musings

Knowing the tide’s coming in, but still celebrating the sand castles we can build before it does

So many people told me to read Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso.  Tens and tens of them.  So many I lost track.  And I finally I did.  And wow.

Ongoingness is spare and sublime, a meditation on time and memory and motherhood and the meaning of life.  “The book’s themes are your themes,” said one friend, and I’ll just say that if that’s true, consider me honored.  Manguso writes a slender, powerful volume about the 800,000 word diary she kept obsessively for years without quoting from it once. On the book’s first page, she says “I wrote so that I could say I was truly paying attention,” which is the best answer I have to the answer of why I write, too.

I have many preoccupations in my life – and in my writing – but arguably the two chief ones are the speed with which my hours (particularly those with my children) fly by and the slippery, inchoate nature of memory.  I’m fascinated in a troubled, deeply-melancholic way by how swiftly my days pass, and I’m often nostalgic for my life even as I live it.  And I’m equally fascinated in a confused way that senses that there’s an order beyond my understanding about why I remember what I do.  It’s often the smallest, most mundane experiences that cement themselves in my memory, becoming the stones I turn over and rub in my pockets until they gleam, whereas the big, shiny “life moments” often recede into the slurry of my history.

I tried to record each moment, but time isn’t made of moments; it contains moments.  There is more to it than moments.

With this pair of sentences, Manguso seems to wrestle with this complex fact.  I think all the time of Ann Beattie’s famous line from Snow, that “people forget years and remember moments.”  What we remember seems random, but surely it’s not.  Just like there must be some rhythm I can’t quite sense about why certain quotes and passages and poems come to my mind when they do, I’m certain there’s a vast design whose pattern I can’t yet discern in why I remember what I do.

Manguso goes on to say that she “started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments that were too full.”  Like Dumbledore’s pensieve, she writes when things are “all too much,” whether to understand or merely to record.  Somehow the practice of writing in her diary allows her to release the pressure in her living, and this impulse is one I understand at a deep, inarticulate level.

Much of Ongoingness reminded me of Dani Shapiro, both of her work and of her teaching, which I’ve been immensely fortunate to receive.  The pages of Ongoingness contain a lot of white space, and there short passages are in dialog with each other.  This is a format that reminds me of Devotion, and which Dani and I have spoken about at length.  The structure of Ongoingness
mimics memory itself; Manguso’s musings and recollections don’t follow a logical pattern, they’re interrupted, and they echo off one another.

At one point, Manguso reverses direction, considers the opposite of her premise (“I don’t need to write anything down ever again”), and posits that “everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound.”  This passage reminded me of the samskara analogy that runs so vividly through Devotion, and of the concept – which makes sense to me – that our life’s experiences accumulate in our bodies, invisible in many cases, but resonant, and eternal.

Having a child changes entirely Manguso’s relationship to time.  “It had something to do with mortality,” she says, and reflects that “I am no longer merely a thing living in the world: I am a world.”  One of the central themes of Ongoingness is the way in which having a child altered her dependence on the diary.  Her son has become, in so many ways, her diary.  In his body, in the “unbearable sweetness” of his growing hair and changing self, she can now see her life recorded, captured, remembered.

“…when I am with my son I feel the bracing speed of the one-way journey that guides human experience,” Manguso observes, and I nod so vigorously my neck hurts.  Yes, yes, yes, I think, as the tears course down my cheeks.   I don’t have an 800,000 word diary, but I can relate to this.  It was becoming a mother, I think, that made me so keenly attuned to life’s inexorable, drumbeat passage.

“Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity,” Manguso writes at the end of Ongoingness, and I think of my children frolicking on a sandbar at the end of the summer as the tide comes in.  Parenting – life itself – is like that, as I observed in This is Eleven: it’s knowing the tide’s coming in, but still celebrating the sand castles we can build before it does.

The season of amazement

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Magnolias remind me powerfully of college, and of this particularly, wonder-full time of year

I write often about wonder here (I think wonder is one of the most-often used words in blog post titles of mine, and probably in the text of posts, too).  It’s true that I feel awe and amazement on a regular basis, and that’s exactly how I want to experience the world. It’s not all good, of course: for example I feel nothing short of abject awe at how lousy vertigo feels.  I’m writing this on day seven and I still feel shaky, nauseous, and flat-out terrible.  I don’t even want to go on my kids’ favorite ride at Canobie Lake Park, the Turkish Twist, for two minutes.  I’ve been trapped on it for a week now.  This is terrible.  And in the true meaning of the word, awe-some.

A lot of the wonder I feel is good, though, and as I walked to do an errand last week (bobbing around on the sidewalk, because I still struggle to walk in a completely straight line), I looked up and noticed that during one of my days in bed the world had burst into insistent, almost ferocious spring bloom.  That this fact continues to amaze me, even in my fortieth year, makes me very glad.  I started thinking about the things that I hope always make me feel wonder.  I don’t ever want to be cynical, or jaded, or to take this world’s breathtaking beauty for granted.

I so many ways, spring is the season of amazement.  I hope I always feel a surge of surprised delight when I notice that the trees around me are jubilantly blooming, that the air has a new, softer texture to it, that the days suddenly seem long.  Like so many things in life, spring arrives very gradually and then, overnight.

So one thing I always hope to feel wonder at is the advent of spring.  There are others, though:

Internet access in an airplane.  In fact, airplanes in general.  I hope I always feel wonder at how it is that this enormous metal tube is flying thousands of miles above the earth, and that I’m tweeting a I sit there.  It’s downright incredible.

The speed of time’s passage.  Specifically, right now, that Grace is graduating from sixth grade.  I swear, I swear, it was just moments ago that my friends – some of whom I’m grateful to still call my friends – and I stood in that same gym, singing our class song, The Greatest Love of All, before exploding into summer, energy and enthusiasm and hormones all coming together into a tidal surge.

Dawn breaking across the sky and the gloaming before sunset.  The fact that we get to witness these majestic moments, every single day (well, most, of it’s not raining), takes my breath away.  Every day.

Organ transplantation.  It’s not a secret that this is a cause near to me, and when I stop and think about the notion that another person’s heart (and another, different person’s kidney) beats in the chest of someone I love dearly I can’t even process it.  The wonder is extreme.  It boggles the mind.  I hope transplantation becomes more common – please tell your next of kin of your desire to be a donor – but I hope it never ceases to amaze me.  Because it is truly extraordinary.

What amazes you?  What do you hope to always feel awe about?

Narrowing

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I loved Shauna Niequist’s post, Narrowing.  I read it several times, and relate to so much of what she says.  Well, other than the fact that she’s clearly a spring chicken still in her thirties!  But, seriously:

There’s a narrowing that takes place as you grow up, I think—you leave more and more behind: things other people want you to be, things you thought you might want to be, ways of living that never did actually fit, like shoes that are a little too tight.

Yes. Oh, yes. The letting go of what others wanted me to be resonates, but so, frankly, does the notion of letting go of who I thought I wanted to be.  I’ve had an on-and-off dialog with a dear friend from college about the concept of a Big Life, and of how, ultimately, that doesn’t really sound appealing to me.  What I want, I know now, is a small life, but one rich and deep and full of love.  A narrow life, I think is what I mean.

Not narrow as in narrow-minded.  Not at all.  More like a narrow passage I squeeze through and then, on the other side, I see a yawning chasm full of a beauty so sparkling it almost takes my breath away.  I’m reminded of something I wrote many years ago, about how I kept seeing glitter on the insides of my eyelids, about how when I narrowed my life I actually opened up passageways to a joy so expansive I could never have imagined it.

I wrote that I had glimpsed a planetarium sky that I want to study, to watch, to learn by heart almost four years ago and it’s only getting more true.  Now that I’ve crossed the bright line into my forties, I find the narrowing continues.  My oft-ferocious attachment to those things I love most can come across sometimes as rigid, I’ve been made aware of that and I can honestly see why.  That’s not my intention, at all, but I agree I can be nearly maniacal about protecting the things that matter the most to me.  I don’t want Grace and Whit to ever doubt that they and their father are the most important people in my life.  I want them to know that for me, time spent the four of us is nothing short of holy.  I need to sleep enough and get fresh air and I want to do a little bit of writing around the edges of my very full time job.  There’ s not a lot of me left after those things have been taken care of.  In fact there’s often not enough of me simply to give what I want to to those few (but large, and deep) buckets!

But there’s another reason that I can’t back away from the narrowing of my life, and it is something else Niequist refers to.  She mentions that she’s particularly permeable during writing times.  Candidly, that’s how I feel all of the time, and increasingly strongly.  I have written many times about my porous nature. What I let into the space around me – the sounds, books, feelings, and people – has a huge impact on me.

Now that I have seen the vast chasm that opens up once I narrowed my life – the geode lined with hidden glittering that Catherine Newman refers to – I can’t look away.

Two years ago

it feels impossible not to acknowledge today, the marathon, the memory of two years ago.  I wrote this then and the picture gives me goosebumps.  Grace looked big then but of course now she’s two years taller and older.  At the last visit to the doctor, 5’1″.  And she runs more now – in fact my essay about Eleven for This is Adolescence revolved around the metaphor that cross-country has become (to me) for parenting.  Incidentally, it was a thrill to see that essay in Brain, Child’s newest issue.

But today is equal parts solemn and celebratory, with shadows of two years ago hanging heavily over a day filled with achievement for so many.  I have several friends running today, and I bow down to their commitment.  They are an inspiration to me, plain and simple.  So is my town, for the way we came together in the wake of a terrible experience two years ago.

City of my Heart

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On Sunday, the day before Patriot’s Day and the Boston marathon, Grace ran her first road race.  On the marathon course.  I was in New York for work, so I missed it, but I was sent this fantastic picture.  My heart swelled with both pride and shock, because really, how can my baby be that old?  That tall?

On Monday, Patriot’s Day, as you know, there was an explosion at the Boston marathon.  That tall, lanky girl, for whom I think the word coltish may have been coined, dissolved into a puddle of anxiety.  I told both she and Whit what had happened the minute I heard (they were home from school, sitting in the room next to my office), mostly because I was so startled by the news.  She hovered around my office all afternoon, lurking, asking constant questions, reading over my shoulder.

Right before the explosions, we had been talking about groups of people from the Marines (or Army, I admit I don’t know) who ran the course in their uniforms with backpacks.  Grace’s first reaction to the events, and to the few pictures she saw of the devastation (before I turned the TV off), was: “But those poor people just came home from war, where they saw this all the time.  They weren’t supposed to see it at home.”

Indeed, they weren’t.

I spent the afternoon toggling between bewilderment at this world that we live in, trying to understand what feels like a relentless wave of violence, and hugely heartened by it, as I received more texts and emails than I can count from people from all corners of my life (and the world) checking that we were okay.

But most of all, this: the city of my heart, my home, is bleeding and broken, under attack.

On our day of celebration, which starts at dawn with reenactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends with the last runners limping across the finish line long after the sun has gone down.  Our day of inspiration and striving, of humanity at its finest: I am always moved equally by the runners who push themselves past all reason and by the spectators who come out to watch the river of dedication and devotion.  Marathon Monday is a pure celebration of our beating hearts and of our feet walking on this earth.  This day, this Patriot’s Day, our day, is now forever marked by explosions, lost limbs, dead children (my GOD – an eight year old – Whit is eight – how is this possible?), senseless death and hurt.

I hate that it happened on our day, on Patriot’s Day, on Marathon day.  I hate that this happened at all.

I ache for my city, the city I was born in, the city I’ve lived in since I graduated from college, the city I love, my home.

I know that many other cities in our country have been visited by tremendous pain and brutality over the last several years.  I feel a sense of “it’s our turn,” followed immediately by outrage that I could ever say that. What world do we live in where that’s the deal?

This piece was originally written and posted two years ago.

Insides and Outsides

I’ve written before about the perilous gulf between perception and reality, and about the dangerous assumptions people make about others (okay, fine, me) based on outsides.

Outsides and insides are not the same.

When I was much younger, and struggling in a difficult period, someone very dear to me expressed frustration and disbelief.  How I could possibly be blue when everything seems to be going so well, he asked.  I have never forgotten that conversation.  It felt like he was challenging the authenticity of my emotions, and my initial reaction was anger.  I know now that his intentions were good.  But I had and since then have seen so many people who seem to have “perfect” lives struggling that I knew the disbelief was unfounded.  Even all those years ago I knew that how things looked was no reflection on how they felt.  My life, while far from perfect, was back then indeed on a smooth highway.  It still is.  I often describe my life – at 30, or 35, or, now, 40 – as exactly as I planned it and nothing like I expected.

This whole things-aren’t-always-as-they-seem works both ways.  Some people who seem to have “everything” aren’t actually that happy.  I also know that some of the most genuinely joyful and contented people I know are the ones whose lives may not look perfect and glossy on the surface.  I don’t know that it’s an inverse correlation, but it’s at least a random scatter.

This train of thought seems related, to me, to what I wrote about on Monday, to my reflection on David Brooks’ marvelous essay about shifting from emphasizing “resume virtues” to “eulogy virtues” in his own life.  This shift is similar to – maybe parallel to – a movement from relying on external indicators to the recognition that what matters is not visible on the outside.  Even as I write that I cringe a little: it sounds simplistic.  But I do think there’s something there.  And most of all, I just want to exhort everyone to stop making assumptions based on what they can see.  First of all, we can’t see the whole picture, ever.  What we see of other people is like the tiniest tip of the iceberg, and the lion’s share of their experience, of their entire person, is beneath the water, out of sight.

I need to remember this too.

Just as I started thinking and writing this post, I read these words of Anne Lamott’s on this very topic on my friend Rudri’s beautiful site.