And I’m not going to tell you how when I was in college,
broke, money just enough for rent, gas, cigarettes,
I determined the only books to buy, keep, savor,
invest in
were poetry and philosophy
being not reliant–you must hear youthful scorn here–
on mère plot.

I don’t know a lot of things now
I knew for sure at nineteen and twenty.
But this morning reaching for a shoe I instead grabbed
Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems
that had been set down just under the edge of my bed
when it had accompanied me towards falling asleep
the other night.

And I won’t undervalue a good plot, after all,
either as distraction from
or survival manual for the painful things in life;
and still, some nights, what you really need is
accompaniment.

Of course it also allows you to tell yourself that you are nursing the cold that has crowded your head, made breathing work, filled the spaces that you are used to taking for granted as space in your head, altered the acoustics of everything that is disconcerting when you are so regularly focused on attention to what you hear.

Staying in bed allows you to pretend everything hasn’t been just hard this week, the physical discomforts of being sick, of being exhausted, the repeated experience of doing the best you can to ask the people you live with to do specific small things to care for the place you live in together and being — this word is almost experimental, disappointed. Because so many times that feeling has come, cleaning the house one day and having everyone come in and leave books, backpacks, shoes wherever they drop, having children sweetly agree they shouldn’t eat in their rooms and when you next walk into their room there’s an accumulation of dirty dishes, dirty clothes — that makes you feel like a failure. Like you’re a nag, a shrew, that if you were just somehow GOOD enough they would rise and meet you there. And so naming it disappointment and allowing it to be there, that seems to be your homework this week.

It isn’t that there haven’t been brilliant moments to the week, too. Walking the crowds of the Last Thursday art-fest street fair on Alberta, and finding an enjoyment rather than the distancing in the crowd that is unusual for me. Some of it is that the word-generating part of my brain is humming a little again, and I can walk through the crowd trying to find the best words for the experience and that somehow, I didn’t think it worked this way, instead of making me feel further from everything going on, it makes me closer. And I am fascinated by the people, the art, the things being expressed all around me, so I am not just a tourist in the carnival atmosphere of very homemade looking art, the scammers who might be geniuses and the geniuses who might be scammers. I find a delight in moving from a soundscape of a band of people in goth-steampunk-vaudeville costumes flailing at banjo and violin and guitar and into a soundscape of tribal drumming and then into the soundscape of another band almost identical to the first, and then a further soundscape of surprisingly good R and B funk. I look and discover that the freakshow tattoos and revealing clothing and sideburns and skinny jeans and funny glasses are tender rather than mere cliches of hipsterism, and that for all of the posturing something sincere and weirdly civic about the crowd.

Other brilliant moments: hiking with my firstborn, and just marveling at the person he is. Buying tickets to go visit a friend in Japan in two weeks which is terrifying (my first solo international travel!) and exhilarating. New energy for writing. And that not only do words sparkle again, but even the sound of an out of tune, scratchy-toned violin enthralls me. I am resigned to the two masters part of that, imagine that it could be like having two children, some things you do feed both of them at the same time, sometimes one gets a little neglected for the other and to your surprise it doesn’t break the child after all, and sometimes the two play together quietly long enough for you to have a hot bath.

And then, I had a lesson of my own, which is sort of landmark, an acknowledgement that I am not just practicing to support the kids in their doing it, that there is something in it for me. And so the practicing this week feels filled with discoveries, that there is a balance of force and delicacy when the vibration of the strings run up the fingers of not just the hand depressing the strings but also the hand moving the bow. That using a metronome brings about a cognitive reorganization around the beat. That I love the paradoxical stillness it requires to do the fastest version of the scale, 32nd notes, eight per bow. The teacher asked for the scales to be dispassionate and “dispassionate scales” has been a subheading in my brain. There’s a new easiness in allowing a movement to come from a handshape when he gave me a new fingering for the scale. He tried to get me to practice keeping my eyes focused on the bridge, finger board, contact point with the bow, saying that this view is my constant, while everything else in the environment may change, and so I imagine this as a home, as a frame, as the place I live.

And there’s something else, too, I guess that’s been good about this week, and that maybe that has to do with a shift in the story I tell myself. That while the homework has been maybe that I can ask for a thing, and be disappointed, and that disappointment is uncomfortable but not unbearable, the deeper story is I am a girl who loves challenges. Not, I am a girl consigned to disappointment, or the work of being human is getting resigned to loneliness or — I’ve had all sorts of lovely stories occur to me and they just aren’t useful. But there was something in the book The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle about how growth happens when kids are in a zone of being challenged, which isn’t about being flat-out frustrated being asked to do something beyond their capacity, not about being allowed to safely keep doing the thing they already know how to do, but being supported so they could reach a little further. And one of my core beliefs turns out to be that we are born loving challenge until that love is drowned out by anxiety or the form of anxiety that is perfectionism or the form of anxiety that is not wanting to let people down or let them see what is hard for you.

Somehow, taking the moments that are just flat-out overwhelming, the testing situation with one of the boys or Raven and finding the space to process it — what am I being challenged to do here? It makes things more bearable. Reminding myself, I love being challenged, I am, and oh, how I resist this word, grateful for the chance to grow. To try new things and to try old things in new ways. And having been told over and over that everything would be just fine if I could focus on what I am grateful for, it finally occurs to me that it’s not about invalidating the feelings of disappointment or fear, that I can’t move past that feeling until I have felt it, but that it’s about helping not to get stuck with the feeling.

Playing with the metronome it’s easy to sort of feel ridden by the beat, like it’s an engulfing wave that will swallow me as I get frantic trying to get on top of it. So I stop, isolate, try to do only two beats worth of notes or one beat plus the landing of the second beat and it’s not like enough repetitions allow me to slow time down, but that if I can take a breath, maybe chant out the rhythm, hear it in my head, I can get on top of the beat, can surf it, be carried by it as if all that force and I were one. And sometimes it’s like the work I am trying to do, the patience, the humility, the trying again and again, the just willingness of it all, it’s all the same work, whether it’s with the violin, the sentences, the kids, the marriage.

I smiled when a friend ended a blog entry with “to be continued” because that is sort of how it works, right? And yet when I sit down to the blank screen I want to have a neat beginning and neat ending, to churn out a perfect essay. And that’s not the whole reason I haven’t written. It’s been deliberately summer here, briefly summer, it’s been a season of doing not the minimum of what was necessary nor being obsessed with the economy and cost that doing one thing means not doing another, but a season of trying to turn off the intense program towards self-improvement and accomplishment that I keep pretending I don’t fall into and doing the things I love and loving the things I do, which narrowed to playing the violin and walking and hiking.

But summer is over, and I feel ready to read stuff that isn’t murder mysteries again, feel ready to see the offspring off in the morning and greet them in the afternoon. Their first morning back in school I had a dentist appointment and listened to the sort of music I only listen to in dentists’ offices, which, not saying I don’t enjoy it there, but am haunted by the Fleetwood Mac’s refrain from Landslide “Even children get older and I’m getting older too.” More, the season seems all Gwendolyn Brooks’ “A Sunset of the City” and I want to stand defiantly against any ideas that somehow the best part of my life is already done — and that is another thought that I’m embarrassed to admit to and don’t really want to talk about. Only I set it out there expose it to light and hope that reality shrivels it a bit: that this message that women are valuable as they are young and attractive (and that those go so automatically together!) or childbearing, that what you haven’t accomplished by forty, you’re not going to accomplish, is not something I invented or am singularly susceptible to, or that smarter women than me haven’t gotten hung up on the same ideas and had to invent whole radicalisms to counter.

A lovely phone call with my sister though. I tell her I’ve started messing around with the Tchaikovsky violin concerto and (notice how I say “messing around with” because if I say I’ve practiced it an hour or two each day after an hour of scales and warm-ups and work on the first Bach sonata after a couple of hours of practicing with the younger boys, then I’d have to admit I’m taking it seriously and it’s frustrating that I’ve only managed to get a few of the fast runs to happen slowly and painstakingly) she laughs with me, because she knows how big it is, but it’s not a laugh, ha, ha, it’s out of your reach, it’s more, she says “You know how to eat a whale, right?” “One bite at a time.” Another violinist suggests that the problem with this analogy is that I tend to be, um, intimidated, and that I must first kill the whale which is my own intimidation.

So intimidation is on my mind. And the fact that the courses I didn’t take, the degrees I didn’t pursue, the careers I forgot to have (which: you know the cartoon, “Oh, Brad! I forgot to have a baby!” that’s sort of the inverse of how my life looks to me on a bad day) all seem to shine as the grass greener on the road not taken. That it’s a shock to realize that the people who I went to school with who became doctors, lawyers, NY Times journalists and magazine editors, midwives, university professors, symphony musicians aren’t different from me in intelligence, talent, or even discipline so much as the choices they made about what to do with their lives.

And I think there’s a way of taking on the intimidation that isn’t about tearing down what other people have accomplished, or even seeing behind the wizard’s curtain how much bluster and posturing and self-promotion goes into doing anything, how much of life is selling yourself, a way that doesn’t even tear back into myself, “look at how you undersell yourself!” but something more positive, which is taking out the whale spoon and finding a rhythm that works for zooming out to the panoramic shot of the large goal and back in to the close-up of the next baby step to be taken towards accomplishing it. Maybe it is another one of those epistemological crises: I feel like if I could realistically take stock of what I have, in fact, accomplished, what skills I do, in fact, possess then I would have a warranted confidence. Which is like want to prove the things you have faith in. And has no bearing on the notion that the very same facts under different emotional lights can produce either despair or buoyant optimism.

Pasted above my desk is Flannery O’Connor’s “The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” And I guess humility is not a bad tool to have when engaging in struggles and whale-eating. You don’t expect everything to come easily or imagine that there is something terribly wrong with you because you have to struggle. It takes a humility to share that things feel like a struggle sometimes. But, I’m here, I guess, and one bite at a time, I’m going to get through this.

*Okay, not nobody. I know not nobody, and I love and faithfully read my faithful bloggers. But my aetataureate hindsight would pick out summer three years ago as a time when some golden conjunction of my friends’ lives resulted in a handful of blogs I loved all in really good conversation with each other and I don’t expect it will ever go back to that, and that’s okay, the future is bound to have some compensatory things as well in addition to being resentably different from the past.

And I want to explode this because where does the meaning come from, the act, the not communicating, the expectation, its breaking, does it mean what I mean it to mean? Meaning-siginificance, meaning-intention?

So posit not just a silence, but a screen between us, I cannot see your face:
I don’t know if it’s mute pain or calculated, sitting back, in control silence. I imagine the one, and then the other, though I generally fail to imagine all of the in-between silences. I don’t know if you’re there, don’t know if you know I’m there. (so okay: we’re both silent. either one of us could break it. And then it becomes a different game, a who’s responsible, really game, a pride game, a blame game, a game I need to be too grown up to play now.)

For all I know you have your phone out, are fiddling with it, not even aware that it is now, officially, a silence. Waiting.

I catalogue the times I’ve fallen helplessly mute and all the forces that come up against speaking, the self-censorship, the run out of things to say because we’ve said them all, and said them all again, and don’t see the point of trying one more time. The lacuna, the silence as meaningful absence, pointing to another thing.

Your silence a window, and am I going to trample and tread to go up right against it and peer in? What will the neighbors think?

The varieties of silence, I mean, you have to include the warm silences, the so-connected we don’t have to make nervous talk and fill it in, knowing silences, eyes met, wicked grins.

There was the party where someone mentioned the five minute lull (elsewhere, I learn, seven-minutes or twenty, five minutes, being a computer memory rule — or well, there are lots of five minutes rules) and then the uncomfortable laughter as again and again through the evening simultaneous conversations would come to simultaneous dwindlings.

Or exhausted silences. A friend told me, about her autistic son, that what she needed him to understand was that to walk through a crowded room with his head down, not meeting eyes, not speaking was still to communicate something and I think that sometimes that is more than I can understand, after all.

All of these years I’ve gently (I hope) tolerated other people’s dogs, hopefully not projecting too much forbearance, since I wasn’t a dog person. Raven and I could almost be defined by our not being dog people, particularly since both of our sets of parents were so very much in love with their dogs, and our childless siblings paid such keen and loving attention to animals, even the brother whose professional and traveling life makes keeping a pet impossible. We had our cat who, though she is more or less indifferent to our presence, we like having around; still petting her was awkward for us, uncomfortable for her.

And now there’s this dog. Baldr. And I am surprised at the lift I feel inside of myself every time I glance at him. Like, I just got it. This is what people have been talking about when they speak of their love for their animals. He lights up for me, and trails behind me wherever I go, like my own private canine entourage. Settles on my feet when I stand in front of the sink doing dishes. Curls up on the couch next to my desk when I am writing in the morning so I can just extend my hand and scrunch up the extra skin on the top of his head while murmuring how fantastic an animal he is to him. So it is like kids, the feeling you have is completely different when it’s your own you’re talking about.

The ways it’s like the kids are startling, I admit reluctantly. Before he came home I privately had opinions about people who compared having a dog to having a kid. But here it is after a week and we filter contradictory advice, we struggle to pay attention to anything else when he’s around, as we need to check to make sure he’s not getting in trouble about every thirty seconds, I’m misplacing keys as I haven’t since Rainer was a baby. We are seduced by all the products that exist to make up for our inadequacies as dog owners (Raven is not allowed to go to the giant pet store alone anymore) and I struggle a little with the etiquette of the playgroup-like dynamics at the dogpark because I only just graduated from having to finesse the playground moms. I melt watching my husband with the dog lying on his chest, and find it perfectly sweet that he will spend hours researching questions about dog care on the internet. And I feel like I have been opened up, made vulnerable to the world in a new way, and it’s okay.

So I admit to some doubt I had about myself before the dog, that perhaps I was insensible to these feelings, that there was some defect in me. I remember my sadness reading Nabokov’s description of how music leaves him cold. This sadness isn’t rational. Nabokov is dead. Who knows what compensatory pleasures he had — that maybe the synesthesia enabled him so that visual beauty could trigger for him what I feel listening to Beethoven. Or maybe my pleasure listening to Beethoven is dwarfed by the pleasure Baldr experiences on smelling whatever he smells in that clump of grass when we’re out walking.

Raven was quoting some CDC estimates that one in 110 children in the United States, one in 70 boys, has an autism spectrum disorder. Given the population my kids are running with, our peer group of nerds and geeks and people in computer and internet technology fields it feels endemic. But I keep wondering what such a label would mean to someone a hundred years ago. Sort of like anxiety and depression, how much were they invented and how much were they just labelled better. And I talk carefully about these things because in the individual, anecdotal level these things are very real and clear and indisputable, but I want to think about what they mean at a cultural level. And how it suddenly seems like we are preoccupied with a normative, prescriptive idea of how people should feel, should respond emotionally in a way that is without historical precedent.

And this thing occurs to me that part of this normative idea of how we should feel comes at a time when we are surrounded by intense emotional manipulation in advertising, and, oh, the movies I go to where it feels like these manipulations have been substituted for art, for thoughtful writing, for powerful acting: the juxtaposition of images is a manipulation, and I’m wary of saying it’s definitely something other than capital-A Art (which I would stay away from, on principle) except that I can tell the hollowness by the empty feeling a couple of hours later. So if we build a culture on emotional manipulation, someone who feels DIFFERENTLY is somehow threatening.

But maybe something else. You know the saddest Star Trek episodes are where Data cannot feel the way he observes everyone around him feeling. But isn’t it necessary he have this one weakness when he is so much stronger, faster, smarter and generally immortal than all of his shipmates. This flaw makes him tragic rather than resentable. And to live with the unprecedented possibility of thinking machines makes it so the gulf between mere thinking machines and human feeling becomes more important than ever. Perhaps, even, this is exacerbated by materialism: if one is skeptical of a ‘soul’ then the capacity for feeling becomes extraordinarly important as a way of giving meaning to our brief human lives. So we build up a cultural anxiety, defining our humanity with this normative notion of human feeling. And my puppy is reduced to a Turing test.

Or not. Sometimes it’s me being tested. The patience when I have to clean up after him again, the willingness to set boundaries now so that as he gets bigger and harder to control he will be a polite dog we can live with (even though it’s so cute now when he puts his paws and nose on the dining room table.) The letting go of some of the need for control and order, living with white hair on the couch and some mud on the floor. I think of how animals in the movies sense the bad guy when no one else can, right, and I think I had secretly suspected that our cat’s disdain for me was this Picture of Dorian Gray-like sign of some hidden truth about me that nobody else knew. So the dog’s faith in me feels extraordinary. And I try to feel what I feel as honestly as I can: plenty of times in this last week I’ve been exhausted, overwhelmed, wondered if we were really ready for this. And yet, there is the lift I feel looking at him, the joy of watching him bound ahead of me on the sidewalks, his leash in one of the boys’ hands.

Over-preface much?

It seems like the list should be more exhaustive. And I don’t buy the sort of Madame Bovary notion that one’s head is filled with dangerous romantic expectations. But the shaping of one’s sensibilities by literature seems to lead to the following:

• A sense of inevitability that leaves one’s sense of free will a little shaky. Again and again things do just sort of work out in books that it still surprises me a little when it doesn’t happen in real life.
• It’s not that my literary predilections leave me all optimistic, by an means, however. I find I have a fear of wanting anything after constant exposure to the literary irony of characters wanting the wrong thing, getting what they want, not being happy. One could begin to believe that happiness is a mirage, an oasis that shimmers only from a distance
• Apophenia. That is, literary economy means that the details that get included are meaningful and have something to do with what the writer is telling us. Someone coughs and it’s never merely throat-clearing, no, it’s the onset of consumption that will leave the character dead in twenty pages. So what to do with all the messy details one notices in real life that lead nowhere? After a morning with my head between pages, I walk and suspect that the universe is trying to tell me something with those two birds flying out of the bush just as I walk past it…
• That thing with primary and secondary and stock characters. Maybe this is just my life-long battle against solipsism, but I’m scared of reducing people I encounter to mere gestures and catchphrases.

• Vital – you walk on sidewalks rather than down the middle of the street, you don’t eat those mushrooms, etc.
• Conventional – cultural rules by which you know whether to wait in a restaurant to be seated or to find the empty seats and help yourself, how to behave in various social situations, avoid the strange looks from others.
• Pedagogical – submission to which you may not understand the reasons why, but you do it anyway in trust of your teacher. Wax on, wax off. The unnatural shape of your hand at a new musical instrument that, built into your technique, will make more advanced passages possible.
• Arbitrary (oulipo) (puzzles and games) – these add challenge to ordinary activities, are the hitting the golf ball into the hole with the club rather than picking it up and carrying it over and dropping it in, the more sensible way to achieve the objective. Choosing to write a novel without using the letter E draws attention to all the E’s we use all the time, maybe. Or something. These rules, set temporarily, may create a longing to burst them asunder and release something powerful.
• Compulsive – the magical thinking ones that you think will keep you safe, but don’t. These pinch and constrict and leave the surrounding flesh gangrenous and dead.

The trick, I guess is the examination. Which rules am I following are which? Which used to serve a purpose and no longer do? Are there grey areas in which one sort of rule may overlap from one area to another, or may morph from being one sort of rule to another? How do conventional rules change, how flexible are we with the force these exert? Have I missed any significant category?

Raven particularly liked the chart I made for myself with a queue for fiction, a queue for music books, one for other non-fiction, one for books of literary criticism or on the subject of writing — figuring that was how many I could responsibly maintain at a given time. Though of course the books we read aloud together to the little boys have a queue of their own in my mind, and poetry — doesn’t make lists. It comes spontaneously to hand for one poem or for a whole book of poetry, filling a need, answering a line crying out in my head, like a song lyric which demands you suddenly find all the songs that were on a mix tape your much cooler older cousin made for you when you were in seventh grade and desperate for even a little of his coolness to shed second-hand upon you like armor to wear to the cafeteria at lunchtime.

So I read again, after months of feeling like I was lucky to finish a book in a month. Part of it is a cold that clogs my ears so that practicing is painful, part of it is the withdrawal I feel during the fast, that if I settle with a book I may make it the last hours of the afternoon before the sun sets and I can eat and drink without being unkind to the boys or Raven. And then I threw my whole list over Friday for Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, I read

We imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real; we have to fasten onto the hunger. The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real; henceforward it is his way of appearing.

and this isn’t how any Bahà’í I know talks about fasting, with all the emphasis on purifying and with all of her aphoristic little penetrations into the nature of wanting and time and, oh, my own grasping nature! But it is exactly right for this season for me.

When we are disappointed by a pleasure which we have been expecting and which comes, the disappointment is because we were expecting the future. And as soon as it is there, it is the present. We want the future to be there without ceasing to be future. This an absurdity of which eternity alone is a cure.

But there’s something curious, too. I don’t know how I’d have read it ten years ago, or twenty, but there’s part of me that reads her longing for the annihilation of self with a resonating identification that this is how I once was, but cannot be any more. The philosophy is so stark and God’s withdrawal from His creation is so absolute, and yet that annihilation seems more pathology than religion to me, now. Which certainly wasn’t always so. I know Weil is smart, smarter than me, but I cannot believe in her philosophy and so it somehow comes out as what I imagine a character could believe.

We finished reading all of the Narnia books to the younger two boys and I think my emotional experience of the books was the strongest it has ever been. The way the characters experienced Aslan spoke to my own religious longing to be known, seen through, all of my shortcomings and failures as well as the small triumphs over self and tiny strides in personal growth. But it occurs to me that I am more prepared to talk about the way religion feels than to argue about why one should believe or not believe anything. I cannot write a polished essay for my blog on what I believe and why, I just share the notes I make to myself reading Weil.

1) It is a tremendous relief to read someone of this century willing to talk of good and evil, attachment and reward, grace, voids and God; I think in those terms but to want to talk about it seems vaguely sophomoric, like something I should have given up after I learned how many people have thoroughly discussed it without coming to any satisfactory conclusions, therefore, where do I get off thinking I have anything meaningful to contribute on the subject?

2) Is it psychology rather than theology discussing how we attach and imagine and inflate ourselves? I can remember “inventing” for myself her “Method of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned but with the thought that God does not exist” not because, according to the little editor-added footnote “God does not exist in fact in the same way as created things which form the only objects of experience for our natural faculties. Therefore, contact with supernatural reality is felt at first as an expression of nothing” but because I was desperate not to pray to a God I had merely imagined, and wanting to make prayer itself the object rather than any attendant rewards.

3) I guess where I have an issue thus far is she goes around perceiving a lot of not-God (which, okay given time and situation she was writing in makes a lot of sense) but that the book seems predicated on “God has withdrawn to create this realm of fringe or threshold” and we must answer the sacrifice of God in not being Everything by being willing not to be Anything because this world is the threshold between God and not-God where evil can exist [I think a lot about this word 'threshold' had in my sleeping brain christened the cat our threshold cat for mewing just beneath a level of 'must do something about that' in our room at 4 am, that the word 'thresholds' always conjures children in the shadowed doorways of a pueblo toured when I was a kid, playing in the dust, impassively watching the groups of tourists being guided past their homes] Has God withdrawn? Is there anywhere that I am sure that God is not? Does the universe divide into God and not-God?

4) Of course it is easy to despair of speaking meaningfully about God, to know that any assertion I make is pretty much fit only for describing other beings, like myself, God’s creatures. How does one respond? Except to go on trying to refine, contemplating, knowing that one never will reach infinity but this does not mean the numbers don’t get larger? Or by giving up: I cannot reach infinity and one’s as far from infinity as a hundred so what is the point in all of the painful struggling and striving? It’s not even, I tell myself, that it’s about absolutes and relatives, it’s that we were built for climbing.

5) Waiting for the sun to go down, late afternoon, a day so grey that I haven’t seen the sun at all, sunrise and sunset are absolutely theoretical anyway. I observe myself that it isn’t that patience is entirely fled, it’s that it’s present but fickle, and can give way to irritation with no warning whatsoever. This is living in a family, we are so attuned that no slamming or raised voices are even necessary, we hear a change in breath, read a shift in body language, and the wound is as real as if the ugliest words were spoken. So I struggle to suppress the rage of the animal body feeling need, to put out not just gentleness but the endless attention the boys clamor for until, finally, I just completely feel unequal to it, I withdraw, guilty, sad, and wondering why I don’t do this with radiant acquiescence or whatever, which is just one more difficult thing to accept, and I sit and I accept and I accept. I want spirituality to look like this thing I thought it was supposed to look like. It doesn’t. I submit.

This is February, music is urgent and demanding again. This blog post ought to be read with Gorecki’s 3rd symphony blaring its sonic layers over it like great glacial drifts and then slaying you with those subtly emerging aching raw buds of melody. I am singing all the time when I am not playing, my brain forms a call and response between the first movement of the first Boyce symphony that the boys listen to get into their heads a certain mastery of baroque shaping and phrasing and the Vivaldi double concerto Soren and I have been practicing.

This is February, an itchiness in my brain, a craving to shed winter skin to run new-created and fresh over dark bare earth looking for signs of return, the trees calling out for longer hours of daylight with the invocation of tightly furled budding. Foolhardy, and heedless, walls of water tumbling down giant boulders. I want to be part of some larger ecological quickening.

This is February with the anticipation, less than two weeks until the submission of fasting, the willingness to be weak and helpless and irritable and exhausted, the willingness to not be in control or in charge, to be made new again.

This is February, the wrestling with the same Wallace Stevens poem I’ve been grappling for months, “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” a monolith I cannot penetrate, a puzzle, only I start at “And not to have is the beginning of desire” and notice my own grasping acquisitiveness, that I want the next piece of chocolate before the one I am eating right now has crossed my lips, that it’s something harder to fill than mere greed, it’s an agony at being unable to grasp time itself, I reach and find my fingers closing on themselves. I was overtaken by the smell of rosemary walking outside yesterday and was suddenly ravenous not for food seasoned with rosemary, but for the scent itself, that I wanted to consume a smell, only smell is this delicate thing that does not yield to the imperative “More!” It’s like memory, in that you can build castles to welcome it, but you cannot cage it, it must come and go as it pleases. I jot:

I get distracted from trying to articulate in my head some truth about the nature of wanting by a smell — rosemary, I identify it — this is the problem with writing essays in your head while walking. The smell tickles and drags in associations and other smells, I replay a smell in my head like hearing the piece I was practicing in my head while I am walking, campfires, the smell of steam from beans cooking in a pressure cooker with the valve making its reassuring rhythmic quiet chugging. I want to consume the smell. The question of how accurately one replays the smell in one’s head makes me greedy and anxious. A particular scent could disappear from one’s life and how could one describe the absence? This is the sense for which I have the smallest vocabulary, the sense that turns me into an animal, subtle imperatives pricking at the base of every quivering hair, perked and alert to the vagaries of buried fragments and shards of memory that are exposed by the smell of a freshly-sharpened pencil, a particularity of damp earth and rotting vegetation, a lingering from a cigarette long passed from sight. With the awareness of the cool air near my scalp is this deeper knowledge that I am alive.

I am alive just for this flickering moment — a second’s carelessness — the car I assume saw me and was slowing to a stop at the crosswalk, the cryptic tumor-timebomb nothing is sure, every second matters. This makes patience harder.

It is February and I am confronted with the cyclical nature of the everything. I waver between despair that I have arrived back at precisely this point and the joy of anticipation, I know the chorus and can sing along, here. I consider how I am different from the self of last February, how the situations of my life have shifted or not, which ones are bigger than I and beyond my control, that I am a creature responding to the longer hours of daylight the promise-song of not-quite spring just like the rest of creation around me. Modernity may be about artificial light, controlled environments, air conditioning and heating and raspberries for sale in February, but there is is this deeper, wilder thing that resists that, that takes its cues from the sheer season.

“The worst handwriting for a girl I’ve ever seen” said my seventh grade math teacher: perversely this became a source of pride. I would be heartbroken to learn that every year was a girl chosen to be bestowed with the honor.

I envy friends with beautiful handwriting, of course — though one can now have a friendship without ever becoming acquainted with the friend’s hand. Which seems so odd to me. Handwriting as private. The first time something came in the mail from a friend who had been an internet friend, whose writing I knew but whose handwriting I had never seen, just the address written on the envelope was precious for being in her handwriting.

My handwriting is like my own face, imbued with my whole history and a reflection of who I am. That its haste makes it looks cursive-y, but I always print. It suffers from its smallness, perhaps some scarcity anxiety, trying to cram as much into a line, into a page as I can against a day when there is no more paper. My best friend’s writing is tiny and beautiful, artful and clear and meticulous. Another friend writes with a larger-fonted abandon that has her force and confidence.

Among the things mine reflects is never having been in my elementary school class when they made us practice handwriting because of various pull-out programs, TAG, back then only called, bewilderingly, “gifted” which is not the way to keep other kids from resenting you. But orchestra too. And while handwriting was important enough to be taught it was never important enough to be made up, though my mother did make attempts of sorts. I was given a pen and a book on calligraphy in the hopes that it would trickle down into neater school work. I don’t suppose it did.

I wonder if at that point there was already some duality being formed, form versus content. Write beautifully enough and no one will care what your writing looks like. Or deeper than that: you can focus on the (superficial) aspect of making your handwriting pretty. Or you can have a serious mind, with no time for such fluff. In other words: feminism writ very small. A messy scrawl will get you taken more seriously? That your handwriting is an assertion, a taking up of space?

How easily do we ascribe masculinity or femininity to the marks left by a pen on paper? When my math teacher made that comment, was it pointing at girls’ alleged greater care in self-presentation? Which, I suppose, might have some truth at ages 9 – 12, maybe, for a swath of girly-er girls on the spectrum versus a swath of boyish-er boys. But the absolute freedom I imagined boys enjoyed, I know now, as a mother of sons, is a myth. Sometimes it just seems as though girls are given a brighter shield of artifice to brandish in front of themselves.

Every two years or so I have this urge to buy make-up that I will wear once and allow to expire before bothering with again. Concealment becomes entrapment so easily. And I do like my bare face, just as I like my laide handwriting.

The bareness, then, becomes a personal quo vadis, a challenge. Maybe the right to challenge assumes a value not yet proven, but I want to be seen by people willing to look deeper, to examine themselves. Were anyone to decide I’d be prettier with make-up wouldn’t I feel sort of sorry for them for having bought a notion of beauty that is artificial? And yet there are feminists I admire in lipstick and I should never constrain their choices,never declare their beauty anything but their own. It’s that long-lost quote (Mary McCarthy?) about being able to be playful with one’s appearance, to feel joy in adornment. There is no loss of empowerment. I complain on the phone to a friend, my frustration that an article on a website that tried to get to a subtle point, neither pro nor con, was flooded with comments that were either enthusiastically for or bitter against, and her answer was about the binariness of internet commenters which yes, exactly. I fight for the space to be other than binary, to find, not even a position but a springing off point that works for me, for this moment, without trying to dictate it for anyone else. The categorical imperative be damned. Sometimes lipstick is just lipstick.

I challenge myself with the bareness, with presentation that is as honest as I can bear, as I can bare. But I don’t pretend that that is not also a choice, that there isn’t calculation, that I could transcend form with substance alone, that pretty implies not-smart. It’s one more place where there is a balance to be found, integrity and readability.