The Girl With the Metronome Heart

A lot of metronome practice this week, as if I could find comfort in the steady, even beat, the tempo where the piece is within my grasp and the challenge is to make the beat so real it is a container into which everything else must fit exactly. It used to seem monotonous, metronome practice. The mechanicalness of it, the fingers like machinery moving not by will but by exactitude. Art, I decided, would be its opposite, to bend the beat and refuse its tyranny, to hesitate, trembling, here and submit to a fury of emotion racing through those sixteenths. To refuse to color within the lines because it was all about expression. Precision and control now seem prior to, somehow, I guess, or themselves a part of expression. * This number-changing season, which even I...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 31, 2010 | 0 comments

Stone Speak

Somewhere I heard or read an account of a people — I don’t know now if it was anthropology or fable — who sent stones as a means of communicating across great distances. When you feel the texture and the heft of this rock you will know what I was thinking, was feeling. Okay so it was probably fable. But the stone in my palm, that fits as if it were dough pinched off to exactly the right amount to fit, the smooth roundedness, narrower at one end than the other like the snugness of the corner of the palm where fingers and thumb meet, overlap, enfold, and the striated speckledness — you surely know what that means as much as any poem or painting. It’s a game I play with myself, I pick up this pebble and imagine it came from other hands...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 22, 2010 | 0 comments

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...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Nov 16, 2010 | 3 comments

Confessions of a Failed Blogger

I hate the last thing I put up, worry I sound oblique or coy and that wasn’t what I meant at all, at all. And hate that the hating of it draws attention to it, that to take it down would make it look like more than it was. Yesterday I had a morning when every word I wrote seemed to come springing gleefully from my fingertips. This morning the words are leaden and have to be squeezed out painfully, and I am angry. I sort papers in my office, read from the book I found on Amazon that seems to be about exactly what I meant to write about, has a title much like my own beloved title, only it’s BETTER, so much better. I scoop up the printed up copies of poems written by the one friend with whom I would like to discuss this, the friend whose absence leaves a...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 30, 2010 | 2 comments

Love Harder

The mantra at violin lessons this week was “simple, not easy.” Which, you know, always. It is a week, apparently, for sorting through priorities and commitments and experiencing dramas that are not my own to write about, and of course I have realizations about how I am living, about what I want from life, and they sound so simplistic as to be completely trite and banal. Which, I know if I get it right, it’s going to be simple, not easy. I take a risk of being all publicly trite/banal as well as the risk of being offensively vague about the nature of the week’s drama, because I need this as a place to lodge reminders to myself, a place where I can set down ideas for when I need return to them. The big one right now, though, is that in order...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 24, 2010 | 0 comments

Interiority

I remember this now. The long hours of sitting and listening to, mostly, what’s just inside my own head. The attention to how my head works, the finding words for experience, the obsessive collection of phrases and fragments and thoughts threading. I think it’s a luxury, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, it messes me up out there; I find myself studying everyone around me looking for evidence that our interiority all has congruencies, that if my interiority and hers, his, are not identical that they at least share certain landmarks, I am shocked at what seems like dullness or just general obliviousness, unwilling to believe that that is really it, in dread of my tendency to slip towards self-satisfaction or smugness or anything resembling...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 17, 2010 | 3 comments