The Wall

It's been a while since I've visited the graffiti wall in Beverly.  I've written about this before; my love of the wall is complicated, because the works of art painted there are ephemeral.  I only go so often to see what's new, and works of art like this one only stay for a short while before they are covered by other art; it's heartbreaking to see a painting like this and to return a few days later to see that a lesser work has been painted over it.  The artists vary in their approach; some never paint their work over someone else's if they aren't sure it's comparable in quality.  Other painters revel in defiling superior art, but there are fewer of these and their work is covered over immediately.  The artists write messages sometimes, angry warnings or insults.  It can be quite a battleground.  However, for the most part, the quality of the art is presented in a spectrum from amazing (the right side of the wall) to amateur (the left side of the wall).  Placement is not a science; sometimes the artist who works on the right of another piece isn't objectively as talented as someone to his left, but only thinks he is.  That's his prerogative; to risk that the other artists will judge him inferior and paint him over immediately.  He's also taking the risk that he's as good as he thinks, and the other artists will leave his stuff up for a while, and paint around it in that conflicted dance of respect and competition.

It's also been a while since I've posted anything on this blog.  My blog has no position in space other than a random placement on the Blogger server, where you can page to the left and to the right to see other blogs hosted by Blogger.  Links to my blog have no position on Facebook, other than to appear more or less frequently than links to blogs written by my friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues.  I guess there are ways of measuring and comparing the number of hits or likes, or something like that, but I'm not terribly interested.  I link a post, and I watch it sink on Facebook like a piece of art being painted over by the creation of other art, which will in turn be quickly painted over.  Why do the artists go to the wall and do this to themselves?  Why do I blog?  We all have our reasons, I think, of trying to make our mark on people's memories with these fleeting offerings.

This is a perpetual concern, that as I spend time reading intensely to fuel the machine, or spend time actually (gasp!) writing something that is not a blog post (fiction, poetry), I am not posting, and thus I vanish from your consciousness.  I can only hope that while I'm spending more hours toiling on other projects, my absence will be marked by someone or other, and that person will click the link whenever I do get around to posting something.  The same sort of person who will see a short story on a website or in a magazine, and make a little tick on their mental register: "Good story.  If you see another story by so-and-so, read it, even if the first paragraph is boring and not really where the story starts."  This is the beginning of trust, or the beginning of the invisible bond between reader and writer.  First, there is some accidental exposure (reader buys a book to read the story of a favored author and accidentally, or out of boredom, reads the other stories).  The reader makes a little tick mark to celebrate the discovery of another voice.  Then, there is, perhaps, another accidental exposure, and another tick mark.  Perhaps then, if the artist is lucky, the fan has caught fire, and the collisions are no longer accidental.  Now that fan is actively searching.  If you don't get stuff out there, the fan never makes the tick marks, and never catches fire, and never starts actively searching for you.  Or if they did, without further stimulus, they quit looking for you.  Your tick marks vanish, and once you start putting stuff out there again, maybe the first round of people who made the tick marks aren't around any more, and you're heartbreakingly back at zero.

This is the concern that leads people who have had some small success writing short stories to continue writing them, or continue blogging, rather than moving to a longer project and risking that their silence will send them back to the very beginning, when no one knew them all.  Imagine that the artist who made the work I've included in this post is someone I have been following by visiting the wall and looking for that style.  Perhaps I've been photographing her art for some time, and it's gotten to the point where I have a whole collection of photographs, and I'm addicted.  Then perhaps this artist lands an art show and starts painting on canvas instead, and leaves the graffiti wall in Beverly untouched for a long time, so long that I stop visiting, or I move away, or I get another hobby, and when she returns to the wall to put up another picture, there's no one there to appreciate it the way a fan would.  Appreciation must then start all over again, with the accidental collision of the art with the person who will know it, and understand it, and appreciate it, despite its flaws.  The person who will understand the intention, even if the technique isn't as perfect as whatever was painted on that canvas during the break.  In the world of writing, it seems like we've all decided that the only way to sell the canvases is to visit the graffiti wall in the middle of the night and splash something, anything, onto it, even if it's just a messy, spray-painted phrase, "I'm here; please don't forget!" in the hopes that the fan will return to the wall each day with the camera, or somehow know when the canvases are displayed in the gallery, and arrive with cash in hand.

This isn't rational, this hope.  It's not rational to go to the wall in the middle of the night and make a mark, good, bad, or indifferent, in hopes of not vanishing while we whittle away at our "master" works at home, where our fans can't see us.  There are too many people, and too little time and energy for those people to spend waiting for us to do something brilliant.  But I do this.  I have some little pleasure from something, and I get hooked, and I do visit the wall, and I do wait, and I do hope that whatever I'm seeing will lead me to the next thing.  I do this with relationships.  I see some little pleasurable thing and I wait for it to happen again, like the pigeon hitting the lever in hopes the pellet will finally drop.  The only reason writers are in business is because people do this.  They go to the stands and look for the names of their favorites.  They accept breadcrumbs on Facebook.  They accept promises and hints.  They stand pathetically in the rain with a boombox over their heads, hoping for a glimpse of something beautiful.  This makes no sense to me, that people do this, that they do crazy things to fulfill some kind of undefinable longing inside them.  That they keep trying long past when someone else might have the sense to get out of the rain before they get electrocuted, or arrested for standing on a train track trying to get a photo of a piece of art before it's sprayed over by some kid with delusions of grandeur or a mean streak or the volcanic frustration that comes from years of being invisible.

This post is a breadcrumb.  It's something dashed off in a hurry, with minimal care taken, and very little artistry.  It's just a breadcrumb to bring you here so you won't forget about me while I'm working.  I'm working on something new, something next, something utterly different, but something that has that old BANG you've come here looking for.  Please, trust me. It's not another short story.  It's not a poem.  It's not another half-assed piece of spray art on the wall, like this one.  It won't be published any time soon.  It won't be finished any time soon.  I give you this half-assed thing right now, because I have nothing of substance to offer you at this moment, because I'm saving my energy for the big canvas.  Nevertheless, nevertheless, I hope you'll stop by my humble little wall now and then, eat these breadcrumbs, and have faith that at some point you will come by, maybe on your way elsewhere, and you'll see something here  that makes you ping in that unexpected way that inspired you to come back the first time, to stand on a railroad track, with the threat of being arrested, to get a snapshot of something that makes you feel--feel some damned thing that makes it all worth it.

Please wait for it.  Keep checking.

The ping, like love, is so very worth waiting for.

Cracked

Each time I sit down to write a blog post, I make a serious attempt to produce a piece of writing that is something more than "what I had for dinner," or "here's what I did today," or "here's how I feel today."  This means I sometimes don't write anything.  Instead, I sit and read, stuffing more into my brain, more ideas for the machine to use for building materials.  This year, I'm hoping that my reading list will be richer in building materials.  I read for pleasure, but reading for pleasure doesn't mean I'm not also working hard.  In the past several years, I have read mostly about building a healthy self, and I think I needed that.  I needed to work on myself.  I'm not talking about books like He's Just Not That Into You, or Skinny Bitch, or the Millionaire Next Door.  I mean Codependent No More, The Artist's Way, and The Art of Happiness.

It hasn't been a year of why doesn't he love me, or I wish I were thinner, or I wish I were richer.  I could stand to lose a few pounds for my health, sure, but I'm not going to give up one of the greatest pleasures in my life to fit into skinny jeans.  The way I look is a lot less important than my blood pressure, and if the doctor gave out awards for a good bp, I'd be able to paper the walls of my office with them.  I could stand to have a better communication style with my loved ones, but I'm not pining for more love.  And I certainly do not need any more money.  In 2009, I was laid off, and my security looked pretty shaky, but I got a new job, and at least for now, they're treating me really well.  If anything, this year I've been looking hard for a way to have more peace of mind, and I think I've been stuck in the bargaining stage of some great grief.  I think that grief is about the loss of my ability to write fiction full time. Sadly, after that, I lost my ability to write fiction at all.

If you look at my bibliography (which I wish were longer, but it's what I have), you'll see that I started with kind of a bang, at least in my small corner of the writing world.  One of my first stories took a 2nd prize in the Writers of the Future contest.  Then, as a writing acquaintance of mine eloquently explained by drawing a diagram on a bathroom mirror (thank you, Jay Lake, may all the gods bless you and keep you), I began the sine wave of real writing.  I'd had some small success, and then I wrote a bunch of meh.  Then I had a spike (a sale), then a bunch more meh.  And as Jay explained would happen, the spikes started happening closer together, and in 2008, I had six short story sales.  And one poem (thanks, Goblin Fruit).  And then, you'll see, it stopped.

As these things tend to happen, sales sometimes happen down the road, because if you're like me, you start at the very top of the list (aiming high), and you submit, submit, submit, until the story finds some editor who likes it, maybe in the middle of the list, maybe down in the "token payment" zone.  So what you're seeing is that I stopped writing new things in 2006, and stopped fiddling with old stories in mid-2008.  I took a stab at novel writing somewhere in there, and at a total of 340,593 total words written, I stopped writing fiction completely.  I wrote a lot of personal poetry that I never submitted anywhere, and I lost my way.  I think I lost my mind--totally cracked. I hope you'll pardon me; I was divorced in 2006 after writing full time for two years, and I think the two things, losing my partner and losing my creative space at the same time, broke my heart, and probably my mind. The passion was still there, but the gift had gone.  Last year, in 2010, I went into a bookstore one day, and I saw no fewer than 4 new hardcovers on the bookshelf, written by people I know.  Ken Scholes, Mary Robinette Kowal, the aforementioned Jay Lake, and James Maxey.  There were more, but maybe I couldn't see them through the tears.  I fingered the spines and the pages.  I wished them well, and I spoke to them.  I know you.  Here you are.  I'm not here, with you, and I'm sorry.

Since then, I've seen books from Will McIntosh, Ted Kosmatka, Alethea Kontis, Brad Beaulieu...and let's just say a lot of Facebook friends who have been so kind as to friend me, after meeting me once at a convention.  I've watched other friends, various workshop partners, and associated acquaintances working like holy terrors, posting word counts, sometimes body counts (mother-in-law died, father died, spouse left me, etc.) and sharing their PhD pain, that great, horrible process of labor and birth that's so very much harder than producing an actual baby.  How I admire you, all of you, for working so hard at this shared obsession, while I've been shattering my spirit and putting pieces of it back together with glue and string and staples.  Bravo, brava, brilliant.  I think it has taken seeing you there, on the shelves, to make this thing real to me.  Before I saw you there, I have to say, novelists had a kind of unearthliness to them, some kind of sheen around them that said of the gods, not of earth.  This not to say that I have lost respect for the novelist; not at all.  Oh, my friends, I respect you so much.  It's to say that you are all human, and you have all lived, and experienced pain, and made significant sacrifices to have accomplished what you have accomplished.

Until then, all I had for role models were the Johns (Updike, Carroll, Irving, Fowles), and authors like King, Straub, Gaiman, Atwood.  Though, one time, I knocked back a bourbon with Peter Straub, I sat beside him as if in the lee of a great, mystical standing stone.  This man wrote The Talisman with King.  This shot of bourbon does not signify a human connection.  It's as though I'm standing in an autograph line, and there are hundreds behind me, shifting from one foot to another, waiting for the signature to be delivered by the tired author, with the glazed look that says, "I really want a spicy tuna roll." The author does not intend lack of connection; it's just not reasonable to expect a genuine connection with someone who is wading through a sea of humanity, to the point where it all becomes absurd and abstract for them.  I have hundreds of books in my home written by these folks, of the gods, not of earth. Now, Theodora Goss gives a reading of The Thorn and the Blossom in Kendall Square in Cambridge last night (go read a review here), and because of a scheduling conflict, I miss it, and that's unhappy making because she is one of those writers who to me has a heartbeat.  I've watched her read her own poetry, and she's a very good reader.  Dora does her own work justice when she reads, and because I know her, despite the beauty of her work, to me she is of the human beings, of the earth.  She shows me in her blog that it's tremendously hard work, but that this writing thing is possible--that the books all around me were written by human beings, not handed down on tablets by the gods from high mountains.

I'm grateful to you, my writing friends and acquaintances.  I can't actually be inspired by those I've read but never met.  I can't eat a secondhand description of manna from heaven; I can only experience a wistfulness, shrug, and remain hungry.  But I've met you; you are real.  You sweat, you work, you cry, you sit at your computers and you look at Facebook, and you play Panda Poet, and sometimes you are just too tired.  You have doubts.  You question your sanity and maybe your integrity.  If you're lucky, maybe you get a pat on the head and a cookie from loved ones, and if you're not, maybe you get a bitter stare: Oh you're doing that again.  But you're crazy or stupid or driven enough to sharpen your pencil or blow the lint from your keyboard and open that one file, that one that's driving you insane, and you put in a few lines when you can.  You type on the train using an Android phone and folding keypad.  You write longhand in dollar notebooks.  You write in your head while cooking dinner or rocking a crying baby.  You have been bitten by the beast, and you have accepted your fate.  It is not that I think "if you can do it, I can do it."  I don't think that at all.  This is me, seeing you, and appreciating you.

You're a writer, and you write.

Keep going.  Please, keep going.

Winnowing

This ceramic tea set comes from Ria Lira Levine (go look at her gallery).  I purchased the set at Arisia 2011, and I assured the artist that I would actually use it for drinking tea.  I don't buy things that are too pretty to use; if it's too pretty to use or too expensive to risk breaking, then I don't buy it.  I do buy art that is not "useful" in a practical way, such as paintings and photographs, but if I buy a practical object such as a teacup, I put it to the use for which it was created.  I do have a cup that I'm nervous about using, because the china is thin enough to read through, but what you do is put warm water in it for a little while (warm not hot) and then you put a teaspoon into the cup when you pour the hot tea in.  If you don't take care, the thin porcelain will shatter on contact with hot water.  This ceramic set is fanciful, and clearly made for use, but when I poured in the hot water, I did hear the glaze cracking (steady little pings). I worry a little, but I'm still going to use it no matter if it eventually means the set's demise.  I select art carefully, because these are the things I want to live with.

This morning, I finished reading the Best Food Writing 2009, edited by Holly Hughes.  If you want to know more about the book, consider reading this review of the book from someone else's blog (share the wealth, right?). I'm still thinking about the Stonecoast MFA program, what I might want to to propose as a course of study with respect to combined major of fiction and non-fiction.  It's been a while since I spent this much time and energy focused on narrowing down the field of "what I want to write."  I've been doing that in part by narrowing down the field of "what I like to read."  This isn't easy, because for the most part, I'm an omnivorous reader, and my time is like diamonds dripping into the sea, and if I want my reading to be useful to my writing life rather than merely pleasurable, I need to winnow.  I need to focus.

The winnowing has been a little bit like buying functional art.  I only have so much money to spend, so I need to spend it wisely. Also, I have a certain aesthetic.  I don't know enough about art to describe it in arty jargon, so I won't try.  Suffice it to say there's a color palette.  I have some art that completely violates the color palette (I have a Dona Nova painting that features safety orange and primary blue) but for the most part, the art makes sense as a collection in terms of color, theme, style.  There are flashes of the macabre, the romantic, and the whimsical. Damask, gauze, lace, distressed brown leather, spirals, flowers, skulls, fairies, goddesses, spirits of the dead, at least one shocking nude that I take down when there are visitors.  And in my house, there is usually beautiful food or plans for beautiful food.  In my cupboards, there is crystallized ginger, five kinds of soy sauce, sweet rice wine, nutmeg, cardamom, turmeric, curry, bay leaf, dill, chile powders and flakes, coriander, garam masala, black mustard seeds, black sesame seeds, wasabi powder, and so on and so on.  There are dozens of caffeine free herbal infusions, bottles of strange pickles, instant miso and five kinds of bouillon.  Right now, I'm having a wedge of granular mexican chocolate (70% dark, from Taza).

Art, literature, food.  Winnow, winnow, winnow.

For me, doing research on "what I want to write" is shaped like an hourglass.  When I decided to give up on other art forms in order to write, I sold my guitars, put away my colored pencils, my pastels, my needlework, my sewing projects, my clay.  I focused on writing, narrowed my attention to the width of a trickle of sand, and things exploded again.  I could write, after all, about anything, and my focus blew apart again.  I could write about books, film, photography, art, architecture, travel, on and on, my head exploding with possibility.  I sat down and wrote short stories and poetry, and I meandered there, too.  I wrote science fiction stories, fantasy stories, horror stories, interstitial stories, which are no kind of story and every kind of story.  I sold some stories, sold some poems, and then my short stories started getting longer and longer, and no one wanted to buy them any more.  I broke my body on novel ideas, and then my life got complicated and difficult, and I quit.  Then I started writing this blog, and the hourglass expanded wider than ever, and I think that's what I needed for a while.  I needed just to paddle along and stretch my fingers, and learn economy of phrase in a way unknown in my fiction.

I don't know what my fiction will look like when I start it up again, but I've been thinking about what I surround myself with, what I read.  Art, literature, food.  I've been doing readings of my short stories at conventions, and lately I've realized that most of them are about eating, or starving, or feasting, or using food as a substitute for feelings.  In my stories, eating, or searching for food, is transformative.  Food is not always at the center of attention, but the awareness of what we put in our mouths or don't put in our mouths is always there underneath, like the grumbling of an empty belly.  Thinking about this, I looked into the vastness of the Internet, and I found these things:

From Wikipedia: "A list of some prominent writers on food, cooking, dining, and cultural history related to food."

From Mary Anne Mohanraj, a fellow SF writer: My students are reading food blogs this week. Recommendations, for your gustatory pleasure:"

From Delish.com: "Here it is: the creme de la creme of food bloggers.  We've scoured the Web and found the tastiest, most delectable, most must-read food blogs of them all."

From Gherkinstomatoes.com: "Here's a very brief list of food-related novels and mysteries sure to keep your appetite whetted."

From the Online Education Database: "Read through these books to get a culinary and literary education all in one."

And it just goes on and on, into the Web, into the blogosphere.  People are writing about food, fiction and nonfiction, and I can't get enough of it.  I've just finished Best Food Writing 2009, and have 2010 and 2011 queued up on my reader.  I laugh now, thinking about my recent posts about the Hunger Games and Harry Potter, two young adult series that approach food and eating from entirely different angles.  On my desk, I have the Pat Conroy Cookbook, wherein the son of the Great Santini tells lush stories about food, each tale accompanied by mouthwatering low country recipes for shrimp, soft shell crabs, coconut cake, peach pie, benne wafers.  I feel I have been circling, scribbling, winnowing myself to this place, where this blog becomes a food literature bibliography.  Never mind the film reviews, you distractible woman, the music festivals, the incessant whining about anxiety and obsession.

Hitch that obsession to the plow and make it pull for you.

It's a fragile feeling.  I feel like the delicate porcelain cup under the flow of boiling water.  Without my protective measures, I may shatter at the heat of the flow.  I am using a spoon, at present, between bouts of furious typing, but not to convey the heat away from my fragile body -- to convey chocolate mousse to my mouth.  Winnow, winnow, winnow.

Art, literature, food.  Heaven help me.

2011 Best American Essays, Part 2

This is Part 2 of my reflections on the 2011 anthology of Best American Essays (ed. Edwidge Danticat).  In my last post about it, I said, "Without fail, so far, these essays are about intense experience, dying, grief, terror, the incomprehensibility of natural disaster and murder," and after I wrote that, I became concerned that maybe essayists really only have one good/miserable/tragic essay in them, I mean, I'd certainly hope so, Augusten Burroughs aside.  Down this line of thinking, of course, I'm considering the essay potential of my own life.  It's certainly a life of quiet desperation at times, but certainly NOT full of riots, house-burnings, hurricanes, and so forth.  Not firsthand, only what I see on the news, and honestly, I get my news from Facebook.  Go ahead, throw rotten tomatoes, but it's true.

I was concerned that Ms. Danticat's selections meant that the Best American Essays must contain a personal disaster, and that, therefore, the writer algebra demonstrates that I do not have what it takes to write an essay anyone will ever call "the best."  The Perfectionist says that if there's no chance of being the best, it's much more rewarding to reorganize the sock drawer.  Balderdash, right?  If I were you, I wouldn't argue with the Perfectionist.  She has a knife for a tongue and will flay you where you stand.  The Perfectionist and I curled around the rest of this book of essays to assess the remainder of the works, to see if the theory held water.  Whitter, whitter, whitter.  Here are the rest of the essays:

"Topic of Cancer" by Christoper Hitchens (from Vanity Fair): author discusses his battle with cancer.

"Chapels" by Pico Iyer (from Portland Magazine): after journalist's house burns down, he spends time in a Benedictine Monastery and lives a "more or less unplugged life in Japan."  Journalist also mentions reporting in Sri Lanka "in the midst of its civil war."

"Long Distance," by Victor Lavalle (from Granta): author recounts his love life in his early twenties -- obese and socially phobic (5'9" 350 pounds), he conducted a two-year relationship with a fifty-year-old woman in New Jersey via an adult chatline.  Later, he lost the weight and found a live sexual contact, but recounts at the end of the essay that the emotional scars of that weight remain: "I lifted my hand until it was bathed in the morning light coming through the thin curtains.  I still couldn't believe what I saw.  My new hand, slim enough to show the wrist bones; the knuckles now no longer lost in flesh.  But this hand hand't replaced the old one; instead it was like this hand had grown around the fatter one somehow.  Both were there, but only one could be seen." 

"What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?" by Charlie LeDuff (from Mother Jones): a seven-year-old girl is killed because we have a race problem in Detroit, driven by poverty, corruption in the legal system, and corruption in the education system.

"Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee (from The New Yorker): Hooray!  A Story about food!  Except that it's actually a story about race, a family identity story told in the struggle between beef bulgogi and gu jeol pan and Hamburger helper, and the traditional American turkey dinner.

"What Really Happened" by Madge McKeithen (from TriQuarterly): the author makes a prison visit to see the man who murdered her friend; the murderer is her dead friend's husband.

"Rude Am I in My Speech," by Caryl Phillips (from Salmagundi): another essay about race.  The author uses Othello to describe the immigrant's experience of being lonely, isolated, and "marooned" in their chosen new land.

"Lucky Girl," by Bridget Potter (from Guernica): the author retells the story of getting an abortion in Puerto Rico in 1962.  "Three years after my trip to San Juan, illegal abortion officially accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S."

"There Are Things Awry Here," by Lia Purpura (from Orion): a rambling, metaphorical, non altogether successful rant about the colonization and destruction of the earth by human industry.  "The land didn't mean to be torn and tar-covered, wasn't meant to sprout stock farmers, farm women, and ranchers.  The land asked to be considered, and seriously.  The land wanted to speak..."

"Patient" by Rachel Riederer (from The Missouri Review): the author is run over by a bus, and almost loses her leg.  The saving of the leg is gruesome.

"Pearl, Upward," by Patricia Smith (from Crab Orchard Review): the author's mother seeks a better life in Chicago, but finds out that there is no running away from the pain of life.

"Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith (from The New York Review of Books):  a reaction to the film The Social Network, an analysis of the intentions of Zuckerberg, and the reductivism and social tragedy of "People 2.0".  "What if 2.0 people feel their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?"

"Travels with My Ex" by Susan Straight (from The Believer): white woman, black husband, half black daughters, daughter's black boyfriend: "The [basketball-playing daughter] got her first citation earlier that year, in January.  The highway patrolman followed her for five miles on the highway and her pull over into the parking lot of a strip club.  Our Laurie was in the passenger seat.  He was questioned at length, about his identification, his address.  The patrolman didn't believe he was seventeen.  When our daughter called me, she was crying.  She said she was afraid of what I would say.  She was right.  I was furious, but not about the ticket.  'When you get pulled over, you put D-- in danger," I shouted at her. 'You're risking his life.  Don't drive even four miles over the speed limit! He could have been shot and killed!' Only some mothers say that to their children."

"A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay" by Christy Vannoy (from McSweeney's): Danticat saves the day by including this satirical essay about personal essays.  "I am a personal essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother.  A brief affair with a second cousin produced by first and only developmentally disabled child.  Years of painful infertility would lead by straight into menopause and a hysterectomy I almost didn't survive."  It was a painfully, painfully funny essay, and exactly the kind of self-mockery needed to keep the collection from being proscriptive of the quintessential essay.

"Unprepared," by Jerald Walker (from Harvard Review): the author reflects on the scarcity of black serial killers while recounting his refusal of money for sex when picked up as a teenaged hitchhiker.

"The Washing," by Reshma Memon Yaqub (from The Washington Post Magazine): the author volunteers to wash a corpse as part of an Islamic practice, where "family members of the same gender as the deceased are expected to bathe and shroud the body for burial."

Why have I bothered to excerpt all of these essays?  It's an exploration, for me, this mapping of the Year's Best American Essays.  It's a study, an investigation of what's possible.  Do I have this kind of personal essay inside of me?  Yes, yes, I do.  Several.  I could even write it in Christy Vannoy's voice of the Personal Essay, and it would be funny.  If I did so, I'd show all my cards, shock the family, make people curse and faint from one end of the country to another.  To write one of these essays, I would need to spill my secrets, and more frighteningly, the secrets of others.  Part of being a writer, part of the suffering of being a writer, is making the choice about which story to tell, because it's never just your story.  Your story almost always involves the stories of others, and writing the heart of a deep story almost always will show things best left unsaid, if you don't want to upset the family applecart.  I write fiction to shroud my true stories in metaphor and myth, and if you know me even a little, you'll see how very thin a shroud it is.

Some day, I will most likely end up writing a Personal Essay about how difficult it was on my family for me to write a Personal Essay.  I'm a middle-aged white female of no particular religion.  I have no stories to tell about race.  I've never had an abortion.  I've never suffered grievous personal injury.  I've never gone to war.  I didn't grow up gay in the suburbs, and was never seriously bullied.  There is no essay I could write at the caliber of the Year's Best that wouldn't reveal something other people would prefer I didn't reveal, a story in which some unforgivable Other was to blame for the central tragedy.  Yet, I have emotional stories that would probably turn your hair white, if only I were brave enough to whisk away the shroud, and show you my truths.

I've heard some people say, "I've written my memoirs, and now all I need to do is wait until everybody dies, so I can send it to publishers."

I think it's true for most of us: our lives (even those of quiet desperation) would make a hell of a story.

David Foster Wallace: "Everybody Worships"

Click here to read the transcript of "This is Water" is its entirety.  If you do, this post will make a lot more sense.

The day I purchased "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace (DFW) in eBook form from the Sony Reader store, I had an immediate and reflexive reaction to its length versus its price.  After reading the speech, I am now amused by my initial reaction.  And today, I finished transcribing the piece in its entirety into my journal.  After doing a little poking around on the Internets in search of a photo to use to illustrate my post (I didn't want to steal someone else's image, and so used a photo of my own feet, taken at Eno River State Park in North Carolina) I learned some things I didn't know.

There are a lot of unhappy people out there who purchased "This is Water," thinking it was something other than a commencement speech packaged as a rather pricey hardcover book about the size of your hand.  They grumble about its presentation, about its price, about the fact that the editors did not mention DFW's suicide in the author's biography, that people are making money from tragedy, that people don't really understand the tragedy here.  That this speech is about how to liberate your spirit from the crushing realities of being an adult, but that the author clearly didn't manage it himself.  In 2005, DFW gave this speech about capital-T Truth, and in 2008, the author hanged himself at home, presumably in the grip of depression.  I'm sure there's a lot to worry about here, a lot to analyze, maybe a lot of moaning and frustrated gnashing, but I'm not going to write about that.  It doesn't make any sense to piss and moan and rend our hair in self-righteous wrath.  I mean, you can choose to do that if you want to, to get all self-righteous and whatnot, but it occurs to me that if the words of this speech really mean that much to you, you might take a minute to reflect on what you're doing, and then have a quiet, compassionate laugh at yourself.

It's difficult to read "This is Water" and then go off on a self-righteous tear.  It really is.

Lately, I've had the opportunity to exchange some letters with a self-proclaimed Buddhist atheist, and I've shied away from discussing atheism much, in that particular correspondence, and in discussions with other atheists I know, because as hard as I try, I don't buy atheism.  I don't buy any kind of theism either, so I don't know what that makes me, if you wanted to label me.  I just know that I agree with DFW when he says in this commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, "This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.  You get to decide what to worship ... because here's something else that's true.  In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.  There is no such thing as not worshipping.  Everybody worships.  The only choice we get is what to worship."

I'm sure there are finer points to the atheism argument that I'm missing, but I'm going to make a choice on how to think about atheism, a philosophy that is not part of my default setting.  I do worship, I have worshipped, and I will continue to worship ... something ... but after reading "This is Water," I realize that I've been in the water all along, that is, the metaphorical water of the choices all around me, choices about how to think that I have not seen.  Like the younger fish swimming by the older fish who questions her thinking, if someone asked me about water, I'd respond the same way. "What the hell is water?"

What does DFW mean?  "The only choice we get is what to worship"?  Please understand I know that I'm taking these pithy sentences out of context.  Please understand that I know these ideas will be much the poorer from being pulled out of order.  I'm sorry about that.  But what DFW is saying in this speech is that even though we're all naturally hard-wired to be totally self-centered, and though the magnitude and intensity of how we feel about our own concerns leads us to believe that the entire universe should prioritize itself according to our own needs, a liberal education gives us the tools with which we might question our hard-wired default thinking.  He says by questioning our default thinking and changing the way we think about things, "It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.  Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it."

Here's where I know I've gone wrong, maybe my whole life.  I've known about the default settings for a long time.  There's a gibbering, yammering, hideous voice inside my head that goes on and on, and in the shadow of it, choked in its terrible grip, I've needed to make my choices, most of them according to an internal set of principles I've hammered together like a lopsided treehouse over the years.  My default settings say, "You need to do X in order to be safe.  You need to do Y in order to be loved.  You need to do Z in order to survive."  The settings don't counsel me to question my perceptions.  They say, "Get these stupid people out of my way.  I need X, and woe-betide the person who gets in my way."  How I've dealt with these shameful voices in my head is to beat them down violently, crush my feelings into a remote corner of my mind, and do what I think is right--only, it's not that simple; crippling self-doubt makes it hard to distinguish the default settings from the principles, and so I swim around in that water like the ignorant young fish, not seeing all the choices, not knowing that I need to let my default settings do whatever they're going to do with my feelings, but that I can actually decide how to think, and I can decide what to worship.

DFW says: "...an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual type thing to worship ... be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough.  Never feel you have enough.  It's the truth. 

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. 

Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. 

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. 

And so on.  The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful: it is that they are unconscious.  They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. 

And the so-called "real world" will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called "real world" or men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. 

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.  The freedom to be lords of our tiny skill-sized kingdoms at the center of all creation. 

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.  The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.  That is real freedom.  That is being taught how to think. 

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" -- the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I have to tell you that this commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the Kenyon College graduating class of 2005 was devastating to my default settings.  I sat, and sat, and transcribed these words into my journal, aware of how much of my life I've chosen, thus far, to sit entrenched in my default settings, not knowing that this is water.  I've concentrated so hard on what I could "do" to help myself, to meet my needs, to achieve my goals.  I've concentrated so little on how to think, on what to think about, and what not to think about.  I believed that if I felt a certain thing, I had to act on it, to protect myself, to keep oxygen pumping into my suffocating little world.  If he says, Y, then I'll have to do Z, so he'll know he can't push me around any more.  It has not occurred to me to listen to Y differently.  To really listen, and think, and choose, rather than bouncing up with my hand on my sword and the wings of death all around me to protect my honor.

I've worshipped power, and been fearful.  I've worshipped my intellect, and felt like a fraud.  I've worshipped my self-control and felt controlled.  I've worshipped control itself and felt insecure.  I've worshipped achievement and felt inadequate; and I can't explain how painful it is now to understand that I've been in water, all along.  I am well fed, well sheltered, well compensated, and my defaults say that I must maintain this, that it is the Truth that these external things, this manufactured environment must be maintained, in this particular way, or I will perish.  My defaults say that I need to look out for myself, or no one else will.  They say trust no one, and show me "undeniable proof" that people are fundamentally untrustworthy.  They prompt me to immediately evaluate the impact any event will have on me, me, me, my concerns, my opportunities, my various comforts and freedoms, before anything else.  I both did and didn't know that I had a choice not to shore up these defaults, but instead spend that time and energy truly caring about other people, and also truly caring about myself--not in that deeply selfish, default way of unconscious assumptions and mindless reaction--but tenderly, with an open and compassionate hand.

I've never "had" anything, and I've never "lost" anything.  I've meandered in and out of consciousness, as people will.  The default settings have clouded my ability to clearly see; the "infrangible set of ethical principles" that I worship is like the Four Noble Truths, but as I said before, home grown.  My beliefs have been hammered together out of fables, poems, fatherly aphorisms, science fictiony idealism, heroic fantasy, thousands of pages of feminist literature, my liberal education.  On one side of the coin, these things illuminate my path and my freedom.  On the other side of the coin, these things are the prison bars of my default settings.  The first side is my heart, the second is my head.  My head sometimes is my prison, and because the pain radiates in my chest, I've made the mistake of thinking that the pain is my heart speaking the Truth, but it's not.  That pain is often the claws of the default settings, tormenting and confusing me, setting free the beasts to ravage my life and dismember my loved ones.

It remains for me to formalize my water practice, my water worship.  It amuses  and saddens me to note that at some point in my life, I became afraid of water.  When I was a little girl, I swam like an otter, and now I barely can step foot in the ocean.  It takes a great deal of patient coaxing for me to go in over my head, and it's been years since I've done so.  At some point in my life, my default settings told me I always needed to maintain the illusion of control.  It has felt impossible to feel safe and in control while submerged under water.  Yet, I know I can be just fine in the water.

The woman in this photo is, after all, me.