Mapping lately

A never-published post from November 2011.

I was feeling poorly two weekends ago and didn't leave my bedroom much, so I decided to tell you about its walls, where I have been keeping track of some ideas and words I've been connecting. Topical mapping, I suppose. I didn't get to finish this post until now, though.

The north wall is the happening one lately. The theme is narration. The relationships between narration, past and present, self as subject, and on.

I want to know: the integrity of a life, of a person's experiences, how we find it. We want to understand it before we tell the story, but how can find that clarity without the process of telling the story?

We don't know how to find meaning outside of our conception of unidirectional time, which is to say, an objectified past, a past that we can act upon and master.

The process of narration, self-narration, in order to glimpse an in-process version of that integrity.

"The Puritan use of the spiritual journal to 'frame' life is a technique to forestall the incomprehension seemingly entailed by our 'continued existence,' to achieve some sense and articulation of a life's shape even as it is being formed — to see, if only through a glass darkly, something recognizably meaningful, something useful to us as we attempt to navigate the often troubled waters of experience" (Jacobs).

I realized that the word "journal" is from the Latin root of "diurnal." By the way.

Have you ever felt the grief of thinking, There is nothing story-like about this? "The clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much of real misfortune and the prosaic littleness which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity..." (Lewis).

That clarity — an intense sense of integrity of experience, a certainty that "everything has been leading up to this" and an understanding of just how — you can take certain drugs to get that feeling. Isn't that weird?

I'm interested in the ways that we deal with and act upon the past, through retrospection and "re-vision": "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (Rich). Interpretation and reinterpretation. Continuity versus rupture.

And the way the past acts on us. The "pastness of the past" and the persistence of the past (Persistence of Memory?), which, "of course, presses on the living from all sorts of directions and in any number of ways..." (Keane).

Shared narratives versus individual narratives, and what is lost and gained in dressing one's experiences in shared narratives. "[L]ocal social realities that cannot be fitted into any overarching narrative...without doing some violence to those realities" (Keane again).

Academically: I want to write a paper comparing second-wave feminist consciousness-raising with Protestant conversion narratives.

Personally: I think I am constantly retelling the stories of my life to myself, changing them a little bit each time so that the sense and coherency of them is constantly becoming more accurate. I need them to make sense. INTP drive for understanding combined with the INFP search for meaning. You know how we do.

- 11/27/11

"Winter," by Bella Akhmadulina

This same poet wrote one of my favorite autumn poems, which I have posted here twice before. I discovered this poem just a few weeks ago, and it continues to hold me in thrall.

Winter became my season during my years in the Chicago area — the sensory sparseness and the deep cold lent themselves perfectly somehow to the different moods and struggles of each year, and my memories of what was so striking to see, feel, and hear hold the emotional memories tightly. I mostly look forward to it now as a time to turn inward, read closely, turn big ideas over and let my thoughts steep without hurry. This coming winter will also bring the time to celebrate a year spent with my love.

The feeling of these memories has accumulated, though; I feel them lying layered and translucent against each other. And I read and love this poem because of how well it evokes (and invokes) some of my winter selves.


Winter

Winter's gesture to me is
chilly and persistent.
Winter has something
mildly medicinal.

Why else does
my unsuspecting sickness
stretch its hands toward it suddenly
out of darkness and pain?

My love,
practice witchcraft.
Let your icy ringlet's tonic kiss
brush my forehead.

The temptation continually grows
to meet deception with belief,
to look dogs in the eye,
to press myself against trees,

to forgive — playfully —
to run and turn,
and when done,
forgive again.

To equal the winter afternoon's
empty oval,
its nuances,
and always be aware of it.

To reduce my self to nothing,
so from behind the wall I can shout
not to my shadow, but to the light
not blocked by me.

– Bella Akhmadulina
trans. Mary Maddock

Some of the pieces

Some things your brain will not permit you to think about until you are in a place where it is truly permissible, where you have free mental space. I have gained some of that recently.

Forgotten:

• In the spring semester of my freshman year, when I myself am in the beginning of a year-long depressive episode, three alumni commit suicide. At least two of them are gay.

• The trigger for the last major relapse of my eating disorder there: being set up with a friend of a friend.  A cool and respectable Wheaton dude; I didn't know why it made me feel so terrified and despairing, but I promised myself I would get sick again and make it go away.

Waiting to be discovered:

• That professor with the fresh, shiny, postmodern explanation for why gay people don't really exist that all the more liberal students swallowed so eagerly? He based his argument entirely on concepts appropriated directly from queer theory, but failed both to give credit and to mention that the gay scholars who created those concepts had found it possible to follow them to different conclusions.

Ruts and fears

Running, I feel neither empty nor too heavy.

I think about when I used to take Irish dance, and about watching the championship dancers at competitions after my section was done. Reels and slips jigs and treble reels. Like having a good kind of fire in your body, like something between singing and yelling.

Now that I am finally able to run again, I could do that too, at some point.

And I think about my first winter at college, when I still hoped to continue taking dance lessons. That January I found a school that I liked and took a class, and the teacher invited me to come back to try a higher level's class, but I never went back, because it was so much work to travel by train and bicycle in the middle of winter to an unfamiliar place after a day full of classes. I just wanted to be cozy and safe, and it was dark so early, by 4:15 or 4:30.

I think now that if I had kept going to those dance classes, I would not have gotten quite so depressed that semester and had such a hard time that year / the rest of my time at that college, really. But I did the best I knew at the time, I believe.

I'm still like that. I prefer to be at home; I prefer to be in familiar places. Doing easy familiar things. Though I get bored easily, I also get anxious easily. So I walk the same routes over and over again. The library, the produce store, the thrift store, the mailbox. I watch a TV show or movie and then a few days later begin again from the beginning, and then again, until it's like white noise, white sugar, the cheap replacement for real silence. I ponder how long I could live taking the same seasonal data entry job each year. I clean my room.

Here in Australia I am meeting people I've only met once before, when I was twenty and too well prescribed to worry. I am less sparkly than I was then, but I don't mourn that self. I carry myself better now, maybe with less self-confidence but definitely with more steadiness.

I want you to know that I am not a terribly brave person. It's just that it's the mundane things that frighten me.

Academia and the intellectual life

This time last year, I thought I wanted to go to grad school. I was studying philosophy and culture theory and feminist theory for the first time in any depth, and I was in love. As I am still. My desire to read fiction has been shockingly low for the past year or so, just because I've been stumbling into so much compelling and urgent-feeling nonfiction.

Really what I think I want, though, is to have a life full of learning and theory-making and hard thinking and books and intellectual conversations and letters, an intellectuality never partitioned from daily life, from creativity or love or politics. And  I can see so much more clearly after a few months out of undergrad that these things do not belong solely to academia. Or even primarily to academia. To have learned how to read dense writing, and to have rigorous-thinking friends, that goes a pretty long and beautiful way.

Going stale

Nightdreams

December 2011, Illinois.

A postcard from last winter

Read in December 2011

1. Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998, by Adrienne Rich
I've read too many of her poetry books this year to keep most of them straight.

2. Planet Germany: Eine Expedition in die Heimat des Hawaii-Toasts, by Eric Hansen
Another expatriate memoir read for my German class. "An Expedition into the Home of Hawaii Toast." The funniest and smartest of the three — an insightful and interesting first-person narrative of German culture.

3. Der, die, was?: Ein Amerikaner im Sprachlabyrinth, by David Bergmann
Expatriate memoir #3. "An American in the Language Labyrinth." So gratifying to have the quirks and difficulties of the German language articulated so amusingly.

4. Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild
A sweet, everything-always-turns-out-okay novel. I like the contemporary setting — 1930s London.

5. Season of Ponies, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
This was my absolute favorite book in third grade — I went to my elementary school library a few years ago and the tag in the book showed me checking it out about eight times in a row -- and upon rereading, I can see why. It has ponies, freedom from adults, creepiness, magic...all the right ingredients, and in just the right proportions.

6. Romaji Diary and Sad Toys, by Takuboku Ishikawa
Part diary, part tanka collection. Emo (depressing). Sometimes relatable, sometimes misogynistic.

2011

Lighting incense / burning rice.

Making friends with winter.

A good production of a breathtaking play.

Getting set up, and going on some dates.

Falling in love with academia.

Lunches with Kathryn.

Social research, culture theory, senior capstone...

Radical feminism.

Meeting Sui and Noel.

Being awake for too many days in a row.

Swimming in Long Lake. In the Atlantic, in the Pacific, in Lake Michigan.

My only digital camera broke again.

This, again. (Thank you, anti-Pharma sentiments!)

Getting to know Niece-Baby.

Watching Xena.

My first full-time job, also the most grueling work of my life — street canvassing for two different non-profits.

Tofu scrambles.

"Hurricane" Irene.

For a few weeks at the end of the summer, traveling light and receiving enormous hospitality.

And seeing my freshman-year roommate again for the first time in three years.

Backaches.

Singing while I walk.

Semiotic ideology.

Gaining and losing my taste for alcohol.

Graduating.

___


Did I realize my intentions for the year? Yes. Especially my invitation to myself to have "more messes, more failures, more learning." More stretching. More experimenting. More biting the bullet.

The primary psychic ordeals, mostly voluntarily undertaken:

• I let my friend set me up with a mutual friend and Went On Dates, despite freaking awful anxiety and cognitive dissonance. I learned that I hate dating, independent of how much I may like the person.
• I went to the undergraduate version of summer camp (an institution I hate) in order to graduate on time. More anxiety (food-related and social). Triumphant in the end!
• I took a job that almost no one can do. AND KEPT IT

Oh, and I read fifty-five books. I made a list of the best.

Food and time

I wrote on Wednesday:

I've thrown so much time away simply because I thought it wasn't mine — time when I was "supposed" to be doing other things. Why is it a rule that when you're procrastinating, you have to be numbing your brain, bouncing around from website to website or similar? It's not. It's stupid. It results in nothing worth remembering, and it's not even enjoyable.

and I wanted to elaborate on that and connect it with eating as Sui did in her comment.

In Intuitive Eating the authors mention several adolescent clients who had gotten into the habit of overeating after school because as long as they were eating, their parents didn't make them do homework. In other words, their right to nourishment was acknowledged, but not their right to leisure time, and the result was that they tried to suppress one need by oversatisfying another.

I've realized that I can fall into a similar trap. When I'm willing to acknowledge my need for, say, an internet break "just to check my email" (ahem) but not my need to do something ACTUALLY enjoyable, like have tea with a friend, or ride my bike, or do some pleasure reading — then I overdo the internet surfing in an attempt to satisfy my chocolate craving with rice cakes. Falling into the black hole that is the internet can take longer than a real break would have, and it's way less satisfying.

I think this also has to do with the fact that I can avoid some of the responsibility for "procrastinating" by blaming the internet's addictive and time-warping qualities. (One earth hour = sixteen internet minutes, to quote my high school government teacher.)

And yet all that's needed to make taking that responsibility less dreadnacious is to accept that taking breaks is allowed — yes, even long unscheduled ones — and that I don't have to guilt-trip myself by labeling them "procrastination." That it really is okay to set aside a paper in order to go for a bike ride. (Appeal to pragmatic side: After all, if that's what I'm craving, then that's probably what will best refresh me and and re-energize me for more paper-writing later.)

Back to the food. I'd like to propose an analogy:

Unrealistic dedication to productivity is to wasting time as dieting is to overeating.

And what is the way out? Intuitive living, something like intuitive eating but bigger? Are there thoughts as trustworthy as the body's hungers?

I think so. I'm experimenting.

November hours

Happiness and gratitudes

• hospitality

• winter

• that a shower and stepping outside for a few moments makes everything better

• a care package of tangerines

• sleeping on campus during the day sometimes instead of in my room at night

• my new pets, which are two star-shaped foil balloons

• how many options I already have for next year

• "Near Town," by The Amazing Broken Man

• bike rides when I get cabin fever late at night, and the combination of emptiness and dark in the streets

• soccer-field stargazing for too long and my toes going numb

• a feeling of soon-will-have-smashed-something-edness

• emailing with Sui

• long Skypes with my Bostonian contesserate

• pesto/tomato grilled cheese

• soon I'll have my degree

Recognizing what I need tonight

(I needed to take the time to think about what I needed, for starters, so thank you, Sui.)

To wait to revise blog posts until tomorrow, because I can't revise well at this time of night.

To face my assignments, because being afraid of them makes me literally ill, so kindness and mindfulness ought to take the form of Biting the Bullet.

To begin again simply, and read Paul's letter to the Hebrews. To taste my old practices again, thoughtfully — the things that "being a Christian" used to imply for me.

To respect the bedtimes that work for me, regardless of how productive or unproductive I have been with my evening.

And a dose of negative capability.

You?

Asleep or awake,/what difference does it make?

One of last fall's songs + one of this summer's songs.

Not sleeping — or living — very well lately. Except for when I'm hyper on caffeine, I feel sluggish and dull, suffocating on food and screen time, suffocating inside my prickly layers in this cold room. I don't really have enough of a courseload to keep me busy, though I'm hardly doing as much as I could for the ones I do have.

I hate waking up in the afternoon, and I hate too-long or inadvertent naps. I don't want this groggy restless feeling; I want to feel alert and awake and properly alive. It's so easy to be bored (how is it that "entertainment" is not the opposite of boredom?), but so shameful. What a WASTE. I won't live like this, I refuse to live like this...

Personal projects for my last half-semester of undergrad

1) Sustainable bedtimes. Like, between midnight and one. That would be great.

2) Do my part to strengthen the feminist presence/visibility on this campus  by a) calling attention to misogyny and male entitlement where I encounter them, and b) offering feminist analyses of the stuff that comes up in our studies and in our lives.* These are my last classes here, ever, so I can be as outspoken as I like without a thought for the consequences of gaining a reputation as "strident" or a "feminazi."

3) Make it to at least one céilí. Anyone in the Chicago area interested in coming with?

*issues other than the ordination of women and gender roles in marriage, because those have been abundantly treated

April, looking out from a fourth-floor dormer

For the third night straight,
I have been awake to see the night through

        And it is hard to see

dawn's approach through the rain.
Until you see.

Three stories about moonlight

ONE.
My father's father and mother were young and newly married. He was still a med student; she was working to support him and they didn't have much money, but they needed a car and so had just bought their first. It was some shade of not-quite-pink (coral?) and had a glass top. They decided quite spontaneously to visit her parents for dinner that night, a few hours away. After dinner, they packed up all the leftovers to take with them so they wouldn't have to buy groceries for another week or so, and on their way back they watched the full moon rise through the roof of their car.

TWO.
The grandmother of the boy who told this story to an auditorium of us his peers. She, like him, was born deaf, and in her time that meant you got taken away to a boarding school where you were forbidden to use sign language. But when the moon was bright enough, the girls in the dormitory would creep from their beds at night and sit in a circle by the windows signing to each other by its light. Once they were caught. She made it back to her bed in time, but a friend of hers didn't. She watched a school administrator strike her friend so hard that she fell and hit her head, and they took her away with her head bleeding. She didn't see her again.

THREE.
When my sisters and I were little, our parents' fail-safe way to soothe us if we got upset too close to bedtime was to fold us up into a ball and wrap a down blanket around us, and then fold that up in their arms and carry us on a slow walk around the block in the dark. I remember the feeling of night air on my face when my cheeks had been hot and sticky from crying. My dad says he'd point to the moon to distract us and we'd talk about where it was in its phases. Sometimes my older sister needed to come too, and I could look up ahead through the quiet and see her in the other parent's arms in the next streetlight.

Anticlimax

So I left the Chicago area and I thought it was for good. For indefinitely, anyway.










Nope. Eight more weeks of class (starting October). I'll rent a spare bedroom from an old lady and take three more half-semester classes. Those plus one online class plus the one joke of a class I'm taking in-person at present here in California will get me a B.A. in anthropology with a minor in German. (Finally.) (It hasn't been as long as it feels.)

Which also means that studying abroad next year in Germany is no longer in the cards. I'll find a way to get back there, though. My German is zang good right now but I'm not fluent and I want to be. I will be. Which means I'm going to have to live in Germany for a time. I'll figure out the auspices...later.

And I turned down the internship in Uganda that I told you I was taking. If I hadn't, I would currently be in the air somewhere between Amsterdam and Kampala.

I'd like a job. It's not in my control whether I get hired or not, but I'm applying to a couple each day, and I'll keep doing that either until I get hired or until my classes start.

Closing remarks on summer classes in Wisconsin

Even though there were kind of a lot of us in one room with not much privacy, my cabinmates made a cool thing happen with all of us. It makes me hopeful about the possibilities of Christian community and female community. And I learned some things about meeting people, especially about the rewards of accepting and respecting and being patient with people I don't think I can like: namely, glimpses of who and why they are, and some returned respect and goodwill.


I got to study by headlamp, which was a strange and excellent experience.


I loved the lake best.


I couldn't choose what to eat, or when; I couldn't prepare my own food; I couldn't eat alone (and I knew only one person when I came). These things freaked me out at the beginning. But I got through it.


And my anthropology class, which met in the little one-room library, was the awesome cake underneath all these toppings. I pwned some discussions, chewed over some important new brainfoods with my classmates, and got to ask my professor some personally urgent questions.