Liteature and Composition

 I say I want to “teach writing”. What does that mean and is it even possible? Although I’ve been told a couple of times that I can write well myself, more often than not, I don’t believe it. Many of my experiences and thoughts are just unavailable to me in words. How am I supposed to teach somebody else a skill I don’t even understand?

My sixteen year old son was assigned some reading over the summer - The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Tess of  the D’Urbervilles by Hardy and A Farewell to Arms by Hemmingway. I read Farewell along time ago and was awed by Hemmingway, even if some people label him a misogynistic pig. You know, who in this life doesn’t have some really fundamental, shitty warp on his or her outlook? I like Hemmingway a lot. Maybe it says something about me, liking a man who was so conflicted about women…betrays my schizoid tendencies. But damn, he could write.

Anyway, my son is nonplussed, borderline bored by the stuff he has to read and because I haven’t read the other two selections I am starting The Awakening so maybe I can help him a little. I feel ineffective and unprepared having just gotten my degree in English and not being able to give him an inspirational pep talk about why these novels are valuable.

About one third of the way into The Awakening, I feel the enormity of what Chopin is going for. I love the words, the scenes, the things that can’t be captured straight on. But what is a sixteen year old boy going to do with this? Without a guide he will not even suspect the wonder and magic in Chopin’s words. I will try. But this is some strange subject matter for a mother to discuss with her son. A mother who is still only sometimes at home in her own awakening. I guess this is what human relationships are all about - doing the best with what’s available right now.

Anyway, about teaching writing - My son’s assigned reading is for an English Lit/ Composition class. At the same time I’m thinking about Chopin, I’m reading a blog by a 22 year old junkie. There’s lots of stuff about dope, shooting up, getting sick and scoring again. But it’s good writing. Not Hemmingway. But it’s real, it’s coherent and it’s not boring (ok, well there’s only so many ways you can talk about dope).  For the most part, it keeps my interest and I’ve gone back to it a few times to check if she’s still writing.

I found myself questioning whether a self proclaimed sex worker/junkie would have the wherewithal to write as consistently and effectively as this woman does and I ran smack (ha) into a wall of my own prejudice. Why shouldn’t she be articulate and have the drive to figure things out, the longing and talent to try and make sense out of her life? She hasn’t had the epiphany but she’s searching. And searching is the state most of us spend our lives in. That or merely existing, plodding through as numb as we can manage. This woman is documenting her experience. For who and why? She says it helps her to get the stuff out of her head. Sounds familiar.

But my son is not reading this type of writing for ADV PL LIT COMP. He’s reading “literature.” But what exactly is he supposed to be studying? Do we read Chopin, Hemmingway and Hardy etc… for the lessons they teach us about writing or the lessons they teach us about life? Why do I find myself thinking about a heroin addict in South Florida who lives a life so unlike my own? Why do I find myself wondering at the frequency and fluidity with which she writes and questioning if a twenty-two year old could have such an easy style? Maybe because it doesn’t come that easily for me. Or because I’m twice her age and feel like I know half as much. Isn’t it supposed to get easier as you get older, get more experience etc. etc…

Later - Finished The Awakening. Brilliant as billed.

Later still - My son finished The Awakening and agrees with his friends that the end is dumb. She just walks out into the water to a deeper place than she can swim back from.

Our conversation about the novel was interesting. I talked and he listened (well, I think he did, at least a little). Maybe he heard some stuff that will sit at the back of his brain and wait for the right time to emerge. Like when he finds a woman and has children with her. He’s smart enough to rattle off an “acceptable” version of what the book is about, at least give the answers that would satisfy a majority of English teachers I’ve had (considering he’s in eleventh grade). But the book didn’t touch him in any way deeper than at the surface of understanding (maybe our conversation did?). Does it do anything more for him than reading the twenty-two-year-old-junkie-tells-all blog? I’m thinking about the sense of accomplishment and joy that I’ve seen teenagers gain from being in a garage band. It’s much more achievable than trying to get them interested in the symphony, although many of them do go on to seek out more skilled musicians and complex music. The thing is, one can be taught to appreciate something while at the same time have no skill to do it one’s self.

First Post in a Long Time

Writing this blog presents a new framework for me that I am not quite comfortable with. It’s a twilight, in between, not-sure-of-my-footing kind of feeling. At first I was enthusiastic about it because I like to write and I like to think. The blog was supposed to provide an incentive  for producing a mixture of the two on a regular basis. The trouble is the dual nature of the medium. Although many blogs are meant to be public and are written with the goal of being widely read, that’s not my intention here (although if scads of people are interested in what I’m thinking, well, ok with me).  But while I write for personal clarification and practice, I’m also aware that this is a public space so I need to be as clear as possible in case someone else is reading.  I’m writing for my own edification, or whatever, but I’m also writing for an audience. 

Rereading this, it does not seem like the blog should present a dilemma, but it does. I guess I haven’t clarified my intention for the blog to myself.  In an earlier post I wrote about excercising and practice. One of my intentions with the blog was to get that excercise in my writing, to build skill and endurance for translating my thoughts into words. But then I started to write and think about things that effect me on a personal level. And I wondered “Why am I doing this in a place that anyone has access to?’

A wierd thing happened at around the time of my last post that I still haven’t figured out. I sent an email to  an author, Akhim Yuseff Cabey whomI had read in my favorite literary magazine, The Sun. I thought his essay was fresh and exceptional. And because he listed his email address in his bio, I wrote to him, something I’ve never done before. He wrote back with a thoughtful and thought provoking reply. A positive experience. The thing that I can’t explain is that he referenced my blog in his reply to my email. I didn’t know the two were linked. I wrote to him again and asked how he  knew about the blog but didn’t get a reply to that query. Although this is only one factor in why I haven’t written for so long, I know it has definitely played a part. It’s not that it bothered me that he had read the blog or even that I want to keep my email correspondence separate from what I write here (wel, maybe in some instances) but it did underscore for me the public/private blurring that is a part of Internet writing.

If I wait to post this until it I’ve worked out the ideas, I won’t ever do it. My list of drafts will attest to this.  So apologies if anyone is reading for the abrupt ending. This is another reason why blog writing feels like a twilight endeavor - the ideas are not quite fleshed out, a little gray and indistinct. That’s the nature of how I see this forum and at the same time this goes against everything I’ve worked to do in my writing up til now.

Reasons for Writing in Black and White

 So, I did it again. Worked on a draft for the last couple of days and lost it. I changed the presentation of the blog to make it easier to read and when I came back - the draft was gone. The thing is the thoughts that don’t gel right away, the ones that are worth returning to, that make me search for direction or meaning or a way to uncover a blind spot I know is there but can’t quite locate - those are the ones that teach me something. I look at my thought process from a day or a week’s distance and see things that I didn’t notice before, missing pieces, links or connections. And sometimes rereading my written words provides an insight that just thinking about an idea doesn’t. Certain words resonate. I see that I used a passive voice instead of a sure declaration. Why? I find connections on different levels and see that maybe what I’m writing about is not at all what I thought I was writing about.

The draft contained a knotted bunch of strings, some that have their origin years ago in my past.

Last Friday a friend and I attended an event on the lawn of the Charles Wright Museum of African American History. A tribute to Gil Scott Heron was what had induced me to suggest the outing. Before we left, Val asked me if I thought it was going to be weird being the token whites there. I hadn’t thought about it much but really didn’t expect to be the ONLY white people there. And we weren’t. There was a little blond boy of about six years old who danced his way among the crowd of people on their lawn chairs and blankets.

I didn’t feel weird being there. The weird thing was that no one else seemed to think it was weird that we were there. I did feel uncomfortable though a couple of times, especially during the song “Niggers are Scared of Revolution”. This was one of the nods to Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” taking it to the next level, so to speak. Val had wanted to shoot some photos down by the stage so we left our spot on the periphery and made our way up front so she could get close to The Last Poets, who were performing. On many levels I understood the song and responded to the rhythm of the drums, the urgency, the passion of the words, the humor, the pathos. I understand false bravado and fucking up. I even related to the desire of the last stanza that tries to distinguish all the things people do to survive in this world from the one thing that shrivels a sense of self, the fear of change, of hiding in the safety of accepted norms. But I was an outsider here. As much as I could relate to some of the ideas Hassan was singing about, he wasn’t singing to me or about me or my experience. And I felt a little like a voyeur peeking in on somebody’s private moment. On the one hand, I wanted to participate in the music and poetry but on the other hand, I was questioning just why I was there.

Why, why, why. Needing to have a reason, a justification for what I do, has stopped me from pursuing things I enjoy. This is one of the strings that I’m trying to tease out of the knot that was contained in the lost draft. Why do I need a reason except that I like it?

Another string is the link to Gil Scott Heron. I had forgotten that in the first car I owned I nearly wore out my Gil Scott Heron cassette tape, playing it over and over again, not really listening to the words so much for meaning as for the affect they produced. And, eventually, being unable to say why I liked it so much, giving it up for something that made more sense (or so I thought) in my life. Afraid of being a poser (before that term even existed I think) but not even knowing what I might be trying to pose as - hip, rebellious, edgy?

Another string that leads from that knot into my present life in white suburban Detroit, a phrase heard a few times in the last several months: “The neighborhood is turning.” I think this refers to racial demographics as in “Our neighborhood is turning from overwhelmingly white to ‘mixed’” but I haven’t had the guts or motivation yet to ask exactly what a speaker means when he or she says this. Maybe it’s the rise in “for sale signs” as a percentage of the ratio of lawns that have them to lawns that don’t as in “My daily walk is turning into an education in just how many real estate companies there are.” And this string is entwined with another that has wended through time: the memory of my childhood neighborhood in Detroit blooming with “for sale” signs and its subsequent deterioration.

So many ways to pull on these strings, pulling them apart or pulling them into a tighter knot. I mostly welcome the change in my neighborhood and I don’t know why. I could say it’s because I think it’s good for my family to live in a diverse neighborhood that better reflects the world etc…but that’s only a small part of the reason. If that had been a big enough consideration I wouldn’t have moved here in the first place. And while I can envision myself saying “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the neighborhood is ‘turning’”  I chose not to discuss my experience at the Charles Wright Museum last weekend with several of my white family and friends because I didn’t know how to explain why I would want to do that, how to justify my choices. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do right now. 

In a way, I think I’m trying to justify writing too.  Do the reasons  matter?

Goals and Practice

Reading over a couple of other blogs this morning, one of my most undesirable character traits surfaced. I began comparing my few and fledgling posts to what others have written and quickly decided mine were thin and lackluster. What I find most troubling about this is not so much the negative self-judgment, (although this becomes a problem when I continually rate whatever I create against professional examples) but that it makes motivation always tied to results and rank. In other words, if I can’t be near the top, or at least above the middle, why even participate? It also limits my perception of other people because at that instant of judgment I only see their performance and not the whole person.

 

                                                                                                                                      

I recently began a twice weekly cardio/weights exercise class. I tried something like this once before, about twenty years ago, in the form of dance aerobics. The class was once a week back then and I don’t remember sweating nearly as much as I do now. As far as comparisons to other participants go, I think I may be the most uncoordinated person in the class. When they go left, I go right. Instead of single-single-doubles, I do double-single-singles. But during the first class I realized that even though I was feeling the discomfort that comes with not being competent at something (in full view of anybody paying attention) I also realized that I like  the feeling of excersising, working my muscles, even sweating profusely (masochistic tendencies here?) and I probably wouldn’t have that experience if it wasn’t for the class. I have to focus on the process, the experience of “doing” and not how my workout compares to anyone else’s. Concentrating on performance, at this stage, translates into big disappointment and probably quitting. Shifting focus and not holding on to the image of me stumbling against the flow of high-energy, buff  Olivia Newton-Johnesque (think 1980’s Let’s Get Physical video) gym nymphs is the only way I will be able to continue the class. (reality check - the gym nymphs in the  cardio/weights class are normal women, just like me, in various states of physical fitness, fat, thin, old, young. I know this but the image persists.)

So, I like the act of writing. It feels good, even when it is accompanied by the sting of pushing past a previous limit, perhaps especially when it means continuing beyond a level of comfort, a level perpetually within/beyond reach. This means there will always be  better writers than me (only someone who understands the focus of  ranking best to worst can appreciate the necessity of stating this).  

Do other people’s ability and expertise affect my writing practice? My first answer is a resounding “No” but on second thought this is not entirely true. Not true at all, really, if I think about it honestly. The reason writing fascinates me is because I’m affected by reading good writing. I’m not sure that my main motivation for writing is a desire to have this same effect on others but I think it must figure in there somewhere. And the excersise thing…while it feels good to just sweat and workout, the times when I’m actually in sync with the rest of class, well, I become a gym nymph too, and that’s kind of intoxicating. 

Again, I started writing with a pretty clear idea of what I was going to say and have ended up in a gray area, this time between the goals of process and result. Which one’s better, more useful? No easy answers.

Forgotten epiphanies

An incredible moment and mundane. Should I publish it or keep it as a draft until tomorrow when I can reread and edit, make it flow?

My husband and I have just been out to a bar for a beer, listening to  our jukebox picks (Foreigner, Stevie Ray Vaughn, ZZ Top) mingled with karaoke singing. One of the singers, Gladys, a lady of about sixty or so, warbling Patsy Clinish type songs.  The real personal ones about how I made the mistake of my life by thinking you don’t matter and IF I had you here, how I would treat you (treat you ) right and believe… again. (God, I love that shit. God I hate that shit.) Gladys was cool. She was off-key in spots but she reminded me of my grandma, singing in church, when I was about six years old. Grandma would sing out the hymns in that unbidden vibrato that comes in later years and at that time I didn’t understand how a physical faculty could be beyond one’s control. ”Why doesn’t she smooth it out? It doesn’t need to waver so much.” I liked the sound of young, strong voices, then.  I didn’t understand that things that come naturally, easily for  twenty  year olds come out differently when time grips the vocal chords and forces the sound through its own filter.  The tone sounds naked and vulnerable.

9:45 pm  - We have to get back home. The children are expected soon. The youngest out swimming at a friend’s house. The oldest at an end of year party/ farewell for the assisatant band director who’s position was cut due to budget considerations.

My son, sixteen, so much promise, so much ahead of him. He knows it, senses his power. In a way, like me, when I was his age, but hopefully posessing a stability that I didn’t know, something I struggle with long after that “peak” time.

My daughter, twelve, also feeling her strength but still needing her Momma. And I, so thankful that somehow I am able to fill that role. My role models gleaned from so many fractional places. Anywhere. Just show me how to nurture. And not destroy.

So here we all are,  in the kitchen, after our evenings out.  (This is where I stopped last Friday night.)

Now, Monday morning, I return to the draft and don’t even remember what was so urgent that I left that moment with my family to sit alone at the computer to get down into words.

I could do the Kahlil Gibran thing:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you…

etc. etc. But I don’t think that’s where I was headed. That we don’t own, in any way, the life we help create, is an old theme for me, not a revelation.

Oh well, the enlightenment has passed.  I write this in hopes that it has the same effect as writing down dreams in the morning, at least the little bit I remember.  I didn’t remember anything I dreamed until I started consciously working to bring my dreams to the surface when I woke up. It’s been a slow process but bits and pieces now come spontaneously on waking. Making the effort to write them down is a commitment, an act of faith that more will come. So I am also trying to summon other instances of intuition or flashes of knowing that so often get forgotten.

Natural practice

I’m setting a goal to write five times a week, even if it’s just a short paragraph.

My son recently gave a presentation at school, a project that combines work done in three different classes over about a two month period. Teams of two give results of their chemistry experiments, explaining methods and math in pretty impressive powerpoint presentations. Everybody dresses up - shirts and ties, skirts and dresses, the whole package. Parents are invited to attend; it’s the climax of the year, really. The teachers in this program are interested in preparing the kids for what they’ll be asked to do when they get to college and each year the presentations get a little more advanced, a little more in depth. And the kids, hopefully, get a little more comfortable.

He’s lucky he a gets a chance to do this (although he might not see it that  way). It’s part of a special Math Science and Technology school that he attends for half a day after half a day at the regular high school. There’s nothing like this at the regular high school. No cross-disciplinary projects or corrobration between classes. No parent invitations. No big projects that help tie together the year’s work.  I’m very thankful that he’s been given an opportunity to experience this kind of work bu t I can’t help thinking about all the other kids who didn’t get into the program and who won’t have the advantage of this kind of practice when they get to college.

So, anyway, feeling thankful, aware that exposure to things makes us more comfortable, enables a naturalness or ease of use that doesn’t happen automatically. I wonder how often immersion or exposure is mislabeled “natural talent.”

The day of the presentations, I rode my bike the five miles or so to my son’s school. This was a mini adventure for me. Although I frequently ride with my daughter all over the neighborhood, my son’s school is in the opposite direction and involves crossing seven-lane VanDyke along with segments of unpaved turf. I thoroughly overestimated how long it would take me to get there and ended up with about an hour and half to kill before his scheduled time. OK so this was a mini-mini adventure but I realized something as I was riding just to have something to do while I waited for my time to go into the school. I began to feel the naturalness, the spontaneity that I felt as a kid as I ditched the bike to sit under a  tree or hung on hard to the handlebars and decided to cross a wide bumpy feild. The bike became an extension of me because my body remembered and my mind  forgot.  It was exhilarating.

Thinking so often gets in the way of enjoyment or even performance. To do anything well, I think we have to be comfortable enough to forget what we’re doing and just do it. It takes exposure and practice. Bike riding, presentations, writing - the more we do it, the more natural it becomes.

Skeletons

 

A couple of weeks ago I began raking out the debris of dried leaves, brittle branches, and the occassional cigarette wrapper from the last couple years that had lodged under the big magnolia tree in the front yard. Every year the tree blooms and  is breathtaking for about a half a day. Then spring rain and wind whip the fleshy blossoms and turn the creamy white petals  limp and rust colored and strew them across my  lawn.  My neighbor has informed me several times that before we moved in, they too had a magnolia tree but opted to cut it down because of the mess it created. “Not worth all that work for the short time it looks nice.” Their plant of choice now is the arborvitae, that ever green, missile shaped, reliable mainstay of  suburban landscaping used to create a “natural” barrier when one does not want to spoil the mood of openness and harmony by erecting a tacky privacy fence. I tell them the mess is worth it . Think about it, a tree that’s 25, 30 feet high covered in nothing but fat, fragrant flowers. That magic lasts way longer than the brief time the magnolia blossoms are in the tree.

Because of the weird weather, the tree didn’t bloom this year. I found one or two lone petals on the grass. That’s all. One day I took notice and the tree was covered in green. Flowers always come before the leaves bud.

The photograph is of the remains of a couple of the leaves I found while I was cleaning up.  Many of the skeletons, as I learned they are called, are intact but handfuls ended up in a yard waste bag before I decided to bring them in the house and save them. Apparently the veins and arteries of magnolia leaves are such that they will keep their substance long after the rest of the leaf degrades. These are almost better than the tree in full bloom. Well, a close second. I learned that floral warehouses sell magnolia skeletons that have been dyed and meticulously cleaned. Directions for making your own skeletons involve soaking fresh green leaves in a bleach solution for several days then carefully brushing away all the extra stuff, the skin that seems to hold everything together. What I like most about my leaves is that they are products of time. Their loveliness comes from overwintering with the bugs and ice and spending months, ignored under bushes, stuck in the mud. And the bits that have hung on, that have refused to release from the skeletons add a depth and an interest that the clean store bought leaves lack.

I imagine the vision of me, on my hands and knees, gently separating and setting aside piles of soggy, dirty leaves confirmed my neighbor’s suspicions that I ‘m not “quite right. ” It didn’t stop the man from commenting one more time though that they had made a good decision in cutting down their own tree. I think he is hoping that one of these days I take the hint.

Borders

I don’t know whether this is a personal blog or a place to work through “academic” ideas. The line between the two is so blurred. Maybe it doesn’t exist.  Right now I’m trying to integrate a couple of concepts.  The first concerns noise - the outlier, the mistake, the answer that doesn’t match the query. Mark Nunes talks about this in Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. The elimination of noise is a goal that is linked to efficiency and a sense of control. Amazon tries for this with it user profiles of where and what I’ve  searched for/bought. It spits back suggestions that are  individually tailored to what it knows about me aiming to eliminate any dross that might waste my time. Only relevant information please.

Another idea I’ve been working on that was supposed to be a paper for a directed study from last semester but is still in the works, is identity, boundaries, why some things are “appropriate” and some things aren’t. In other words, accepted boundaries define what is allowed. Allowed by whom? I guess the powers that be. When those boundaries are compromised it can make people uneasy, queasy even. EEEWWWE…  It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. If you don’t like it here, leave. This is America; learn to talk right; . These kids and their obsession with computers - nobody knows how to read or write anymore! Yada yada yada… The thing is, there’s always somebody messing with the boundaries, mixing up stuff that ”should” have a  proper place. It’s just that these people usually don’t have a lot of power; they’re on the outside. But the reason they don’t have  power is because the old boundaries don’t work for them. They make their own so they can have a little control, at least, even if it’s outside the “norm”.

So, boundaries define noise. Old story. But is there a chance that boundaries are becoming less solid with the Internet? Search engines like Google combined with what I imagine as the typrical user’s search criteria  probably just reinforce accepted categories. Is there a way to search differently - a way that produces more possibilities? Can boundaries be mutable and functional at the same time - because boundaries are sometimes useful and necessary?

The personal part: I don’t really care about any of this stuff except that it affects me, my life, how I view things. The more I learn, the more my own definitions and boundaries change. Sometimes I don’t like it. It’s uncomfortable, even painful. What’s the payoff? More options, more control maybe. A paradox in this is that although I realize that I act from a position of self-centeredness, by attempting to accept the transience of borders, the center becomes dispersed. Perhaps, the center becoming unstable does not mean chaos but a new ordering system.

To Go Through

Through is an intersting word. I hadn’t thought much about it until I named this blog. I chose “Writing Through” because I’m interested in how writing gets an idea from one place to another or rather how I get from one idea to another through writing. Is writing like a passageway, a tunnel to travel through and come out the other side, in a different location? An English teacher once warned me to remember as I wrote about personal experience, “Writing changes it. It won’t be the same once you write it down”. Like any medium writing allows through  only the bits that can be affected by words, by their sounds, their connotations, their significance. What are the things that writing filters, the stuff that is unwritable ?

Writing this I’m reminded of a haiku by Buson (1715 - 1783) that for me holds the unwritable between its words and makes me qustion if there is ever a clear ingress and egress through anything.  

 A sudden chill-

in our room my dead wife’s

comb, underfoot.