Category: sathead

So today is Monday, and in honor of the outset of the workweek and the national holiday around the corner– some thoughts on labor.

There are all sorts of reasons one might hate one’s work or at least seriously resent its gouging intrusions on personal creative resources (energy, time, etc.). Here from the privileged shade of my current personal time oasis (not a mirage but also eventually evaporating) a fresh breeze perspective: work is good.

For awhile there I was deeply displeased with my working life–for, you know, various reasons (always there, ready as rain and stray electrons). In the midst of my then-particularities I was sufficiently irked to make a rather sudden and unprepared leap of jumbo dimensions out of the paid workforce in pursuit of… what exactly? Here I am many months later, striving daily to define and realize what constitutes good employment (in, you know, both practical and existential senses).

My current course of work ethic exercise contains a calm dose of self-discipline applied with practical orderliness. The tangible daily environment plays its role in a round robin of creative puttering and fiddling: I arrange and re-arrange the surrounding stage with objects and projects and books and ideas, concocting impromptu still-lifes in micro stopmotion movie sequence, directing miniature dramas in collaged and fantastically peopled dioramas… So the creative morass comes to a rolling boil.

But it can feel unhinged and off the handle without the grounding of external concrete goals most days. This week I feel securely tethered by a sense of purpose and drive, having recently come off a job of work I had to finish, just a little something-something worked up for a friend, which got my noggin back in gear. The momentum and conductive energy generated seem to have shifted around the bits and oddments and jarred my sticky stuckness loose. At least momentarily; time to knock together the next outline of completion targets.

Here’s today’s occasional truth: A concrete project with defined external goals can be a real energetic jolt for us malingerers. Olé!

Lately, amidst swirling considerations of fertility, foster care/adoption, and shared family resources, I’ve been giving some extended thought to demonstrated value systems.

In the process I’ve been considering, from my own particular perch, a treetop view of what’s important–what ranks, what rankles, and whither each of us chooses to invest time/money/energy with purpose.

Even wellspring imagination, temperamental & capricious mount, is prone to divagation, in want of muscular drive.

I feel greatly honored to have known some really talented and principled people in my round of days. Among near friends as well as the brushing digital variety I count heroic creatives and witness their regular contributions to the collective good, aquifer of inspiration.

(Of Lamb by Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter – an utterly exquisite delight)

Sometimes after reading PR-oriented bits and blips, I can come away feeling rather humble and humanly erring in reflection.

Reeling from intensively engineered rhetoric, I’ll order lists and resolutions.

words are flummoxing, persistent, legion. poised at the digital nexus of blogs & email & facebook & twitter, I’m foundering a bit in a soup of verbosity.

in lieu of words, I’m currently losing myself in concrete shapes and patterns of color.

homemade book cloth & paste paper finding unbound purposing…

oddly thematic etsy favoriting…

dear world, dear life,

today I write to you in order to acknowledge that my view of you is wildly skewed. and that I’m sorry for that fact and also, on a more upbeat note, that I’m attempting to realign my perceptions of the past and the present to be more accurate and truly appreciative. but it takes constant work and a degree of vigilance I’m unaccustomed to, and I am human, so there are recurrent points of slippage.

take, for instance, old grudges. they lurk! o, how they’re inclined to lurk. and fester and shift and morph and grow into shapes of things that no longer even remotely resemble what they purport to represent in the real world.

this morning I had a big bout with my own carnival of distortions– went the rounds with all three rings, and, after some possibly unnecessary woe and tears, emerged clearer-eyed and -headed and -hearted on the flip side, I’m *most* pleased to inform you.

imagine, if you’re game, how one might misremember– o, willfully! overweaningly! albeit all on the quiet-like and subconscious– the sequence of events that transpired in actuality– malign and sneaky retrospect recrafting the stage to cast so-and-so as pencil-mustachioed villain– while documentation from the time reveals this person in the guise of protagonist.

ultimately, I’m left feeling not altogether certain which view, if either, is real or accurate. maybe both, at least experientially. but still. the wild pendulum of perspective is something to contend with.

so this morning, re-resolved (solved again and again?) and fortified against habitual deer trails of self-deterance, I stayed abed girded only with El Capitane the iphone, whose micro screen precludes distractions such as multiple visible browser windows, and pulled up Pokey Mama once more– smart lady, she even has a mobile app version of blog posts!– and picked up reading through from the beginning, as I’ve been yearning to do daily (acutely despite the zillion self-distraction tactics which I’ve made my true profession).

I got a dozen or so posts along, brainsplosions occurring at regular intervals, until I finally had to stop, get up out of bed, go make coffee, and wait in antsy dancey hopstep for the toast to pop– so I could go write.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, free of charge– this here’s the greatest gift one writer can give to another: the inspiration to respond in kind. the best sort of reading I do prompts it, that conversation in scrawled or tip-typed syllables which I so blithely maligned in my last post.

[deep breath]

by golly, I can’t un-say that the writers’ workshop did a number on me– or, really, to be more exactly precise, not so much the workshop(s) its(their)self(ves) around the big serious tables in the dey house– more the social scene that revolved around my two years in the program– and really, if I’m going to be 100% honest with both of us here, only a windbaggy vocal minority within the surely more diverse and varied, veined with secret, quiet channels, social ethos present at that explicit moment in the workshop’s history.

what’s more, I did it to myself. hell, if I don’t own my own responsiblity in this farcetastrophy right now, it’s likely to go on plaguing me forever– I tagged along at the heels of those bolder friends into the night glare of the foxhead bar. I sat there listening and gawking while the literary cocks puffed their breast feathers in display around the pool table, and I bought their brand of bullshit. or deplored it while internally buying it wholesale. nobody dragged me, nobody shackled me to those ages-inscribed wood-topped booths. I opened my receiving orifices and took it all inside and let it pile up atop of my own good voice like so much rotten packing material and let it fester there, squashing down anything I might think to say until the stew burned hot and white in my belly. for ten years. I did that to myself.

I stopped myself writing poems— the writing that had literally saved my skin just a couple years prior– all those sproutlings grown into contorted little hermetic contraptions, I took them in my own angry grasp and throttled them off right at the root.

and why? because other people sounded smarter than me.

what a boatload of smelly carp.

whew. I didn’t really intend to write about the writers’ workshop when I sat down at Mister Macbook this a.m. thanks for that, too, Miz Dryansky– for the permission to detour and meander– so much nicer than deterring and mouldering.

what I meant to write about this morning was the tendency toward stuckness. and fertility anxiety of several varieties. and self delusion and the gracious occasion to glance back over it with kinder eyes toward ourselves and all our human foibles. and in good Pokey Mama fashion, maybe I did just manage to enact that last one after all. and maybe I can be okay with allowing the other bits to filter forward in organic fashion in future blog posts sometime, whenever. maybe I’m not really ready, yet, to address the baby-making petrifaction that freezes me barren for more years than I can count. whatever. I will, I expect, find unstuckness in my own good time. for now it is a beautiful and immense gift simply to be able to write something.

paddling around, arguing with myself over every last little thing until I’m exhausted by the tug of war and finally resort to escapism of several different kinds, I waste time.

the fact is I am not of an age where potential counts for anything whatsoever– only the work of daily action, only engaging with our outright, most intrinsic and authentic selves. in actuality, it could all be taken away in the next breath, or the next, or the one after that, in an accident of transportation or health or random circumstance.

all my life I’ve done battle with a fierce internal editor– one part the wrassling wild inner heart from which flows most vivid creative juices and the other this starched and pinned, bespectacled and buttoned-up magistrate whose hyperactive gavel decrees out of order over and over on a hair trigger. much of my life has been spent knuckling under to presumed civilizing forces– keeping myself in check, toeing an arbitrary line, fastening the lid shut with spit and chewing gum and heavy books of rules of order.

what works itself up inside springs from pressure cooking and, sooner or later, blows the patch job wide open in great swoops of unrestrained impulse: five year old me, unable any longer to bear being ignored by the grownups, walked down to the river, scooped up a jugful of water, and tossed it high up in the air, up to the the bridge where they all sat above me, soaking the back of the worst offender; after college, miserying my way through a cardboard “real world” job/lifestyle (with repeated violent bouts of salmonella-induced vomiting– there was a terrible outbreak in the eggs that year– surely signifying some urge for psychic expulsion), I got up one day and drove from the west coast to the east of our broad country, all unannounced upon the doorstep of a virtual stranger, in search of a big answer; hating it long enough, I’ll quit my job or move to a new city without a well-articulated or -constructed plan of next steps– just do. and deal with the consequences.

a sloppy and wasteful way of proceeding. and for what? some rationalized idea of being acceptable/responsible/normal? by no means even a desirable goal.

wouldn’t it be better to evolve some better terms between the savage and the jailer? the savage, after all, far from truly savage– at most bleedingly human, substantive, weeping, real– full of the force of aria and tarantella– my own best self, squashed and shackled, wanting only to shine out and range onward openly.

Lately, prompted by some very articulate women I’m connected to and reading (thanks to Facebook, by golly– so it’s not a 100% time-waster, only about 99.5%…), I’ve been considering Writing Issues– particularly those challenges involved in being a woman who writes (or doesn’t “write”…); the complex array of considerations around being a woman of child-bearing age (just barely) who has not, as it were, borne substantive fruit of one kind of another; questions of value/progress/success– all really rather in keeping with the theme of “work” that’s developing in the current incarnation of NavelGazer.

I’ve been dialoguing with myself as I read along, venting the occasional spewed thought-bit over diner omelettes to Chris, paddling feelings around with the hot water mix in the bath, watching the ins and outs weave through the grainy 3 a.m. air that hangs above the bed– and mulling, more than anything, just how I might, for my part, crystallize my own thoughts in writing— narratively, cogently, in actual (lord help me) reader-readable fashion.

I’m painfully aware of my own inclination toward the hermetic and apocryphal in the language concoctions I stir up and pepper through this digital interface. I know I hide out inside the blur of elusive syntax, skitteringly allusive prose– suspect I dodge fixing and discernment in lieu of opening myself to the sorts of heavy handed judgment of early years. It is, quite frankly, a cowardly approach to writing.

I’d truly like to speak more plainly and openly here– not forgetting or dismissing the dance I’ve done down these several years with the ethics around revelatory truths not exclusively my own. I’ve learned in painful ways how even incidental, seemingly innocuous bits feel threatening to others who’ve not themselves released those bits for public consumption. In consequence somewhat I’ve settled into the verbal tick here, online, of skating ellipses around any sort of particularized personal truth– apart from the very most internal, subjective, and personal of all, the bits I see day to day, flying fragments, stuttering partial whispers.

But I’ve been reading other writers who seem to manage it with so much more aplomb, cleanly, forthrightly, with simple backbone, humility, and grace– for example Amy Dryansky– poet, artist, essayist, mother, and author of the beautifully thoughtful blog Pokey Mama. And Pokey Mama makes me consider one way I might approach my own narrative more directly: piecemeal. That is, by attempting it in small portions (oh, Melida Mae, gobble that whale, bit by mealy bit, dear girl). One small part today, another another day, explicitly picking up the thread of the last.

Coincidentally this morning A.Word.A.Day struck me to the core with sitzfleisch, that very “chair glue” I often despair of, and in particular this: “Sitzfleisch is … often the difference between, for example, an aspiring writer and a writer.”

Oof.

Well, I hereby resolve: I’m gonna work me up some sitzfleisch and give this writing thing a bit more of a concerted whirl. Maybe in small bits, but by golly I’m’a diggin’ in.