when I stop pushing myself, stuff happens

So, having restrained myself from acting on self-hating needs to Do something for the past few days, today I woke up and wanted to write, so I did.  The whole thing had a lovely, easy vibe to it.  I'm scared to write this, lest I somehow then make it a mandate.  Because mandates never works for me.  I'm one of the few writers I know who hates a deadline.  They make me freeze up.  I need to Not make myself do anything for anything to come through me.

After writing - and I stopped myself after a bit so I could do the other things I needed to do - everything else went more easily.

I was having lunch the day before with my friend Dana (who writes the Momover blog - see link on blog roll) who reminded me of the principle of detachment. Somehow, it stuck.

I got all the paperwork done I needed to do and prepared the apartment for the movers coming tomorrow. I have shelves up and ready for books and a closet almost empty for boxes.

The moral of the story here is: when you need rest, rest...even if imperfectly and even if watching TV.  The old pseduo-Buddhist cliche someone scrawled in the tunnels below the dorms at my college holds true: don't just do something, sit there.

For me, all creativity has to be voluntary.  I cannot do it under any form of duress or pressure.  It just won't budge.  Some people can, but I am not one of those people.  Something in me dies inside and I just feel beleaguered.  I hope I remember this, because it's important.

Other things that don't work for me: formulas and rules.  Sometimes guidelines can help, but only if they are flexible.

If I am being paid to do a specific job, like teaching, of course there are parameters and that's fine.  But if I'm teaching something on my own, like a workshop, the same principle of radical flexibility apply.

The other thing I'm happy about today - the writing gave me the sense that I only used to get from directing - namely a calm sense that things are OK.  Not a big whiz-bang sense of exhilaration - just calm, which is so nice.

I think I should stop writing about this, though, lest I turn even that into a formula of some kind and labor under certain emotional expectations. There is a very thin line for me between allowing myself to work and tipping over into workaholic, expectation-driven activity and I need to steer clear of that.

Literally Everything I've ever created worth a damn has worked outside of that driven state, and Everything I have ever created within that more dogmatic, externally-focused way of working has been deeply flawed or just plain bad.

The first play I wrote, I wrote blind with no idea what I was doing and thinking I'd gone kind of loopy but knowing it was meant to be though I didn't know what it was.  The theatrical techniques I created with a handful of actors and artists in labs started in labs with no expectation of anything coming out of it other than exploration.  As soon as the expectations began, the process dried up in some deep way.  Almost invisible this subtle killer of creativity (external motives - away from intrinsic value), but nonetheless deadening.

I want to keep following the voice inside me that said "leap and I'll catch you" and brought me back here to my beloved city, without knowing how the fuck it was going to work.  And it did.  That trust, that soul dive, that's the only way, The Only Way anything ever works for me.

Hopefully I can remember this more and more as I continue on with this life thing.  The less I force, the happier I am.  Thanks, Dana, and all of you who have listened to me recently and over the years, who have reminded me of this.

Oh and finally (and male readers, this last section for you is strictly optional), I have been dealing with peri menopause and have discovered a miracle 'cure', which is maca-based, called Femmenessence.  I am so not being paid by them or anyone (and refuse in fact to 'monetize' my site - by selling ads - because I'm a crappy capitalist and because of the aforementioned expectations thing), but it works and I was suffering, so feel kind of ethically bound to share this info with anyone in the same boat.  No more hot flashes and all kinds of stuff I thought died seems to be kind of waking up again - anyone going through this will take my meaning.  I'm also drinking a "Green Stuff" mixture, taking Black Cohosh and calcium and a multi-vitamin.  Can't say enough good things about having this turnaround, because wild horses won't make me take hormonal supplements, which just have cancer written all over them as far as I can tell...plus hormonal alteration stuff makes me crazy and I mean Crazy...But before addressing the symptoms, it was like living life with PMS.  No fun for me or anyone else...

OK end of female-health hour...

Wish me luck with the Stuff from London arrival tomorrow - expect it will be emotional, but also will be glad to finally have my papers and books.  Scared of the smell of clothes and sheets...smells are my madeleine...and London smells very different from NYC.

Time though for bed so I'll be ready for the movers...though God Herself only knows when they will arrive...

still unspooling....

Still lacking focus and finding even basic tasks difficult - this is standard issue for me after doing lots of structured stuff - so wish I could just relax into it a bit more...

When I do rest - without distraction - certain ideas come into my mind that wouldn't happen otherwise, but I find myself at times too easily distracted by the internet and television and such and then think I'm being lazy, etc...not sure what is 'constructive criticism' of myself and what is just being too hard...

On the good news front on Monday saw the space at The Brecht Forum where we will be doing the reading of We live in financial times and it is perfect.   We will be able to Do things rather than just tell them even in a staged reading.

Today met with some friends and then sorted out some paperwork.  Feel like I should have been able to do more, but I couldn't.

Last night, I finished The Liars' Club, which I think is a miracle of a book and again will recommend it.  Even though it is non-fiction, it reads like an amazing story, in a good way - in that it moves from one unexpected place to another but with a sense of inevitability.  I hope one day to be able to do justice to some of my own life in that way... Right now reading Margaret Atwood's new story in The New Yorker who creates her version of this but with fiction.  Learning from the masters...

Don't think I'll be able to sit down and do my own writing right away (aside from the blog), so figure the next best thing is absorbing those from whom I can learn...

Ugo the Cat continues to get more and more comfortable and in one month is acting like the cats I had for years. This is a small triumph, and I'm happy he feels so comfy and safe here, though I fear I am spoiling another cat rotten.  Oh well.  Worse crimes have happened.

Not very inspired this evening, I fear...but wanting to keep with the integrity of this project - recording the experience of these days in transition as they happen even if not particularly glamorous or inspired.

Back to Atwood...g'night...

Finished teaching and grading so have no brain...

Just finished the last grading of the semester, finished teaching last Thursday.  Consequently, I have the brain of a squid - no offence to squids but you get the idea...

I wondered why on Friday (the day after I finished teaching), I could not instantly focus.  I had planned that by today, Monday, I'd be back writing regularly.  Probably needless to say, that has not happened.  I am in desperate need of what I hope I can give myself right now: deep rest.

However, all my stuff arrives from London on Thursday so am wondering what that will bring in terms of space issues, etc...what I'll do with stuff and blah blah blah...I also have the voices telling me I have to be writing at least One of the books I'm working on...or else I'm a Fraud...(yawn...even I'm bored with my own self-laceration routine...)

I have some little things to do here and there and am doing them and I guess I'd like to believe I'm allowed to believe that's enough - I've been on GO since mid-June when my husband said he wanted to separate and I agreed to try that out.  I did not have the break I had envisioned in September in Orkney or any kind of break at all really (if you think I'm exaggerating - re-read this blog from mid-June on and please inform me when you get to the break part).

However, saying this, even SAYING this makes me feel guilty - like I should be on GO at all times, every moment...OR if I'm going to rest it has to be in some particularly wholesome zen yoga way that involves incense and focus.

Christ on a stick.

Please dear JesusBuddhaMaryJosephAllahVishnuWhoeverThe Fuck save me from this Driven Madness...this is workaholism pure and simple - driven by the dogs of self-hatred and exhaustion.  A nasty little demon, tiny annoying with bite like some particularly heinous parasite...

Which is all a long way to explain why there was a break however brief in this blog, as I needed to even Not to do this...

This feeling of MustDoNow is also blowback from some good decisions I made earlier this week to not to do something that would have been exhausting, so the usual pattern is this: first, feel ashamed of making that decision, then feel better, and even somewhat proud of myself, then find a reason to worry about something or a reason to feel badly about myself, then focus on a project I am Not doing and begin the process of lashing myself over the head with that.

Nice.

OK, so I'm going to stop typing here and allow myself to Imperfectly Rest...or as someone once said to me: whatever's worth doing is worth doing badly.

Amen to that.

So I bid you sweet dreams while I go off and do something badly...

It was 31 years ago today...

well almost, by the time this post publishes, probably 31 years and a day...though also about this time of night I imagine...no pun intended, that John Lennon was killed.  As if Reagan winning the presidency wasn't bad enough, a month later a guy who just talked about peace was killed.

I remember reading somewhere that Hunter Thompson was talking to Ken Kesey about this and saying: "why him? Why not me? I'm the asshole" and Kesey saying "you never promised anyone anything, that's why."  I think he had a point.

I woke up the next morning (dec. 9, 1980) to my radio alarm blaring out the voice of a DJ saying "-n was shot last night" and then a Beatles or Lennon song playing - was it Yesterday?  Imagine?  Honestly, I don't remember.  I just remember knowing as soon as I heard the song that something terrible happened, the person's name ended with 'n', the Beatles were playing, so there was a good chance it was John Lennon.

I was 17 and in love with all thing Lennon at that time, which made me incredibly unhip in 1980.  I think I may have written about this earlier in the blog, but this was when I was at boarding school on scholarship and my similarity with most people there was slim to none.  I of course thought this meant something was deeply wrong with me and didn't realize until years later it might have had something to do with the gaping chasm of a class divide between us wherein most of them were raised to rule the world or at the very least (some female students) to marry a ruler of the world.  Many of them, for the record, now do rule the world.  No, I don't know how to contact any of them now, though I probably could through the miracle of social networking, but then again I'd probably have about as much to say to them now as I did then, i.e., not much.

The students I liked and admired were into things like punk and new wave and went to CBGBs on the weekends.  They seemed like they orbited a different social stratosphere than I did.  I listened to the Beatles, Abbey Road mostly, sometimes the Doors and the Who - living in some 60s la-la land that probably never existed and certainly bore zero resemblance to reality in 1980.

But to those of us who lived in that world, and there were a few true believers at Choate, mostly other smarty-pants scholarship students like me who were pale and serious looking and clung to each other in un-hip-smarty-pants-ness, Lennon's assassination was brutal.  We were depressed for days, some even wore black arm bands.  I don't think I went that far, either because I thought it was odd or because I lived in a whole house of people who didn't really care, were Way too cool for school and which I had somehow ended up in because I got along with the Dean of the Girls, Francelle, and her husband Ken because of my growing interest radical left-wing politics.  I used to spend weekends in their living room drinking tea and talking Marxism and Latin - you know, the usual way one spends Saturdays when one is 17.

I loved her tea, though - Francelle's - and the ceramic handmade mugs, the honey that was fresh from some honeycomb somewhere, that you twisted around a wooden ridged stick thing.  It felt warm and safe in her kitchen and living room.  I met her many years later and told her she had saved my life that year.  She told me I had helped her a lot, too, which totally surprised me.  But in retrospect, she wasn't your usual person at Choate, especially not with her then-husband Ken, who was from Trinidad and had hair that went up straight, which always looked like he had just put his finger in an electric socket...seriously.  But he would talk and talk and talk about left-wing political theories and ideas and they would reminisce about Oxford and I would stare at them and think: wow.  I would then research lots of these ideas for various papers and teach-ins and like whatever...so I was their little protege I suppose.

So why, to this day I can't figure it out, was I alone in their little TV room watching Reagan bounce on to that stage with 'his Wife Nancy' to the tune of Happy Days Are Here Again?  I was crying and crying, thinking: things are going to be terrible...which they were/are still/as in we haven't recovered from the damage done - and it's only getting/gotten worse.  And I was ALONE.  Very, very alone. None of the other girls in the house gave a shit as far as I could tell and why would they?  They were safe and snug as bugs in a rug (oh except of course for the ones who would die of drug overdoses and stuff...yes it was an illusion, their safety, but they believed it is the point...I didn't know how to reach my parents half the time - this made things different - perhaps they didn't either, come to think of it - oh never mind - let's just say they had more money and leave it at that...)

Then a month later Lennon gets shot, right after putting out the Double Fantasy album and that haunting Rolling Stones cover with him naked in a fetal position next to Yoko, fully clothed.  I stared and stared at that photo - riveted by the possibilities inherent therein - not the least of which was the gender reversal that was Unheard of in 1980, even that late in the day - this was truly radical.  Now, probably not so much.  Then, truly shocking in a good way.

He was shot when he was what 42 maybe?  I'm 48, so I've already outlived John Lennon, which is depressing from both angles: i.e., he should not have died so young and I have accomplished only a teeny tiny shred of what he accomplished in his short life.  Both of these facts depress me, his death more so, because I can still rally (she said bravely).  At least I hope so.

I'm not going to even talk about the shooter or all that shit because it's sensationalist well shit.  The fact of his death is what matters and that it was violent and unnecessary but probably given our weird aversion to peace inevitable.

Is the Occupy movement the beginning of the pendulum swinging back...finally?  Too soon to tell I suppose but at least small things are changing in the way people talk - it seems to be rearranging certain politicians' spines back into left wing alignment where they were supposed to be according to their rhetoric...and so long may it continue.

It's heartening to see people so aware, awake and close to fearless - rallying here and there - defiantly remaining leaderless.  I can't help but think Lennon would have loved this rebellion/Happening.  It's part politics, part Fluxus (the group Ono was part of when they met - you can see home movie like footage of all of them Jonas Mekas took if you happen upon the right gallery one day...on the Staten Island Ferry as I recall...).  That's kind of great.

The students where I will be teaching next semester, Hunter, are already occupying their school.  My favorite tweet was from one of their professors saying "I'll join you guys when I've finished grading your papers."  I look forward to doing the same, except it'll be even more fun since I'm teaching acting. My base text will be Joseph Chaikin's ʼThe Presence of the Actor' - a great manifesto about theater and politics and what he refers to as 'the set up.'  That and my own stuff.  Should be pretty great.  And it will link in effortlessly with Occupy.  Not in a didactic way, and no my students don't have to sign up for political action, etc., but the theatricality of it will be made apparent...and the idea of how to create theatrical spaces in public places and the theatricality of political action...etc...

So here's hoping the great big gorgeous spirit that was John Lennon (and yes I know he had his dark side and yadeyadeya...but come on so does everybody - but not everybody sings Give Peace a Chance until they are hoarse...right?) is delighting in this new spin on the dance floor of possibilities opening up.  I hope the creaking sound is of the pendulum finally taking a swing back and not the damn thing just flying off its axis...always a possibility...but even then, something New would happen...

It's late now, I finished my last day of teaching for this term today.  Hurrah!  So I can stay up late again and sleep past 6:45am.  Anyone who knows me will know how important this is.  I am one of the 5% of truly night people.  I have decided I am descended genetically from the cave nightwatch shift, the ones who were supposed to keep their eyes peeled at 2am for marauding lions or whatever.  A small but proud minority.  For whom a 6:45am start is cruelty.

Back to watching the cave...but now, hopefully Ugo the cat can take charge of that so I - who did have a 6:45am start today, can toddle off to bed.

"The objects for which there is no satisfactory solution."

The above is a quote from Joan Didion's newest book Blue Nights.  She is referring to the many mementos she has of people and time gone by, some of which is here or there in places that make  some sense and then there are 'the objects for which there is no satisfactory solution.'

This is why she loves non-fiction.  This is also why I love non-fiction.  As she said in the interview I mentioned yesterday, "there is more space" in non-fiction.  With fiction you are compelled to follow a narrative.  And as we all 'know' narratives don't take too kindly to 'the objects for which there is no satisfactory solution.'  Those must be tossed out as unwieldy, perhaps too beautiful or too big or too small, but for whatever reason not right.

So much of life in my experience fits into this category, which is why I resist narrative so strongly.  I feel it masks more than it reveals.

Having said that, in Mary Karr's excruciating memoir of her childhood The Liars' Club (referring to the effect one of her father's tall tales, as told to his group of friends, the eponymous liars' club, who listen to his stories in particular with attentive respect, even when they know they are being lied to somehow, or should do) "I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth."

So perhaps it is living on this line that's important - when writing 'non-fiction' knowing it is always to some extent fictional, contingent, subjective (Didion says when she started placing herself in her journalistic stories it was not the done thing but she felt it was necessary to allow the reader to know "who that was at the other end of the voice") and when speaking or writing fiction knowing it can penetrate to someone's core, but perhaps only if the recipient knows it's a lie.  In the section Karr is describing, it's the first time she is complicit with her father and knows he's lying.  Perhaps it is that knowledge that allows her the other feelings?

When referring to the other men in the liars' club Karr says "Daddy never fessed up to the lie that I know. It stayed built between him and the other men like a fence he'd put up to keep them from knowing him better."  So without knowing the truth of the lie, something is lost.

Didion was so clear that memory is a liar, that all we remember is what we do not want to remember.  I think she's right in the end.  If a memory is painful, we'd rather not have that, but sometimes, too, good memories can bring us closer to the lack of whatever moment/time/place/person that was.  She is obsessed in Blue Nights with "how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here."  She then repeats the phrase: "How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is another thing I could not afford to see."

She reads these phrases, says these things, sitting on a chair looking like an oversized, very calm exotic bird - quite thin, quite beautiful, thankfully allowing her skin to be wrinkly in that same exquisite way that Louise Bourgeois' face became carved with all her life's suffering and laughter mapped on it for all to see.  These women look heroic to me, like statues prior to death.  I imagine that is not how they feel or in Bourgeois' case felt, but to a woman like me (of a certain age...) these women are heros.  They have carved out their writing and art into the world, which finally appreciates it/them.  They have suffered huge losses, but they survived.  They see so keenly.  They are the wise ones.

Doris Lessing wrote about the 'wise ones' in one of her books, I think it was the Golden Notebook, and she speaks of these people as those who will walk through and over whatever is necessary to survive, not give up, give in, shy away.  She was writing that in her 40s I believe, in a bid to become one of the wise ones, which she of course has become.  Is.

Mary Karr is in her 50s and is walking the same path, is probably already a wise one, but I have no doubt will continue in this walk and become even wiser.  I hope she too survives well into her dotage so we can benefit from her words.  I hope I can live that long, too, so I can finish all the projects I so want to write and create.  I am not sure I can possibly finish them all, but I am lucky, I realize writing this, so lucky: to have so many ideas.  To want to create that badly and to have time (I hope) to do so...

My teaching for the semester ends on Thursday.  Once I have finished marking and get some paperwork into Hunter for the acting class, I will be able to focus on the writing and such for a blissful 6 weeks.  Well, that and all my shit from London arriving in a couple weeks and deciding where on earth to put it all. There will be many objects for which there is not satisfactory solution.  That will take about a week, then holidays, etc...but I promise myself as a solemn oath to take big chunks of time to write and do my own work.

I want to be one of the wise ones, too, which means I need to be more ruthless with my time and energy than I am.  This makes me wonder if I will ever be truly wise or perhaps more like my meditation practice (which I refer to as 'dumbass meditation' because I don't even attempt not to think, which is like impossible anyway - I just sit there, eyes shut, coffee cup to my left and breathe for about 25 minutes with coffee sip intervals - but 15 years of that every day!).  Perhaps, then, the best I can aspire to is dumbass wise.  Somehow that seems more probable and like attainable...

So, now to preparing my last review for this semester of the Fundamentals of Interpersonal Communication, God help us all and especially my students...I do my best.

"I simply decided to go without a narrative"

Joan Didion on her books from The White Album to Blue Nights.   Quote above is her speaking about Blue Nights - her most recent book about the death of her daughter.

Below is a link to this interview.  We'll call her my involuntary guest blogger for tonight.  Sometimes you just gotta give it up for the wise ones...

Joan Didion interviewed by David L. Ulin

All hail to the master realist with the cold-hot eye for what can be written down, how we make narrative and when it all falls apart.  Plus heart...no cold intellectualism here, just intelligence of all kinds.

Not Just Another Fucking Statistic

OK, so now someone I know has died of this disease of alcoholism and in a particularly horrific way.  She was about my age and leaves behind children.  She was in fact probably the age of my friend Vickie who died of breast cancer, and so this is the weird thing: they are both dead, they both leave behind teenage boys, and the similarity ends there.

One person was surrounded by loved ones and as sad and unfair as it was, she was prepared and so was everyone else as much as that is possible.  She was able to be fully present and accounted for up until she died.

In this other case, this poor woman was not able to be present to herself or anyone else and in the end was killed by the disease that kicked her ass and everyone's around her.  I am just devastated by this.  In part purely out of sympathy for her and those around her and partially because I'm staring at a path I was allowed the grace not to follow, but which could easily have been mine.

Why me and not her?

That is the question that haunts me always.  Always.  It never makes any sense.  Why some people are allowed off the auto-destruction freeway and others are not.  It makes about as much sense as a cyclone or a tsunami.  I would yammer on about being protected by forces greater than me but then what does that imply about the people who do not survive?

Words fail.  Logic fails.

It all just fucking shuts down.

It's devastating.  Devastating like Hurricane Katrina was devastating - there is the natural devastation, horrendous and then the fucked up, dysfunctional way of responding to it.  The whole package: physical, mental, spiritual.  A total breakdown inside, outside and everywhere in between.

I just hope to hell that I remain as grateful as I should be for the gift of my life and never, ever forget how luck I am. I do of course like all the time.  All the Time...but I shouldn't.

What happened to this person could easily have happened to me at any time when I was actively out there trying to wipe myself out - or was that what I was doing?  Wipe myself out or as Jung said was it a low-grade spiritual search?  Is active alcoholism/addiction the attempt to let go of what can be referred to as the 'bondage of self' - not my actual self...but because the disease is so fucked up, the metaphor gets lost and the desire becomes death itself - not directly necessarily but ultimately that is the course.

The complete obliteration of the self by any means necessary.  The utter shame of being alive, the inability to live in one's skin the sheer utter self-hatred...and many times this comes about because of action perpetrated on people when they were children - actions that dare not speak their name for fear of more shame, abuse, violence, or simply the horror of not being believed (see in re: Sandusky, Penn State).  70+ percent of alcoholics are victims of child sexual abuse.  That's huge.  Some people become alcoholics just 'cause, but many have pain inflicted early on plus the genetic predisposition and many other factors besides.

Alcoholism is like conception - we know stuff about it but in the end no one Really knows what causes it, not really.  But like conception, you know it when it's happened.  The parallel ends there of course but still...

I hope this woman now lifted off the earth in horrendous fashion finds peace in whatever form she now manifests.  I hope those souls left on this earth to walk through the wake of her storm can find ways to do that that ultimately lead to serenity and love.  I know first hand how much fucking easier said than done That is and if I could fast forward the switch for any of them, God/dess knows I would and fast.  But I can't.

Anymore than I can do that for myself and my own grieving right now, which while real and sad seems quite small compared to this cyclonic event.  For the simple reason that I am alive and, as far as I know, healthy and as Raymond Carver once said about a similar state of grace "all the rest is gravy."

In terms of that, though, just want to acknowledge that my husband sent back a loving letter in response to mine and while we are saying goodbye for now it is without rancour or drama but with love and sadness.  It sucks but it is not any worse than it has to be and for that I am grateful.  Resentment makes things stick and cling and when I am lucky enough to be in a circumstance where I do not have to be filled with it, I am glad.  Anger to my mind is the not the same as resentment.  Anger is a feeling. Resentment is that feeling stuck, with hooks tearing at my flesh, demanding to be taken out by someone other than me while I keep screwing them in deeper.  It's ugly.  Anger is energizing, at times even pure, if vented and released quite healthy.  I'm not particularly good at that, I should add, but when I can do it, it's always a relief.

And love - where is that?  Still figuring that out, sometimes feel it, know it when I feel it and act on it - but real love - rare.  Real love is selfless and unconditional.  Hard.  Intimacy?  I say I want it but if I've spent so much time with someone I believed was not capable of it to the degree I thought I wanted, then what did/do I really want?  These are the questions I need to ask myself quite clearly without flinching. But with compassion lest I fall into a swamp of self-hatred that does absolutely zero people any good.

But for now: a prayer for S. and those she has left behind.  A prayer of gratitude for this beautiful day. and for all of you who are alive here now to share it.

Be grateful for this day.  Notice it.  Find some beauty somewhere no matter what.  Cry your eyes out if you need to and feel the sense of emptiness and lightness that comes after that can then be filled by something else.  Love something, someone, yourself...love anything, anyone, your cat...

Don't give up.  Just don't fucking give up.  Not today.