Wordless

I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing here.  I stopped awhile back, and I'm not sure exactly why.  All the places and types of things I used to like to write just shut down.  It's like the flow of words I have always relied on just dried up.

I suspect I know why.  Before the semi-cataclysmic events of last Wednesday, I had reached a place of such worry and such stress that I basically shut down every system that wasn't essential.  Does a person do that?  Is that possible?  It feels possible.  Nothing was resolved Wednesday.  In fact, a great many things might get very much worse now.  However, two of the biggest issues in my life came to a moment of crisis, and at least now I'm not running from them.  Sometimes I think I was using up all my energy and effort with the running.  Maybe there's a mercy in the dropping of some of the old juggling balls after all....

There's also the fact that during the most fruitful period of this blog, I was writing with the idea that someone out there was reading it, someone specific.  I won't go into all that, but it's not the same now, and I've found it hard to come back here when I know that one-sided conversation is at an end.  That's just stupid of me.  It never should have been about a single person other than myself.  Knowing that it was stupid has also prevented me from coming back.  Will I fall into those same old patterns?

I miss the writing, though.  At certain times in Turkey, I saw something, and a fragment of a poem or an essay would start to form, and then it's like a hand swept away a cloud of incense, leaving me with the frustrating feeling of having glimpsed the finished work while being totally unable to capture it.  I found something  in a random notebook I  had tried to write about the Hagia Sofia, and I was astonished by how really terrible an effort it was.

I took out my book of poems the other day, the ones I have typed up and mostly in a final form, and it seemed as though another person had written them.  Maybe there's truth to that.  We do grow and change constantly, or at least we're supposed to.  It's not supposed to be a bad thing.  I just can't stand the thought that this new person, this current incarnation of me, is wordless.

On Writing

Well....That Was....Unexpected

I'm in the last phases of cleaning out all the things in my grading folder to close out grades tonight, and as I shifted the papers around, I found a typed essay with JUST READ IT!!! on the top mixed in with other assignments.

Puzzled, I glanced at the title, "The Hollow Woman."  Then my blood absolutely froze in my veins.  If you're paying attention to all the players and points around here, then you will know that was the title of a blog of mine early in September.

Once I started to breathe again, I started to read.  One of my students has taken the structure and even some of the words of that entry and sort of....written back to me.  I had to read it twice because my brain stopped working the first time through when I realized whole phrases had been lifted from my own writing.

It's not signed, or rather the typed signature reads only "Anonymous," so I have no idea where it came from.  It's a personal thing, the content of which I won't share here.  Someone perhaps connected to what I was saying in that blog and wanted me to know it.

I am torn between two emotions:  compassion and a wariness that I can't quite shake.  The last time current students of mine found my blog, a couple of really bad things happened.  This doesn't feel like that, though.  And those students weren't writing back, either.

I'm going to take it on faith, then, that this is just somebody who wanted me to hear their response, to know they were listening.  I am going to say, "Likewise."  I hear what you're saying.  I'm sorry it took me so long to find it.  And despite what you may believe, I am sure that nothing in your past would possibly keep you from whatever future you desire.

Get. Out.

I'm having very weird dreams again.  D. is in them.  I haven't dreamed about D. or even thought about him, really, in ages.  What is dragging that corpse up now?  He's sitting in every dream I have, though, smug, smiling that same old smile, dispensing his own personal brand of concern and advice, even though I don't want to hear it even in dreamland.  I'm going to assume it's the Topamax dosage change dredging up deeply buried layers of crapola and hope that he goes away again soon.  I cannot imagine why else I would possibly have him in my head.  It is not comfortable for him to be there.  It just NEVER ends.

I uploaded a great many of my poems, etc., to my Google Docs locker today as an extra measure of storage/backup, and also as a means to facilitate sharing them with a couple of people on occasion for this and that.  As I did so, I was weeding through them, rereading them, and it struck me again how long its been since I really sat down and wrote consistently.  I am hoping very much that this summer, for a variety of reasons, will mark a turning point in that pattern.  One, hopefully I won't be exhausted all the time.  Two, I will be travelling, and I always write better when I am.  Three, I will have a little time to produce.  Maybe that happy combination will break the lock of silence that has been sitting so heavily on my Muse.  The few things I've produced over the last year or so have not been terrible, but....

It's late and tomorrow will come early.  There is probably more to say, but for now, I'm headed off to the land of dreams and pray there are no ghosts from my past waiting on me there.

Silent Muse

I'm not writing.  Not anything.  Not even bad things.  The stories I have begun are all waiting for work.  The few fragments of ideas I have for poetry waste away like fruit that came too early to the vine, received too little rain to grow.  I feel hollowed out.

I keep telling myself that it's a season, that it's just the remnants of an incredibly stressful school year lingering, but what if it's not?  What if there is nothing left to say?  What if my little vein of talent, never great at the best of times, is tapped out and gone for good?  What if the Muse has folded her wings over her face and turned away?

Last year was so MUCH.  There was so much turmoil, so much pain, so many days where I came home and quite literally fell down on my couch unable to do more than take in some form of food before I became unconscious.  There were so many tears, angry ones, frustrated ones, desperate ones, futile ones....  Maybe I burned something vital inside me out, blew a fuse of some kind that I need now.

I'm so afraid that I know what part of the problem is.  I only write really well when I'm in love.  It doesn't have to be love with a person; I can be in love with the place I'm travelling through, in love with the thing I'm doing, in love with the new thing I'm seeing or experiencing.  I write best, I think, when there is also that great engine of love for somebody driving me, but right now, that is so frustratingly not possible.  Instead, there are only the things that I do not want under any circumstances, the things that I know I cannot have, and the things that mock me from the past.  Instead, there is only this vast unbroken winter that continues to expand inside me, everything still, everything cold and waiting.

And I hate it.  I was not made for cold.  I was not made for winter.  I was not made for this emptiness.  I was made to pour my love and wonder through a pen, though the keys before me, to try to share what the glory of the world looks like to me, even if I don't do it very well, just as a way of offering gratitude for the gift of the vision.  This perverse dullness, this sense of beauty that hovers at the edge of my vision but disappears when I go searching for it, makes me feel like I've been exiled because of an offense.  I have my fingers wrapped around the gate, peering in, but I somehow lost the key for the lock....

If running out and jumping into some stupid fling was the cure, I guess I would try it, but I know myself well enough to know that shallow does not work for me.  I am not one who "flings" although, I suppose, I have been "flung" once unintentionally on my own part....  I lack the temperament to run out and just "fall in love" for the hell of it.  I can't set up some unsuspecting guy to be my own personal "Laura" and sonnet him to death.  Either I really have to feel it, or it can't be forced or forged.  I wish I could lie to myself, comfort myself by putting a clever mask on something that I knew was lacking, temporary, and flawed, and dancing it around for awhile just for the sake of having some relief, a little Spring, but I've never been able to pull that particular Fool's Dance off.

Maybe if I can just get out on some trips, some of the ice inside me will start to break up.  Maybe I'll see things through the lens that will inspire the nib.  I'm starting to be afraid, so very, very afraid, that it is permanent.  I don't know what to do with myself if I become that frozen ice floe version of myself.  I don't think I can stand that.  And I know there won't be any help forthcoming from outside sources to help me attack the encroaching ice, so this is yet another problem that I'll have to deal with myself.