Of Porn and Pants (Or, "The More We Change...")

I have been cracking up all morning.  I've mentioned that I consult the I Ching every morning for some lesson to take with me through the day.  Today's hexagram is K'an: The Abysmal, and the lesson is that in times of trouble we should flow like water.  Accordingly, The I Ching for Writers advised me revise only lightly today as my writing might be headed for turbulent times.  You'd think I'd forego the blogging today, but NOPE, it is my nature to push on (hence the need for taoism).  Actually, today's lesson reminded me of another poem I wrote around the same time as Opus.  Even though today's hexagram (The Abysmal) is really two water trigrams, I think you can see how this poem reflects the spirit of today's lesson.  Oh, and that I was clearly a taoist before I even knew what that meant.

I wrote this in the spring of 1997.  I was hormonal -- that's my only explanation -- and an inconsolable, disagreeable mess.  The Cray and I were hiking in the Organ Mountains that preside over town.  Even in the midst of my tantrum, we decided to drop our pants and just stand around for a little bit.  Somehow, the feel of the open air on my undercarriage made me feel a little better.  Then I went home and wrote this. Take note of the third stanza. That's the one that had me in stitches.  I'll explain after.

Of Water and Wind 

Thought of the wind like water today:

a swirling flow

pooling in valleys,

funneling through canyons.

Not blowing to satisfy nominal expectations

like gravity or some other force,

but an ocean:

a constantly changing

ebb of imagination pushed aside

by rocks and other hard things.

It is undertow: not caught up in itself,

but taking in its path;

not disappointed by this side of the rock

or wondering about the other.

Inside: gentle color, 

and unseen lethal force,

the more obvious bearing jags and razors

still not caring one way or the other, but moving

aside and going where it can.

The earth fidgets in its restlessness:

at first a breathy quiver,

and then both explode

into a tsunami of tears and gasps

mixing two that should never have been assigned

separately in the first place

Until, in a spitting foam rage,

they punish and mold land to their liking

to remain so for as long as Hs and Os desire.

The oceans

of water and wind

can always go back to their gentle moves,

but the land must remain until the others decide

to blow off the dust of old carvings for a new path.

They continue to needle and thwart each other;

each change making for new shapes and flows

that are still worth looking at

and noticing

and listing

under beautiful things.

I think it's interesting that my efforts to recover my writer's voice has resulted in multiple returns to pieces I wrote the first time The Cray and I were together as undergrads in Las Cruces. Maybe I should take a moment to state for the record that I don't necessarily think my writing is spectacular, just that I did it regularly and that's what I'm trying to recover.  Cases in point:

"Breathy Quiver." This is my go-to porn star name.  No, not for myself. But in conversation, when I needed a fictional porn star name, that's the one I'd go with.  Okay, I don't know how to explain why I led such an existence that everyday conversation would require a go-to porn star name, but what are ya gonna do?  But clearly, even in a fit of rage and despair, I will still crack jokes to myself and/or reference porn.  Also, I'm almost 100% certain I didn't do this deliberately when I wrote it, but I'm amused by the vaguely pornographic imagery in that stanza too. Oy vey.

The other little nugget in there is the "punish and mold" line.  Sometime around 2000, I found myself on the losing end (the stupid end) of an argument with The Cray about, of all things, Monica Lewinsky.  Rather than simply ceding the point, I flew into yet another inexplicable rage. (Seriously, I don't know why he still talks to me.)  Let's just say that the incident ended with me standing on the futon in our basement room in Seattle and tearfully accusing him of seeking out younger women (he's 6-1/2 years older than me) so he could "shape and mold" them.  Even I couldn't keep a straight face through that one. And let me tell you, he still loves dropping that line on me when I'm acting a-fool.  

A final note before I run off to school: in creating the "porn" label for this post, I realize that means that on some level, I anticipate future posts in which I reference porn -- at least enough to warrant a whole label for it. Of the eight people whom I've notified about the existence of this blog, my parents aren't among them.  Jess, this means this is officially an F-bomb-friendly zone.  

Bombs away!

The Te of Writing

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog is to un-block my writer's block. This is another one of those things that I attribute to my dissatisfaction with the social aspects of this program and the entrenched structural inequities and epistemic violence that runs rampant in the academy and that it is loathe to acknowledge in any meaningful way. (I'll go into this more directly in another post.)  In addition to unclogging my writing pipes, I also know that I want to develop my writing so that it is performative and embodied.  That is, I need my writing itself to do something (this is political, related to my research, and the "beef" I have with the academy that I alluded to above), and I need the body to be present in my writing.  This last part might be more difficult, but these two goals are what I am focusing on this semester.

To this end (returning to the writer's life generally, embodied writing more specifically), I have done two things:
1. Added links to journaling/writing prompts. I hope to spend 30 minutes each morning doing some kind of freewriting.
2. Enrolled in a course on ethnographic writing that is something of a workshop, complete with guided writing activities. Today was our first meeting. It went well.

She asked us to first brainstorm on different sheets of paper the forms of writing we do, the kinds of texts we produce, and the audiences for whom we write.  After the brainstorm, we paired off and discussed out writing processes, issues, concerns. Then we returned to the room for a bit of freewriting.  Here is mine:
 
Writing is an embodied experience for me. Though I often think too fast for my handwriting to keep up, I love the way writing by hand feels in comparison to typing. For our brainstorming activity, I switched writing implements three times: from gel pen to pencil to thin pen before I finally settled on the pencil after all. It felt the best on the single sheet that separated it from the conference table. The gel pen always feels good, but today it scratched across the surface in a way that didn't allow the gel to flow freely. The black ink didn't trail behind in the thick lines the way I knew it could on the softness of multiple sheets. And the thin pen. Oy. No matter how many sheets of paper separate its ball point from the hard backing surface, its ultra fine point always seems to scrape across the paper violently – like one false stroke will tear the page. And I never use it to write in cursive. I always use it to print. My printing is something closer to angular than flowing. It's my Deliberate font. But anyway, I ended up back with the pencil. After years and years of strict loyalty to pens all through college, PhD school has returned the pencil to my hand. Even though it's erasable, pencil makes me feel like I'm really writing. Maybe because I can hear it. It's like I can hear and feel the lead being transferred to the paper in ways you just can't with ink. Ink just stains. It seeps. I guess I can hear the thin pen too, but that's the sound of the roller scraping against its housing and the metal against the page, not the actual transfer of ink. Yeah, those gel pens feel smooth and look great, but they don't sound like pencil. Even when you have filled both sides of a piece of paper, the penciled paper sounds (read that as an active verb) – it makes sound, the way it has been warped by the writing. Gel pages are just soaked. And silent.

I admit, I couldn't help but channel an old poem I wrote in the mid 1990s (1995, I think).  It's not too difficult to see how these two pieces are connected:

Opus

I like the sound of crispy pages --

ones that have been  

written on

glued on

spilled on.

I saunter-jaunt

through states of mind

with the turn of each 

wobbly-edged page.

Until I find a hungry one.

My blood warps the pulp

with every

letter    comma    word:

paper lapping lovingly 

from my veins.

Watching capillarity

                      caterpillar over fibers,

I forget how to spel

I think this is an interesting first step down the path back to my writing self.  I'm tapping what it is about writing that nourishes me. It's not necessarily the turn of a phrase or brilliantly capturing/expressing an idea, but the very act of writing itself -- putting pen to paper, self on the page. This is probably why Gloria Anzaldua's writing resonates in me and gives me the courage to even attempt to "write the thing that scares me" as my advisor so wants me to do.  (Don't worry, I'll take up Gloria and Aimee and all the rest in future posts.)  For now, I'm pleased to have put words on the page (screen).  It's such a comfort to know that my writer's voice hasn't been silenced forever.

On the Subject of Intent

It is very tempting to try to say what I plan to do with this blog. I will just say that I intend to take about 30 minutes every morning to write in this space, if only to write something every day.

But since hardly anything ever turns out exactly the way we envision, I will take a taoist approach to this as well. Taoism, like cultural studies and performance studies, resists definition and canonization. I suspect that is why I am drawn to all three. In my life I've found that some of the best things have been the result of having no plan. And so it will be with this blog.

And now my 30 minutes is up, so I will get on with the rest of my day. I have to set a time limit because I have a tendency to burn a lot of time pondering pondering pondering. Perhaps a time limit will make me more productive on this blog and in my day.  I sure don't have a lot of writing to show for these 30 minutes, but that stands as a testament to how clogged up my writing arteries are.