Raging Against the Dying of the Blog

I do not write. I am not writing. I cannot write. I write only by subterfuge, telling myself that I am not writing, just jotting down the few words repetitiously knocking about in my head like song lyrics that will not go away.

If I am not writing, what, then, am I doing?

It seems like the last few weeks have been dedicated to listening: I listen to friends going through various crises or life-changes or growth-spurts, do what I can to cheer them on, get dubbed Ma-rah-rah which cracks me up. Recognize myself in each of their struggles so that I can say, honestly, it’s not just you. This stuff is hard. I absorb fear and anger like a human sponge and go and wring it out where I can, come back to do my cheering on: you can do this, you are doing this, I know it’s hard, you don’t have to do this by yourself, it’s going to be okay. you’re going to be okay, you are okay… I come home grateful I am in a still quiet place where I can offer this small thing. Every day another search query brings somebody to the blog looking for “external validation” until I want to urge everyone I know to walk around looking people in the eye and saying “I see you, you know, and I accept you. It’s going to be okay.” Which, okay for most people would be really weird, but there must be a lot of desperate people if they’ve stopped looking for “snorting abilify” and started looking for “external validation.” I see you looking for external validation, I want to say, and that’s okay. It’s marvelous you’ve recognized that need, and that’s the first step to getting it met. Your needs will be met, I have no greater faith than that, but in the meantime, maybe you could offer to help meet the needs of somebody nearby in some small way?

I listen to myself, question myself soundly: what are my motives for spending my time and energy as this cheerleader, am I merely avoiding my own problems, my own life? But my biggest problem seems to have been being unsure of what I am supposed to be doing with my life right now, and I am not imagining I can save anyone, just that I can briefly lighten loads of people who are close to overwhelmed and I love them and I cannot not do what I can.

So I am listening. I am listening to my violin, a lot, trying to train my ears and discern tone, overtone, surface noise. I am listening to become more precise, listening like a scientist, listening moving the focus up and down so that sometimes I am aware of what is the bow change and sometimes I am aware of where the intonation has become more demanding and sometimes I am aware of wanting to be more closely married to the beat, to make the rhythm exact and inevitable.

I listen to music hungrily. I want music that drapes itself across my internal landscape, music that is more hopeful than happy, that gets agitated and then settles, that suggests possibilities. I listen to it privately, so that when I need to repeat a thing over and over again like scratching an itch I don’t make anyone else crazy. I listen to it gratefully. Somebody thought this was worth doing and it lasts and is part of the conversation in my head now.

I listen to my children’s exchanges trying to understand how the surface of what they are saying is related to deeper needs and slower trends, try to listen to their relationships to each other as well as to me, to understand conflicts as the expression of needs and the place where they acquire the skills to negotiate, to recognize their own feelings and needs. Try to listen so that they know they are listened to, to listen more and talk less and ask interesting questions. I listen driving with them, walking with them, drawing pictures with them, Rainer and Soren’s new favorite game to add step-by-step pictures to Rube Goldberg machines and obstacle courses. I listen to Rainer as we rake leaves together, he exuberant and bossy and pleased with himself and this morning the leaves have accumulated in drifts again, better than snow for all the color.

And at last the listening comes to the words that, slightly trampled, are yet springing up in my head, the ones that notice that a tricolored leaf yellow at the heart with a band of dark plummy purple and scarlet at the tips is an inverted sunset, I listen and laugh at the Wallace Stevens poem stuck in my head and my lesser answering lines: What is the point of a violin? What is the point of a poem? They cannot fill you up but only cast light on the empty spaces. Perhaps that is enough.