Not-Writing

I type this with blistered hands, hands not blistered from writing, as they should be, but from climbing. Though the blisters are on top of callouses, and maybe those callouses are from clutching my pen? Why do I doubt that?

So far this weekend, I've gym-rock-climbed, haunted the outskirts of a local Oktoberfest, climbed again, watched a new series, did sporadic research on murals in Belfast and even re-read parts of this awful blog in an attempt to avoid writing critical response papers.

I'm listening to a band I used to listen to summers in California after I'd returned from Ireland. They're kind of awful, but awful music tends to be a better back-drop for my critical writing.

The Dutchman has passed out on the couch after a 15-mile mountain-run, and I'm wondering what the Other is doing right now. I know that, by day, she's successfully yanking poetry from young Czech selves, and that's fairly impressive. I imagine that, by night, she's drinking better and cheaper beer than I am. I wonder what her critical writing process is like, without the constant and perhaps debilitating distractions I tracked so well in this blog?

Will I keep this up? I don't know. I have gone to many lengths to procrastinate. Even traveled many states.

One thing pulls me back--that Joyce quote. 'I hear nothing but your voice,' Jimmy to Nora. Perhaps procrastination is just a painful avoidance of times when you don't hear the voice.

Habitual

It's t - 2 weeks before I take off for Northern Ireland, and I am sitting in my twin bed in California, trying to crochet a scarf while under the influence of alcohol.

My friends' recent blogs convinced me that I should probably give up the fictional Joycean act and have a "real" blog for once--"real" meaning a blog in which I confess where I am, what I am doing, what color hair I have. I considered starting over, the way I thought I was by moving to Belfast, but a recent conversation with a high school friend about habits has convinced me to give this blog a second go, changing the tone and style this time around.

For once, I will accept the advice of nearly every male college writing professor I've had in the last 4 years--I am going to try to stop hiding behind the facades I create so well. (The men always manage to say it with the gruff, soul-smacking way.)

I've hidden behind the mask of one Maura Barnacle for the past few years, proposing theses, asking questions, making jokes with layers of half-truths and truths. Having recently graduated from college, I felt the need to start anew, thinking that all decisions that I made this summer would somehow set me on one path, without room for change. This mentality nearly drove me to a new blog that helped ease my transition into this new world. But in the same way that a few close friends of mine, those ones with the quiet intensity, have slowly convinced me of the error of my thinking, I have recently accepted that post-grad me is merely a continuation of all the previous mes. Thus, I am going to accept these past blitherings as rough drafts of my present writing self.

And right now, that self is thinking about habits, and the first habit might be trying to write more about the concrete world around her, whatever that world may be, whether or not she wants to be there. I'm working at it, so forgive me the transitional moments.

Tonight, I frequented the local haunt in town. Fortunately, doing so is not a habit of mine, but the friend whom I met--a friend from high school, and in some ways, a good writing friend now--casually mentioned how she was trying to break certain emotional habits. Having spent the last year breaking a few habits--smoking, falling back on certain men, hiding behind sarcasm, busting balls not for feminism but to protect myself--I took her casual comment to heart. Faced with the paradoxical enormity and smallness of this next year, I've become convinced that the only way to wade through it is to change my habits.

For example, I have committed myself not only to running as much as possible, but I have also reintroduced flossing into my life. Mundane change, no? Well, perhaps. If I were yet Wallace Stegner I could convinced you that the slowness with which I tug plaque from my teeth is akin to the way in which I tug truths from a lover, but I'm not quite at his writing level yet.

The morning after I arrived back in Novato, I had to go to the dentist for a routine cleaning. Since I was neither hungover nor jetlagged (a first for dental visits in the past few years), I expected an easy, encouraging cleaning that would only renew my newfound tan, fresh-faced beauty. Alas, I instead got a mouthful of blood from the intensity with which the military-wife-turned-dental-assistant went at my teeth and gums. She told me that 60% of germs are taken care of through brushing...but that leaves 40%....and given that I'm known to have a dirty mouth, I figure it might be more 70 / 30....now....I may be a recent graduate with dual degrees in English Literature & Philosophy, but I took enough AP Calc to realize that I needed to start flossing.

So...flossing down. Wearing hair curly pretty much there. Running....fairly good. Now if only I could stop biting my nails, drinking so much whiskey, and hiding in dark corners at social events. Habits--those slowly developed actions that come to dictate a mental state. Habits--perhaps the only things I can change, slowly, right now.

In order to incorporate my previous writing selves into something more cohesive, I have decided to tack on a previous blog I wrote. This other blog was more a place to think about social issues, to write like the journalist I am trained to be. So from here on out, this blog will be more confessional, perhaps more creative, and the other will be more necessary updates on my life abroad in Belfast next year.

Maybe if I force together these two blogs--evidence of my past selves, and perhaps indicators of future selves--I can develop the "right" writing habit. Everything about my now more sober state tells me to start fresh! Have a new blog! But I think I am going to go against that habit of mine--the habit of escaping, "starting over." (See: http://echolt.wordpress.com/about/

Instead, I am going to leave you with the song I have been replaying while teaching myself to crochet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBzA76QGgz8&feature=av2e

Sinne

The Irish word for the collective we, "sinne," invokes a sense of communal strength. Unlike the pronoun for us, the emphatic naming of "the we who are" brings unity where there might not be any. It also invokes the smell, feel, and dim light of a favorite Cork haunt for Maura and The Other, a place too tiny and easy to be in to make us want to ever leave.

Maura is currently sitting in her tree house while baby-beer-Borscht tries to keep up with the flow of the whiskey and The Other celebrates in a state so far from the ocean I doubt its existence. One step away from collecting the dole, Maura is very accustomed to this sort of solitude these days.

Narcissus somewhat recently mused in a somewhat Coleridgian manner about what happens when one is confronted with the unexpected. Narcissus advised us to try on that hat, our metaphorical Other, that presents itself in the corner of the room. Maybe it's a hat that's sat in the corner of the room our entire lives, a constant comfort that we can't quite manage to put away for awhile. Maybe it's one that we struggle with--we can't decide if it fits or if we're too stubbornly forcing it one way, only to see that it really bends another, and maybe, for the best. Or maybe it's just sitting there, quietly watching us, letting us be, letting us prepare for the real confrontation that comes from being with the Other.

In one form or another, The Other, Narcissus and Maura are all again facing the unexpected. Shocking, I know, since we so commonly stay in one place, with the same people, the exact same goals and the exact same desires. Unchanging we are. Fortunately, there is as much propensity for change in this trio as there is in the Irish weather. This tendency, or rather, necessity, to change allows for perpetually renewing relationships.

The other day, The Norse and The Other advised that Maura "roll with the punches" in order to deal with her unexpected situation. Roll with the punches. See what comes, come what may. Is this near Buddhist acceptance, wise in its openness? Or just aimless wandering? Or the stubborn inability to make a decision with real consequences? Regardless of Maura's motive for refusing to roll with the punches, she's trying. Maybe going with what is presented can be proactive. Maybe it's all we've ever been doing, but now it looks weaker, less courageous.

It seems that one might need, say, an army jeep to get up the courage to drive out to the boonies and tell someone how they feel, but maybe it's not a huge risk, as we've always thought. Maybe it's a punch. We're given it, and we see what we can do with it. It seems one might need balls of steel to accept someone back in their life when they've wronged us before, but seem to be changing. But maybe it's not so courageous. Maybe it's being weak, being open, rolling with it. And maybe it is more courageous to stay quiet with that Other, watching from the corner, waiting, estimating the risk worth taking. But maybe Maura just needs to accept that moments of weakness are perhaps the only learning opportunities.

The holy trinity has been a trio, a we, a safe haven from the sharper "real" world of shadows and strings. The strings among us are loosening, and we've no more than the collective naming, the "sinne" to claim community. But maybe in letting those strings loosen, those spaces between us open up, we can allow for some weakness, for those moments when our gut tells us to do the thing we think we shouldn't. What an interesting life one would have if they perpetually did what they thought they shouldn't.

The Stillness

"He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry." --Colum McCann

If Maura is lucky, she could, within the next six months, be off to the North, to finally embark on the journey she has needed for some time now. If there was a train that left tonight, she might board it. And yet, the image of this room comes back to her. In this room, there were ordinary things, daily things, daily pressures and sadnesses and hurts. And a tree, encasing them from the rain, snow, sun, letting their stillness last. Sitting at the top of the city now, hearing her own breathing, loud and sharp, Maura wants the ordinary, is entrenched in the ordinary and yet isn't seeing it.

Mary Black says she doesn't want to fall in love again, he's living in a glass jar. Maura is wondering what it would be like to look from inside a glass jar.

Why is Mary always blue, she wonders?--Claire Keegan

Throw Out the Thoreau, Take Up the Gabaldon

On an evening not too long ago, Mr. Narcy, in a very un-Austen-esque manner, declared that he needed to learn Self-Reliance. He had been buffeted between cultures, languages and different men, and ultimately, which relationship is the most important? The one he has with that little gerbil turning the wheel inside, the one that IS the wheel.

As Maura traverses the corners of the home in which she grew up, as she sometimes ventures out into her old town, she remembers many a night, during the last year she lived there, spent awake, tormented over the state of things, tormented because she wanted so much more than her daily life provided her. She was raised with images of happiness, of love, and rarely with expressions of the thing itself. So to help herself fall asleep, she used to listen to one Oirish singer, she read the tales of her people, to create new images--images of self-reliant women she would become, to take her away from everything in that old town.

Once she moved, those images seemed false, perhaps because there was more of the thing itself in her daily life, sometimes painfully so, ironically evoking the older times she once thought were so simple, but were, in fact, never simple. In lieu of these images, she found herself connecting to people--a far more dangerous thing, but a far more worthwhile effort, in her mind.

But the years have only taught Maura that years necessarily mark the cutting of the ties that bind us--not forever, but at least temporarily and again, painfully. Is this how we sail through life? If we are wise, we sew ourselves to others, only to have the strings cut, seemingly only so that the Master Marionette can sardonically laugh and remind us of the most important relationship of all--the one we have with ourselves, regardless of what the "self" means to you.

Last night, Maura was again in the same bed, a bed which somehow evokes thoughts of fear, separation, and a life half-lived, lived only in the slow passing of images. But she reached for another image, perhaps in a different vein this time--she pulled up a story from one of her favorite master storytellers, telling history, perhaps for Mr. Narcy, somewhat simplistically.

After a few pages, she was reminded of the only lesson she might be able to clean from this object which possesses her mind at night--the cold virginal bed, sweating under the pressure of too much down comforting, holding someone that is perhaps none of these things. Maura has been learning more about Object Lessons through Woolf and Boland, and perhaps this bed is only useful to evoke the lesson she should have learned from years spent in it--years of fevers, nightmares, gentle sleep, day-dreaming, early morning reading, the bed where things fell apart and maybe, someday, will come back together. Perhaps the only useful part of this image is that Maura is in it on her own. Mr. Narcy and the Other feel the weight of an empty bed, but through it also comes the very idea that Mr. Narcy sought--self-reliance.

We've already been practicing it for years--guess it's just time to stretch the muscle a little further.

The Little-Ass Bird Sings

Now that the summer days are through, we do indeed pass through places, and I look to the soles of these traveling shoes, and wonder, where we've come, where we are. Blame it on Jimmy and his constant desire to circumambulate the feckin town he loved and left so well, but thoughts of travel have been flooding my mind lately. These thoughts push forward, wanting the pen to take them down, but as Edna O'Brien once said, "Writing is like carrying a fetus." So I must tread lightly, find the right nutrients and promise a good name for protection on the playground. Now, I tread into the first person, because, after all, it doesn't hurt Maura to let a few Others in every now and again in the Levinasian epiphany.

As of late, I have been working on the epiphany story--what it means, what it does, how one does it. (Yes, you all think Jimmy is the only real writer, but hell, the little fecker got most of his wordplay from me anyways. You think a Dubliner would know those things about the sea? Scrotum-tightening, he said. Hmph. He twisted that from a sheela-na-gig-esque comment I mighta made) The wise souls to whom I have been looking for advice on writing have told me to consider the epiphanies I have had in my own life. Aside from the annual celebrations of those fierce kings with their gifts, those magic or magi ones, I dunno, I can only think of one recent realization that necessarily changed the shape of my summer, and it was entirely swept up with Story.

The night before I left Dublin, I wandered to our old place on the Liffey--a place where The Other and myself have left various...aspects of ourselves, a place lit only by traffic lights and car brights, a place a bit too close to the actual waters of the Liffey to ensure any sense of cleanliness. As I sat there, tipsy on the red wine and cigarettes I'd been consuming, feeling sweet off the last good dark chocolate I've have since then, grief stricken over a sudden onslaught of personal emotions I'd been feeling, I thought about the summer before, where I'd sat with The Other, weaving our the stories of years past and future to each other. As I lit the last cigarette I'd smoke on Irish soil, and thanks be to god, on any soil (heh, sorta), I suddenly knew the only way I could return to Amerikay with any sense of wholeness. I had to write a story.

For most of this past summer, I had been writing and re-writing the same story of my life, knowing it to the point where it was more Hail Mary than Nicene Creed (the fecker is long ladies). It included certain characters, and I thought they were necessary. It included certain habits, which seemed defining. It included an outlook. But in that moment, by the Liffey, I realized that I could write another story, and it would be just as true, if not more so.

Robert McKee says the power of the story, the necessity for a story, comes from the fact that humans can only process, nay, experience the power of their emotional and psychological urges through art. In the moment one witnesses death, in the moment one feels or inflicts severe pain, emotions and thoughts are a muddle. But in art, these are united, and the viewer, the listener, feels the enormity of the truth, the beauty.

I remember a certain conversation, held on one chilly playground with the Lightening Rod, where I discussed the importance of a need to create, a need to express oneself, a need to do something new so as to ensure true life--life lived in the present. Well, the present isn't as pretty as it has been the past few months, in tree-top house overlooking the city lights, where the call of the train whistle threatens to call me away again and again. It's darker here, there's more static noise in those energy sucking news boxes, funny faces pop up here and there as I slip through town, ridiculously clad in black on a bicycle with the loudest breaks ever not-oiled by an Irishman. The tea party tempts us, and I constantly consider slipping off to a nearby airport or BART station to visit the Mad Hatter and Alice.

But here I must be. So it's time folks--let's write a new story for this year. And start to believe it, for once. I've always loathed the celebration of the last day of the previous year--maybe it's time for us to raise our glasses to something new, a something of complete uncertainty, of complete tipsiness, a complete acceptance that the Postmodern Experience is IN FACT Life Lived on LSD.

Edna O'Brien once said, “When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”

What else are we, ye three wise medieval drag queens? Let's prove her right.