Small, seemingly insignificant moments

Creative Invitation II

Pioneer Life Insurance Building, Fargo, ND, June 2012.

I’ve lived in a pile of self-doubt most of my life. I didn’t trust my intuition, nor could I feel it, to be honest. I didn’t trust my worldview, nor was I sure what it was. I didn’t trust what I wanted from life or that it was possible. I didn’t trust my own creativity or that I was creative at all.

I was so disconnected from my emotional center that it wasn’t until I was 25 that I slowly began to identify, understand, and support it. Not being able to identify or describe one’s emotions is called alexithymia and I still struggle, when in the middle of big feels, discussing what I’m feeling. I prefer to retreat and process before I share and, if necessary, explain. And I do get big feels. BIG, BIG feels.

Though it’s not a situation I wish for anyone, there are upsides: it’s taught me to question new data, remain open, discover. I turn things over from different angles. Rub them up against existing data to see how it feels or plays out. In other words: I observe.

Because of this disconnect from my emotions and ability to turn things over and over again, my first fictions were rooted in concrete detail and used the sensations and proximity of my characters’ bodies in an attempt to build emotional weight and tension without using words like “she felt anxious”. My characters didn’t feel anything, they experienced moments.

I wrote detailed settings from what I knew intimately: the rooms and streets I occupied were my backdrops and they created a mood. The stories were just as much about place as they were more specifically about the characters. And I think that writing those close, detailed observations, whether I did so effectively or not, was an accidental path to learning to trust and observe myself from the inside.

In his poem, “The Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour,” Allen Ginsburg observes a construction worker at rest almost in a single breath without overtly introducing his own thoughts or feelings about the subject. Of course, the language we use to describe anything (and even our choice of subject) will reveal a bit about our perceptions, knowledge, situation, worldview, etc., but making the effort to record as accurately as possible, almost as if with words, we’re drawing the subject rather than writing it, roots us deeper into our own immediate experience.

In case you need a refresher on the poem Ginsburg notes as the turning point in his poetics, I’ve taken the liberty of pasting it here, probably illegally, from a blog that probably also posted it illegally:

Two bricklayers are setting the walls
of a cellar in a new dug out patch
of dirt behind an old house of wood
with brown gables grown over with ivy
on a shady street in Denver. It is noon
and one of them wanders off. The young
subordinate bricklayer sits idly for
a few minutes after eating a sandwich
and throwing away the paper bag. He
has on dungarees and is bare above
the waist; he has yellow hair and wears
a smudged but still bright red cap
on his head. He sits idly on top
of the wall on a ladder that is leaned
up between his spread thighs, his head
bent down, gazing uninterestedly at
the paper bag on the grass. He draws
his hand across his breast, and then
slowly rubs his knuckles across the
side of his chin, and rocks to and fro
on the wall. A small cat walks to him
along the top of the wall. He picks
it up, takes off his cap, and puts it
over the kitten’s body for a moment.
Meanwhile it is darkening as if to rain
and the wind on top of the trees in the
street comes through almost harshly.

The first time I read this poem I was moved nearly to tears by its seeming simplicity, its concrete detail, its tenderness both in the action of the subject and the writer.

Sometimes I feel my writing must contain broad strokes, grand adventures, big emotional upheavals (partly because I’ve had so many) and I forget that the smallest, seemingly insignificant moments can move us. And that we spend most of our time living in thousands of small, seemingly insignificant moments most of which we forget, rather than in the big upheavals.

So this is my invitation to you, whether you need to build self-trust or not: closely observe a person (or animal or moving object) in a single moment, movement, or action. A cat at rest, a child at play, a partner putting away the groceries, a barista making coffee, a Roomba roomba-ing, yourself writing. Use whatever descriptions you like, but refrain from entering into feelings or thoughts. Also, poets out there, avoid metaphors and similes. Be direct and precise.

But above all: play, delight, explore, expand. Share in the comments or via email if you’re feeling social.

With love,