writing

Passé: High and not so dry

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Finally, someone shared the same unusual set of experiences – and was experienced in similar ways. Finally, it meant that she did not immediately get bored, annoyed and frustrated.

Always before, she found that the things that are everyday and even passé to her were inevitably going to be exciting and fresh for most others. Even sought after. Having lived completely different lives within just one life, nothing like what anyone who’d crossed her path had lived, such big divides opened up on fundamental matters, no matter how many superficial things were shared in common. The excitement, anxiety, rush, fear – whatever one wants to call it – that filled most people each time s/he took a new step, particularly on her/his own, seemed quaint and cute to her at first. She had been taking these steps alone, reaching beyond ‘normal’ boundaries and experience, since she was not even old enough to vote, drive or get a job.

It was all ‘been there, done that’ for her – not that she could not enjoy any of these things anew, but for her, the awakening to new things and feelings could only come in relation to others, to see things afresh through their eyes. It would take something truly remarkable to move her deeply.

To others, she was an untrodden path, albeit one set with new traps (for anyone who had been hibernating in a long slumber of a closed system). She represented both the life one could finally see, taste, touch and smell while vibrantly on her/his own, exploring, as a facilitator toward the next chapter of life, and yet also the very real possibility of being ensnared in an offset jaw trap. With teeth bared.

In more literary terms, all entanglements, thus, were short stories with abrupt endings. For those middle-aged toddlers, wandering into the world wide-eyed and virtually inexperienced, or perhaps merely cautious, so much unseen, the story was over almost as soon as it had begun, while she continued to linger in those pages already read, imagining it as one chapter in a longer work. She served as a transitional plot device to some while she was, for still others, the awakening that portended an entirely new body of literature.

She wondered whether people ever actually could find themselves on the same pages, at the same time, or at least find that they were ready to stay within the same chapter to move forward with the narrative together.

And, then, just as the question dissipated, seeming to have no answer, it all changed.

Photo (c) 2011 Minnesota Historical Society used under Creative Commons license.

Writing at turmoil’s gunpoint

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“We’re doing this thing on my timeline. My way.”
He looked at her with avuncular condescension. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tired of listening to other voices, or writing in them, she walked out.

“My story, Sir Pen, is, to put it briefly: I’m a blank sheet of paper that no one will write on.” -from “Peer Gynt”, Henrik Ibsen

“But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect; how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?” –The Uses of Literature, Italo Calvino

Turmoil sharpens syntax and diction, makes the willingness to hunt for the right words acute – heightens the senses like a hunter on the trail of his prey. You will know what I mean if you write when you feel anguish, pain or even the murky mist of questioning. When you revisit those distress-filled writings, you might not find answers, but you may find keen edges on your prose that you don’t find when you’re writing without emotional gags and bindings. It’s odd to consider that turmoil, which can render us helpless and not free, gives us the freedom of discipline (which sounds contradictory). Turmoil forces us to write, and ties our hands and our minds to make us only write about what it wants.

“For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on.” – The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

On the other hand, for a person so ‘haunted’ by the demand to write, only by writing through it can you make sense of your experience.

“By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.” –The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

You may go back, as suggested, and see well-chosen words and sharp edges, but what you read might not fill you with the glee of someone who has written superlative, quality prose. No, in fact, it will probably read as self-pitying, naive, maudlin, even silly.

“There is no separating yourself from the things you make, he thought. If you are a cesspool, what else can your work be except shit?” –Before the Fall, Noah Hawley

You’re not doing it because you think it will be a masterpiece; you don’t even imagine anyone will ever see it.

You nevertheless were held hostage to the need to get it out.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

Contextual past and eventual becoming

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“I am writing for the person I used to be. Perhaps the person I once left behind persists, standing there, still and grim, in some attic of time – on a bend, on a crossroads – and in some mysterious way she is able to read the lines I am setting out here, without seeing them.” –A General Theory of Oblivion, José Eduardo Agualusa

In If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino hints gently at context, and by envisioning parallel, fictional realities, we may be ripping some gem from its intended context and stuffing it into another to serve another purpose, to enhance another context. These are not even close to his words, and in fact, in my own paraphrasing I have moved his original words (in translation no less) quite far from their origin and intended context to justify my own. It is the intent, perhaps, that a reader should interpret and ‘steal’ concepts (I know that in one of the multitudes of books I have read this week, there was a passage somewhere about stealing and refashioning good ideas – but I don’t know if I saved the quote. A shame).

But this is my pattern. I read aggressively, voraciously, feverishly highlighting meaningful passages (stopping briefly to wonder if I might highlight different passages and quotes if I were in another frame of mind, or context). And later I find some application – or context – for those passages that meant most to me in some way.

Behavior eventually shows its hand and establishes a pattern if you wait long enough. I can change these patterns to change behaviors, but the underlying drive comes out the same. I shifted from television addiction to a reading addiction, which I would argue is the better of the two addictions. But both are addictive and almost compulsive behaviors. To compensate, I seek and find some balance, and my constant underlying drive is not just the search for balance but the search for change. And for me, change is always about the future and ensuring some otherness or difference from the now and the past. It is not about dragging vestiges of the past with me into new scenery; it is likewise not about erasing that past or its experience. It does not mean cast off the you who was, but does mean give careful consideration to the you who will be.

“This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase. Therefore I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum of erasure with the minimum of recomplication.” –If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino

While many recognize and complain about their patterns, they do nothing to alter them. Change, after all, is what we most avoid. Because of this aversion to change, at least some kinds of change, the complaints are idle and the angst projected about them contrived. But we all have our blind spots, especially when it comes to other, unpredictable, people.

“…but at that moment it was as if an undigested bit of the past had come back up his throat.” –The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Paolo Giordano

Yes, people. Unpredictable people who jump around in the timeline of our lives. Almost dead within our archives, yet somehow we live on, almost as living, breathing people in the daily existences, of which we are (almost) no longer a part. I can control my books or tv viewing or the lengths of walks in the rain (though I cannot yet control the rain). I can control how much I sleep and how deeply involved I become in my mad dreams (how I love these). But people… and how much the past wears on and continues to affect (and infect) people.

Someone told me recently that “the past is a foreign country”, which sounds, not unlike my allusions and references to Calvino, like something lifted from a literary source (with which I am not familiar). This is poetic, but Calvino himself manages to describe the pernicious nature of the past with a far more apt simile:

“The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry curled up inside me”.

The past, and the people who populate it, has a voracious appetite and will eat away at one from the inside, if one lets it.

The interesting part is that the phantoms, those living in the past as though it were yesterday: they are often the most honest ones. Maybe not about how the past was (they can in fact be quite blind and/or deluded), but they aren’t hiding their intentions or papering over their defects. And the people laboring along in the firm belief that they are living in the present and looking toward the future? The veneer of calm does not hide the high-strung individual underneath, paddling away from reminders of the past like poor swimmers with no instinct for floating – there is no actual serenity in those who so desperately seek it. Maybe, like Daniel Hall writes in “Love Letter Burning”: “The past will shed some light/but never keep us warm”.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”–Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion

Photo by Tobias van Schneider on Unsplash

treading muck

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“Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push?” –Hunger, Roxane Gay

What can be said of the burden of having to lift another from the greyish sludge, the misplaced but ever-present feeling of being responsible for bringing them back to life, to infuse what had become mundane with new meaning?

“Make me feel again,” she demanded.

Knowing the lukewarm nothingness through which she had long waded, he could not deny her, but felt himself being pulled under at the same time. What a disaster to sample – to reawaken her dormant taste buds, to be the one to have to give everything a flavor again.

“How can I, possibly…?” he asked himself. How could he walk every step with her toward more than just another transformation… to accompany her in the birth of someone completely different?

Especially as he questioned whether he would even want to be there at the end.

Photo (c) 2010 Jim Hickcox used under Creative Commons license.

Sandpaper

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“Any one of us, over the course of our lives, can know many different existences. Or occasionally, desistances. Not many, however, are given the opportunity to wear a different skin.” –A General Theory of Oblivion, José Eduardo Agualusa

It’s a strange contradiction that when one feels most defenseless, she becomes most defensive. The armor of sarcasm and distance traveled in retreat should cry out ‘vulnerability’ but instead create all new barriers.

How does one never learn that insidious attempts to understand will not lead to understanding but rather will lead to being rubbed raw from the inside out? Being too close to a ‘subject’ and trying to get under its skin, and feel as it feels (or learn why) means that those carefully crafted barriers, built over so many battles and through so many years fall -swiftly – so much more swiftly than the time it took to erect them. And the barrier building and demolishing goes both ways. Often leading to reckless ruin and unforeseen disappointment. Closeness always brings a sensitivity that makes words sharper, or heavier, with interpretations, the ruins of barriers more perilous to climb out of, the injuries more acute to nurture back to health, and that sinking feeling, deep in the pit of the stomach, leaden with the realization that she must start all over again.

All those afternoons in darkness spent with the voice in her ear, loved and loved and loved, feeling broken down and completely enveloped in only that one being. Suddenly, abrasively rubbing against all expectation with words and images that moved so completely against the grain of how smoothness had felt up to that point, with walls falling and joints fitting together perfectly. Sanding the skin, seeing the bloody, pulpy reality underneath for the first time rather than smoothing edges out. She had never felt sharper edges or been more splintered, gasping imperceptibly, thinking, “I really got this one wrong.”

Could it be that this sudden need to wear down the surface is a need to create distance, or a smooth plane and flawlessly empty horizon? Was it a splinter she left behind and failed to pluck out? Or was it a command move of making sure no rough surfaces would assert themselves again – a reminder that nothing is joined, or even clamped, together in the way that one could so easily imagine?

Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

Zij

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“And give me news of him now and again,
so that I will not have to ask strangers
who wonder at my boldness, and
neighbors who pity my persistence.
You whose hands are more innocent than mine
stay by his bedside
and be gentle to his dream.” -Vesna Parun

When every word and statement appears as though it had been engineered to extract information manipulatively and surreptitiously (the listener is too suspicious to fall for that), a conversation is always a cat-and-mouse game. Zij wanted nothing more than to pump hard for information but knew she could not get any if she went for the hard sell. No, it had to be subtler, a conversation in which casual half-remarks might pique the listener’s interest and cause a careless offer of more information than intended. Zij attempted at times to lull the listener into loose-lipped revelation through flattery, searching out all the buttons that would stroke even the ego of a person so tightly controlled they didn’t seem to have an ego. The listener, connected in some feverishly imagined way to a place Zij wanted to get back to, calmly responded in an academic and dispassionate way to all comments.

When Zij did not get what she wanted, she changed tack.

“You are “better” than me in so many ways,” Zij said to the listener. “A more high-minded being.”

Why should such comparatives arise at all? It made no sense to compare: the listener is no better or worse than Zij. Either Zij wanted to be reassured that it wasn’t true, or she really must have self-esteem that low. So uncomfortable was Zij that she was unable to focus her love on herself or those who had proven themselves to love her unconditionally. No, there was always the increasingly hard pushing-away, boring in to gather ammunition while at the same time diffusing attention across as many sources as possible, to find solace temporarily where there really was none.

Thinking these thoughts, the listener listened. Why should the listener constantly be compared against this phantom from the past, by that phantom herself? What was the purpose of this exercise? In response, the listener finally replied coolly, “No, ‘better’ is not the right frame for this. It’s just different. People, as simple as it sounds, would not be interesting if we were all the same.”

When the listener proved to be responsive only to talk of her identity and bouts of mania, and this did not produce information – or even a reaction, Zij tried another approach:

“That place – that island – is so completely different from every other place on earth. I didn’t appreciate it when I was there, but it was unique and nothing else can rival it in the world. I should have loved it for what it was but didn’t. I was careless, making a mess of this land, inviting equally unappreciative strangers there, stripping and commoditizing this oasis.”

The listener remained silent, knowing a contradiction was coming.

“But I don’t understand why the island grew so inhospitable. I am sure that any other place in the world would have accommodated us forever – because that’s what places are for – that is what they do!”

The listener considered this, finally answering, “Can you really have appreciated the island for its real qualities if you never really knew them? If you used it for your own purposes but didn’t understand its ecology, what sustained it? And now, so many years later, can you be trusted as sincere in your regret at abusing and trampling all over the island and pushing it to the brink, if it appears that your regret is only about what you lost – and not about what the island lost or didn’t have in the first place, or didn’t get from letting you run rampant all over and through it? If your regret for the place and how you mistreated it were real, wouldn’t you step back and respect that it needs its own oxygen, it needs time… it can’t regenerate as long as the weeds and vines of the past continue to overgrow and overreach everything?”

Zij was silent, if only briefly. She did not like this answer at all. Attempting to regain the upper hand, completely forgetting any pretension of composure, she changed strategy yet again. Wanting to elicit… what? Anger? Jealousy? Curiosity? Insecurity? Uncertainty? To drive a wedge?:

“Do you have any idea how many people want desperately to visit that island now? For some reason it’s completely off-limits, but even people who have exclusive access to every other place in the world, who have piles of invitations they could accept… they want to go to THIS place but are denied. Why is it that you are welcomed there… and they aren’t? What is it about you that is so special?”

Underneath these words, the listener could hear a childish, deafening and always-growing-louder refrain: “WHY YOU? WHY YOU? WHY YOU?” underpinned by a whispering and desperate, “And why not me?” The listener again failed to react, immediately, thinking of the inherent immaturity of this line of questioning, wanting to quote the simplistic Bonjour tristesse: «Vous vous faites de l’amour une idée un peu simpliste. Ce n’est pas une suite de sensations indépendantes les unes des autres…» But knowing there was nothing that could be said to reliably explain anything. No explanations were required or owed.

It seemed once more, or still, that Zij asked the wrong questions of the wrong entity, diffusing all her pent up frustrations, regrets and feelings to all the wrong people. And the listener could only feel sad compassion for a life spent idealizing a past that kept her from fully living in the present.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

You bring it on yourself …

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I just can’t “do” pettiness. I have petty thoughts and moments like everyone else, but when the time comes to act petty – to do something that really crosses a line, I can’t do it. And I don’t see how anyone can. Are people so hollow that they must extract a momentary ‘victory’ or pinprick of self-satisfaction from things that will hurt others or ultimately just be a pile of nothingness? Here I think of everything from going out of one’s way to genuinely hurt or threaten someone else because of one’s own childish impulses (and by hurt or threaten, I am talking about actual things, such as launching things into the world that could jeopardize another person’s livelihood or cause problems in his/her daily life) to the daily pettiness, such as spewing anger, hatred, outsized frustration about things that don’t matter, that could easily be ignored, just feeling a need to stir up trouble.

It’s hard to let the impulse toward pettiness take hold. I spend so much time immersed in books about Soviet prison camps, slavery, civil rights, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, climate change, neoliberal paths to failure and destruction, civil war, post-colonial problems, Ebola, poverty, lack of access to and other disasters in healthcare, discrimination and so many other things that are just so much bigger than whether someone cut you off in traffic, whether your roommate swept a few crumbs off the kitchen counter, whether you feel a little lonely and blue, whether your bourgeois concerns, such as forgetting to cancel a scheduled grocery delivery when you’re out of town, send you into a panic. It’s not that those things don’t matter at all – it’s just that I don’t understand how and why anyone can really get so worked up about them. Is it just that the world is so full of interwoven, complex problems and so much human-on-human, human-created misery that it becomes necessary to go inward, become hyperfocused on the petty and immediate surroundings just to get through?

No doubt: humanity is cruel and ugly – defined in so many cases and total epochs by sheer brutality – my choice of reading and viewing materials are constant reminders that this ugliness is universal, eternal and takes very little to provoke and escalate. I do this to myself, though, creating this chasm between the daily mundane (convincing myself it doesn’t matter) and the big awful (things that, in most cases, I can’t do anything to correct or change anyway). It is perhaps just as nihilistic to find no middle ground where cruelties, ills and evils cannot be mitigated in some way.

I try. Step by step, individual by individual. I have been thinking and writing about, for years, the idea of caring for others, as individuals or in groups/organizations, trying to help in one way or another. But lately the question has reignited in me: where is the line between helping and enabling? The things, the issues, the people who linger and cling – and where I have wanted to help set them on their feet so they could run forward, they’ve instead dug in their heels. Am I blind in these cases, putting my own well-being into peril because of what I won’t see or let go of? And is asking the question a full circle back to the pettiness I am trying to avoid?

Smash the bejesus out of July

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How, oh how, is it JULY 1?

Already?

Rolling my eyes at people saying, “I just don’t have the bandwidth for that.”

Fucking right you don’t – you’re not a goddamn wifi network. Find some … original, non-corporate-cannibalizing language for being busy. I want to take giant earth-moving equipment, scoop up all the bastardized and meaningless corporate language and dump it in a landfill and start all over again with the basics.

But then lots of words and their uses, misuses, mispronunciations and all manner of language-related things get under my skin. Not always in a bad way. My dear Scots abuse language constantly. My inner grammarian cringed at first, but the linguist took over and fell so much in love with its unique flavor and quirks.

I have written before about how a person, particularly a writer, will get stuck on a word and repeat it (I am not alone in this inquiry) – at least enough times that I think they either have bad or no editing, or they themselves are deliberately reveling in and using this word. That is, perhaps it has a deeper meaning for them, and they want to hammer a point home with its repeated use. Or, as Anne Helen Petersen does in her recent book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, some version of “abject” or “abjection” recurs, quite deliberately as a key word. She goes so far as to define the word and pick apart its roots to show how it applies time and again to “unruly women” – the subject of her book. (I happen to like the word “abject”, and I was pleased not only to see it here but to notice it in a book I read after Petersen’s.) Perhaps the way my brain tracks individual words reduces the overall power of the theme or the work, but I hope I’m taking it all in regardless of my own obsession with diction.

“Never again is what you swore the time before”

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“What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” –The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

She waited for him to come to his senses, emerge from the sleep they had been enmeshed in for months, possibly even years. But no, the deep voice of stability and the grip of a steady hand continued to greet her each day. Perhaps because they had each already gone grey before finding each other and understood the calculus of what each had given up versus what each had gained by being together, the radical madness of young, unbridled romance was missing. But no, the electric tingling and orgasmic singeing of the fingertips, fire spreading rapidly to the internal organs, betrayed not just a lust one associates with youth but also an abiding and unretractable love, warmth and a mutual, complicit almost-ownership the likes of which neither had felt before.

Still, the emotional safety brought about by his reassuring adultness never quite allowed for the erasure of this nagging voice, whispering repeatedly before crying out, “Any minute now, he will come to his senses,” even as he spent long afternoons tending their garden, year after year, putting seeds into the ground that would not come to fruition for many more years. He was firmly rooted, encircled by and entwined in a whole world of nourishment. Watching him working, she wondered whether she had ever seen something so basic and beautiful.

But her nagging inner voice was accompanied by nagging ears, ears opened to listening to the sounds echoing from the past. Phantoms sometimes returned to haunt after many years, singing songs of regret, lament, actions not taken and whole imagined lifetimes not lived: “But sometimes it would strike me suddenly, watching you walk across the room: ‘fucking hell she is beautiful’. Those lips, those eyes, the high cheekbones. It was arresting and would take my breath away. But I couldn’t act. I couldn’t show you those parts of myself.” Hollow words spoken as a long overdue attempt to display some sensitivity that never existed. Empty attempts to make what had happened seem more substantial, as though he could have taken all that time back and redone it, even though in reality, he never would have wanted to in reality. Idealizing vague memories decoupled from what actually was.

Are these old admissions from a derelict entanglement even worth listening to? No, never again – again. No, the garden grows and grows with nowhere for weeds to hide.

Photo by Arnaldo Aldana on Unsplash

Invisible Ink

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“There comes a time when you swim or sink/so I jumped in the drink/cause I couldn’t make myself clear/maybe I wrote in invisible ink/Oh, I’ve tried to think, how I could have made it appear… but another illustration is wasted cause the results are the same/I feel like a ghost who’s trying to move your hands over some Ouija board in the hopes I can spell out my name…” -Aimee Mann, “Invisible Ink”

I kept hoping he would go away, but not even the stark red of the editor’s pen could redact him. I hate red pen. It felt like erasing his existence would be easiest because I no longer knew how to create dialogue for – or with – him. As though he were a living, breathing person.

Things became strange. In the deflation of his persona, all the conversations I invented for him became less realistic, full of long explanations no one would ever voice. My hopes for his intellect, and even for his very fictive soul, were dashed with no way to refashion them. The long bout of silence created only a stilted awkwardness that could never be penetrated; his character would have to die once he became incapable of a simple conversation.

But my red pen and I could not kill him.

Yet, when I tried in my own silent but sweet way to make amends for this erasure, for leaving his character idle and adrift, not even affording him the finality and closure of a dramatic, storied death, reaching out with a nice forest green or autumn-leaf brown footnote, my hand was swiftly cut off.