Category: writing

Posted on

Performance anxiety

It’s always best to begin with questionable etymology, no matter what the subject. (See, Heidegger did teach me something after all.) Wikipedia says (today) that the word sin ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *es-, to be. Provocative! – to be is to sin. Even better: the word(possibly) (maybe) comes through an unattested intermediary, whose meaning is “it is true”. Truly, to be is to be in sin.

That’s how I was feeling the other morning: I can’t help but fall short. I don’t have the resources to live adequately the shortened, cramped life i’m leading now. How then could I make the fuller life I want? I’m not capable. Only so much energy. Then I have nothing. (Funnily: I tend to act out this feeling with frantic bursts of energy, shouting and stomping.)

The parable of the talents has always been terrible to me. In lower, quieter moments, I seem to hear a voice, asking: Why have you done nothing with what I have given you? Over and over again, I feel like I have given hope and disappointed it, throughout mylife from start to now. Overcommittal and underperformance are my foci, I always feel equally too close to each.

And I feel judged by a distinct personality, who has distinct hopes and wishes (which are masked from me, in the vain but loving desire to allow me my own [terrible] choice). I can sympathize with pantheism intellectually, but I don’t feel it. With a full belly and with a good night’s sleep behind me, I can talk myself into feeling the oneness of nature. But it’s a derivative oneness, with a created character, bearing the stamp of its maker. When I was still trying to believe in god, I felt that atheism would be such a comfort. There is no judgment! – because no one is there to judge. No one but myself. Now that I am confident I can’t believe, I find (with relief) that the perpetual feeling of being judged has not disappeared. Only there is no god any longer to bear the personality. I went to where he was not, and even there he still was.

The empty, worn out feeling is uncanny. I wriggle with panic in the grip of it. It seems larger than any energy I could have the use of, and I vanish in comparison while my uncompleted tasks only grow. It’s large, and dark, and heavy, and turning my eyes to it makes me furious with terror.

Also funny: the reaction that calms me down fastest: the kind of backstage banter that acknowledges the anxiety but shows its other face. It’s all a performance; the eyes that watch me from the dark don’t have power over me; I can relax and take off my mask. It’s a particular knack to this kind of banter that both affirms my sense of the immensity of the dark, but that also deprives it of ultimate reality. God is only my father, I don’t have to do anything I can’t, just dip this sponge in water and those painted lines come right off the face.

Posted on

Tristes Tropiques

Blogs collect unfulfilled projects. (It’s a form of internet lint.) Why should this one be different? One more thing I plan to use this site for, another thing I get to avoid doing in avoiding coming here, I won’t notice it. So let’s announce it: We, Mfc and I, plan to read Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a couple chapters a week, for the next however long, and blog an exchange about it. It’s one of my favorite books, and I haven’t read it in five years. I’m really looking forward to revisiting it. You’re welcome to participate, comments are open.

The rough idea is: we’ll choose a short passage, one each each weekend, and write a short, off-the-cuff post about it. Dialogue, hopefully, to follow, threaded beneath. (No promises, though.)

Posted on

Post

Shortly before I moved across town at the beginning of December, I sent a letter to my new address, as a welcome home. But I didn’t include my apartment number (it had slipped my mind). I sent it a couple days too early, there was no one by that name at that address. So it was sent back. But by that time, I had changed my address at the post office: so it was forwarded on. But it had already been sent back from the new address once. So it was sent back again, and went into postal limbo, from whence it emerged only last week; but I had forgotten about it by then. So it was a little traveling time capsule.

The longer pace time walks with when you write letters: you write, you send, you wait. A month later, the conversation you had started continues, with the reply. You view it from a new place – much has happened. Do you still speak or think in the same way? But not much has changed in a month: are you different at all? An interchange of letters makes a good repeated theme: longer than a measure, shorter than a movement. And, unlike either, subject to variation, expansion, iteration; potentially never completed.

I used to be an excellent correspondant (up to about eleven years ago), I remember writing letters between classes, on the metro, during classes, at home in the morning and the evening. I would have hardly sent a letter off before beginning another, often to the same person (to be completed, and sent, after I got the reply back). The extended monologue directed to a single person is a model of thinking.

Recently I decided to start writing again. I made a list of everyone I could think of (I made a file of stamped and addressed envelopes), I wrote three letters a day. I scattered them, for about a month. And so now I’m receiving my bread back from the waters. A couple times a week, another letter comes in, or two, replies go out. Correspondances make a nice zigzag canopy to live under: they provide continuity and mutually reinforcing roof support, like a web of interlocking rafters, or better grape vines growing on a scaffolding above a path.

Posted on

Piling up

I’m not being productive unless I’m feeling overwhelmed. Usually I don’t do much. Then I’ll have a burst of activity. Then the energy will run out, and I’ll find myself overcommitted. & then I retract from my commitments, rest, then feel ashamed of how little I do, and start the cycle over. I’ve never learned how to surf, but an analogy suggests itself:

In between active periods, I’m just afloat. A wave will cross me, I’ll swing with its motion, and return to my original starting point. Likewise a new interest will come up under me, and carry me with it for a limited period of time, and then it passes and I am back where I started. This is the normal state of things: rest, ride, retreat, repeat.

Then a wave of energy approaches (I can feel it coming across the calendar), and I start to gather myself up: I sign up for more activities, I plan to start new habits, I acquire responsibilities. The wave comes, I’m on top of it; the best part of the feeling is the power I have. I can do anything, and I can take anything. The feeling of infinite adjustment: I have room in my time for whatever new might come along, and any jar that comes along I can translate into a pleasing bump in my schedule; accidental becomes intentional.

The wave comes down eventually – it runs out of room underneath, and brings me down with it, or in it. The bouyant forward motion that sustained me before begins to push at me from all sides, with no coherent progress that I can perceive. I’m suspended in chaos by contrary motions. (And I get sand and salt in my mouth and eyes.)

When the wave is done with me, I’m deposited, exhausted, on dry land. Little waves of energy come and go but don’t move me. (They sort of tickle.)

Later, what remains with me, both in what I’ve produced and what I remember, tends to be the period of falling and unwilling abandonment to too much from too many sides. The fear and loss of control make it exhilarating, in a different, less pleasant way from the feeling of gathering power that comes on the crest of the wave, but more true, in a way I fail to express adequately.

Posted on

Low

I haven’t been blogging, because I haven’t been writing posts, partly because I’ve been feeling low, and strung out. That shouldn’t keep up for too long.

By weight, blogs are 75% and upwards apology, like zines and communications with thesis advisors and editors.

Here’s something I wrote six months ago, and I wonder at myself:

Avoidance of responsibility can also be a sign of confidence. Either in yourself: you are sure that the responsibility is not onerous, you will get to it at some later date, or that this failure will not affect you (your essential you); or in events, that they will smile on you, and your debts will be erased.

I think I had told myself I had to write one of those a day. So there are a lot of iffy ones. I’m not sure the thought on that one was all bad, but it’s poorly expressed. More exactly: I’m not sure what I’m saying or whether I mean it. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got the intellect to power it through regardless. So it’s strutting; checking its fly with one hand and combing its hair with the other. This one has more zip:

The foundation is measured quickly, but what if you become old, waiting for the concrete to set, before you can begin building.

Posted on

Dialogue beginning, draft

Another project I’ve had sitting around is a philosophical dialogue. It bogged down because I couldn’t see what my point was. But I like as far as it got. Maybe it’ll go further. (Here’s to hoping.) You’ll see I wrote myself into a corner. Or at least I’m not sure where to go from there.

Scene: outdoors, summer. Public park.

Philo. – Hello, friend! What are you reading? Whatever it is, it has you quite by the tail: you didn’t even hear me approach. What has you so enthralled; is it another of your ancient books?

Iskander. – Oh no, it is quite new, published only twenty years ago, and not translated until ten years after that. I have become quite contemporary, you see.

Phi. – Well, what is it about? What is the gist?

Isk. – Just now, the author has begun a new topic, which I do not yet fully understand.

Phi. – Do not tell me what he has just begun just now. You never will tell a story properly, with all its parts attached: beginning, middle, end. I ask you what your interests are, and you tell me about a new fad that has only held your attention two days and in three more will be entirely forgotten. I ask you what you are planning to do, and you tell me about the most idle fancy that has occurred to you, the one you are least likely to put inhas written about that you have already comprehended, so I can judge clearly whether there is anything in this book to make it worth my while, rather than once again getting caught up in one of your windy enthusiasms.

Isk. – Let me rather continue as I have begun, and perhaps you can help me understand this difficulty.

Phi. – What difficulty is that?

Isk. – He begins by speaking of boredom, and he divides it into three kinds.

Phi. – I do not wonder that you are so focused! What could be more captivating?

Isk. – You may reconsider after you have heard me speak. In any case, if you have come only to give another exhibition of your sarcasm, I have more interesting conversation partners I can speak with, who will appreciate the work I have put in beforehand, and will treat it with the respect it deserves. Listening is as much part of the art of conversation as speaking, and it is the duty curiosity owes to thought.

Phi. – When did you become such a sloganeer? Very impressive. Yes, I will be silent and hear you out. But I will not promise not to mock you once I have heard you.

Isk. – He divides boredom into three kinds. First, there is the kind of boredom where you are attending on some one particular thing with intensity, unable to hurry its completion or to do anything but await it.

Phi. – I could comment that this is the situation you have placed me in. But I do not. Instead I possess my soul in patience, and await the sequel.

Isk. – I admire your restraint.

Phi. – Then reward it: what follows from this?

Isk. – The author draws conclusions from this regarding the nature of time.

Posted on

Admonitory premonitory

There’s a guy I see around town from time to time, and I never like seeing him. Oh, he’s harmless, pretty nice guy, we’ve talked a few times. He always says hello when he sees me. But there’s always a sense I get, whenever we meet, that there’s something shameful between us, and we both know it.

I met him in late 2004, at one of the first jobs I worked at in Portland: temping in the swing shift at the check batch processing department of a bank. My job was to pull register tapes from batches of checks, scan the tapes, and bundle the checks with a rubber band. When I’d done enough to fill a tray, I would walk the tray over to the side of the floor with the optical scanners. It was an okay job, so long as I kept myself in books on tape; minimal attention required to do the work.

He had the same job: a shortish, reddish man with a white moustache and short white hair. He stood out, most of the people on our side of the floor were South Slavic college students, stood out even among the temps (temps are always odd lot). Serious demeanor, slurred the s sound in his speech in a deliberate way, was always reading on his breaks or at off-peak times. One day I noticed he was reading a book with that tell-tale inter-library loan sheath around the cover. So I asked him about it, and he told me he was assisting a friend’s research – something about some Indian philosophy, I don’t recollect if it was ancient or contemporary, but I have a feeling that it was something that had been fashionable or attractive thirty years ago and was largely forgotten now. That was more or less the end of that conversation. I thought about trying to get him to talk more about it, explain a little more what he was researching, why, whether I would be interested. But he seemed so ashamed during our first conversation that I left him alone.

At any rate, we didn’t talk any more about it, and I soon quit that job – taking three days off unscheduled at four hours’ notice counts as quitting, it turns out – and then I started running into him all over. Especially on the bus, at the central library, and the Portland State University Library. Invariably he would be reading, I would be reading, we would both ignore each other until it was impossible to keep it up, then nod, and say hello, and do our best to ignore each other. I don’t know why I made him uncomfortable, but I think I know why he made me uncomfortable.

I had been reading New Grub Street by George Gissing at the time I met him, and it had rubbed off on my whole self-perception and my perception of my environment at that time. If you don’t know the book: it’s about the life of different writers and the different ways they make ends meet in late 1890s London. It’s stands out for me especially in its detailed description of the day to day economics of living a writer’s life, and the effect that kind of life has on the domestic lives of the characters. Detailed isn’t the word, maybe concrete is: the description is hard to ignore, large and cold and finely delineated, all the bumps and irregularities that make a thing real, that’s what I want in the word.

I was just coming to realize at that time (as I do, from time to time – every year or two I have a giant skull-opening, mind-blinding realization of the same damn thing each time, over and over again) what it means to have to earn your bread and self-respect by the sweat of your brow, or I mean sale of your time, and that depressed me. My time, the only thing I had that I could make into something that might not pass away irretrievable like everything I said and saw and felt, the only space I had to work in.

And seeing this one everywhere I went like my own future coming back to warn me, this specter life had clearly passed by, hanging on to charlatan intellectuals still living in generation-old fashions, taking books out from the library and bringing them back again in an endless round, desperate to talk to someone and touch another mind but ashamed to try, well, it seemed threatening to me.

I saw him today on the bus. I had two stacks of groceries, a Finnish novel from the thirties, and another book by the guy who wrote The Body Snatchers. He saw me, pretended he didn’t, sat leafing through a book, watched me, for a little and pulled out a notebook and made a few notes, then put it away and greeted me as he went towards the door at his stop. I didn’t respond quickly enough, or something in my response put him off, so he felt he had to explain where he knew me from, turning bright red as he stepped onto the curb. I wonder what he wrote about in his notebook, and do I bother him as much as he bothers me.