The real work

Today Beth of The Cassandra Pages celebrates her 10 year blog-birthday, and the entry she posted to commemorate the occasion raises for me the usual questions about what my “real work” is. Is it writing blog posts? Writing books? Teaching? Taking care of pets? When it’s all done and I’m dead, will it make any difference that I blogged, or that I did anything at all? What does it mean, after all, to make a difference in a world that keeps spinning—change and impermanence reigning supreme—whether I do anything or not?

What, in other words, is any writer’s “real” work? Annie Dillard, whom I’d like to emulate as much as anyone, said at the beginning of Teaching a Stone to Talk that her short nonfiction essays weren’t written to supplement her “real” work; instead, her short essays are her real work. Another of my literary heroes, Henry David Thoreau, wrote essays, poetry, several book-length works of nonfiction, and a multi-volume journal he spent his entire adult life adding to, page by page. So what was Thoreau’s “real” work? The books published during his lifetime? The books published after his death? The journal he spent his entire creative life adding to, and which served as the source of his published essays and book-length nonfiction?

Blogging is an ephemeral genre: what I wrote last week doesn’t matter much tomorrow. But if you look at a blog as being an ongoing project, then the dedication it takes to keep a blog going long-term has to count for something. As Beth herself writes,

…what emerges is a body of work. It isn’t conventional, or even graspable, and perhaps will be impermanent, but I know that it is, in fact, THE body of artistic work accomplished in my lifetime which most closely represents me. It’s also taught me the most. Once upon a time I wasn’t satisfied with that. Now, I am.

Ten years is a long time to do anything faithfully, much less thoughtfully and with care. It took me ten years to get my PhD, and between you and me, those letters after my name haven’t meant much in terms of professional prestige: I make no more money and have no more job security as “Dr.” than I did as “Ms.” So is my dissertation—a book-length work that was the culmination of ten years of scholarly work and now sits in the archives of my alma mater—somehow count for more than Beth’s ten-year body of blog-work just because my dissertation was “published” and earned me some letters after my name?

Both Beth’s blog and my dissertation reflect ten years of work, but one has been reaching out to readers and encouraging them on an almost-daily basis to think, write, read, draw, paint, take photos, sing, make books, speak out, and otherwise be active and engaged, whereas the other is considered a scholarly work and collects dust. So what is the “worth” of an active mind engaged in creative pursuits? What is the “worth” of ten years of showing up, paying attention, and sharing what you see?

If you’re a writer of nonfiction prose, it’s easy to fall into the trap of categorizing your work on the basis of its length: sustained, book-length narratives are “real work,” and short, self-contained essays are something else. If you’re a writer of nonfiction prose who also keeps a blog, it’s even easier to get confused by these categories: short, self-contained essays that are published in print count as “real work,” but blog-entries (no matter how carefully crafted) do not.

I would love to write a book, as Beth has: I have always wanted to write a book. At the moment, I have the vague, sketchy outline of book-length narrative in my head, but whenever I turn to work on it, my ideas turn tail and flee. Given my desire to write this book, should I force myself to work on it exclusively, even when it doesn’t “want” to be worked on, or should I follow my muse wherever it appears, even if that means working on the book while also writing “mere” blog-essays that may or may not ever “lead somewhere”?

That is the sticking point, isn’t it: this idea that what we do should “lead somewhere”? The other night I had dinner with Seon Joon, whose blog is younger than Beth’s, but just as deep. Seon Joon asked me, point blank, whether I was working on a book, remembering (I’m sure) that I’d mentioned one, vaguely, the last time we’d talked. My response to her was yes, I’m working on a book…but no, I don’t know whether that work is leading somewhere, or whether the product of that work will ever be finished, much less published. But in the meantime, I know I’m enjoying the process of working on a book, keeping a blog, and basically being creative in one way or another every single day.

Regardless of where the road leads, in other words, I’m happy being on that road. Did Thoreau know when he started his journal that it would eventually fill some seven thousand pages and be published as a work in its own right? Or did Thoreau keep a journal simply because keeping a journal felt right as he was doing it?

I for one am glad that Beth has been blogging faithfully and thoughtfully these past ten years. She is one of the writers who inspired me to start a blog of my own, and the fact that she is still posting is immensely inspiring. Maybe the real work isn’t a noun—a product you finish and publish—but a verb: a thing you do and keep doing. If that be the case, then here’s hoping Beth keeps up the real work for a very long time.

 

Retrospection

I’m slowly re-reading my hand-written journals, starting with one I began in August, 2002: nearly ten years ago, when I began journaling in large, lined Moleskine notebooks that now fill a shelf of their own.

It’s strange and surreal to have a day-to-day chronicle of one’s own life, an account that’s infinitely more raw and personal than anything I’d share on my blog. I’ve always enjoyed reading writers’ journals: my fondness for May Sarton, for instance, comes from her prose journals, not her poetry, and I love reading the mundane thoughts of essayists such as Virginia Woolf and Henry David Thoreau. I’ve intermittently kept a journal since high school, but I destroyed most of my scattered and self-absorbed notebooks from high school, college, and even the early days of graduate school. Only in 2002 did I start keeping the journals I kept.

It’s interesting to eavesdrop on another’s mind; it’s interesting to see how the rhythms of thought get patterned into prose. When you read the journal of a writer you’re familiar with, you can recognize in embryonic form the ideas and images that appear in later published pieces. One fascinating aspect of reading excerpts from Thoreau’s 1851 journal with my former writing students, for instance, is the way bits of Thoreau’s later essays appear there: for instance, scattered passages that ultimately appeared in the essay “Walking,” which was published in its present form only after Thoreau’s death.

When you read your own journal, you can trace the foreshadowing of a story whose outcome you know, having lived it. In 2002, my father was diagnosed with a cancer I now know he survived; in 2002, I applied and began training for an online teaching job I still have. In 2002, I knew my first marriage was doomed but didn’t have the courage to end it: that wouldn’t happen until two years later. In 2002, I lived with, tended, and had as my constant companion a dog in the prime of life who I couldn’t envision ever growing old, much less dying.

When literary scholars read the journals, letters, and other ephemera of published authors, they are looking for the seeds of greatness: how did this artist take the thoughts in her or his head and commit them to paper? When I read my own journals, I’m similarly looking for suggestive patterns, but only as they provide insight into personality: who was I then, and what happened in the interim to make me who I am now?

I think it’s significant, somehow, that it took me ten years to complete my PhD; I taught for just over ten years at Keene State; and now I’m revisiting nearly ten years of journal entries that offer their own partial slice of both experiences. Now that Reggie’s dead and I’ve left Keene State, it feels like it’s time to move onto something new–something Next. When I finished my dissertation, colleagues warned me of the let-down graduates often feel in the absence of a Big Project…but when I finished my dissertation, I quickly moved onto the big transitions of divorce, life as a single woman, marriage to J, and ultimately moving from Keene. Only now do I feel like the emotional aftermath–Buddhists would say the karma–of so many changes is starting to clear, providing an opportunity for me to discern my next step. What better way to figure out what to do with the next ten years of my life than by re-visiting my journals with their day-to-day account of the past ten years?

 

Words

Although I haven’t been blogging much, I have been writing…just not here. I’m still in the habit of writing four handwritten pages in my paper journal almost every morning, and most days this month that’s been all the creativity I’ve had time for, the rest of my energy devoted to the classes and course design project I started last month.

I finished my course design project last week, one of my classes ended this week, and another class ends this weekend. Once I’ve submitted grades on Tuesday, my schedule will finally slip into something more comfortable: just one online graduate class that runs until September. As always, I’m looking forward to a (relative) break from teaching and grading: a chance to return to writing, letting my own words settle into the spaces recently filled to overflowing with the words of my students’ posts and papers.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Words. I’ve blogged the photo at the top of this post twice–first in February, 2009, and again in December that same year–and I blogged the photo in the middle of this post in May, 2010.

These days I’m still writing loopy words with a Waterman fountain pen in a lined Moleskine notebook…but recently I’ve been using purple ink rather than green.

 

Irreconcilable

This morning I found the following entry in an almost-empty notebook: an essay I’d written on a day I’d gone fishin’ at the Museum of Fine Arts back in August, 2009. This is one of the things I like about keeping a journal. At any given moment, you can turn the page to rediscover something sensational you wrote then subsequently forgot.

Irreconcilable
Thursday, August 27, 2009

The judge was nearly an hour late. I don’t remember much from the divorce hearing that ended a nearly 13-year marriage, just as I don’t remember much from the modest wedding–just immediate family and a handful of friends–that began it. But I remember the judge being late.

It was October: too early for weather delays, but old cars break down year-round. Presumably my judge–funny how spending five minutes with a man will make you feel possessive of him–drove an old, unreliable car, as the bailiff seemed nonplussed when he announced the delay.

On that October morning, my judge was late–nearly an hour late–to my divorce hearing, and I fretted in the plain, paneled courtroom with its lawyers and tense-looking couples, none sitting next to the other, that the judge wouldn’t show up, my court date would be postponed, and after almost 13 years of marriage, I might have to wait a few extra days or even several weeks to end it all officially.

Marriage and divorces are both peculiar things. We place such value on the inexplicable power of brief, spoken sentences, as if words had the power to effect instantaneous and miraculous change. “I do” is the incantation that starts it all: so much tumult and transformation curled into two short syllables, an entire life–two entire lives–changing irrevocably in the space of a single breath.

My practiced line at my divorce hearing–my divorce hearing, not ours, the simple choice of pronouns saying everything–was much longer, but just as life-changing. When asked by the belated judge–my judge–what was the cause of this uncontested divorce–a dissolution so banal, my soon-to-be ex-husband didn’t even drive from out-of-state to be divorced in person–I was instructed by my lawyer not to tell the most dangerous of things: the truth. Instead, the magic incantation that would move my belated judge to sign the magical paper dissolving nearly 13 years of marriage was “irreconcilable differences have caused the irremediable breakdown of this marriage.”

It’s a mellifluous-sounding statement, sufficiently grounded in legal terminology to sound official, “I quit” or “It’s over” sounding too impetuous. A line like the one I rehearsed was complicated enough that you did have to practice it to sound convincing. You didn’t just utter it in the heat of passion or on a whim; if you could say it with a straight face, presumably you meant it.

Reality, of course, is never as simple as even the complex lines we practice in advance.

The real answer to my judge’s simple question of why would have been much messier had I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of truth. Why did my ex and I divorce? At the time, I’m not sure I could have explained something as simple as why. Who was to blame, he or I? Had we married too young? Had he starved me with emotional neglect, or had I choked him with unrealistic expectations? Did our marriage die under the inestimable weight of lingering resentments and reality-crushed dreams? Was either, both, or neither of us to blame?

“Irreconcilable differences” is a convenient shorthand for the most terrifying utterance of all: “I don’t know.” When I told my mother about my impending divorce, she told me, repeatedly, not to blame myself. “You can’t see yourself as being a failure,” she insisted again and again. “These things happen; you haven’t failed.” These weren’t the words I expected from my long-married, devoutly Catholic mother: surely someone had to have caused even a presumably no-fault divorce, and who better to blame than the only partner present in that blandly paneled courtroom?

I’ve tried hard these past five years not to blame myself–not to blame my ex–not, in a word, to blame. It’s incredibly difficult, though. That question of why still lingers, and pointing to “irreconcilable differences” feels like a cop-out. What have I learned from the end of an almost-13-year marriage? What mistakes did I make then that I might avoid in the future? On the one hand, I mustn’t see either myself or my ex as having failed–I mustn’t stoop to the vindictive level of blame. And yet on the other hand, if I don’t study my mistakes, how can I avoid repeating them?

You can’t simultaneously excuse yourself from blame and learn from your mistakes, although I’ve spent nearly five years trying to do both. These two ideas and the impulses they inspire, I’ve found, are simply irreconcilable.

Click here for more images of the Japanese garden, or here for images of the giant baby heads, or here for images from inside the Museum of Fine Arts, all of them taken the same day I wrote this subsequently-forgotten notebook entry in August, 2009. Enjoy!

 

Returning

This past week, I’ve returned to my usual routine of writing morning pages after a week or so of being too busy to write. For writing instructors, April is a busy time–the cruellest month–as we’re neck-deep in drafts from our students’ semester-long projects: a recurring cycle of writing, reading, and re-visiting as students and instructor alike rehearse their same old thoughts in search of something new.

Revising is largely a matter of courage: the courage to return to something you said yesterday, last week, or last month to see what (if anything) can be recycled, reused, or re-purposed. Returning to a neglected notebook demands a similar kind of courage. When I was new to journaling, I’d despair whenever I missed a few morning writing sessions, sure I’d never establish a lasting habit if I allowed myself to miss days at a time. Now that I’ve been keeping morning pages for years, however, I know better. Now that keeping morning pages is an established part of my morning routine most days, I know that occasionally missing a day here or there won’t destroy that established habit. What’s important is the underlying pattern: a settled sense that even if I fall off the bandwagon today, I’ll surely climb back on it tomorrow.

Over the years of keeping morning pages, I’ve learned that the simple act of keeping them is the point. It doesn’t matter what I say in my journal, but it matters that I do say something: it matters that I show up. It turns out that most spiritual disciplines are like that. Did you show up, and did you stay? And if you didn’t stay, did you at least come back, and do you keep coming back, again and again, no matter what the result, even when you’re not sure whether your practice is actually working?

If you keep showing up–if you keep returning–the pages and the practice are working. The simple fact of returning is the whole and entire point. This is true in writing and meditation alike. It doesn’t matter if you miss days or weeks in your journal if you subsequently return to the page, and it doesn’t matter if your mind wanders countless times while you’re meditating if you subsequently notice it wandering and then bring it back, bring it back, bring it back. If you keep showing up–if you keep coming back–if you keep try, try, trying–the words, the practice, the discipline won’t fail you. Words will appear under your pen; strength and stability will sprout beneath your rising and falling ribcage, as present as any breath. If you show up in prayer sincerely seeking the face of God, God’s face will appear to you, albeit in a guise you might not recognize. Ask, seek, knock, and return, return, and return. This is the universal truth of both spirituality and creativity.

Last month in a consulting interview, I described our inherent Buddha-nature like this. There is inside us a loving, compassionate being who wants nothing more than for us to wake up to our clear-minded and selfless potential. This being sits by our side like a patient grandmother, lovingly watching our every breath as we sleep in muddle-headed ignorance, looking for any sign we might stir. We might be sleeping late because we are sick; we might be sleeping late because we are drunk. Our Inner Grandmother doesn’t care: she just wants us to wake up, come home, and be present.

Our Inner Grandmother ultimately doesn’t care how long we slumber in our own selfishness; she’s patient and has brought plenty of knitting. Whenever it is that we stir and finally open one eye then the other, our Buddha-nature will sit up in her seat, smiling with kind eyes as she hands us the cup of tea she’s kept warm for us. It doesn’t matter to our Inner Grandmother how long we take to come home to the blank page, our meditation cushion, or our own true nature; what matters to our Inner Grandmother is that like a long-awaited spring, we finally return.

 

Something sensational

In the Importance of Being Earnest, one of Oscar Wilde’s characters famously quipped, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” And so this weekend, apropos of nothing, I took from my bookshelf the very first Moleskine notebook I ever filled and began reading a random slice of something sensational.

Reading one of your own journals is bizarrely fascinating, like window-peeping on an exhibitionist neighbor. Here is this seemingly familiar character viewed in an unaccustomed guise: should I watch with voyeuristic interest or should I politely avert my eyes?

The journal I pulled from the shelf dates from August, 2002, when I was working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way with a friend and subsequently trying diligently (and with mixed success) to keep regular morning pages. What I ended up writing was a day-by-day account of my first marriage at one of its critical junctures: the last autumn my then-husband and I lived in our old house in Hillsboro, NH. Within a year, we’d sold that house and moved into the rented apartment in Keene where I still stay during the week; within two years, we’d separated before our eventual divorce.

Re-reading one of your own journals is like re-reading a murder mystery: now that you know how the story is going to end, you can pay attention to the clues you previously missed. In retrospect, I see all the signs pointing to my first marriage’s demise, and this makes these particular journal entries especially painful to read. I cringe, for instance, at the number of times I mention sleeping in the living room in a favorite chair where Reggie would curl beside me before taking his accustomed spot sprawled on the couch. In retrospect, I clearly see how my then-husband and I used our house (and even our dog) as a buffer between us, the simple avoidance of going to bed conveniently shielding us from the awkwardness of intimacy. Had I known then that there is life after divorce–had I known then that I’d thrive on my own, and that I’d eventually (unimaginably!) re-marry–would have I have lingered so long in a marriage that was so clearly not working?

It’s all there on the pages: the bone loneliness, the oft-repeated and pointless arguments, the frustrations over housework, finances, and work. In the fall of 2002, I was teaching at two different colleges, working part-time as a freelance technical writer, doing occasional word-processing work for a lawyer in Boston, and plodding away at a dissertation I thought I’d never finish. I was doing everything in my power to pay the mortgage on a house I couldn’t afford while my then-husband was at home not walking the dog, not doing the dishes, not doing the laundry, and not cooking and cleaning. In one exasperated journal entry, I silently wondered why anyone imagined that Atlas, the mythical character who holds the world, was male when it was so obvious to me that it was women like me who shouldered the world’s burdens. In the fall of 2002–one year after 9/11, and two years before my divorce would be finalized–I silently wondered how much more I could stand.

Whenever I consider the “Me” I was when I was unhappily married, I want to reach out to her: I want somehow to send my voice across time to tell myself how things turn out. Reading these old journal entries, I want to reach across the years to hug that tired, lonely, frustrated woman I was; I want to send her to bed for the rest she so clearly deserved, and I want to reassure her that she really doesn’t have to carry the weight of the world. I want to tell her that everything works out fine in the end: the dissertation gets done, the divorce isn’t the disaster she might have predicted it to be, and it doesn’t really matter, ultimately, whether she finished the dishes, the laundry, and the cooking and cleaning on any given day.

If the woman I am today could talk with the woman I was then, I’d tell her something sensational: that in a world of second chances, I came home from walking the dog this morning to find my very own Atlas had done the dishes while I was gone.

 

Mornings like this

I technically don’t have time to write this morning — I have student papers to read and classes to prepare. But here I am, determined to fill at least a few pages because I like what I wrote a few days ago, and I believe writing sludge on mornings like this fuels the more fruitful writing on mornings like those.

I’m at that point of the semester when I feel desperate for time: “please,” I find myself begging the Universe, “just give me a few extra hours!” Who knows what I’d do with that time if the Universe were to grant it. I’d probably spend it sleeping or walking or sorting through pictures — anything but working.

It’s time, I think, to let a few apples fall.

So here I am scribbling instead of scrambling, trying to find an inner sense of balance between Work and More Work, Teaching and More Teaching. “What do you write every morning,” J asks, looking for a general synopsis rather than precise particulars, and I’m unable to answer. How do you summarize the contents of your cognitive junk drawer or explain why it’s important to your inner sense of calm to keep one? My morning pages have become a coping ritual for me, a way to see where I am in this world and in my head: a way of assessing how I’m doing…really.

I scribbled these paragraphs in my journal on Tuesday morning. This morning, I scribbled something completely different: the sound of rain, which I’m saving for a sunny day.

 

Be write back

On Monday night, I submitted the last batch of grades for my face-to-face classes at Keene State, officially ending a busier-than-usual Spring semester: time to re-introduce myself to my own life.

I’ve written before about the weird let-down I experience twice a year, in December and May, at the end of a busy semester, “the transition from super-busy to leisurely shocking me with its suddenness.” For the past few weeks, I’ve been juggling four classes, and for several months before that, I was juggling five; now, suddenly, I’m teaching only one. Now that I’ve submitted grades, I’m revisiting long-procrastinated tasks and reintroducing myself to friends I haven’t seen all semester, both my to-do lists and my social life tending to fall by the wayside at the height of the academic year, when the effort of juggling two jobs and living in two states takes most of my mental focus. The sudden switch from “on” to “off” is welcome, but disorienting in its own way.

One of the things I’ve been itching to have more time for is writing, both here on-blog and in my offline journal. I managed to keep up (mostly) with my morning journal-pages this semester, as I’ve learned over the years not to postpone the important stuff. But for the past month or so, during the always-busy month of April, I’ve downsized my morning routine, writing two pages rather than my usual four. Writing only two pages doesn’t save that much time from writing four, but when I’m busy, I find myself spending most of my journal-pages simply reiterating the to-dos I’ve listed elsewhere, spinning my wheels just thinking about the upcoming day’s tasks. At a certain point, it’s less frustrating to put down the pen and actually get down to doing the things you need to do rather than scribbling on about them, and writing two journal-pages a day is my compromise in the face of that fact: a nod to my busy schedule, but a conscious decision to keep in daily touch (literally) with the blank page.

I find there’s a substantial difference between writing two journal-pages and writing four, a kind of degree of depth you achieve after you’ve run out of superficial things to say. Once you’ve spent two pages describing the weather or noting the current behaviors of any of a number of pets, you then turn the page and have to dig a bit deeper to fill two more pages. Once you’ve stated the obvious–once you’ve repeated the same mundane observations you note pretty much every day–you have to go beneath these superficial details to figure out what’s “really” on your mind. Once you’ve gotten over the introductory pleasantries, you can tackle the question of how you’re doing, really.

In the past, I’ve looked forward to summer as a chance to write longer and more thoughtful blog-posts, and I’m looking forward to that this summer, too. But I’m also looking forward to having time to write longer and more thoughtful journal entries, the writing I do simply and entirely for me. When I don’t have time to craft long or thoughtful blog-posts, I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt, as if I’m neglecting my blog and its readers; when I don’t have time to devote myself fully to my morning journal pages, I feel a twinge of sadness, as if I’m letting my own self down. Now that my summer is here, I’m truly happy to be write back in the rhythm of my own life.

Click here for more photos from the Boston Women’s Memorial, which I photographed last month on the way to Symphony Hall for a BSO concert. Enjoy!

 

Purely prosaic

Several days last week, I was able to blog my morning journal pages, having had some topic or theme in mind during my morning dog-walk, then exploring it in my journal. It’s easy to post to my blog when all I have to do is type up, with minor revisions, whatever I scribbled in my journal that morning. But some mornings my thoughts aren’t that organized–some mornings, I walk the dog without having any one thing On My Mind, so I end up filling my journal pages with scribbled nonsense that’s of interest to no one but me–just the trivial minutiae of this and that.

It strikes me that just as I’ve always liked keeping a journal, I’m always interested in reading others’ journals. May Sarton is one of my favorite writers not because I’ve read much of her poetry or fiction; she’s one of my favorite writers because I love her journals. Journaling is a loose, more comfortable genre than sometimes-prissy poetry or the formal rigors of nonfiction. If personal essays are the literary equivalent of jeans and a T-shirt, journal entries are like a well-worn bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. In a writer’s journal, you can see her or his mind at leisure and lounging. What kind of logical leaps does an active mind make when nobody but the trusted page is looking? What kind of thoughts does an insightful thinker harbor before revision has tidied things up?

I often find myself wanting to re-read Sarton’s journals, her prose being so delicious, and on my intellectual bucket list, I’d like to someday read Henry David Thoreau’s and Virginia Woolf’s complete journals cover-to-cover. We read excerpts from Thoreau’s 1851 journal in my Thinking & Writing class, and these snippets always leave me craving more. When I see the way a practiced journal-keeper wraps her or his mind around a sentence, I wonder why the world even needs poetry, the rhythms of prose seeming more than ample enough for anything the mind or heart could ever wish to convey.

 

Inexplicable

I can’t explain why some days when I sit down to write in my journal, the words flow easily while on other days my thoughts and words are halting. On some days, my mind locks onto a track of thought and my scribbled sentences come easily, and on other days my words are halting and my attention gets snagged by anything but the blank page before me.

It’s not exclusively a matter of having “something to say,” for on some days I blather quite easily about nothing while on other days, my words and thoughts trip over the Profound Thoughts I want to convey. For whatever inexplicable reason, some days are smooth and some days are choppy: there is no rhyme or reason to it, just as there is no logical explanation for why some days it feels easy to meditate and on others it feels like torture simply to sit still.

Neither meditating nor writing necessarily gets easier over time; you just learn to keep doing it–to keep showing up–whether it feels easy or difficult, smooth or choppy. After you learn that it’s possible to write or meditate even on choppy days, it becomes easier to keep doing it consistently, even though there are plenty of days when the actual doing feels difficult. Like walking the dog in all seasons, you learn to roll with whatever weather the day offers, persevering even when the way feels difficult.