Translation of Inner Voice, Month of May, 2009

I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna…

A Summer of Hurdles

I am wondering this morning how I should think of my current situation.  For example, is packing up and leaving an apartment I love because I cannot abide my new neighbors a defeat or a wise choice?  Is it sometimes a wise choice to allow ourselves to be defeated?

When my landlord sold the apartments where I live, we didn’t immediately feel the impact.  But the community here has changed.  Where the tenants were once mostly graduate students and university staff, there are now families with children, undergrads with no furniture and about $3000 worth of stereo equipment, and everyone seems to have a large dog (after which they refuse to pick up).  I didn’t mind the families moving in.  I hear one father in my building often playing with his kids in the parking lot, and their noise is usually cheerful.  I could ignore the dog shit because I loved my apartment.  But the thumping bass and the surround-sound movies at 4:00 a.m. I cannot ignore.

First obstacle: I have an 840 sq. ft. apartment with hardwood floors, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, a wooded balcony, and lots of storage that is close the school and within biking distance of pretty much anything you’d ever need, including a farmer’s market.  There’s bus stop right out front and laundry on site.  There’s a small pool as well.  I pay $560 a month for this.  The other apartments I’ve looked at online in the area are generally smaller in size and are at least $100 more per month.  Is the battle to stay worth fighting?  And if so, how does one fight such a battle without engaging in a battle of the bands?

Second obstacle: How to study for prelims when you look at your reading list and are suddenly struck with both panic and the sense that, despite having three degrees, I am woefully behind in everything.  My education has been a whirlwind of information that never settled: I cannot see the tracks for all the dust.  It seems the only thing to do is to start over, to lay out the vernacular paths through the material on my own terms this time.  Anyone have a compass?

Third obstacle:  General malaise, which is a response, I think, to the first two issues plus a bout of “I can’t do this anymore” thinking, the last of which I am hoping our newly waxing moon will ease.

I am realizing more and more how much like my father I am.  Dad seemed to be obsessed with waiting for the absolute ideal moment to begin or embark on something.  This was a form of perfectionism that eventually ground him to a halt.  And so he almost never traveled (unless his job absolutely required it)–there were so many things that had to be tackled or accomplished before he could leave.  He gradually stopped taking pictures–the light, the weather, were never just right.  And he never fully launched his company, Firstlight Enterprises, because the universe never gave him the green light.  He was a driver with all the right equipment waiting at the starting line, revving his engine at the yellow light all his life.

How many confident green lights does the universe give us in this life?  How do we know when to go versus when to stay, when to allow ourselves to be defeated, when to understand the difference between “I think I can’t” and “I have no desire,” when to relinquish control, and when absolutely to grab it by the reins and yank the bit hard to get the universe’s attention?

Life’s Cycles and All the Other Go-with-the-Flow Stuff I Can’t Seem to Master

Ever since I was a little kid, I have insisted on trying to buck off some of life’s most inevitable cycles: sleep, for example.  I fought my bedtime rituals so hard that my father, finally exasperated, once picked me up, carried me into the bathroom and dropped me into a full bathtub fully clothed (he’d given me three warnings).  I knew once I had that warm bath, I’d get sleepy, and I didn’t that.  I wanted to stay up.  It didn’t help that I had wicked nightmares as a kid, but that resistance is something that’s continued.  I like nighttime.  I like my bed.  But the act of lying down and willfully relaxing seems to be the point at which I fail.

I am beginning to understand this as a particular form of anxiety, once that stems from a belief that, if one stops being vigilant, the world will fall apart.  School was a cultural initiation I fought for years.  All throughout elementary school, I purposely made myself sick so that they would have to call my mother to come and get me.  I think the principal and the school nurse began to catch on after a while.  They demanded I lie down for a while or sip milk, which did usually calm down the panic I’d summoned to do a tap dance on my stomach; and I couldn’t lie.  Twenty minutes later, when they asked if I felt better, dejected, i had to say yes, and they would send me back to class.  But I felt compelled to make myself sick because I was sure that, if I was gone from my parents and from home too long, something disastrous would happen.  The house would burn down–that was the scenario I most commonly imagined–or my parents would have to pack up and leave with no chance to come and get me.  I had to be near my family or they would disappear.  I was certain of it.  But this isn’t that kind of thing one admits to adults.

Did I have some vague sense as a child that both of my parents would die before their time?  That we would become estranged from any extended family?  Or was I just having anxiety attacks as a kid?  Back then they called what I had “schoolitis,” a term that has been replaced by Latinate jargon like generalized anxiety disorder.  But where does such fear come from?  Is it residual–does it accompany the spirit from a previous life?

I have never been very zen about the process of letting go, by which I mean both the act of giving up and the act of relaxing and going with the flow.  I do not, for example, handle the wait-and-see model well.   If I do not have a practical task to perform, I tend to lose it.  But cleaning, or cooking for grieving family, or running errands makes me useful, accomplishes something, and keeps me together.  When my mother was battling cancer, I learned to love the smell of lemon furniture polish, the planning out of meals and the making of grocery lists.  Domestic work propped me up.  The more I think about it, the domestic tasks I gradually took over for my mother were an unrecognized form of caregiving.  Though I was not the one bathing her.

Being of use:  this is the only antidote I know for grief, or for the hypervigilant anxiety that threatens to run off with my rational brain.  I have been thinking about all this as I have been watching over a sick cat, engaged in creaturely caregiving, worried that I will miss some sign of greater distress, that I might miss the one clue that could tell me how I could be of use.  In the meantime, there is so much wait-and-see, so much that requires patience, that virtue I never learned.

Writing Advice from the Tarot

The other night, in preparation for a summer of reading about and writing poetry, I consulted my Tarot about some key things to keep in mind when in search of writing motivation.  Here is what it advised, in a nutshell:

1. Develop your intellect and wisdom.

2. Be realistic.

3. Develop some discipline in your life.

4. You will inevitably experience frustration, impatience, and disappointment at times.

5. Let go of ego-oriented competition.  (An interesting subpoint of this card’s meaning: remove yourself from crowds that thrive on creating dissension.)

6. Don’t lose sight of what is important (my interpretation: the creative endeavor itself).

I think 2, 4, and 5 will be especially key for my own endeavors, but overall, I found this reading to be amazingly wise.

A Note on the Use of Tarot: Some people perceive the information given during a Tarot reading as coming directly from the spirit world. Others view it as a divinatory tool that allows the reader to access and give form to her own intution, which already holds the wisdom she will need.

The Moment of Creation

Early this morning, according to Jewish tradition, the sun slid into the place it occupied at the moment of all creation.  It seems appropriate that around dawn today, I fell into a dream in which I was driving urgently across a bridge, the whole time aware that the river was rising.  It was raining like the world’s end, and waves would wash over the bridge, pushing the car sideways.  I made it to the other side just in time to see the bridge devoured by the flooding waters.  (The random element?  When the other drivers and I turned to stare at the bridge we had just crossed, we were no longer in cars but tea cups, watching a flotilla of Volkswagen Beatles drift by, each flying an American flag.  I cannot even begin to assign meaning to these last details…perhaps my psyche was spring cleaning.) 

Just the night before, I had a long, narrative dream, the most interesting detail of which were the objects around the house that would spontaneously burst into flame.  The bright light of the small fires were startling, but their flames did not threaten to burn down the house or the other objects around them.  Like the burning bush, their fires were self-contained.   Both fire and water are the elements most associated with creativity, fire as the element of transformation and water as the essential moisture necessary for life and growth.  Both elements, in excess, can be both creative and destructive. 

If this pattern continues, then I expect to dream about earth energies next.  Or have I already met with air?  Is this what last week’s tornado dreams were, the excesses of the element of air?  If the sun has once again assumed its “creation position” for the first time in 28 years, then the sudden flood of elemental energies makes sense (although the tea cups and Volkswagens remain a mystery).   

As a writer, I am currently wondering how I can harness the universe’s burst of creative energy for my own purposes.  Scratch that metaphor–it’s too “beast of burden.”  Rather, I am wondering how I can tap into a stream of this river of energy to turn the mills of my own creative processes.

“Advice on the Writing Life,” Part II

Last week, Patricia Henley and I had an email conversation regarding her blog and its project and an earlier post of mine regarding the plethora of books that offer advice on the writing life to young writers. 

Out of this conversation have come some further thoughts regarding the significant differences between advice and mentoring.  In my opinoin, much of the writing advice that one finds published has two major failings: 1) much of the advice offered seems written under the assumption that writers all work/create in essentially the same way, and 2) it is static.  I would not,  by the way, discourage young writers from exploring some of these books; I might, however, encourage them to take the advice offered within the pages with a grain of salt.  (I do highly recommend Anne Lamotte’s Bird by Bird to everyone, and I assign the chapter titled “Shitty First Drafts” to my freshmen composition students every semester.)

What is infinitely more valuable to any writer is real and ongoing mentorship, something that Patricia’s blog seeks to offer to women writers in particular, and something that many writers seek when entering MFA programs (though it can certainly be found in other places as well).  Mentorship is a more personalized and dynamic onging relationship between two (or more) practicing writers.  This is, I think, one argument for MFA programs, despite the perrenial arguments that such programs reduce all work to what some have derogatorily dubbed “workshop” poems in journals–this is, by the way, an argument I find completely absurd.    The work of the three other women with whom I graduated could not have sounded more different from one another, and I found all of their work alive and promising in unique ways. 

Because of the personal nature of mentorship and because of the creative work at stake, I would advise those writers looking for an MFA program to get to know, if they can, the writers who teach at the programs in which they’re interested.  It is far better to attend Podunk University and find a mentor who supports you, who is both honest and invested when it comes to you and your work, than it is to attend the most prestigious university (or MFA program) in the U.S. only to be stuck with a mentor you don’t find to be a good fit; and personality has a great deal to do with the success of such relationships.  The writer whose novel or poetry you idolize is not always the best person to mentor your work.  Sometimes, however, the two match up.

Living in a Hive

Last night, I went searching through my apartment complex, trying to find the source of the bass that has been vibrating my apartment for the last two days.  Itwasn’t that loud, but bass travels a long way, through ceilings and floors, as any of you who have ever lived in an apartment know.   I never found the source, but when I woke up this morning and heard it again, I called the apartment managers, who instructed me to call the police.  I felt silly, but I called anyway: last night, I dreamt about that bass.  I was obsessed.

With warmer weather comes open windows and a window into the lives of those who live around you.  Snatches of conversation or argument…or music.  Those of us who live in apartment buildings often convince ourselves that we possess privacy.  Just as we believe that we are “alone” in our cars when we are driving (that no one is, for example, watching us wail along with Martha Wainwright at that stoplight), we believe that we are “alone” in our apartments with the windows open.  I often wonder how much of my life my neighbors can hear: my footsteps across the wooden floor, my ranting at stupid on TV, or my long, rambling conversations with my sister in Alaska late at night: “Someone left a garbage can with a moose leg on your porch…really?…and you skinned it?”

While I am self-conscious about the possibility of people overhearing all these things, I still manage not to close the blinds when I am changing in the morning, secretly believing that no one looks up at the third floor windows.  

Even after the police came and the music was turned down (some), I can still feel that bit of vibration, its mysterious source sending its sound waves into my small, would-be private world.  But really, this is a hive, and our living is not as private as we think.  The sounds of living drift in and out: doors slamming, people laughing, the neighbors’ kids taking the dog out.  And some days, all I want is for my apartment to be hermetically sealed, to be living alone in a house in the middle of a field without the noises of other peoplem in every room with me.  And other days, such noise is communal and (dare I say it) a little reassuring.