The wheres and whys

This morning I walked Reggie first thing upon awaking, recognizing we both feel better when we begin our day on foot. Reggie rests more quietly–he’s less antsy–after he’s been walked, and I feel more alert and alive after our strolls. Taking a walk makes it easier for me to come back home, have breakfast, and then write in my journal, even if I haven’t seen anything on my walk worth writing about. The simple act of getting out and getting moving pulls me away from my laptop’s virtual world and pushes me into my neighborhood’s actual one, and that’s a good thing.

Mark posted from India today about blogging and diary-keeping, and I posted a lengthy comment in response. I think it’s natural for bloggers to occasionally ask themselves why they started (and continue to keep) a blog: why keep a blog when it doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything? Yes, some bloggers become famous or at least popular via their online writing; some bloggers get book deals or make money from their sites. Most of us, though, do not. Blogging is something we do primarily for our own satisfaction; if we were looking for something else from our online writing, we’d give up, discouraged, the moment we discover New York literary agents aren’t pounding down our doors with book deals and expensive pens in hand.

The only reason I continue to keep both a journal and a blog is I see each kind of writing as being a spiritual–not a commercial, professional, or even practical–practice. I write journal pages and blog posts the same way I sit in meditation: the act of writing or sitting is its own reward. Any positive consequence of sitting, writing, or blogging is an accidental side-effect: a result (good or bad) that’s beside the point. Long ago, I gave up any hope or expectation of achieving “enlightenment,” figuring that sitting quietly, breathing, and lightly gazing at the floor in front of me isn’t a bad way to spend an occasional half-hour. I’ve given up, in other words, any hope or expectation that meditation will give or get me anything remotely practical; instead, I figure if I’m here in a human, breathing body, I might occasionally spend some time simply experiencing what it’s like to be breathly and embodied.

Writing is the same kind of practice for me. After eating breakfast in the morning, on most days (when I’m not in a frantic hurry) I don’t have much better to do than sit a spell while I finish my morning juice or tea. Given I’m typically in no hurry to attack my to-do list right after breakfast, I might as well do something rather than nothing with that time…and scribbling into a notebook is the “something” I’ve chosen. You might reach for the newspaper while you finish your morning coffee, or someone else might flip on the television before showering and getting dressed. I reach for notebook and pen: nothing special.

Were I a perfectly faithful journal-keeper, I’d have no need for a blog…but an online audience keeps me honest. If I skip a day or two, a week or two, or a month or two in my journal, no one but me will notice. But if I disappear without a post or picture for several days or more, presumably someone in cyberspace (I tell myself) will notice. On many days when I just don’t feel like I have anything to show or tell here, the expectation of an awaiting audience (whether they’re actual or merely imagined) makes me show up rather than slacking off.

Ultimately it is that fidelity and discipline–that entirely quotidian commitment to show up more days than not–that keeps me blogging. Practicing anything (meditation, writing, or other) by oneself is no less fruitful than practicing with a community, but many of us are more likely to show up consistently if we know other folks–including folks whose names and stories we know–will be showing up as well.

So these days, I blog about Keene to remind Mark what it’s like here while he spends his academic sabbatical there. The rest of the time, I blog about my environs to remind myself time and again what it’s like to be “here” even as I remain close to home, steeped in the here and now.

This is a more-or-less exact transcript of this morning’s journal pages, written after I’d walked Reggie, made a quick check online, and ate breakfast. If you’re interested in this topic of blogging and journal-keeping, I’d highly recommend Mark’s post as the push that set my mental wheel in motion.

 

The weight of words

It’s the fifth week of the semester at Keene State, the fourth week of the semester for SNHU Online, and the third week of the semester at Granite State. In other words, this week I’m feeling the full brunt of being a multi-institutional adjunct instructor, burning the proverbial candle at both ends to keep all my juggled balls aloft and moving.

I’m tempted to say that like Mother Hubbard, my blog-cupboard is bare, but that’s not true. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, pictures to share, or ideas for blog-posts: there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all.

At times like these, I feel more like a bricklayer than I do a writer. While my poet friends concern themselves with the crafting of fine delicate trinkets–the work of literary watchmakers or jewelers–I’m daunted by the sheer weight of words as I try to keep on top of a perpetually renewing paper-pile. There’s no time to help my students craft fine delicate sentences; instead, we’re in the business, my students and I, of building weighty walls of prose, and that means schlepping a lot of words.

It’s tiring work, this building with words, brick by brick. At the end of one of my marathon teaching days, my feet ache with the weight of language, and I come home wanting nothing more than to sit on my couch and say nothing. On grading days when I’m home with dog, laptop, and the ever-present paper-pile, my head and neck feel the weight of words like a yoke as I plow, ox-like, through the furrows of other people’s prose, pen in hand.

At this point in the semester–the simultaneous fifth week, fourth week, and third–I ask myself why I require my students to write so damn much, a question I’m sure they’re each individually asking. The answer, unfortunately, is always the same. If you want to become a bricklayer yourself, you have to lay your own wall, brick by brick; if you want the benefit of learning from an older, more experience bricklayer, she needs to watch and oversee your progress. It’s long, grueling work, and there are no shortcuts. By week seven, six, and five, we all will be stronger and more callused, my students and I. Between now and then, though, all we feel is the slow grind of a heavy haul.

 

A grief observed

Yesterday I started The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of the emotional aftermath following the death of her husband and the life-threatening illness of her daughter. I’ve not read much Didion apart from a few essays anthologized in various freshman composition textbooks I’ve assigned over the years, but what I’ve read, I’ve liked. In the essays I’ve read, Didion demonstrates a ruthless, unflinching refusal to turn from grim and difficult scenes. A “pretty cool customer” is how a hospital social worker describes Didion when hospital workers approach her in the Emergency Room waiting room to inform her of her husband’s death, and this “cool customer” tone resonates throughout the book as Didion recounts the experience of losing her husband while worrying about her comatose daughter.

As a writer, I relate to this “cool customer” aspect of Didion’s prose. I believe that when you’re writing about something emotionally charged, you have to separate the emotion from the words, allowing language itself to act like a twitch–a clamp attached to a horse’s lip to distract it during veterinary procedures–so you aren’t fixating directly on your own pain. If you’re worrying in your author’s mind about a particular turn of phrase or the peculiar echo of a repeated image, you’re less likely to be sucked under by the pull of pure emotion. Instead of writing about your own pain, which is an entirely subjective subject, your writer’s mind considers pain as an abstracted, almost Platonic thing: what universal elements of Pain does my experience point to, and how can I share that accurately with any feeling heart?

When you write about pain–particularly your own–the words serve as a sort of lifeline, something to cling to in the maelstrom of contradictory feelings and remembrances. As Didion’s memoir vividly illustrates, in the face of tragedy you can’t control your feelings, the tidal ebb and flow of grief, but you can control the words with which you describe your own emotional tsunami. When you write about your own pain, the act of crafting language becomes one way of making sense out of the senseless, a written version of Freud’s talking cure. Because Didion has such a long, illustrious history of being a “pretty cool customer” in her essays and fiction, her sights were honed to razor-sharp acuity when tragedy struck, every wife and mother’s worst nightmare happening while she stood with eyes wide open.

I’ve borrowed the title of today’s post from another classic memoir of grief, the journal C.S. Lewis kept after the death of his young wife. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction: husbands die at the dinner table, daughters lie in comas caused by hospital-contracted infections, and wives die before their older husbands. There’s no sense to be made of any of these inexplicable realities: sickness and death defy the narrative arc of “happily ever after.” But as long as a writer’s eye remains open to her or his experience, even tragedy can be transformed into art, a pretty cool customer finding the kernel of truth behind events most mortals prefer to ignore.

 

Morning would

I’ve moved beyond lamenting there not being enough hours in the day. At this point, I regret that there aren’t enough first hours.

On any given day, there are at least three or four things I’d love to do first thing upon awakening. A faithful writer should write first thing; a good Zen student should practice. Unless I want to get increasingly soft in the middle, I should exercise first thing in the morning to make sure I don’t put it off, and on any given morning, Reggie is waiting by my bedside to make sure I let him outside and then get his breakfast first thing.

When I lived in the Cambridge Zen Center, I woke at 5:00 am and did two hours of bowing, sitting, and chanting meditation before breaking silence and beginning my day…but that often meant staying up late the night before to finish the necessary grading and class prep for day’s worth of teaching. These days, I don’t have the energy to stay up late grading and prepping classes, so if I don’t get everything done at a reasonable hour, those work-related tasks are waiting for me first thing…after, of course, I’ve done a quick check of my online classes to make sure there are no Urgent Issues that need to be addressed before I head off to campus.

During the summer when I don’t have the deadline of an 8 am face-to-face class breathing down my neck, my preferred morning ritual is to wake, walk, and then write, the walk satisfying both Reggie’s and my needs for exercise, and the writing happening in the tranquil moments after we’ve both been fed. But during the school year, it’s difficult to find enough hours to get everything done, much less everything done first thing.

My Mom once described the psychological juggling act of motherhood by saying “Being a mom means there’s always at least one person who’s angry at you.” Although I can’t speak toward motherhood, I can assert that being an adjunct instructor teaching a full-time-and-a-half courseload means there’s always a student email to answer, a pile of papers to grade, or a class to prep. I have an ongoing fantasy of leisurely mornings when I can wake without an alarm, reach for a handy pile of books and magazines, and lounge abed for a while, lulled by the comfort of pleasure reading. Instead, I have a dog who doesn’t believe in sleeping in and a pile of student papers stacked up to my chin. It looks like my morning would has gotten crushed again by a heap of morning shoulds.

 

Who knew?

Try to imagine the shock I experienced during yesterday’s visit to my favorite stationer in Harvard Square, Cambridge: Moleskine now makes extra-large cahiers, which are sold three to a packet with either black or buff-colored covers. As so elegantly displayed by the black-gloved Phantom Shopper, these soft-backed notebooks are roughly the size of a composition book, dwarfing both the pocket-sized and large notebooks.

I refrained from buying any of these new extra-large notebooks because interestingly enough, I’ve recently downsized my Moleskine preference. Although I still have a religious dedication to my large lined journal, I no longer carry it with me everywhere. Yes, after having selecting my ubiquitous walking bag largely because it is sized to fit a large Moleskine, I’ve begun leaving my large lined journal at home on my kitchen table, where as you already know I sit and write over my morning cup of tea. These days, I carry with me in my walking bag a pocket-sized sketchbook for recording doodlish inspiration, a pocket-sized weekly planner for tracking appointments, and a single pocket-sized cahier for to-do lists, grocery lists, random thoughts and forget-me-nots, etc.

So while I’m carrying a collection of three Moleskines with me these days, they each are pocket-sized, my large lined companion holding down the fort on the kitchen table. And with that, I think I’ll put the kettle on for tea. It’s never too late to sit down with a long-time friend.

While I’m having a spot of tea, click on over to The Dog’s Breakfast, where Panthergirl is hosting her Second Annual Comment-A-Thon for Greyhound Rescue. Just like last year, Panthergirl will donate money for each new comment received on today’s post, so click on over and tell her Reggie sent you (woof!)

 

Elsewhere in the blogosphere

Here’s a rear-view picture of Central Square’s bronze sentinel, his view of Main Street blocked by December’s Christmas tree. This statuesque fellow plays a starring role in an essay I wrote on the Qarrtsiluni theme, “Finding Home,” which you can read here along with recent contributions from Natalie, Fred First, Fred Garber, Ruth, Trix, Tom, and Rachel. Yes, we’ve had quite a run of impressive contributions to Qarrtsiluni…and although we’re no longer taking submissions on the current theme, we still have a handful of posts by way of finale this week. So be sure to bookmark the site for future visits: you’re in for a treat.

Another site you should bookmark to visit often is teju cole, the illustrated travel-blog of a Nigerian-American re-visiting Africa after a long absence. Teju’s blog is both stunning and ephemeral, having begun in December and promising to terminate at the end of January (read it while you can!) I’ve been gradually savoring past and present posts like gourmet chocolates: a taste here, a revery there.

So while I myself head downtown to check on Keene’s bronze sentinel, I encourage you to take a trip elsewhere in the blogosphere, over to Qarrtsiluni, again to teju cole.

 

Time flying

Yesterday I took a break from writing to take the dog for a walk along Airport Road in nearby Swanzey, NH. I took this picture to compare with one I took the last time Reggie and I went walking at the airport, way back in August, when both trees and fields were green and leafy.

Yesterday was sunny, so time wasn’t the only thing flying. Every area pilot, it seemed, was taking advantage of a mild Saturday afternoon, including several biplane daredevils doing tricks: loops, barrel-rolls, and drop-dead nosedives. A strolling father and son stopped to admire the show, as did an incredulous middle-aged man on a bike. “Are they putting on a show for people at the airport?” the latter asked as he rode past. “I think they’re doing it just for the fun of it,” I replied.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard concludes with a profile of stunt pilot Dave Rahm, who took her for a couple barrel-rolls over the Cascade Mountains several years before his death during a performance for Jordan’s King Hussein. In Dillard’s description, a stunt pilot’s control of the invisible line “written” with his plane is akin to a writer’s quest for beauty with her pen, beauty being both intoxicating and potentially deadly. Standing yesterday in shirtsleeves gazing slack-jawed at the sky, though, I couldn’t see the similarity, for surely stunt pilots are superior to writers. No matter how wild our words, at least we writers keep both feet on the ground while even the most elementary daredevil throws caution to the wind, flying as recklessly as Time itself.

 

Turn the page

Last night I marked the kind of small accomplishment that brings a spot of joy to these otherwise cold, gray days. I filled my most recent Moleskine.

As someone who’s been journaling on and off since high school (and we won’t do the math to calculate how long ago that was), I’ve written my way through lots of notebooks. Even greater, though, is the number of notebooks I’ve started but never finished. Life has interfered with writing, or a blank book that looked lovely on the stationers’ shelf has turned out to be uncomfortable to the hand or too scratchy under the nib. In a word, I’m picky when it comes to journals: when I happen upon a brand I like, I become obsessively loyal to it, stocking up on extras “just in case” Apocalypse or market trends make it impossible for me to buy one when I need it. Like Seinfeld’s Elaine hoarding a closetful of her favorite contraceptive sponges, I have a Moleskine stash that should keep me writing for, say, the next few years. (Yes, this should tell you something about my social life: forget about being sponge-worthy; what I want to know about any given person is whether they’re interesting enough to be chronicled in one of my precious Moleskines.)

I adopted large, lined Moleskines as my journal-of-choice back in August of 2002, and since then I’ve filled eight of them. Before that, I was obsessively insistent on black Blueline recycled-paper composition books: they open flat, are narrow-ruled, and have a medium-sized page. And they’re black: my journals must be black. Yeah, pretty journals are, well, pretty…but we’re talking the tools of my writerly trade. When’s the last time you heard a carpenter insist that her hammer had to be pretty?

Large Moleskines are smaller than Bluelines: large Moleskines nicely fit in a bag or purse. (Yes, I choose my handbags on the basis of whether or not I can fit a notebook in them: forget about carrying a wallet, my notebook is the True Necessity.) Moleskines’ compact size and elastic band make them more easily portable than my Bluelines ever were, and I really do stash stuff (stamps, stickers, stationery, photos, addresses, business cards, laptop backup CDs) in the rear pocket. Although Moleskines are substantially more expensive than Bluelines (the latter being intended, after all, as a school child’s comp book), Moleskines simply feel more substantial and serious. Carrying a Moleskine and pen (Waterman Carene fountain: the best $200 anyone’s ever spent on me), I feel like I’m carrying the toolbox of a working writer. Moleskines mean business, and I feel that when I write in one: although I have (and have thrown out) many a half-filled comp book, I’ve consistently filled (and kept) all my Moleskines, eight down and counting.

And now I’m working on number nine. Today is bright and sunny with highs predicted to top the freezing mark; this afternoon I have a date to meet Ivy and Beth, two of my long-time blogreads, for hot beverages and book-browsing. Yes, the morning after starting a brand new notebook, it looks like today’s going to be imminently Moleskine-worthy.

For all the bibliophiles who are squinting to see what else is in my collection, I keep my Moleskines right under my God Shelf, which is home to the sundry remnants of my Bible-thumping days as well as books by and about my favorite Christian mystics: Merton, Rolle, Julian of Norwish, Teresa of Avila. And for Reggie, a guide to Dog Health and Care. This triptych to God, Writing, and Dogs says pretty much all you need to know about my life priorities, thank you.

 

The 50,000-word giggles

If you’ve been watching my NaNoWriMo progress on my blog sidebar, you’ve already seen the good news: I finished and thus “won” my write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge, logging in late last night with a whopping 50,311 wretched but oh-so-gratifying (now that they’re oh-so-over) words. Can somebody please pinch me?

In my Zen school, there’s a famed phenomenon called the 90-day giggles. During the winter and summer months, monks, nuns, and motivated lay-people have the chance to sit a 90-day intensive retreat that involves a 4:00 am until 9:45 pm schedule of sitting, walking, and chanting meditation. During the entire 90 days, retreatants keep silence; consume no meat, sugar, or caffeine; and are encouraged to refrain from making even eye contact with other retreatants. This rigorous regime is designed to clear the mind of all mundane distractions so meditators can focus whole-heartedly on their practice for the duration of the retreat.

By the time the 90th day rolls around, something quite remarkable happens. After ridding the mind of distractions and slowing down to enjoy the minute details of life, retreatants are completely in-tune with the universe and themselves. And in response to this remarkable feat, people on the final day of 90 days of silence often, typically, get a massive case of the giggles…the so-called 90-day giggles. After sitting in silence staring at a hardwood floor for three months, nearly everything seems gut-wrenchingly, side-splittingly, fall-on-the-floor-laughingly funny.

Although I’ve never sat a full 90-day retreat, I’ve sat week-long chunks in the winter and three-week-long stints in the summer. After 21 days of silent retreating, you do get somewhat slap-happy, the simple phenomenon of eye-contact being enough, at times, to send you over the edge of silliness. First one person starts giggling, then another, and another…before you know it you have Zen Masters slapping their knees and monks rolling in the aisles. It’s simply natural, I think, to need some sort of physical, emotional catharsis after the intensity of doing nothing but concentrating for 7, 21, or 90 days, and a good senseless giggle fest is as good an emotional enema as anything.

So last night, after hitting the Wall of Despair around word 43,000, I experienced a nearly terminal case of the 50,000-word giggles around word 46,000.

Writing a novel in a month is very similar to sitting a long retreat. When you sign up for a Zen retreat, you have visions of how relaxed and enlightened you’ll become after spending a concentrated amount of time meditating without distraction. Once you’re actually sitting a Zen retreat, however, you inevitably reach an “oh shit” moment where you realize or remember that Zen retreats really, really suck. Your knees hurt, your thighs ache, and your back is screaming for mercy. Your mind is either wildly racing with distractions, neuroses, and obsessions or you find yourself literally bored to tears. You find yourself madly craving pizza, beer, and chocolate, and you have elaborate fantasies of seducing, slapping, or simultaneously doing both to whomever (man or woman) happens to be sitting next to you. In a word, your mind goes completely and entirely nuts when you spend massive amounts of time doing nothing, and the tricks it comes up with to entertain itself make you want to run out of the room screaming.

And in a word, that’s pretty much what the act of writing a novel in a month feels like. When I began NaNo’ing, it sounded like such a cool writing exercise: what better way to kick-start my writing and kill my Internal Editor by diving head first into a massively insane writing project? Partway through actually doing the damn thing, though, I experienced that aforementioned “oh shit” moment where I realized writing a novel in a month really, really sucks. I’d lost all sense of plot (not that I had any to begin with), I lost all sense of characters (not that I had any to begin with), and I lost all sense of sanity (not that I had…oh, never mind!) I ran out of words to say but continued writing anyway, taking the storyline in directions that were entirely unbelievable, adding sex scenes that were entirely unnecessary, and having characters do things that were entirely out of character. Around about word 46,000, I was tired, thoroughly sick of the horrid crap that was masquerading as “my so-called novel,” and completely slap-happy.

As Gary, who finished his NaNo novel yesterday afternoon, can testify, last night I could barely speak I was laughing so hard at the utterly awful sentences I was writing. In the end I killed off a handful of my characters in a shoot-’em-up blood bath; had one character speak from beyond the grave to talk about how she’d died; featured a rhapsodic sequence where rocks, trees, and Mother Earth herself derive a so-called moral from this tawdry sequence of events; wrote a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards in a cheap attempt to pad my word count; and transformed an otherwise innocent, idealistic female character into a lurid seducer who beds (in absurdly comic and astonishingly acrobatic fashion) nearly the entire male population of her college campus.

So, what did you do over your Thanksgiving weekend? Now that it’s over and my ribs are slowly recovering from the 50,000-word giggles, I’ll proabably be crazy enough to try the whole NaNo insanity again next year. But I won’t be able to say then that I didn’t warn myself now. No shit, Sherlock: writing a novel in a month really, really sucks, so maybe next time I’ll try to start off with a plot, a couple of characters, and an ounce of sanity in my head. Or then again, maybe not…and maybe that’s what’s the funniest of all.

 

Decision time

No, this is not an official endorsement: although I’ll be casting my ballot in tomorrow’s election, Hoarded Ordinaries is a truly no-spin / no-comment zone. This is just a glimpse of what the Sunday morning before a Presidential election looks like in Downtown Keene, with Kerry supporters on one side of the street and Bush supporters on the other. With tomorrow’s election on the horizon, it’s Decision Time: which do you prefer?

My latest batch of online grades is due by noon today, so right now Decision Time means grading for Yours Truly. After I’ve finished my final calculations, signed my gradesheets, and faxed them off, I’ll be settling in for my first stint of NaNoWriMo insanity. My friend “A” (not her real initial) already wrote her first 1,032 words right after midnight, so she’s set a marvelous model for me to follow. In the meantime, I’ve decided on my first line, so when I sit before my laptop to write later today, I’ll be starting with the following sentence: “The first line, like the next step, is always the most difficult.”

We’ll see where exactly that leads me. For those who want to stay tuned to my novel-writing progress, I’ve added a sidebar snippet that will list my current word count as well as the last line I’ve written. (Thanks to Gary for the suggestion of featuring such an update on my sidebar rather than tainting my main entry section with bad prose.) So my Monday will be filled with grading, faxing, and writing…what’s your next step?