getting organized & the muse

'I NEED TO GET ORGANIZED' has been the constant refrain of my inner articulations for most of my conscious life.

Having grown up in a chaotic household, where any hope of wholesome structure was dim and distant, I have to wonder if my own proclivity for free form lifestyle is BOTH nature and nurture.

From my own experience, I'd say that bringing up children in disorder is inadvisable.  Even though as a child, I had horrible nightmares of suddenly being thrust into a regulated environment--a Victorian orphanage, for example. I was fearful of peers' parents who had a reputation for being 'strict'. I understood it as a synonym for cruelty. I was afraid of the neighbor girl's mother who despotically enforced afternoon naps.

source

This wasn't to say that growing up disorderly was paradise. Far from it. My room was a junk pile of old toys and books, but it rarely dawned on me that there was an alternative. Sometimes my father would venture in to chastise me for my slovenliness. But I was an untutored little girl. I was mystified by his critique. Did other modalities exist? These were only distantly surmised, perhaps in foreign lands or other planets. Closer to home, actually within the home, the parental master bedroom resided in majestic ruin, full of Collieresque stacks and piles of papers and miscellaneous items--and actually included little paths from door, to bed, to closet, to bathroom.

I'll say this for the disorderly childhood. You learn not to exist in your environment. Physical reality becomes something you tolerate. Hold at arm's length. Learn to ignore. It enforces external passivity.

Such formative experience forces you inward. In my case, it was into storybooks. The library. My artwork. My own precocious scribblings, the 'novels' composed at age nine. These became far more important and far more real.  The worlds of my own making.

the muse & the dirty girl

As I was a feral child raised by wolves, and thus am jealous of those raised in a barn--I suppose my education on housewifery skills is not up to snuff.

As a Virgo, I am entranced by the organization books in the bookstores, and container stores that sell glossy organization systems. But growing up I developed a high tolerance for clutter. It's not that I'm in love with clutter. It's not that I cling to it like a caddis fly larvae clings to its gravel nest.

I'm not one of those 'my clutter, myself' people. At least I didn't think I was.

I like cleanliness and loathe dirt like the best people. Don't I? But when push comes to shove, and I'm writing on my masterpiece (or glitter painting bird houses, or decoupaging coffee tables, or making resin-filled soda pop top jewelry) I can afford to let some minor household matters slide.

Slide? Avalanche for all I care! When I'm blissfully creative, in my zone, the dishes can pile up in the sink! The laundry can stay in the basket! The bed can stay unmade! Besides, the cats are too comfy to move them. 

And anyway, when this earthly life is over, will I on my death bed say, 'I regret should have washed more dishes?'

Or will I say, 'I should have let the dishes feck themselves, followed the MUSE, and CREATED?

more writing days

I've been a melancholy failed writer for a number of years. My once shining literary potential was reduced to a pitiful wreckage of thwarted hopes; a cautionary tale for women who allow themselves to become tragically/happily sidetracked by traditional domestic roles.

O! My writing career!

Such feminist critique is out of favor these days, I know. But as bright young educated women find themselves spending year after year home with the kids, and putting off their hopes and dreams--yes, even if you love the little darlings with all-your-heart as I do!--eventually, they may come to a bittersweet epiphany. Yes, you are a lucky, lucky girl to be a mom, and maybe even to stay home with your babies, instead of working and having to put them into the indifferent auspices of daycare.

But still, what of your hopes and dreams? What of your brain, and its perhaps hard earned education?

It is still there, wanting to be acknowledged, under all the fuss and furor of daily domestic routine.

The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction, and feminism will come roaring back. This I predict.

Anyway, I digress. Which is a sort of motto for me.

But for reasons I have yet to pin down, I've been churning out the pages these days. I'm on the penultimate draft of my novel manuscript--yes, the one I've been working on for decades. I call it penultimate, as I will give out copies to select readers for proofreading and continuity checking and the like, before I give it a final good polish and start shopping it around.

However, I won't be asking for the fatal criticism which goes like this: it's good, except I'd make the heroine a boy, and instead of setting it in New Jersey it should take place in Timbuktu, and instead of the setting of the 1800s make it the 1500s, and all the downstairs furniture should be moved upstairs, and all the upstairs furniture should be moved downstairs, and the tree in the front yard should be in the back yard, and why don't you just scrap the whole project and start over again?

Whatever do you mean--revise?

I won't be asking for that kind of criticism.

I got gobs of that in graduate writing workshops. I had a whale of a good time in graduate school, but the workshops were a mixed bag. There were pros and cons. I do feel that I learned so much; that it accelerated my writerly education, and learned to recognize common mistakes in my work as well as my fellow students'.

Some of the criticism was very valuable. I would often hear a 'ding' when I received something thoughtful and applicable to my artistic vision.

Some of it was completely stupid. You'd often come across students who were unable to disengage from their own writing vision. They were really not able, or even interested in speaking to other students' manuscripts. Their criticism amounted to a vain attempt to remodel your story into something they themselves would write. They were most unhelpful in helping you along on your artistic journey.

Then there were the condescending types, who would tell you about a typo on page seven and just give you pitying looks. 'You, a writer?' their looks seemed to sneer.

I usually allowed negative criticism a while to settle. If it still bothered me in six months, I would examine it more thoughtfully. That meant sometimes that something useful was there. If I had recovered from the blow, but now was laughing at how absurd the comments were, I would feel happily free to forget them.

Anyway, those days were long ago. I don't know about my fellow students in my graduate writing program. Are they still writing as I am? Some have published. When I was working at Barnes & Noble a few years ago shelving a new shipment of books, my heart fluttered painfully to see the name of a fellow student. Yes, I admit pain, not joy. Jealousy. But most of them, I have the sinking suspicion, have ceased to write. I believe the AWP data on MFA graduates confirms this.

Not me. I'm still plugging away. I'm still rolling the boulder uphill, as Sisyphus. And I can happily report that lately the chapters are just piling up.

With luck, I'll make my deadline of January 1st, complete my goal and get this feckin' monkey off my back.

I will keep you posted.

writing days

I blew off everything today to work on chapter fourteen. I have twenty tasks barreling down upon my head, but I blew off all to work on my manuscript.

Good for me! Administer pats on back!

Some will wonder at my life of ease and indolence, and find it incredible that still I can't seem to finish my novel, find time to write.

Sometimes I wonder at it myself.

It does come down to sitting down and doing it.  But despite my privileged circumstances--and I call them thus, because even though I live just above hardscrabble in America, my life contains greater luxury and comfort than any medieval princess--I am distracted beyond description.

Every call to my attention merits more of my time, energy and consideration than the thing I call my heart's desire--my writing.

Every wail for help, 'Where's the scissors?'

'The green sweater?'

'The vanilla?' (On the spice rack, at eye level!)

His Magnificence wonders why I can't wash my dishes as I use them; he is intent on domesticating me and cultivating in me some civilized habits.  When I say, 'I'm on a writing tear! I can't stop a moment lest I lose momentum!', he thinks I am being a scoff-work.

Really, the dishes can wait.  The telephone bill can wait.  The dentist can wait.  The ancient Toyota's oil change can wait. It all can wait, until I finish chapter fourteen.

la petite mélancolie

fern andra, silent movie star

Although I originate from a family of depressives, I've always fiercely resisted that identity.

I was not, I was determined to believe--constitutionally depressed so much as situationally so. To that end, I've striven to live my life as such: I own I have a naturally happy disposition.

Childhood photos of me bear witness to this fact. Photos with my family often depict me as a rosy cherub, beaming at the camera. My melancholic kindred are downcast. They look away from the lens. Or regard it with sullen forbearance. Of course, my siblings regarded me as retarded. My cheerfulness clearly marked me as having a membership amongst the intellectually impoverished. 

Depressives often develop a sort of superiority complex about their mental state. It is the more ARTISTIC state of mind. It has a rich poetic tradition. It is très BOHEMIAN.  . And, if you were truly paying attention, were as acutely aware and deeply observant as they--then you too would be depressed!

There is something to that. In psychology, the concept is known as depressive realism.  In 1979 psychologists Alloy and Abramson, and in 1989 Dobson and Franche conducted two separate studies which seemed to indicate that depressed persons may have a more realistic perception of their abilities, importance in the world, and prospects in life. Which is an interesting, if depressing finding.

Although at times I've toiled like an Egyptian pyramid builder to maintain my happy outlook, often I've FAILED.  Miserably.  When I'm free-falling into the black chasm, scrabbling to get a handhold on the edge of the bottomless pit, I am apt to wonder if I've been fooling myself all along. Perhaps I am a dismal melancholic, like the rest of my dreary tribe.

Should I just be REALISTIC? And accept my fated chemical temperament?

Again and again, I conclude that it is not the case. Gothic gloom may be novel at Halloween, and titillates when one is in certain moods--but it is not my permanent address and I don't want to live there year round. Though I admire the phantastically creative Goth aesthetic, I was never tempted to adopt it as my personal style. After a while, the darkness palls and I yearn for something fresh and clear. I must wear pink, go swimming, and laugh at something hilariously witty, but not morbidly so. Thankfully, even when I've been at my most miserable, and worried to death I will be stuck in that mansion of despair forever, somehow I have always wriggled myself free. 

And again and again, I conclude that even those times when I feared I was clinically depressed, in hindsight there were ALWAYS situational components to my distress. When I figure my way out, I find that my natural happy disposition returns.  As novelist William Gibson advises, 'Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just SURROUNDED BY ASSHOLES.'   Which has often proved to be my real problem, not defective levels of serotonin or whatnot. 

Now, after years of encountering such 'situational' situations, I have a bag of tricks, a Girl Scout emergency kit in which to rescue my oft-times teetering moods.  Happiness repair has become one of my 'mad skills.'  My mental hygiene.

fern andra, silent movie star

Admittedly, this current bout of melancholia I've been faced with has been a long, dismal slog.  This time around has exasperated my can-do spirit.  My usual bag of tricks has come up empty.   After planning a magnificent year for myself--I made the now seemingly quaint intention that 2012 would be the best of my life thus far, and was even writing in a silly old gratitude journal for Pete's sake--I found myself living through the worst of years.

(At least since 2009, the year of the LANDLADY-from-Hell, but that is another story...)

I could list my tragic losses for the year, my woe log, the various sucker-punches dealt by the random and uncaring universe: but I shan't wallow.  On the other hand, mayhap I should.  I have no compunction about WALLOWING really; for wallowing (or less pejoratively, FEELING) is an essential part of the grieving process, and one must get through it to find the other side.  Too often people who are not depressed, not grieving, are quick to judge--and tell the besieged person to cheer up and forget.  But as the old Zen masters say, that which you resist, grows stronger.

We all know of poor, misbegotten individuals who are stuck fast in their depression, and they are sad cases indeed.  The wise person knows when it is time to cease grieving, when the noble wallowing process is finished, when to put a period at the end of purgatory, and start a new project.  Count me amongst the wise: I may be smacked down by life's giant fly swatter, but I am resilient.  I will come back.  The sap is rising into my poor listless limbs, giving strength to my sword arm, or in my case, my pen.  Or my keyboard.  I finally feel my old happy self returning--and I am on the march toward my GLORIOUS hopes and dreams.

And even at this late time of my life, I am still going to GET THAT PONY.

fern andra, silent movie star

Even if it is totally UNREALISTIC.