Circadian Calm

My priest, the last one I had, used to say, when wrangling someone to serve on a committee, we each have the same 24 hours. My mind would cry out, but I am busy! When it did, I had made his point.

We each have the same 24 hours.

I hadn't caught up with Modernism when I wrote my first novel (in the drawer). I thought it was my idea to write in 24 hour segments. Well, it was a good idea.

I always had a sense of the day as being the big picture. Nature impressed it, I suppose. I deeply believe in dailiness, in its value. If you want depth, attend to your relationship, your book, your muscles daily. Two minutes, ten minutes, ten hours, that isn't important. It is doing something in the period of one circadian rhythm that matters.

Interruption is toxic.

I just had a week alone, at VCCA. I kept my head down and worked. I had a week of days. Each morning I woke up and lay in bed for a while, listening to the birds. I made coffee in the nearest kitchen, and wrote for a couple of hours. Then walked over to the dining room for breakfast, which I ate as silently as possible. More writing, thinking, reading. Lunch--a plate taken back to my room, not meeting anyone's eye. A break after lunch, phone a friend, go into town to Lou's Antiques, a walk at Sweetbriar. Back to the desk until dinner. Then back to the desk until my final step outside to look up at the sky, and to watch the horses in the dark.

Did you get a lot done? I wrote pages, revised pages, planned. The main thing, though, is that each day I poured from my sleeping self into my waking self completely, the way a tidepool is filled and emptied.

A Very Special To Do List

Today I have the pleasure of introducing a new book of poetry by Sarah Salway. The book is called You Do Not Need Another Self Help Book. A bit further below, you can hear Sarah read a poem!

Here's Sarah.  Isn't she lovely? I am very proud of her, and to be her friend.

I met her at the artists' residency, VCCA, several years ago. We drew together quickly, and spent many hours walking the paths and trails at Sweetbriar College, talking about writing and other less august matters. Our friendship outlasted the residency, and became another mutual residency, and then visits back and forth across the pond. Sarah lives in England--can you hear it in her voice?

She is an amazing writer of short stories and novels, including Getting The Picture, Leading The Dance, Something Beginning With, Tell Me Everything, and more! She has been a Royal Literary Fellow holding the fort at The London School of Economics, and is presently the Laureate of Canterbury, in which role she is doing many exciting projects, some of which you can read about on her website. (See the link below, after you listen to the poem.)

Today's reading is part of Sarah's audio blog tour. You Do Not Need Another Self Help Book can be ordered from her website. Look under the Read Me heading. It will be officially published in March.

When you click on the link below, you'll hear a reading of a poem. 

Things to Do Today

For more about Sarah, including links to other stops on her audio tour, please visit here:

Sarah Salway's website

 

Congratulations, Sarah, and best wishes for this excellent book!

Two Steps Up

Loren was an early riser, relative to the rest of her family, and we'd hang out while I waited for her sister Tina, my best friend, to get out of bed--which usually happened around noon or later. The parents were late sleepers as well, so it was just the two of us up in the house in Wynnewood, doing as we liked. One of the things we liked was to watch Shirley Temple movies. Shirley Temple Theater was off the air by then--it only lasted for three brief years, 1958-61--but somehow we had a taste for her, enough to pursue a learning of her repertoire. We formed our own Shirley Temple Fan Club, with some degree of irony, but that was hard to sustain. Shirley was so enormously talented and charming, and the plots of many of her films sent us out of the television room to an attic in London or an hotel in New York or a southern plantation (yes, we were aware of the awfulness of these plots and settings)--more effectively than nearly anything else. The films were fantastical, and chocked with song and dance, but she embodied innocence and an uncanny ability to make herself heard--a trait alluring to me, I see now.

My favorite was The Little Princess. Shirley's father is lost in the siege of Mafeking, and because her school bills aren't being paid, she must go live in the attic and work at the school rather than being a regular student. (This idea doesn't go away; witness Newt's proposal to make poor students work as janitors in their schools.) I loved her relentless belief that her father was alive, her quest to find him, and the music of the word Mafeking. (When I went to South Africa some years later I very much wanted to see Mafeking--not really a tourist destination.)

Below is another favorite scene. Yes, it is from another era and there are all kinds of things wrong with it in terms of race and class. There remain, however, some points of value; the kindness to a child who doesn't want to go to bed, Bill Robinson's extraordinary dancing, and lesson in teaching.

The emotional content here moves me in two ways, the first being the actual scene shown here, and the second being the depiction of a process of working and learning that feels, if not literally accurate, resonant with what I know of working, learning, teaching. Do the step slowly, move ahead, drop back and do the step again with a bit more speed, move ahead further, and so on. That is still more methodical than I am, but this small scene is an emblem of practicing an art form, any art form. It is the case that for every person now living there has been a great who has gone before us who has figured out all the steps and can be studied as Shirley watches Bill to see how it's done. It is always a great leap forward when a student can look to the geniuses rather than the very goods and see through the perfect creation to the scaffolding underneath.

Loren and I were lucky to have our fan club, because it came about so naturally. There is a great joy in sharing the pleasure of a movie, book, painting, music in the company of another--really sharing it, not just sitting next to each other.  We were young, and it was fun. As one becomes older it becomes harder to reveal the emotion of responding to a work of art at a deep level of being. It's so private to experience moments that resonate with your soul. To show how it feels to read or to watch something meaningful is a self exposure that makes one very vulnerable. Mostly we quickly wipe our tears away, and are sheepish if anyone noticed them. To take an experience that is most usually a communion between artist and an audience of one, and to extend it to an audience of two--two together, in rhythm--is really an experience of love.

Epitaph: She Was Interrupted

Interruption. Here I am at 6 in the morning, getting ready to write, girding against what will intrude.
I know I only have a few hours before I have to stop and do the to-do list.
The dog is snuffling behind me on the bed; can't be helped. The cat is sitting right next to my computer and will need to be stroked periodically--a given.
Cars are roaring past, and every few minutes, an eighteen wheeler. That's life. Coulda, shoulda bought a house on a quiet street. Who knew? It sounded like a tomb compared to 96th Street.
Now I prepare.
1) Clear off the desk. Get everything out of sight except the grey wall. All my books are behind me. I am allowed to keep one book on my desk. It varies. Usually one I know well and can lift and drop. The criterion: good sentences.

My talisman

2) I suit up: fleece socks, Superman fleece pants, a fleece top. Warm slippers. Hair up in a clip. (Note: try to remember to change clothes before going out.)
3) Plug in my blue "fairy lights," as Sarah Englishly calls them. I have them strung around my room, for happiness.
4) Put my talisman next to me.
5) Get my supplies ready and in the right places: a notebook, the right pen, sharpened pencils, a yellow narrow lined legal pad, cat food, a pitcher of water, a cup of coffee, a blanket.
6) Light a candle.
7) Do breathing exercises for 10-15 minutes.
8) Write down the scene I am going to work on for the first stretch. Write down what it needs to do. Write down how it needs to feel.
9) Make sure I'm ready. Settled.
10 ) Turn on Freedom for 120 minutes.
11) Set timer for first session, 25 minutes.
12) Turn on noise cancelling headphones.

Now I begin.

Interruption is the theme of my life, I see that more and more clearly. I have a memory from when I was about eighteen months old, sitting on the beach in Cape May, looking out at my favorite grey ocean rolling toward me, thinking, thinking...I was thinking. Then someone picked me up. Who? I can't remember. Father, Grandfather. Lifted me off the ground, out of my thought, into their impulse to grab me. My thought was lost. I don't know what it was. I was interrupted. I am left with that memory of the vulnerability of my private life, how easily it could be whisked away by the needs of others, and how helpless I was to stop that. I still am. So much interrupts. I have learned to interrupt myself, with thoughts that are unessential and feelings that want to control other feelings, and so on. To write, I have to return to being the small child on the beach looking at the ocean. I know that. I know that in the space between what I thought and what I saw that day was my true mind, my self.
This is the beginning of an essay. Not what I am writing this morning. What I needed to think about to get ready for now, for finishing this story. The one I am writing now.
I often pause to write something like this, a blog post or a diary entry, just before I begin, to be in touch with one of Dicken's ghosts, the future or the past, before I sit in the present.

Dear Diary

One of the Christmas traditions I most enjoy is the afternoon when two good writer friends and I meet, raise a glass, and exchange presents. This year I gave them each a five year diary. Neither of them had ever written a diary regularly before, but they seemed excited to try it. I am curious to hear their experiences after a couple of years.

I have always kept a diary of some sort. I often keep a journal as well. The diary, the five year diary, only offers a few lines per day, and turns out to be a great challenge. Is this something to be written for posterity--or will I write exactly what I want? I think most people feel an onlooker, often judgemental, peering over their shoulders when writing a diary. The convention of addressing it with the word "Dear" implies this. Who out there is Dear--Dear enough to read my secrets? Or is the Dear meant to be ingratiating, to protect myself from harm? Do I tell Dear what it wants to hear and keep the truth to myself? Over time, I have evolved from one to the other. Dear now likes me or not. The question has become, what do I tell myself?

Much of it is dull: I went here, I went there. Some of it is pure emotion; I felt, I hated, I wept. All of it indulges use of the word "I"; a counter to how I was raised not talk about myself. (Like George H.W. Bush!) The diary is allowed to be about me and my reactions to life; my inner Anais Nin. Narcissicitic and self-fascinated. Where else does this fly?

The journal is more complex. It's mainly about writing, but every so often I take an hour or two to record a conversation or an event that I want to remember fully. The writing portion is notations for how to make whatever I am working on tighter, how to pull a metaphor through the scenes; it is an architect's notebook. Very messy. Notes for a map. When I have enough I draw the map, which is prettier, enough so that it can go up on the wall. That's late in the game, though. Mainly it's the wild notebook--quite unlike the tidy chemistry notebook that Gale Boetticher kept on Breaking Bad. Golly, that blew me away. Lines from Whitman, too. He didn't deserve what he got.

From Gale Boetticher's notebook...

Mine looks like this.

Though I don't write it backward as it appears. I don't imagine anyone is looking over my shoulder when I compose this--it is work, and only work. Capable of being immediately junked when I move forward with the project.

The diaries are meant to last, at least until I die, when I hoped they will all be burned, or go in the coffin with me. That would serve me right! If I am buried alive, as my grandfather always feared he would be, at least I'd have some reading material for the last few days. Though what could be more stultifying than reading about oneself while fading away?

I've gotten fairly comfortable with my diary, and tell it a lot. In fact, it's a record of how comfortable I felt writing things down. When I sit with it at night, it makes me aware me of what I choose not to say--how reticent I am. It's good to know my limitations. Keeps me honest.