Bring on the Long, Blank Summer

Today is the first day of my summer vacation. *sigh* I couldn't be happier about graduating from high school, but I'm a little irked at the thought of no longer being able to procrastinate writing because of schoolwork. I have a job, so I won't be doing nothing besides writing, but I'm not used to having no paper, test, or project in the back of my mind. It's scary to be only responsible for my book. 

A week ago, I was giddily "in the groove." I wrote a page a day and enjoyed it. Now I've slowed down a little, probably because I'm immobilized by my fear of losing that momentum, an obnoxious self-fulfilling prophecy. But I realized my mistake: I was focusing on product, rather than process. I'm sure everyone has had this problem, but it always takes me a while to realize I've fallen into this trap yet again. Fear works in the dark, and you only realize it's there after it's done you damage.

So I guess this isn't an incredibly original post, but I thought I'd get this blog started up again. (And your excuses are running out. School is over. For most, anyway.) Here is this post, tidily summed-up, straight from my bulletin board: "You must not intend to create something worthwhile. You must intend to play with blank space."

Personify, personify!

I am dangerously devoted to Rilke, and his obsession with inanimate objects is blaringly apparent in my own poems. So you can imagine my disillusionment when I realized that personification defeats the purpose I once thought it had.

I was trapped in the back seat on my way to Pennsylvania when I decided to amuse myself by personifying bent trees, something about how they were scooping things from the ground--then it hit me: the trees are not scooping anything. Trees are trees and they don't even know that they are trees. Maybe a few of you have already grasped this shocking concept, but this was news to me. Did this mean that all Rilke's studies on "Things" were just fancies, ridiculous projections of his own humanity on inanimate matter? Well. . . yeah.

Maybe this is why some people don't like poetry, labeling it far-out nonsense with no actual content, no "reality." Because that's actually what I'd been aiming for with personification, trying to find the reality behind non-human things. But now that I realize my mistake, I'm surprisingly still comfortable with personifying. So what if it bypasses the "Thing" altogether by relating it unreasonably to the human world; what was I trying to learn from a mute birch, anyway? By making such an association, by making a baby tortoise a "Ulyssean atom" (D.H. Lawrence) or the inside of a rock a hidden kingdom (Wislawa Szymborska - "Conversation with a Stone"), we learn more about ourselves and the questions we're confronted with. I can get over the fact that matter doesn't mean anything, in and of itself; in that case, it won't mind if I give it meaning to further explore my comfortably human world.

Vacation

Vacations are invariably disappointing when you don't actually take them. This is what I've been doing all week. My April vacation--or do you call it spring break?--has consisted mostly of writing essays for scholarships and practicing for the AP calculus test. 

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't make such a martyr of myself, sighing heroically whenever my mom told me to take a break, answering sullenly, "I have no time." But then again, I have no time! I think I'm clearly on the path to being the nutty old lady who throws things at trick-or-treaters because I just want the world to leave me alone. I want to have time to read my pile of unforgivably good books and to write my own. 

I can get very upset when I am afraid about my writing, and watching unfunny America's Funniest Home Videos just makes me feel degraded. Half of them are too violent to laugh at and make me feel like an audience member at a very boring Coliseum. 

You might be able to tell I'm still uneasy about writing at the moment. But I did discover a pattern last night: fear>frustration>crying>exhaustion>surrender. And surrender is where writing can begin, because you're simply desperate to get something on the page before you fall asleep that night. So, maybe I'll do that again today. Or maybe I can somehow begin with surrender.

Surprises

1. I threw away half of a Lindt chocolate truffle today because I didn't want it anymore.

2. This morning, there was frost on my mom's windshield. Frost. On April 9th.

3. What matters is not discovering the unknown, but my willingness to be submerged in the unknown.

That last one could use some context. Since January, I have been writing a book. It's set in Chicago in the very early Great Depression and it's about racism, revenge, extra limbs, death, God, blindness to each other, idealism, etc., etc. I'm going for something Woolf-ey, very situated in my character's minds, and the whole thing will span one week. I know everything it's about while knowing nil about a silly little thing called 'plot.' 

So, I started drawing the irrational conclusion that knowing the plot is what really matters, although I have a certain short story perfectly plotted out with imagery, parallelism, even a clincher of a closing line,--that I have no incentive to write. It's sad, I know. It's saved as "new," and has been since February. 

Therefore, I think it's safe to say that knowing what I didn't know (i.e.: plot) doesn't necessarily spur me on to write. What does spur me on is the decision to plunge into my own ignorance and wait there at the bottom of the ocean, holding my breath, until I see some flash of light. Uncomfortable? Yes. But it's the only atmosphere where my characters will show their faces, maybe even do something. I have no story without them, and without my essential darkness.

On Vicariousness

Okay, my first two posts have been thoughtful and abstract and thereby kept you all ignorant of my true nature: I am a complainer. And a procrastinator. What's more, I fully believe my complaints justify my procrastination, that is, until I watch something like Ansel Adams on American Experience.

It was stunning, I didn't know much about him before watching. I was awed, enthralled, and convicted about my own lax quotas for daily writing (half a page a day typed, if that). But these exposes on great, above all, diligent, artists have become a sort of temporary fix for me. I vicariously pull their all-nighters, scour their starving-artist fridges, hang on through their roller-coaster love lives, waste away with their terminal illnesses--all the while producing jaw-dropping work from some other-worldly energy source. It's all irresistibly romantic. But does it change my attitude about writing?

I don't think so, because it's (I really mean "I'm") placing all the emphasis on the artist, and all the artist's romantic agonies, rather than the art. And forgetting self is the first step to finding something new. 

But I can't honestly say I'm going to reform and wean myself off of American Masters and American Experience. These programs do have valuable things to teach me, I just have to be sure I don't allow to think of myself as "one of them," as an artist; the artist at work is always a nobody. To disappear in the act of creation is the only real romance.

Attention vs. Application

I've just finished John Hellman's Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought, a lovely little book about the French philosopher/resistance fighter/Marxist/Christian mystic who I find extremely stimulating. Anyway, in the second-to-last chapter I ran across Weil's concept of attention, which relates to many of her spiritual ideas but also applies strikingly to writing:

"Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one's pupils: 'Now you must pay attention,' one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.

Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application that leads us to say with a sense of duty done: 'I have worked well.'" (Hellman, 85) (I wonder, do I have to cite my sources on this? I'm so entrenched in MLA format.)

"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. . . Our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive the object in its naked truth. . . We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them." (Hellman, 86)

Now, of course, the real question is how to go about doing that. Well, I think what she's saying is that application means focusing on trying to focus, and attention means not trying anything at all, and focusing as a result. I hope this helps you guys as much as it's helping me. That's all for now. I'm off to go not-trying.

Write With Death in Your Pocket

Greetings, Prism Review! I hail from slushy Massachusetts and am thoroughly excited about joining the blog. Here it goes.

Lately, I've noticed something: it's much easier to bring myself to write on busy schooldays than on the weekends. One would think that more time equals more writing, but come Saturday morning, watching ice melt is downright fascinating compared to dragging myself to meet the blaring white face of my computer screen.

So I pinned this little line on my beloved bulletin board: "Write with death in your pocket." I figured the reason I can write when I'm busy is that the night is so obviously fast-approaching. An empty schedule makes the day seem eternal, so I lose the urgency to write. Therefore, since each night is a "miniature death," I guess, remembering the fragility of life makes me use my time more wisely. 

This may hang a perfectly The Iceman Cometh pall over your day, or week, for that matter, but that's truly not my intent. I might be twisted by being comfortable meditating on death, but I honestly think it's helping me to write, so I thought I'd share it. Maybe another visual would be more helpful for some. . . Something like an angry pirate who'll kick you with his wooden leg if you don't write. Sure. "Black-beard wants a sonnet."