Prolix

When unhappy, it is all I can think of doing. When anxious, it literally saves me. When excited, I anticipate using it to conceive, chisel, and free the thought. This is writing: my life so far, and by now all I am fit --I hope and trust--to do.

Though I did want to be a veterinarian for quite some time. And before that, a princess.

I am opposed to the notion of writing as therapy, although it has performed that function for me. No, I employ a flesh-and-blood therapist to do the kind of work that only a therapist can do, to listen to the tears, and at times provoke them. It's the way the structure of the mind works, and even if you would like it to be true that you can "do it alone," that won't do anything to alter an immutable fact. You can't. Just like wishing the apple would float up instead of fall. Gravity is a law; so is the need for outside corrective to the damaged psyche. And I'd love to meet the person who doesn't have one of those. In order to get off the damnable gerbil wheel of repetition most of us get stuck on, we need someone else to stick a pencil through the bars of the cage. We might go flying and land with a bruising thud, but at least we're off. Not getting right back on again is the real trick.

There is a great bonus, too. Psychotherapy is one of the most enthralling intellectual pursuits there is. It encompasses virtually every strain of thought we have yet come up with: philosophy, biology, the mysteries of art, the literature of narrative, metaphor, and fable. And puzzle: It's as if, at the first meeting, the world as you knew it was broken up and dumped on the table before you as a 1,000-piece picture for you to reassemble. And so nothing will ever again look the same. The front page of the newspaper, even, reveals itself to enumerate the same patterns of behavior you yourself are beginning to realize are the result of a buried motivator that propels you every waking moment, and every dreaming one, too. I imagine this little thing as looking something like a mine. A hard metal sphere with a few wires sticking out. At once improbably innocent and radiating malevolence. And look, on the side--something stenciled, though fading. The owners, perhaps? The ones who hid this under a light layer of soil, waiting for a slight disturbance? Yes, now I can read it: "Mom and Dad."

Learning about how this was set in place--or at least it was for me; let me speak only for myself, since I write in the self-serving egotistic form that is called "slow blogging"--was like a repeat of the most exciting classes I took in college. And there were many; they hopped me up as if delivering speed directly to a vein. I'd want to collar strangers in the quad and shake them till they saw stars--exactly what I was seeing when I read Hawthorne and Melville, Heidegger and (now I cringe) Derrida. The world was shaking under my feet, re-forming itself.

Not that it's entirely pleasant, though. Sometimes it feels like being slapped upside the head by someone much bigger than you. And sometimes it feels as though you're back on that gerbil wheel, only now you're in the chair revisiting, again and again, the same shit you thought you had identified and thus washed away sixteen years ago. Not. It just keeps coming back, in ever new inventive disguise. But your kind, wise, compassionate shrink says it must be repeated. As many times as it takes for you to get sick of it, or to finally see it. The first three hundred times were just warm-up, apparently.

I thought of this again as I was reading (quaintly, on the printed page, that which is about to be phased out completely, which makes such people as writers very, um, nervous) The New Yorker. I can't remember what it was exactly, but it made me reach for a pen and one of those flighty scraps of paper on which I write all these disparate notes and then tear my hair out over when, three years later, I'm trying to corral them in their thousands and make some sense out of them so I can start writing a book. Whatever it was, it struck me as a long argument predicated on something fictive. A false originating motive, which then makes the conclusion false too--like the notion of a whole-cloth substance called "evil," or the dominance myth of dog behavior (on which Cesar Millan has made his empire, but which is woefully faulty and functionally ends up as actually near to evil for the dogs on whom it's perpetrated; hmmmm). Something someone wished to believe (as to why, I must refer you back to psychotherapy) but wasn't in fact true. So the elaborate argument was a house built on a foundation of whipped cream.

This then dovetailed with my beginning to read, finally, when I should have done this two years ago before life threw its spanner into my works, B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Oh, how I wished he hadn't titled it that. Because what he says about what motivates human behavior, in just the first couple of pages, is so patently true that one can easily believe all of human life would be vastly, immediately improved if we could just make this "paradigm shift" from wishful thinking. The worldview would change, just as it does on that first day of psychotherapy. And it can never go back, which is a good thing: let us evolve, in our thinking, just as we have done in our bodies.

Writing is like therapy, even though it is not therapy, because writing feels good even while it pains one deeply. I actually feel itchy, short of breath, uneasy, needing suddenly to do the dishes or the laundry, or go take a walk mid-sentence. I'm dying to get away from it, even as I'm dying to get the next sentence down, see if it is one of those sentences that takes off like a kite with you at the end of the string pulling back with all your strength. That's what feels good: the appearance on the page of a line or two you didn't know you had in you. A thought that actually sounds smart, when you were feeling dumb. A rhythm that comes out like the percussion line of a driving dance song.

This is what feels good about writing, and why I keep doing it, why I've let myself go unfit for any other employment. So now I am undiversified as General Motors. With the same financial outlook.

To further clarify, I am, I just decided, an "ostensible writer." That is, I never write about what it is that I am ostensibly writing about (yeah, baby: check these blog posts! a whole new genre!). There are always other things that fit themselves in sideways, or insert themselves underneath the thin film of the surface. --This is the way I think, too; I wander through the woods looking at whatever, or I see my dog holding up her hurting paw from the snow (is she asking me for help, and if so, what does this say about her ability to intend, or posit results?), and a dozen new spokes are suddenly radiating out from the center of the thought. Jeez, it's a miracle I end up finishing anything I start writing, come to think of it. Or maybe I'm just ostensibly a writer.

This does tend to lead to a problem, though I experience it as a richness. "Prolix" was a word I first encountered on the top of one of my grad-school papers, meant to be a slap of a rebuke. It certainly is that. But it means that I will always be able to sit on top of a mountain of words, and that, at least, is a form of luxurious soft cushion. From it I see even more.

Uh-oh.

Flow

Starting to write something is like trying to live: sometimes I wake up unsure of how I ought to feel about it. Oh, I know how I do feel--it's a welter, a morass, a quicksand of shuffling emotions, often beginning with a compression in the chest and a tingle in the nose. But just as I knew in high school, most of these feelings are not "right." How do I know? Because people have hastened to tell me so, of course! You need to let go of that. That isn't funny. Someday, hopefully, you will be able to . . . and other instructive advice. Meanwhile, what do I do with whatever feeling actually is burning a hole through my shirt?

Likewise, sitting down to a blank piece of paper (yes, future biographers: I often use pen on paper, though sometimes I use the computer, and sometimes I go back and forth between the two, so that when I hit a wall using one, I switch to the other with my fingers crossed that it will dislodge some bricks), I never know if I've got the tone right, or the form, though they might well be the same thing. One wants to write a brilliant book, no? So the first sentence must be brilliant. And when I sit down to write a brilliant sentence, well, the jig is up. I can go fold the laundry all I want--when I come back and try again, the brilliant sentence craftily eludes me some more.

So I seek to set a trap for it: I pour a finger of bourbon, not to drown the sentence, but my anxiety over not getting one. Then I put on the headphones. Sometimes I choose music that's fast and insistent, with a compelling rhythm. (No mystery why martial music is big on percussion, and in a further aside, I was thinking last weekend as my son and I were listening to my precious old double album set of Civil War music--my son helpless to do anything but get up and march about the living room, not so different from the slightly older boys whose ears, filled with this prompting, marched onto fields of blood--it is unlikely that anyone will be issuing a collection of Iraqi war music.) I hope that the energy of, say, the Gypsy Kings will cause the words to flow quickly, so they can slip past the internal schoolmarm who wants to halt them so she can see that they've washed the back of their necks.

This last would be analogous to what dog trainer Kim said to me the other night after I had just put Nelly through a short course of agility equipment: "You're overthinking it." When you're doing something physical, it's amazing how quickly--unnoticeably quickly--a little input from the conscious mind can cause a collapse. Nelly, of course, picks it up before I realize what I've done: all of a sudden, she flies past, not over; she comes back out the same end of the tunnel she went in; she does the bedeviling weave poles perfectly the first two times, then the third she pops out at the fourth pole, looks at me as if to say, "Mom, what the heck do you want me to do??" and we try it again and again, until the expression on Nelly's face and indeed whole body is one of pure frustration. Of course, she is eager to voice it (did I mention that Nelly is a screamer?).

That's when I know my mind must have switched on, very much like the electric sensor for our furnace, which I can hear underneath the kitchen floor suddenly clicking, running, then clicking off (though this might actually serve better as an illustration of how poorly insulated our floors are). A moment's hesitation on my part--oh, damn, where is number 6 again, the walk or the chute?--causes everything to fall apart in an instant. Dogs are so attentive to our bodies that the slightest inclination of the shoulders can send them in a different direction. You're not aware that your foot was pointing half an inch off from where you wanted your dog to go; or that your eyes had flicked for a second over there and not here, but your dog saw it. You weren't aware that your dog did, but then your dog speaks body language, and you're just a beginner in it, struggling along with your tapes and remedial classes and your execrable pronunciation. Your dog is fluent, writing poetry with full mastery of tense, nuance, tone.

Sometimes I listen to Bach concertos, Glenn Gould at the piano, cranked to the top. This is the recording that keeps the plane up when I fly; I think it must be the sound of Gould's breath and hum under the music. These compositions are so head-exploding, so humanly impossible, that half the time I am able to write, and half the time I burst into tears. Anyway, crying seems the only proper response to this music's hugeness: it is an aural cathedral, so full of awesomeness the whole sweep of human existence is there before you, and you are at once aware of its puny futility and its unspeakable wonder.

If this doesn't get the words out onto the screen, I might resort to another finger of bourbon, for exactly the same reason that I do so when at a party: intense social anxiety. I have to fake myself out, chemically if necessary, so I don't think about what I'm doing wrong, which will cause me to fall to the floor in a paroxysm of self-consciousness, and then I'm rather unlikely to attract a date, aren't I? Not to mention a brilliant sentence.

Can you tell that I am trying to start some new writing?

I am overthinking everything these days. I just heard the furnace click on.