by Lucy S.
At umpteen random moments, I could write the best blog post ever, or the article I mean to finish (or start), or the book I have started so many times (but not 'for reals'). There is never enough time to plunge my mind into it, but how can this be true - and I tell my students that none of that is true, that they must not wait for muses and inspiration, that they must "just write," but this isn't quite true for me. I am not that kind of writer. I can just write and write a bunch of mediocre observations and same-old-feelings with nothing to them, but what is the point of taking up all of our time in doing that?
And yet, I still feel as though I'm not quite 'there' yet - not at that place and time where great writing might occur - and then I decide to just go ahead and step into the stream of postponements to at least say SOMEthing for now. And maybe that is what writing and teaching and any kind of labor in life is.
This weekend I'm rushing to finish the poetry anthology I'm putting together for this class, which I want to be somewhat different than the one for last semester, and it will just be whatever it can be with the time I can give to it. And before yesterday's class, I was looking up what I could on Willa Cather and on the Homestead Act and the migrations to the Plains in the later 1800s and whatever else I found that connected to her novel O Pioneers. I told them about how the nature of capitalism demands perpetual expansions of some kind for its markets, and places for some of the burgeoning population to move out to in order to defer confrontations between poor or working people and the capitalists who rely on them as a labor force. What I had wasn't good enough, but that was all the time I had. And it will be something like that for Monday. I will feel a deep well of terror inside again all semester, which I will manage to put to sleep sometimes. Like some other beings, it sleeps best when there's a lot going on around it - pleasant buzzes of conversations and physical movement and maybe some music - and it wakes up crying and anxious when things get too quiet.
But quiet is precisely what I need to prepare to teach, and to write, and to read. Yet I go to write - even now - and think of everything else I should be doing - and I think that maybe this - whatever 'this' is in that moment - is a postponement of the 'main' work I need to focus on - and I stop and go to that - but that is often just another postponement of some other 'main' work I should be doing - and I now have such a hard time staying with one thing to finish it. Yet somehow, work does get done, including this writing. I sometimes write through the urge to postpone what I am doing, or the urge to stop postponing the other thing I mean to do, and just push long enough to let something come into a full enough state of being to be 'done.'
In other news: a big union has come to town (or sent some organizers dedicated to the adjunct cause). And I can think of reasons why the effort might not be perfect, and how we might postpone rushing in, but I signed on. We have to change so much about higher education in this country, and about education as a whole.
In other news: my department gave me two classes to teach for fall! Double what I'm doing now, but not quite. They're two of the same, so the readings will be the same. I'm hoping I'll be fine. If not then, when would I ever be fine? Or is being fine ever the goal anyway?
In other news: my cousin might lose his third try to get disability income under Social Security. I'm tempted to erase that and skip anything about that topic, because he doesn't understand enough about the process, and I can't understand from far away. But I know he emerged from that California state prison after 17 years with diabetes, high blood pressure, and Valley Fever. I know he goes to one or another doctor or medical clinic almost every week. I know his blood sugar was in the 300s the other day for reasons he doesn't understand. I know he struggles to breathe at times, and has had pneumonia five times in the year since he got out of prison. I know he can't work any kind of regular job. I hope he gets the SSI this time. I almost want to tell him to hold off and send me the forms so I can check that they're done right this time... But he says there will be less than ten days to get them back, and I don't know if I'd do it right, either. I would like to know why our government agency acts like a corporation trying to keep as many as possible from getting disability income in a game they play, knowing some will give up.
In other news: we got the daughter of one of my cousins into a place. It was a joint effort. One of her friends, another single mom, said she'd move her two little girls into her bedroom so Nicole could rent the other bedroom of the two-bedroom apartment. Nicole is trying to get her two little boys back and couldn't do so until she had a place to live. She had been homeless for over a year. She needed $1300 to get in ($650 for rent and $650 for deposit), so some of my family and friends pitched in and we put in the other $790. I had made up my mind that if nothing else, we would get this done. I don't care if it's not the Revolution or is only a private solution. I only knew that I could not stand for her to lose her kids simply because she didn't have a place to live. And so I figured, screw all that "if you give a man to fish" stuff when the person's lying on the ground about to pass out from starvation. Just meet someone's needs and figure out the other stuff later. Anyway, I am sick of so many slogans.
In other news: I'm trying to figure out how to move back to California, and it feels so daunting at times to pull it off. Why was it so easy to just pick up and move years ago, and why is it so hard now?
I wish I could do it the same way I might write a book - packing a set number of boxes a week, moving them over to a new place - but that isn't all that akin to how I'd write a book anyway, at least not just that. Some things must be done in bursts when the time doesn't feel right at all, followed then by some consistency, followed by more bursts, with it all teetering on the edge of the permanent postponement called disaster - until some barrier is passed and we finally know that even if it's grueling, this will happen. Or the grueling part will be over, and I'll be in those last exhilarating hours. That happened before, when we were moving from Minnesota to California the last time. Driving through the mountains of Northern New Mexico, knowing we'd be in California sometime the next day, those joy surges finally overcame the exhausted numbness of moving out of the duplex rental on below zero days in January. It had seemed impossible, but there we were driving through the snowy mountains that morning, scattered pines on the land around us and ultra-blue sky encircling us from above, planning to stay one last night in Santa Fe before heading on toward home.
We are 5 / 24ths into 2014. I'm writing for now. It's all I have.
Back to the poetry anthology.
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