11 VII 2002 - 22:54 - verba21

I haven't been online much recently. In fact, I shouldn't be online right now -- I have a test in my German class tomorrow, and I need to study and fill out the rest of my workbook. I think, however, that if I don't get moving on the most recent Alchera project, I'll never get it done. And so.

I think this entry will try to tackle two options at once, so here's the assignment:

OPTION NO. ONE: What are your fears? What fears have you overcome and how did you do it? Why have you been unable or chosen not to overcome the fears that are still with you? What is it about fear that makes you want to keep it around? Lastly, how have your fears affected the way you view fear in itself?

OPTION NO. TWO: How do you view your writing? Do you journal and/or blog? Do you write poetry or prose? What are your views on the art of writing, from journaling to writing poetry to crafting prose? What type of role does writing play in your life? What writers have influenced you to keep going when you felt like giving up?

Let's go.

Looking at this most recent project, I began with option two, the only one that really got any reaction from me when I first looked at it. I thought it might be nice to write a poem of sorts about it, but after trying for a bit, this is what I came up with:

scraplets of thought in dactylic hexameter clutter my notebooks
vying for time and expansion: here in my fragmented writings
hangs my existence, product which (powerful) drives off my fear of
not-being: void. At night I dream young men's dreams in the freest of free verse;
waking, write the structureless pap that i claim as my birthing.

Here, what my writing accomplishes I cannot, bound by shyness,
hobbled by age, which no one quite listens to if it's too little
for this world. I say what it seems should be said and then hide it,
storing foolishness lest a more sober day should destroy it.
I, conservator, do give thought to the appearance of balance
even if only so that it may finally find a destruction.

Meter of vowels to meter of stress, the change is imperfect.
All change is, but therein its blessing, hope of the better.
Nonnative meter for immigrant youth, in dactyls and spondees
(some of those trochees) bleeds my pen through Latin, and previous,
Greek. To sketch me thus clumsily might find a final name, hubris

and I stopped, because quite frankly, it was about as terrible as most of what I write is, and if I were to take the time to go back and fix everything wrong with it and increase further the proportion of dactyls, which is necessary for light dactylic hexameter, it would be December before I could think about posting it. Also, I had chosen the wrong meter; I'm most familiar with dactylic hexameter, thanks to a course in the Aeneid, but I describe no epic hero, only myself, and should therefore rightfully use a lyric meter. Something like sapphics or hendecasyllable would have been more suited to my purpose.

However, I did get to work 'dactylic hexameter' into a poem of the same meter, which is nice, because the rhythmical accent of that phrase is (when I hear it in my head) a double dactyl with a spondee as its head -- not so suited as the word 'hendecasyllable,' but that is a labor for another time.

Rather more succintly, then, I'd best say that my writing lacks the skill and effort I know I should be putting into it if I want it to be worthy of even my own consideration. Being grammatical is never quite enough, and it's the writers whose prose and poetry sings, in any language, that alternately drive me into an envious frenzy and urge me on. In case you haven't noticed it, I tend generally to dislike my writing, most of which follows the general summary: a chimaerical failure of a poem that owes much more to prose than it does anything else.

The act of writing, however, allows me to explore the possibilities inherent in who I am and what I might become. Most of the time, I'll find a month-old poem in a drawer and be disgusted -- I cast fragments off like refuse -- but also part of this general exploration is this journal, which has a (generally shorter) counterpart on Livejournal. So much of the reason I feel I fail in writing, despite that through it I'm able to figure out just what I feel at a given moment, is that writing, to me, is about opening to the possibilities of a language and its euphonies, about recognizing the beauty in what shades of meaning a tongue has developed, and not always so bound to meaning. (I've said this before, and people have referred me to James Joyce -- but I find that for me, now, the inventiveness overwhelms meaning. I haven't said this is a bad thing, but I will say that I incline towards a balance of the two.)

The act of writing also allows me to shape and assume an identity. Every word I type and write is in English and fixes me more firmly in the Anglophone culture of the United States, which allows me the freedom to write about my own feelings and how having the background of another culture to carry with me can be quite so alienating. Being fixed in a culture also allows me to have a place to grow from, that I might explore more securely everything else of me.

Having a pen gives me the voice that I can never seem to raise in response to the things that put the taste of bile in my mouth; it's always so much easier for me to write to someone than it is for me to speak to him.

The types of writers that urge me on are therefore the ones that seem to use language beautifully; the ones who in epic speak of honor and the coming glory of Rome but manage also to convey that there is no victor in war, that it is always the young who die; the ones who with reason make their argument; the ones who master the sketch -- of themselves, of a land -- in every poem.

And because I suspect I will always be a student at heart, I cannot resist an Eco, a Borges, a Calvino, for what he accomplishes with his text, and wish only that I could read the original language of each book.

Most of my fears -- of dogs, of spiders, of dead flies, of crowds -- aren't so much fears as extreme reluctance to come in contact with them. The solution is generally simple: move to the other side of the street, don't go to the Castro for Halloween, use a vacuum cleaner or a jar to get that dead fly out. They belong to the world of the irrational: so, too, my former fear of the dark (cured by spending a week in a room where it was either complete darkness at night or the glare of the streetlight in my eyes; I chose the darkness) and of the water (cured by swimming lessons). Fears of this sort don't help me, but they don't hurt me so much, and it's generally easy to avoid or change situations where they'd be a problem (I may, however, want to rethink that lucrative career in crowd control I had been considering.) Subways are an entirely different matter; if I focus on getting where I want to go during rush hour, the fact that I'm 'as close as I can get to other people short of adultery,' as a local columnist put it, I can ignore the crowd. With such a relative balance worked out, I can afford to let these fears lie for a while.

Next we come to those fears which contribute to those qualities of mine which other people praise: the fear of suddenly not being able to learn anything new, the fear of, in an instant, forgetting everything I ever knew, and the fear of being completely alone.

This last one I'll have to qualify for a moment. It's not that I want a full social life -- I enjoy silence for itself, and small spaces (so no mansions for me, eh) -- but rather the thought that there will be no one to close my eyes for me after I'm dead, and that in life, I will have no one to laugh with. This isn't a rational thing -- I have a few friends and could be quite content having known them -- but it's the suspicion that I'm entirely lacking in the social graces that urges this particular fear on.

Both of the fears which got no explanation above have to do with learning; that I am a creature with the ability to learn, especially where languages are concerned, is so bound with my identity, both personal and familial -- my mother's line is from a long tradition a line of scholars -- that the thought of suddenly not being good at something so important to me is profoundly unsettling. The thought also of having my hands cut off, being deafened, being blinded -- all of these inspire in me a sudden need to curl into the fetal position and wish very hard that the thought would just go away.

But I live with these fears, because they must contribute to the vigor with which I name the subjects I would like to learn, with which I go to class, because even if I find myself unworthy always, the converse of that is that I strive to improve myself always, that some day (as far as gatsby's green light?) I might be found in my own reckoning worthy. Fear is so much a potent driving force that I'm not sure I'd be able to manage without it preying on the back of my mind.

The last category of fear is incapacitating fear, and under this falls the fact (not so much a fear, but I'll talk about it anyway) that I'm incredibly piss-shy. It wasn't always this bad; I used to be fine if only I could get a stall. But now, the mere presence of someone else in the room renders me unable to do anything, and it seems that my bladder muscles, given the choice between gradual kidney failure and sensible release, go with gradual kidney failure. Only absolute necessity -- for instance, feeling as if I'm about to explode combined with having to sit through the next three hours of an opera afterwards -- can convince my bladder to allow me to do much of anything.

You can probably see how this might pose a bit of a problem under normal circumstances. (The 'emergency' clause doesn't work all too often.)

But, you see, I don't understand this fear at all, don't understand what it does, how it acts, and why it's there. And so I can't begin to tackle it. One article a friend sent me said that taking a friend with me into the bathroom might help -- but, ah, my problem is that I make, quite generally, female friends, who could conceivably go with me into the bathroom, but it wouldn't be the best thing to do. (The first reason for that is the state of a bathroom in which boys have gone feral. It's not pretty, I tell you.) And if the bathroom were deserted enough for them to come in without incident, it would be deserted enough for me to have no problem.

Against this indefinite and disabling fear, I have no defense. But since none of my fears have really stemmed from a trauma (the closest I get to that is the dog who decided that my head would be a good place to make water -- I was sleeping on the floor), unlike a classmate of mine who nearly drowned and won't go near large bodies of water, I'm inclined to treat my fears as purely irrational constructs, meant to be conquered or to be used as tools.

Of course, telling myself this doesn't help me do it, and it definitely doesn't help me when I'm stuck in the bathroom.