on methods of displaying word-snippets, and possibly a mental illness

I have way too many blogs. Thank goodness I stopped trying to have a system for which entries to post to which... now I just kind of go with whatever feels right. And I'm trying to keep it simple by usually cross-posting from Raid or Chronicles onto the myspace blog, but sometimes I don't. The result is that my three blogs (I've contemplated trying to post blog entries into my facebook notes too, since that's the only one my brother would read, but that way madness lies) read like alternate universes of the Ginny mind: lots of overlap, but each one presents a slightly different picture.

But that's not what I came here to talk about. It's just a thought that arose as I was trying to decide which blog to post this to.

What I came here to talk about was this: I miss away messages. I don't miss talking on IM (note that I do not call it AIM, first because I use ichat and second because people have started pronouncing it like the word "aim" which drives me BATTY) but I do miss away messages. So often a phrase comes to me, either internally or externally, that I want to display before the world. The away message was terrific for this. Actually, college in general (which was the last time I used IM with any frequency) was terrific for this. There was the quote wall, the quote book, there was scribbling lines and excerpts on the back of one's notebook when one was bored in class, there was, heck, just standing in the middle of the quad and shouting stuff. Though I don't think I did that. Much.

I was going to use that little headline quote in myspace for this purpose, but the current quote is so perfect, in origin and applicability, that I can't bear to change it. But I have three other quotes waiting in the wings that desperately need to be broadcasted somewhere. What's a girl to do?

WAIT!!! I know!!! I will start another blog! A quote of the day blog! Or week, or whatever. Displayed on the front page will be whatever snippet of wisdom, cleverness, compositional beauty, or just absurdity I feel the need to place before the world. And then I will have an archive of all the thoughts that struck me as displayable during this phase of my life. Which, for some reason, I value.

...

I have this sinking feeling that somewhere in the universe, something just went horribly wrong.

and what do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?

On the wall of my dorm room freshman year were many scraps of paper, more or less artistically cut, bearing some phrase or slogan, or occasionally a stanza from a poem. I still have them all in a folder; "Hamlet Schmamlet" is my favorite, for assorted subtle "you had to be there" kinds of reasons. But one of them, written much smaller, reads: "Another day at Oglethorpe: slack off, drink coffee, and develop a new plan for our lives." One of us said it at Starbucks one evening, I think just after we had been detailing plans for the coffee shop/ice cream bar we were going to establish some day (the ice cream was at my insistence.) Or perhaps that was the week we decided we would all get PhDs-- Joy in philosophy, me and Rachel in English I think-- and come back and teach together at Oglethorpe. We loved to sit around and design futures for ourselves, new ones coming as regularly as paper assignments (there might have been a correlation, actually.) This never seemed to get old.

That was six years ago. Apparently it still hasn't gotten old. I've spent the last several months coming up with new plans. It's all hovering around the academic lately, and the list of graduate degrees I've "decided" to get since January is prodigious. On Monday I came up with a definitive plan, one that encompassed all my hopes and ideals for a satisfying life, and contained several contingency plans and branching possibilities. A settled, workable plan, so I could stop trying to figure out what to do with my life and start actually doing it. A map of my future, drawn in ink. I've already started revising it.

Meh, it's a fun game. And judging by my parents, it's a game that I won't stop playing any time in the next several decades. Anyway all those things that I want to do with my life are secondary. I know what I want to be when I grow up: I want to be honest. I want to be someone who can speak the truth without having to concentrate. I want to be transparent. I want to be so secure in who I am that it's okay for people to actually see me, and even dislike me if they want to.

I want to be willing to learn, to change, to be wrong. I want to get rid of the idea that I have to be unapproachably excellent at everything I do. I want to learn NOT to laugh at my mistakes; laughter is a defense, a hastening to poke fun at myself before anyone else does. I want to champion my mistakes, to stand by them, to proclaim, "Yes! I screwed up. But didn't I screw up grandly?" I want to get through a game of go without undergoing a personal crisis.

I want to occupy my own place in the universe. I want to be generous with the gifts I have, instead of worrying that they're not welcome or not sufficient or not the right kind. I want to accept that I can't be everything to everyone, and to love the people I'm given to love in the way I'm capable of loving. I want to reach out to people freely, when I have the impulse, even when I don't know how they'll respond.

In short, I want to be free from self-absorption and cringing pride, to inhabit my own skin with peace, to stand in the world with all the grace and self-possession of the tree that is flowering outside my window.

Anyway, it's a start.

on description vs. decision

A more refined way of asking about fundamental beliefs: not "do you believe in X?" but "what is X like?" Instead of asking someone if they believe in God, or free will, or the soul, or true love, ask them to describe the God or free will or soul or true love in which they believe or don't believe.

The merit of this approach should be obvious. Many popular conceptions of God are puerile and inane; the white-bearded thunder-hurler, gleefully dispensing either candy or spankings in accordance with one's "naughty or nice" status, is not worthy of being believed in by any but the most childish mind. If this is what one means by God, one is far better off not believing in God at all. Throw that word out; find some other language for the truths of the universe that are being unfolded to your eyes.

In some cases, the answer to the descriptive question provides the answer to the belief question. I was asked, several months ago, whether I believed in the soul. I hadn't given it much thought up to that point, but when a definition of "soul" was chosen (in this case, we agreed upon the idea of a non-material entity which is attached to a material body and dictates, like a puppet-master, the movements of that body) it became clear to me that I did not believe in it. It offended all my aesthetic sensibilities: whatever linkage there is between my physical brain and body and my consciousness must be much more fluid than that, much more organic. The idea of mix-and-match souls and bodies, of a reservoir of souls that are plucked out and placed into physical bodies, just seems silly to me.

That doesn't mean that the word "soul" cannot be useful to me, as a believable concept. As I stand right now, the word has two meanings: one, the puppet-master soul which I have described and rejected, and the other, a collection of perceived realities that I'm still working to understand. What is this thing that I experience as consciousness and sense of identity? Where does it arise from? How is it related to the movements of pulses in my brain? I don't know, but "soul" is a useful name for it.

To say, as some do, that thought, emotion, and consciousness are only a product of a particular pattern of chemical impulses, does little to answer the most important questions about them. Our instinctive human reaction is to feel that this deprives them of meaning. "Only" a pattern of chemical impulses... that's tantamount to saying that self-awareness is an illusion, that our thoughts and emotions are trivial byproducts of an electrical wiring system!

Well hold on a minute. To say that what we call "the soul" arises from the material processes of the brain is not by any means to say that it is a trivial byproduct. And to say that self-awareness is an illusion is nonsensical. We are self-aware; if any statement of reality can be verified by perception alone, it is that one. To know more clearly the processes by which a particular event happens, like the perception of identity or the formation of the earth, should not rob that event of its significance for life. On the contrary, it should increase the significance, yielding new insights into the truth of the world and our relation to it, and helping us understand better the consequences our actions and decisions.

If, however, one cannot see it this way, if a materially-based conception of the soul does nothing but deprive human thought, emotion, and consciousness of its meaning and reduce everything to a mere chemical sludge, then one is far better off holding to a more traditional belief about the soul. And so you see again what I mean about description as opposed to decision. If someone actually believes that self-awareness is an illusion, then that person is a moron; in the same way, if someone actually believes that God delights in torturing bad people, that person is a blackguard. A very sophisticated moron; a very moral blackguard.

In conclusion, then: I think the proper way to deal with questions of belief is to delve descriptively into the exact notions that one is believing or disbelieving. And if one finds at any time that, in one's own understanding, a particular belief leads to either idiocy or villainy, to drop it, and search for something better.

one for sorrow two for joy

What broke you, you lovely one, to make you now so hard against giving and taking life?

You have graceful hands, did you know? and honest eyes.
And you are tender towards the hurt ones-- to this I can bear witness--
and you can speak truth with gentleness. And you wear your wisdom without pride.
And you love the lovely things of the world.
And you laugh when you dance.

These are gifts enough for a man to bring before us.
You are not measured by what you lack. None of us has sufficiency.
Limping, we carry what we have, and offer it to those we can.
And what we can build with all our combined gifts, whether it is towering and strong or slight and frail, is of secondary importance. The first thing is the giving.

Why then do you hide from us? Why do you skulk in tombs and wrap yourself in graveclothes?
Come forth; we are weeping for you. All we ask is the light of your eyes.
Love will bear so much: haven't you seen it? Can't you believe it?
With patience for what you lack and gratitude-- yes, gratitude-- for what you have. We are not so full ourselves that your gifts are not missed.

Only this love will not do, cannot do: love cannot crawl into the tomb with you.
Cannot wrap herself in matching shrouds and sit, blind and cold, until you both stiffen and decay to nothing.
To bring you out, she would do anything, even that,
but you would only shrink further and wrap yourself tighter. And she, without a sharer inside or out, would cease to be love.

***
I would have carried you through fire.
I would have breathed in ash till my lungs were choked, would have let my flesh burn down to bones.
I would have held you high and been consumed-- I swear I would-- even to nothing, would have let every inch of me burn to dust,
If I could only have set you safe on a high place, a place of fresh water and clean air, where you could be at peace.

I learned very quickly that I could not do this.
I could do nothing more than dip my finger in water to cool your tongue, whenever you asked it. And the only burning I could feel was in this small touch--
One finger of mine, against your whole tormented body.

But in the end--
Oh joy--
You found your own way through.
And though I have never seen you in a place of peace
(I suspect peace is foreign to your nature)
It is a greater gift than I could have hoped for, to see you standing where the air is clean.

a confession

Friends, I have defied a cultural norm. I have broken a taboo. There is an impulse which most of us have felt as children, and many of us indulged it-- but when we did, we found out quickly, from the shock and anger our mothers expressed, that it is NOT DONE. Shame and disgrace were poured out upon the innocent, experimenting child, and the lesson took root: in a decent, civilized society, people do not cut their own hair.

So swiftly was the social shame invoked that most of us never even asked why. To take scissors to one's own hair was FORBIDDEN, and that was all the child needed to know. As mother fusses and frets, trying desperately to cover up the great gap and the too-blunt ends where a hand more bold than skillful has severed a lock or two... as she shakes her head and clicks her teeth and worries aloud that she may have to shear the whole head to make it even, the prohibition is burned into the child's soul. What, exactly, the calamity consists of is unclear, but children are constrained by many such reasonless disasters.

It is necessary that it be so: but should not we, as thinking adults, look at the matter with a more lucid appraisal? It is for us to assess the validity of the prohibitions we accepted as children. Some we will approve and uphold without further experiment: "Don't put your hand on that stove!" Some we will modify into an appropriate form for adulthood: "Don't talk to strangers!" Some we will test and see for ourselves what the alleged dire consequences really consist of. Various primal urges will be indulged in, in a more or less infantile way, until we reach our own understanding of good boundaries and self-imposed constraints.

But of all these primal urges, one that gets relatively little press time is the urge to cut hair. I myself did not recognize until recently what a powerful and vital impulse it still is. The taboos imposed in childhood are strong; it generally takes a fair amount of external encouragement even to recognize them, let alone to break through them. So that, among the many taboos whose breaking has become fashionable, a subtler and less publicized prohibition remains as entrenched as ever.

It began, for me, about two months after I first got my hair cut short (by, of course, a qualified professional.) I had been for one trim, by another qualified professional, and it was getting shaggy again. They had warned me about this: Short hair needs to be maintained, they said. You'll need to get it trimmed every four to six weeks. And I found, crinkling my nose every morning at too-long wisps of hair down my neck, that they were right.

I hate appointments. I strive, as much as possible, to keep my life to a small, routine circle of activities: even an enjoyable break in routine, like a concert or a day trip somewhere, is met with some reluctance. Tedious and compulsory breaks in routine are worse, and to be eliminated wherever possible. And even more than appointments I hate these little, eternally repeating chores, these things which never stay done but must be done over and over, at regular intervals (e.g., bed-making, which I usually eschew, and tooth-brushing, which I usually succumb to.) And here I had introduced into my life the tedious, compulsory, eternally repeating chore, of going to get my hair cut. Gah.

So as I stared at myself in the mirror, these few offending wisps (only a few... most of it was quite acceptable), my mind railed in frustration that I would be compelled to make an appointment over such a small problem. And then, furtively, the image of a pair of scissors in the other room crept into my mind. Could I not just attend to these wisps myself, and put off the trouble of an appointment for another couple of weeks?

NO! the childhood prohibition boomed. We do not cut our own hair! That is work for trained experts! You don't have the education for that! For a moment, the thought of cutting my own hair seemed as wrong-headed as performing my own appendectomy. But then reason reasserted itself. It's only hair, after all. What's the worst that can happen?

I got the scissors. And with the first snip, a new freedom flooded through me. This was not some esoteric art, to be practiced only by the initiate. This was hair, and making it shorter. I could do this. I had the technology.

I stuck to my plan of just trimming the scraggly edges, but the thought of those scissors haunted me. Could I not do more? Could I not maintain my own haircut, without any professional help at all? It was only scissors and hair. How hard could it be?

I was timid at first. I picked an evening when I would be free the next day, to have the ravages repaired by a professional if necessary. I used a bathroom in my parents' house, where the arrangement of mirrors allows you to see yourself from just about every angle imaginable. I cut sparingly, conservatively. The result was favorable: there was barely a difference, only it was tidier than it had been. The success of this effort gave me boldness in subsequent essays. I bought a comb and a large hand-mirror. I began keeping my little vacuum cleaner in the bathroom to tidy up. I found that the more I cut, the more I wanted to cut. It had, at moments, the power of an addiction. I would have to firmly tell myself, "Lay down the scissors. Step away from the mirror."

I am still trying to analyze the peculiar enthrallment. It has its root, I think, in the simple experimental urge: "What happens if I do this?" It appeals to both curiosity and power: I have learned something, and I have made something happen. Fascinating. Let's try it again. Anyone who has spent time in the company of infants can see how primitive and basic this urge and appeal is.

Atop the appeal of experimentation, there are overtones of image and identity. I have never liked walking out of a hair salon feeling like my head had become someone else's sculpture. I don't care if you tell me it looks great. It is my hair, not some medium for modern art. My first desire, on returning from a hair salon, is usually to frantically wash and brush until it has started to look like my hair again. In the past, I told myself this was because I was uncomfortable having a fashionable or put-together image, had some pathological aversion to looking like I was trying to be stylish. But can one not as easily put the opposite spin on it? If I don't want to look like a magazine picture, why should I have to? Is there some rule saying that women must be designed and coordinated? And if there is, why am I trying to obey it?

This is a debate that cycles over and over for me. I oscillate between declaring that I want to develop a "style" for myself, and declaring that I don't care how I look. Neither is strictly true, and whether I will ever settle the matter remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I have begun cutting my own hair. And some days (today, for example) it looks like it. And I don't much mind. If my chief object, hair-wise, was to look great, I'd hire someone to do it. But there are things I want more: I want time, I want freedom, I want self-determination and the fun of experiment. And I want the play of scissors in my hand, the clean decisive snip, and the soft dark tufts falling into the bathroom sink.

a theory of moral sentiments, continued

I had lots more to say on the subject of my last post, but I was out of time and whenever I start a post and save it to finish later, it lingers in my "drafts" box for weeks and months, and by the time I get back to it my ideas have so evolved that I can't continue it. So I decided to just post it and continue later, if moved.

The state of mind I ended with in the last post-- the understanding, not just intellectual but emotional, that my neighbor's suffering is an evil equivalent to my own suffering-- is most clearly felt when the neighbor is loved. In fact I might make this one of the cornerstone definitions of love. A strange thing happens, only in moments and glimpses mind you, but even these moments and glimpses are peculiar and powerful... a strange thing happens when we love someone, and that someone suffers. For a moment we feel that suffering, and it is just as potent and painful an evil as if it had happened to us. It is not simply the discomfort of having a loud crying in our ears (though that occurs too, and is a factor at times even in the most loving relationships); it is, for moments and glimpses, a true fellow-feeling. Not that we ever think, at such times, "I feel just as bad as if this was happening to me"... that thought belongs to a different state of mind. What I am talking about is sitting beside a friend in pain, and feeling their pain without reference to oneself, or to the friend, but as a wound on the face of the world, under which we all suffer.

This is not to denigrate the individual sufferer's place in suffering. If there were no individual sufferer, there would be no suffering at all. But the suffering of the individual, if we only understood it properly, acts as a wound and a blight to all of us-- to the whole of humanity, and possibly to the nonhuman world as well. To feel this-- not to know it but to feel it-- persistently and wholly, would be in the truest sense to love our neighbors as ourselves. Possibly it would also crush us.

Then comes the final question of my last post. If one person's experience of suffering is a universal wound, should not one person's experience of joy be a universal blessing? I don't know; the second conclusion doesn't seem nearly as intuitively sound to me as the first. I will have to think about it more.

I have strayed a long way from my fable of the infants. But the connections should be obvious. If the infant loves his twin in the deepest sense, then it truly will not matter to him which of them receives the pinch. It is because he does not see clearly enough that he and his twin are the same kind of creature that he prefers the pinch to fall on his sibling's foot rather than his own. He has learned that they are the same, but he keeps forgetting it; he keeps thinking there is some grander distinction than simply which feet they are connected to. But that is all it boils down to. I occupy a particular place in space and time; I am connected to a particular set of receptors-- eyes, ears, skin-- by which the world touches me. But whether a pain is given to these receptors, or those to which my neighbor is connected, is a trivial matter; the important thing is that there is pain. And if I could know this, and feel it in my gut, and never forget it, then I would be incapable of hurting another person by either activity or neglect.

a theory of moral sentiments

Imagine twin infants in a crib. They're pretty new to this whole life thing, but they're slowly picking it up... sights and sounds that are repeated become familiar, some of them are associated with pleasure or pain. As these associations build up, they perhaps begin to experience anticipation, both positive and negative. When big sister's face appears over the horizon and she is smiling, they may feel a positive anticipation, because usually this means she is about to play with them or tickle them or sing to them. If she looks angry, though, they feel some apprehension, because sometimes she is resentful, and takes out her resentment by pinching their feet in not at all a nice way.

(By the way, this is a fable, not a treatise on child emotional development. I'd be interested to know in what order these various associations and emotions actually emerge, but it's beside the point here.)

One thing that neither of them knows is that they are twins. While to outsiders they are more or less a doubled unit, identical and interchangeable (and even in the family they are usually lumped together in talk as "the babies"), to themselves they are entirely different types of entity. One of them may indeed have noticed that there are four more or less identical feet in the crib-- but for two of the feet, when big sister tickles them, there is a delightful sensation and urge to laugh. For the other two, in appearance so similar, no shred of such sensation results. So clearly the four feet, though they look so similar, belong to two vastly different classes of object. So that, whether big sister tickles or pinches those two feet really makes little difference.

The infant may later observe that in fact it does make a difference whether the other two feet are tickled or pinched. First of all, the other object in the crib either laughs or cries, and if the object's laughter is pleasant and crying unpleasant, then the infant has good reason to prefer that the object be tickled. Second, if the object's feet are pinched, chances are that the infant's feet will be pinched imminently. The fate of the object's feet is a reliable indicator of the mood of the big sister, and for that reason too it makes a difference to the infant.

All this emotional range is quite plausible for the infant, and out of it may come a very strong appearance of sympathy. The infant doesn't like it when its twin's feet are pinched. He is likely even to begin expressing his dislike by crying even before his own feet are pinched. But the infant is worlds away, probably years away, from even beginning to have a real sympathy for his twin. The pinching of his twin's feet affects his world negatively; that is why he cries.

At some point, though, he makes the shocking discovery that that other object, the twin, is analogous to himself. It flies in the face of many observed facts (those feet produce no sensation! How can they possibly be like mine?), but there it is. The world must now be re-ordered to contain many subjects, not just one. He begins to understand that the twin's feet do produce sensation--for the twin. How odd.

Suppose, now that everybody is a little older, big sister has become more refined in her resentment. Instead of hating or loving both babies at once, she deals with her conflicted feelings by hating one of them and loving the other-- switching more or less randomly between each. (If you think this is implausible, consider the black sheep-white sheep phenomenon that arises in most families.) So any time she approaches the twins, she will tickle one's feet, and pinch the other's.

This changes the emotional landscape considerably. Now, for one of the babies, the pinching of the other feet means two things: the other twin will start to cry, which is unpleasant, and the sister will tickle his own feet, which is pleasant. And there is, too, in the back of his head the knowledge that the twin has experienced pain, very like what the infant himself would have experienced had the sister's wrath fallen on him instead. What does the child do? Does he cry because his twin is making such an infernal noise? Does he laugh because his feet are being tickled?

Or does he really, in a flash of inhuman insight, internalize the fact that, for the whole state of the universe, it makes no difference whose feet are pinched, his or his twin's? In the universe, someone's feet are being pinched-- whether the pinching happens to fall on my foot or my twin's matters only to the two of us, and only because we're so locked inside our own bodies. Whether the pulse of pain happens to flow to me or to my neighbor clearly is not the important thing: the important thing is that there is a pulse of pain.

And then the yet more unthinkable thought: is it the same for joy?

Simone on attachment, reality, and loss

I have recently begun reading Simone Weil. I learned about her through reading Czeslaw Milosz, who loved her. She was quite a woman... anyway, I am going to post now and then some of my favorite of the paragraphs. I'm posting them without commentary... I have a hope that it will get a conversation going in the comments.

***

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer onto things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

As soon as we know that something is real, we can no longer be attached to it.
Attachment is no more nor less than an insufficiency in our sense of reality. We are attached to the possession of a thing because we think that if we cease to possess it, it will cease to exist. A great many people do not feel with their whole soul that there is all the difference in the world between the destruction of a town and their own irremediable exile from the town.

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it. If we can let our whole good rest with something hidden in the ground, why not with God?
But when God has become as full of significance as the treasure is for the miser, we have to tell ourselves insistently that he does not exist. We must experience the fact that we love him, even if he does not exist.
It is he who, through the operation of the dark night, withdraws himself from us in order not to be loved as the treasure is by the miser.

To lose someone: We suffer because the departed, the absent, has become something imaginary and unreal. But our desire for him is not imaginary. We have to go down into ourselves to the abode of the desire which is not imaginary.
Hunger: we imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real: we have to fasten onto the hunger. The presence of the dead person is imaginary, but his absence is very real; henceforward it is his way of appearing.

the story of my life, so far

Recipe for a crisis

Layer in an individual:
20 years upbringing instilling conservatism of morals, inquisitiveness of intellect, and independence of will.
1 church attended in formative years where most of the people appeared to be feeling or experiencing things not felt or experienced by this particular individual
4 years education in a liberal environment, reading beautiful, tormented, difficult books and meeting beautiful, tormented, difficult people
1 year spent mostly in the company of secure, more or less fundamentalist Christians, who are quite confident in what they believe and why

Add, in quick succession:
1 father converting to Catholicism
2 friends with hard questions, who won't take crap for answers

Stir vigorously. Watch the mix boil.

So if you haven't heard from me in the last month or two, and you're the kind of person who expects to hear from me more frequently and talk at great lengths, this is why. Not that I've intentionally gone into hiding, but just that I haven't reached out to talk as much because I haven't known what I would say. I still don't, exactly.

There are a few snowflakes blowing around outside. I mention it because I love snowflakes, and also because it is important to remember how much of the world actually takes place outside of my head.

Here are some questions I am not asking right now:
Who am I? I'm not really very worried about this. Actually I'm obsessed with it, but that's nothing new, so I'm not counting it as a question which makes up the current crisis. Asking who I am is not so much an activity as a continual mode of being.
What is my purpose in life? This is even less of a worry than "Who am I?" Teleology, naturalism, extrinsic and intrinsic finality... these are interesting ideas to play with, but from a practical standpoint they all break down to much simpler questions like "What should I do for the next hour?" (or possibly, depending on your philosophical view, "What will I do for the next hour?") Much like "Who am I?" this is a question which does not wait for an answer. It merely exists, to be answered further every moment.
Is there a God? I tried asking this one for a little while, about a month ago. It didn't stick. My aesthetic framework doesn't seem able to support such a question in its purest form. Taking "God" in a very broad sense, as some force or entity which drives, shapes, and/or evaluates the universe... well either there is or there isn't. And if there isn't any such thing, then there is no story to the world (an equivalent phrase might be "no meaning.") And if there's no story, I'm really not that interested. Stories are to my mind what blood is to my body. If there is no God, then I, as a maker of stories, am the most interesting thing in the universe. And since I'm going to go on making stories whether there is a God or not, then finding out that there's not a God (if such is the case) is not a high-priority activity for me.

Now we move to the questions I am asking right now:
What is God like? This is huge. I don't know if you noticed, but "some force or entity which drives, shapes, and/or evaluates the universe" leaves a lot of room for specification. There are many possibilities within this category. I haven't even begun to try and rule some of them out. An important sub-question to this is "What, if anything, does God require of me?" On this I have some thoughts, which I may try to flesh out in a later entry.
What is the source of the Christian belief which I have held as long as I remember? To say that my parents taught me to be a Christian is true, and trivial. Why did I believe them? Why did I never, seriously, doubt that what they told me was true? Does it owe more the to quality of my relationship to my parents (and friends and teachers who reinforced what they said) or to the quality of the universe? This may be the biggest piece of this task I'm embarked on: rejecting unsatisfactory sources of my belief and replacing them, if possible, with sounder ones.
What is the Bible? In the gamut of possibilities, from "every word is stamped with God's approval" to "it's a handful of literary works cobbled together by various religious and political bodies" where does the truth lie? I don't know where the answer to this question will come from, though I'm going to begin by investigating, in detail, the historical background and origins of various parts of it. So we'll see.

There is another question, one which I can't seem to either ask or not ask. In one way, it is the most important question of them all. But it deserves its own essay, and maybe soon I will write it.

What does all this mean? I don't know. It will come as a shock to many of you... it did to me. At times I think that faith, whatever it is, exists independent of intellectual belief; that all these doubts, which for me are real and vital concessions to intellectual honesty, may persist for months, years, even a lifetime, while my identification with Christ still lives on some fundamental level where it cannot be shaken. This is a comforting thought... though it still leaves a lot of questions about the shape my life will take, particularly my place in various social worlds.

Other times I listen to songs, or read poems or passages from books, that I once sang and read and celebrated as containing truths, truths which were as real-- though not as tangible-- as the tree in my front yard. And I feel like I've been robbed of my most precious possession.

on sharing

How to speak-- and to whom-- and of what? For me nearly all difficulty and all reward in human relation resolves to this: speech or silence. Was it always this way? Is this essential to who I am, or is it a state brought about by some sequence of experiences, or is it a phase I will grow out of? To be understood-- why is it still so important?

Maybe it is the search for an ally. Everything out there is so big, and so hostile, and so confusing, that I seek for one, just one, companion in my thoughts: one place where the battle and the search can cease, and I can rest. I have no such person-- probably no such person exists-- and even worse than the loneliness is the sense of being perpetually under attack.

And yet the impulse is to reach out, even with these thoughts, to present them to other eyes. What is it I want in response? What is the hope that these words fly on? Why do I permit myself such a ridiculous, overprecious phrase as "the hope these words fly on?"

It is at this point in writing, in my notebook with my fountain pen, whose current ink color is a bright pink, that I stopped to post those three poems. I wrote them three or four years ago, and there are lines and phrases in each that make me shudder. I want so badly to write well, to write elegantly, irreproachably, without cliche or evasion, convincingly, and beautifully. That there should be works of mine out there that betray the staggering weaknesses of those three poems is painful to me. I don't want those weaknesses aired.

Some of you will protest. Some of you will say, "But Ginny, I really liked those poems! I thought they were good." I know. In the genre they belong to, the genre of amateur poems which exist mainly to express to the author's own satisfaction some feeling or experience, they're not half bad. And in fact they do express, to my satisfaction, the things each of them were meant to. There are lines and stanzas in each of them that I will recite to myself, pleased. But it is my vanity, my aspiration, that says, Not enough! If I am to be a poet, I must be a great poet, an irreproachable poet, a poet without weaknesses and clumsy moments. And if I cannot do this, and I cannot, then my poems will be for myself only. If I must have weaknesses, they will be for my eyes only.

One of the beauties of learning to play go is that it shines a pitiless light on this vanity of mine. There is a beauty in good play that I crave, that I strive for, and that constantly eludes me. Instead I play sluggish, vulgar, fumbling moves; and if I ever tried to convince myself that it is not so, the final score would show me the lie. Worse yet, there is no end in sight. My teacher, who beats me four times out of five with a nine-stone handicap, loses as badly to people who lose as badly to still more people. This is well understood in the world of go; which does not make it any less painful to me. I hit a very bad wall early in my learning to play, where the gap between my aspirations and my abilities was so frustrating that it crippled me. I got over it-- I had to, or I would have had to stop playing-- but it still stings.

My teacher tells me that to improve I must play lots of games. This means lots of bad games, lots of weak and clumsy games which are still the best I can do. I have been making my peace with this. Now it is time to turn the same eye to writing. If I am to write, I must write a lot, and I must write much less brilliantly than I desire to (it is the only way I can write; so high is my vanity.) And I must, God help me, submit to criticism, as I submit to the review of one of my games.

One of the reasons this blogs sees so few posts is that I once designated it my "quality-controlled" blog. My other one, Chronicles of the Ephemeral, (which I do not want to delete, only because I'm so fond of the title) is where I post whatever thoughts or stories I feel like sharing, without worrying about whether they'll be of general interest or whether they're written well. Of course, once I put the expectation of quality on this blog, it was doomed to receive only rare updates. (Chronicles has been neglected, too, these last few months, but there are other reasons for that.) And of course the beauty of it is that Chronicles has many posts that are, in retrospect, much more interesting and witty and insightful than anything posted here. Bah.

So I am going to try and demolish the barrier between "quality-Ginny" and "regular-Ginny." It's an artificial distinction, and it causes harm in ways I'm only beginning to identify. There is only Ginny, foolish and weak and clumsy at times, but also, also, having her moments of quality. (This applies to much more than writing, by the way, but it is a good place to start.) After all, the world can absorb a few more bad poems without sustaining too much damage. If I hide my weaknesses, it is for my protection, not theirs. I think-- we will see-- I think I can do without that kind of protection.

three poems, from a time past, presented not out of pride but of necessity

Iron Maiden

This room is like a stone
Both of us sitting here motionless
Pressing wads of silence and pride over unspoken wounds.

When I look at you, my eyes bleed.
You are careful not to look at me at all.
If I should get up
To wash my face or get a drink
It would remind us both that we are here.

Once I called you by my name
And we laughed as at a perfectly understandable mistake.

The remote is handled with perfect courtesy:
“Would you like to watch something else?”
“Oh no, go ahead.”
“Are you sure?” “I wasn’t really watching anyway.”
Your books stacked beside you
are an unassailable wall.

This room is like a stone
And the floor is lined with knives
And I shudder to pierce in you or me
Some yet unbroken piece of skin.
If I should smile
It might pull open a crack in chapped and blistered lips
And pour forth a salty rush of red that you, or I, or both, may choke on.

They say salt water heals.
I have always been afraid of the sting.


***
Freshwater

Something broke—
ice or a storm
or a black crust
fragmented and floating
carried away on a newborn river.

A gladness like white flowers
springs along the banks.
The river breathes
in and out with the tide
of quiet awakening...

That life is still possible
that the thunder cries of birth
that the ice hatches the river
that you and I can lie side by side in the dark
talking of the stars.


***
White Christmas

I. Visitation
Snow falls from another place; layered
On trees in black-white limbs, it lies like
Eternity settled over that which dies.
Cold crystallizes air, splintering breath
And piercing silence into every throat;
Changeless it spreads, forcing blued fingers stiff,
Beating pliant flesh brittle.
Freezing, sharpening, it descends, shadow of
The hard bright dagger coming to split the earth.

II. Homecoming
Homecoming was a crawl, not a march,
A bloodied drag over frozen ground,
Toward a remembrance of warmth.
But she and he were gone to warm each other,
And on Christmas morning my father exploded
Because the juice pitcher was empty.
The sun bleeds pink every morning
Or fades up in grey invisibility.

Shall I tell you of the war and waste?
The grey lands, filled with the snap of invisible bows
And sting of arrows I could not duck—
I, the only pink and pulsing thing
In all the unwoundable cold.
I carry it with me
In my hard and black toes—
Let me sleep in sight of your fire.

III. The Party
His apartment was clean and white-walled;
Her influence was plain.
The graham-cracker cookies his sister taught me to make
Were laid on the table on a green plastic plate.
In the kitchen she talked with her friends
About the dresses– navy blue,
Which would not have flattered me anyway.
Their mothers both smiled and asked about my year
And told me to say hello to my family.
I was very cold.

IV. The Death
On Christmas morning my father exploded
Because the juice pitcher was empty.
That was the end.
Nothing was left except
The struggle not to break over
The scrambled eggs hardening on my plate.

V. The Fall
Cold is born soft
Leaving the iron air to fall
With the delicacy of an eyelash,
To blacken with the spit of a tire,
To fade with the heat of a breath.
Once I dug a foxhole in a snowbank
And lay there until nightfall.
Unthinkable: the dagger which descends
To pierce the earth and freeze its core
Comes with the lightness of dandelion seed,
Softly as a breath layering the earth
With eternity;
Draping frozen rocks and bitter trenches
With grace.

the Christmas Song Rant

It's that time of year again. It will happen seven or eight times between now and January. I'll be out shopping. The stores will be playing their usual blend of more-or-less hokey Christmas music. A new song comes on, and at the first words I tense up: "Have Yourself..." I can't help it. My ears are pricked, my mind derailed from whatever it was doing a minute ago. I just have to listen till I know. "...a merry little Christmas, / Let your heart be light." The next two words will determine my mood for the next 90 seconds. If I hear "From now on," I will roll my eyes, sniff a little, and frown while I shop and compose more of this rant in my head. But if perchance the words should be "Next year," I will smile with delighted surprise, and there will be a little more bounce in my step as I walk the aisles. They're actually playing the good version! I might even buy something extra from the store, as a reward for their good taste (I'm all about irrational recompense.)

I bet some of you didn't even know there were two versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Wikipedia will tell you everything you need to know about it. Suffice it to say, the original version (well, the second original version... Judy Garland put the kibosh on the original original) is a sweet, melancholy song, filled with the homesickness that marks all the best Christmas songs of the 20th century. The rewrite is a bunch of glib, saccharine tripe, filled with the tinselly hyper-optimism that marks all the other ones.

Not that I feel strongly about it.

I'm not going to talk about "the real meaning of Christmas"-- much. For my money, there's no subject more pregnant with poetry than this one idea: "God is born." But you don't have to sing about that. You can sing about home and family; you can sing about snow, though I'm going to have to ask you not to write any more songs about it; you can sing about winter, especially if you tie it to themes of death and rebirth or something nice and archetypical; you can sing about peace on earth and goodwill to men. But your songs about home and family will be most convincing if you're singing about how much you miss them, and your songs about peace on earth and goodwill to men will be most authentic if they recognize the ubiquity of war and hatred.

The other song I have a rant about it "What Child is This?" Last year I spent four hours searching iTunes for a recording which had the original second-verse chorus. A few of them include the proper third-verse chorus, instead of repeating "This, this is Christ the King" for all three verses, but none I could find had the second-verse. For those who haven't heard it, it goes like this:

Nails, spear shall pierce him through
The cross be borne for me, for you;
Hail, hail the Word made flesh
The Babe, the son of Mary.

According to Wikipedia, this verse is typically left out "due to the rather unfestive content." I ask you, what's so unfestive about crucifixion?

Okay, bad question. Let me rather ask, Why does being festive mean pretending nothing bad happens? This is the real problem I have with the secularization of Christmas. A church festival is a celebration of an event in the past, and the implications it continues to have. So is nearly any other annual festival. In this way, most days we celebrate can allow for almost any mood and circumstance. Independence Day can be celebrated while we're at war, or in a depression. The tone of our celebration may vary, it may indeed be bitter, angry, or pained; but there's still a lot to say and think and feel about our country, and it's a day to do that. Even a birthday allows for melancholy, if that is what reflecting on one's life and aging arouses that year.

Christmas, though-- if it's not about the birth of Jesus, then no one seems to know what it is about. "Family, peace, goodwill" seem to be the best people can come up with... but these are unstable and elusive elements. How do you celebrate family if you can't stand to be near them, or if one of them has just died? How do you celebrate peace on earth with your eyes open? You can just manage it, if you focus on small graces, if you make up your mind to celebrate the isolated, illuminated moments where peace and goodwill are manifest amid the ugliness. But if you try to do it without acknowledging the ugliness, you just sound like you're kidding yourself and us.

And if you do acknowledge the ugliness, suddenly you're "not in the Christmas spirit." You're supposed to be happy at Christmas. Otherwise you join the ranks of lonely or cynical people that they make movies about, isolated from all the Christmas cheer, either wistfully making the best of it or grouchily Scroogeing everybody you can. (The people in the movies always find love, of course. Which only makes you feel worse.) You're not part of Christmas anymore, you're part of anti-Christmas.

Do what you like. If you want to keep writing and playing sappy tinsel-songs, that's your prerogative. If you want to spend one day of the year kidding yourself that all's right with the world, be my guest. But you will be doing yourself a favor if you find some other, stronger meaning to hang your Christmas on, something that will not evaporate one year when things become difficult. If you don't like my meaning, there are others you can try.

This is what my Christmas hangs on: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. / And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it. It is stirring to me, it is chilling. It encompasses family and love; it encompasses peace and charity; it encompasses the haunting beauty of winter and death and birth. And some year, when I have none of these things, when I am alone and desolate and heartbroken, it will still stand, the Word made flesh, the last thing I have to hold to. It is a song I can sing any day, any year.

silent night

He was conceived less than 19 weeks ago. Last weekend his mother started cramping, then bleeding. By the time she came to the hospital it was too late to stop labor, so he died and was born. And because I work at that hospital, and because my mother was his mother's nurse, I got to see something most people never see.

He would just fit in the palm of a grown man's hand, with his head resting against the fingertips and his tiny heels brushing the wrist. His skin is a dark rose-color, faintly translucent; I can see shadows of organs underneath, and over his chest a ribbing of thread-thin pale lines.

His face is perfect. The eyes are closed, the head tucked over one shoulder, just the way a living newborn's head falls when he sleeps. His nose is just simply a baby's nose, rounded and soft, like the nose on a miniature baby doll, but sculpted to impossible detail. His mouth opens just a little when we pick him up to weigh him.

His head slopes high in the back-- his face and body have not yet caught up with his brain. His body is still very thin, his legs looking like the legs of a malnourished child in Africa, little more than bone and blood vessels under the skin. But his feet, like his nose, are perfect miniatures, and so are his hands, with the fingers fine as cherry-stems. We take his handprints and footprints, I holding the ink pad while my mother presses each small hand and foot against it. Living babies are only ever footprinted, because they curl their hands into tight fists. But his little palms are open, and so we have a row of prints, two hands next to two feet, each one the size of one of my fingerprints.

His weight (7 ounces) was needed for the hospital record, but the prints we took for the mother. She did not want to see him at first, but my mother convinced her to see him and hold him. This is important, because otherwise she might go home thinking that the last four months yielded nothing but blood and heartbreak. Now she can see what a strange, sweet little man has been growing all these weeks, and she will be free to love him and mourn him. She has named him John.

He has a sister who is ten years old-- the age I was when my youngest brother was born, three years older than I was when my twin brother and sister died in the womb. I wonder if he will stay with her as she grows up, if she will think at times, say once or twice a year, to how old he would be now and what he would be doing. (18-- just finishing their first semester of college. In my head, Amy plays soccer and William plays piano. The first night they're home for Christmas break, Amy will stay up all night telling me stories of boys she's gone on dates with-- she's quite the flirt.)

I saw other babies that night, living babies, pink and chubby and squalling heartily as the nurses cleaned them. But this tiny broken thing will not leave me, and I think-- I cannot begin to tell you why-- that he was more beautiful than any of them.

The spoiler policy

Leah asked about this, so I thought I'd post it here instead of burying it in the comments. With my discussions of movies, I will stick to what seems to be industry-standard spoiler policy: avoid giving away major plot points, especially things that occur near the end, but talk freely about general trends of action, or specific details of scenes that don't give away major plot points.

I'm always torn when faced with a review of movie I haven't seen. It's so rare to go into a movie clean-- knowing nothing more about it than you saw from posters and previews. This is pretty much how I watched Punch-Drunk Love, and I think it was a better experience because of it. But if you're going to do that, you have to either see movies as soon as they come out, or strenuously avoid reading and listening to lots of things you'd like to be reading and listening to. (Or, as happened with me and Punch-Drunk Love, wait so many years before seeing it that you've forgotten everything you'd heard about it.) Is it worth it? The consensus seems to be no, unless it's a movie where a surprise is an important part of the whole experience.

Which brings me to a tangent: what about those classic movies with a major spoiler, like Psycho and Citizen Kane? I haven't seen either, but I know the surprise in both, from numerous sources. There seems to be a point at which spoilers pass into the public domain, as it were, and it's no longer a social crime to reveal them. My real question is, when does this occur? When will it be okay to talk freely about the surprise in The Sixth Sense? It's not, yet, but there's a sense that the restriction is slackening. As fast as our culture moves, I expect it won't be many more years before the movie attains "classic" status, at least in that sense.

This gives rise to a number of interesting speculations for me... defining "classic," the pace of culture, reasons spoilers pass into the public domain, unwritten social contracts... but it's Thanksgiving, and I'm in charge of potatoes, both sweet and white. So I'll leave the discussion to be picked up by any of you who are interested.

love in context: a double feature

-The movies: Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Monsoon Wedding (2001)
-The link: They're both love stories. I didn't say the link had to be terribly specific.
-The comestibles: Gouda cheese, Clementines, and the leftover Shiraz from when Leah was here. I have no idea how these things are going to go together, or how they'll go with the movies, but they're what I had on hand, and tonight was kind of an afterthought. Plus, the wine really needs to be drunk.
-Thoughts and expectations: Monsoon Wedding is one of my favorite movies. Punch-Drunk Love is a movie I've wanted to see for a long time. Pretty much I walked into Blockbuster looking for a movie I that I hadn't seen, wanted to see, and could make a plausible pairing with Monsoon Wedding. I did say tonight was something of an afterthought. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Now, for the movies.

***
Wow. What an interesting combination. I'd really love to write a separate blog entry on each one, but I don't have time. So we'll stick with a brief overview, with a particular eye to how they comment on each other.

I knew they were both love stories, and I had a hunch I'd be able to make the link more specific, but I didn't know enough about Punch-Drunk Love to be sure. Now, though, I can say that they're both love stories deeply embedded in a cultural context. The romance itself in each takes up a fairly small amount of screen time (in Monsoon Wedding, of course, there are several romances, as well as other storylines.) So you have a love story with lots of other stuff going on around it.

I'm struggling to define the culture that Punch-Drunk Love lives in. It's contemporary American, obviously, but it's more specific than that. It's a culture that hasn't been named, as far as I know, but it's very familiar to us. I might even say it's the default culture of Americans: if you don't have a group-- family, ethnic, religious, activist-- then you probably live in this culture. It's the culture of isolation and alienation. Its hallmarks are a craving for intimacy and a profound distrust of people and institutions alike. There is a desperate need to be heard, to be understood, to connect with someone, anyone, but the knowledge of how dangerous it is to reach out for that is crippling. And it's not paranoid: they really are out to get us... if not to crush us maliciously, at least to use whatever we give them for our own ends.

Punch-Drunk Love is not subtle on this point. Twice, early in the movie, Barry Egan tries to break out of his isolation. He knows the dangers. In both interactions he voices, repeatedly, his worries about what the other person might do with the information he is giving them. They assure him he's safe, protected, that this is confidential. They lie.

And this is the culture the movie lives in. How do you have a love story in this kind of world? The movie skirts this question, simply allowing, almost miraculously, that Barry meets a woman who does love him, protect him, and forgive him. He can't possibly reach out for her: the avenues he attempted earlier to break out of his isolation were both much more clinical, professional. He was looking for closeness, but a distant kind of closeness. The idea of actually looking for a woman, an intimate companion, was inconceivable to him. He did everything he could to avoid it. She found him, she pursued him, she made it safe for him to come to her.

So the hope-- I might even say the daydream-- is that a Lena Leonard will someday appear in our lives, and like us enough to persist through our weirdness until we can bear to trust her. Then we will no longer be alone... and on the strength of that astonishing, wondrous not-being-alone, we can brave and conquer all the other hostilities of our world.

The culture of Monsoon Wedding is, of course, a family in India. I don't know enough about India to judge where it fits into modern Indian culture, but I know plenty about families, so that's where I'm going to focus. Family comes with its own problems, and its own kind of isolation. Paranoia is not an issue... you pretty much know who you can rely on for what, and when there's a betrayal of trust it's shattering (as opposed to PDL, where it's expected.) But just as there is an isolation of solitude, there is an isolation of belonging. In PDL, Barry Egan says, "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are." That's the isolation of solitude... you are horribly conscious of the gulf between your mind and anyone else's and you have no idea what's going on on the other side. You can't define yourself in terms of other people, as we all for some reason feel compelled to do, because other people are hopelessly distant from you.

In the isolation of belonging, you have no problem defining yourself in terms of other people. You can't escape it. Everybody in a family has their labels, and the family as a whole has an identity against the outside world. The isolation comes because you're not really defined by those labels, and you know it. You have your secrets, and you have the pieces of yourself that no-one sees. The torment here is to be in a room filled with people who know you well, and yet don't see who you are; to have someone give you a glance of understanding, and yet have no idea where your pain really comes from (I am thinking of the scene when Tej has just offered to fund Ria's education, and amid the celebration someone mentions Ria's father, and Ria's eyes fill with tears.)

In the love stories of both movies there is a moment of honesty, where one character reveals to the other something they've kept hidden. And it is that moment that forges a union between the lovers: suddenly they are no longer isolated individuals, but allies against the rest of the world, whether it is the cold, bare hostility of Punch-Drunk Love or the noisy, nosy crowd of Monsoon Wedding.

Monsoon Wedding, of course, doesn't stop there. Being about a family, it displays a range of relationships in many stages. And it is clear that the moment of honesty is not a one-time thing. As relationships continue over time, there is a continual ebb and flow of concealment and authenticity. Isolation-- reaching-- and rebuff or embrace, leading to further isolation or another moment of unity, solidarity, lasting for a while until the process starts over again. And in between? The patterns of family life, the everyday conventions we use in dealing with those close to us. The quality of these patterns largely determines whether family is a comfort or a misery, and also either facilitates or inhibits the moments of authenticity. But I have strayed now from talking about movies, so I will end here.

Double feature: introduction

Here at a raid on the inarticulate, we like to introduce new features every so often, to continually improve the quality of blog our readers have come to...

Aw, who am I kidding? I pretty much post what I feel like posting, when I feel like it. Sometimes. If there's nothing more compelling to do. When a few kind individuals offered suggestions on how to increase my readership, I pointed out that if I increased my readership to any significant degree, it would probably involve creating expectations that I would, oh, post somewhat regularly, and with some continuity of content. And that's the very last thing I want to do.

However, I did have this really cool idea, and it involves a somewhat regular posting here, on a specific subject. And since I intend to make it a steady ritual in my life, there is some faint hope that this, the premiere, won't turn into a standalone post, as nearly all my other posts that were meant to be part of a series have.

Enough preamble. The ritual is Double Feature Night. This is where I watch two movies, with suitable accompaniment of food and drink, and then write about them a little. The parameters for the movie choice: 1- at least one has to be new to me. I'm going to try to make it both most of the time, but every so often I'll pair a movie I've seen before with a new one (as I'm doing tonight.) 2- they must be reputable movies, movies that have some claim to quality. This is not guilty-pleasure-movie night. I may occasionally break this rule if there's a good enough reason, such as pairing a high-brow movie with a low-brow movie on the same subject. Which brings me to 3- they must have something in common, or at least yield an interesting juxtaposition. This I expect will be rather easy to do, since almost any two works of art can yield an interesting juxtaposition if you want them to. Part of the fun will be in seeing what unexpected things come out of the pairings.

I expect three main benefits to come out of this new ritual. First, it will lend a bit of the whole regularity/content thing to this irregular and whim-based blog (my plan is to do this once a month. Maybe twice, if I feel like it.) Second, it will get me watching movies that have been on my list for way too long. Third, it reserves a night for me to do something I enjoy all by myself. And I need that, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here.

Final note: I am indebted for this idea to Sam and Stephen of All Movie Talk. They gave me the idea in quite a roundabout way, by twice mentioning in their show pairs of movies that I thought I'd like to watch back-to-back. The second time it happened I decided to make a ritual out of it. This paragraph really exists solely to be a plug for their podcast, by the way, so it'd be a shame if you didn't at least check it out.

an explanation, and a break in precedent

So my last post was more than a post. It was a boat-burning. It was the seal on a decision. Now I can say the decision is made, and I've done something to cement it.

My last post was also the beginning of my most recent law school essay attempt. Which is why posting it here was a boat-burning. If I was actually going to submit it to any schools, I wouldn't have posted it here. So my having posted it makes it final that I'm not going to submit it.

But wait-- there's more. Not only am I not going to submit that essay, I am not going to submit any other essay, written or yet-to-be written. This year. Which is a fancy way of saying, I'm not applying to law school this year.

Wow. Writing it feels weird. I've been pretty settled in the decision, but actually typing and publishing it (for all the world to see, right?) is a different thing. It's real now. Kind of like when I cut my hair... I'd been imagining and thinking of it short for two weeks, but actually seeing it short was still pretty dramatic.

Oh yeah, I cut off all my hair. That was the "thing I'm doing on Friday," for those of you keeping score at home. It's short now. I'm just starting to get used to it.

But I digress. By most counts, deciding not to apply-- yet-- to law school is more momentous than the sudden breeze at the back of my neck (though I am knitting up a new crop of scarves to get me through the winter.) And some of you probably want to know why (actually, some of you probably want to know why I cut my hair, too. But we're focusing here. On law school. Not the hair.)

It started when I was trying to write my second essay, which ended up being the one I just posted. I had weeks and weeks of false starts, though, and that's usually a bad sign. I can have problems in writing, when I'm lazy or unfocused or just not in a writing mood... and at those times one of two tactics fixes the problem: either just gritting my teeth and writing until it starts to flow, or putting it to rest for an hour or a day until I'm in a better place. But when I've tried, day after day and week after week, and pushed through actually getting words on the page, but still can't manage to hit my stride, then it's usually a sign that something else is wrong. "Something else" might be the topic I'm trying to write on, or some emotional issue that needs to be written out before I can devote creative energy to anything else... but something is wrong, and just sitting and writing won't fix it.

So I started to get this sense of something wrong, but several topic shifts weren't taking care of it. At last I managed to get an essay out, and kind of a cool one I thought. So I submitted it to my review board. (Again, for those of you keeping score at home, I did not in fact string them up by their toenails, though I wanted to for a minute or two.) They came back with basically the same response that the first essay received: great writing, interesting enough, gives insight into who you are, but not a compelling reason to admit you to my law school. (Neither of them has a law school by the way; though if they did I'd totally go.)

So after a lengthy text-message argument, which served nicely to pass the first four or five hours of my shift at work that night, I got to thinking. Then I went home and thought some more, while I was supposed to be asleep. And the end of all my thinking was: Maybe I shouldn't apply to law school yet.

It was one of those decisions I talked about in my post a couple weeks ago on decisions. I kinda knew right away that it was the right thing. But I thought about it more, because I don't trust these impulses, and also because I've been planning my entire life around being at law school next year. Only the more I thought, the more good reasons I came up with for not going yet.

The reason, in brief, is that I'm not ready yet. There are things I want to do to prepare. I'll talk about some of those later, but that's the gist of it. I put off college for the same reason, and it was one of the better decisions I've made in my life. When I went, I knew who I was and what I was about. Of course, all of that changed through my four years there, but I went in poised and focused, and that was good.

If I enter law school next year, it will be with a firm but vague conviction that that's what I want to do. And that's not enough. That's not how I do things. Nothing about the process, right now, sits well with me. My plan was to apply to a bunch of schools that seemed good to me, and then investigate them further once I'd found out whether or not I got in. But that's not how I do things either. I figure out what I want, and what steps will best help me get there, then I take them. None of this scattershot method of choosing where I'll spend three difficult years. So one of the things I need to do to prepare is visit law schools... all the ones on my list and others that seem worth investigation (anyone want to road-trip to Chicago or New York in the next seven months?)

This is good. I'm excited about it. It's a little sad, putting off returning to an academic environment for another year, but there's plenty for me to study on my own (Russian is next on the list.) And I won't mind having my intellectual freedom for a little longer. It's going to be hard for me, especially at first, to let go of all the fun things I like to do with my brain to focus on law. I want to make sure I'm fully ready before I attempt it.

So that's that. I will be entering law school no earlier than the fall of 2008. I'm pretty confident that it's the right decision, and anyway it's made. And, as I've been learning, sometimes to have a decision made is more important than having it be the right one.

On self-discipline

This post is more than a post. I will explain in my next post. If I actually manage to break my habit of failing to write posts that I foreshadow.

I have a problem with self-discipline. People often assume, when they hear I was homeschooled through high school, that my self-discipline must be powerful; the reasoning, I suppose, is that powerful self-discipline would be required in order to do all the work one normally does in high school without the external motivators of grades and class pressure. And they’re probably right. The flaw lies in the assumption that I actually did all the work one normally does in high school. I didn’t. In fact, at the age of sixteen I essentially dropped out of school (it’s hard to tell when you’re homeschooled, but my parents and I knew) to work full-time. When I decided I was ready for college, I took a few months to brush up on those areas of study my father and I felt I was behind in (chiefly math), and then I applied.

Even before I dropped out, my education was not the arduous, time-intensive march I see most high school students conscripted into. I studied mostly what was interesting, and occasionally what was necessary. What was interesting to me ranged from botany to Greek mythology to the Lizzie Borden trial. As I pursued these and other interests, I picked up a wealth of knowledge on any number of topics most high-school students never study. The question which my parents held with anxiety as I entered college classes for the first time was, Is it enough? Are there major holes in her education, areas where she’ll be hopelessly behind her peers?

There proved to be only one, and it wasn’t an area of study so much as a mental muscle. I found that most of my classmates, unlike myself, knew how to do boring work. They could sit at a computer screen under the weight of some assignment that they weren’t interested in, and trudge through it till it was done. I could not do this; my mind rebelled. If it was mechanical, calculative work I could manage it, but to expend creative effort on a project that didn’t interest me proved impossible.

This, of course, presented a problem, as many of the paper topics and research projects assigned to me were not of my choosing and not inherently interesting to me. But I was determined to excel in college. I suppose I could have learned self-discipline, even at that age, but I didn’t want to. My mind was free and fertile, it delighted in weaving stories and unraveling riddles. Why would I subject it to drudgery? Part of my resistance was simple distaste for an unpleasant task, and part of it was fear of losing the joy of thought that had characterized my life till then.

So I found a different way of coping. Instead of forcing my mind to bend to uninteresting work, I simply forced it to figure out how the work was interesting. This proved easier than I would have thought: it turns out that nearly everything is interesting. Some exploratory thought on a paper topic would show its relation to a question I had been thinking about, and then I could address both questions in my work. Each paper I wrote, then, both pursued my already-existing interests and expanded my ideas of what was interesting. A rich, interconnected web of questions began to form in my mind. As the web grew, the connections extended farther, until in my senior year I was seeing fractals in the novels of Nabokov. Instead of subjecting my mind to tedium, I had discovered a glorious playground of ideas, and how delightfully each question speaks to another.

I have a problem with self-discipline, if self-discipline means forcing the mind, or the body, or the heart, to do something it was not meant to do. The consequences are evident in the world of physical exertion: there is a tremendous difference between athletes who train in cooperation with the body’s strengths and internal rhythms, and those who drive their bodies by brute force of will. Both are working hard, but one is building strength and increasing capability, while the other is working toward physical breakdown. I firmly believe that it is the same with any activity of the mind. Work, by all means, but work with your mind, not against it. Instead of working toward getting the project done, work toward the ignition of interest; then you will find that the project is never done, even when completed, because the questions and ideas it has raised have been woven into your mental framework.

Lessons from a dysfunctional relationship: communication

These are thoughts I've kept for years. It's time for them to begin to emerge. I can only guess at how they might be received by my various readers, but to two people at least I have things to say. To one: don't worry. What you see here is not a change in me, but a reawakening of parts of me that were asleep when we met. To the other: I love you; and I know that I am not telling the whole story. But this is the part of it that, right now, is crying out to be told.

Whoever talks the most loses. If I bare my soul to you freely and without prompting, and you reveal your thoughts rarely and only after much coaxing, then you are the winner.

First, you are the winner by simple economics. If a good is flowing liberally from me to you, and only scantily from you to me, it follows that I am being steadily impoverished.

Second, you are the winner because in both exchanges I am the one betraying need. I need to share with you, and I need you to share with me. You, apparently, need neither, since you neither solicit communication from me nor volunteer information on your own. So I am weak, because I need, and you are strong, because you do not-- and you have power over me, because you control whether my needs are met.

Third, you are the winner because you have the power of superior information. You know things about me, and you can-- and do-- use them against me, while you remain impervious. You understand me, and I do not understand you. You are a cipher, I am transparent. And this is exactly how you want it.

With regard to the first, I did in time learn to stem the flow of communication. I learned to talk, if I must talk, to a notebook, or to a tree, or to God. I learned-- and I thank you for this-- that I can be a whole person unseen, unshared. I can be real without being reflected in another's eyes.

Learning not to need your communication was another matter. It was complicated because I knew that your independence was an illusion. In truth, you needed to tell me things much more than I needed to hear them... but you could hardly bring yourself to share, let alone to admit that you needed to. And so, my love, I continued to need your words-- continued to draw them out with hours of painstaking questions, bracing against rebuffs. It looked, to one watching, as if I was letting you make a fool of me, subjecting me to this mortifying ritual of supplication for your confidence. But by that time I didn't much care about foolishness.

In the end, you found other ears, and I was freed, first to be silent, then to begin to rebuild a sane pattern of communication. We talk, now, like friends. And the real measure of grace is that much of the time I don't even remember what a gift that is. The lack of astonishment in our dialogue is the most startling and beautiful thing of all.

But these things I learned from you have gone deep. The good and the bad in them are wound so closely-- independence, circumspection; constraint, frigidity-- that I hardly know how I ought to shape myself, even if I could master the fear of being exposed like that again. It is such a mixed legacy that time of ours has given me; so many twisted lessons I have learned. It is time, at the very least, to bring them into the light. This is the first.

On decisions

I will not be doing NaNo this year.

Some decisions are made through deliberation and calculation. Some are made in a moment; as soon as the thought occurs you know it is the right one. You may consider it afterward, weighing the consequences, but you know, as you knew from the first moment, that the decision has already been made, and everything else is just getting comfortable with it. So it was with my decision to go to law school. So it was with my decision to do what I'm doing on Friday (you'll know it when you see it... don't worry, it's not that momentous, but it is somehow important to me.) Decisions like that are not so much about what to do as about who you are. You come to a moment of definition, and you realize that your priorities and desires lead you to this path, and no other. The only decision, then, is to accept it, casting away what must be cast away and embracing what must be embraced, or to reject it, stubbornly clinging to an older self which has already died.

So it is with my decision not to do NaNo. (If you don't remember what Nano is, this post should refresh your memory.) I really wanted to do it, this probably being the last year I'll be able to commit to two thousand words a day with any trace of realism. Law school will certainly forbid it, and who knows what my life after that will be like? And last year I won for the first time, and I really wanted to enter this year knowing I can do it, and adding another victory to prove the first one wasn't a fluke. And there's this story I can't wait to write...

All of those are good reasons, but as it turns out they're not enough, because my heart isn't in it. And I've learned better than to commit to a significant investment when my heart isn't in it, no matter how many good reasons there are. (Not to say I won't ever make that mistake again, but I certainly have learned better.) I realized it while finishing my law school essay this morning (yes friends, the essay is done! assuming my review board approves it... and even if they don't, I may just string them up by their toenails and send it off anyway.) The essay is about self-discipline and intellectual freedom, as I have experienced it, and after writing a few hundred words on that subject the truth was plain: I am not going to do NaNo this year. I could try it, making a half-hearted attempt, becoming frustrated, and giving up around the 16th or 17th, or I could spend those weeks engaging in tasks that will be fruitful, because I'm truly committed to them.

So what am I going to do in November? Begin studying Russian. Get better at go. Read four or five great books (maybe more... since I started War and Peace I've forgotten how long it takes me to read a normal book.) Finish the skirt I'm embroidering for Gretchen, and maybe even Peter's afghan. And start posting to this blog again.

So goodbye, NaNo... you have been a beautiful and difficult part of my life for the last five years, and I shall miss you. But it's time to move on.