February 22nd, 2010
If one is mindful one can wake up on Valentine’s Day and be grateful for the abundant loves in one’s life. I go reflexively into an abstracted third person doing it, as if superstitiously deflecting the evil eye, because there is no rationale behind how tremendously fortunate I have been in love, a husband who is my other half, the boys who are better than reflections of the best in the two of us, an extended family that we couldn’t have chosen better if there had been choosing involved, friends that inspire and support and understand. So how is it that in such a profusion of love the love that I find astonishing on this day commemorating romantic feelings is the love that exists in the writing and reading of a book?
It seems almost metaphorical, this love. After all, it is profligate and hardly monogamous, books being sold by millions, so that there is no claim to exclusivity in the relationship, only in the personal reading experience. Buying a book is a commercial transaction, and if a book were mere entertainment, the act of falling in love with a book would have the weight of a crush on a movie star. And still, I don’t mean that the experience of reading a book has been like love, I quite mean it has been love. It has reshaped me and the flash of deep recognition has momentarily broken the boundaries of self, and this is the only definition of love that works for me right now.
I argue out definitions of love with myself after writing that. I haven’t mentioned how the act of reading, the act of writing bear the same elements of risk and trust and vulnerability as any other form of love, or how being anonymous doesn’t make it impersonal, it just makes it personal differently. Or that I sometimes find myself slightly cynical that the more traditionally “personal” loves of familial relationships and friendship have transactional qualities, are as rooted in domestic economy as in deep passions and maybe this is why I go questing after a love that asks only for openness, for understanding.
“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find,” writes Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She describes the joy of chalking arrows on the sidewalk and the anticipation of the penny being found, but also, how she didn’t stick around to see who picked the penny up. It strikes me, on the one hand as an act of astonishing purity, to ask nothing of the finder of the penny but the imagined delight in good fortune, but, on the other hand, perhaps the not sticking around was also a protection against disappointment, a defense of the imagined delight. The anonymity allows the finder of the penny to be a perfect Everyman.
I turned off the comments on my blog last week, turned off the stats and tracking tools that would allow me to know who is reading, if someone is reading. This was hard; I have forged a few friendships by blog with people whom I might never have gotten to know if geography had its way, if we had to suffer through small talk forever to get to know one another. I have cherished the conversations in the comments on my blog, the joy of an enlarged perspective, and the thrill of feeling understood. But I woke up one morning and tripped over the realization that I cannot write for comments, that I must write, but I must write for my own version of the anonymous perfect Everyman, someone who needs to read the words I write just as I need to write them. I must write without expectation of anything except the tremorous sensation of finding the right words, the shaped truth, that come as a physical thrill, like any act of love.
I exercise listening to the radio and a story aired in anticipation of Valentine’s Day leaves me gasping, stops my workout. It’s the story of Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan falling in love in the midst of working on the recording to be sent out on the Voyager space mission, a recording with the quixotic noble mission of capturing the best of what it is to be a human being, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Ultimate Mix Tape. She is interviewed and describes the phone call where he went from being someone who had always been a professional colleague and friend, only, and this eureka moment of realization that they were in love, so intense, so profound that they were engaged to be married by the end of the call; furthermore, a sound recording of the electrical impulses of her nervous system as she meditated on the wonder of this newfound love was included on the record, with the notion that perhaps someday an alien civilization could translate those sounds back into though. She has survived her husband but describes the consolation of knowing that this recording yet travels outward. What a bright penny they have sent out into the universe!
And I still hold that if writing is an act of faith that someone out there will understand precisely what you mean, so is reading an act of faith that what was meant was meant for you. And it seems like a larger, deeper form of the acts of faith that go into being in relationship with all the people in your life, that whatever misunderstandings arise will be worked through, maybe even transcended, that the penny will be seen for the bright and shiny object of deep value that it is to you.
February 9th, 2010
Mostly at yoga I am not overcome by words. The words Dana uses to guide me, the custom images she fits me are tools, means to an end, and I feel released from words; I feel a little guilty today that I finish with her and grab a notebook to scrawl.
It is what it is.
The triangles of my knees and legs are fleshy and real, not Euclidean partless points, and this suddenly is not contemptible or sad, it is joyful.
Since my first reading of Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek I was caught by her using the theological expression “the scandal of the particular” which I would carry around rolling it like a pebble across the tongue, how it captures some aspect of what it is to inhabit the body, to be particular in this way. This body and no other, this history and no other. That I have been uneasy with the particularity of body, grateful, perhaps not as much as I should be, that it is a healthy body, a strong body, that mostly I can forget about it because it is so serviceable, but that I am still prone to being fraught with issues of body image (happily, less so than I have been at other times and places).
There is the history of the body, the history of the ideas about the body, and there is the end of yoga today when Dana encouraged me to breathe into my chest. I was flooded with imagery like Catholic sacred hearts and the recollection of one moment when I drove around a curve and this treed hill and blue sky and perfect roll of landscape opened in front of me and I had this sudden awareness of joy as a physical sensation, the chest burst open, a sensation that has come back with music and really good conversation, and it finally hits me today that as the emotion created the sensation the body, I can be in my body to invite the emotion.
In another pose Dana tells me I look like a ballerina. I have tried explaining to Dana the growing up feeling graceless, uncoordinated, utterly unathletic. I played violin as if I did it with my brain and not my body, and she has laughed and told me I am more coordinated than I believe. One cannot play the violin without coordination.
Yoga has been a strange pathway into trusting my body. I believed yoga was something for people fundamentally different from me, with more balance and coordination and flexibility, plus, it always took place in group settings, so it was people willing to exercise with other people. I exercised, but privately. Pregnant, though, with my third son I was willing to try anything to keep my blood pressure from going up, keep from being confined with bed rest, so I ventured into prenatal yoga, and it was safe, it was good.
As much as I loved my midwife, I think the prenatal yoga was a huge part of how great the births of my third and fourth sons were because it had been about learning to trust my body, to understand what I could take, when I needed to listen to it, not push harder, to understand myself as being as strong and coordinated as I needed to be. Something said when I was in labor the second time made me fearful, made me think I just didn’t know how to push well and needed the doctor to explain to me better how to do it, and that was an idea that was just exploded in midwife-assisted births where I was listening to my body rather than some outside authority telling me when and how and for how long.
I still might not have pursued any sort of yoga in Portland, being secretly convinced by the friend three years ago who told me that all the yoga classes she had been to were basically meat markets, single men and women with beautiful bodies checking each other out. But Dana moved here this summer and was looking for students, and it’s suddenly this anchoring point for my week, the checking in, her enthusiasm and encouragement, and I feel GOOD, which is no small thing.
What is surprising is the nostalgia for the particularity my body when it was pregnant or nursing, which I know is at least partly my remembering selectively. I sat this morning in a crowded coffee shop to write and the weekday patrons include mothers of babies meeting for a playdate, delicately negotiating the needs, the considerations, that their babies come first, the friendship, as I remember it, which can be a lifeline, also is this fragile thing, one of the mothers has been kept waiting, and they both have a slightly exhausted, strained look to them. Another woman is there, hugely pregnant, and doesn’t easily navigate the chairs that clutter the pathways between any two points in the shop, which brings another memory flooding back.
Learning to negotiate the differences of life in Prague after life here, there was one morning when we were newly settled in our apartment there and I decided with some trepidation to get some of the small food items we needed at the little shop on our block rather than in the larger Tesco supermarket that would require a journey by tram and subway. Maybe I just needed to get out of the apartment, to see other human beings even if I didn’t have much hope of actual communication with them, because the hours Raven was at work were lonely. It was late summer, so I was hot and sticky as well bulky, and wore a dress, one that wasn’t even a proper maternity dress, as I remember, maternity clothes having seemed like an extravagance to be worn for only a couple months. When we left the States I was six months pregnant, not sure how big I would get, so I had hit Goodwill for just clothes a few sizes up. And as I walked the narrow aisles of the neighborhood market, the whole shop no larger than an average Czech apartment, the hem of my dress caught on a glass bottle stacked near the edge of a bottom shelf. This led to a total upset, another shopper pointing and getting the shopkeeper’s attention, yelling, she had to clean up broken glass and syrup and I think was quite anxious that I understand I still had to pay for it, we had no common language but the resentment in her face, the burning cheeks in mine, the language and currency all incomprehensible, the fact that at that moment I needed compassion as I never had in my life, and tears pouring out because what had we gotten ourselves into?
I was suddenly bitterly aware of the easier life I wasn’t living, had left behind back across an ocean and a handful months, where I had mastered how things worked at work, had been comfortable with my place at the university and in family life, and that here, I was overwhelmed by everything, marriage, the parasite inside me, the parasite I felt myself to be on a husband who worked while I failed at shopping, the parasite that the American presence in Prague and all our innocent good thoughtless intentions boiled down to. And the part of it that was most out of control was this alien body that I couldn’t even estimate how much space it would take up when I wanted to be invisible and take up no space at all.
And this is part of the story of my body just as much as yoga.
My story of myself, of my body, of particularity is open to a little revision.
This is what yoga does for me, I am surrendering to the poses, to the body. Reading this week has been about finally, really surrendering to the books, writing about surrendering to the words and images that come bursting forth, and here in yoga I surrender to my body.
One day doing morning pages I have music on and discover how grateful I am there are no neighbors’ houses positioned to see in the studio windows because I have to get up and dance, have to at first trudge in tribal circles around because I have to move, then, I lift my arms, I swirl and spin like a little kid, and finally my feet have to leave the ground. There is no dignity here, just mad joy of motion. Surrender to motion.
Another morning when it seems I am locked, trapped in the few cubic inches of skull, half an inch back from my eyes, I feel unreal, I fantasize about walking out and lying in the wet grass where I’ve been watching birds hauling worms from the ground and sorting among the leaves, birds whose backs are the same color as the damp winter remnants of leaves littering the grass so that one has the unsettling notion that it is the leaves, getting up and hopping around. As I go to stand at the glass door and watch them, disturbed, taking wing, I fantasize of lying on my back in the grass ad letting the rain soak into my body, taking a small quantity of dirt and putting it in my mouth just to be in my body, to be real, to be part of that scene.
I am no abstraction; mind and body are no duality. I take my particularity, hold it cupped in my hands, those parts of my body that hover, visible in front of me, on keyboard or with pen in them, holding the smaller hand to be led to school, submerged in dishwater, I listen to my breath escaping with a sigh, I release.
February 2nd, 2010
I think I need to turn the comments off on my blog for a while.
I was talking about this with my friend Sarah, today. She doesn’t have comments on her personal blog, and she told me that some people don’t consider it a real blog if you don’t have comments. But then she blogs for a living on other blogs and the comments there are enough to erode one’s faith in humanity, long ad hominem arguments, people getting entrenched in their own positions and so on.
That of course of has never happened on my blog. My readers, both of you, are much too civilized for that. In fact, the joy of blogging has been the thoughtful comment, the delicious conversation. So turning off comments feels perverse and self-sabotaging even by my own crazy standards.
I’ve missed my blog. Even with the regular journal writing I miss the spot to have my thoughts composed and set out and polished a little, presented. But when Sarah generously gave me a shout-out on UrbanMamas it made me freeze up. People were looking at my blog. They were going to be expecting something.
Which is why, right now, I kind of have to close the door and pretend you’re not there. I am haunted by the image from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, that reader and text and writer form this triangle, and there is no connecting writer and reader only the connection that each has with the words. And when my brain gets all abuzz with the droning of little envy bees and competition bees and the crowded field and the feeling of my own voice lost in the crowded hive, the only redemption I have found is to retreat to the private world of words.
In college I was dating a guy who adored Alice Walker and got tickets to go hear her read and afterwards dragged me to stand in line to get an autograph and it was utterly disconcerting after the deep intimacy of having her poems in my head to be standing face to face, flesh to flesh with this very real human being who didn’t know me from Adam.
I think also of Salinger. Who lives in my head as loudly as any writer does. And was the first writer with whom I had to experience the weird relinquishment of understanding that other people had a claim to him just as I did, that the girl I thought the biggest phony in high school was as busy relating to Holden as I was, and how strange a jealousy that was! And that I interpret (though of course your are free to otherwise) his reclusiveness as an attempt to be a real person rather than succumb to the dangers of believing in the hype. And that there is an odd redemptive experience of being grateful that that private experience of me as a reader alone with his books is not even one I can be jealous over, it simply is.
And finally, I think of privacy. Not as in the keeping of my secrets, my family’s secrets, but what it is to be public versus private. That on my worst days Facebook is redubbed Jelusbook because it is where I can go for tangible, objective evidence that everyone has more friends than I do, that the the friends I have prefer their other friends to me, that there is something just lacerating about every act of friendship becoming a public act. That if I pitch my voice differently with my children when I catch someone listening to us, especially when someone smiles appreciatively at something particularly adorable Rainer has said, something fabulously witty Aodán has said, some deep observation Xander has made, some incredibly thoughtful Søren has done, then how can my behavior to my friends not change with the apprehension of audience?
I love the internet. I am always dismayed at how quickly the conversation becomes this over-simplistic reductive internet good vs. internet bad one, but I still wrestle for a healthy relationship to it. I love the worlds of inexhaustible information available at my fingertips, and have found wonderful and deep friendships that are independent of geography. But the friendships, once formed, deserve a degree of privacy.
So, I will try to get the backlog of thoughts I have that I have wanted to polish and articulate and layout slowly queuing onto the blog (or, for how backlogged I feel, I want to spell it queueueueueing). But for now, if you feel compelled to talk to me about it? I’d really love an email. And of course, I reserve the right to change my mind.
