Survival Mode

I'm a fan of low-bar goals I get over easily. Usually, I clear the bar with room to spare. I've set a goal to do ten push-ups a day. Totally easy. There, I just did them. Goal met. Here's the thing: I'll likely do ten more because it's so easy. If the bar is set at one hundred push-ups a day, I'll probably end up doing none.

Your mileage may vary.

My goal on the job is to survive. I'm not a fan of that. Survival is the sort of thing that should be taken for granted. I'm trying to stay afloat as the water rises over my head. I have to survive because this is the job that pays the bills.

Maybe your job is similar.

I talk to students about the difference between a job and work drawing the picture I've posted up top. We do a job for pay and health insurance, the necessities. Work is the stuff we need to do. Not doing our work leaves us empty. My job is teaching high school. My work is writing. The sweet spot is a job doing good work, what Donald Hall calls Life Work.

Students ask if teaching is my job or my work. I say, I'm a teacher who writes but wish I was a writer who maybe teaches. I close my eyes, sigh, and say, that's my wish.

To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish. We always hesitate when we wish for something. In my theater I like to show the hesitation and not to conceal it. A hesitation is not the same as a pause. It is an attempt to defeat the wish and put it in to language, then you can whisper but the audience will always hear you.

-- Zofia Kalinska, qtd in Things I Don't Want To Know by Deborah Levy, page 10

I don't wish to survive. I wish to write, but I don't know how to do that yet so I do both work and a job. I don't see how the work can pay the bills. I fail to believe I can pull that off.

Deborah Levy has figured it out. She is also a spectacular and brave writer. Here is how her book Things I Don't Want To Know begins and ends:

That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. (page 1)

I rearranged the chair and sat at the desk. And then I looked at the walls to check out the power points so I could plug in my laptop. The hole in the wall nearest to the desk was placed above the basin, a precarious socket for a gentleman's electric razor. That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket. Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adapters for Europe, Asia and Africa. (Page 111)

I don't have it figured out and I'm not yet especially spectacular or brave. I don't have a book that begins or ends other than the one I'm writing one essay, poem, and story at a time. I need a good extension lead, a hole in the wall, and just the right adapter for whatever powers me. Then I have to keep doing good work regardless of my job. It's that simple and yet I can't yet even imagine where I might get to. The bar seems far, far too high.

---

A few other quotes from the book:

If I thought I was not thinking about the past, the past was thinking about me. (110)

This strange memory in turn reminded me of a line from a poem by Apollinaire....'The widow opens like an orange.' .... I did not know how to get the work, my writing into the world. I did no know how to open the window like an orange. If anything, the window had closed like an axe on my tongue. If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it. (109)

...but I couldn't work out what I was trying to say. I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world, but I was overwhelmed by everything and didn't know where to start. (101)

Monday Morning, Cold Dryer

The dryer isn't working. It has been in trouble for weeks. We run a load while we sleep and sometimes wake to cold, wet clothes. The heating element isn't working, but each time I think it's shot, I send the laundry around for another tumble and it works. Last night though, things stayed cold right through.

I write three morning pages every day. They are practice, therapy, and the beginnings of ideas. This morning I wrote of things breaking down, holes in my life, and dreams that keep me from sleep. It was all connected.

My basement writing nook isn't far from the dryer. This morning I ran the dryer hoping for luck. Towels tumbled while I wrote page one but, but the machine stayed cold. Midway through page two I left a message for service, thinking, okay what now?

It wasn't a reasoned question so much as a cry, like there weren't any good choices and life is difficult. My life can be difficult but not very. I mean, big deal, the dryer is broken. I started page three thinking, I'll go to the laundromat. That's where I am now, typing this. The clothes are drying. The whole thing cost a couple of quarters. Real big deal.

Thursday a guy will look at the dryer. He'll fix it or tell me to buy a new one. My mother will come over to let the guy in since I'll be at work. By Thursday afternoon I'll know the shape of this problem. Right now, I only know the vague outline. The dryer doesn't work is all I know.

Well, no, I also understand that I've called for service, asked Mom for help, and I have survived worse things than a broken dryer. There are holes in my life and reasons why I have trouble sleeping, but the dryer is easy. I might as well savor this whole experience from problem through solution, and everything in between. As far as I can see, stuff like this, well, that's life.

Still Haven't Run Out Of Ink

There's a thing called a six-word memoir made popular by Smith Magazine. It originates from a six-word story often attributed to Hemingway that probably wasn't written by him:

For sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.

When I show this to students, they laugh at such a short story. I give them a moment, sometimes saying the story three, four times getting them past their laughter, and they find that it's a tragedy, the kind they can't quite understand yet. As a father, it gets me just a little every time.

The six-word memoirs are poetic, the good ones anyway. I have kids write some and most of them find that one six-word memoir leads to another and another and another. One kid filled five sheets of notebook paper with them. The first three pages weren't really memoirs but then she found the poetry of it and her last couple pages were something special.

I've written a few hundred of them, but this one pretty much sums me up:

Still haven't run out of ink.

I write with fountain pens and have a glass bottle of ink from I refill my pens every third day or so. Then I go on writing. I seem always to keep writing.

For years I ended blog posts with the words write on, a good ending and a way to push myself forward.

These last two weeks I have written a lot. One of my students asked if I run out of ideas, things to write and say. I smiled. It does seem like we would have a limited number of pages within us, but my limit is based on how many I choose to write before I die. He wanted a better answer than that, though, so I told him something like this:

Writing begets writing. One idea creates two more. It's like a nuclear reaction in which splitting one atom releases two particles that split two more nuclei that each release two more particles. And on and on.

I told him that writing about the book I had finished reading led to an idea about Dad which led to thinking about my car which got me to thinking of my turntable and records all of which led to a childhood memory that got me thinking of how my younger daughter wants to buy every book she sees. And on and on.

Yo, he said. That shit's crazy. I write ten words and I'm like done.

I smiled and said, you might be surprised what happens if you keep the pen moving.

We have family in town so I won't be able to write much today though I have half a dozen things ready to write. I'll make notes so as to remember. Later, when I check how much ink is left in my pen, I'll know I've got more ink in the bottle. I still haven't run out of ink. I don't think I ever will.

Stephen Kuusisto's Have Dog, Will Travel

A book about a blind man getting his first guide-dog? Why was I picking this up. It was on the Rapid Reads shelf at Petit Library and I had picked it up each of the last three times I had visited. Something about the cover, the title, the idea was grabbing me, but I resisted thinking it a light book while I was in the mood for something heavier. Something in that fourth time picking it up got me. Maybe it was Billy Collins' blurb, but probably it was me finally giving in to my instincts.

It was not a light book. Nor was it too heavy. It weighed in just right.

Kuusisto is a poet and writes prose like one. It is good prose with the occasional moments of poetic intrigue. A sentence is phrased in an odd way. Maybe it's broken, a fragment but placed just so. Whatever he has done, it works here and he led me through the story surely and firmly. A book about a blind man getting his first guide-dog? Hardly. It was the story of a man bonding with a partner, falling in love, becoming an independent man, alluding to the forces that had shaped him, and accepting grace. It is, simply put, a good book.

A few choice lines, but only a few. I found that I was reading more than harvesting. I was too involved in the story to stop and take note.

It seemed I had three problems. I was sad. I had to learn how to walk in a larger world. And I had to trust I could do this. (16)

There's an old Zen adage: if you want to get across the river, get across. (17)

Andy Warhol said: "As soon as you stop wanting something you get it." (23)

I'm hoping that these three work out for me. I'm sad at my job and need to learn how to go back out into the world of uncertainty. For that getting across, I just need to get across. And while I believe that I might get what I need when I stop wanting it, I also believe that working is true wanting and that work will get me there.

...my job is to dare to be in the world. (175)

Okay, that line has reshaped my life just a bit. Or maybe it has altered my trajectory by a tenth of a degree. Either way, I'm grateful for it.

Modesty is a requirement if you're walking a long way. (229)

This is a Zen koan. I'll be thinking about it for years.

I've ordered the rest of his prose from the library and will then move to his poetry. Maybe I might even write him a note since he lives right around the corner. I'm in proximity to good writers. How great is that?