Foodstuff Friday: muffins and the angels

Who knows why anything happens or doesn't. Sure, some things are certain, like if you drop a dime on the boss an angel develops a dangerous sounding cough; or rat out the mob you'll be dubbed "mousy" in Page Six. 

As to questions of greater import, however, like why I'm in bit of a winter blog-slump or if the sun at apogee is confident it's the best sun it can be, remain mysterious in an ageless, can't solve to got better things to worry about way.

Which brings us to muffins. A few years ago, I decided that in heaven there would be the best of ripe peaches, thin-crust pizza and muffins. I was more explicit in my reckoning with the Almighty, regarding mouth-wateringness, basil from hills of Tuscany, and moist though sugarlessness packed with fruit from the garden of good and evil.

It finally occurred to me that if heaven lives up to its rep, it will make available all foodstuffs according to our soon-to-be angelic desires. And if we lack desire, so be it. We won't miss it. Maybe.

A muffin is the baked equivalent of an apple. It is transportable, always tasty, a full meal if need be.  And really that's all I have to say, today, about muffins, about foodstuffs.  I was reminded of angels and Rilke a few minutes ago and so I post one of his poems, hot off the web, don't even know who translated. 

Ignorant Before the Heavens of my Life

Ignorant before the heavens of my life,
I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness
of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still.
As if I didn't exist. Do I have any
share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with
their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow
change with their changes? Let me put aside
every desire, every relationship
except this one, so that my heart grows used to
its farthest spaces. Better that it live
fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than
as if protected, soothed by what is near.
_______________
Rainier Maria Rilke

Fiction and Frustration: The writing process, unemployment, e-mails.

Roman Verostko "Genesis"

On the one hand, my friends, I am not getting enough freelance work and am scared about my future plans. Well, there is only one plan right now, to hold onto my rent-stabilized apartment. So I look for work but am seduced--or allow myself, or pretend nothing is going to work out so I might as well. . .--by writing.

Case in point:  Monday I worked in an ad agency from two to ten (afternoon to evening), copyediting and proofreading. The flow was steady. I earned my money and return tomorrow, Friday. In between?

Tuesday morning I did the usual coffee drinking, NPR listening, moments of thoughtfulness, and started to "feel," for me a dangerous activity AT TIMES. This kind of "feeling," depressive, was the enemy for years.  I thought it couldn't be battled.

A friend of mine once  joked with me that we could have written a novel or two (or a year's worth of stand-up routines in her case) in the time we spent having feelings.

Tuesday as feelings descended I thought of a different friend, T. A month ago I realized I'd fallen back on my lazy non-writing ways and asked T. if I could email every day, for a while, to report. Five minutes. Two hours. Edited. Wrote. Like that. T.'s a good, as in goooood, writer, with a day job and a nice flow of output.

Soon after I email T. a responsive note appears with his output for the day. I hadn't planned on that part of the exchange, initially, and was, at first, only begrudgingly willing (or able) to read of T.'s work. I did the emails for a month last year with another writer who merely responded: Great work!

More and more, however, I knew T.'s output to be inspiration. On Tuesday when I was headed for that morass of depressive nihilistic thinking, I remembered T. Did I want to email "no work, I had to flagellate"? 

So I wrote a draft of a new story on Tuesday. I was at it (maniacally so) for five hours. I haven't yet taken a look at what I wrote--the steam of intensity is still too hot to allow approach--but whatever I wrote needed expression if only so it could be cleared and another story written. (Not saying it isn't good--I've written three new short stories this year and I'm happy with all three.) Just saying, well, who knows.

Time off, as in unemployed, makes my writing richer. Not being alone with my writing helps; definitely helps.  (I'm not a workshop person.) The balance between work and writing remains unsteady.

In Praise of the Laptop Dancer: writing and loneliness

When I was in grad. school I asked a professor to help me work with loneliness, a curse on writers or certainly on this writer. I felt pain when I was alone and concentrating, waiting for creativity to put me in a necessary trance. Writing fiction eats hours like crumbs, days like appetizers, years as if they were a first course, the main one being Your Life. In an earlier blog I mentioned the huge and ridiculous stretches I’d devote to book reviews, as if they were the ultimate Elizabeth Bishop sonnet. Something was amiss, friends.

The prof. said she could help but we never returned to the topic. I could have pressed but didn’t; and clearly all manner of this-es and that’s-es barnacled my psyche.

Could be the ability to live with, even love, loneliness may be one of the self-selecting factors for being a writer; if you can’t stand the heat step away from your typewriter, to paraphrase. Or not every writer feels what I did. All sorts of authors happily tell you their characters keep them company. When I hear that I generally think they’re in denial. Even if so, so what. I tend to overlook denial’s benefit, the ability to carry on despite real hardship or personal angst. Certainly booze and drugs, fabled buddies of some artists, have given a hands-up to denial.

I am a baby boomer and like my generational peers fascinated by my process, the every feeling of Sarah Sarai, and, like or unlike my fellow Children of the Corn of the 70s, unable to step away from introspection. So denial was no aid to me (not to say it hasn’t helped me avoid other things).

Since transformation is the greatest healer I know, the True Philosopher’s Stone being one that helps us change hate to, if not love, then acceptance or dispassion, distance, equilibrium, the ultimate goal might have been to transform my great aching loneliness, which bespoke of so much more than that I was a writer, to acceptance, or something spiritual.

H.L. Mencken wrote, “The writing profession is reeking with this loneliness. All our lives we spend in discoursing with ourselves. . . . The loneliest people in the world we writers are. Except that, while we are conversing and laughing with ourselves, we manage to shed our loneliness . . . to scatter it as we go along. (What a Life!)

Shed loneliness? Loofah it, exfoliate, metamorph?

It is possible and I’ll give you my routine, how I learned to live with necessary aloneness.

One major aid has been to work in public. As if helped me to read Henry James novels in the college cafeteria, shutting out the noise made me concentrate, it helps to work in cafes. But I couldn’t do that until I had a laptop, and I didn’t have that until roughly two years ago. SUCH a long time to be without.

But now I’m with laptop. When it failed I got a notebook, same thing, smaller screen. If that fails, I swear I’d get write on a Blackberry. I haven’t healed myself of discomfort with loneliness or identifying that as what I'm feeling (I'm a little more sophistication than I'm letting on but my psychological innards on the table won't help you or anyone). I’ve learned to work with myself. Yes, I still write at home and do much editing at home. Since I borrow, so to speak, Internet connection, piggyback, I can justify buying coffees and the occasional bagel.

This isn’t the ultimate essay on writers and loneliness or the ultimate solution. It’s mine and for now it’s working. I still need to find an agent for my novel The To-Do List Manifesto. I need to spend not much time at all finishing other fiction. I swear I am impetus-impaired. I am one lazy writer but at least no longer alone. The kids at my coffee house of choice know me, know what I’m doing. It helps. I’ll take it.