I miss writing here. For years, it was what I did at the end of most days, a ritual but also a frame. I liked marking time with words and how they felt as I wrote them, even when I had nothing of consequence to say.
It’s been long enough now that it feels strange, like a house I used to live in. Still, I’m compelled to return at certain moments, if only to imagine what it would be like to live here again.
I tell myself that it’s okay: that there are times when writers write and times when they don’t. And that it is hard to write when one is in limbo, which is the place I am living in now.
Sun in the twelfth house; Saturn in Virgo. Even the stars are at a remove.
Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.
–Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Cook Book, via Salon
Well, as the Montrealers among you well know, it’s been a lousy summer. The rain is near-constant and falls in showers, sheets, and occasionally violent storms, the last of which flooded basements throughout the city and unleashed a rumoured tornado. The weather makes it difficult to commit to a terrasse, and even my balcony has lost its allure, being as often as not too cold and damp to enjoy.
The weather does have certain upsides: for example, it interrupts my neighbours’ renovation projects and sends their children scurrying indoors, leaving the alley beyond my window blissfully quiet. But whatever benefits this silence confers are far outweighed by the feeling of being trapped within four unchanging walls.
When the sun peeked out the other day, I dropped everything and bolted outside with my camera, which, not being waterproof, I’ve had little opportunity to use. On a whim, I decided that I would document the network of alleyways that Mile End is famous for, which had suddenly come alive in a burst of flowers and billowing clotheslines.
As the neighbourhood has gentrified, the facades of its buildings have lost a certain amount of their charm. Wood has been replaced by aluminum and steel, which are sturdier materials but also less crafted and colourful, and the decorative flourishes provided by unsupervised tenants have slowly given way to the visual conservatism of owners preoccupied with design concepts and property values.
Still, you can see vestiges of the old Mile End in its alleys, which, by virtue of being less public, have been slower to succumb to renovation. From the back, the neighbourhood is still a bit funky and lopsided, which is of course just the way I like it. It means that people like me still live here.
A few days ago, I encountered three lines of a poem in a report about the protests in Iran. A protester sang the lines to the reporter, translating them for his benefit:
We should go under the rain.
We should wash our eyes,
And we should see the world in a different way.
The lines stayed with me, and I resolved to find the poem from which they had been excerpted. It took a bit of digging, but I found it.
The poem is by Sohrab Sepehri and is called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.” The translation is poor, but it hardly matters. Even hobbled by language, it is a marvellous poem.
Now, I’m not a literary scholar, so I don’t know why it is marvellous. But when I read this
Life is getting wet time after time.
Life is swimming in the pond of ‘Now.’Let us take off our robes:
Water is only a step ahead.
I wanted to swim more than anything else in the world.
We have, in fact, reported all the censorship – of local newspapers as well as communications. The footage of a brutal police force assaulting the political opposition on the streets of the capital has shocked the world. Rightly so, although no one has made comparison with police forces who batter demonstrators on the streets of Western Europe, who beat women with night-sticks, who have kicked over an innocent middle-aged man who immediately suffered a fatal heart attack, who have shot down an innocent passenger on the London Tube… There are special codes of morality to be applied to Middle East countries which definitely must not apply to us.
–Robert Fisk, “In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows“
What doctoral students in my field actually do:
I propose that what Communism needs is a rebranding campaign to sex it up a little; to bring it forward into the 21st century. I think that a political party could probably put forward a lot of Communist ideas as long as they adamantly denied that they were Communist ideas whenever anyone asked. They could call themselves the National Conservative Democrats or something and no one would be the wiser.
If they wanted to be even more hip, of course, then they could take the revolution online and make up a whole bunch of campaigns with savvy sexy kids in their 20s with wavy hair and colourful clothes talking about how technology is helping everyone to learn to share everything now and that this idea of sharing should be infectious and spread into every sector…because that’s the way things work now.
The screen fades to red and the title credits come on in bright yellow:
iMarx …the way things work now.
–paidbytheword, “Rebranding the Revolution.”
Today, I attended a career workshop for PhD students who are about to be unceremoniously ejected into the worst academic job market in years. It was, in a word, awful: a vague mish-mash of pop psychology and group exercises that offered little in the way of concrete information or practical advice, and entirely too much about finding one’s joy and being “free” and “creative” in the face of imminent unemployment. To add insult to injury, the workshop leader clearly had no idea what it is that doctoral students in my field actually do, which is an honest enough mistake but which left her struggling to respond to questions tainted by years of critical theory and draft beer. read more…
One of the things I value the most about blogs, even if their cultural moment has passed, is the window they provide into the parts of people’s lives that usually remain unspoken. I was reminded of this when I read Zura’s last post about her return to dance after an emergency sabbatical, which has stayed with me for most of the evening.
I didn’t know this about Zura, who is, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her, a powerhouse of a woman: intelligent, driven, and crackling with energy, not to mention strikingly beautiful. But reading the précis of her experience, I am not at all surprised by the path her passion for dance has taken.
Of course, I identify with Zura’s experience strongly, albeit from a vantage point that is as listless and sedentary as hers is hectic and physical. The relentless pursuit of a goal, no longer for its own sake but merely to prove to oneself that one can “hack” it, a process which then becomes slowly tainted with anxiety and resentment… Well, what’s not to identify with?
I think the experience that Zura describes is latent in the act of striving, which can be directed towards a thousand different goals but which is always, invariably, about the relationship the one who strives has with herself. And on a certain level, it is a relationship that is premised on bad faith. The belief that no matter how hard one works, it is never enough–that the body or the mind must be pushed to its limit, not only when it is absolutely necessary but as a matter of course—belies a mistrust of one’s abilities that can only be overcome by a level of commitment that verges on punishment.
Is that right, Zura?
Over the years, I’ve heard many confessions of bad faith from fellow graduate students, a number of which I suspect were inspired by this blog. Some have spilled out over drinks in darkened cafés; others in sudden bursts of tears in the middle of brightly lit hallways. In every case, the culprit is actually an Achilles’ Heel: a sense that the confessor is of the wrong gender, the wrong race, the wrong economic or cultural class, the wrong body or family or place, and, because of it, that she must hold herself to a standard of achievement she can never hope to achieve. I have learned to listen, to acknowledge, to offer fellow-feeling, but I’ve never had much in the way of advice to impart.
Next time, I’ll just paraphrase this:
In the end, the main lesson I learned was all about giving myself permission to move at whatever pace was appropriate for me, and who cares what everyone else is doing and how. I make my own rules governing me. When I returned to work, I allowed myself to work in 30-minute shifts, where I would concentrate for half an hour and just work, the rest of the time I allowed myself to relax and take a break, guilt-free. As I did this, I found I could do more and more chunks of 30-minute work intervals, and soon 30 minutes would expand to an hour. (Let me tell you, it’s amazing just how much work you can get done in a simple 30 minutes with zero distractions… )
Thanks, Zura.
The chapter is done, all of the windows are open, and I am drinking a beer. I spent the day catching up on chores, which, like most other things that are not my dissertation, I have neglected badly. I even toyed with the idea of doing my taxes, but since I had run out of clean underwear, laundry won out.
Underwear aside, my life is as small and clenched as I knew it would become. I’ve been here before, and although so much is different this time around, the core of the process is fundamentally the same. Retreat. Immerse. Write. Repeat. I wish that it could be less monastic, and perhaps under different conditions it will be, but for now this is what works. So be it.
My last horoscope began with this: “Saturn in your sign is a heavy influence, but it’s teaching you to hold your ground and give your life some dependable shape.” I suppose that it is, but not in any way that I am able to recognize as such. I don’t know how I will pay my rent next month, or what I will do for a living, or if my father and I will ever speak again. And yet, I am writing as if none of these things matter, which is either madness or progress or quite probably both.
In any case, it is almost summer. I won’t let this one slip away.
