lot to tell me about his day.
And how do I feel? Loving and solicitous, holding my hand out to the car, Raven managed to ask what I planned to do with my day while being reassuring that I don’t need to give an account of the hours to myself unfolding all of the sudden, that I don’t need to rush to make any plans for the rest of my life right now. And that reassurance would have been crippling if he didn’t already know the paths my brain treads well enough to know that I would need it.
And to some degree, there are elements of my life that stay the same all year round. I feel like I mention these too often, but I have a hard time explaining myself without them, and the embarrassment is fearing that I sound like I think everybody should have such things or that I don’t know how to function without them, when really, they are just about an ongoing attempt to figure out exactly what works for me, the balance of head and body, inside and outside, self and other, habit and freedom. I cling to the routines of journal and exercise and musical practice, trying to give myself the structure on which I recognize myself as being very dependent, without becoming so rigid that I am breakable and brittle. So I struggle to make this transition work. All summer the knowledge of fall’s quiet house loomed, that I was on the one hand aware of how much I was craving some quiet and on the other hand terrified it would be a pressure to do something, be something, that I would rattle around, clean obsessively, watch the home shopping network for hours ordering thousands of dollars of things we didn’t need or decide to become the queen of Facebook and see if I could make thousands of new online friends to keep from feeling alone. Or something. Rashly agree to chair the PTA, volunteer to work in the school five mornings a week.
It has been thirteen years since I have had regular hours of quiet and not attending to needs of small people. Even now I sort of glance at the phone expecting a school to call and tell me my kids are being sent home for a week for having lice or terrible behavior or some such. I pinch myself to make sure it is real. I make myself a deal. I drop off Rainer at 8:45, am home by 8:52. Between 9, then, and noon, I lock the house and hie myself out to the studio where there is no internet connection, no housework. I can read, write, compose a blog entry, listen to music — and that’s about it. At noon, I am free to meet people for lunch or jump on the elliptical, throw a load of laundry in, do grocery shopping or go to the library until I pick Rainer up at 3. In other words, half my time I will dedicate to space for words, and the other half gets rendered to Caesar. Or something. We give it a few weeks and see how it goes.
Some days it’s as though the pen cannot keep up with the words in my head, some days there’s a lot of staring into space, adjusting, fidgeting. And I try to figure out the difference, that the easiest or maybe simply the most joyful is the connection of things that becomes a new idea to me, or a recognition of some thought as an old idea in a new form. Some days there are emotions to be worked through, things that when I felt them I might not even have been able to identify exactly because my feelings like to wear masks and I tend to have to take off one after another to get at what exactly what I felt. It turns out righteous indignation is indeed rare, and fear doesn’t like to be recognized at all. But I don’t suppose that this is the bulk of the journal either. Stalling for time I catalogue sounds, dogs and birds and the neighbors’ fountain, rustles of leaves, and the heaving sighs of busses at the stop a few houses down the street. So is the different between a fast three pages and a slow three pages only the level of detail?
