You can get anywhere in America from anywhere else, but some trips are easier than others.
– Terry Teachout
Monthly Archives: May 2009
don’t climb up there
Today I got sick of being ear-infected and quarantined in my apartment. I went up to Ravenswood and wandered: brunch, the library, the Grind, an hour of a movie I’d already seen.
The best part of it was sitting in the sunlight and writing on the granite curb-seat outside the Ravenswood library, and watching the kids who went by – and watching them watch me.
As one little family approached me, I heard the mother saying, with resignation, “Don’t climb up there – DON’T climb up there – ” and I saw the girl looking at me like “She got to climb up there! What the hell, Mom?” She even put one hand up onto the curb, longingly, and kind of looked at me as if she hoped I would overrule her mother. I couldn’t help her out.
I wrote, a very little. (Stop with the Austen constructions.) I found myself wanting to draw, probably because I read SLOTH (graphic novel) at the library, about teenagers in comas and lemon orchards. I drew a planter and a tree and wrote “I can’t draw” on top of them.
At the Grind, I was reading WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, by Philip Roth, and the girl sharing my table with me (tiny cafe) was like, “That book’s really good.” I do like the way Chicago is so demonstratively literary. And I also like the way that strangers tell you what they think.
Think about it this way:
In Julian Jaynes’s THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, in the introduction, he says that to imagine inanimate objects as possessing consciousness is an error of understanding. Once I read this, it stopped the clockwork of my thoughts, and I read no more of the book.
I still don’t know how to think about it. Imagining inanimate objects as possessing consciousness is what I do all day. It’s how I direct. How I write. How I make the day turn from time into presence. Without that error of understanding, I have nothing – or a significantly reduced something – to understand. This has bothered me in every line I’ve tried to write in my head since. I think it’s what led me to stop comparing.
I mentioned this to no one for awhile, and then I brought it up to my friend B, who has the credentials to understand it better than I do. She explained to me, over fried fish at Navy Pier before a viewing of the STAR TREK movie, that even though Jaynes is right for philosophy, he does not have to be right for the purposes of art. I suppose I knew this already, but I needed B – a bona fide philosopher – to tell me. She essentially said “Carry on.” But I still feel as if there may be something that I am doing wrong.
I want to be informed by and aware of science. Otherwise what does it mean to be a writer who lives today, as opposed to yesterday? What good is my poetry if it can’t comprehend that paragraph?
I still don’t know if it’s really okay to think of the table as alive. But it’s too late, at least now, to read the rest of the book.
(Created a “philosophy” category w. this post.)
instead
of spending Seattle in Memorial Day (reverse the nouns), with my brother and my cousins, I am spending it here on my Chicago-based couch, watching television and taking antibiotics, in the second installment of Ear Infection 2009. I am watching Eileen’s copy of the BBC Pride and Prejudice, and maudlinly identifying with Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s punchline heiress-daughter, whose “sickly constitution” prevents her from being presented at court.
Earlier, I watched Beyonce videos. You certainly don’t see her sitting around feeling sorry for herself cause she has an ear infection.
you’re not done
That’s a good motto for all of us – find someone to be successful for. Rise to their hopes and their needs. As you think about life after graduation, as you look in the mirror tonight, you may see somebody with no idea what to do with their life. But a troubled child might look at you and see a mentor. A homebound senior citizen might see a lifeline. The folks at your local homeless shelter might see a friend. None of them care how much money is in your bank account, or whether you’re important at work, or famous around town – they just know that you’re someone who cares, someone who makes a difference in their lives.
That is what building a body of work is all about – it’s about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up to a lasting legacy. It’s about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star – because one thing I know about a body of work is that it’s never finished. It’s cumulative; it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best, and give back, and contribute to the life of this nation. You may have set-backs, and you may have failures, but you’re not done – not by a longshot.
back out of all this now too much for us
I am deeply unsettled by all my self-descriptions being spilled in a sea of HTML on this site. How long has it looked like that? I don’t want to know. There is only one thing that will cleanse the space: Auden. The last lines of the last poem I memorized for a high-school acting class, these words are one of the last connections I have to a time of unquestioning confidence.
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Can’t be wrong.
that’s better
What a nightmare of introspection. WordPress vomited every description I’ve ever written of this blog, simultaneously, onto the sidebar. SIMULTANEOUSLY. Young and hopeful: older and hope-weary: oldest and hopelessest, side by side, and each one of them beginning chirpily with “My name is Dara Weinberg.” Oh, it was awful. One might age, one’s perspective on one’s art might grow, develop, or wither: one might sum oneself up with less bravado than one used to: but, for the love of Blog, one does not need to be reminded of it. My slate may not be clean, but at least now my sidebar is. I am suitably chastised for having neglected both this space and the space inside my brain, and for having had no ideas for a fortnight of fortnights except survival. This is what I get.
shock!
Blog, what happened to you? My sidebar is all wrong! I’m sorry I’ve been gone for so long. This is awful. Hang on a sec.
been a long time
I haven’t known how to blog lately.
I did not write the scene that never gets written at B’s house. The next day, sleep-deprived, I wrote it, and it turned out to be the worst thing I had written all quarter. Maybe there is a reason it never gets written.
This is a lesson I haven’t learned but keep seeing: stop making rules for yourself of what to write. Write what is easiest. Stop following the rules. And making up new “rules” doesn’t count. I don’t know if this is a lesson everyone needs to learn, but I have learned the converse.
I guess this means I have to stop worrying about what kinds of comparisons are “the right” kinds of comparisons. I started a train of thought today in which a soul was like a child who wouldn’t eat and I just let myself have the thought without stepping on it because it was a bad comparison. Sometimes, the only way out is through piles and piles of bad poetry.
settling in for the night
Two expatriate Californians, two MacBooks, two hopeless tasks. I am at B’s house on Addison writing the scene that never gets written till Friday night, trying to write it sooner by being at B’s house. B is trying to apply for a job, and thinks me being here will help. We’ll see about that.
Sitting in one armchair with my feet on the other makes me remember nights – multiple – sleeping in this arrangement, last year. That must have been at someone’s house, working on some play, but I don’t know which one.
B stacks piles of job applications across the coffee table. I blog.
Dara Weinberg 