The Cerebral Mum

A while ago I wrote a post about why I started this blog. At the risk of being redundant, I think it deserves some expansion. In the last couple of months I have learned some things about blogging. I have learned why I do it and I have learned what it can do.

Chris Garrett wrote an article for the Blog Herald today, 3 Non-Financial Reasons Why Anyone Should Blog. It unified some of my thoughts and gave me a sort of framework through which I could express them.

The last but not least of Chris’ 3 reasons was the joy of writing. This is obviously an important one for me. I have talked about my need to write over and over again, but I have never mentioned that thing which drives it: My need to be read.

I know there are people out there who “write for themselves”, or I am told that there are, but I cannot relate to them. For me, the need to write is a need to communicate.

This is a polite way for me to say what many writers feel: That what they have to say is worthwhile, that their voice should be heard, that they have something to offer the world. Orwell said there were four motives for people to write: The first was Sheer Egoism, and the following three contained that egoism within them. Writing requires arrogance. No matter how meek, how insecure or how neurotic writers are in their daily lives (and I, myself, can be all of those things), when it comes to their work - published or unpublished, paid or unpaid - there is nothing diffident about them.

In the first sentence of the paragraph above I used the term “writers feel”, but that was coy. Writers know. Even in the depths of despair, even when they go back over what they have written and loathe it, even when they loathe themselves because of it, there is still something in them that is assured.

How much contradictory arrogance did it take to say, as Sartre did in Being and Nothingness, that “Man is a useless passion”? How much authority did Anais Nin assume when she wrote,“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say”? Writers are secure in the privilege of their voice. I am secure in mine.

My arrogance in this respect may not be the most attractive quality, but there would be no literature in the world if this quality did not move writers to create it.

Blogging feeds writers. Immediately. One push of the button and there are faceless, nameless people all over the world reading what you have written. Your voice is no longer lost in the wilderness, waiting on rejection letters from publishers, hoping for people to hear you. Eventually. When you’re dead. That audience writers know they are entitled to is suddenly, actually, there. They encourage you and they challenge you.

And sometimes, they are moved to speak.

This brings me to Chris’ 1st reason to blog, networking and making friends. Before I started this blog, I had never read a blog. I had written poetry, short fiction, essays, parts of film scripts and half a novel. This was a new medium and I needed to learn. So I dug around and I found voices I wanted to hear, voices I wanted to respond to. I fell in love with blogging, not just because I love the sound of my own voice but because I love the richness of everybody else’s. If all of the arrogance I have written about so far seems a little repugnant, think of this: The humility to be moved by other people’s words is the other side of that coin.

I am a terrible “networker”. I find it difficult to slow myself to the pace which is required to build friendships. I do not have the patience to mine the archaeology of character and I struggle to connect when the cores of us are are covered in the dust of our social boundaries. In the physical world, it is difficult to see inside the vessel and it is difficult to be seen. In the blogosphere, such a synthetic world, there is a visible reality more truthful and more raw than we can perceive in real life.

I once wrote to someone dear to me that if we were able to see all people as they are we would be blinded by the light. So we see our few; we see our “bright, particular stars“ and it is the rarest of joys. Here in cyberspace, the skies are so much clearer.

I have seen so many bright stars in these three months of blogging and the brilliance of their light astounds me. I have seen strength and generosity and sensitivity and integrity. Not everyone I have met through blogging will become my friend in the traditional sense of the word but my contact with them has enriched my life and my mind. And I am so grateful for it.

Just as I am grateful for the opportunities blogging has brought to me, which was Chris’ 2nd reason, and my final one. I have had the opportunity to interact with people I would never have come across in real life, I have had the opportunity to write and to be read. I have received support for my feelings, my thoughts and my work. The enthusiasm I have found here has given me the impetus to return to my novel and I have been asked to join a small writers’ forum where I can work toward finishing it, no longer in a vacuum.

While Chris’ example - a published book on the shelf in Borders - is more concrete than those I’ve listed above, blogging is drawing me, step by step, closer to that goal.

I really need to sign off now. Once again, I have spent the evening at my computer when I should have been packing boxes and doing dishes. And sleeping. And yet… I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of why people should blog and what blogging can do. There is so much more to say.

But not tonight.

Yes, she is. And I don’t like the sound of her voice. She’s a nag.

Three nights in a row I have fallen asleep on the couch after putting Caspar to bed at 7pm. I think Sleep is trying to tell me something. But I hate sleeping. I always have. It’s not something I have ever been good at. As a child, I had an early bedtimes. Today it seems like children don’t have bedtimes at all but back in the day… So I went to bed. But not to sleep.

Growing up in north east Victoria we had long, hot summers, hot enough to melt the roads and it seemed like the sun never went down. I would read and read and read, squinting at the pages in the half-light until I had to admit defeat, no longer able to make out the words. Then I used a torch, which was confiscated from me regularly. I recall one night waiting until my parents were asleep before going outside to crawl under the house and retrieve it from it’s hiding place. And I remember hours spent overnight in the toilet with a book, working on the theory that if my parents awoke and discovered me, I had an excuse at hand.

I also remember waking early, around 4am, and reading some more. I would leave the house before 7am, still reading as I walked the 15 minute walk to school. School didn’t start until 9am.

So I didn’t sleep but I spent a lot of time in bed. With my books. In 40°+ heat ( that’s 104+ in fahrenheit for my American friends) I would be snuggled under the doona with Enid Blyton or Judy Blume or Jane Austen. Lost in their worlds, I had no concept of time or what was going on outside. The day I read R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, in the year of the Ash Wednesday fires which wiped out half the state (I was nearly 11), it was hot, really hot. When I finished it, in bed with my electric blanket on in the middle of the day at the height of summer, I was surprised to look outside and see it wasn’t snowing. That the air, sweltering, was a burning jewel.

After leaving home, there was no longer any bedtime and my sleepless nights continued. Sometimes, I worked late at a McDonald’s in the city, a 17 year old girl working her way through her last year at high school. Occasionally I went out to a club, stumbling from the early tram into my school-funded apartment for a long bath before classes. But mostly I read, now grown into Plath and Sartre and Camus. And I wrote.

As an adult, I succumbed briefly to the 9 to 5 life but continued living without sleep, spending dark hours at the computer working on my novel. Sleep is boring, I would say. I started working nights on top of my day job, just to stay awake, before doing away with the day job altogether and surrendering once more to my vampire life. I closed my eyes only when I could keep them open no longer.

Now I am not working at all and I am unable to sleep whenever my body wins its battle with me because of that small, warm, perfect boy now peacefully snuffle-snoring in my room. Still, I find myself again and again at my computer at 3am, writing this blog. My body is fighting me for its time; it’s time to recuperate, to rejuvenate my mind, to replenish itself, rebuild itself. It is not winning. It is ten minutes to one and after a restless nap on the sofa, I am here writing.

I confess, O nagging Sleep, that it is my bedtime. I will submit to that much.

But I am taking a book with me.

30 poems in 30 days. A simple enough task. It is now Day 22 and I have written only 10 poems for the project. I have never been very good at finishing things. I am a great procrastinator. Take for example my novel and this painful confession:

I began it in 1994.

Even allowing for 3 computer disasters (which left me computerless for roughly 5 of those 13 years), a lost manuscript (recovered after 7 torturous months) and a ritual burning of about 200 pages (somewhere around the turn of the century), it is a fairly unimpressive effort. At the moment I could not even tell you what state it is in. I hadn’t finished word processing the copious notebooks and scrap paper I filled with my insane scrawls during the penultimate computer crash before the last one occurred.

And then I got pregnant.

I worked my butt off during my pregnancy to save as much money as I could before entering the realm of single motherhood and have not touched my novel since. And I won’t. Work will not begin again until Cas and I have moved back into the city and I am no longer in the in-between. My rough estimate is that about 60% of it is written but it will require some major structural editing as I have been writing it disjointedly for years.

When it does get published, we’ll just avoid mentioning the year 1994 to the critics. Marcel Proust I am not.

But back to that original thought I haven’t yet finished. I am 12 poems behind with only 8 days left. Even excusing myself for the days I was hanging over the toilet bowl as though I were in my first trimester, that too is a fairly unimpressive effort. I’m not being hard on myself. It’s just a fact.

So do I try and catch up? Do I give up? Do I let it go and finish each assignment at my leisure?

I would like to finish the 30 poems in the allotted time; because I chose to participate; because it is hard; because leaving everything to the last minute, until it seems everything is about to implode, is no longer a habit that works for me.

I am a mother.

I used to thrive under pressure; write papers which earned High Distinctions on the night before they were due, work 17 hour shifts on two hours sleep and then go back for more, frantically fill page after page until I was dizzy from the pace of it and I could no longer see. It’s not that I don’t have the stamina any more: I never had it. It’s because I don’t have the drug.

Adrenaline.

I was an adrenaline junkie. Life just pushed so hard that there was never a chance to be tired, and if it didn’t push me hard enough, I made it. I ran on my second wind for years and I loved it. Motherhood has its own hormonal highs but it is nothing like that rush of blood to the head. Motherhood is not strenuous. It is neither a sprint or a marathon. Motherhood is a slow shift.

I was about to launch into a long paragraph about how working in hospitality is like being a rock star but that would be another digression. Let’s just say that it is driving, physical work and it has it’s own momentum. It generates energy and you feed off it. You get caned all night then you clean up and hang out, drinking and smoking and seeing who can tell the most scurrilous stories about the guests.

But the slow shifts - the ones where you’ve polished every bottle, restocked every fridge and wiped every surface twice - those shifts are the killers. Your body isn’t pumping sugars to your brain and you have time to think. Usually, I would think about all the other things I could be doing if I wasn’t trapped in that bar or restaurant, standing at attention like a palace guard. I would be annoyed by the lack of customers, and then annoyed when a customer interrupted whatever boondoggly task I’d found to do.

Babies aren’t very demanding. Their needs are simple, they sleep a lot, their movements are limited and they are easily amused. But in that first year we have to stand at attention constantly and all the things that used to get done in large blocks of time have to get done in pieces. We cannot let the house go to wrack and ruin while we play at whatever is more interesting and then tidy it in a frenzy all in one day. We can’t immerse ourselves in a book and read it cover to cover. Babies’ needs are too constant and not constant enough. There is too little to do but you aren’t free to go and do something else.

This manic insomniac who burnt the candle at both ends until she crashed and and then lit the next one with glee needs to find new ways to get things done. There is not enough pressure but there is no valve to release what is there if it builds up. You can’t put babies on hold. You can’t call in sick. You can’t take a mental health day. You can’t just say, Stuff it - I’m going to the beach.

So I will try and get my poems done but in all likelihood some won’t make it within the 30 days. I’m trying to realign the way my energy works with the requirements of my new life (which I love!) but it is a trial and error process and I don’t have the answers yet.

I do know, however, that it hasn’t done me in!

I’ve been meme’d.

I’ve sat on this for 4 days, partly because of my computerlessness but mostly because the task is not an easy one:

Name 5 of your strengths as a writer / artist.

Like Musing who tagged me, I could easily name 5 weaknesses, or 50, but even though I will state I am a good writer, my reasons for doing so are based on why I write and my experience when I write rather than being an analysis of the writing itself.

Although it seems counterintuitive, writing is what leads to understanding, not the other way around, and I am hesitant to take away a little of the mystery of the process. But craft as much as art creates good writing so this is a meme worth answering.

(I should probably clarify that when I think of my writing, it is my novel which dominates my thoughts. None of my fiction is published here (yet) so you will have nothing to weigh my opinion against. You’ll just have to take my word for it.)

Strength #1 - Truth

Truth is unwieldy. It is large and paradoxical and difficult. I write the truth; the brutal, raw, ugly, uncompromising, but never absolute, truth. It is my standard of beauty.

Strength #2 - Reading

You can only learn about language - both what it can do and what it can say - by reading. Years of studying grammar and style cannot substitute for it. They can only make conscious what you already know. Being a good writer is dependent on reading. And the best reading inspires you and challenges you. It makes you pause and write whole passages in your head, it makes you reach for your notebook. It makes you think and it makes you flow. I have the appetite for it and I feed it.

Strength #3 - Poetry

There is poetry in my prose. It is driven by rhythm and imagery. It is rich and dense. It can be read aloud. It can be read again.

Strength #4 - Voice

My voice is my own. I’m sure I could name “influences” (Henry Miller and Violette Leduc spring to mind) but they are writers I recognise something in, writers I feel an affinity to. I could never hope to emulate them and I have never tried. The content and style of my writing is mine alone.

Strength #5 - Love

You cannot write the truth and hate the truth. If you try, you will go mad. I love people. As they are. I know their infinite potential cannot be seen without accepting the depths to which they can sink. The best of us and the worst of us are the same. The subject matter I write about is often sordid, often unhappy, but it is never negative.

For this meme I tag:

• Rosemary Nissen-Wade
• Edrei Zahari
• Rebecca Woolf

The seventh assignment from 30 Poems in 30 Days… About forms and lists…

“Write a list poem that uses a single line for each item on the list. Feel free to choose one of the topics above [topics can be found at the Writer’s Resource Center via the assignment link], or use anything else that comes to mind.”

Note to Self

Don’t be so literal (This is a poem)
Don’t be so linear (And then and then…)
Use an adjective (Now and again)
Or a metaphor (This is a poem)

Use punctuation (It’s there for a reason)
And capital letters (For proper nouns)
Finish your sentence (See how it sounds)
And rhyming won’t kill you (This is a poem)

Say something smaller (It’s all in the detail)
Say something greater (What does it mean?)
Write of the seen (No, of the unseen)
What does it matter? (This is a poem)

I truly do think this is a bloody awful poem. I started this list before writing Sapphics on the Deep when I was quite frustrated with what I had been writing, but the subject of my list puts me in mind of a poem I really like by Edward Morgan, Opening the Cage. And while looking for a link so you could read it, I found another based on the same John Cage quote, John Cage by Dillingworth. Both of these put my effort to shame.

And if you’re interested in John Cage or jazz, this short film in three parts is worth watching:

Sound (1966-67), Pt. 1
Sound (1966-67), Pt. 2
Sound (1966-67), Pt. 3

There is a wonderful blog I found called the Writer’s Resource Centre which I haven’t yet even begun to tap the depths of. They’ve just announced a new project called, yes, 30 Poems in 30 Days.

Every day I will discuss a poetry-related concept and give out a poetry assignment along with a recommended poet to read. All of the poets I will recommend are working in the field today. There will be no Coleridge or Whitman to sample here. We will look to the present instead.

This series of posts has two goals. The first is to teach you a little about poetry and give you some things to think about. The second is to give you enough potential material to publish your own book of poetry. Thirty poems are enough to create a small book of poetry. At the end of the thirty days, I will discuss at least three low-cost ways to publish your own book of poetry.

I haven’t written poetry in a long, long time but it was what I first started writing as a child so I’m going to take up the challenge. As I’m currently trying to figure out who the hell I am through writing, it’s seems like serendipity.

The first two assignments have already been listed, so I’ll be playing catch up tonight and you should all expect me to post some pretty horrendous poetry over the next month.

It might be bad, but it will have purpose. You can’t write well if you’re too afraid to write badly.

_{*Participant’s work will be posted in the comments over at the Writer’s Resource Centre, so if you want to see what others are doing, you’ll find it there.}

I have no idea who I am. I am in stasis. I interact with few people. I am not working. I do not see my friends. They are ghosts. They live in the world I used to belong to. The only human contact I have apart from my son is Big Sis whom I am both too close to and a world apart from.

Of course, I see other people. I pay the check-out clerk for my groceries. I say, Have a nice day. I speak to the Maternal & Child Health nurse as she weighs Caspar and checks his head circumference. I watch the audiologist as she moves the dials and records Caspar’s reactions on a photocopied form. I ask for a locker key at the front desk when I go to the gym. I say, Thank you.

But these people are nobody.

Because I am nobody.

I blame the suburbs, but it is I who is to blame. I am a snob.

I was always a snob. I liked large things. I liked words which could be capitalised. Truth, Beauty, Art. The people I loathed were those who went to the opera so they could say, “Last night I went to the opera”, those whose tastes were formed by magazine and newspaper reviews: What’s hot? What’s not?

I liked the way the world flooded my mind, rushing through it like a braided river, sometimes of water, sometimes of blood. Everything moved me. Everything was made of words.

When I read Henry Miller I would salivate. Even the bed lice and the pissoirs would make me salivate. Miller said:

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. _{Tropic of Capricorn}

And I was.

I am no longer. I do not want to be aware of the minutiae of life. I reject it. I am self-destructive. I can no longer even feel the Nausea.

I want to feel ill again at the sight of my hand. I want life to be large again. I want to be that girl again, who, when she walked down the street, felt so huge that shop windows would explode and cars would burst into flames. Years ago, in my novel, I wrote:

...I have been trapped here in this silent inertia by my desire to drive earth’s gears into reverse and nothing – nothing! – can be unmade in this world of time. It will not devolve for me.

Writing is prescient.

There is nothing I can do except write until I am true again.