On Over-(and Under)Thinking

It's been a while, as the faux-metal emo among us might have it. The semester usually gets away from me, and this one in particular ended pretty powerfully and busily. But I'm still here, and I'm still writing. My summer projects are all dissertation-oriented - I'm not there yet, but I'm trying to think of the next phase as an integral part of it (which, in fact, it is, whether I think of it that way or not). I'll plan to write more focused and specific posts about that work over here, and save this space for less professional musings (for the four of you who read this primarily, I suspect, as people who love me).

I did want to get some thoughts down here on overthinking, though, since I'm good at it and I've been doing a fair bit of it as I embark on this next project. Some of my research interests as a comp-rhet person center on process, so my overthinking sometimes can morph into the framework for actual projects. I love to talk to my colleagues and my students, for example, about their processes as they write. Lately, the idea of what my Process Will Be on this Next Important Project has made it hard to get much Actual Writing done. Guilt comes along with that, and also Intransigence.

But I've made it through to the other side (where actual reading and writing live), and that in itself makes me think: we, as thinkers and doers and teachers, need breaks. But we also have a lot of thinking and doing and teaching that happen when we aren't looking. Every time I talk to a mentor or a friend or a loved one about my work, I'm adding to the thinking I'm doing. It's like a low-level buzz - never really off, for good or ill. It's underthinking: happening all the time, feeding into the actual work that happens. It's part of the reason I do what I do.

Happy summer to all!

Winterson and Silence

Consider Jeanette Winterson's essay "A Work of My Own," in which she writes:

 "My work is rooted in silence. It grows out of deep beds of contemplation, where words, which are living things, can form and re-form into new wholes. [...] It is sometimes necessary to be silent for months before the central image of a book can occur. I do not write every day, I read every day, think every day, work in the garden every day, and recognise in nature the same slow complicity. The same inevitability. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of this as readiness. A writer lives in a constant state of readiness."

I often think of the unspoken (and the state of readiness) in specifically pedagogical contexts:
The frenzy (or lack) of participation
Wanting to get your comment in before someone else
Getting beaten to it (by students or professor)
Coming up with new things

 In this environment of intellectual rush, what does slow complicity mean to you?

Reflections

I'm writing on a train, and it's a train with no wi-fi. The man next to me is harrumphing his way through his coughs as he watches a show I don't recognize on his tablet. Everyone else is quiet. I have finished the homework I can do without wi-fi. My presentation for tomorrow is complete,  and to edit it, I'd need wi-fi anyway. My phone battery is fading, and I need to keep myself from draining it further in case I need to call my aunt to meet me at the station. This man next to me will not stop harrumphing. I shift my hands so he can't see what I'm writing, and then I write anyway. He's got his show.

In this space of relative disconnection from my preferred forms of new media (if with an inconsistent ability to ignore the other distractions around me), I find myself coming back to Erin's great description from last week of her own train experiences. What I like about getting work done on this train is that I don't have the internet to distract me. That is also what I hate about getting work done on this train. Since I don't travel this way that often, there's an allure to the out of the ordinariness of it that I think helps me focus. 

On the other hand, I've been riding this train, however intermittently, for years. I remember many trips when I'd call my mom on the way and she'd be the one to pick me up and drive me the 40 minutes to my aunt and uncle's house. Sometimes I'd chatter with her, and sometimes I'd be more sullen, depending on how attentive of a daughter I was being. (In my partial defense, I was in my early twenties.) I remember the one Thanksgiving when my ex-boyfriend called me from Texas and I spent the rest of the ride wondering what that meant for our fledgling friendship. (It's now definitely, deservedly ended.) I remember all of the times between December 2012 and the following January when my cancer patient uncle would pick me up and bring me to see my cancer patient mother. We'd moved her up to live with them, and my aunt cared for them both. I visited as often as I could. 

I remember the trip I took in the bitter cold of January 2013, my frightened cat in tow, when I thought I would have many more chances to take her to see my mom. (I think I brought the cat more for me than for either of them.) That's when I thought I'd go on leave from work and move up to Connecticut to be with my mom as she transitioned to hospice. Strangely, I don't remember the train part of the trip when my mom was, as I thought of it then, officially dying. What I remember is the car ride with my aunt, slicing through the dark, brining me closer to a mother whose last word to me, three days before she died, would be my name.

Internet wasn't the biggest concern for most of those trips. Even as I write about it now, I'm not crying. I'm still. I'm cried out for right now. Some of my recent tears have been for or because of other people. It's very interesting, I'm finding, when grief shifts to allow you to care about other things. Death is still there. My mother's loss threads through every aspect of my life. Even thinking of her as lost is still so evocative for me: it's like she's behind a wall, and I can't reach her. Sometimes she seems to be moving backwards away from me. Sometimes I can feel her calming, smiling, sometimes angry, always loving self practically peeking over my shoulder. That poor man, she might say, or Jesus Christ, just cough already. I wonder if the phrasing is hers or mine. 

The man next to me has packed his tablet in his suitcase and moved. I worry that he has seen what I wrote until it occurs to me that he's probably getting off at the next stop. As soon as he disappears, I wonder where the edge of the thinking I'm doing right now is. (I think this just as someone else coughs.) I have more space, so I decide to do a quick version of Sondra Perl's Guidelines. I settle my feet on the floor. I ask myself, what do you want to write about. I add, in silent parentheses, something that you're not already writing about. You are writing a memoir about your dead mother. You are writing about her life, and yours. What else do you want to write about?

I take mental stock of my in-progress abstracts. I flit my attention over to the essay I wrote for a professor the previous term, and the journal in my bag that I am hoping will accept it. I decide to edit it on the train home, after the conference. Thinking of the conference makes anticipation rise up, a combination of "oh g-d, am I prepared enough" and "oh boy, I get to present my ideas to smart people." I reflect on how far I am from my felt sense in this moment. I am having thoughts I have so many times, semester after semester. 

I try another version of one of Sondra's questions. What do I know about (and I add to myself, other than grief)? Today, I decide, I will think about knowing about - I cast around for something outside the window. Trees. No, reflections. There's a beautiful image outside the rushing train of the sunset above the lake and the evening-blackened trees reflecting onto the water. What can I write about reflections?

My first thought is that they express recursivity. You can look at them from two distance angles, but it's almost as though there's no beginning or end. You could have the trees without the reaction, but you couldn't have the reflection without the trees. Those ideas don't seem to go together. I look again, and I notice how fuzzy the trees' outlines are in the water, as opposed to to the way their progenitors cut sharply through the sky. This is Gendlin's edge: these fuzzy tree shadows. When you get to their end, you are firmly in the water, and there's no place to attempt to go but somewhere new. You probably haven't been there before. (I haven't.)

I am not the swimmer in this increasingly odd thought experiment, but my imagined figure doesn't want to go to shore just yet. She wants to see what else is out there. She wants to challenge her own orthodoxies, the meanings of her own words. She's not worried about someone else's coughing. She's like my mom in a lot of ways: fearless, open-hearted, gleeful, creative, dedicated. I like this swimmer. There's a bit of me in her somewhere. 

I take an email break (11% battery. Leave it alone, Hilarie). I take stock: 1,100 words and counting. Two guidelines at least partially considered. Annoyance at coughing man abated. Love for and feeling of connection to Mom re-established, as every moment I continue breathing ceaselessly allows me to do. In some ways, when my mom died, I thought I'd reached the edge of my strength. I didn't know how much I'd need to keep going, and to keep going in a healthy way. Sometimes now, fifteen months after her death, I still don't, but I keep going anyway. Like a train, like a lake, like a fresh thought, like love.

Thoughts from McCann

It's been a while, readerfriends. I've got some catching up to do, but until I finish that, here are two thoughts from Colum McCann from a talk at (my favorite bookstore) Greenlight last May.

"I never have a perfect day"

"Who in the world was more aware of their bodies in the nineteenth century than a slave?"

Happy New Year!

My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Alison Barker for tagging me!

1. What are you working on?
Long answer: article edits, syllabi, comprehensive exam prep, a memoir, a novel, some journal articles

This week: comps prep essays, notes, and reading

2. How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

I guess it depends which genre you're talking about. Academic writing is an interesting one, because I straddled the gap between college and my MA at NYU obsessed with theory and its jargon. I think I thought that I could only be a successful academic writer if I wrote like that, and I also thought that I needed to pretend I understood it. In my Ph.D years, where I am now, my writing is much clearer, I think, and I'm less attached to slippery, polysyllabic words. Ultimately, I guess, I'm much more interested in how to make my writing elegant and clear than how to make it sound fancy.

Where memoir is concerned, I'm working on a grief memoir about my mom. What I don't want it to be is just that - I want to include as much or more of her happy, healthy, amazing life as I do of her illness, her death, and my experience soldiering forward without her. 

3. Why do you write what you do? 

Most boringly, I write because it's expected of me, but I wouldn't have chosen a career path so centered on it (academia) if I didn't love it. It frustrates me routinely, but then, so does love.

More profoundly, I write to honor my mother, who died unfairly, painfully, and too soon, and who gave me a voice and a desire to use it. She was one of the most poetic and clear writers I have had the pleasure to read. (Her personality was like that, too.)

I write because I feel most like myself when writing is part of my day.

I write because I can't stop - I have written on the walls of my bathroom and I write when I run (I pause and I take notes on my phone). 

4. How does your writing process work?

I could write a dissertation about that. I try to write at least 750 words a day, my favorite motivating tool for which is 750words.com. (It's free! It's fabulous! You should use it.) I don't always get that many down, but I like having a no-frills platform that I can access on any browser. I write on my iPad a lot, since I'm often in transit between home and campus and/or yoga studio or what have you.  

Lately I have been rediscovering my own handwriting. I carry a small notebook now to jot in, rather than my usual habit of using the app on my phone. (I do both, actually.) It's very nice, and I'm rediscovering the ways in which my thinking is facilitated differently by different technologies. DragonDictation fits into this nicely (also free! You should also try!).

My dear friend Valerie Wetlaufer, an amazing poet, did this awesome process tour as well: check her out!

Fragment: Tatouage

I can't stop thinking about tattoos. I can still smell the ink, even though my newest one is a few months old. My industrial-size jar of Aquaphor sits in the bathroom and leers at me. My favorite artists' business cards live on my fridge, and wink every time I go out the door. Any kind of buzzing noise evokes a tattoo shop for me. (There are electric saws and lawnmowers outside my window as I write that both pull out the feeling. The quickening pulse, the impending sensation, the scent of ink.)

Healing Sources

From my horoscope email: "What are the sources that heal and nourish you? Where do you go to renew yourself? Who are the people and animals that treat you the best and are most likely to boost your energy? I suggest that in the coming week you give special attention to these founts of love and beauty. Treat them with the respect and reverence they deserve. Express your gratitude and bestow blessings on them." 

 I am nourished by strenuous movement, most of the time, but also, sometimes, by being still. Touch heals me, and laughter. Really good words put in a wonderful order. Really good notes and sounds and voices. 

What are your healing sources?