Process Reflection

 

 Every Tuesday for the last five weeks I've posted something here that I knew in advance that I wanted to write about. In each case it was about something or somebody I had been reading (Renee Gladman, Mark Strand). I had a number of motivations for doing so. One was simply that I had gotten out of the habit of posting to Throughlines, but was not yet ready to give it up, so I figured I'd better get myself together and try to jump start it. I have learned from long experience that I work well, or at least better, when I am working to a deadline, either one set for me or one I set one for myself. So I made a preliminary decision, after my first Tuesday post, that I would put something up each Tuesday for as long as I was able to keep that up. So now I'm writing this on Monday December 9, and what you are reading at this moment is the byproduct of that subtle pressure building up: what I am going to have ready to post tomorrow?

A second reason for posting was that as a retired English teacher I find it hard to get out of the habit of talking up writers whose work I admire. It's my hope that at least once in a while someone might read about a writer here and be encouraged to go out and read that author on their own. I once read someone's snarky description of a well-known poetry critic as being a "bobbysoxer for the poets that she swoons over." I thought to myself at the time, Well, what's wrong with that? There are of course legitimate differences in how individual readers will respond to individual writers. The question of what is good and what is not good in any of the arts is always up for debate. But as a matter of principle I am more inclined to respect those who speak up on behalf of what they like—even if I am unconvinced by their observations—than those who seem to take pleasure in ripping others to shreds.

The third reason—and in my mind the most important—is one I have often written about before. Writing about what I read is for me a generative act: it helps me to better understand what I have read, and, on good days, to work my way into thoughts and realizations that I would not otherwise ever have arrived at. And now that I find myself well into my seventies, it serves the additional function of imprinting in my mind the essence of what I am taking away from the reading. I find at my age that when I don't write about what I have read, it fades much more quickly from my mind. That's always been the case; it's more so now. In recent years I have on more than one occasion found myself halfway through a "new" book saying to myself, "Wait a minute. I think I read this book already." Books I have taken the time to write about, however, tend to stay with me.

The same logic applies, of course, to writing more generally: writing about our experiences, writing about what we believe, writing about our dreams, writing about people we know, writing about our pet peeves, writing about what's wrong and how to fix it. So much of what we experience every day is subliminal, below the threshold of perception. We may be scarcely aware of what we actually do think unless we make it a point of practice to spell it out for ourselves. That's why I'm here today, and why I am planning to have something to post next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Given the world that we live in and its many distractions, it's easy enough to fall off the wagon, and I supposed at some point I will do that. Until I re-booted myself this November, I had gone sixteen months without posting anything to Throughlines. It's not that I wasn't writing, it's just that I was not posting any of it here. And I've come to miss that.

It's not that I'm under any illusions about failing my legions of followers. No one is going to suffer any intellectual or spiritual impoverishment in the absence of my reports from the field. The only person to whom this enterprise is truly essential is me. So here I am. It's good to be back.

Ars Longa

I'm not in the mood to write tonight, but I'm going to anyway. The whole point of maintaining this blog is to develop the habit of practice, and the whole point of that habit is to override the part of the brain that says "I'm tired" or "I don't really have anything to say tonight" or "I'd rather read" or "Who cares?" I'll leave that last one for now, since what I have come to understand, to accept, and at this point even embrace is that "Who cares?" is ALWAYS an unanswerable question and a classic gumption trap. I'm not writing because I expect anyone to care. I'm writing because I find that writing forces me to be more thoughtful and deliberate; and that's something that I care about, and aspire to. So here I am, ready or not. If you're there, if you do care, thanks. But I'm gonna write this even if you're not, or don't.

As far as reading goes, in the space of the last month or two I've gone from having a lot of stuff I was looking at to being so backed up that I may never get caught up. I'm partway through My Struggle (Book Three), In the Light of What We Know, The Magicians, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Building a Better Teacher, No Place To Hide, The Knowledge, Little Big Man, and Son of the Morning Star. On the table waiting for me are Greyhounds for Breakfast, How Late it Was, How Late, An Untamed State, Straw Dogs, Personal, A Schoolmaster in the Great City, The Secret Place, and Empire of the Summer Moon. That's, uh, lemme see, 17 titles, all of which are of genuine interest to me and all of which I'd like to finish, well, this week. But October will be more realistic, and given that other titles will likely insinuate themselves into the list between now and then, who knows where it will end. It's a little dizzying and panic-inducing. But it's also something that I know I can walk away from. The only urgency driving my reading, the only books I really HAVE to finish, are the ones on short-term loan from the library. And if I don't get around to finishing them, nothing world-shattering is going to happen.

But deadlines do focus the attention. Four of the best books I've read recently were finished in short order precisely because I knew I had to get them back to the library: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; Faithful Place by Tana French; My Life in Middlemarch, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of very readable and likable essays by Ann Patchett. The first I picked up because I happened to see it on the shelf at the library and I remembered hearing good things about it. (It's amazing.) The second also jumped off the shelf at me, mostly because I love Middlemarch, but I was completely won over by Rebecca Mead's thoughtful and incisive and very personal response to th book. The third I read on the strength of a review and recommendation in the Times (which I wrote about very briefly last week). The fourth I picked up at random off the library shelf and started reading an essay in the middle of the book which I was still reading as I walked out the library door. That's how quickly Patchett gets her fingers into your brain.

I'm tempted to write specifically about The Blazing World but it's a complicated book, both structurally and stylistically, and to do it justice I'd need to write for a very long time, and engage in the kind of targeted re-reading that would allow me to write about it with greater understanding and authority. And I guess that highlights one of the dangers of blogdom: the writing you are doing for the blog is the displacement of the writing you are not doing on something else. If I spend an hour each day writing for the blog—as I will have done this evening by the time I finish this post—that's an hour that I might have spent on something else, e.g. a chunk of what might become an extended essay on The Blazing World if I were to spend an hour a day for a couple of weeks on that. Or on keeping up my personal journal, in which for a while last month I was logging 500+ words a day. Or on other projects begun and since suspended, like my omnibus essay on another great book, The Ten Thousand Things. Or on The Book that Nick and I have talked about over the years, the definitive book about education called "What's Wrong and How to Fix It," which exists in wispy fragments in various parts of my brain, waiting only for me to sit down and pound it into shape.

So I'm talking here about time, and about how to manage it, which has throughout my lifetime been one of the essential questions that I keep returning to, one way or another. As we all must. Art is long; life is short; decisionmaking is difficult. (There's a nice little article in the wikipedia tracing that axiom all the way back to Heraclitus, who himself was summing up the accumulated wisdom of the elders who had gone before him.)

So yeah, even though I was tired, and even though I really did not have something teed up to write about tonight, I managed to push on through to the other side. My hour is up, and now I can head off to bed with some small sense of writerly accomplishment. Just another day in California-nei.

What I'm Doing Here

Looking back, I'm somewhat surprised that I was able to post something every day for 50 days in a row until I finally fell off the wagon on Tuesday. Obviously, there are tradeoffs when you're writing under that kind of compulsion. The most time I'm likely to have to write on any given night is limited, maybe an hour on average, certainly no more than two. It's hard enough to write well when you have as much time as you want to develop and re-think and polish whatever it is you are working on. So forcing yourself to write daily is a little like walking on a very long balance beam. Each step is an adventure, some steps are likely to be more wobbly than others, and there's always the chance you're going to wind up on your ear. And the fact that each night is a new beginning makes it unlikely that any given post is going to be either remarkably significant or remarkably deep. Which is okay by me. This is not the only kind of writing I do. I can always go back and work into what I write here. I look at throughlines as being a kind of workshop, a place to body forth whatever is rattling around in my mind at a given time, with the understanding that any likely result will be, in the language of design thinking,  a non-precious prototype. Sometimes I'm just trying to capture and follow up on some thread or idea that came up in discussion during the day. Sometimes I'm just trying to use the act of writing as an incubator  to hatch ideas I haven't had yet. Sometimes I'm just playing around. But most of the time it feels like work, in the most positive sense of that word.

Basically it's a practice, a discipline, an attempt to live up to something I believe (and have sometimes annoyed some colleagues by saying out loud): that teachers of writing should be teachers who write. One core message that I attempt to convey to students, in one way or another, pretty much every day, is that it is better to be an attentive, thoughtful person than an inattentive, thoughtless person. The second core message is that if your question is how to do that—if your goal is in fact to cultivate within yourself your potential to be a thoughtful, attentive person—there are few more powerful ways of proceeding that to voluntarily, even enthusiastically, submit yourself to the disciplines of daily reading, daily writing, and daily reflection. Given that that's my message, how hypocritical would it be for me not to practice those disciplines myself?

That's not to say that there are no other disciplines that might serve (meditation, prayer, art, and music spring to mind, as well as things like, say, gardening, or public service), nor that people who do not read or write much are necessarily less attentive or thoughtful than those who do. But the hours and days (and yes, weeks and years) of our lives go by so quickly, and it is so easy to be drawn into the flow of everydayness, that it is certainly helpful to create a space for yourself to stop and reflect and process what is going on in your life, to consider the (inevitable) gap between the way things are and the way you would like things to be, and to think about what you might want to be doing differently by way of narrowing that gap. Gandhi's exhortation—"Be the change you want to see in the world"—implies two prior conditions: firstly, that you have looked at the world—attended to the world—carefully enough to be aware of what might need changing, and secondly that you have determined and thought through (and accepted responsibility for) what role you might have in effecting that change. It doesn't just happen. It's something you need to make happen. And that, more or less, is what I'm doing here.