Noise Reduction
quiet reflections on life in a loud worldArchive for Blogging
It’s 8:30 And I Don’t Know What To Do
Ever finish a novel and feel sad? Last night I finished Youngblood Hawke, by Herman Wouk and tonight I feel like I’ve been stood up for a date. It’s a huge book and I was into it all the way. Every night when the Hobbit went to bed, I tip-toed down the hall to get the book and dove right in. The husband’s been on the road for two weeks now and this book has kept me company all that time. The entire weekend past I was torn between wanting to escape with it and dreading the final act – that last full stop and those blank filler pages at the back. Last night I got there, and tonight, well, I suppose the best thing I can say for myself is that I’m posting an entry on my blog for the first time since May.
I do have other excuses (for not posting, that is). Just days before I posted that last entry I’d found out I was pregnant, and just days after that the worst weeks of the pregnancy began. That’s right, woe was me. There began fourteen weeks of mental fog, constant nausea, exhaustion and blues that some days were as dark and deep (and not nearly as pretty) as a midnight sky.
But, I’m through all that now. I have more energy and more interest in life, less need to eat as often as I breathe and generally more pep in my step. I can play with Hobbit1 and enjoy the new movements of Hobbit2, or newbaby as we like to call it around here. I can read a novel without falling asleep. And I can post a little of this and that on my blog. Here’s to that.
Life Going On
Sometimes, when I want to post but can’t think of anything that moves me enough to make me want to write about it, I come back to “Noise Reduction” and spend some time thinking about what that means to me right then. The title, like any good title, is my anchor, and today, as I reflected away, I found that what I was most aware of was a din inside my head that has, for what seems like weeks now (I wrote “Lost in Space” after I’d already been feeling lost, and spacey, for some time), incapable of concentrating on any one thought for long, feeling any one feeling with strength, writing even one sentence with conviction. For a while I thought it was a symptom of seasonal transition; but Spring is well-settled now and I’m still feeling floaty. Sometimes I wonder if it has something to do with the childlike nature of the way I spend much of my time. My Hobbit – he doesn’t do a lot of analyzing or reflecting. He just experiences life, and life, at least his life, is not very complicated. Joyous, hilarious, interesting, sad, maybe confusing, sure – but not complicated. We go to the Top of the World Park and run around on the empty basketball court in the rain. It’s great. We go to the zoo and say “Hi Giraffy!” to a lanky, sunbathing giraffe, visit the gorillas, run over to the monkeys then eat hot dogs while watching flamingos walk back and forth along a path for no reason we can figure. We love it. While folding laundry, we make up a song about the Husband’s abundance of socks and sing it loudly, cracking ourselves right up. We sing our chicken soup song as we make our chicken soup then slurp it up three hours later saying yummmm.
Maybe. Maybe it’s that.
And maybe there is another factor: time. For me, just conceiving of a project takes time, and getting traction on a project takes even more time. They take time and concentration. And so do reflection, and idea-exploration, and the process of massaging reflections and reactions in search of kernels of wisdom and insight. It all takes time, and right now, on average, I have about enough quiet time to begin conceiving of projects. And that’s the way it’s going to be for a while, unless I give up sleep which, as a reformed insomniac, I won’t do.
So, along those lines, here’s something that jumped out at me this week. Something I haven’t quite had time enough to explore as I would like. On Thursday, there were three brief news reports in my paper, each about prison. One, was about Lori Berenson, a woman my age who was put in prison in Peru thirteen years ago after a trial before hooded judges. At the time, she was associating with members of the violent revolutionary group MRTA and was charged with being a leader of the group and therefore a traitor. I’ve watched her story through the years, and even read a book about her written by her mom. I always related to Lori in a way, probably because we are the same age, and because around the time she was arrested, I had many friends who were working for justice for poor people in Latin America. The most recent news? She had a baby in prison.
The second story was about a message found in a bottle buried underground in Poland. In Auschwitz to be precise. The message was written on material torn from a cement bag by six prisoners of Auschwitz who, in 1944, were forced to work building a bunker for the German military. The prisoners were sure they were going to die in the camp and wanted to leave something of themselves behind, so they wrote their names and numbers on the material. Several of them survived the camps, a couple are still alive. You can read about them here.
The third brief was about Roxana Saberi, the American-Iranian reporter who was arrested in Tehran in January and has been in prison since. She is a freelance reporter who works for NPR and the BBC among other outlets, and in a one-hour trial held behind closed doors she was charged with spying for the U.S. The report was about her decision to stop a hunger strike because of health reasons.
What was stirred in me by these stories was an awareness of a paradox of prison life, which is that in prison, life simultaneously stops and keeps going. I have a friend who was a political prisoner in Turkey for a decade. She was arrested when she was 18 and released when she was 28. During those ten years, she was all but completely cut off from the outside world and her life as she knew it simply stopped. Her university years, stopped. A career, nonexistent. Yet, within prison, a strange and usually horrible life went on, and that was what I was reminded of by these three stories.
And that’s that. I’d like to have more to say about it, but I can’t quite get my head focused enough to corral my thoughts into coherence. Maybe another day.
In the meantime, I’ll note that Roxana Saberi’s appeal trial is scheduled for tomorrow. Oh, how I hope that it will go in her favor and that soon she will be free to start her life again. What a glorious mother’s day gift that would be for her mom.
August Dispatch
While the hobbit naps, I type. It’s been many weeks since I posted anything to the site and even now I don’t have much to add. I try to write, I do, but most often I end up reading instead. I figure this has to be good in long run. After all, “Read everything” is age-old advice for aspiring writers. But dare I admit here that I don’t even feel like an aspiring writer any more? I feel like a mom, a woman, a human being. An observer of nature – this morning, for example, I watched as my mom’s cat pawed and pawed at the baby squirrel she’d caught. The poor little squirrel was dying slowly, burrowing its head into a pile of fallen leaves, while the cat just kept poking at it – and a consumer of food, the written word, red wine and the Olympics. I just visited the blog sites of several writer friends and even as I felt proud of them and longed for their company, I felt 100% like a nonwriter. Funny thing is though, I felt only moderately upset by this. Mostly I didn’t really care. I like my life at the moment. I’m doing the best I can to participate in the world. I laugh more with the hobbit than I’ve ever laughed in my life. Russia and Georgia are at war, but what can I do about it? I mean, just the other night I saw George Bush and Vladimir Putin sitting three seats away from each other at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, laughing it up together. Surely, if the problem was going to be solved quickly, they could have solved it. No?
But I digress. I just wanted to log in and say hello to anyone who still takes time to visit the site. (blog stats reveal that just yesterday two nice people stopped by) I wanted to say I think about writing all the time and even have a few ideas, I’m just not in a position to compose at the moment. I think my point of view is still a little blurry and my time too limited to filter anything but the essential. The light where I am is so different from the light in London, the horizon so far away, the happenings so new to me. I’d like to write about rural life but I’m not going to be living rurally much longer. In a few weeks I’ll be relocating to San Francisco and maybe then I’ll have more to say. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read, I can report that The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon is one darned good and powerful piece of literature.
Seeking: Point-of-View
Mid-thirties, good sense of humor, creative, compassionate, reasonably sure of her place in the world……….
Ho, hum. I had intended to write about my last days in London right up to the morning of my departure. Unfortunately, darn it, life got in the way. Packing took time. Saying goodbyes took time. Sleeping, eating – these thing still had to be done – and, as always, the little hobbit needed looking after. After all, it was not as if the little guy had a clue what it meant to be moving and was sitting around encouraging me to make notes on our life so he could read them when he grows up. No, no. I mean, in the first place, he still doesn’t speak English. But more important, as far as the hobbit was concerned, in those last days, life was going on as it always had. He had stuff to do, and as he was still lacking in the ability to do most of that stuff for very long without falling on his face or into a fit of frustration, he needed my help in doing it.
Now here we are in our new, temporary location in sunny, rural California. We are staying at my parents’ house, which used to be my grandparents’ house. These are my grandparents who used to be in the ranching business, and who have been succeeded in the business by my brother, who lives down the road with his family. A little farther down the road from them is the barn. At the barn are the horses, and the saddles (plus the reins, the ropes, the brushes, the rats, the cats, the bats, etc, etc) as well as the corral where, as a child, I was taught by my grandfather how to climb up onto a fence and onto a horse.
My surroundings could hardly be more different from London. In front of me is a yellow-brown hilly horizon that looks very much like the paw of a giant lion (not that I’ve ever seen a lion, giant or otherwise). The cultivated fields in the valley between the paw and me are alternately green and brown and uniformly rectangular. There’s a two-lane highway out there, too. Highway 156, running east and west, between San Juan Bautista (my temporary home town) and Hollister – populations 1,744 and 35,690, respectively.
Given all this difference, and beauty, you might think I’d be bursting with energy to write. Unfortunately, the fact is just sitting here at the computer is requiring great effort. It’s been three weeks since we arrived, and in that time I’ve written next to nothing. This is not for lack of effort I’ll say in my defense. Probably every other day I’ve tried in some way to put thoughts on paper or on screen. But all I’ve managed is a lot of false starts, a few quasi-compelling titles and some scribbles that are about as comprehensible as the ones the hobbit has taken to making on just about any surface he can find. (The most recent victim = the edge of the tub in my bathroom. Doh!)
Wanting to make some lemonade out of these writing lemons, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about this particular block and its possible causes. I’ve stared out at the lion’s paw from the bench on my parents’ deck, sat behind the wheel of the car in various strip-mall parking lots, let half my brain go a’wandering while the hobbit and I strolled through what little there is of San Juan, and lo and behold, after all that thinking, I believe I can safely say I’ve got some lemonade. In other words, I’ve realized what the problem is and the problem is this: I’ve lost my point-of-view, darn it. I’ve become like one of those winter-scene shake toys after it’s been shaken. My identity has been undone and all the little bits of me are colliding with each other, causing confusion. I’m a mom living with my parents in the place where I spent my childhood summers. I’m a sister trying to catch up with siblings who have been living their day-to-day lives without me for four and a half years. I’m a loner who’s suddenly surrounded by people. I’m a writer who’s not writing. I’m a city kid living in the country. A Californian who actually enjoyed the London weather. I’m a mess, really. A right disaster. Yikes.
In writing circles, particularly fiction writing circles, we spend a lot of time talking about point-of-view. We usually refer to it as “POV,” and we do things like question a writer’s chosen POV, find fault with her sloppy POV shifts or his inconsistent POV. We talk about omniscient POV, first-person POV, third person distant, third person close. I’ve talked about these things. Often, confidently, perhaps even pedantically. But, honestly, it is only in the last few weeks that I’ve really begun to understand, I mean REALLY understand, the significance and the power of POV, because it’s been in my life, not in my stories, that my POV has been murky. This has been no exercise. This has been day after day of waking up and not knowing what to do other than look after the hobbit. Afternoon after afternoon of feeling lost. Evening after evening of looking back over my day and wondering how I managed to do so little and remember even less. I’ve come to understand that a clear point-of-view is no less important for an ordinary person trying to live a life as for a narrator trying to tell a story. Just as it is impossible to tell a good story if you’re not sure of your take on the events, it is impossible to feel fully engaged in life if you are not sure of how you relate to the world around you. If your identity is in bits. If you feel more liquid than solid. Truth be told, I remember feeling this way when I moved to London. I remember a day when I was asked to sign for a credit card transaction and could not for the life of me remember how to sign my name. No exaggeration. I was paralyzed. I had lost a sense of who I was, of where I began and where I ended. I was a blur to myself then and I’m a blur to myself now.
The good news for me is that in realizing this, I discovered my current point of view, and in discovering it, I was able to write this little bit. Thank goodness.
Last Days
Friday, 25 April, 8:34pm. I don’t know about you, but I have difficulty describing the sky. Especially if you deprive me of the word “beautiful.” For example, right this moment, the sky outside my window is beautiful, but that word alone doesn’t tell you anything about its softness or the calming effect of the particular shades of blue and purple I’m seeing. Nor does it say anything about the fact that right now, the sky outside my window is made more attractive by the old chestnut tree that stretches elegantly between my window and the sky. The whole scene is deeply comforting. The tree is silhouetted. It looks navy blue. And beyond the tree stand my neighbor’s houses, looking cozy, with a few windows lit up by lamplight here and there.
All of these details seem especially important right now, since all around me, on the floor inside my window, are piles and piles of possessions waiting to be packed. I’m leaving London in a few days. After living here almost five years, having a baby here, getting a master’s degree here, getting to know London and Londoners, mastering the Tube, toughening up – I’m heading home, to family and the familiar. I’d say it is hard to believe, but it’s not. It is time to go, and going home feels right. What I find hard to believe however, is the fact that in a few days time, London will no longer be where I live. That this physical environment that surrounds me right now will, in a matter of weeks, be nothing more than part of a set of vague memories. An emotional touchstone, to be sure, and permanently part of the being I call “I”. But suddenly part of my past.
Saturday, 26 April, 11:10am. The hobbit slept late this morning, which means that I slept late, which means that, instead of waking in response to the sounds of a hungry hobbit, I was able to ease from sleep listening to the sounds of the neighbors playing football with their kids out back, of birds chirping and a cat meowing. The sun was high. The sky was a washed-out shade of light blue. The tree outside my window was the color of dried mud – green-brown up where the light hit it, slate in the shadows.
I was glad for all this, and I lingered in the bed, again aware that my days in this flat are numbered. I was glad, too, when, after the hobbit finished his breakfast, the hobbit and the husband and I stood at the window together to do a little neighbor-gazing. In one yard, parents and children were busy setting up for a birthday party or baby shower, we couldn’t decide which. In another, a neighbor we call Mr. Nick was playing with his boys and sipping some hot drink from a tall Starbucks-issued cup. In a third, the shades were pulled on the upper windows where the new baby sleeps. We figured she was napping. In a fourth, we saw no people, inside or out. Just a bursting-with-color spring garden. As we stood there making our guesses, the husband and I, the hobbit babbled and babbled and tapped on the window. And the birds chirped.
For breakfast, I had Lucky Charms, which is ridiculous, because soon I’ll be in America, where I can buy Lucky Charms at a tiny fraction of the price they go for here. But the husband bought them for me the other day for a treat, because I love Lucky Charms. They are hard to find here in London and throughout our time here they’ve provided a taste of home. Silly, I know, but there you have it. Probably I should have had a big fry up, with black pudding and sausages, baked beans, grilled tomahtoes. But the Lucky Charms were nice. And the milk was delicious, and packed in a sensibly sized container. I’m not looking forward to the milk in the U.S. It just doesn’t taste as good. And it comes in such shockingly large jugs and boxes. The first time I went home after being in England a while, I was so stupid in supermarkets I really shouldn’t have been allowed to go on my own. There was so much of everything and everything was so HUGE. I remember my mom sent me to buy a few items one evening and when I returned over an hour later she looked at her watch and asked with shock in her voice where on earth I had been.
Focused on Fiction
This Is A Hard Hat Area
Sorry, had another story deadline today so blog is on back burner. With any luck, that means the post will be that much more interesting and subtle when it’s finished. Should be up tomorrow or Sunday.
Until then, cheers.
Otherwise Occupied
I suppose this is another one of those weeks in which things would have turned out different if I’d had a boss breathing down my neck. Instead, all is still up to me, so things have turned out just as they have. In other words, I’ve not got much for the blog this week, since I spent most of it finishing a draft of a short story I was due to submit to my writing group for feedback. It was the first fiction writing I’ve done since boxing up my novel, and challenging though it was in moments, overall, doing the work was a pure delight. I was so happy to escape into story land and forget the world around me, with all its muddiness and murkiness, its cruelties and confusion. I was so happy passing hours wandering through a world of my own creation, and hanging out with characters who are caring and funny and kind, and perhaps most satisfying of all, refining and refining again my word and phrasing choices. I really do love writing. It is incredibly lonely at times, and in material terms, desperately unrewarding; but, more than any other activity I have ever undertaken, writing offers me chances to feel truly free, transcendentally focused, and, from my fingertips to my innermost being, at peace. The only other activities that come close to affecting me this way are reading beautifully written stories and spending time with the Hobbit, who, thankfully, is still too tiny to be affected by life’s muddiness etc.
So, with any luck, the group’s feedback will enable me to put the final touches on the story and post it here soon. In the meantime, I’m going to spend a little time reading, a lot of time with the lovable Hobbit, and whatever time there is leftover doing my best to live well. Thanks for stopping by. Sorry to have been so brief.
When All Else Fails, Try Liszt
Excuses, excuses.
I missed my deadline last Friday. Since then, I’ve been wishing I had a real job; a job in which my deadlines aren’t self-imposed but boss-imposed; in which people talk about “incentivizing” other people, like me for example. I’ve been in a just give me a penny or two for my trouble and I won’t miss a deadline come Hell or high water kind of mood, yet here I am, boss-less, paycheck-less, and on the wrong end of one o’clock on the Wednesday following the Friday when I missed my deadline in the first place. And I’ve got nothing polished to post. What a bummer.
Actually, as I think about it, I realize that what I really want are institutionally-sanctioned sick days and a number I can use to call in sick. Because that’s what I have been. Sick. The hobbit and I both. I, with God only knows what horrid thing, and the hobbit, with whatever I’ve got plus that favorite of contagious childhood illnesses, the chicken pox (poor little creature).
It all started a week ago, when I was trying to go to sleep early, because the hobbit wakes up early and the husband was away so I had no one to spell me. I was reading, I was happy, it wasn’t even nine thirty. But then some devious little something began to tickle my throat, and though the resulting cough was weak and dry, it was persistent and it caused me a whole lot of trouble in getting to sleep. Meanwhile, the hobbit snoozed, and at six he was up and ready for First Breakfast. Ouch.
Things went only downhill from there, as the cough got worse and my lungs felt like they were caught between the jaws of a vise, a headache kicked in, and my temperature rose and rose. All this plus the hobbit still needed to be fed and looked after, and the husband was still away. Then the hobbit began to cough, the hobbit’s temperature rose, and the first spots appeared. Day blurred into night and night into day again, almost entirely without notice, since the sky outside our windows was just one long stretch of time-indeterminate gray. Also it was raining. And the wind was rattling the windows in such a way as to make us want to turn our backs on the whole mess Nature was making anyway.
By Sunday afternoon, languor was the best way to describe our state. We were lying on the sofa, the hobbit and I, coughing in turns, too tired to talk, too feverish to do anything really. The hobbit was struggling to find a comfortable way to lie with his head on my stomach, and moaning (by this point I had nicknamed him Moanie), while I was rubbing his back, half-watching him and half-staring out at the slate-colored four o’clock sky. I was thinking he was cute. I was thinking I was glad I still had the presence of mind to cherish this moment with him. I was thinking about this blog. Thinking, If I could get to the computer, what would I write?
“Write what you know” is a piece of advice young writers are given. Its origins are unknown to me. Regardless, it is a piece of advice I rebelled against for a long time, believing that it was unnecessarily confining and anti-imagination. These days however, I respect the advice the way some Greeks respected the utterances of oracles. It sounds simple, but in practice, “write what you know” requires you to know what you know, and this, I have come to see, is no simple matter. It is a lifetime’s project, since every minute one is alive adds to or alters, deepens or illuminates what one knows. In other words, we all know a lot about a lot, and that lot just keeps expanding. Some of it we care about more than the rest. Some of it we care about on Monday and barely remember on Tuesday afternoon. This is one of the great challenges of writing: figuring out what you know, then what you care about, then sustaining the caring long enough to finish the piece you start.
So, back to Sunday and my little moaner and me. While I started writing a blog article in my mind, little Moanie kept tossing and turning on my tum, trying to find a way into sleep. He wasn’t getting anywhere, so I reined in my writing mind and did what I often do when he’s falling apart and I’m too tired to actively entertain him. I announced that we were having a ring tone dance party.
Ring tone dance party, you say? Oh yes, I say. And what a fine way it is to entertain a baby. Just get yourself to the ring tone menu of your mobile phone, scroll through the options, and get your groove on. Usually the hobbit goes for the pulsing, bumping, fast-paced electronica-based tones, so I started with those. But poor little Moanie was in no mood to boogie, so I kept scrolling, trying, for example, to make him laugh with “Ding dong”, to remind him of visiting his grandmother’s house by the river with “Bullfrog”. He made an effort to look interested, but interested was not what he seemed. Then, I came across “Liszt” and we were done. He stopped tossing, turning, squirming and moaning, lay his head on my stomach so he was facing the window, and closed his eyes. Romantic piano music was apparently just what he needed. To be honest, it did it for me, too. So, when the ring tone had played out, I played it again. And again, and again. Until the hobbit fell asleep and my writing mind was free again to wander.
