Well Running Dry

I was about to post this yesterday, when all hell broke loose in DC, and it seemed like nothing would ever be the same. But now that the election has been certified, it looks like things will go on as usual, and until January 20^th we will resume our watch for the daily presidential outrage. So what I wrote earlier in the week still applies. 

Out walking Bisou in the murky grayness, I detect another human coming in my direction. From the butterflies knitted into her woolen hat, I conclude that it is a woman, possibly one I know well.

“Hi!” she mutters into her mask, “how are you?”

“Well, you know…” I shrug. “And you?”

“Could be worse, I guess,” she says. 

About half of my interactions these days are like that one. The other half take place on Zoom. Those conversations are longer, but they hinge on three topics: the awfulness of politics, the horrors of the pandemic, and how grateful we should be that we have it so good. 

I am all for gratitude. It can make us more contented, kinder, not to mention better company. However, when I hear people reflect on how lucky we are and how grateful we should be because things could be so much worse, I am driven even deeper into the slough of despond. 

I know that, compared to the rest of humanity, I am immensely, even grotesquely, fortunate. But I don’t see how that is supposed to cheer me up. When I compare my life to that of people dying alone in ICUs, their weary nurses, their disconsolate families, the unemployed in danger of being evicted, and the single parents trying to work from home in the company of their terminally bored toddlers, I feel not only sorrow for their suffering, but guilt because I’m not out there making things better. And on top of that, I feel guilty for not being a more positive, optimistic, glass-half-full kind of person. 

The two other topics, politics and the pandemic, are inherently depressing. And, to make matters worse, they have stayed soul-killingly the same month after month. Sure, there have been moments (Biden! Vaccines! Georgia!) when the sun has parted the clouds, but mostly the two topics elicit only moaning and lamentation: “Can you believe what he did today?” followed by “Did you see those clips of people in bars, with not a mask in sight?” 

Round and round we go, my friends and I, shaking our heads until they are in danger of falling off the frail stalks of our necks. What else is there to talk about? Nothing comes to MY mind, that’s for sure. 

I look desperately around my cottage/hermitage for topics to write about: the dog (done that); the cat (ditto); the spouse (out of bounds); my past (can’t remember a thing). The squirrels, the birds, and the houseplants have remained mind-numbingly constant in their habits. My brain is like a house after the movers have left, where only dust bunnies and a tangle of forgotten wire hangers remain as evidence of a once rich and active life….

 

Writing Prompt

 One listless afternoon last week , I sat in the sun room thinking that I would never have anything else to write about. The Covid claustration had lasted almost as long as a pregnancy, and as happens with pregnancy my focus had turned progressively inward, until the external world had all but ceased to exist. Of course the external world is still around, but it is either off limits because of the virus risks, or so alarming and depressing (fires, floods, shootings, politics), that I simply shut it out. 

No, there really was nothing to write about, and probably would never be. This was it: the well had run dry; I had sung my swan song. I was deep into a fantasy of life as a non-writer when my dog Bisou burst into the outraged bark that she reserves for the fox: “out of my yard, you weird-looking dog!” I had been missing the fox’s visits, which had grown rarer now that the spring’s young were on their own, so I got up to take a look. 

There, just a couple of feet from the house and facing away from me was an odd-looking creature, larger than a squirrel but smaller than a fox. The back of its big ears was white rimmed with black. Its fur was tawny, its belly plump, its legs short, its tail stumpy. It was clearly an infant. But whose? 

OMG, I should be taking  photos! My phone was in the room somewhere, but like the apostles on Mount Tabor, I couldn’t bear to take my eyes off the apparition.  I whispered to my spouse to come look. What could it be?

Then the little animal turned to face us and its white cheek tufts gave it away. As did its ultra-fierce, non-cuddly demeanor, its look that said, come near me and I’ll bite off your arm…or maybe your fingertip. And having delivered this threat, it toddled off into the undergrowth. 

Where, I hope, the mother bobcat found it, gave it a good scolding (“you are NOT old enough to hunt squirrels, you hear?”) and took it home. 

I haven’t seen any more bobcats, big or little, since that day, though a near neighbor tells me she has seen what I hope is the mother. But that infant on the prowl has been constantly on my mind. Sometimes I think I’ve dreamed him (or her). And a dozen times every day I look out the sun room windows, just in case he's come back (as if). 

I feel grateful to Nature for sending me this writing prompt just in the nick of time, and for reminding me that the writer’s most important tool is neither intelligence nor inspiration, but the ability to pay attention. Colette wrote that her mother's greatest gift to her, what made her the writer she became, was the single word, "Regarde!" Everything starts with that.

Milestone

Google Blogger, which keeps track of such things, tells me that as of last week I have published one thousand posts on My Green Vermont. Other than breathing and sleeping and brushing my teeth, I can’t think of too many acts I’ve repeated a thousand times.

Back in 2008 the friend who got me started (thanks, Indigo!) had to explain to me what a blog was. Wanting to avoid unnecessary gaffes, I consulted a number of websites about the rules of successful blogging. And they all said the same thing: you must post frequently. Daily, if possible. Several times a day, if you’re really serious.

I took the advice to heart and gradually increased my output until by 2010 I was posting over four times a week. That was the most I could manage, given that I’d also taken it into my head to accompany each post with a drawing. None of the how-to-blog sites recommended this, but I did notice that most blogs featured photos, many of them beautiful, sensational, or both.  Apparently, online readers expected to be served pictures along with words.

I had a digital camera but its battery was unreliable, and rather than deal with that I decided that it would be simpler and more creative to illustrate my posts by hand. (Now, after all these years, I could paper a room with the originals of my little drawings.)

How did I come up with so much to write about? It turns out that blogging is like finding a loose thread in one of those factory-made hems—you give a little tug, and it just keeps coming. I would start a post about one of my pullets laying her first egg, and that led to memories of being in bed recovering from the measles, with my pet lame chick hobbling and cheeping on the blanket.

I wrote endlessly about chickens and goats and gardens and woodstoves and the wonder of having made it to Vermont, where I could finally live “close to the earth,” as I proclaimed on the blog’s banner. When it became apparent that I couldn’t sustain my homesteading way of life indefinitely, we moved to a retirement community, and for a while I wrote about the dramas of downsizing, and the necessity of letting go of beloved objects and remaining flexible in spirit if not in body.

And then, one day, there seemed to be nothing more to write about. Gone were the goats and the milking pail, the hens and the egg basket, the compost and the wheelbarrow. The woodstove gave way to an efficient gas fireplace and my garden was reduced to a couple of potted citrus trees in the sun room (I gamely squeezed out a post about those).

What was the meaning, if any, of my new life? What occupied my mind? There were my fellow residents, obviously, and the shock of living in a kind of village where the only people under sixty-five were the staff. Plenty of grist for the mill there, but what if a neighbor took it into her head to read my blog?

Between 2015 and 2018 I only managed a measly total of sixty posts. And, just as the advice websites had predicted, my readership all but disappeared, drawn no doubt to livelier, more committed bloggers who managed to post every day, or even twice a day.

Then this year, in the dark of winter, I was spending my days in a miasma of politically-induced despondency. I badly needed to shake myself out of that state. What if I started blogging again, maybe only once a week? I could pretend that it was a real job that required me to post every Wednesday, except in case of emergency. What did I have to lose?

And so I tricked myself back into writing, and once I gave that initial tug, the thread kept coming. Now my week has rhythm and shape.

With a feeling of dread approaching nausea (what if, this time, the thread has broken, the well run dry?) on Thursday morning I force myself to spew whatever is in my head onto the screen. On Friday I piously gather any crumbs worth preserving and ditch the rest. I spend the weekend adding more crumbs and worrying about how I’m going to wrap the thing up.

On Monday I ditch some more and, if I’m lucky, come up with an ending. Tuesday is for drawing and for fighting the improvements that Canon insists on making to my scanner. On Wednesday, just before I hit “Publish,” I ditch some more (how could I have let this ridiculous sentence almost make it into the finished piece?). For the rest of the day I bask in the relief-- reminiscent of the way I once felt after my daily run--of having written.

And because I fret daily about meeting my self-imposed deadline, other worries, such as about the fate of the nation, not to mention the planet, are temporarily forced to take a back seat. It’s going to be a long, angst-filled political campaign. The way things are going, I may have to start posting daily, just to keep my sanity.

Writer, Interrupted

The year my first daughter was born, I wrote my dissertation. I had spent the previous nine months researching and then making an excruciatingly detailed outline of the project. The outline consisted of a complex system of index cards arranged by topics, sub-topics, and sub- sub-topics, each one bound by a rubber band and grouped with others in its category by a larger rubber band.

Having heard that babies could be time consuming, I figured that if I had just fifteen minutes to spare, I could remove the rubber band from a single sub-topic and write a paragraph or two before the next diaper change.

Besides the baby, I had a temporary part-time job teaching in a private school. Thanks to my rubber bands, I nevertheless managed to write all but the last chapter of my dissertation. Since by that point my daughter was no longer nursing every five minutes, my mother came up one weekend and babysat while I went to the library to finish the job.

I found a carrel in a quiet corner, took out the final batch of index cards, snapped off the rubber band and looked around. This being Saturday morning, the stacks were empty. There was no one, not even a mouse, to disturb me. I could concentrate to my heart's content....

Except I couldn't. Somehow I was unable to sustain mental effort for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. Motherhood had worked a weird kind of interval training on my brain, so that I needed frequent interruptions in order to function.

Despite the weirdness of those two silent days, I did manage to sweat out the last chapter--but, ironically, it was the only one that my advisor asked me to rewrite.

In Silences, her heart-wrenching book about why writers don't write, Tillie Olsen says,"More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible." These days, fatherhood may in some cases get in the way of writing as well, but it's still mostly motherhood that keeps writers from writing.

No matter how talented the writer, it's hard to produce a masterpiece in fifteen-minute stretches. A middle-class mother may well have a physical room of her own, but where to escape the moral obligation, let alone the inborn desire to satisfy a child's endless need for food, company, stimulation, love?

The German poet Rilke was so leery of the drain that affections impose on a writer that he could not live in the same house with his wife and baby. He couldn't even bear to have a dog: "Anything alive that makes demands, arouses in me an infinite capacity to give it its due, the consequences of which completely use me up." (Rilke quoted by Olsen, in Silences.)

For me, the days of index cards and rubber bands were followed by decades of further interruptions, by growing children, work, and life in general. But my present schedule is one to make struggling would-be writers faint with envy: I could, if I wanted to, write uninterruptedly from dawn to dusk, every single day.

But not quite. For as soon as the opening fanfare of Windows announces that I've sat down to write, the cat Telemann comes rushing up to investigate. He sits on the desk, rearranges my papers, sniffs  my coffee, and reaches out his white paw to tap on the keyboard (he's been known to delete important stuff). Is he bored, I wonder? Hungry? In need of affection? Poor thing, he never gets to go outside--I should play with him a while.

My little red dog Bisou, less intrusive now than in her youth, is content to sleep in the room while I write--until she starts to wonder when we're going for our walk, or if it's almost dinnertime. She's been with me through thick and thin for the past decade, her entire tiny life. How can I deny her?

My two goldfish and my houseplants are less vocal in their demands, but I can't bear to see them languish. The fish must be fed breakfast and dinner, and the water in their tub changed regularly. The plants need water--not too much--and food and grooming, and carefully placed full-spectrum lights.

Clearly, my brain is still on its old schedule. After fifteen or twenty minutes of writing, it looks around for interruptions. What--no phone calls, no emails, no appointments, nobody at the door? It must be time to walk the dog.

Short of infants of my own, I have hobbled myself with a set of living beings that arouse in me that infinite capacity to give them their due.  Rilke would say I'm committing creative suicide.

And so I walk the dog, and play with the cat, and I try not to beat myself up about it. Fifteen or twenty minutes of writing is better than nothing, after all. Despite his richly emotive poetry, Rilke strikes me as a little cold. Besides, who's to say that a well-loved creature is less precious than a great poem?

Bulletin From Sabbatical

As the winter solstice came and went I found my resistance to posting on this blog, which had been growing through the summer and fall, impossible to overcome.  I'd been writing here for seven years,  and my blogging well had run dry.  It was time to let it replenish. 

We spent ten years in a house with a recalcitrant water well, and I learned the hard way to pay attention to its moods and its periodic needs for rest and recuperation.  No matter how high the pile of dirty laundry, if the water level was low there was nothing to do but wait for it to slowly rise again.

So after New Year's I decided to give myself a sabbatical.

It's not just the seven years of posting that finally got to me.  Our move to Wake Robin last summer, followed by my daughter's cancer diagnosis, had discombobulated me at a deeper level than I realized.  Thankfully, my daughter is doing very well, which means that we are slowly beginning to breathe again.  The move to Wake Robin feels like the right decision, but it has made a radical change in how we live, and that brings with it its own quandaries and dilemmas.

Why is it, for example, that now that I no longer keep chickens or grow vegetables or cook or shop for groceries (or post on my blog) I seem to have less time than ever?  Maybe it's because the chickens and the gardening, etc. have been replaced by other stuff that I cannot resist, such as:

--A surprisingly demanding yoga class twice a week
--Weekly visits with Bisou to the residents of Wake Robin's nursing facility
--Daily recorder practice, and duets with my recorder buddies once or twice weekly
--Dinner with fellow residents three or four times a week (optional, but fun)
--Daily dog walks (not optional)
--Daily walks to the community center for meals and classes (2/3 mile round trip) often in a sub-zero gale
--English country dancing once a week
--Ditto ballroom dancing...

For a former hermit, let alone a hermit with CFS, this is a major shift in activity level.  You should know that, compared with my fellow residents, who hike, snowshoe, ski, garden, maintain the community trails, sing, serve on committees, make maple syrup (locally known as "sugaring"), and practically run the place, I am the very soul of sloth.  But one does what one can.

Sometimes, when things get quiet, I hear a faraway tinkling, as of water falling drop by drop into the depths of my writing well.  There's not enough to run a load of laundry yet, but there may well be by sugaring time.

The Writing Bed

One day when I was in the depths of my recent shingles attack, I set up the double bed that spends most of its life folded inside a convertible sofa in the downstairs guest room.  I

I put on a blue fitted bottom sheet, stacked some pillows against the back, and folded a crocheted afghan across the bottom.  Then I lay down, exhausted, and closed my eyes.  Bisou came streaking into the room, took a flying leap and landed beside me, and gave a big sigh.  I sighed too, a sigh not of pain or discomfort or boredom, but of contentment.  I had solved the bed-and-Bisou problem.

Knowing the limits of a spouse's tolerance helps to keep a marriage going, and in the case of my particular spouse Bisou's body on the conjugal bed is beyond those limits.  In normal times, Wolfie and Bisou sleep on their own bed at night, on the floor next to my side of things.  During the day, I do my reading or writing or napping or mindless staring into space on various sofas and chairs where Bisou and I can be in close bodily contact.

But when the shingles hit, I was too sick to sit on a chair or even recline on a sofa.  I needed to be in bed, but I also needed my comfort spaniel.  Hence the recourse to the guest bed during the day.

I'm feeling better now--today I even did the laundry--but I'm still spending a lot of time on the guest room bed.  I have the phone nearby, and a cup of lemon balm tea from the lemon balm jungle at the back door.  A good lamp on either side of the bed, and a view of the trees turning russet along the driveway.  Also my Kindle, for when I get tired of writing.  And when I get tired of reading I can close my eyes and subside against the pillows, one hand on Bisou's silky back.

Compared to this, the living room, the sun porch, and my study, have come to seem pretty spartan.  In those rooms you cannot flow seamlessly from snoozing to reading to writing and back again.  You have to make an executive decision about what you're going to do and where you're going to do it, and then you have to get up and implement it.  It's a vertical kind of existence, and I am really getting fond of the horizontal.

The tradition of writing in bed is a long and honorable one.  Before central heating, lots of writers wrote in bed, for practical reasons.  But even in the twentieth century, when houses became more comfortable, Proust, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, George Orwell and Truman Capote all took to bed in order to write.

Why is that?  It's possible that the bed evokes a less formal and therefore less intimidating feeling than the hard, flat, cold surface of a desk.  In bed, you can just scribble and jot, whereas at a desk, you have to WRITE.

And perhaps the bed, with its softness and warmth, its invitation to recline and even to close the eyes, offers a physical conduit to that dreamy state in which the internal critic retreats and the poor neglected subconscious comes out to play.

Just curious:  how many of you like to write in bed?

When Words Fail...

...draw a cat:                                           

Why Carving Stone Is Easier Than Writing

I've been doing a bit of both lately, and thinking about the differences and similarities between the two.

When you sculpt stone, you take an irregular lump of rock that looks like nothing much and you chip away at it with your mallet and your pointed chisel. Then you chip with your fork chisel, and eventually with your flat chisel. You chip and you chip until your arm hurts and hours and days go by, until eventually you realize that you have taken away (to paraphrase Michelangelo) everything that wasn't the form within the stone.

Writing, at least for me, is much the same process of taking away what doesn't belong. Sacrificing what seems clever for the sake of form and flow. Chipping away at whatever gets in the way of the point of the piece.

But here is the main difference between carving and writing. In carving, you heft your stone into the studio and heave it onto the carving stand, then prop it up with sandbags so it stays still while you whale away at it.

In writing, before you can start whaling, you have to produce the stone. And birthing that rock, that raw material, often feels like it must have felt to Zeus to have Athena burst, fully armed, out of his head. Sometimes the prospect of birthing that rock gives a writer writer's block.

Me, I try to get the rock out of my system as quickly as possible. I try to think about it as little as possible as I'm setting it down, except to remind myself that it is just a formless lump, something to work on later, something for my mallet and chisel to chip into shape. And once the rock is on the work table, I get a great feeling of relief.

Because I know that the rest is just fiddling with the stuff--cutting and pasting, changing a word here and there. But mostly it's erasing, deleting, taking away even what is dear to my heart, until the final form emerges.

Has The Well Run Dry?

At least for now, I think it has.

I've always believed that there's no such thing as writer's block; that the more you write, the more you CAN write, and so on. But for the last couple of days, as I've mentally looked around to find something to write about, there's been nothing. Or nothing worthwhile, anyway (that's the Critic speaking up, I know) .

I'm coated in a sort of gluey, translucent layer of indifference. So what if I never write again? So what if I never make another drawing? Everything seems like such an effort...
sigh,
yawn,
fade to black.

The Muse Takes A Nap

On ordinary days, as I go about my business I have at least a couple of topics for posts running through my head. On less ordinary days, themes and phrases tumble around in my brain like lottery tickets just before a drawing.

But yesterday was different. I could not think of a single thing to write about.

Now I know very well that there's no such thing as nothing to write about. Not for nothing did I spend a couple of decades studying and then teaching French lit, many of whose masters prided themselves on making something out of nothing (“faire quelque chose de rien”). A hint of adultery here, a spot of introspection there, and voila: a 500-page masterpiece.

On a day when I feel only some reluctance to write, I just focus on whatever is in front of my nose—say, my hand—and pretty soon stuff comes to me: how it's getting bonier, how it reminds me of my father, how I've never been able to grow my nails, or keep polish on them for more than five minutes. And each of those thoughts can take me in a dozen different directions.

But yesterday my reluctance was absolute. I had run up against a stone wall—not a hard thing to do in Vermont—and I couldn't even write about the wall. My Muse, I suspected, was hiding behind it.

Sometimes if I don't feel like writing I go do something else for a while, then give the Muse a whistle and she comes running. I spent the entire day yesterday doing something else, then whistling, then doing something else again. But she didn't show.

Eventually, I gave up. The Muse, I decided, was taking a nap. Maybe she was cold. After all, my hens have stopped laying the last couple of frigid days. Why shouldn't the Muse get a break too? So she did, and today, I'm glad to say, she's hovering near.

When your Muse yawns, how do you react?

November 12, 2008 "Why I Write"

I write to get rid of the awful feeling of not wanting to write.

Sometimes this reluctance feels like a real illness—am I coming down with something? And it always feels like fatigue—I'm too tired to do anything! So I wander around the house thinking, maybe I should go back to bed, or take an aspirin, or eat something...yes, I should definitely eat something! Eventually my Higher Self kicks in with the diagnosis: you really don't want to write, do you?

After that, the clouds part, the coast is clear. I know the medicine I need. I'd better get to writing.

My Higher Self Tells Me To Go Write

I try not to think too much about what I'm doing, especially not about the first sentence. I just plunge ahead, sort of like diving into a cold lake. After a few minutes of thrashing around and getting water in my nose, I start feeling warmer, more comfortable. On lucky days I can swim for quite a while, and lose track of time.

And then, when it's over, the endorphins kick in. I have written! The day has been salvaged. I have proven myself a worthy person. The flu symptoms are gone, and I can face whatever comes with a certain degree of equanimity because, after all, I have done it. I have written.

Why do you write?