Word After Word

My friend A., just retired from a teaching career, set out, in May, to have a relaxing summer. No big trips (she was just back from Thailand), no big house renovations, just noodling around with the chickens, the grand-baby, plucking slugs out of the herb garden, meeting up with some friends. “I just want time to putter!” she crowed happily last spring. A. lives in

We were talking yesterday on the phone when she said to me, “I’m so mad at myself. I was so slug like this summer. I hate this lazy part of myself.”

I shrieked and the dog frowned in his sleep.

We want it both ways. We want it three or four ways. We use this habit of self-critique not to learn, but to limit ourselves. If she had written two books and grown heirloom corn and made a bundle and started a Montessori program, she would have been saying to me: “Summer flew by, it wasn’t even summer! I have to learn to relax!”

We are so weird. She set out to have the very summer she had, but somehow, her mind still tells her: you did it wrong. She had a glorious, enviable, intentional, beautiful, tasty summer, but no, no credit—that was a wasted one.

Why do we do this?

I do not know. I do know A. is getting ready to write a book, and I suspect this self-critique is fear of starting, fear wearing the summer full dress uniform of a cheesy dictator.

I should have worked all summer! is an insidious way to develop the muscle of not-working.

My friend J. said essentially the same thing in the weight room yesterday. “I didn’t lift all summer. I don’t know what is wrong with me. I was bad.” I laughed so hard. This is how I talk to myself, too, and I can’t imagine saying this kind of thing to someone else. It wouldn’t happen. Why? Because it’s mean, presumptuous, and uninformed thing to say. J actually lifted enormous weight all summer: she moved into a new house. Lots of physical and psychological weight lifted and set down and shifted there. Two huge deaths. A lot of weight this summer.

After being away from my book for only four days, I am having so much trouble concentrating again. Why is it so hard to see what I need to see in my own work? I can see so easily A and J had the right summer though some part of the back-to-school brain is telling them they did summer wrong. But I can’t see where I’m off in my work.

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 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?

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.

Jackie B. is the best reader in the world. I would be lost without Jackie Bartley. She is a goddess and a genius. She’s a steering wheel, a poet, a scientist, a reed, and she knows what is good and why it is so.

PS: Thanks for the delicious chicken, too. The blueberry sauce was so much better than you said it could be. She does not know her own strength.

My bike date stood me up because he had to ride hard and fast. I am slow and easy. I love slow. But ride hard and fast—I understand the need in my bones. And yet I was thrilled to discover how unsad I was to not bike, how much I wanted to go running. I only started biking because I couldn’t run. Now, I’ve been able to run again, following strict safety rules. It’s like running in a challenging foreign language. I can’t just blab blab blab.

            1. Every other day at most.

            2. Feet on frozen bags of brussels sprouts and then rolly ball after.

            3. Only on track at new school, track made of tiny black super sponges.

            4. Slow in brand new shoes.

            5. Ask feet how they are, really each ¼ mile. And listen.

Happily enough, I’m in a slow phase. I’m writing slow. Eating slower. Driving slower. Getting dressed a little slower. Looking longer. (I am also in a cowboy things phase, but that’s another world and not part of the slow thing, it’s just fun—pearl snaps, tiny flowers, kicky skirts, and a cache of hand-crafted bolo ties I came upon in a secret and surprising location. (Bad idea: trying on new cowboy boots in running shorts, but UPS truck pulled up as I was trotting out. I had to try them on, right then. They stood up to the running shorts. That is how great they are. They just looked up and said howdy, no affectation, no judgment.)

I had a foot problem for three years. It might be fixed. (Thanks, Tee!) I’m going slowly because I earned the problem speeding while running, going over the limit. Little Miss hubris. My feet are small and beautiful feet and I was treating them as though they were monster truck tires. I was saying GIT R DUN to my feet. Using a heavy fake accent. Hollerin. And trying to run faster than people who were not even racing. 

Three years ago, I was slow but I thought I was Little Miss Fast.

Now I’m racing myself to see if I can hold a slow pace, really go slow. It’s harder than fast. There’s no kick, it’s not like drugs. It’s more like love, or listening. I have to ask the feet each ¼ mile: how are you really?

So my bike date had to ride hard and fast, and the feet leapt up and said: we can go two miles. No, I said. Really? I was thrilled, surprised, and, after the brief UPS delay, out of there.

There is nothing like running. It feels like the feet are what makes the world spin. The rhythm of it aligns the heart, the sky, the head, and town. There is no other way to do that. None.

The kids in the middle of the track were running around like little goats or animals, organizing themselves around the frisbees and soccer balls and coaches and the sun shone done, and the moon was perfectly halved. I ran around 8 times. Maybe more. I’m terrible at counting laps. They are terrible at counting me, too.  We round.

If I had planned to run, I don’t think it would have been so much fun. It was a secret run. Like the accidental essay I wrote instead of working on my book. It was an instead-of, a gift run, a perfect night in

I came home singing, Olympic-ish, and I kissed my feet on their foreheads as though they were two tiny twin babies. Which they are. My small slim beautiful kind feet. Little tiny bony wings.

Cycling is great. I live for it. But there’s nothing like running. Running is like having a superpower.

We practice what’s easiest for us, my yoga teacher said in class last night. Not always what needs practice.

I think about writing, and how I generate new scenes, scenes, scenes, scenes. Love to write scenes. I like to make pieces. What I need to practice, what is hard for me: wholes. Sequences. Brilliant summary, external action reflecting internal action, the townscape reflecting the interior of the life within, and all this a seamless whole. I need to practice tightening scenes, the hook, the make-point moment, the button.

But it’s so fun to generate and much harder to tend.

(Most gardeners do this, too. Easy to practice New Planting: go to Jonkers and buy three new astilbe. Shiny and new. All filled with their astilbe possibilities. But what is needed is attention to everything already in the garden, the rampant ivy, a great clearing. Harder to practice.)

Every writer I know wants big chunks of time in which to work. I’m off teaching for the summer, and then some–I have time now. And, as I’ve suspected, time is good but it is not everything! It’s not exactly what is needed. When I have a whole big giant Tuesday or a freckled loamy looming Saturday ALL HOURS FREE FOR WRITING I tend to falter, freefall, get cranky, and lose my way completely. I want more time when I don’t have it. What IS this all about?

Resistance.

You have to have something to push against, I think. It’s a Capulet thing.

So, I’ve spent this week with Tons O Time getting very, very little forward movement on my project–I’m writing about the same amount as when I have two hours in the early early mornings and a full teaching load. (Comparing myself to some other professors, but not all, this whole Sabbatical Choke is very common.) 

Today, I invented a new way of working. It’s called One Hour At a Time.  At the top of the hour I eat almonds. Make tea. Serve more almonds. Get very very clear about just what it is I will accomplish in this hour. (This is the hardest part, drawing a little square around the work, and going in to that spot super focused.) I pretend that’s all I have: one hour. I am better able to get out of time when I have less time. Time focuses us. But it can also swallow us whole.

Time isn’t the thing.

Getting out of time–losing track of it–that’s what we are after and it’s harder when you have Big Time–it’s like trying to lose Goliath. And when you have little time, little tiny time–it’s so hard to slip into that space. For me, an hour is a good amount of time to run for, to eat for, to write for, to have coffee with a friend for, to bathe or swim for. I love An Hour. It’s like the denim jeans of Time. It fits so many occasions.

Whole days, whole summers, six months–it’s like the Coronation Dress of Time. You will never feel like it’s the right occasion for this Time.

I am learning how to stitch a row of hours together.

Send almonds.