Word After Word

1.  We want to be published so it feels like it matters. We don’t care if we are ready or the work is ready. It’s like sex. It just seems like a really great idea to have happen.

2. If you are alone in the evening and your heart is broken, that is a good time to write. (But not about your heart probably.) But grief screws with concentration. And so does joy. A boring life, this is the writer’s goal.

3.  Rick Moody writes every day, but what about? How to keep the projects going and finish one on Friday and start on something, deep, slow, serious, worthy, fabulous, the very next day? This is called genius. Good writers have a plan.

4. Talk like you talk to your best friend. Don’t encode the work, don’t try to turn it into writing. Stay with the true thing you yearn for and worry and know and do not know.  What you want to explain about the work goes in the work.  Resist the urge to tell yourself what triggered it, what it is. That goes in the work! Put your secrets and the plain things in the first sentences.

5. People who talk to a child at least once a day have an easier time focusing on their work.

6. Don’t decorate. Instead, collect things that you like (it always feel more like items find you). They will always match. This applies to the living room and it applies to the poem.

7. Slice time into smaller parts. Slower, slower, slower.

7b.  Tango moon!

The other day I heard a man complaining about his wife, her terrible habits. His burden was being married to her. As I listened to him go on and on about how bad he had it, I realized she actually sounded perfectly fine, a very nice person, who had to put up with a rather challenging husband. Who knows. The point is no one wants to listen to this talk. I think of my friend Jose, who adores his wife Sherri, and it’s so much fun to be around him. Jose is the kind of man who bursts into song when talking about his wife or his life.

Which got me thinking about the bane of my existence, my annoying, difficult, endless bad spouse: Insomnia. About whom I complain ceaselessly. This must come to a stop.

I can’t remember when it started, this inability to sleep at night. I think it began after my car accident, a devastating thing that happened in 1994: unconsciousness, surgeries, guilt, and swelling. But I am not sure exactly when the terrible not sleeping curse began. Maybe earlier? I know when I was young, I used to fling myself into my messy bed and sleep like a child, exhausted, bewildered, deleted. I do not know exactly when that abandoned easy sleeping stopped and the horrible wakeful nights began. But at some point, I became a person who lost the talent for sleeping. Was it the near death experience? a profound desire to stay awake, sleep being to close a sister to death?

It bothers me that I do not know when the insomnia got started. And that is part of the whole problem: I wasn’t paying attention. To my life, to the road. To my body, to God. To the moment. I wasn’t paying attention to my sleeping. I wasn’t paying attention to my waking, either.

A car crash is many things and one of them in punctuation.

So I am now in a bad marriage with my (not)sleeping, with my nights.  I am so sick of hearing myself complain about my little insomnia husband to my friends. It’s all I talk about! I want pity and understanding. I want to sleep. I want to feel rested and quick, focused, less like I am walking through the day as though walking underwater.

So this week, I decided to take me and my insomnia to marriage counseling, metaphorically. I have instituted a series of New Approaches. I am going to fall in love with my insomnia. I am going to cherish it, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Call me Mrs.Insomnia.  : )

Our vows.

1. A moratorium on whining about wakefulness. I want to be like Jose and sing about my nights. I want to love my nights, even if they are difficult, what isn’t difficult?

2.  Melatonin. Why not try? (Since the car accident, I have feared anything that would make me sleepy aka depressed because of the aftermath, emotionally, from that event. But I am not in a car accident right now. I am strong and healthy. I can try this melatonin. Which is like sleeping while being pulled by a tug boat through a choppy bay. Not restful. But the pulling is nice. At least I’m lying down.

3. Enjoying being awake. Instead of berating myself for being wrong wrong wrong and freaking out about how bad I will feel all day tomorrow, I am steering towards a good book. How nice to have time read. No thinking about tomorrow afternoon, and how un-witty I will be. So many books needing reading. Some part of me doesn’t want to sleep. I will try to enjoy these dark weird hours.

This is how I am loving my marriage to insomnia. I am with him. When he is there, I am with him.

I find you like this: I breathe. To find you, I have to be in my body and calm. It is, I assume, like fishing. (I haven’t fished in decades, so I am only guessing.)  I have to find a way to be satisfied with the moment just as it is, and I have to be very satisfied that when I “see” the person I am looking for, I won’t know for certain. I will make mistakes. I will think lots of people could be the person. Breathing really is the key.

So, confidently not-knowing, following, literally, behind my breath, I walk around. This is the difficult part, walking around looking at people. Everyone looks, potentially, like a person I am supposed to know, and many people seem like the person I am wanting to find/be found by. (In this way, prosopagnosia is, for me, the opposite of dating). I am watching the gait of each person while simultaneously attending to how emotions pass across the face. It’s sort of like when you watched the sky as a kid, and you saw all the shapes of the clouds, and how they moved within themselves, some parts fast, some slowly folding. You could see the sky, but you weren’t aware of it—it was the canvas or the background. So it is with the faces in a parking lot, where I’m wanting to meet up with a friend. The faces are like sky—they’re there, but they’re not what my brain pays attention to. The way the face expresses emotion—that’s what I’m tuned to.

So, this is how I find you. I see you see me. I see a face, mounted on a body that moves like yours—and the face expresses the cloud formation I know as “recognition.” I can tell, often, that someone approaching me is known to me, because they open, and create this connection. I recognize the spirit of the thing. And make a good guess. It never feels like knowing. It never feels like recognition. I’m wrong a lot. (Which feels like being stood up.) But it always, always always feels good to see someone else recognizing me. That’s what I lean into. That’s what I know.

I don’t recognize your face. I recognize recognition on your face.

Last night at dinner the topic was “words you pronounced the wrong way in your head, maybe for a long time.” Junior and Jacob reported the classic triumverate: macabre, infared, epitome. We added “buffet,” with the “t”. But Katya won with “fugh-a-tiv.” A real hard-landing g. No easy escape out of the word at all. Using the hard g takes all the sexiness out of fugitive. It makes the fugh-a-tiv seem like he is caught, doltish, and almost a part of speech, not really at all a man on the run.

We are people who prefer the created pronunciation over the one that is right.  Now I am hoping my students will comment on this post with their examples. I want to make a long list. I want a whole shadow language, a bizarro lexicon, made up of the secret wrong words. What I love is that every always knows which word you really mean; two words, simultaneously, for the price of one. That is a good trick, syntactical sleight of hand.

Wearing her Applebees uniform, she walked into the cell phone store, where Chad was slowly, sweetly, calmly explaining to me some fast features of the 21^st century and she said, “Dr. Sellers, hey I don’t know if you remember me.”  I read her name tag and listened to her voice and I said, “Of course I do. Stained couch, shag carpet, whole family laughing in the kitchen.” I could remember her essay, image by image, and her poems, too. “It is great to see you. You’re such a fabulous writer.” She told me how great my class was, how she missed it, and how she missed the other students. She complimented my teaching and I looked at my friend, who knew what I was thinking: I want to remember this moment, this true regard between us. Monica was already a great writer when she came into the class; she felt like she learned a lot, and that makes me beam but I doubt I have too much to do with it. She landed in a room (my classroom) where this thing she does really well, and cares about a lot, is highly valued.

We talked a little bit about her new classes and how polite everyone in West Michigan is and how we want to tell the truth so badly. And then Monica said, “But what are you doing here? You said you would never get a cell phone. You always told us that.” My friends intervened, I told her. And now I was standing on the precipice. It occurred to me, finally, I could try technology in my home, and if I hated it, I could actually get rid of it. Wireless and the cell phone could be an interesting intentional experiment. Maybe there will be parts that will add. Maybe this new process is not an abdication of my values.

“Be careful,” Monica said as she turned to a display of shining gadgets. “You’ll never go back.”

It was like I met up with a truth-telling angel in the ATT store. It was very comforting.

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 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