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.

Breaking the Monster's Back

‘Where are you going with those flowers in your hair?’

Where is Maura going with those flowers in her hair? The electrician hanging upside down from the scaffolding posed this question tonight, after Maura spent another Day of Rest teaching wide-eyed Katie Couric want-to-bes about subject-predicate constructions. (Mr. Narcy’s bullet-laced prose is beginning to feel like a warm blanket in comparison.) Maura could feel The Almighty stirring the clouds, mixing the thunder, pondering whether the newspaper’s resident Catholic should be allowed to keep getting away with so many philosophical protestations against the need for weekly mass. But after ending last week with two intense discussions about the point in life she is going to start having those 15 womb-benders, since apparently it is something like deciding when she is going to prison in this Solzhenitsynian universe constructed as of late, she has been considering—where is the dear muse going?

She both loathes and lives on the idea of teleology. But it always begs the question (not logically) about where she’s been, where the entire trinitarian ensemble has been. One thing is certain—they are moving away from this role of the muse, this static position ironically mixed up with longing, a desire for a home, the need for endless self-aggrandizement.

Maura’s trail has been has been charted out, in part, on these pages. The Maura who returned to the dark Galway of her youth is no longer here. The tone, currently a bit more somber, reflects a journey of sorts. A journey that Mr. Narcy and The Other viewed only through late night skype calls, drink-induced Facebook messages and ragged marks on paper, blurred from those rainy nights when Maura thought it was a good idea to light a cigarette from her electric burner and proceed to smoke out her kitchen window. They all viewed their journeys in tiny snippets, marking the characters with epithets so that The French boy, the B.A. Fiction boy and even the boyfriends all seemed like slim caricatures of their true selves. Because all sense of self had been questioned, pushed and maybe even erased.

Now, Maura sits atop a green house full of emotional girls, a veritable whorehouse, where Saturday evening dance marathons shake the neighborhood. She is writing, watching The Other convince the public of the need for social change, with tea in her whiskey, a concoction brought on by The Other’s dangerous rhetorical powers. (Watch out for her exquisite use of silence and the non-look.) Maura sits here and thinks about the journeys the Trinity has been on, what they’ve learned from them.

She went on a few different journeys this summer—one to the one place where all questions of identity and belonging seem obsolete, a place that strips her Romantic longing down to the bare-bones collegiate pretension that it probably is, a place Mr. Narcy rightly notes may someday trap her forever with its barnacle hands. But there were other journeys—coasting out of the bleach-blonde world where sparks flew—the electrical sort—perhaps dangerously, and thus necessarily so, then dragging The Other back to this land of rain and unclear coastlines. The journey was rough—the mixture of new cities, un-sensitively selected Irish music and the desire for more whiskey and beer brought on a maelstrom of tears as the female di-umverate entered each new northern city.

But now the gang’s all here. Mr. Narcy and The Other both recently remarked that they never quite understood the homesick—thus, they never quite understood the perhaps somewhat stubborn one sitting across from them, demanding inspiration and guilt-inducing means of procrastination. Maura never longed for her place of birth, but rather for that place where Romantic longing takes on new meaning.

But the cost of too many journeys can be high—the wanderer never settles, never attaches. Maura only discovered her attachment to Mr. Narcy and The Other when they left. Now, they are here, and all planning their next flight off this boiling hot continental U.S. (The land of beach-blonde film stars is hardly the U.S., more like a non-world that can only be entered when one is armed with a militaristic Narcy-esque goal.)

And yet, maybe for the first time in her life, Maura is not yet itching to leave. Despite tiring of the way in which skinny jeans seem to tighten the scrotums and brains of many of her fellow students, the local dislike of outsiders and The Other and Maura’s inability to be ethereal and flighty enough, Maura must be here, at least for now. Here, geographically, and here, in a sense the Czech philosopher can translate. The Trinity will never be children again, but the joy of a child, the magic of a child, lies in the child’s complete inability to conceive the importance of the past or the future. They are entirely in this moment, this moment where Maura and The Other must cram 5 Chinese girls into Maura’s sex-on-wheels-mobile to find them a proper hotel and give them advice on dating American men. (Clearly they do not understand why Maura and The Other keep fleeing the continental U.S.) The moment when Mr. Narcy stuffs Maura with orgasm-inducing doughnuts after three hours of sleep and a Bon-Ap caffeine high that would put Starbucks’ marketing team to shame, only to stand in Costco’s freezer, debating the merits of different local, organic and oh so eco-friendly mushrooms while Maura searches for whiskey, only to remember that this lovely state does not allow the sale of liquor in grocery stores.

Snow hasn’t yet hit their city, inciting the endless playlists of The Commitments and Joanie Mitchell, the longing for darks ends of the street and rivers that make the Atlantic look like mere puddle in the crossing. But when it does, Maura, The Other and Mr. Narcy will once again feel the pull—the pull back to the cottage where questions of French salonieres, Apocalyptic fervor and depictions of Irish female corporality and their implications for silenced sexuality were all that seemed to matter.

But there is a reason that the triumverate is still here. Here they must remain, forever. Geography an accident, here the station.

Van the Man is breaking the current silence, telling Maura something probably far wiser than her own musings:

“If my heart could do my thinking and my head begin to feel, I could look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.”

The Blue Light in Town

At this moment when Maura, Narcissus and The Other have an extended break from the world of academia, some of them are currently in towns that bespeak past memories, and in the case of Maura, maybe even past identities, which led her to wonder...if identity is not merely just composed of interactions with others...is it also composed of landscapes? And moreoever, can it be utterly dependent on interactions with certain others?

Currently, as Maura plans to pack up her traveling case to come visit the arid lands of her dear friend she has lately been heavily entrenched in the dry, crisp air, torrential downpours and sunny days that constitute the land in which she grew up. While entrenched in this land, thoughts of the past, and of past individuals with which she had seminal interactions, Maura has found herself missing her Jimmy, not merely for the more obvious reasons, but also because it seems as though living up to her best potential as an individual is greatly aided by Jimmy's presence.

When Maura left her seaside hometown (both the historical Maura and the metaphorical one), she left behind individuals who did not wish her absence. But with stubborn focus, Maura insisted until she realized and moved forward with a new adventure, leaving the town of Galway to the fishermen and their wives. Once she was settled in her new life and had established an independent but co-existent relationship with another, she realized how much the very presence of Jimmy, even a silent presence, was in fact necessary for her to speak sweet words and leave the self-encasing and self-prohibiting persona that can be her own skin. When she returned home for a brief stint, she also realized that the presence of some others from her small town seemed to bring her back to actions and thoughts that she seemed to have grown out of, and necessarily so since they brought moments of pain both to herself and others...yet they pulled at her, in an entirely different way than do the strings that tie us. These were more like the strings that bind us than the strings that lift us up, support us, or fling us into new possibilities.

Is it thus possible that our identities are not merely composed of interactions with others, but utterly dependent on this interactions? Once in her life, Maura would have certainly said, No, because for an identity to be strong and capable of withstanding turmoil, it must have some strength of its own. But clearly, it is all but ludicrous to deny this fact. Once these presences end, naturally or out of forced circumstances, does this identity crumble? Or does the skin go out and seek another one to depend on, in any manner of a relationship? It would seem that this is the case.

It seems natural and necessary that the absence of The Other and Narcissus from Maura's life would change Maura's own identity as well. Do we also depend on the absence of another to define our identity? Anyone who has experienced grave loss beyond the momentary lack of another in their life would probably assure Maura, that yes, this is the case. So these identities are a constantly fluxing, momentarily defined thing.

Oddly enough, all this talking about identity has made Maura give much less of a damn about the entire idea. Partially, because there are more important things to worry about with the Oirish tendency for worry, and partially because The Other, Narcissus and Maura need a new topic of philosophical musings for a bit. They can come back to this one later. Maura's fountain pen is getting a bit dry, so she is going to take a break for a bit. Signing off with sincerity - Ms. Barnacle.

Dark Corners of Potential

As we all know, the initial intention of this blog was to write the lives of the others. I know that dear Maura has broken from this goal in the last few posts, but given her current situatedness, she began to think about The Other & Narcissus. So she will turn her thoughts back to them...

Due to her itch to move about and settle somewhere with dark corners, barrels of tea, and enough quiet to allow the din of traditional music and her thoughts to meld together and float over her in a wonderful reverie, Ms. Maura has become a whore of coffee shops. She has visited so many that she is now becoming a bit familiar. She has sat in so many seats that she has regular seats in each one...that's a lot of seats.

But looking around, trying to avoid eye contact with the medieval text before her, she thought about what The Other & Narcissus are doing on a night in their respective lands. The sun was coming in on Ms. Maura's dirty locks, and she thought about what The Other & Narcissus would be doing if they were still in the Emerald City, facing the inevitable dust on historical and literary textbooks that arises when one tries to pull a thesis out of one's arse.

And she decided that what they must be up to...must be much better.

So here's what they better be doing.

To start with The Other...Last night, a wonderfully mysterious looking foreign guard knocked on her window to ask a question about the garbage can outside. In Shakespearean moment, this Stranger saw her emerald eyes and dark hair, like that of a mystical selkie, and decided that despite the fact that their countries were miles apart, and perhaps even at odds at times, he loved her. Reaching for her hand, he lifted her down from her window and decided that they must run away together, if only to a pub across town (since he had another shift the next morning, and well, he keeps the streets safe.) Fingering a brandy glass in his hands, he watched The Other's green eyes as they sat, silently in the dark corner of the pub. There was no need for the loud words that scorch The Other's soul, nor was there need for questions regarding The Other's supposed brick walls encasing her. The Stranger was actually a builder in a foreign life, and all who create things also know how to make them fall to pieces. With one look at The Other, he had crumbled her walls. After silent but perfectly attuned communication, The Other & The Stranger wandered through the streets, in a moment as pure as the snow on the ground. As he walked her back towards her apartment, he confessed that his mother was quite traditional, and that she required that his marriage be pre-arranged. The Other nodded and looked down at her big black boots. And so they agreed: both would convince the mother that in fact, they were meant to be and would not see each other until the marriage day in order to abide by the mother's wishes. So now, The Other sits in her room, pen posed above the page, waiting for the weighty words that befall her in moments of enlightenment, thinking of The Stranger and their fateful day.

Narcissus on the other hand...has found himself in the company of another, by slightly more manipulative ways. The company they share is virtual, as of yet, but will soon be corporal and shall I say, embodied. We'll just have to see how that plays out....manipulations don't get as much attention from Maura. She craves the mystery that her own Jimmy offered her. As well as the tension...She forsees that there might be tension for The Stranger and The Other...but sweet tension, troubled by doubt and sharpened by need.

To Strive or Not to Strive: Narcissus' Question

In sitting down to revise a story I have been working on, I thought of an experience in class on which I think The Other and Narcissus would certainly have comments.

I submitted a story entitled Alchemy for a fiction class with a certain surly, Richard Ford, James Dean wannabe, and he decided to discuss it in class. Initially, this man was excited to hear my story, having conceived of it with me in his office before class. He sensed that I knew where I was going. Yet, in class, I discovered that I had failed to meet his expectations, and apparently, ignited some sense of ire in him.

While I had apparently achieved fine writing and imagery, the execution of the story reflected my inability to plot out the story well enough. I had left too many mysteries for the reader, and thus, left them utterly untethered to the story, lost in my words. The more that he spoke, the more he came to the conclusion that I had written a character that was too close to the author, hence. He made veiled references to moodiness, a troubled pysche, and confusion in this character, then expanding this character as an example of how authors fails when they write too close to themselves, because they can't differentiate themselves from the writing. And so they have characters who can't make sense to a reader, because they can't make sense to the author.

At first, I completely understood his point. Then, my own ire was ignited. How dare this man presume that this character, who is going through things I have never gone through, acting in ways I never have, be me? He knows very little of me. Then I started to think about the core of this character - this moodiness and confusion. And well, maybe he was onto something. Or just being snarky without intending to be so. But I am going to say that he was onto something.

I left class not upset - he actually helped me to see many things about the story that had been frustrating me. But he also left me wondering about these questions of identity and the construction of it. For once, I thought I was constructing an other, but was I?

Narcissus expected that I would violently protest his claims about our modern inability to find a home where our identity is clear. That the very home for which we strive is in the striving. And yet, oddly enough, I think I agree with him. I know - the ground is shaking under me as I write this. But the other day, I was thinking about the dualism of Romantic philosophies and that infinite longing. I recently read a passage from Ovid in which he said: It is not enough to want something. If you truly want it, you must long for it. For if it is not longing that pushes us towards our goals, our pursuits, the fulfillment of relationships, then what is it? What do we find in complacency?

Last year, while sitting on a smelly carpet that reeked of tea and honey, we all wanted a sense of complacency to counteract our angst, our desire to leave and figure things out. And always, I looked around us and saw many people for whom these desires seemed not to exist. Sitting in this fiction class, I often see students who seem to not be plagued with these questions. And yet, I, for whom apparently the expectations were high, had failed whereas everyone else was onto something.

These notions of identity and home, striving and clarity that I had apparently not sorted out with my character were suddenly thrown back on me. In the middle of a stuffy English classroom on a rainy day in which my fellow comrades wanted to debate the "hotness" of my character, I was put on the spot: without saying it or intending to do this to me, this man asked if I had in fact figured these things out. My character leaves her daughter in a foreign land and returns home. He asked why she would do that, since the story did not in any way indicate why someone would do that. I replied that my former reasons - illness - were dropped in order so that I could explore other reasons of breaking a string with a family member, particularly a daughter. I then said that I wasn't quite sure why she would do this. Apparently that answer was akin to saying that I had never read as a child because it prompted his verbal attack.

So here I am - back at the striving. I took a few days merely to think about my ideas, my characters, and to read examples of writers who are succeeding where I am not. I have new ideas, and I must now pen them. I have often been told that I must be the best defense attorney for my characters - that they must be so well-crafted that they are hard to judge, as it is hard to judge people that we know intimately. So is there an authentic self that I find either in myself or in my characters? How do you create a character, who should reflect reality, (if one is writing in the realist style that is the order of the day) if there is no authentic self and if the author isn't an authentic self?

I used to think as The Other did that the construction of a self was who one was when no one else was around. Still, I hold onto aspects of that while realizing that the others that we encounter forcibly change us. So I wonder - will I change back once a particular other is gone? I don't think this is quite possible and I haven't since the absence of certain people from my life.

So yes, my dear historian and dear philosopher, I think we just have to keep striving. As we're all seeing, those plans that Narcissus wrote for us did not necessarily come true and they don't have to. But the striving helped forge us into a self that could get through days with which we didn't want to struggle. So, we strive.

I am going to strive my way onto a page right now.

Maura Takes a Moment to be Narcissistic

Today while I was sitting in the newly renovated café underneath Elliot Bay Bookstore, listening to some tunes that are a new addition to my electronic musical library, a man came up to me. He was probably about 30 years old, or close to it, and had a leather jacket and glasses. He pardoned himself for interrupting and said that he sometimes has the habit of saying things to people if only to say something nice to another. He was very humble and polite about all this. He paused, put his two fingers together in the air, and said, “You are a complete….vision. You look like you stepped out of a Rosetti painting. It’s probably the red hair, but I just wanted to say that.” He smiled and then walked off with a jaunty step.

It was a very nice surprise and actually the second time that I had heard something similar today. The other was from a young homeless man, selling copies of Real Change. While I would have loved it even more if the young man in the café had asked what I was working on, seemed interested, if only by appearances, and then offered the name of a publishing company to read my material, well, then I might have been ecstatic, but well, how much can I ask for.

I tell this story not merely as an egotistical anecdote, or because it honestly touched me as one of the few utterly selfless things that someone has done for me lately for absolutely no reason (no connection to me, nothing to gain—the man walked off and this is not a regular enough place for me these days for him to see me again), but because it led me to think about how people sometimes literally run into one another. How relationships even form. How random they can be—romantic relationships, friendships and casual acquaintances. While walking down here, I was plotting a way to find a third roommate to live with another friend and off in a townhouse off campus. Aside from the few people who already go to our university and who are returning from their studies abroad, I could only think of one other person to live with me. It was a random thought—a girl who I have not seen in maybe over a year, who I have known since kindergarten. We were not always the closest of friends, but I know that she has had a bit of a hard college experience. She hasn’t liked her classes, hasn’t been able to pick a major, hasn’t found good friends or any sense of home in the city in which she lives. It would be utterly random and spontaneous for us to come here and move in with me, maybe even a bit of a Coyote Ugly transformation for one of us (minus the dancing on bar tops, though maybe we can still ensure that). And God only knows where that would take us—she and I living together and reforming a friendship would in itself be an effort for which I had not planned. But it’s an interesting what-if.

I have been quite fortunate to have found such close friends while in university, friends whose absence makes little things a lot more difficult than I thought they would be. While most people might take this opportunity to fall in with a new and exciting crowd that’s utterly different than their old one, on free afternoons such as this one—in which I just need to read for class and plan to write and fun for leisure—I instead always find myself alone, wandering around town. Running into homeless men, leather-clad men with spectacles, the nice man who got me a Coke and smiled. Yes, even I notice that there are few women in these lists. Why? I’m not sure—it would be refreshing and I think a little comforting to have a new female friend to confide in just a bit, at least with which to have fun, drink a bit, watch some television, talk about books. Is it merely my nature that leads me to this solitary life? It’s funny, because I distinctly remember many a day freshman year, before I was writing as much for the university newspaper, before I had as many friends or a boyfriend to see in between classes and work, when I would come down here. And sit precisely where I now sit. How have things changed? Clearly the appearances of things have—the café looks younger, fresher and I look older. And still I sit, and watch.

Sometimes I consider myself to be an outward person—someone who needs to talk to people to sort certain things out. Someone who doesn’t wish to live entirely on her own. But I also develop a certain static, a white noise in my head when I have been around too many people and haven’t had enough time for myself to merely think or daydream or just wonder. I’ve heard that at this point in a study abroad program, a student learning another language usually starts getting this static because of the amount of information that they are learning to process. That would probably be the case for my friends who sit miles across the ocean from me, reading this more confessional (Augustine, be proud) entry, yet I am, for all intensive purposes, home. And yet it somehow feels like a study abroad experience for me.

Oddly enough, I think that I’d feel more at home, more likely to go out and make new friends, if I really were in a certain land right now. I think I know what it’s like to feel almost utterly un-tethered. There were times after a long day at work this summer when I felt it. There are many times these days when I feel it. And I know I will feel it even more acutely once this undergraduate experience is over, something I am not that hesitant to experience so soon.

The other day, I was listening to a song called, The Strings that Tie You, and I started wondering about the strings that tie us. There are some that we don’t pick—our families; some that we do—lovers, friends. Things like work that maybe capitalism picks for us. (Ha). What do you do when certain strings haven’t been cut but others have been stretched for so long that they are in danger of snapping? I’ve always put a lot of importance on “feeling at home” in a place. I’ve heard from The Other that she transitioned more easily to her current city than we did to the one where I still reside. I understand that—it’s still taking me some time to adjust to being here. That question of where home is for the moment (since we’re young and very mobile people, let’s presume that a home isn’t a permanent thing) seems to give people a sense of relief if only because there are certain questions that don’t need to be asked. Perhaps for myself and for The Other, one of those questions is a question of identity. While she has been around certain new friends that pose questions to her of her interactions with the opposite sex, ones that seem a bit obvious, I might presume to say that she might not have the same concerns about who she is that arose in this city in which I muse.

This summer was perhaps one of my quietest summers of my life, spent in a lot of solitude in which I thought, wrote and read quite a bit. At times, surrounded by people who presumably knew me, I no longer felt the need to explain why I might get quiet. Why I might lose my temper at things. Why I felt the need to leave places frequently. Why I wanted the things that I did. Maybe it was because there was a pattern for some of these tendencies in the family I was with. Maybe it was because they were merely not pushy people. But having no need for explanations—is that merely what it is to be “at home”? I feel like Michael Buble is going to burst into a painful, sugary sweet serenade at any moment to complement the potentially ridiculous nature, so I will move on.

I turn to the subject of writing because it’s one that The Other and I have talked about lately, and it’s one that always concerns me. Being in a city setting that reminds me of the alterity of a given “other”, looking for a new place in the city to live, I’ve held on more tightly to writing as a means of grounding myself. And lately, I’ve encountered many people, written sources, and ideas that ask me why I want to write: in some way, yes, I write, in order to make more sense of the world. This mildly solipsistic entry is given proof of that. But I will never lose sight of the sense that I write in order to affect others the way that I have been affected by writing. It’s bringing separate strings together in order to create something that holds someone up. As I walked down here, I really wanted a certain old scarf from home to keep my neck warm. The green one that I have here has several strings coming loose. So I guess the question that I ask for the others reading this, is do we just let them fall a bit loose? Maybe we do. Couldn’t hurt, could it?

I am now laughing because the singer that I am listening to just said, “No one gives a fuck about us.”

What else is true, really? If The Other and I have accepted this vow of being post-Catholics, this singer has a point. “We’re living off somebody’s trust.” Or maybe just our own.

Tubthumping

Despite the bitter and poorly edited written attacks that have been made against my name, I press on. I may get knocked down, but I get up again, because as both The Other and Narcissus know, I too am a child of the honorary path of truth. If 200 pages of reading and 20 critical journals will not push me off the deep-end, then surely the driveling words of an acquaintance will not either.

Now that the true facts of my physical situatedness and current occupation have been revealed, I suppose that I have no need to further the guise of my mysterious existence. However, since identity itself is a constantly morphing and socially constructed entity - nay, not even an entity...a construction, a concept - as I have tirelessly reiterated, I cannot concede that the rants of Mr. Narcy have truly succeeded in uncovering my true self. For who really can? It is nice to at least know that Mr. Narcy concedes that I have a soul. Thank heavens for that.

Speaking of the heavens, I was recently in a small house of worship, tucked down a dark and twisted alley that The Other knows as the potential site of lurid night-life and lusty excitement. Being in this blessed place made me think of The Other because of her obvious devotion to the Papal throne. It also made me think of Mr. Narcy due to his disagreeable view of the world as a Godless place. While I will willing own up to a certain cynicism, skepticism, and even negativism, I fear that I could never accept a world quite as destitute as the one that Mr. Narcy envisions. Then again, I am currently living in, and will continue to have my residence in, a place where soldiers of the pen are not pushed down side-streets before certain physically enduring events. Thus, I can more easily believe in a faith-filled, hopeful world, since the blessing to be able to speak out of any orifice, even one's arse, is essential to a society that is saor, as the local people would say here. (Translations not provided. Deal.) While I worry for Mr. Narcy as he inhabits a world a little different than the one I currently occupy, I do know that he will surely find a way to subvert the social norms and bring peace and justice to everyone that touches God's good earth.

Nonetheless...entering this place of devotion reminded me of my honorary comrades and I could not help but imagine what it would be like to watch the two of them in a celebration of the body of Joshua Ben Jospeh in this foreign land. Surely, The Other could make herself a bit more discreet. But let's just imagine....

As the ringleader raises the cup to the sky, chanting worlds that the devoted silently ignore while thinking about how much they need to confess but won't because that lad in the bar the other night was just too delicious for words, Mr. Narcy suddenly realizes the choice that is about to be put in front of him: accept this nectar of the gods - sorry, God - or risk offending the local culture that he trying to blend into. Now, this would be no problem were it not for the horrific effect that God-nectar has on Narcy. He nudges the elbow of The Other, who has her head in her hands. The Other ignores Narcy and gracefully rises from her kneeling position, getting into the processional line leading to the main table in this humble and faithful abode. Narcy has no choice but to follow the dark-haired beauty of The Other, stepping on the aged marble with a force that might require restorers to sigh for the futility of saving remnants of the medieval world from modern intruders. As the cup is presented before The Other, he pauses. Out of the corner of his constantly turned eye, he sees the bottle from which the nectar came, only moments ago. It is a Chilean Cabernet, not at all the wine that would properly accompany the meal that Narcy only just cooked for himself before leaving his home and racing across town on a child's bike. Grimacing, Narcy takes the cup and swallows enough red liquid to wet his tongue. He follows The Other back to their pew and kneels down very slowly. But within moments of kneeling, the dark juice has gone to his face, his hands, his hair, his nose, his lips. It hath infected and it hath made him drunk.

Now, being drunk in a house of worship ain't no big thing for most people. For most believers. Yet Narcy has a certain...grip, on rationality. A grip like that of a mother on her rosary beads before her daughter gets married. That will not let him go and that he will not let go. Thus, any loss of control strikes every fibre in his being like a wooden stick on a bodhran, beating, beating, beating, him senseless. Stumbling out of the edifice, suddenly loosed from the need to control his outward expressions, Narcy starts mumbling incoherently about the authenticity of the individual soul, the separation of the artist from the art itself, societal constructions of...gender, universal ethics, Kant, and most importantly - JUSTICE. Stumbling and mumbling until he sees a flash of coarse hair, the color of fish-blood, out of the corner of his eye. Before he knows it, a glass of cold water has been splashed on his face, his cheek has been slapped, and he has begin come to his senses.

As Narcy comes to, he looks up from his groggy haze to see The Other, standing a few feet from him. In dark brown boots, red lipstick, and a black skirt that hugs her ivory legs, she drags on a cigarette (tobacco free), and sweeps her long bangs across her face, looking at Narcy with one eyebrow raised. The Other, in preparation for an impending journey, has fully taken on a new look that has men stopping for autographs. But she merely waves them off with a few Czech words that she can't yet translate but convey that she doesn't have any English. She just looks at Narcy and sighs.

"Wha...wha...was that the Fireheaded Celt? God-damn her!" Narcy asks as he jumps at The Other.

"What iiiissss presence...was the Fireheaded Celt here...physically....perhaps.....mystically....always..." The Other flips her hair off one shoulder in a flourish and hugs her dark green shawl closer to her.

"Feck her". Narcy sighs and collects his bike.

"Elizabeth Bennet was nicer."

Mr. Narcy Takes a Walk

I recently read on another, slightly less poetic blog, that the Fireheaded Celt had passed away. I was initially shocked to hear this because any passing is a bit of a jolt to the soul, but then I just laughed to myself. Because ah sure, don't you know that this particular Celt was a bit of a pagan and believed quite strongly in a place called Tir Na Nog. Maybe you have heard about it? Well - needless to say, the Fireheaded Celt will live on in her own special way. You will surely see her again in the future.

Throughout much of my stay in this protected and undisclosed location, I have pondered what it would be like to take dear Narcissus along with me on my travels. I will reveal that I am in a place surrounded by water - in lakes, rivers, streams, falling from the sky in frequent heavenly doses - so I imagine that Narcissus would have an interesting time not just navel-gazing, but directly gazing at his own dear phenotype in any one of the pools of liquid divinity which this place saves in abundance. Thus, I imagine that the first few days with Narcissus, or Sir Scribbles, would be a bit tedious, what with the amount of arm strength I would have to use to pull him away from anything that would reflect his lovely skin and luscious eyes. But once my fiend was settled, I can just imagine how a day would go....Let's give it go, shall we? A look into his mental gymnastics?

Narcissus walks along the main city street as though he has been called to active duty at the time of the Apocalyspe. This is the moment for which his legs and calves have been training. He will dart, he will jump, he will duck - he will do whatever it takes to beat the traffic and arrive at his destination. Where, you ask. The nearest coffee house - the only place to do sincere philosophical observations and musings (conveniently also a prime place for observing delectable morsels of human meat). As Mr. Narcy (almost like a certain Mr. Darcy, but not quite) patrols the streets, he mutters to himself about the state of the others sharing his path.

"Fecking woman. Yes, yes, now is the prime time to stop and stare at your coffee cup - the cup that is holding the fruits of some poor, unpaid day laborer's sweat and blood, the cup that will undoubtedly remain on this soil until long after the Second Coming, sitting on lush potential like oil sits on life-giving water - stare at that cup as though it is your newborn babe who just so happens to have the same oversized ears as you. Stare at that cup and slow your walk, so that you and your hipster Italiano-leather shoe lovin' boy toy stops to look at it as well, so that you can both rejoice in the fact that globalization and vanity-driven consumerism has been so effective as to bring Seattle's own Buckies all over the world."

Avoiding the woman in front of him, Mr. Narcy pulls out a small plastic figurine from his scouting daypack. Spitting on it ever so slightly, he pauses long enough for the figurine to meta-morph into a bike, just large enough to make more of his precious manpower and push him towards his destination. Flying between buses with the litheness of the snakes that supposedly fled the Emerald Isle, Mr. Narcy finds himself a decent establishment which he can dare to grace with his presence: "The All-Natural, All-Organic, All-Considerate, All-Peaceful, All-PC, ALL Jesuit Coffee House" (the ANAOACAPAPAJCH for short).

Yet when he entering his favourite establishment, a different smell meets his extra-sensitive nose. He smells neither smell harmony nor inner-drive. No. Mr. Narcy soon realizes that he, unlike the Fireheaded Celt, is a bit behind on the news and missed the notice that his dear place had closed. While the old sign remains outside, inside those eco-friendly glass doors lies something that Mr. Narcy had never dared step into before out of fear of losing a bit of his soul: a place of booze, of lust, of irreverant jocularity, a place of crude gender generalizations. A place that many call a pub. Immediately reaching for his inhaler, Narcy takes three puffs - a bit of an overdose, yes - and squints his eyes as much as possible. All around him stand the enemy: Tall, beefy, football-playing men. With cropped hair and tight shirts, muddy sneakers and small girls biting at their heels, the men smell of heterosexuality. (Their cologne - "Man-Smell for Heteros is sold at the local tourist shop next to Guinness flavoured condoms).

Because his legs have traversed half of the city, Narcy has no choice but to sit down for a moment to allow his lungs to start back up. Pulling out his only defense, the MacBook Pro, he stretches his fingers, puts his keyboard condom the keys so that they are not exposed to whatever jock-driven ITD (Intellectually Trasmitted Disease) is floating in the air, and begins to hammer the keys - but only for three seconds, before he stops again. Looking at those around him, he catches the attention of one member of the Crew-cut Mafia who is wearing an earring and seems to have overwashed his pants a little bit. The two stare...Narcy opens his eyes. The man can't tell, but continues to stare. Tension fills the air. Smoke fills Darcy's lungs, stings his eyes which turn red. He grabs the nearest glass on his table, conveniently filled with a lovely lager, and downs the remains in the glass, turning a brilliant shade of tomato red within 0.5 seconds. He touches his hand to his chest and cocks his head. The man might have a friend conveniently situated near Narcy's other side who could attack at any minute. Will they talk to each other? Will they discover that both have the hidden desire to write achingly poetic studies on gender and equality in developing countries? Will the man reveal that he gets aroused at the scent of pork? Will Narcy reveal that he falls for struggling poets that scribbles their loves and desires on tiny notebooks in their tight back pockets?

As Narcy's inner core asks all these questions such that his mind reels like a dancer on craic, his line of vision suddenly gets blurred. A tall, sleek, woman with redhead and troubled dark eyes steps up to Narcy's table and pulls out a cigarette, holding it between her fingers, rubbing one side ever so slightly:

"Want it?"

Drunken Insomnia

Here lies the blog of Miss Maura Barnacle, lover of all things philosophical and all things literary. Because I am a lover of all things literary (even the things that drunken and high people write in European bathrooms - no, especially those things), this blog will be undertaken in a literary fashion.

After this initial post, my future posts will be in the format of a short story, with my fellow writers as main characters.

I start out my first blog entitled "Drunken Insomnia", though the entire blog can in fact be found at" philodrunkenlullabies", because I have undertaken a journey, and at this point in said journey, I am still a bit shaken from being apart from my dear beloved ones who will constitute the character list in my writing. So alas, despite the number of spirits that I imbibe, I am awake many a night under dark skies of lashing rain.

I have embarked upon a journey to a land known for its certain way with words, a way with certain spirits, and a way with music, and in keeping with other traditions on this island, this blog certainly try to include all three of this island's specialties.

But enough specifics about me for now. In fact, too much. Like my namesake, I hope to maintain quiet and mysterious - the silent muse behind the work of other great bloggers close to me.

Those dear beloved ones that I mentioned earlier have also started a bit of writing, though I have recently been informed, via mental telepathy, that one of my better halves is currently in another state. One where the cows are lonely and the cowboys afraid. Yes, the Other is in Wyoming. You guessed it. I mentioned this Other because I have recently been implicated in some other philosophical "musings" because of my initial encounter with said Other. Upon my first meeting of this Other, I did in fact label her out as my competition. These my friends, were during some of my earlier, more competitive days. Long before I realized the Other's amazing ability to make a daycent cup of tea, down seven courses of beef, or analyze my life's problems down to an understandable T. I have now jumped in certain freezing waters with said friend admittedly not wearing my pantaloons, drank the nectar of the Irish goddesses with said friend, and defiled many a sacred place with said friend. Fiend. Friend. (Oh, Mary Shelley, pray help me.)

I would also like to defend some claims that were made to a certain "Fireheaded Celt". Yes, I will proudly admit that this name was in fact applied to the now genteel lady that you see writing before you. I am the "Fireheaded Celt". And while, yes, some of my former, smaller appearances in the blogosphere might have been written while I was under the influence of a certain dark friend, this dual identity is simply owing to the fact that I have alternate egos that are often at war with each other. Upon reading the most recent post made by Sir Scribbles (British loving bastard that he is), I was initially about to confront his ludicrous claim that The Other needs to go to Prague to "find herself". Given that Sir Scribbles undoubtedly adheres to a certain philosophical position that I too think is quite accurate - that one's identity is entirely a creation of the society and interactions around her or him - I was quite shocked that The Other was demanding such a fruitless and well, navel-gazing, plan for our dear, dear Other.

I will let you all muse about how I deal with having these dueling identities if one's identity is truly constituted by one's society. Perhaps I am torn between the love of two societies? Perhaps I am, dare I say, even more of an exile than my dearly beloved - the infamous "Irish Exile" - that loquacious man who once said that it was sad that he met Yeats when the poet was so old because my man couldn't influence him more. Yes, modest he is.

I am coming to believe more and more, especially since the moment that I met my own dear Jimmy (he's not a bad writer, you know? Has a nice long cane too...), that one's conception of herself or himself is based on interactions with other people. Thus, if The Other is to use her critically acclaimed good looks for a good purpose - that is, the search of an identity - then her very success while abroad does not depend on sausage or beer. Nay, it depends on those with whom she locks eyes. Those with whom she locks more than eyes. And since I am currently courting a drunken sailor myself, who masks as a literary god, I pray and beseech The Other to do one thing for me: go get some.

Goodnight.