Clutch
Something was/is/went (will go, can go?) wrong.
It took me a while to realize that something was wrong; I had gotten a handle on showing up to blog, and I had been so focused on overcoming that obstacle that the idea that it was not all clear sailing beyond did not want to sink in. So for a week I came to the library and sat in front of the computer and failed to write. Eventually I did realize that I was wasting my time.
The poet, the one who said that "unnamed poems are like unnamed children", whose name I still need to go look up- he also said that poets should read good poems for three hours every day, or they will exhaust their resources prematurely. At any rate, staring at the blinking cursor on the screen for sixty minutes straight was driving me batty. I felt that my clutch had disengaged; I was pressing down on the pedal quite hard, and my brain was screaming, but nothing was coming out again. I took a break, and went back to my beloved library and checked out
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, which I have been meaning to read for years.
Somewhere or other I picked up the presumption that
Catch-22 was satire of the style found in
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy; they do bear a very strong resemblance at times. Very slowly, though, the book revealed that it had more in common with Jonathan Swift's
A Modest Proposal. After reading so much Vonnegut in the past months, and absorbing his relentless criticism of the Vietnam Conflict by contrasting it with World War Two, the idea of a satire that in any way specifically criticized World War Two stunned me.
Catch-22 was excellent, confusing, hysterical, witty, too long, profound, and horrific.
Thanks to synchronisity, when I turned on the television for the only time all week and started surfing, I found the end of
Catch-22 playing on the AMC channel. The scene where Snowden reveals his secret had been filmed, and then the secret itself had been edited out by the Federal Communications Commision. The effect was quite like that at the end of the televised version of
Shawshank Redemption, in which Red says that Andy swam through a river and came out clean on the other side.
I felt better after reading the book; but for some reason I did not immediately go back to writing about my mother. Maybe one can concentrate on the subject of one's parent's history for only so long without going mad. Maybe I got distracted with learning how to prepare my taxes, or with the research paper that I have to turn in on Thursday.
Each time I go to the library I check out more books than I can possibly read, and end up returning most of them without doing so. When I picked up Catch-22, I got waylaid by the Science Fiction and Fantasy paperback rack, which happens every time I go to the library, and it would not let me pass until I took
On A Pale Horse. The book languished on top of one of the many stacks of things in my room for a while, unattended and uncared for like most of my library overflow, until one afternoon when I, on the rebound from
Catch-22's depressing, tainted love, seized it unawares and ravished it in one six-hour sitting. The book amused me.
The author of
On A Pale Horse, Piers Anthony, put an extended author's note at the end of the book which amounted to an extra chapter. It has some cute anecdotes, and a discussion of the writing process.
Piers Anthony claims to be the only writer he knows of which never has writer's block. He says that he has become such an overman through the use of his secret writing technique, which he described in detail and demonstrated. It consists, primarily, of continuing to write regardless of whether or not he can think of what to write next. He says that when he hits a rough spot, he just 'starts a bracket ', and begins freewriting until he feels ready to return to the text at hand. He says his brackets are filled mostly with notes on other writing projects, and other parts of whatever project the bracket is in.
[There has got to be something else I can start a sentence with besides 'He says'. I have just used that phrase three times in one paragraph. Argh. "He says he does this. He says blah blah blah. He says he is a great writer. He says his daughter is cute. He says he likes writing in the freezing cold in a log cabin with a typewriter. He says Magee's Fez exceeds the Fed's fleece regs." Something is dripping on my shoulder. Oh no, wait... it is okay. It is just my brain.]
Voila.
So the moral of the story is... wait a minute, I have not finished the story.
Well, okay, so I have finished the story. But I need to explain again about my perfectionism. For the umpteenth time.
I want to write this story elegantly, profoundly, and relentlessly. I want to be a machine. I want to crank out pamphlets until they bury the reality studio. I want to be able to publish my posts with the rhythm, grace, and punctuality of Cassius Clay's fists.
I do not know what really constitutes obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is one more disease which has been reduced to a buzzword, a scapegoat, an excuse, a label, and one more convenient ingratiating form of self-depreciation. I do not believe I am obsessive-compulsive. But if you believe that really, really, really wanting 'Mom, Part Two' to immediately follow 'Mom, Part One' is O.C., then feel free to think of me as such.
It is disheartening that progress so often appears to mean letting go.
So the moral of the story is that I can work on my thesised posts, but that when I get stuck I must go ahead and freewrite one, and come back to the thesised ones later, and hope that I can finish the thesised ones quickly enough that they still make some sense.
Anyway. The stickshift is in the first position; I am taking my foot off of the clutch.
May you have a bright shiny day today, or a dark velvet night tonight; whichever you find more appropriate.
