Freedom of Expression

I envy young children.  This morning in church, a little girl in front of me had a cough.  I could see her out of the corner of my eye—she was curled in her mother’s lap, warm, comfortable…and yet she started to cry after coughing twice, as if that were the pinnacle of all misery.

How freeing, I thought.  How nice to be able to express yourself utterly without thought for whether it might embarrass or discomfort someone else.  To cry when you’re sad, to laugh when you’re happy, and to do so as loudly and as long as you like, to never worry that someone else might think your feelings foolish…it sounds incredible to me.

Society today teaches us at a very early age to be polite, to always consider others before we speak or act.  Some of us learn that lesson better than others; some of us, too well.  Politeness, consideration, restraint—these are wonderful things.  But there is something to be said for the freedom to express yourself exactly as you like.  I think that the urge to do this is what makes a creative being, and when one finds a way to do it without offending others (much), that is what makes an artist.

Poetry: Asking the Impossible Question

I don’t know what poetry is.  Speaking in terms of literature, it’s relatively simple.  The Oxford Dictionary calls a poem, “a metrical composition, usually concerned with feeling or imaginative description.”  A rather dry description, but accurate all the time.  Poetry is words built with rhythm, concerned with sound and feeling and imagery. 

But there’s so much more to it than that.  I don’t consider myself a poet, and yet sometimes I feel the words sliding through my mind like snakes, twisting restlessly.  Taking off my makeup after work, I think of my eyelashes melting, shifting shadows and then gone, leaving red shadows of weariness.  I look at a woman as I’m setting down her meal and decide she has a meek mouth, but strength in her bent fingers.  Poetry moves through me, a spark in the brain, a weakness in my limbs, stronger when it’s been a month or two since last I put my thoughts to the page in this way.  For others, those who define themselves by poetry, it must be a compulsion, the only way they can understand the world.

What is poetry?  What is it in us that drives us to anguish, to agony, if we can’t describe the world as it needs to be described?  I don’t know if I want to know the answer.  The power of poetry is in the seeking, finding the wrong words, but just the right wrong words—the providential mistake.  The power of poetry is in the almost knowing.

Long Road Home

I want to talk about roads today.  We don’t really spend very much time thinking about them, do we?  But they’re everywhere.  Anywhere you need to go, there will be a road to get you there, whether it’s a ten-lane interstate, or a gravel road that may or may not drive through a creek.

The business of roads has to be enormous.  First there’s building them, which can take years of literally blasting the way through the land.  Then there’s maintenance, including cleaning up roadkill, removing trees, fallen power lines, and gas and oil spills, salting in the winter, and making repairs.  Periodically roads have to be torn up and repaved.  Toll booths have to be manned, police have to patrol, signs have to be manufactured and put up—the point is, thousands of people go to work every day to make sure that the rest of us can get where we’re going with a minimum of inconvenience.

I’ve been thinking about this because for the past few days, my road has been under construction.  Now often this is a source of annoyance, especially when the workers take months to do what should take weeks.  But I’ve been paying attention, and I’ve noticed that every day there’s progress.  The road is being repaved (which is kind of cool to watch, honestly) and so it requires the road to go to one-lane for a while.  When I drove out, I noted where they were; on the way back an hour later, I noticed that people were driving on the section which had just been laid down, and the workers had moved on.  I’m impressed, aren’t you?  It was forty-seven degrees today, as cold as it’s been so far this year.  It may not sound terribly cold, but when you have to stand out in it all day, it’s pretty chilly.  And yet things were getting done. 

So here’s a little shout-out to everyone who helps lay down the path for us.  To those who lay down the path, who connect A and B and perform the work that isn’t noticed unless it’s done poorly…thanks.

Writer's War

Last week, I made a very unfortunate discovery.  I was walking to my car on the way out of work, and playing with my keys as I went (because how can you help but toy with a ring of keys in your hand?).  And somewhere between the restaurant and my car, I realized that there was something wrong.  I looked down at my keys, wondering why they felt so light.  Then I realized what it was, and my heart sank right down to hang out with my stomach.

Let me describe my keys to you as they should be.  There are four keys on my key ring: my house key, mailbox key, car key, and the key to a neighbor’s house, which I use when I go over to play her piano.  I have a rubber loop key ring which I use to hang them from a hook by my door, and of course the remote to lock and unlock my car.  All of these hang on a tiny caribiner, a clasp that lets me hook the keys to my purse when I’m away from home.  And there should be a pair of black, squarish flash drives on a separate ring.  But there aren’t.  Sometime in the past week or so, the flash drives were just so balanced on the caribiner that when I opened it to hook or unhook my keys from my purse, they made a bid for freedom.  I never heard them fall, and I didn’t notice they were gone for I don’t know how long.

This may not seem like such a terrible thing, and maybe it wasn’t.  But those flash drives were more than just plastic and software.  On them was stored the entire contents of my computer, the backups to all of my files.  Some of those files may be gone forever.  I haven’t had time to assess the full damage caused by the loss of the drives, but I know that I lost some things.

Such a thing a few years ago would have devastated me.  The loss of my precious work?  My ideas and my emotions, stored away, lost forever?  But I met the disappearance of my flash drives with a kind of dismayed resignation that surprised even me.  Where are the tears? I wondered.  Why am I not more upset about this?

The fact is that this has happened to me before—many times, I think I can say now.  The first time, I was fourteen or so, and I had been working on my first novel series.  I was so excited about it.  I’d made notes, drawn maps, written poems for the world I created.  I had one novel finished and another two-thirds done.  I was so proud of it.  Then our family computer crashed.  I had no back-ups, and the work was lost.  All that time, all that energy, wasted.  I cried for hours.  Since then it’s happened again: when my own laptop crashed in my sophomore year of college and just this year in January, and when a flash drive died on me and the files on it could not be saved. 

I thought I’d learned from this.  The two flash drives were updated (somewhat) regularly, and I kept them with me always.  I felt secure with them.  But this time the failure was human, not technological, and my files were gone again.

Finally now, I view this with acceptance.  It’s a sort of battle I’m fighting, struggling to preserve my stories, my thoughts and feelings.  These things are supposed to fade—it’s what they do, making room for the new.  And for writers these days, the loss of our work is a risk we always have to take.  Even paper can be soaked, torn, burned, lost.  What part of our work is visible is nothing but a record of our true calling, which is ethereal and transient.  If the record is lost, then the thoughts we wanted to preserve are long gone.

I’m still fighting the battle, of course.  I have new flash drives, new plans for greater care and security.  But I’m beginning to acknowledge that there will be casualties in the writer’s war.  My hope now is that my desire to write, my need to create, is never one of them.  

Obligatory Election Post

Whether or not they voted this week, I believe that every American with a pulse and the ability to speak has had something to say about this election.  I also believe that my heart is still beating and people could still understand me if I say “Enough already with this campaign &%*!”.  There is no one here to test that, which could lead me into a very interesting philosophical question, but that’s neither here nor there.

So I do have something to say about this election.  Don’t worry, I’ll make it quick.  What interests me is the actual act of voting.  This year was the first time I voted in person rather than by absentee ballot.  I went to the address given to me (several times) in the mail, a local middle school.  There I walked around following signs to come to the entrance.  Just outside, a gentleman handed me a sample Democratic ballot—and only a few steps beyond, another man handed me a sample Republican ballot.

It made me laugh.  How can people honestly think to influence anyone at that stage in the game?  By the time people walk into the building to vote, they know who they’re voting for.  If they didn’t, they might as well have stayed home, and I’m sure many people did for just that reason.  Yet there they were, the volunteers, braving the cold (well, it wasn’t that cold, but it wasn’t warm, either) to give it one last try.

I’ll come back to these volunteers later.  Inside the building (a gym, which reminded me that some things never change), I joined the curving line marked by caution tape and waited.  I was very glad that I’d brought a book along with me.  People were chatting idly, some about the election, others not.  Some people had brought their children.  I saw one woman leave the line early, as she couldn’t afford to wait; I heard her say she’d come back.  Despite the wait, the procedure went smoothly—at the front of the line, I showed my ID, received a ticket, and was shown to the first available booth.  The electronic ballot was self-explanatory and very quick.

All this made me think about what an enormous endeavor this must be.  Hold on, I’ll explain.  I’ve learned over the years that when events look effortless, they almost inevitably were not.  Events that run smoothly mean dozens—in this case thousands—of people working together towards the same goal of efficiency.  Those who designed the electronic voting booths, those who collect IDs, those who gather the information on voters, those who select the voting locations and notify voters where to go, those who tally the votes…it’s simply huge.  And yet after the campaign, voting is often just a relief, a thank-goodness-it’s-finally-over moment (at least it was for me).  But I would like to take  a moment to be thankful that voting is so very easy in our nation, and to appreciate the many, many people who make it so.

PS—when I left the building after voting, the same two volunteers handing out sample ballots were chatting and laughing with one another.  It was nice to see, after months of Republicans and Democrats at each other’s throats.  Our differing opinions don’t mean we can’t be friends.  Think about that for a while.

Photo credit: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/04/opinion/norden-voting-rights/index.html

Get To Work, Snowman Says

Yesterday was the first day of November, which isn’t any day particularly special, I suppose.  Unless you’re in the United States and you’re relieved that the end of this damn election is in sight.  Which I am.  But this is not why I marked the day.  The first of November began National Novel Writing Month, commonly referred to as NaNoWriMo.  And for the first time since I learned about it in 2008, I will be participating.

Now, you might say, But Eileen, you’re a writer.  Wouldn’t you have done it before?  And you would be right.  I should have taken part in this event long before now.  My craft is writing, and my medium is novels.  To teach myself how to write a novel in a month would have been very useful for my career and for my process.  And the very essence of NaNo is to help writers get work done, without worrying about editing.  Editing comes later—this month is for the pure flow of ideas onto paper.

The reason I haven’t done it before is because I believed I didn’t have time.  November was always the last full month of the semester, the time for pulling together final projects and thinking about studying for exams.  (I never actually did study.  Well, maybe once—it didn’t help.)  Added to that I had work and extracurriculars, and I always had to spend some time wishing it were December already.  So I didn’t set aside time to write.

But I’ve realized something—something that should have been obvious to me all along.  I’m always going to be busy.  This year I’m out of school, and I'm working thirty-five hours a week—more this week—and my free time is taken up with music and errands.  If I wait until I have time to write, I’ll be waiting years.  I might be waiting forever.  And I do need to write, in more than just snatched moments on my off days.  I need to make room for it in my life.

Therefore there is a note on my wall now that reads, “Did you write today?  No?  NO SLEEP” and in the corner of it, a snowman with drawn-on evil eyebrows laughs at me.  And I mean to enforce this law religiously.  At least 2,000 words a day, or the day isn’t over.  Because if I don’t write, I don’t have a right to call myself a writer, and if I’m not a writer, what am I?