This is not a blog post.

Journal excerpt:  I think about returning to blogging, so here are some to save for the time when I feel that it is right to start posting again:

Sometimes, frankly, I just feel a little silly about blogging.  Strangely enough, such afflictions rarely affect my commitment to writing privately for an hour each day, in the latest edition of a long-growing stack of notebooks in various shapes and colors.  I tell my deepest secrets to no one, I pine within the lives of invisible ghosts.  Such seems perfectly natural, but I tell you that every time I blog I can’t help but being drawn into the circles of others who also do, and this is always a soaring euphoria - connection with others! O kindred soul! Where have you been, my friend, my love?  How have I missed you all this time?  I vow to never cease,  to live even for this and this alone for within this is the pulse of something too great to name.  

You can see, by now, where this is going.  Eventually, in certain settings, the soul’s most earnest songs begin to wear the cheap and tawdry rags of desperation.  One can’t help but notice the way that so many other writers are doing the same.  Blog.  Ugly word, it begins to sound a bit like the sort of uncouth act that might be performed in the back alley off the 56th block of Broadway in any city in these states.  One can’t help but notice the veiled desperation in the words of others.  Social networks read like the classified ads of the not-yet-loved.  Read this, they always say.  Here is something profound, so many tend to offer, but not without this:  link to me, subscribe to this.  Follow me.  Read me, read me.  Love me. Here’s my handle, here’s my twitter, here’s my Facebook page.  A body grows exhausted just thinking about all the clicks to come.  Is this our world now? There’s a tendency to want to run away, and I tend, on at least a yearly basis, to succumb to this.   This is despite the fact that the very world that I am scorning here has led me to kinship with souls for whom I dearly care, and with whom I may never have connected otherwise.  

It’s disgusting, really, but I guess its only as abhorrent as many of our most basic functions, which are after all, the ultimate denominators of our common humanity.   So, for whatever this is worth, I tend to return, and such is one of the many conundrums of living as a human among others.  One is always dying to give oneself away.  So here I go again.  Look at me.  Is anyone still reading?  I don’t care, really.  I’m writing anyway, and that is - once and forever - enough.  Forget I ever asked.  I’ve got to get back to work.  

Photo courtesy of  Trisha Weir on Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Fruit of the morning

Daybreak in the Schofield Barracks* tastes like a stolen mango, lifted from the yard of a tiny dark-skinned woman who rolls her own cigarettes and smokes as she keeps watch over three mangy dogs in her yard and - I thought then - over us.

From time to time, in bursts that seemed to coincide with the final puffs of each cigarette, just before she ground it in a tray by her right elbow, she would wave the machete that seems to have been a constant fixture in her left hand, waving it like a prayer or a curse - I never could tell which - over the dogs, over the empty yard with half a dozen rusting cars on blocks, over the land that I later learned, in brochures printed on the continent, was paradise.

An anonymous volcano smoked too, in the distance, with the portent of God waiting to strike, or maybe just fuming, and the light refracted off the machete like angels cast out. I remember hoping that was the case, as the hot daycare room steamed and children who seemed unaware of anything but one another and of the combined forces of velocity and volume, commingled in a torrent like shrieking harpies, and I knew that it was a long time until lunch, and longer still until my father would arrive, in his crisp button down shirt, quietly shining with starch and certainty, to lead me home by a hand.

On the way, we would pass again by the fence of our neighbor’s yard, and help ourselves to a low-lying fruit, a smooth weight whose cool promise would be placed on the kitchen counter, not to be opened until the next morning, tasted over the sound of honeycreepers and before the altar of Kolekole Pass bleeding pink with sunrise. Then, chin and chest covered in illicit juice, the impossible sweetness brings my mother, with a gentle washcloth and a goodbye kiss. She leaves only a thin coat on the insides of my cheeks: to be sucked at, poked and prodded with a tongue, as I watch the woman with the machete roll her cigarettes and throw angels all over her yard while God smoked his authority above us, and children in a red room in the barracks scream their way through the confines of a long, low-ceilinged prison, which might have been a perfectly fine setting for a morning of play, if I had been able to crack the code that they seemed so effortlessly to understand, the thing about volume and velocity, and if I had been less distracted by the lingering sweetness on my tongue, tasting like a promise that came and went too quickly, and a day that was yet to begin.

* For the record: I have never been to Schofield Barracks, nor have I ever tasted a fresh Hawaiian mango. This is a fictional exercise that reminds me of a writerly maxim about the way that fiction has a paradoxical tendency to be more true than fact, sometimes. I thank Judy Reeves for inspiring this entry with an interesting exercise that involved the cutting of maps into pieces, and writing from the section you received.

Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?

I have been nowhere, writing mostly in my head.

For weeks (months?) now, I have ben meaning to compose a post with a heading to the effect of “Where I’ve Been”. Obviously, I've been more thinking than posting. When I began this blogging endeavor, I was diligent and proud: Two or three posts a week, I thought. Yes, I thought, This is It. This is what I have been meaning to do. What a loving reception, I thought, What a kind audience. What a wonder, I thought, to find kindred spirits unseen, in the atmosphere of online Being. I am off to begin a novel, I boasted.

Then, I stopped blogging.

This was not planned. I had looked forward to bragging about the process; I thought I might document the development of fledgling notebook pages into readable prose I wanted to tell you about the voices that I’ve learned to listen to. I wanted to try to explain how I was learning to devote myself to them completely. How I could almost see them in front of me in a way that I have not been able to do since my imaginary friends stopped coming around some thirty-plus years ago.

Mostly, I wanted to remember. What was it that drew me to begin this project? A fragile thing, one that tends to evaporate in daylight, like vitamin D or the components of Olive Oil that make it worth buying in dark bottles. I don’t know. I only know that they became so easily lost, and that I feared that I would lose the best of myself along with them if I did not make a concerted effort to hang on. At such times, I often fantasize about what wonders I might create if I had fewer things to do: What if I lived alone, what if I was independently wealthy, or if I needed to only work part time? What if I were a kept woman; a woman of leisure, with nothing to do but lounge around in silk clothing and live in her head? I suspect that I would be quite good at such a life. But it's not mine, and this is a blessing.

[Omission here, of about 500 words composed months ago. Summary: Blah, blah blah.

We moved.]

The thing about moving that is it is very real, and has a tendency to take oneself out of

one's notebook, to be placed squarely into... well, other issues. There was packing and unpacking,

petty arguments and resolutions, calculations based on finances and lack thereof; there was the

silent clipping of coupons on Sunday mornings, and Sunday nights awake: staring at ceiling fans,

and finally, a long-awaited sigh, sounding like a gentle Okay, and an eventual return:

to notebooks and long-winded wonderings and things that are naturally, to any writer, much more

real than most of what passes for urgent.

Beginning the novel

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

- W. Somerset Maugham

If you divide the quantity of words on notebook pages, by the degree of earnestness with which they were intended, shouldn’t you arrive at at least a single chapter?

Unfortunately, I have been learning, it is not so easy.

My advanced novel writing class began a few weeks ago, and my first chapter was due for critique this past Thursday. Thus, my absence from this blog. I have found blogging to have a quality that is consuming in its own right, and I realized that, given my limited time, I must temporarily swear of blog-related distractions until I had completed my work. When I did this, I secretly thought that I could wrap things up rather quickly with Ch. 1 and return to my blog dreams. Ha ha.

Here is some of what I am learning so far:

1. I know this is obvious to some. But it truly is remarkable to me, just how vast the difference is, between having pages and pages of notes, descriptions, and sketches, and having a story that works. I have felt like I was swinging blindfolded at a pinata. Fortunately, some of the copious note making is paying off. Now I feel that I am still blindly swinging, but that I am developing some of the heightened sense of hearing that blind people are known to experience, which allows me to maneuver somewhat more adeptly, via my own primitive and clumsy version of echolocation.

2. The omniscient point of view, though wildly attractive to newbies, is wrought with problems. Which is too bad, since I so looked forward to playing God. Sigh, C'est la vie. I think that these are problems worth negotiating, but I will wait until I have more experience.

3. Beginning novelists often want to have their characters waking up. This is considered a cliche. I thought I had an above-average radar for cliches, and yet I had missed that one. So, there went a few ideas for opening scenes, right out the window.

4. It’s beautiful when the story begins to take on a life of its own, offering unexpected surprises.

A few people have asked me to report a bit on my experience with taking a novel writing class online. I have nothing but positive things to say thus far. I have taken quite a few writing classes, and more than half of them have been “live” sessions through UCSD’s Extension program. That was before I was a mama, and I must say that there is no way I’d be able to do a regular class at this point in my life unless it was online. This is my third online writing class, done via Gotham Writer’s Workshop. For me, it’s ideal. Classes are small (12-18 people per class) and I have been impressed with the qualities of the instructors and of each class I have taken. In this class, we submit 2500-50000 words for critique, 3 times in the 10-week session. I review lectures, post assignments, and review the work of my peers from the comfort of my home. I usually work at odd hours before sunrise, with my feet up and a cup of coffee beside me. I benefit greatly from the structure and the pressure of having regular assignments. Although I consider myself quite disciplined, I strongly feel that at this point in my life, I would not be able to complete chapters without this pressure. Or maybe, I would not prioritize my writing to such a degree without the “excuse” that class deadlines provide.

Well, I’ve got a long way to go, one page at a time.

Photo provided by J. Paxton Reyes on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Words for luck

You are dumb, you are a fallacy of probability, taken as a love note or a hex. You are cheap like cartoon leprechauns; like marshmallow rainbows and gold-plated slot machines; like grandmothers soliciting, in voices that must be better suited elsewhere, Cocktail? Cocktail?

You are a four letter word. Even Frank Sinatra begged you, Be a lady. Tonight. One can only wonder what he thought you were on other nights.

My husband and I called ourselves lucky when our daughter was born: ten fingers and ten toes, crying with healthy lungs. Other pregnancies were less endowed with your present: your presence. Or, so we thought, once. Our first pregnancy ended in a burial service, and afterwards we drove into the mountains. On the way we passed pop-warner games and proud parents, and we were silent. As we climbed Palomar mountain, there was no way not to notice how the clouds seemed to hover like the cotton of a storybook angel’s embrace. We were fools looking for reasons to breathe, as if not doing so were an option. We drove from mountains into desert, passing ocotillo, prickly pear, sand verbena, and the lance-leaved live-forever. We drove beneath bald eagles, condors and red-tailed hawks. We drove past miles of arid, desert wastelands, and these were framed by the mountains that towered in the distance above us, like a congregation of wise ancients.

We are all of us creatures of your caprices, playthings of your will. You come and go: like wind and rain, babies and death; like fortune, like homelessness, like drowned bodies on a shore, and families reunited in a shelter. To everything there is a season, but to every season, you.

Better to call you dumb, perhaps; better to make you cheap. If you are intelligent, if you are a wealth of everything there is to offer, then we cannot help but wonder about your purpose, in painful and infuriating contortions.

You are neither cheap nor elegant. You are not vengeful or benevolent. You are drowning us, allowing us to breathe; the air we cannot see because it holds us up; the water that’s invisible to swimming fish. Count ourselves? We couldn’t, anymore than we could presume to call you by your proper name.

We cast dreams into the future like fishing nets, and we call on you to make them full.

***

A note about this post: Thanks to Meryl Jaffe, Ph.D. for recommending the Theme Thursday blog as a source of inspiration. I have been dulled by exhaustion this week, and I found it helpful to be challenged with a topic. Meryl’s blog, Departing the Text, can be found at: http://departingthetext.blogspot.com/.

Photo provided by Chaval Brasil on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Ides of March

Shakespeare was nothing if not a man who could make words sing with profound truths. In honor of March 15, here's some food for thought, from Julius Caesar:

O! that a man might know
The end of this day's business, ere it come;
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known. (5.1.131)

Photo provided by las-initially on flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Whispering amen

"Art is imagination at play in the fields of time." - Julia Cameron

So now the ice is broken, an iron curtain crossed: from private introspection, years of gathering resources - to a small, public sphere. Strength expands like a parachute. Glide down with it now, through the atmosphere, and then below, as a soul’s purpose deepens. Strange, I thought myself a private person; yet now, out here, exposed, I am more myself than I have ever been, with so much given, undeserved. Where to place this gratitude? My head spins. I am falling; I am found. Finally, I am beginning now, to be.

A purpose emerges: give words to the things that so often elude words. Catch the dust that falls between the details of a day, and watch it glow. Speak for things that are pointless, that are only games; remember that play is divine, dancing with us.

Live here, if nowhere else: in words, in strings of letters on a page. Continue as you have been: hovering somewhere outside of the space that the body occupies, between the exhaled breath and the atmosphere.

Photo provided by yiseol you on flickr under a Creative Commons license.