Dispatches from the Writing Warren

I don't know what else to call it. I go into some kind of place where I write a lot every day. This place has many little cubby areas where a bunch of people, including me, are beavering away at writing projects. We sit there and write ... and write ... and write.

I have become addicted to this place, because (a) it's quiet - except for every once in a while there's an annoying person who sniffles a lot (not as in crying, as in has a cold and for some reason doesn't understand the world includes tissues) or clicks a pen...but these people are at a minimum (and FYI - male - the women somehow all seem to be able to stay quiet - as do, to be fair, most of the men), (b) everyone else's focus seems to help mine and (c) somehow even though no one is checking on me I feel guilty if I'm not actually writing. When I need a break, I go out to the kitchen and get a coffee or tea, heat up some food, whatever, chat to my new cell-I mean writing-mates.

Because of this focus, the writing is moving ahead at a brisk clip. The words are piling up, as they have been all along, but also other things are happening - synchronistic things, the more mysterious things that start happening when Something is taking shape...it still feels like early stages in some ways - even though I'm close to a rough draft now (at over 225K words, I certainly freaking hope so) - the shape of what this will become is only now coming into view - and it comes in and out - still not entirely clear - but that's OK.

And this is the best part: it seems like that's OK - for perhaps the first time - and I don't even want to write this because I'm sure I'll jinx it and tomorrow I will go back and think What a Dump! So, we'll just say to hedge bets - for today - for today it's OK. (I've been writing about the ins and outs of all the self-hatred, fears and in some cases just emotional pain due to subject matter that has gone into this day by day on the evil that is Facebook - so this is an overview more or less...)

In the middle of the writing, FYI, John, my beloved Canadian and I had a lovely Valentine's Day back at Bread and Yoga - doing a Thai Partner Massage workshop that ended with homemade chocolate tasting. Can you imagine anything better? It was as great as it sounds. And we did need it, even though we were the creaky oldsters, we managed...

This is important, too, to this process: the pauses to rejuvenate - gather energies, but also need the relentless moving forward - it's a balance.

I saw an amazing documentary from 1982 about James Baldwin retracing the steps of the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s forward - it's called Heard it Through the Grapevine and if you can find a way to see it, you should. More relevant now than ever. This served to remind me of what 1980-81 looked like (when the film was being shot) in the US, among many other things. And what a weird ass time that was....from Carter to Reagan...the end of one era (FDR) into another - an era that began in 1980 and in which we still live...God help us and When Dear Lord does the pendulum swing back? Please tell me...but anyway, it's an amazing film and should be required viewing in every high school and college in the US. If you haven't read Baldwin, just do it. If you want to understand the US and especially racial politics in the US, it's a must...he does way more than that, but he was more clear-sighted than most on these issues...

This all relates, because of so many strands of my grandmothers' lives, but too tired to go into all of those right now (plus that will be in the book)...

However, I will tell you my realization about Nietzsche - which I'm sure you're all dying to know - and it's this: his whole thing about beyond good and evil (and about the inability to judge anyone because there is no place from which you can stand to do so - and there is no way to judge without isolating someone else's action from the course of their entire life and all that has affected that person and led to that particular action)...is directly related to what any great art does. If you are writing or creating anything that involves stories about human beings - even if what they have done is horrendous - you can't just stand outside and judge them.  If you do that, you become a moralist, but you are not creating great art. Great art happens in the place where all judgment - as in standing outside and tut-tutting - ceases. It also means letting go of all resentment (which was another big Nietzschean no-no - bwahahahahaha - but still...), because that stands in the way of clear seeing.

I seriously doubt I am anywhere near the first person to see or say this, but the realization had a profound effect on me, because it affirms not only the challenges of being a deeply flawed granddaughter writing a book about my deeply flawed grandmothers but also my whole PhD thesis (about theater/art being an act of philosophy and art usually being out ahead of philosophy...etc.)

But even more than any of that is what it implies for living, too. How important it is to find a way to see clearly without searching for an illusory moral high ground from which you think you can fling your judgements hither and yon and in order to be considered Wise or at least Clever.

Is that an ideal? Sure as shit it is, but it's one worth shooting for. I think this is also what Virginia Woolf was on about when she was saying it would take women 100 years (from when she wrote A Room of One's Own) to write something as incandescent as Shakespeare, because there would be a need for women to be able to stand on their own two feet without fear or favor...without having to simply be in a rage over their own status...This is troublesome politically of course in many ways to contemplate, but there is some truth to it. There is a certain level of serenity needed to write or create anything with clarity that does not fall into some form of self-justification or ego-feeding. What creates the soil for that serenity/clarity can be argued, but there does need to be a still point out of which all the rest can emerge.

OK, I'm now babbling and it's 3:30 a.m. so it's time to wrap this up...but a book is on the way, my friends, at least there is that...this rough beast is indeed slouching towards - well - me, I suppose - waiting to be born...