Still Sundays

December 26th.

Paradox of fog.  We move forward with what we don’t know. “Museum of Innocence.” Antidote to ‘Anxiety of Influence’, this time, by T.S. Eliot.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

This Sunday morning I tried to find an alcove made of stillness on my parents’ farm house while everyone is here for the holidays. On at least one other Sunday I have attempted and barely succeeded. I just re-read that particular “Still Sunday” where I discussed the paradox of stillness, commented that the earth is vibrant and moving, and then offered an antidote by Alice Walker and Jack Kerouac for “anxiety of influence” when it comes to creating.

A lot of nights and mornings in the fall and winter seasons in central California (not quite LA but further north east where there is nothing but farms) are heavy with fog that marches around proudly. Fog has always intrigued me ever since I was a child. Most children recall memories of catching snow flakes on their tongues, but because I didn’t grow up in such climates (and by this I don’t mean I grew up in California), I recall trying to inhale fog or catch fog in my hands when I was little. I was puzzled by how something that hinders sight also brings a clarity of vision, illuminating somethings while masking others. I especially recall how roses look in fog: as if in a painting that is inside a dream.

The other night the trees around the farmhouse were wrapped around a blanket of heavy haze and the fog might as well have been a commander-in-chief directing and defying what the eyes saw.

I watched the silver brume move, an ancient goddess making her way through trees, carrying a stillness made of a translucent sky that had come down to exhale on earth for the night.

Sometimes we see things more clearly when we are too mystified to see the big picture.

I don’t find books they find me. As if I am on some undisclosed mission and due to the stakes involved even I can’t know what it is. This made research blissfully “lucky” during my Master’s and Law years and personal quests have never lead me to go seeking.

I have not been able to read fiction—any new fiction in its entirety, as far I can recall, since 2008.  I read ravenously in 2006 and 2007.  It was as if I somehow knew I would not have the appetite again for a long time. I don’t go by reviews, awards,  or literary standards. I pick a book, I touch, I feel, I read the back cover, I read the first paragraph, I flip the book open to the middle and read a few pages to assess whether the juxtaposition of words, the writing regardless of plot, is for me, and then, finally, try to justify whether I can afford a book I may not have time to read.

Time. Time is a lie I tell myself.  A ghost of some great book whispers: it’s not that there is not enough time but that you are afraid—afraid it won’t be the kind of book that will make you forget time, the kind of book you can’t put down, the kind where you have to hide from those around you so you can’t be found so as to finish it as if it was a sacred love letter written just for your understanding—afraid you are too old to feel that way about a book again.

I buy the book just to prove this ghost wrong.  I read and eventually can’t finish due to time.

For someone who is in love with words and respects the disciplined effort required to bring a craft to completion, I am at once embarrassed and annoyed to have to admit this—this—inability to read or rather finish another’s fiction, especially since I began writing seriously.  Shorter pieces are even harder. If the novel must engage in the first 10 pages, then the short story of ten pages or less must grab me from the first paragraph. Anything shorter than that, something online, must tug me after the first two sentences. I wrote on one particular “Still Sunday” how stories in the New Yorker magazine hardly sustain my attention span beyond the first two paragraphs. Someone wrote a blog post about me and that “Still Sunday” stating that was….arrogant? self-absorbed?… I can’t recall, something to that effect. I am attracted to even the most distant chime of some truth that gets stirred within but the analysis of that particular “Still Sunday” didn’t even invoke a reaction. I know this much about myself: I never dismiss out of arrogance.

I long gave up that childhood obsession: if started, must finish.  I don’t go to religious institutions because I have to so why would I continue on with words just for the sake they were written when the only tonic that satisfies me is the craft that is a brew of a revered Source.  I found solace in the fact that I was re-reading a lot of fiction and non-fiction, including new non-fiction. I concluded this was something all those who write did: step away from the fictional world created by another so as to drive inside the world he or she was trying to create.

And then it happened. Like all falling in love does. Out of this Grand Nowhere yet perfectly Orchestrated.

Sometime ago I shared Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech addressing literature and writing. Thereafter, a kindred creative and author, Lucy Pollard-Gott, and I engaged in a discussion about Pamuk. We read and discussed articles about him and his interviews. I noticed his latest fiction, The Museum of Innocence, was available. I went to the bookstore, read the first few pages, and had an inkling that it was time—that this might do it. But I ignored it. I didn’t buy it. I told Lucy his latest book was available and she went ahead and purchased it along with some of Pamuk’s other works. Well, I wasn’t going to just stare at her as she shared what she was gathering about Pamuk. So I went to the bookstore again and stared at The Museum of Innocence for a long time. I noticed it was 532 pages long. Where was I going to find time to finish this, given I had recently purchased The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Greene and In Motion: The Experience of [‘Deep’] Travel by Tony Hiss, a fellow New Yorker. I do read many books at once, especially non-fiction, so I could manage but why collect another fiction book I was not going to finish.

I began The Museum of Innocence and read the few page and realized it was not going to happen and switched over to the latest by Tony Hiss. No attention span, no time, for fiction. Then Lucy mentioned she was on page 34 and what she thought so far. Now I was intrigued. I told her I would catch up so as to comment. That was three days ago. I am on page 289. I have not been able to put it down. I am on page 289 of a 532 page book and I still don’t know what will happen. In a good story, as in a life truly lived, you don’t know what will happen but you read on.

We move forward not only with what we know but because of what we don’t know.

Pamuk is a master storyteller and every sentence pushes the next sentence forward to a plot driven by the main characters. No sentence, like no moment, is extraneous. How glorious. How incredible!

Moreover, I am elated with joy that I am not reading like one who writes but like a reader! It is hard to read like a reader when one is writing. Similar to when I was teaching—every thing was a possible lesson plan for the students: articles, songs, movies etc. and similar to when I was consumed with law—I thought like a lawyer: every news item was received not as a consumer on this planet but decrypted so as to be understood within the legal code, where others saw fair or unfair, I only heard legal or nonlegal. I still do sometimes—I don’t think one can ever forget his or her former selves in their entirety and nor should be expected—but I am definitely more removed.

I was reminded by Oscar Wilde’s words from The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

I was reading The Museum of Innocence as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera for the first time in 2001 through train rides in Italy and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first time when I was much younger. This was the only time I had ever loved a book! There was no book before this, nor would there ever be! I forgot I wrote. I no longer wanted to write. Ever! I just wanted to read—-give me more, more, more of this!

I was so consumed by this book that I even called someone dear to me by the wrong name! There is no way to cover that up. I apologized and I am grateful they are understanding. I told them it was not going to be a still sunday to write. Perhaps I should just take a break!  It wasn’t that I was so consumed by The Museum of Innocence—I know the main character too closely—but what was going to become of me after I finished it?! I am grateful to this person for reminding me: await the stillness of a Sunday. Even a Sunday after Christmas? Yes. Even when we are having guests over? Yes. Even when I can’t fall asleep because I just want to read on? Yes.

This is also where the tug to the downward spiral began: I really didn’t need to finish my current manuscript. I could just tell people to read Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence. Although his novel is set in Turkey and my manuscript spans three continents, why bother? I knew better than to say this out loud for those closest to me (and therefore the manuscript) would not even hear the first of it and angrily retort: ENOUGH. No good reasons, no solid excuses, no deprecating comparisons. Nothing. Just finish the damn thing. We are tired. You are tired. We want the same thing as you: you back. So just finish.

Then, while deciding if I really could gather any stillness this Sunday morning (now afternoon), I picked up Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot from my parents’ living room, which is really a sea of books. I flipped it open and read the following:

Maturity of language may naturally be expected to accompany maturity of mind and manners. We may expect the language to approach maturity at the moment when men [and women] have a critical sense of the past, a confidence in the present, and no conscious doubt of the future.

In literature, this means that the poet is aware of his predecessors, and that we are aware of the predecessors behind his work, as we may be aware of the ancestral traits in a person who is at the same time individual and unique. The predecessors should be themselves great and honored: but their accomplishment must be such as to suggest still undeveloped resources of the language and not such as to oppress the younger writers with the fear that everything that can be done has been done, in their language. The poet, certainly, in a mature age, may still obtain stimulus from the hope of doing something that his predecessors have not done; he may even revolt against the beliefs, the habits and the manners of his parents; but, in retrospect, we can see that he is also the continuer of their traditions, that he preserves essential family characteristics, and that this difference of behavior is a difference in the circumstances of another age.

The persistence of literary creativeness in any people, accordingly, consists in the maintenance of an unconscious balance between tradition in the larger sense—the collective personality, so to speak, realized in the literature of the past—and the originality of the living generation.

The maintenance of the standard is the price of our freedom, the defense of freedom against chaos.

I have finally made peace that I can not rush my current manuscript. Everything—interactions, what I have read, and written—up to this point has amounted to a very profound understanding about the story I am writing. There is something I am not quite grasping and hence the delay. The split-second that it clicks, every breath would be a typed word and I will not stop till it is finished. So far I have worked in spurts. I had such a series of hours in November where the narrative voice was bigger than any intention of mine and I just watched myself write. Then I was interrupted by life. Then halted by trying to understand something or another.

Writing makes me impertinent and at once humble. I stand between the force of audacity and compliance at arm’s length as the walls cave in.

Those who create are some answer to a question no one quite understands.

Sometime when one is home with the past, with memories of how far one has come, how far one has to go, the place you will always gladly belong but never quite fit the same, the stillness is foggy, but you can see right through it if you watch closely and with patient eyes.

Related posts:

Still Sundays Still Sundays Still Sundays Still Sundays