writing my name in water

 

i just finished rereading michael chabon's wonder boys and i'm feeling a little off. maybe it is the fact that i've been confined to my house and mundane activities or maybe it is the fact that i don't really have much to worry about but things feel off. so far the tally is up to three and a half books since i've been home (plus countless hours of 30 rock, bones, and the x files, a trip to houston, and one grad school application down) and i keep telling myself that i have to just finish this one book and then do something different. a craft, bake, leave the house, finish my grad school applications. now i have a handy holiday excuse of christmas day to let me finish tom stoppard's arcadia to add to c.s. lewis' till we have faces, tom robbins' jitterbug perfume and the aforementioned chabon novel. as i was lying in my bubble bath finishing up the last chapter, i felt myself empathizing with the crazy grady tripp and i realized i over-empathize with literature. i go into every book as an escape and i'm not sure what i'm running from or what i'm expecting but i always expect something. i'm always looking for something and even when i don't find it, whatever it is, my mind tries to find something to latch on to with every bit of information i process. i can't just read a book or listen to a song without over-analyzing everything, underlining passages that apply to some oblique thought or occurrence. finally having someone around who understands how my mind works, someone who is around me almost constantly, i am starting to see how unreasonable my worrying and fixating can be. i'm not able to simply enjoy things unless i look at them from a dozen different angles, unless i take in every possible opinion and interpretation. i spend so much of my free time with my head in a book or listening to music but i have never really been able to do the same thing with movies. why? because i can't invest in movies the same way i can with literature and music. i can't immerse myself in movies the way i can with these other mediums so maybe i should start watching more movies - empathizing with some of these literary characters doesn't seem healthy. i'm not finding what i'm looking for, so should i keep looking? i can't give up books or music, but maybe a different approach is in order. books straddle the realm of transience and permanence - a fleeting escape, one that you can come back to again and again. maybe i can't keep looking for an escape.

clean gone

i haven't really been inspired to write in a while. maybe it is all of the energy i put into academic writing these days, but as i finally have time to read outside of the classroom, i'm slowly feeling more inclined to write outside of academia as well. i picked up a book which had been collecting dust on the shelf, so to speak, for quite some time now - a book that i started in a half-hearted attempt a couple of years ago, put aside, lost a copy, bought a replacement and still never got around to reading. it took a friend coming into my depressing little dorm room (yes, i'm 23 and still live in a dorm. let's not talk about it, okay? i think my age is the depressing element in the equation) and saw it on my shelf - a 1966 edition of C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces.

i can't even begin to talk about how much this book moved me once i sat down and gave it the time it deserved. i'm going to write about this book; professionally, i mean. or as close as professionally as an undergraduate can get. academically maybe, but it is a bit more than that. there is no grade riding on this, no deadline, just my own personal motivation to do it right. clive staples is one of the few writers i know who just gets it, who sees the world the way that i see it. okay, for all of you out there who just associate him with narnia, feel free to check out right now. granted, The Last Battle means a whole hell of a lot to me, the authorial voice really comes out in his philosophical works and in the Perelandra series. until this book, the closest i ever felt to C.S. Lewis was probably in The Problem of Pain (you can read more about that here). there is something about him and i can't articulate it (at least not yet), which oddly enough, brings me to my point.

the complaint was the answer. to have heard myself making it was to be answered. lightly men talk of saying what they mean. often when he was teaching me to write in greek the fox would say, "child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." a glib saying. when the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. till that world can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? how can they meet us face to face till we have faces?