EXPERIMENT

I tried to live without writing for a time, and happily, it failed miserably:

I had no relationship to myself, therefore none to anyone else. I had no reason for eyesight, nor much reason for insight. I became afraid of my physical voice. I lost my laugh. Time had no meaning, nor seasons, and I no longer had any way to gauge my growth. It didn’t matter whether I was in Peoria or Astoria, whether I was at work or I wasn’t, whether I was naked or clothed. I had no perspective. I had no body, because it didn’t have an interior. I no longer had emotions; also, I had emotions I had no idea what to do with. I couldn't stop useless thoughts or feelings like wanting, every morning, to kill the person who'd designed the city busses with the aisle too skinny for even one Pittsburgh-sized body, let alone another trying to pass it. I couldn’t love, because I couldn’t communicate; or perhaps because I no longer understood myself as separate from anything or anyone else around me. There was no “I.” Every day that I didn’t write, I hated instead. In time, I forgot why I hated.

It was like I had tried to forget what I knew, and this you cannot do. You can expand your point of view, you can change your mind completely, but you can’t wipe your mind clean for the sake of it. “What I knew” was that I had to write in order to live, or at least, to live as I would like to live.

I’m reminded of the Groucho Marx joke a friend told me, “I used to live in Pittsburgh once…if you call that living.” Which leads me to the W.C. Fields joke the same friend told me, “I spent a week in Philadelphia…one weekend.”

THE LAST LINE IS THE PART I WOKE UP THINKING ABOUT

When I first met G______, we went out for a secret rendez-vous, even though we weren’t aiming (or headed) for a romantic relationship. There was undoubtedly an attraction of some sort, and even a certain urgency to tête a tête, either of which would have surely had our respective girlfriends jealous. But perhaps more to the point, there was already an unfettered joy between us, one that was lacking in our very fettered home relationships, neither of which lasted overmuch longer. G_____ and I were both lovers of meetings, secret or otherwise, we both believed in friendships, and we both liked strangers, the stranger the better.

I knew G______’s face from the bookshop, just one of the many regular customers I’d seen over the years. Then suddenly I saw him twice one week: once before--and once after—I’d shorn all but a quarter inch of my very-long dark hair. He stopped short on his way out the door. “Wait, didn’t you used to---?” “Yeah,” I said.

The third time that week was the time we actually met. I was in yet another hairdo—a tall red wig, part of a costume in which I was reading from my first novel. G______ had innocently come into a bookshop to browse (a different bookshop now; Brooklyn, not Manhattan) and felt “caught” upon finding himself at a modestly-attended reading. He stayed, then liked what he heard. But as the reading ended and the Q and A began, he started to take his first chance to bolt. “Wait!” I called. “Don’t you recognize me?” (My costume consisted of details like 4-inch heels, a gold-lame mini-dress, pancake makeup and redrawn eyebrows; in my normal life I tended to wear Levi’s and soccer shoes.) “Yeeee…not exactly,” G_____ replied. “I work at _________, I’m the girl who just cut all her hair off.” “Oh!” he said very convincingly, though months later he would admit that he'd had no idea what I was talking about.

G_______ was a recovering alcoholic at least a decade older than me; he was a poet who’d been writing a few decades longer than me. For our rendez-vous he took me to a bar he knew in Brooklyn and we walked straight through to the backyard, one of those unexpected urban spaces with quiet, flowers, pebbles, and privacy. We sat on wrought iron benches and were prepared to order seltzer waters should a waitress come around; none did. We talked and talked, about writing mostly, and life, and the city; we laughed easily; we forgot our home troubles.

After a few undisturbed hours, we left the backyard sanctuary and G_________ walked me most of the way home, one neighborhood over.

When we parted on a corner near my house, G________ told me definitively, “You should keep writing.” Then as he started to walk down Manhattan Avenue the way we'd just come, he paused and turned around again; added, “If I don’t write every day, I just feel bad.”

MULTI-TASKING IS A WAY OF DEATH

For professional reasons, I recently attended a lecture by a fellow who traveled to Kazakhstan to introduce a group of librarians there to Web 2.0, i.e., "Open Source" web.

I was struck by his excited statement early on in the lecture, "Multi-Tasking is now a way of life!" I was struck by how happy he was about this. Me, I associate multi-tasking with unrealistic bosses, with the overlapping customer demands of retail at Christmastime, with the disturbing effect of the internet on my 21st Century A.D.D. I associate multi-tasking with forces outside of me that I must obey in order to pay my rent, and with a resulting rhythm I internalize and don’t want to; when I waitressed for a living, I'd have to come home and lay on my back for a few hours to try and calm the swirling inside of me. I would argue that waitresses and mothers, to name just two, have been multi-tasking for centuries, that it is nothing new. I would argue that multi-tasking is not a life to celebrate but a life degraded.

To me, writing is life, because it is the thing which connects me to my inner self, the thing which brings my interior realization in tune with my exterior interactions. To write at all, I must concentrate, and if I am writing well, I am nearly meditating. Have these words all but lost their meaning in a multi-tasking world? A friend of mine, a fellow writer (who is not a fellow), is finishing up her book on deadline from her publisher. She tells me that for several months she has been sitting in bed with her laptop, surrounded by stacks of books and boxes of dry food. She has ignored everything but her writing. Her credit cards have cancelled themselves, her car has parking tickets, her email mailbox has 2000 unread messages, and her friends are angry. But she says she knows of no other way. "Writing is like a stone sinking to the bottom of the lake, and everything going dead quiet. But you're the stone."

To me, writing is not only the absence of multi-tasking, but sometimes it is the inverse of multi-tasking: Other activities collapse into it. When I am really IN the writing of a novel, I am in a zone of concentration where the words I'm looking for come to me (or through me), the story is writing itself somewhere deep inside of me, and it's more like I'm making time and space to listen for it than like I'm making it up. Certain repetitive tasks, if there is some quiet involved, jog the story to the surface, to my inner ears: washing dishes becomes writing, taking a shower becomes writing, taking a walk becomes writing.

The poet, Martin Espada, in a Pittsburgh lecture last March pointed out that poetry never pays the bills, and that the bills must be paid, if you’re most of us. He said that he has to “steal time from [his] own life” to write his poems, often on trains or in airports on the way to teaching poetry, which is how his bills get paid. Multi-tasking IS the demands of others, the demands of economics; no one will ever ask you to concentrate, to meditate, to write—the onus is on you entirely.

The other night I went to see the Whirling Dervishes at Carnegie Music Hall (here in Pittsburgh). I had seen them at New York’s City Center in 1999, and back then, the two hours or so of deep song and white-draped whirling transfixed (even transported) me. From the sanctuary of my seat, I could concentrate, I could lose myself in the movement and the sound; because of the silence I was allowed, I was able to experience a bit of the ecstasy of the Dervishes’ ritual.

By contrast, this recent performance was preceded by a whole lineup of distraction: a video promotion for the sponsoring foundation, a professor’s lecture on Rumi, a radio announcer introducing each upcoming segment, a brief performance of the singers separate from the dancers, an intermission, and a staged dialogue explaining the symbolic meanings of the Dervishes’ ceremony. Finally, the whirling. But even that was backdropped by an ever-moving Power Point slide show of the kind of explanatory text that used to be contained in printed programs.

Still, I am reminded by the Dervishes’ ceremony what writing offers me: The Dervishes whirl to bring themselves into harmony with the spinning earth, the revolving planets, and the revolving inside everything around us, at atomic level. I write to bring myself into harmony, to make sense connections between inner world and outer, I write to remind myself what feels good and to purge myself of what feels bad. I write because feeling without writing about feeling usually un-balances me.

The Dervishes, before they begin their ritual of spinning (with one palm up open to the universe, the other palm facing their heart), begin by walking slowly in the form of a circle. At one end of the circle, it is someone’s turn to revolve and face the man behind him; then they greet each other by bowing. This symbolizes a recognition, specifically an acknowledgement of seeing the soul of the other from your own soul, though your souls are clothed in (separated by) bodies.

There are at least two basic activities that multi-tasking has nothing to do with, that multi-tasking can’t make faster, because it can’t accomplish them at all. One is (real) Writing, and the other is Recognition of other people. To my mind, the defining quality of true recognition between two people is a full attention, a whole-heart-edness. How can I have a heart to heart with you, if the message that you receive from my body language is that I am doing 12 things at once? How can I see you truly, hear what you are feeling, listen to you fully, face you honestly, be moved or even transformed by your life, if I am doing everything to distract myself from you?

Multi-tasking is a ways from Life.

GREEK TRAGEDY IN ASTORIA
A letter found on the staircase of the 30th Ave. station (ca. March 2005)

Page One: “You are everywhere and nowhere. I constantly see you in front of me and I can’t touch you. That kills me. I’m tired of accidentally calling your siblings E____ and having to give excuses why. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you enter my thoughts. You don’t know how much and how long I just want to hold you, kiss you on the dimple your cheek makes when you smile, and fall asleep in your arms. Imagine what my pillow must go through every night.”

Page One (Back): “My friends can’t understand why when we go out and drink, I’m out of it. They ask me where is my kefi they know and love. But I have to lie about the truth.”

Page Two: “I see myself, and I can’t believe how much I’ve changed. I can’t understand how a woman can have that much power over me. (But you are worth it.) I feel so weak that I don’t have the strength to tell you I Love You in person or on the phone. You might laugh at what I am writing in this letter or believe that I am pitiful. I DON’T CARE. At least I’ll know that I tried. Every night I pray to Panagiatsa and Christouli to bring us together. I am afraid that my Love for you will be too much for your”

Page Three: “heart to bear, because mine is ready to burst. But one piece of my heart I know I can never give. That piece belongs to your Matakia, Trifera heilakia, kai to lakakisto magoulaki pou me treleni. I am sorry honey, I met them first. My whole body is shaking, just like that night we exchanged that passionate kiss. An innocent kiss as the song says. I wake up every day with a picture of you in my eyes, the sound of your laughter in my ears, and the vision of us together in my future. My lips form a smile and I”

Page Four: “feel like a young child that has been left to run and play at the park. Suddenly, my smile morphs into a frown and I feel a tear form at the corner of my eye, slowly coming to the realization that this is only a vision, and not reality.”

ECRITS FOUX

I am almost too angry to write.

"Writing," when writing is happening (I regard it as “happening”), is not begrudging like anger is, writing is a yearning to give something of me, a yearning to communicate, from where do I communicate but the heart. Even writing that seems much more cerebral or superficial than “heartfelt,” the flow, the wish to make writing happen, the wish to write--to a reader, unknown as she may be—those impulses come from an openness, a generosity.

Anger is a block to that openness. Anger is a staccato interuption in the usual flow, is a spike in the usual energy level. But no, how can I forget, anger fueled so much of my writing. I was angry at so many things. Political anger, abandonment anger, employment anger; anger at city planning, at architectural eyesores, at women who bullied, at men who stopped calling, at laziness that took credit, at form that didn’t follow function, at mayoral and employeral and presidental sins of omission or comission. Anger at injustices near and far.

Anger is energy, I had so much anger, I had so much energy. Salman Rushdie wrote the novel, Fury, in three weeks, burning with anger. I understood that story the first time I heard it. Anger in me wanted to shoot out of my body, as quickly and as accurately-aimed as possible. Writing saved me from picking up a different weapon. Mostly I shot at politics and exboyfriends, in order to spare anyone I wasn’t willing to harm.

Finally, getting engaged made me run out of exboyfriends: It suddenly seemed like so many cheap shots. My fiance told me recently, he doesn’t hold resentments against any of his ex’es except the one. I was incredulous. I’d say I am resentful of all of them. (And there were many, because I didn’t have the stamina.) Sometimes I picture my backed-up feelings for all the people in my life, unexpressed love and anger both, as filling me up to the middle of my eyeballs, and I think, “This poison must be expelled.” Another image: Resentment becomes habitual, then a magnet attracting more of itself, then a density in the body’s matter, then disease.

Resentment is perhaps what I mean when I say I am too angry to write--I am too RESENTFUL to write. Resentment is anger that has outlived its usefulness. Re-sent-ment. Latin, “feeling-again.” I am feeling my anger over and over again, I am holding on to anger instead of letting it do what it will, run through me and pick up a pen and generously tell its story on its way out of my system. Resentment: I am reliving the hurt or offense again and again, becoming its repeated victim, gathering shame for this action; for it is an action and a choice to hold on, to feel again.

Today, “I am too resentful to write.” I am not feeling generous, I am hording this anger, it is winter, I am keeping my anger close to the vest. I am closely allied with my anger, I am scared to give it away, scared because it fills my cavity entirely, scared because I am identifying with the anger. I wonder if there will be anything left of me, if I let it become liquid and pass through me, this venom, this anger.

ADA LIMÓN WILL READ TONIGHT AT GIST STREET IN PITTSBURGH
Author of a new Autumn House poetry book, Lucky Wreck

Thursday, November 2nd: Ada Limón and Ellen McGrath Smith read to a modest-sized but alive and attentive crowd, at lunchtime in University of Pittsburgh’s Book Center. Limón was (is) visiting from Brooklyn and Smith is a local writer; the poets were hosted by the South Side publisher, Autumn House Press.

Each poet had a talent for marrying outer observations with an inner life both lived and image-ined, and translating the resulting fusion into writing that wants to be read and heard. In each writer I enjoyed witnessing a similar struggle-—the struggle to illuminate the (necessarily-dark) inner world, and the struggle to articulate the negotiations of moving through the world in a (dynamic, fragile, female, thinking, feeling) body.

Smith made me laugh out loud when she read a poem about the 1960s, when (she claims) everyone but everyone smoked cigarettes. She gave us a list of smoking types, the usual suspects and the unlikely (like dancers), and read it in a sort of jaded, motherly, what-we-didn’t-know-then way, but after she ended the poem commented, “I still haven’t quit.”

In another set of poems she read (these will be included in an Autumn House anthology on poetry and prayer), “I wrote about [yoga] positions that reminded me of different alcoholic beverages,” she said. She took both of these themes to another place entirely, combining in one work the images of Rolling Rock’s brew-factory in (nearby) Ligonier, drinkers imbibing the green pastures of Western Pennsylvania, and her body’s position releasing her energy like a stampede of wild horses inside her.

Some other lines of Smith’s I particluarly liked: “Crush the weak/ The Hum-Vee’s on the street declare.” Speaking to a stranger (“like Jesus, he didn’t look respectable”) who would help her after her car died (“a white corpse on the side of the road”), she asks, “Can I trust you?” While they drove, “He told me August Wilson’s real name.”

Limón was a warm and generous reader, who started by thanking Smith and expressing her delight in discovering her as a writer, and in being in Pittsburgh for the first time.

Limón’s poems often circled back on themselves with a drunken, dream kind of logic. (Indeed, one set of poems actually was a set of sonnets linked by the first and last lines, a seven sonnet “crown.”)

In one work, she “dreamt the word ‘Philadelphia,’ ” and she wonders aloud what that dream-word could mean. “...you want to cry or pray but because you’re no good at either, you tell everyone to leave you alone...., maybe she could call that feeling, ‘Philadelphia.’ ”

In a poem to her lover: “I want to know some things for certain, and other things for vague.” She tells him that she doesn’t want to know his zip code, his state bird, or anything that could helpher pinpoint his whereabouts, because when she finds him, she knows “for certain” what she’ll want to do with him.

Yet another poem spoke of the pleasures of longing to be somewhere else vs. the luxury of wanting to be where you are, which she did once when swimming in a particular river: “But how do you hold a river in your head/ before it turns straight and black/ like some mean road rolled out before you.”

You should keep your eye out for Ellen McGrath Smith, who’s sure to read in town again, and you should go see Ada Limón, who is “unsure if I am jealous of the web or the fly,” read tonight at Gist Street. And if you go, you should go early. I’ve heard this reading series is getting so popular that they sometimes have to lock the doors a half an hour before start time.

Ada Limón reads with Richard Jackson: 8pm Friday, November 3rd, at the Gist Street Reading Series, 305 Gist Street, Uptown, Pittsburgh, PA
http://www.giststreet.org/