This sounds so negative, but feels merely observational
Posted Sunday, June 24, 2007 @ 01:44 AM
I am a thinker. This is the best I can say of myself lately, with a summer spent (so far) mostly in bed with my computer, books, and movies to keep me company. So much time has passed that it takes seeing a fellow ASFA creative writing graduate to remind me of life in a workshop. I see that they're revisiting a book we read and discussed for weeks on end, or I hear they've attended a reading by some poet we'd idolized together between classes or over lunch. Sometimes it is merely a joke—something along the lines of "Like, all it has to do in life is drift, and it's like fantastic. Like an aquatic Kerouac"—the kind of silly writer joke we used to crack day in, day out, as high school students.
I still ache for the je ne sais quoi of the creative writing department, but I feel that the life of a workshop, and perhaps even the life of a writer, has begun to escape me. While the brief encounters I manage with other creative writers rarely address writing in any way, I think we're all aware, at least vaguely, of who still writes and who doesn't. Though in a sense we all arrived at the creative writing department of our own accord, without help or dependence on any kind of workshop experience, some of us graduated with the drive to keep writing the forms we learned there, and others (like myself) haven't written a line of verse since. The transition from an adoring public—a small family of eager readers—to a much larger school of students who can't comprehend what that family was like—is something each of us has experienced. However, it wasn't merely the lack of comprehension that I found disheartening, but equally the fact that no family of trusted readers existed. Perhaps it reveals some great insecurity in me, but to write in that void and crushing silence is much harder than writing poorly in the face of great criticism. We've found some solutions; every now and then I receive a packet of poems from a fellow graduate, and I still write pages and pages of letters to some of them, often about things relating to our shared high school experience. But it has been strange to discover just how much I rely on readers. I have always kept a journal, but much prefer writing in places (like here) where I know someone is listening and might respond to what I've said.
I have the same trouble with photography, I think. I spoke recently with a friend who graduated from ASFA in music, and in catching up he explained his developing interest in photography. He's gotten a job at a camera shop, and as a result knows multitudes about lenses and bodies and the entirety of the Nikon line. Since he obviously does a lot of shooting, I asked about his process—what does he do with all those photos if he never updates his flickr photostream? He said he edits, and sometimes shares favorites with family and friends, but rarely makes prints—that mostly they sit on his hard drive waiting to be backed up.
This isn't to say that I create solely for an audience, but that perhaps they provide something essential for me that I have trouble finding on my own—a sense of purpose and organization, a timeline of where I've been or where I'm going, with whatever skill I'm exercising to share with them. Without them, I'd have semblances of the same—a definite record, an accumulation—but maybe not the drive to keep it up. After all, without a camera I still have eyes, and without paper and pen, I still think and observe.
This past week I made a trip home to Birmingham to see friends from high school, friends from childhood—for the most part, people I haven't seen in months (some, years), and may or may not see again over Christmas break. This is the business of college, and of moving away: you never know when you'll next see someone, or sometimes if you'll see them again at all. One friend whose family moved to Wisconsin this time last year has made a few trips back to Birmingham, and I've been fortunate to see him each time. Every time he visits he's certain to say, "This is probably the last time we'll ever see each other," and each time I remind him that he said it the last time he visited, too. Still, there's no way to be certain that his trips from Wisconsin and mine from South Carolina will ever align again. That is, if he visits Alabama again at all.
It is this trust and uncertainty that hides behind each visit with old friends—the trust that we'll see each other again eventually, but the uncertainty of what the circumstances will be, and how soon. Each casual lunch date or dinner reunion becomes a deep and serious discussion about our schools, our lives, our relationships, and our futures. She returned from a trip to the Dominican Republic and is working in museums and galleries for the summer, wants to apply for a graduate program at the MoMA in NYC. He is living in the same house with a new room mate. She, a bleeding-heart liberal, is seeing a conservative. She misses Philadelphia. She's working for a senator, then participating in an eight-week German intensive immersion program in Vermont before returning to school in D.C. I am surprised each time I hear what someone is doing for the summer, and what their plans are for the next few years.
We are all straddling the line between adolescence and adulthood in a very big way, but it's evident even in basic conversation. We ask the basic "adult" questions. Where are you living? What are you studying? Where are you working? Are you seeing anyone? Most of us are months away from twenty, many of us living on our own. Some of us are in serious relationships, others have been changed by them. But when the adult questions are over, we tell silly, immature stories about college—who has the worst room mate, who witnessed the craziest party, which drinking games are rampant on which campuses, whose dorm is the most disgusting and weird.
But there is something beneath all the conversation, present in every visit with friends, which unsettles me. Once, before a reunion with a close friend I hadn't seen in over a year, he confessed he was afraid. When I asked why, he explained that, though we felt as close as ever, the distance that had accumulated between us would surely show itself in our reunion—that he was sure I'd changed in some way. When I asked how I seemed different, he said it wasn't like that—neither he nor I knew how I'd be different—that I'd just changed, in big and little ways that I could never explain to anyone, and that you could hardly notice unless you were standing right before me. I find it is the same with my friends in Birmingham—we have all changed in ways we can't explain to one another, and in ways we hardly understand ourselves. My time with them is nostalgic and tremendously enjoyable—trying to catch up with someone in just a few hours makes conversation thick and lingering. But ultimately, with each interaction, there is something that is incommunicable—some desire or expectation, a need to be understood without explanation. Each time I return to a place I am living or have lived (Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Greenville), I feel like a traveler returning from a remote land without photos or souvenirs, or a man returning to his family from war. I have learned words in new languages, essential to my vocabulary, which do not translate. I cannot possibly explain the battles or events I've witnessed, much less the ways they've affected me.
On some level, I feel the same way about writing here, which may explain my uncertain or infrequent visits. I have changed in so many tiny ways I can never explain to you, and so much of what I would write is too close and too truthful, and so instead of writing here I hardly write at all. Instead I am constantly thinking over my experiences. I understand now what it is to be a reader and a thinker without writing, how it is that "adults" are always speaking about jobs and houses, how it can be that, as you grow older, the process of really knowing someone slows down so much that it feels like it hardly happens at all.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
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I used to visit your blog once a long time ago. Now I remember I liked your writing... This transition from adolescence to adulthood still seems to go on, at least for me, now almost in my mid twenties. It is upsetting to me to think that I will never "grow up". What does adulthood mean anyway? It is good to think and observe, and nevermind that you may not write as often as you wish or used to... you are still a "writer" and don't let your natural creativity escape you. I think the nature of creativity is a constant ebb and flow anyway... it's not always ON, and if it is "off" it doesn't mean that you aren't creative anymore. That's what I try to remind myself anyway...
25 Jun 2007, 12:39 PM.
You've always had a knack for magically extracting my sentiments from my brain while I sleep and articulating them eloquently for all to enjoy and relate to. Thank you.
26 Jun 2007, 9:41 AM.
Glynnis, I'm always glad to find you developing.
This question - what exactly constututes being an 'adult'? - was the theme of my year, from age twenty to twenty-one.
I have come to understand adulthood as being the measurement of ones sense of personal accountability. A person matures only as he realizes and acts upon the potential of his abilities, to do the greatest good for all men and to respond earnestly to that awareness.
Children are not held accountable for almost anything. A child's mistakes belong primarily to his parents until the child is old enough to comprehend his actions. Then arrives youth, bringing along desires for every benefit and freedom of adulthood without full accountabilty for their misuse.
Finally, becoming an adult means assuming responsibility for ones freedoms and choices. In this sense, adulthood is taken by degrees. It is not a tabletop of bills stamped 'paid', nor a position applied for with a lengthy resume in hand, nor is it an all-access I.D. card into the idiocies and indulgences previously forbidden. Coming of age means owning up to ones selfishness and reacting against it.
A business-minded professional may carry three titles and balance an unbelievable schedule; yet if he does not assume personal responsibility for family, nation, environment, and God, he has grown little beyond his self-absorbed youth. He has become more artful, but none more adult.
The essense of development is to move from self-absorbtion to the full maturity of active compassion.
27 Jun 2007, 11:32 AM.
I will be turning 40 in a couple of months - so the theme of your thoughts reverberate through my head a lot lately. In so many ways I feel I am still the same guy I was twenty (really twenty, OMG) years ago - I can get still get excited about a song I discover and forward it to all my friends, today as a link, before recorded on a cassette, but still the same. What is different is that I can't fall back on my parents to bail me out of trouble, I have to pay taxes, my utility bills and try not to accumulate too much credit card debt, I got disapointed by people I thought were friends and made new friends I initially tought were strange or boring.
As much as I like Michael's view on things - it just sounds sooo boring and well, mature. Life is a blast and I try to enjoy every day, learn new things, help someone, do something I've never done before, ask questions, kiss my wife, play with my cats, be creative, try to inspire other people with what I do...
I nearly died a couple of years ago and I understood there that life is a gift and it really can be over any minute - so we better do something with it. Reflecting, evaluating, thinking are important parts of living and growing up. Compassion yeah, responsible yeah but also crazy, in love, happy and most of all awake and using all our senses.
What I am doing on my birthday? I am going to Disneyland.
27 Jun 2007, 11:04 PM.
The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where were you born?
Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change.
- from "Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"
14 Jul 2007, 11:25 AM.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/hoxxx140/architecture/square-watermelon.jpg
21 Jul 2007, 8:31 PM.
I remember the best summer was after my first year of college, when my best friends from high school came back for the summer and we could hang out again like the "old" times. I recall sitting around a campfire, saying, "wow, wouldn't it be cool if we could get a big house that we could all move into together, so we could just be with each other forever?" Everyone agreed wholeheartedly. Oh well oh well oh well.
22 Jul 2007, 10:10 AM.