Archive for the ‘The ambivalent writer’ Category
December 6th, 2007
When I discovered Tom Robbins as a teenager, the passage that I remember just being blown away by was in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues where he talks about the brain overestimating its own importance because it’s the part of the body that goes around estimating relative importance of body parts. I think the word-generating, word-understanding part of my brain has been similarly carried away lately, since I wrote an unprecedented number of words in November and this week finished reading the 750 pages of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, which is LOVELY and funny (and I love the name Abysmillard! And the comical Binky-isms!). And then I started reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard which I couldn’t read during NaNoWriMo because I always feel like “If I can’t write like Annie Dillard I don’t want to write at all” which is not a thought I am proud of or want to perpetuate, because the world needs lots of non-Annie Dillards.But, basically, it feels like word overdose, and it’s hard to blog when I am weary of my own voice, and it is time to remember the kinds of knowing that there aren’t words for. I went into a knitting shop this weekend to meet some Urban Mamas and my friend Sarah and even though I haven’t touched yarn or knitting needs in — four years? I came home and picked up a ball of yarn just to see if I remembered what to do, and funny, even though I couldn’t have put it into words, or drawn a picture, my hands still knew what to do (in a very limited, I can make squares and rectangles, only, sort of sense, scarves and afghans) but, for this second week when Raven has had to go out of town, I am finding comfort in the rhythm and repetition of the needles clicking and putting down row after row in what will probably be a scarf, because that’s all I know how to do. And, anyway, what it is is really less important than the pleasure of it in my hands being made.And because life is synchronistic, I am busy thinking about non-verbal knowledge and when the violin teacher started teaching our eight year old to read alto clef last night, it was about by-passing the word-generating part of the brain, and going straight to associating a spot on the staff with a spot on the viola. I could feel myself start to get a little panicky, thinking this is less orthodox, this could make understanding theory further down the line more complicated. Except. I trust the teacher. With a conscious willingness to put my ideas aside and do things his way and trust the process. And my son can already can read bass and treble clefs from piano, and has this quick mind, that makes connections that surprise me and I don’t think he will have a hard time understanding key signatures or accidentals. And I could see the wordy part of the brain really messing with the instantaneousness of reading music, and this was, when I think about it, how I taught myself to read alto clef.So there is irony in trying to write a celebration of the non-wordy parts of knowing, but there are things I don’t have words for: what to add to balance the flavor of a sauce, the overwhelming combination of tenderness and safety and self-and-otherness that I feel with Raven, the response to music when I cannot listen to another minute of NPR and another story on climate change, how far I can stretch in yoga and have it still be all right.
September 8th, 2007
Ok, even a literary novice like myself realizes that the worst possible ending sentence for a book is “It was all just a dream… or was it?” Which makes me fantasize about a prank appending this sentence to, say, every work in the Penguin Classics series. Watch, I’ll never get a job copyediting now.
Still, I’ve realized that one of my on-going themes is distrust of my own brain… It’s been coming up a lot lately in terms of self-doubt, and the odd circuitousness of knowing how your own head works and trying to out-think it, making a habit of filing doubts away right now because they are not useful to the process of making words come out. The funny thing is how doubts don’t like being filed away, and fight back with meta-doubts about the process, generate stories about people who dismissed as doubts their own intuition and good old common sense and came to terrible ends.
I am sure some of it is defensive, my brain having decided ages ago that should it whisper the most devastating things to me it could imagine it would act as an inocculation or homeopathic against the inevitable criticism coming from elsewhere, and yet when I listen to that I become mistrustful of real flesh-and-blood people saying actual nice things to me. Which is not a good direction to go in.
And it is a double-edged sword, how something can seem diamond-brilliant in the evening, and the next morning you re-read it and are embarrassed to have been seen parading about in such cheap costume jewelry, or can seem a bit tawdry at first and then you understand that there is a deeper glint to it. So, you conclude you have no judgement as far as your writing (and perhaps many other things!) are concerned, and that leaves you with the choice between scribbling in journals that you want burnt upon your demise, trying to find safety in reclusiveness, or at least as much conformity as you can muster, or taking a risk and putting it out there.
Sometimes I wonder if my approach to self-doubt and mistrusting my brain would be something more therapeutic or pragmatic or perhaps hypochondriacal had I been a psychology major instead of a philosophy major. Because I tend to look rather skeptically at the premise of certainty, in the end, after all, that it is not just judgement I am not sure of, but the foundation of knowledge itself (foundations themselve?). Or I wonder if I had been a literature major if I would have taken this as the natural unfoldment of story, our understanding of a situation changes, so instead of pathologizing it or taking it as the crack that admits persistent and pervasive doubt, I might instead have learned to appreciate the way it keeps things from getting too static, heightens the drama, keeps things interesting.
But hey, it was all just a dream… or was it?
August 29th, 2007
So some days writing seems like something I cannot help doing, something as natural as breathing, something I wake up looking forward to doing, the daily opportunity to capture some of the words and thoughts that have been drifting around in my head. And some days it feels like torture.
The blog seems like an additional pressure, I don’t want to disappoint anyone, I am sure that anyone reading is going to get sick of it and stop reading entirely, and of course, I have the stats chart conveniently provided by WordPress to back me up (would I be happier with it disabled?). Or I open the computer and read a dozen other blogs and either dismayed at how brilliant the brilliant ones are, or at how the ones that are more like social connection-points for groups of friends seem completely alien to me, in-jokes and empathy and support, how BAD bad blogs can be, how I feel boxed in to this tone, this voice, of having a thesis sentence, elaborating, commentating, and it’s as bad as hearing my own voice recorded, as bad as seeing a photograph of myself on one of my picky days when all I can see is blemishes and hair sticking out funny or not liking the way that shirt fits — a photo, that left for a year or two I might pick up and notice how happy we all look in it.
And I am still here trying. I do know that it’s a cyclical thing, too, that rough spots are followed by easier ones, that on the days when I cannot get a sound I like out of the violin or viola, I still practice, though I might work on just the most basic stuff, saving the expressive bits for another day. I also am willing to experiment a bit with tone, and keep pondering appropriate blog-fodder: I surprised myself writing “the most personal writing is not about our medical histories or our sex lives, the things that would hurt other people to read, but the stuff that tells you what it feels like to be me” in a comment-conversation and I am still pondering that.
What has it felt like to be me today? I guess I am muddling through the “doing it imperfectly because there aren’t any do-overs” with parenting — my kids deserve someone more patient and perhaps willing to spend more hours coloring and playing board (bored?) games and go on nature walks and, and, and… well all the things I wasn’t doing when I was reading this great “Reader’s Manifesto” in the Atlantic Monthly, an attack on the pretentiousness of American literary prose that makes me feel better about the books that have left me cold. But it’s a long article and the kids were pretty much playing video games while I read it and I wasn’t thinking about them at all. And they were playing video games while I wrote my morning pages. And while I sorted through the papers on my desk for any important back to school notices and answered emails that date back to when we were camping. And talked on the phone with my best friend. And I wonder if I’ve crossed the line from “valuing self-sufficiency” to mostly-benign neglect. And I know that once school starts we’ll be back to virtually no screen time Monday – Friday, that I still read to them, with them every day, practice with them happily, that they are, fundamentally ok, but it still feels like I ought to do better.
Being me today involved going to the back-to-school picnic potluck (are potlucks going to be obsolete when everybody’s dietary restrictions finally explode into our consciousness?) and after going through the line to get my food sitting down at on of the only spots open, at the end of a table next to two women who clearly knew each other and were gossiping about who was there and who had just gotten married and whose daughter was starting high school… and Raven put down his plate and popped back into line to get some food for the shorter members of our family, and I sat there and ate and these women didn’t acknowledge my existence and I didn’t see any easy opening there. So when I looked over and noticed my oldest son sitting by himself eating, I jumped up and ran to him. And he really didn’t seem able to go up to any of the kids from his class and start a conversation, or maybe just wasn’t that interested, and I didn’t want to pressure or push, but I worried a little when he describes himself as a “loner” because really, he’s also a kid who knows how to be a great friend, has these leadership-y abilities to come up with cool games and organize the kids around him, has this lovely moral reasoning ability and personal code of conduct. But, ack, what was the model I was providing him? I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone there. Actually, the population of parents of gifted kids that this was, seems a bit introverted and eccentric generally, anyway. But we ate as a family except for the second-born who was joyfully greeted by all of his friends, and after eating Raven decided this was boring and not a good use of our time. And the oldest son and I didn’t argue.
Being me today felt like Portland hitting 95 degrees after yesterday’s was 85 and the day before 76, was just uncomfortable and cross and sticky, and after the fiasco of the picnic we couldn’t stand coming home to the house without air conditioning, and since it was going to have to be done at some point we might as well go get school supplies at Target. Which was air conditioned. But out of pencils. And pink erasers. And the little personal pencil sharpeners on all three boys’ lists. The denuded bins, the pawed-through stacks, misplaced crayons in the spot where pencils ought to have been, cardboard displays falling apart, and empty shelves seemed to be echoing with contempt for people who put this off to the last minute. Like, a week before school begins. Or maybe it was just making more room for Halloween candy.
Being me today felt like the only real redemption was to cross the parking lot and go into Barnes and Noble where Raven and I could switch off turns in the children’s section: I found Wislawa Szymborska’s Poems New and Collected, and Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, he got Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit and Madeline Bruser’s The Art of Practicing. And being me today felt like that redeemed the whole rest of the day.
July 30th, 2007
At fourteen I thought Douglas Adams’ lesson on flying, to throw yourself at the ground and miss, was about the cleverest thing ever. Now, when I have a day when a grocery list seems like a tremendous creative stretch, I find myself trying to figure out what it is I am so actively not writing about as I jump up to re-fill my coffee cup, wipe the spattered bathroom mirror, start another load of laundry. But that writing should come about by just putting down whatever it is that I am not writing about seems as slick a trick as flying by missing the ground.
There’s this feeling of something missing, and I try to imagine what it is I most want to read. Were I to click on a blog of erised, which shows you what you most want to see, what wisdom would be waiting for me, what brilliance, what wit? Would it be something where I could recognize myself, because ultimately, what I really, truly want is reassurance, comfort, and, dammit, a little bit of flattery? Would it be some simple truth, some insight into a happy life, getting along with others, producing stuff you’re proud of, staying connected, sleeping well? A story of facing a challenge and coming through well which reads like validation of all the challenges you’re struggling against? The sort of dark humor about how insane all of this is?
What you learn about yourself when you force the long hand writing of three pages every day, is that sometimes you have to take it pen stroke by pen stroke, sometimes you get to take it idea by idea, they come in this big knot that you can hardly sort out. You learn how dreadfully you overuse some words (this is also evident when your three year old likes saying “actually”), and what things never stop bugging you. You learn about the relativity of time. You learn that you can carry the sting of no one wanting to sit next to you in the cafeteria in middle school for more than twenty years, so that when grown women carry on with the some sort of excluding behavior there is no comfort — even when they aren’t people you even like. You learn to write lots of letters to yourself, dear self, take a breath, it is all going to be ok, even if you can’t see it right now. You learn that you are a person who doesn’t procrastinate well because when there is something unpleasant to be done, it’s all you can think about. You learn how fabulous it is to have a friend who understands and explains you can tell your brain it’s in time-out whenever it starts endless cycling on that unpleasantness.
So maybe it’s not exactly blockage, it’s just that good days are sometimes followed by difficult days, and sometimes difficult days are followed by even more difficult days. And some days there are a lot of things which aren’t blogging that require a lot of energy.
July 24th, 2007
… we’re just keeping up a habit of blogging, if not daily, than more frequently than waiting for the perfect subject to hold forth upon and the time to edit and shape it and get bogged down in perfectionism. I endure the pain of seeing typos, homonyms that slip past the internal spell checker, though I correct them later when I find them. I remind myself that this IS hard, the singing loudly enough to drown out the internal censors, who natter away about how this really is not interesting to ANYONE and whom do I think I am fooling, exactly, that I OUGHT to be embarrassed to be putting this sort of practice writing out there for anyone to read, that everybody will read it, that nobody will read it, that this is but one more step to dying one day alone but for my twenty-four cats. That someday I’ll apply for a job and this will come back to haunt me: the particle physics theory of blog exposure, if I reveal my location, I must not reveal my velocity, and vice versa. I only decided after some internal debate I did want my name here, did want to be findable, don’t have deep dark secrets I’m not writing about, just a modicum of discretion, respecting the privacy of others in my life, that the only thing worse than being read was not being read. I think of the scathing attacks on on-line columnists like Anne Lamott or Ayelet Waldman for not having enough barriers up to protect their families from their writing, and wonder if the sort of disclsure involved in personal writing brings up a feminist question.
Anyway, it was one more successful day of the house not burning down, exceeding my low-bar expectations of the kids all getting enough to eat in the day, wearing clean clothes, and going to bed with clean faces — after we got home from a violin lesson and had dinner, we made fudge, and I read a chapter of HP7 aloud with Raven listening in on speakerphone. There’s a fine line with doing voices, it’s almost hard to avoid where she writes in dialect, but I’ve been caught off-guard, reading a line of dialogue in a hearty voice only to get to “the old man wheezed in an unexpectedly high voice.” I love reading aloud, love being read to, love that the boys have developed good reading voices, love that this is the seventh book my husband, older sons and I have enjoyed so together, all honor-bound not to race ahead. I am sad at the prospect of that ending.
July 19th, 2007
I listened yesterday happily to a Fresh Air interview with Natasha Tretheway, Pulitzer-winning poet whose experience was biracial and losing her mother at 18 when her stepfather murdered her, and the questions and answers were both so unflinching, the questions we want to ask but fear are not polite… a good interview. But uncomfortable, in the sort of slamming up against the frailty of our mortal boundaries, that happens with violent death. How thin is the bone protecting our defenseless brains! the integrity of the tubes of blood coursing through our bodies, the tireless pumping of the muscle that is heart: it all seems so improbable and terrifyiing to rely upon. Even the hardened atheist materialists among us breathe faith that all of the complicated chemistry of metabolism should happen without us worrying about it or even understanding it, that the cells in our body should get the message to be fruitful and multiply, and then stop multiplying at the tight time. That the atoms supporting our weight should cohere, so we don’t go plummeting through the center of the planet, catapulted out the other side. It is only by faith that we not hear the crunch of realizing a mistake too late, falling, disjointed, until impact, the sudden anticipated and surprising stop, the spreading warmth and looseness in the joints of adrenalin alerting us we’ve crossed a line we cannot cross back. Mortality scares me, and I challenge myself to stand unflinching and face it, that my whole universe is knit on the successful electrical impulse through a handful of nervous systems telling diaphragms to keep sucking air, hearts to keep the blood coursing. And sometimes faith is willed blindness, too. An artistic license granted the illusion of seamlessness, this breath and the next, a sigh , an unpleasant smell of decay coming in my bedroom window behind the scent of a tree blossoming.
Oh, dear unreliable, impermanence is not just for loversl I hold myself back from writing more in the comments of your blog and less in my own about the way life feels like a kaleidoscope and just when all of the colors and bits seem to be arrayed in a most pleasing design, someone has to go and shake it, and how bitterly I regret not being able to make the world grind to halt so we could all mourn time gone by. We should use Memorial day not to honor just fallen soldiers, but the teacher you had a crush on and mutely fumbled, never adequately expressing the gratitude you felt. The senior person at your first real non-retail/non fast food job who took a mentorly interest, explaining things and being kind even when pressed of time, who would have been uncomfortable, no, mortified, by an attempt to express your appreciation. All those friends from summer camp, the chemistry that existed during one bright moment and could never exist the same way again. Your youth. Gone, gone, gone. Somehow we do keep recognizing when a time has come and it is right to move on, that staying in one place does not stave off loneliness, that of all the joys of the cherished mentor, there is the bittersweet realization that you have outgrown that relationship, that need, and must go hurtling meteorically away from it. Or sometimes with a lot less drama, a quiet lunch or a Kit Kat bar.
Faith is that real connections do not just go away, that six states away your best friend can call and you can talk for hours about nothing in particular, faith is that your new situation is going to surprise you and you are going to surprise yourself. Faith is that if you stop pretending you can staunch impermanence or mortality, steel yourself and confront it, there will be relief and you will be able embrace the thing that is permanent, carried deep within yourself.
July 9th, 2007
So I pushed aside the stack of books I am planning to read to start Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers on the strong recommendation from the unreliable editor, which is definitely a mark of esteem since I was as sworn off books on writing as I was on books on parenting. And it felt like it was written for me, which is hard to admit, because it means I am confronting my inner ambivalent writer and admitting that I am just like a million other aspiring writers in this country with little to show for it. I guess it’s like when I read Catcher in the Rye in the eleventh grade, a book that had been a source of a lot of identification a few years earlier, only now I had to listen to several other students that I was sure were, in Holden’s words, phonies, identify strongly with it and, oh how uncomfortable that was! Somehow, it seemed, I ought to be special, have a short cut, an exemption, from whatever it means that being the ambivalent writer is. Being a writer, or a phony, ought to be clear and obvious and not this subjective thing.
Lerner strongly advocates figuring out why you write, which has been fuel for lots of journal entries the last week, until the self-absorption and reflexiveness of it makes me queasy. Because if I admit I do it, I want it, there is some responsibility there. It’s so much more comfortable acting casual, diffident, only my life doesn’t work without writing in some form — cue the Brokeback music, “God, I wish I knew how to quit you!” It gets in the way of other things: the Suzuki teacher asks me to assist her in teaching an early childhood music class, with a plan in her mind of my getting trained up and starting my own classes, and what’s in my head but “I never wanted to be a music teacher, I am a writer (but not out loud)!” But the writing thing is deeply ambivalent. I want, have always wanted, more than money or fame or sex or food, connection. Not just squealing “Me too, right?” when somebody else likes the same tv show or song or whatever (which is still validating and lovely) but ideas evolving, morphing in front of me, so that I don’t know what’s mine and what’s yours, metaphors blossoming and turning toward the sun, casting light on the nature of the things being compared. And more than four years now of three pages every morning has resulted in 1) I am a little clearer about what I want, what I need, what I think, which helps a little in being a good wife, a good mother, and not horrible friend 2) lots of lists of things I need to get done in a day 3) faith that it is possible to add a habit to your life from nowhere even without understanding the motivation and 4) occasional insights and connections and ideas metamorphosizing all by themselves. So morning pages by themselves would probably suffice, but, lately, the blog addiction. And the tantalizing prospect of connection, outweighing the terror of having my thoughts out there being judged.
So: I started writing this a week ago just as I was finishing the Lerner, and was trying to sanitize the fallacies out of my thinking — surely there’s a fortune cookie/horoscope fallacy when she describes the great writers who were notorious, ballsy self-promoters versus the dysphoric and retiring Dickinsons, two opposite extremes on a spectrum — so it’s easy to find yourself there, “Yes, me too!” In fact, in her catalogue of neuroses, addictions, and self-sabotaging behaviors of writers, I am doing the Psych 101 thing and self-diagnosing all over the place, which is surely enough to convince me I am a great writer.
Only. Some completely forgettable magazine article I was probably reading in the dentist’s office and am thus excused from citing had one line that jumped out with some probably completely bogus definition of expertise as taking ten years to acquire. Which means little, except, I realize, I have been a mother ten years! And I started musing on what that means and what has changed. Aside from tricks to keep things flowing smoothly, persuade small people to do what I think needs to be done, organizational tips, and a few routines worked up to entertain them at various ages, and the patience that comes with realizing how much of it all passes, I think most of how I do this has stayed the same. A basic spirit of empathy has been with me from the get-go, an assumption that we are all working towards if not the same, then generally compatible goals, except I tend to have the longer point of view. I started out confident and have remained confident, but the big change is in the quality of the confidence, moving from arrogant confidence (”I am good with children, and mine will be exceptional”) to a more humble (and complicated) confidence (”this is damn hard, and I make mistakes and learn from them, stand up and brush myself off, apologize when needed, and my children belie a grace in that they are better than my parenting. still I can do this, am doing this…”) In some of the conversations my sister the cellist and I get into late at night about Art and Music and all, it’s come up this paradox that arrogance is often a mask for insecurity, that those who are truly great are often great in a humble way. That creating something good does require a backseat ego so you can get into a Buberesque “Thou” mode, which is a humble thing. So, so much of what Lerner describes in the pathology of writers comes from insecurity, and while they may be correlatives of the writing life, they are not a necessary condition of it. Keep a list at the back of the journal of poets who didn’t kill themselves, right?
I do cringe at the spectre of the relative merits of writers and artists, the great and the not-great and the not-yet-great, when it is the connection I crave. One more music related attempt to understand this was the discussion my sister and I had about kids starting music lessons at different ages and learning at different rates and how it was possible that you might not tell the 12 year old who’d been studying since he was four from the 12 year old studying since he was seven by technique alone, but that there was a value to not having a memory of life without daily practice and I lay this gem proudly at the foot of the Suzuki music teacher, who exclaimed “But you most certainly can tell the child who has been playing since he was four, he should be almost a virtuoso!” This stung, like, “Ack, by not starting our older children until they were seven and eight, we’ve hamstrung them, held them back, kept them from meeting their true potential!” and it took a little to recover my equilibrium. There is a schizophrenia in the focus on progress and absolute, comparable ability on the one hand and on encouraging a child where they are at because the music, the time practicing itself is a gift. This is slowly mapping for me into the strange breakdown of every art in our culture into “that which can be taught” vs. “that which wants to be expressed,” which I sort of shorthand as techniqe and connection. I think that they want to balance each other, that a deficit on either side is going to be frustrating.
Oh, but it’s late and this is a landscape pitted with false analogies and romantic notions, not to mention convenient excuses. My husband is turning out his light and spreading out the comforter, so I will close not like it’s a piece of formal writing and I have any sort conclusion…
