Word After Word

I am walking in to my doctor’s office and I’m smiling. I so love to see her. This is largely due to the fact that she thinks my jokes are really funny. So of course I think she has a great sense of humor.

When I am there, I very much want to make her laugh. She laughs so hard—she really knows how to stay with it—and then she usually makes a joke, and often we just be laughing. The moment stretches out, and swallows everything bad that ever happened. It’s pure joy and could likely be the main reason I’m in much better health than I was a year ago. I go see my doctor, and laugh, hard. Not that I don’t think her other treatments are not working; they are. But the laughing, maybe it’s the activator, the catalyst, the substrate. The spark that opens up the space where the healing will come in and do its work.

I always intend for this laughing joy moment to happen between me and my doctor. But I can’t try, plan, or work for it. I can’t make it happen.  Only if I use the invisible material in the room, at hand in an unknowing, unclingy, unexpected way. I have to look at the big diagram of the ear. I have to look at the calligraphy. I have to let go of thinking and let something else enter.

It is (wait for it….) exactly like writing. (And falling in love.)

To be funny for/with my doctor, I have to get into this place of total focus and concentration. I have to be completely in her office, in my seat. I can’t be thinking about books, calligraphy, groceries, school, injustice, tire pressure, or gluten. I have to be there fully and watch her very carefully but not with any objective. It’s like riding with a good tailwind. The world whooshes by, no effort from you.

The state I’m trying to locate, to become, when I am going to co-create the hilarity with my doctor (or write the next poem) is made up of these qualities: curious, attentive, open, assertive, patient, energized, calm, engaged without expectation. I am active but not after anything. I’m leaning forward into how we are together, but I’m not searching for anything specific. I never know if it will happen again or not but I have to want it to happen and then also forget that I want it to happen. Both.  

It is just like writing. I know all the qualities of the state of mind required to create something, but I can’t be aware of any of them consciously and also be in the state of mind. It’s very weird and addictive and delicious. (Also like falling in love—you are completely out of yourself, yet completely self-centered at the same time and you don’t know what will happen next.)

The parts of this book I thought I was going to love so much – writing about running, writing about writing—weren’t the parts that interested me the most.

It was Murakami describing how hard it is to think well, and put thoughts into speech (especially when you are a writer). He describes a feeling I have had a lot; I bet it’s really common. “…when I have to speak seriously about something in Japanese I’m overcome with the feeling of being swallowed up in a sea of words. There’s an infinite number of choices for me, infinite possibilities. As a writer, Japanese and I have a tight relationship. So if I’m going to speak in front of an undefined large group of people, I grow confused and frustrated when facing that teeming ocean of words.”

At his desk, he can catch the words he wants, and pin them down. But when he speaks, he feels “very keenly that something—something very important –has spilled out and escaped. And I just can’t accept that sort of disorienting estrangement.”

He prefers to put together a talk in a foreign language, because his linguistic choices are limited. He has to pick words easy for him to pronounce.

This is just like writing a sonnet or setting up some very specific structure to work within, right? Without restrictions, an ocean of choices rushes in, and we’re swamped, inarticulate.

I was so happy to read that this gross inarticulate happens to this bright successful wordy man. It makes me feel so much better about this awful drowning that happens when I’m trying to think without a pencil in my hand. He goes on to say:

“….as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don’t necessarily write down what I am thinking; it’s just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write though I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination.”

The best his thinking gets? “An analogy between the structure of the problem and something else.”

I was complaining to my wisest friend about how overwhelmed I am. My list of things to do has three columns. And color coding.

He interupted me. “Heather. These are all great things. And you are writing. Enjoy your life.”

My stepson is visiting us from the Air Force. He and his brother are so close and to see them walking together and crying out “Army of Two!” at breakfast, in the hallway, whenever they are aligned, makes me happy.

Jackie made Lissa a sleeping for the doll. Lissa loves the sleeping bag so much. We’re going on a trip together. She’s nine. She loves High School Musical and a boy named A—. She also handed me a painting “Heather YAY” it said in every color water color can be. She loves hot dogs and the idea of hotel lobbies, marble, and fountains. She loves dolls and high heels. And I think we all do.

My dog has licked off much of his own fur in some key places but he looks really happy.

I have good new friends, an open heart, and great old friends, and a belt of medium-known steady friends.

I didn’t worry about Fay eating my parents. My parents have rafts. Small rafts.

Amelia came over last night and ate all my blue berries and we did the rhumba in our rockin chairs.

I do not have to go to school today. But here I am.

These are some of the good, good, good things.

I ran too much or too fast.

Now I can’t, at all.

It was almost worth it though. Those dang Olympics. That’s how I got into the speed work.

I am not Jeremy. “He’s so cocky!” my Pilates teacher said.

I like cocky. It feels to me like pure intention.  I’m sure I’m wrong,

but it seems like a good thing. Making yourself into an arrow and

wearing a necklace. He seems like worry and no-worry, cancelling each other out.

I

 sonogram of my dog

I love this unscrutable photograph of my beloved Cubby in Lake Michigan, getting his stick off the side of the sun. This photo reminds me so much a baby sonogram–I can never ever ever see anything but light and shadow and a dog getting maybe a stick? in those weird black and white squares people bring out and show. I like this sonogram much better.

Tonight, we’ve been in the dunes. (”Dunes” is a word he knows.) We’ve hiked for an hour and tonight will be the meteor shower I will miss–I can’t find open horizon at 2 in the morning.

My heart is in it and not in it at once.

I just like the shapes of the light and dark and knowing it’s him out there. Sonograms make me cranky, dumb. All that looking, all that murk. This photograph makes me cry and it makes me hopeful–it could be a great night in so many possible ways.

I have been so sunk under the demon named Structure these days. Fretting not working, outlining, not really working. Succumbing, not outlining. Listing most what I hate about the book. It felt like my good self divorced us—and I was left with a terrible me, all alone.

Friday, for the first time in my life I considered not writing, not finishing my book. This felt like contemplating suicide. Friday was a dark day. A very dark day. Much darker than Luke’s darkest day day which, admit it, has a great sound track, laced with whimsy and also Lorelei, unlaced.

I didn’t mean to, but all the sudden I started an essay about dating and it was so fun to list all the dates and relish the horror, loving not mocking all I feared. Because I wasn’t supposed to be writing the essay, the work fell out of me. For three whole days, I wrote the essay, always saying after each sentence, one more, then I will work on the book, I will, really.

Playing is so much better than not playing. I played my way back into you know what. Structure problems?

I am very much looking forward to reading this new book!

I love a friendly letter.

Adding our writing life to our to do list—tasks, ideas, projects, the next small thing—was important and we wish we’d thought of it much earlier. Why did “dry cleaner” get written down and not Chapter Six?

His new book The Half-Known World is a must read for all fiction writing or any reading students.

(He had a .9 GPA, earning my immediate confidence.)

Boswell was a terrible fiction writer at first. In one of the chapters of this perfect book he explains how useful it was, being terrible, to his growth as a teacher.