I wake with a headache; pain is its own reprieve, perhaps. I grant myself the morning to meander. At least the sun is reaching for me through the window.
Before coffee, I’ve already gone swimming in a strange bath of news—the cruelty and shame of adjuncts in academia; the maddening mantra in these times, “they knew, they knew”; the death of the middle and the mediocrity it often peddled; it’s all too much for a Wednesday morning meant for writing an essay on letters.
I went to Cheesecake Factory the other day, and it was packed, and it was actually really good. I don’t think we can romanticize these places any more than we can critique them for the paradox they perpetuate—that we want ease and consistency and we also want curation and gates.
Walking on an indoor track is a form of self-hypnosis. I started listening to a woman talk about memoir and her video had the strange tinny affect of a 1990s infomercial. She wanted to sell me her genius and kept on dangling the promise of two main components to a memoir that she discovered after studying thousands of them at a big publisher. It took her at least three minutes to reveal her secrets: the scene.
As I circled the track, I grew mad at her for wasting my time and then I also realized I had no where else to be and kept walking. I left the gym with her gems: 1. a scene must have a time anchor; 2. something must happen in the scene. That was her reveal, the grand finale fireworks of her spiel. I thought about it while dreaming last night, still walking around the track inside my mind.
I’ve decided that when I write a scene, it’s actually fine if nothing happens, as long as there’s a person and a verb and feeling. Time anchors are useful, to stretch beyond the once-upon-a, but I call bullshit on the pressure to advance a plot. Guess what, we’ve lost the plot. Fragments and figments are their own kinds of happenings, and that’s the kind of non-story I need to tell at this point, about anything real or imagined. And I’m still circling the track—I’ll be back.
Why did I leap from poetry to the journalism? Some naive idea about justice and the facts. I spent about a decade thinking I could comb for them carefully and come up with real gold for the people. But the newsroom is a blues room with the same 12 bars. The stories got predictable, though the players often changed. We rarely riffed or reflected, rather put together and scrambled the same puzzle parts over and over again, until many of us got laid off.
“To be a writer is to betray the facts,” writes Christian Wiman, in his very dark and difficult essay, “The Limit.” It made my stomach turn, the scenes and the story. But I kept reading to mine this reminder: “to cast an experience into words is in some way to lose the reality of the experience itself, to sacrifice the fact of it to whatever imaginative pattern one’s wound requires.”
My wound requires a wind-up and a let-down—I want the story to come in pulse beats of sensation. I am not a puzzle maker or a heart-breaker, and I certainly realize at this point that memory is a make-believe game.
I’ve read and thought about much too much darkness before noon. It hurts my heart. My transit slips are slipping from my grip. I’ve collected all these mental notes for scope, but I’m not obliged to analyze or file. Wiman says we can work with memory as little stones we “smooth and polish with the waters of imagination.”
Transit Slips, #25
Before coffee, I’ve already gone swimming in a strange bath of news—the cruelty and shame of adjuncts in academia; the maddening mantra in these times, “they knew, they knew”; the death of the middle and the mediocrity it often peddled; it’s all too much for a Wednesday morning meant for writing an essay on letters.
I went to Cheesecake Factory the other day, and it was packed, and it was actually really good. I don’t think we can romanticize these places any more than we can critique them for the paradox they perpetuate—that we want ease and consistency and we also want curation and gates.
Walking on an indoor track is a form of self-hypnosis. I started listening to a woman talk about memoir and her video had the strange tinny affect of a 1990s infomercial. She wanted to sell me her genius and kept on dangling the promise of two main components to a memoir that she discovered after studying thousands of them at a big publisher. It took her at least three minutes to reveal her secrets: the scene.
As I circled the track, I grew mad at her for wasting my time and then I also realized I had no where else to be and kept walking. I left the gym with her gems: 1. a scene must have a time anchor; 2. something must happen in the scene. That was her reveal, the grand finale fireworks of her spiel. I thought about it while dreaming last night, still walking around the track inside my mind.
I’ve decided that when I write a scene, it’s actually fine if nothing happens, as long as there’s a person and a verb and feeling. Time anchors are useful, to stretch beyond the once-upon-a, but I call bullshit on the pressure to advance a plot. Guess what, we’ve lost the plot. Fragments and figments are their own kinds of happenings, and that’s the kind of non-story I need to tell at this point, about anything real or imagined. And I’m still circling the track—I’ll be back.
Why did I leap from poetry to the journalism? Some naive idea about justice and the facts. I spent about a decade thinking I could comb for them carefully and come up with real gold for the people. But the newsroom is a blues room with the same 12 bars. The stories got predictable, though the players often changed. We rarely riffed or reflected, rather put together and scrambled the same puzzle parts over and over again, until many of us got laid off.
“To be a writer is to betray the facts,” writes Christian Wiman, in his very dark and difficult essay, “The Limit.” It made my stomach turn, the scenes and the story. But I kept reading to mine this reminder: “to cast an experience into words is in some way to lose the reality of the experience itself, to sacrifice the fact of it to whatever imaginative pattern one’s wound requires.”
My wound requires a wind-up and a let-down—I want the story to come in pulse beats of sensation. I am not a puzzle maker or a heart-breaker, and I certainly realize at this point that memory is a make-believe game.
I’ve read and thought about much too much darkness before noon. It hurts my heart. My transit slips are slipping from my grip. I’ve collected all these mental notes for scope, but I’m not obliged to analyze or file. Wiman says we can work with memory as little stones we “smooth and polish with the waters of imagination.”
Transit Slips, #25
