Tag: inspiration

Writing and movement

Once a week I take my tablet and head someplace at least an hour away from home to write. I will find a strange coffeehouse, or a park, or a museum. I will write at a table, on a bench, or sitting on the floor or ground. No matter how far I go, I try to write at least 1000 words, letting wherever I am seep into what I am writing—that café au lait, those trees, this painting.

Two Monets the National Gallery of Art

My students obsess over the idea of writer’s block, and having been away from my writing for years at a time, I can understand why. They see their relationship with their writer as a relationship between themselves and the void—the blank page or blank screen, waiting to be filled. And to be sure, there is a void. Before one writes it, nothing of what the writer sets down exists, not in that exact form. That is, of course, part of the thrill of writing. While there may well be a void, the writer fills it—as much as she or he can.

I disarm the fear in a number of ways. I write every day, whether I feel inspired or not. It is like sailing on the ocean: gale, steady wind, or little or no wind; the sails go up and progress is made. Some days are tedious, at least to begin; fortunately, I find that the act of writing can ignite vision. A friend of mine posted about “Static Writing”—how the grind of daily writing can feel stagnant and stagnating. I get that, and yet, I feel that in the creative endeavor, having a “static” process, one that is not bound by outcomes, but by the power of filling the void (It can never be filled! Keep going!), will lead the writer to their best work.

I also acknowledge that writing is a physical as well as psychic act. Sometimes pushing a pen or pencil over paper can help remind the writer of this, or by the way one pounds out letters on a keyboard (old manual typewriters made this experience easier to understand). Directing the passage of the words from an abstract (thought) into a concrete medium (onto the page/screen) requires physical effort.

In addition, I am aware of my surroundings when I write, and when I write, am aware that the transition into my writing time and space. I often play a specific song to help usher in that time. But I learned not to bind myself to a specific place.

A few weeks ago I attended the DC Authors conference, and someone asked the first book writers (a novelist and a historian), where they wrote, whether they had a special set up for their writing space. I can remember those kind of “what’s your ritual” questions from grad school. Writers would concern themselves with pencil or pen (and what kind of pen), or how much cleaning to do beforehand, or what was in the candy bowl next to where they wrote. I can understand why this is a preoccupation with writers; writing is hard. Writers risk their very sense of self when they make the effort to create a world out of the void. If they fail, not only does the world threaten to spin into unmatched threads, but their hands threaten to unravel as well. Ritual can be a talisman against disaster.

And yet. Writing is movement. While it may be a move toward a center, some still, quiet, and contemplative space (or raucous, ecstatic, unrestrained dance), it is a movement. A writer who can tap into this seems less likely to be caught when his or her ritual is interrupted. “Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,” writes the old poet. We leave this world and enter the void, and make what? Some strange caravan.

So, I go, physically, and in the going drop the pretense of metaphoric movement, embracing actual movement. I allow myself all the charms and dangers of distraction, but I know, all too well, that giving myself this time and this freedom of space will reinvigorate my work, that if some of the threads which I am spinning together have become hackneyed or too full of my will, I can energize and brighten them. A bite of this slice of cake. The sound of that woman exhorting her child in Arabic, the presence of this sculpture of the Buddha.

And so now, cloistered in a room of students taking exams, I can write. Again, and always.

The Unmet Reader—writing novels

Since the 1987, I have started at least five novels. Some I carried with me for a few months—the story of a wedding, unfolding like the petals of a rose. Others lingered over decades—the story of a woman who stole paintings. None of them lasted beyond seventy or eighty pages, or in the case of the long project, fifteen or twenty starts at initial chapters. I had notebooks full of scenes, outlines, character sketches, dialogue, and thematic connections. All the while I wrote other things. Shorter pieces, poems, prose poems, essays, sermons, children’s stories. Or I wrote nothing at all and suffered in silence. I believe that I was unbearable in those times.

What cracks the shell, and let’s the story run out?

I do not know.

I do know that I burned the first one. It had stuck with me for a couple of years, and was the piece I was working on when I went to the MA program at Binghamton. I put the pages on the little hibachi I owned, and watched it burn. I kept the ashes in a brown paper bag on the desk in my office at grad school for as long as I was there. Some of my friends found it morbid. I found it freeing. Move on.

Over the years it has been less easy to move on. I became more anxious. Would this happen? Had I somehow failed? I had other successes as a writer along the way. Why not switch course? Why not give up and go in another direction? There are many ways to write.

Even as a high school English teacher, novels called to me in ways that poems and shorter pieces did not—as exhilarating as a poem or short story can be. There is something satisfying about the duration of a novel. There was also, like it or not, the commercial aspect of novels—they are designed to draw everyday readers. I loved that about them. 300-500 page pop songs.

Perhaps I was too enchanted by the high art novels that I read in my graduate classes, and in the critical approaches we used to pull them and the ideas that surrounded them apart. I forgot about the old thrill of reading for pleasure—which is why novels exist. Art is fine, better than fine. Criticism is a world unto itself. But writing for an audience, for a world of unmet readers, that is everything.

And so, this time, I am following Seymour Glass’s advice to his brother Bruno, and I am writing the book I want to read. I am my own unmet reader. And will hope, against hope, to find many others.

Trusting imagination

I have carved a method out over the several months. I am writing smaller chapters, and it seems to suit the task. Someone may correct this later, make a suggestion to combine and reorder, but for now, my brain jumps from scene to scene, from image to image, from scrap of dialogue, well you get the idea. But I have no plan, no worksheets containing outlines hung on the walls. No maps with pins tracking destinations tacked to a slanted ceiling. No scribbled notes in the margins of a dozen or two books. I have done all of those things over the past twenty years. And not written. I am working without a plan.

This method requires trust. First, and foremost, that I will continue every day, no matter what. I have done plenty of things every day over the past twenty years, but never my work, always someone else’s work, and often done with their idea of what I should be doing. How much does “should” become a cage, and I paced like Rilke’s Panther. I had to change my life.

Second, I have to trust the story as I write it. While I know where it will end up (provisionally), the work opens before me. The writing unlocks images and settings. As I wrote before, surprise is the generative heart of this work. But I have learned that the simple act of writing is like scraping away at the rust and dirt that covers something beautiful. All I need to do is scrape. I find this amazing.

Third, and this is related to the previous one, I have to trust my imagination. This is what I am uncovering. This is what had grown rusty. What I have uncovered isn’t exactly waiting for me, already made, it is the thing that does the making.What I am scraping away at is me, my hands, my mind, my heart, my imagination. Mostly my imagination.

And my imagination includes, as the dictum goes, everything. I went horse riding in the fall, and now there are horses, and one fabulous horse, in the book. I saw the Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs at the British Museum, and the lions are there. A friend went to Kathmandu and heard an American band playing reggae at a bar called “Purple Haze”; that’s in there too. Patagonia? In the book. Another friend pointed out that what one of my characters was doing was a metaphor for how I felt about making up for lost time. Yes, that’s in there too.

The imagination eats all of the world and transforms it into some odd new thing. I trusted my imagination before, making up shorter pieces. But not like this. And so I scrape away, and find it, as vital as it was when I was a child and fell in love with Sinbad and the genie, which I learned was a story from Scheherazade and the Djinn. It all comes back.

Piece by piece, and like Scheherazade, I know I must keep telling this stories, and trust to make it through another day. The alternative is most unfortunate, but even that will be a surprise.

60,000 words

I was compiling blog posts today—why not a second book about writing and second chances? (Yes, but first things first)—and realized that I had written over 60,000 words in two directions since the beginning of September. While working at a new job. While beginning a new relationship.

That is more, by no small amount, than I wrote in any year I was in graduate school, when all I had to do was read and write.

When I saw that number today, I was in a room with a friend at school, and nearly broke into tears. I don’t know why it took so long, but there it is.

I don’t know why the shell had not broken open before. No novel came while I was getting my PhD in Creative Writing. I received crazy kudos from some of my academic professors about my critical work—but I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I knew the successes would have been too tempting. I would have been a writer manqué. The worst. So I struggled and struggled. And struggled.

I always wrote, frustratingly, stupidly at times. There was never a period of time when it stopped entirely, but it all felt like awfulness. I was ashamed of my work. It stank. No one could convince me otherwise. I hated that feeling, and hated how it conflicted with the desire, the call, I felt daily.

And then, when I went to China to adopt my daughter, that shame abated. About many things. Over the next several years, culminating with this one, I found my way back. It was hard earned. I stopped listening to old demons, stopped worrying about quality (though good things were happening), and stopped waiting. It wasn’t a smooth restart, but it got me here, and to what has happened over the past several months.

I have not started writing for you, dear reader, though I love it when the few of who do, do read my work. Those flags from many nations delight me. I like that you have been here while this has happened. I enjoy sharing my exhilaration with someone. I have tried to talk to my best friend about it, but he’s in the “don’t tell me” camp of writers. I’ve shared with a few others, but it has been nice to share with you.

This is my chance. I know it. I know all the costs and weight of regret and everything else that goes with it. I was a “happy enough” man for ages, and always felt the horrible gnawing of unfulfillment. I took the first full strides back to my work a year ago, and have spent much of this year falling back in love with myself.  Somehow, this love freed me to be myself again, and in some ways, for the first time.

Yes, dear reader, I have regrets, but I cannot dwell in that space. I have to look to my future and embrace it. That is all there is, the only way I can live now. I know the other paths, and they are death. I will not go there again.

This way. Forward.

Keep writing.

The impulse is to judge, and then to correct. Don’t do that, do this. Or at the very least, Don’t do that.

Keep writing.

There is the (I hope it is apocryphal and, sadly, know better) story of Galway Kinnell working all morning to take a comma out of a poem, then returning the next, working again all morning, and putting it back in—a sort of “for want of a nail, the war was lost” mentality. While I see the value in such a granular vision—yes, yes, as Twain. wrote, “Th difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning”—does every comma need to be examined, interrogated, and tried?

Keep writing.

As a teacher, I struggle with two impulses: fix everything, and encourage my students to keep writing. I teach younger students, and while, yes, their writing has flaws, mainly they are flaws of omission (not enough detail, not enough focus, not enough development, not enough). More is a welcome problem. So, I suggest, add details, organize, and:

Keep writing.

As a younger writer I had an early teacher who would simply read my stories, and if I was not hitting the mark suggested:

Keep writing.

When I hit the mark, he cheered:

Keep writing.

As I developed, I had a teacher who jotted “No’s” into the margins, and exercised comments in red pen. Fortunately, I was driven and obsessed. I revised and redrafted furiously. At least to start, but as time passed, I began to think that there was no way forward without to web of red ink. Red means stop.

Keep writing.

This creeps into our daily lives as well—the impulse to correct, to impulse toward perfection. We hold up ideals and ignore the working or workable drafts. Or complain when the dishwasher is full, but not packed the way we like it. Or demand, “Turn here!” There are a thousand roads to Mecca. The first steps to Avalon are through impenetrable fog and mist. To find the end of the world, get lost. And yet, afraid of missing something, a voice within us insists: The right way, the right way!

Keep writing.

In the song, “Move On” from Sunday in the Park with George, a vision of Dot sings to George, who is struggling with his work:

Stop worrying it your vision

Is new

Let others make that decision-

They usually do

You keep moving on

Keep writing.

Yes, you know this already. Whether a word, a paragraph, or 2000 words, all that matters is the writing. Fix it later.

Keep writing.

Losing the Path—How a writer can get lost

Along the way, I lost the true path. So many of these past posts have been about finding my way back to the right road—to my purpose, to writing, and to love. Like the Italian poet, I am perhaps a little attuned to an inspiring force—a Beatrice, if you will—and so as writing has come back into my life, I have found inspiration as well. But the path is writing, and I blundered off.

Dante begins The Inferno:

Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself

In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell

About those woods is hard–so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel

The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.

And yet, to treat the good I found there as well

I’ll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter

I cannot well say, being so full of sleep

Whatever moment it was I began to blunder

Off the true path.

Of course we ask, “Why? How?” For each of us who blundered off, the cause of our blundering was specific. Perhaps there are similarities. Here are mine.

Some of my challenge is surely due to some odd predisposition against the kind of selfish drive that must accompany the purposeful and durable impulse to write—or do anything. I recall when I was twelve or thirteen and we were electing pack leaders in my Boy Scout troop. I was nominated, and I did not vote for myself. I did not do that because I had been taught, always and hard, to think of others first, to not be selfish. I had two younger brothers—and not just younger, smaller—and was expected to make way for them, to not impose myself. Whether the overall message came from my parents, from teachers, or from some other source, I cannot say. When the time came for me to vote for a pack leader, part of being a leader, so I thought, was making the generous and considerate move. It was an early lesson.

My life in the world has set me against those who are primarily selfish. I see selfishness everywhere—the thousand daily infractions of an overarching ethical code. Be strong. Do more than your share. Tell the truth. Be kind. I do not understand behaviors that subvert those rules, and when I have broken them, or come close to breaking them, I have borne that certain weight. At some point on a dating site, there was a question, “Do you know the worst thing you have ever done?” I know the ten worst things. One was yelling at a boy with a physical disability to not block the stairs going into school. It is far from the worst. I work to balance the ledger.

I have framed the writing life, my writing life, as a calling. While that is a powerful vision of writing, a calling has its drawbacks, even dangers (see “The Dangers of a Calling“). It means that our work is not about or for us, but for something outside us, and this can lead those who live within this frame, to sacrifice, even sacrificing what is at the heart of that calling. Somewhere along the line, we must learn to be ferocious, obsessive even, about our purposes. This, and nothing else. No matter what.

Beyond that, there are many other roads, especially when one is in the dark—whether suffering through a bout of creative disconnection (no stories!), or suffering through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (the daily bits of life and love)—and a wrong road can seem very much like a right road. There are so many opportunities for success, and routes that promise fulfillment. The greatest dangers to purpose are not dissolution and waste; they are “almost purposeful” fulfillment. How hard to turn away from success (or the road to success) as a leader, as a teacher, as a father, as a spouse. Who would not want all these successes in his life? I am writing about me, so the male pronoun is appropriate here; I imagine that a “she” or a “they” would have the same kind of struggle.

One of the attractions of success across a broad range of fields is the push to be well-rounded. How many times was passion curtailed because it was deemed too obsessional, too blinding to a balanced life. From early on in my life, I was strongly encouraged to be conversant in several fields of study. To understand science, math, history, and, English. To be a scholar athlete. To be well-informed about the news of the day (not just local, parochial news, but in the world as well, and not just news about proto-historical events, but arts, sports, business, everything). To play a number of sports. Always more. The monomania to do the 10,000 hours of practice was seen as ungentlemanly. Me, the last amateur, breezily succeeding, breezily failing, breezily letting life slide past.

Purpose was nearly antithetical to my life. And I have paid for that. Midway on our life’s journey, I reclaim the right road. I leave these markers for you, and for me. Follow.

The Way Back to Writing

Today, teaching Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, I asked my students about the little ways that they organize their worlds (the book’s narrator has autism, and has strategies to do exactly this). This is one of those “connect to the text” questions that teachers love to ask, and often, promptly regret asking. The regret can have two sources: information given that is wildly inappropriate, or worse, that flattened response of sheer disinterest. Fortunately, today’s foray was fruitful.

In the process, I thought about what I did—especially how I trigger my writing. And as soon as my classes ended, I played a song that opens the magic doors (a symphonic version of Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love”), and have been hitting the keys since.

I have fought so long to give myself proper and indelible roads back to my work—unencumbered by other concerns or commitments. This has been a challenge, because my magpie brain connects everything. There are few things—song, food, image, street sign, building, landscape, plate of food—that do not immediately trigger a dense and specific memory. The chance that something, anything, has latched itself to just the dream of writing, has been less than slim.

I do not know why, finally, after decades of struggle, the bonds of memory have taken looser hold of my consciousness and my writing process. Perhaps, as much as I needed to remember, to hold onto some past fiction of myself, I also needed to forget, to release that great anchor and drift.

The poet Antonio Machado wrote,

Mankind owns four things

that are no good at sea:

rudder, anchor, oars,

and the fear of going down.

Here, on the ocean of my dream, deep into the sea of fiction, I find my way back to the sea roads, and let the current take me.

Manqué—a Writer’s Predicament

Almost thirty years ago, I was eating dinner at a little restaurant on the edges of Johnson City and Binghamton, New York. My mentor and her husband had invited me along. These were heady occasions, full of discussions about writing and literature, and the program in which we all worked. I was a student, but, still, I worked. On this particular occasion, they started talking about writers manqué—although I heard it as writer manqués. It was a new word for me. Manqué: having failed to become what one might have become; unfulfilled. They started listing writers who had been in the program, writers who had published and stopped, and writers who were currently in the program. It was sharp and cruel, and the sobriquet stood out as one to be avoided at all costs. These may not have been eternal footmen, but there was snickering enough to go around.

The muse is a durable construct for the writer, because the muse can go away. Most writers I know have experienced life-crushing bouts of silence. It is the single worst event in the life of a writer: when the inward eye stares and stares and sees nothing, and all the inward voice can do is wait, or write, less vividly, about less, or about the nothing. Think of Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snowman,” and the listener, who “listens in the snow,/ And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”  A writer who has faced silence has faced the absolute nothing. It makes the writer question her or his ability to evoke a world, to create, to even be. Stevens turns it into a gift—the ability to not see anything but what is, to inhabit a “mind of winter” without preconceptions or preconditions.

The writer carries a slew of preconceptions and preconditions. While most can leave their jobs and go home to become a mother or a husband or something, the writer, like a soldier, is on duty all day. Unlike a soldier, who can remove the uniform, and briefly be, what? human? the writer never becomes anything else. Her or his humanity is bound into this one peculiar characteristic: they make worlds with words. I’m sure this is true of artists of all sorts. A friend recounted an interview with a composer who told how each time when she wrote and felt that the work was wonderful and that she was flying, when she started the next day, she had to learn to fly all over again, that she was rooted to the ground. Success is no bulwark against the feeling of starting all over each and every day.

And so, locating that characteristic in a muse—and those old Greek muses were incredibly flighty—was, is, a safe way to inoculate oneself against the silent times.  It isn’t me! It’s that damn fickle muse!

Some writers simply prescribe habit to overcome the silent times. Stephen King wrote the commonplace advice: “Writing equals ass in chair,” which is a grittier take on Mary Heaton Vorse’s “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Getting used to daily practice removes the onus of waiting for the muse. Sit down and write. Repeat. Of course King provides an example of a diligent sitter in The Shining, when Jack Torrance produced reams of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” A little more than sitting can be a help.

Nonetheless, the fear of being unfulfilled lurks. In a prose poem called “Ants,” I render it as a mass of ants that eat the speaker, even while success beckons. Having come to writing in stages, and later than many, I was thrilled by the force of words as they seemed to tumble forth. I was also a little suspicious. Was this really what I could do forever? What about money? or success? Hearing my mentor denigrate those poor “manqués”—I imagined little monkey of Isak Dinesen’s tale “The Monkey.” How horrible to lose oneself to that invidious transformation.

Like any great and terrible idea, this one lurked. Even when I was writing every day, and earning the admiration of friends and mentors for my creative and scholarly work, I worried. Perhaps that is exactly because I did come late to the craft, that coming so late, I did not have a firm belief either in it or myself. There are half a dozen other reasons, all of them lying in wait. Monkey. Like the law-seeker in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” I was ready to be stopped at the wall, and wait. I knew better—I even knew the antidote! I did!—but the idea of “manqué,” so formidable, grew out of proportion to all reason.

When the silence came, I was unprepared, or, rather, I was over-prepared. Too ready. I sought and found success outside of my work, and followed those paths for years. However, the muse—or the mind—did not forget. It simmered there, stoking my peripheral vision for years. Characters and stories inhabited the edges of my consciousness, darting away when I turned my inward eye upon them. Chiding me—don’t you know how to see us? I did not. It hurt. I carried half a heart in my chest, wearing an inner funeral black no matter what flags of color banded my body.

And I had success. But what is success to a writer, to an artist, but the work? Teacher, husband, father, religious leader. I had to tear my life apart, reorganize it.

Kafka has another short story, “My Destination” (“Das Ziel”), in which the traveler declares “I need [no provisions], the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.” I knew this long ago, and sang it out to any who asked, but could not hear it, not truly, myself. Physician, heal thyself. I could not. And a silent wound festers until it explodes. Or until the call is heard. Again.

And, as if by magic (and not magic at all, old artificer), seeing that I had given myself back to the craft, that I was writing every day—these blog posts included—the vision began to hold. I wrote, I changed my life, and continue to write, out a sense of surprise and without expectation. I write without a plan—and that is my secret. Without a goal, other than writing, there is no question of staring straight at something, or letting the peripheral vision take precedence. I can move forward by sidelong glances. Into the unknown, ignorant of my former limits—and not, stupid memory—and finding the old useful joy and craft.

Repetition, again.

Is it any surprise that repetition plays a significant role in my life? I came of age as an athlete knocking out sets of 30 200 yard freestyle swims. They were yardage eaters—a quick and dirty way to lay in 6000 yards of workout and buy time for rest of the yards that the coach had in mind. We finished them at intervals of 2:30, 2:20, and 2:10, which left 50 minutes for the rest of the practice—an easy pace for the two to four thousand yards to come. Pushing off the wall every two minutes and thirty seconds, there was time for conversation between swims. Leaving at every two minutes and ten seconds put a crimp on anything other than brief exchanges: “This sucks,” “Stop hitting my feet,” “I’m hungry.”

We did this day after day.

With my head down in the water, my eyes trained on the feet of the swimmer who left 5 seconds before me—chasing, always chasing. In high school I was far from the fastest swimmer on the team. I made myself a better swimmer. One summer I traveled to Iowa and a training regimen that increased the junior varsity’s load of 3500 yards in an afternoon’s hour long practice, to 22,000-28,000 yards spread over three practices every day. I lost whatever baby fat—and whatever other fat—that my 15 year old frame carried, crashed my immune system—catching a nasty staph infection that laid me up for days after I returned home—and sliced ten seconds off my hundred breaststroke time. No mean feat. I made the varsity team. Repetition was the way.

Years later, when I was a graduate student in English, I read books two and three times. I would attack most of the books for my classes in two weeks before the beginning of the semester, then again as we read them as a class. The initial reading with facile, getting the joys and traps of plot out of the way, allowing the words—and all the ideas in the words—to come to the fore when I read along with the class. If I wrote about a particular book, I read it again, and some passages, dozens of times.

Since I was in school to write, I wrote and rewrote some stories six or seven times. My classmates, colleagues, cow-writers, and teachers, shared the demanding mantra: “All writing is rewriting.” And we practiced what we preached.

As a teacher, I sometimes warn my students that this—and the years to come in college—are the best years, because of the preponderance of the new. Almost everything they learn is, will be, new. Each encounter with something new gives a new opportunity for mastery—another shot at sudden improvement and the giddy transformative moment of adding some unknown idea to the swirl of self.

I warn them because at some point there lives will bend toward repetition. Yes, the repetition may lead to a finer, hard-earned mastery. I think of all the miles that I put into the pool, and how it shaped and shapes my body (still). I think of the ways that great works give up new meanings after repeated shared readings, and how I became a more aware reader. And while I may not rewrite as much as I once did—obsessively, compulsively, debilitatingly—I know that writing begets writing—good, bad, or otherwise. The thing is to write, over and over, every day, without fear, even without hope. The words will bear you up. Push off. Go again.

Well do I know that repetition can suck the joy from the flower of life—making no honey, leaving all empty, colorless, scentless. I do not how how I managed all those laps in the pool, with nothing but the dull roar of water passing my ears, the steady ache and agony of my muscles, and the songs that played in my mind, setting an unimaginable pace. There was joy at the end of each 200 yards—“Good time!”—and these little victories provided enough of a goad to return to repeat success. Who determined what was a “good” time? I did, in concert with the clock—the cold but consistent arbiter of performance. Time, as opposed to opinion, never wavered. The clock was not making a comment because it had a good or a bad day. Go again.

I hope that my students will discover some place where they can demonstrate mastery, and change the long monotonous drone of repetition into a glorious repeated success. That they will find a way to insist, “Again, again,” holding on to that inner childlike joy. That in spite of how hard their task may be, that their arbiters are, if not cold, consistent and consistently challenging. I hope all this for myself as well.

The sweeping red hand of the clock on the wall flies past the black hashmarks: two minutes and one second; two minutes and two seconds, two minutes and three seconds. I breathe deep, and get ready. Here I go. Again.

Heeding the Call

Some of my students are aghast at the idea of reading a book a second time, let alone a third or forth, or fifteenth time. The life of a teacher means revisiting books again and again. They become habits. The past dozen years brought steady stops in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Homer’s Odyssey, and maybe Shakespeare’s Macbeth. All became exceedingly familiar territory—terra too cognito—and I welcomed the changes that a change of job and change of curriculum brought this year. I taught half a dozen book I had not read in years. The freshness helped revive my vision.

Of course, repetition is the backbone of study. There isn’t a piece, whether film, book, or painting, that I have not poured over. And over. Some works hold up to repeated visits—this is especially of true of paintings and sculptures. I have sat in front of some paintings for hours, and then gone back a year later to do more. The ability to give concentrated attention to something is a rare quality. And yet, I find myself loosing the fire for return visits and viewings, even for old favorites. How many times can I return to Hamlet, or It’s a Wonderful Life, or Wings of Desire? I know there are things I have not seen, and they call to me.

With spring, my attention is pulled back to baseball, and a group of friends with whom I have played rotisserie baseball for nearly thirty years. I have risen at odd hours when the season began in Japan, as it did again this season. I did not wake to watch early in the morning, but acknowledged the game at arm’s length. I almost did not play our little game this season, almost tired of keeping track of scores and statistics. 162 games and fifteen teams works out to nearly 2500 events to be aware of in some nagging fashion. Enough already.

How much has repetition and routine play a part in life? Too much. At times it seemed that I flew on autopilot, barely aware of the ground beneath me or the time that slipped past, never to return. Sometimes the routine is good—I don’t give more than passing thought to breakfast and lunch when I am busy. I eat the same thing, more or less, day after day. Perhaps my life would be better if I added variations here, but I have had other pressing concerns, like a Stephen Greenblatt essay about Hamlet. There are ways to keep the standards fresh. Still, there must be more.

I changed large parts of my life this past year—there were many reasons, but one was to interrupt the flow that had become too familiar, too easy. I wanted to drive up to a different door—my door. It did not have to be more beautiful—and it wasn’t—it just had to be different. My work as a teacher, although familiar enough, had to take me to different books an different students. And I needed to extricate myself from a years long creative drought. I needed to write to be alive.

This past December, I traveled to a new place, London, to which I had meant to travel almost thirty years ago. I traveled after I did a series of new things, each one satisfying, but each fueling a desire for more. Almost everything that has been part of the solid ritual of my daily routine tastes bland. I don’t hanker for extremes—a solo sailing venture around the world, or an ascent up some foreboding mountain, or a year in a seraglio—I yearn to encounter something as if for the first time. I wish to be a beginner again, with a clean slate ahead of me.

It will not be. There is much that I cannot jettison (Overboard! Overboard!), and some of which has been central to my life. But to bring my daughter along for the ride. To carry my brave and loving heart into boundless possibility. To write without care for sharp tongued critique. To go, and keep going.

I recognize that when I felt at my best, I was a student, learning, reading, discovering with a vigor that few matched. Right now my writing carries me vigorously to some new place—an undiscovered country that is beyond death—the little death of stagnation and routine, the larger death of a withered soul. I need to find a way to return this more adventurous, more daring, more profound sense of discovery to the rest of my life, to every aspect of my life. To become a masterful student again. Even while I wear the mantle of expert, I am an expert explorer. It is time to honor that. And go.

Perhaps my writing will be enough to answer that call during the long school year. My work feels, for the first time in longer than I care to admit, durable and ecstatic. However, I cannot let anything—or anyone, even myself—keep me from discovery. There must be time for new thoughts, new places, and a new world that will animate my work and revive my old heart. Here—there, and everywhere—I go.