… an essay written 27 years ago..
Like the whale, whose two eyes must concentrate on two
different scenes at once, and attempt to merge them into one
intelligence, I am often in the position of trying to direct
the various portions of my life into a single stream.
Lately I think a lot about the fact that I have plunged
myself into a full-time writing program, at the age of 51,
when I could be earning money for my Winnebago years.
While I am planning to write a brilliant essay on Life
in one of its most obtuse aspects, I am filling the car up
with gas, buying groceries or a new plant for the garden,
and making a bank deposit. At the same time I am usually
either justifying or attacking my smoking and eating habits.
Frequently the loftiness of my thoughts leads to coming
home without the onions, giving a daughter permission to do
something I never intended, and having a couple more
cigarettes.
The monologues I subject myself to in the car often
combine flashes of deep insight into whatever I am pursuing
at the moment, with questions of Truth and Life, and this
leads to more questions and more thoughts, and when I sit
down to write I am like Melville in his letter to Hawthorne:
“I began with a little criticism … and here I have landed
in Africa.”
So here I sit, wondering if all writers have these mad
thoughts on their way to the typewriter, and wondering why
any of us do this anyway. What is our need to write it all
down? And why, when the compulsion is so great, do we
complain incessantly about the difficulty of actually doing
it? Most of all, to get right down to the bare bones of my
dilemma: Why me? Why now in my life am I consumed by such
an overwhelming need for a community of writers that I have
saddled myself onto several years of school, galloping up
and down the New York State Thruway in my little Honda,
every free moment given over to reading and writing.
My mother always said to me: “There are thinkers and
doers in this world, and Nancy, you are not a doer.”
Managing to get maximum work accomplished in a minimum of
time was essential for my parents, who came to adolescence
during the Great Depression. They were workers, savers.
Their early married years, dramatized by World War II,
confirmed the belief for an entire generation that hard work
and sacrifice, at home and on foreign battlefields, was the
means for saving the world. Since idle hands are the devil’s
workshop, doing was the key.
I was not a doer. That I may have been a thinker was
too unfortunate to be mentioned. A thinker is a dreamer, a
questioning heart, a possible soul in limbo. Thinking is
not necessary when you have faith in the structures that
arrange the order of your life. For my large family those
organizations were the Roman Catholic Church, the
Democratic Party, and iThe US MArine Corps.
If we just followed those paths, and worked hard, there
would be time to have a little fun on the weekend.
What was there to think about?
Recently I read that Colette sat for half an hour
sometimes, pondering an adjective. Thinking. Not doing
anything else. It jolted me physically to know that others
felt the freedom to allow words to arise from the depths of
the thought process, from the innermost chasms of the body
at rest, from just thinking. I’ve been well trained, as
have many of my generation, to be busy. Even while writing,
which I’m not yet totally convinced is doing, pressure
invades my psyche about what there is to accomplish in the
day. Aside from our jobs and family lives, many of us have
chosen a large part of the world’s problems and adopted them
like so many orphans. After all we can’t rely on the
Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, much less the
United States Government to take care of the whole world any
more.
So, when an adjective escapes my net I leap up,
knocking over the director’s chair I sit in for writing, and
do something else while I think. Household tasks can
successfully hide the fact that, under the layer of my busy,
busy hands, I am thinking.
All writing has a rhythm, a dance, a tempo. Part of
that beat is silence, through which we hear words, those
precious tools of our craft. How many ways are there for us
to hear the sounds of our accumulated visions and to pull
forth the thoughts that we spread across paper? How many of
us allow ourselves the title of Thinker? How can we accept
that thinking, and writing our thoughts, is a valuable form
of doing, one that does not need to be hidden behind a
screen of action? Why is there so much self-doubt in a
writer’s life?
During my childhood I gradually became quieter and more
solemn. I stuttered, and was asked to be even more silent.
Books were taken away because they were exciting my mind,
not to mention what all that reading was doing to my eyes. Friends
were brought to the house to entice me outside, into the air, into the
social action. Finally at college I found freedom to think
and read. And that was what I did. I had my own curriculum,
and occasionally it coincided with my course work. I
allowed my mind to drift through the college library at its
own speed, gathering straws of knowledge into a broom I
could ride through the night sky. And then I rode out and
landed on the ground of doing again.
Through the sixties, seventies and eighties I did
career, marriage, children, housebuilding, quilts, garden,
politics, yoga, tai chi, acting, editing, reading, singing,
traveling, teaching, swimming, volunteering, dancing, hiking; all the
“ings” available to those living in this nuclear world. But
I was still the whale, concentrating with each eye on a
separate section of my life. I wrote essays while making
the bed, and dreamed poems about writing those essays. But
that is no longer enough to satisfy the draining pull of my
mind.
We write to share our lives, our thoughts, our
questions, our world in all its majesty and horror. We share
the sameness of our days, the unique smells of home, the
wondrous light of evening in a foreign land, the feel of a
coin between our fingers, our doings and our thoughts
together. We don’t even have to be right about anything but
ourselves and the honesty of our minds. And we can even lie,
and exaggerate, and make the large small, and turn the sky
green. Let the theologians and physicists come up with their
own versions of the cosmos.
Someone recently said to me that if we were meant to be
creatures only of action we would be called human doings
instead of human beings. So I will be. And for me, to be is
to write, is to think. If I don’t write, why then, I may not
know what I am thinking. As I write more and more often, I
find that I express thoughts I didn’t even know were lurking
in my mind. Where do these ideas come from? What can I
possibly be thinking?
I no longer give power to the Church, the Democrats
and the Marines. Somewhere, at some time, perhaps while
counting the zucchini multiplying in the garden, writing to
my Senator or carpooling to dance classes, I came to believe
in what was once called my “daydreaming.” I decided to be
in charge, even though I may not know what it is I am in
charge of. I’ll find out when I write it. It’s a pilgrimage
and I will end up worshiping at many shrines.
Like Queequeg in Moby Dick, who had a treatise on attaining all
knowledge of heaven and earth tattooed on his body, in a
language he had never been taught to read, I carry
everything I may want to know around with me. Writing is my
dictionary, my secret code book, my thinking and doing
together, my being. And I don’t stutter anymore.
Just some thoughts 