I think I’ve stumbled across resolve, some small sureness, that paradoxically throws everything into question.

I am startled when I am overtaken by a strong opinion or moment of resolve, which, really, shouldn’t seem like such a big deal. I think there’s even an old expression about opinions being like a part of an anatomy which every one has one. And it’s not as though I never have opinions. I have a friend I didn’t speak to for a year when we were what, twenty or something, because we disagreed over something that was so ridiculous that if I put it down you won’t believe me, you’ll think it’s hyperbole — but, if memory serves? it was over whether pop culture of the ’70’s or the ’80’s sucked worse? And I am so averse to conflict that I think this disagreement marked the beginning of a period of preferring not expressing opinions to fighting over them, and the opinions I hold I tend to hold tentatively, prefacing “of course, you might not feel this way, there are so many other ways to feel” which when you have to put in such an obvious preface, what exactly is the value of it?

The um, James Wood dust-up two blog entries ago? Where I felt practically as if I had started a flame war for merely citing somebody who has different opinions than some people I respect a lot? Yeah. That’s sort of typical. I love goodreads for helping me keep track of what I have read, what I want to read, what friends are reading, but the very act of assigning stars or writing anything like criticism? Freaks me out a little.

This is not something I particularly love about myself. As much as anything delights me about my boys, I love that they comfortably hold opinions different from my own.

And the easiest way to describe what it feels like being me, is that I sometimes feel like water, taking the shape of whatever container I happen to be held in, being as agreeable and as pleasant as I can in the name of getting along, and not at all sure what shape I would have were I not suitably contained.

And then when I am not happy it seems like I have a tendency to wait passively for things to change. Because they do, always. And I don’t know how to be different, only that it’s time for me to start growing here. Which is terrifying, I haven’t a clue how even to start, and all I can guess is that it is like the children’s game of hotter and colder, one has to start moving, slowly but steadily so that as one gets closer to or further from one’s objective, one gets hotter or colder. And it’s the trying to discern for myself what constitutes feeling warmer, it’s like trying to wake up a sense that has been numb. A friend assured me that I don’t have to be able to imagine what happier looks like from right here, and I tell myself that I will just do little works of removing obstacles to the happiness even if I am not sure I believe in happiness.

And this is stinky hard to write about. I don’t want it to be so vague as to sound like cloying self-help nor so specific as violate the privacy of the people whom I am engaged with in this process, but writing about stuff is how I know how to move forward. Silence doesn’t feel right. So I put this up to say, here I am, struggling along, and it might not look so epic from the outside, but as uncomfortable as it is, the notion that I can own this and shift from a passivity to a sort ownership of my own life seems like a good place to be in.

Some days it’s as though the pen cannot keep up with the words in my head, some days there’s a lot of staring into space, adjusting, fidgeting. And I try to figure out the difference, that the easiest or maybe simply the most joyful is the connection of things that becomes a new idea to me, or a recognition of some thought as an old idea in a new form. Some days there are emotions to be worked through, things that when I felt them I might not even have been able to identify exactly because my feelings like to wear masks and I tend to have to take off one after another to get at what exactly what I felt. It turns out righteous indignation is indeed rare, and fear doesn’t like to be recognized at all. But I don’t suppose that this is the bulk of the journal either. Stalling for time I catalogue sounds, dogs and birds and the neighbors’ fountain, rustles of leaves, and the heaving sighs of busses at the stop a few houses down the street. So is the different between a fast three pages and a slow three pages only the level of detail?

I should never run out of words, I suppose if it is so, because there is always more detail to cover. Only it starts sounding like an English 101 paper attempt to bulk up the word count, the inventory of items on my desk, the tedious recounting of things that don’t change, feel as if they will never change, houses passed walking Rainer to school with Christmas lights out in September or already fully decorated for Halloween, interesting plants I don’t know the names of, what I heard on the radio, what I read before falling asleep, the weather, the annoyance of power tools buzzing and the behavior of people parking on our street in front of my house, details that don’t mean much to me, watchfulness without any real object.

And I think what I try to make my way to, however slowly is that the factor in the number of words for a day may not be detail but attention. Minus a sensory deprivation take, can one not assume rough parity among days for the number of details present? Or that details are mines which this casual habit of three pages a day is in no danger of stripping bare, that the presence of details is, as a matter of functioning, emotional truth, if not mathematically accurately, infinite. Or that fractal-like, the closer one looks at a detail, the more detail there is to it?

I try not to go all tree-falling-in-the-woods-with-no-audience but what is a detail unlit by attention? Can attention create details?

I hold my pen posed above the paper, thinking, one second, two, three, it plunges back down, onward, leaving the messy trail.

And it’s not that every detail has equal weight. Time is a detail, but a tyrannical one. The amber translucency of the honey in a jar on my desk from doctoring tea for my sore throat is a more pleasing detail, less startling, less interesting — everyone knows the color of honey, I have no new take on describing it. I want a detail that is unexpected. Deviant.

I play as if I could create a taxonomy of details, the idiosyncratic, the personal, the universal, the artificial, the red herring, the negligible, the trite, the repetitive, the sensory (could I invent an abstract detail? what about something statistical that you do not perhaps experience directly?

And where does my attention go on the days when I struggle to put a single word more down? Is the attention vested in a day any less fixed than the hours? Or do I hide it from myself when my attention is spent on envy and covetousness and feelings of deep inadequacy, the days when I suspect I am a better friend when my friends are having a hard time than when everything is going well? Days when I get that seventh grade feeling that the rest of the world is having a much better time, having a party to which I am not invited?

Mara Leah Collins is vaguely disappointed but cannot name what it was she was hoping for.

Mara Leah Collins thanks you for playing.

Mara Leah Collins is disturbed at her tendency to compose Facebook updates throughout the day, the clever completions to “Mara Leah Collins…”

And I attempt not to bore you or myself with another exploration of my complicated feelings about social media though, yesterday I resisted the urge to put links on Facebook to the two radio stories — On the Media ran back-to-back stories on the first American Internet addiction treatment center and on a documentary about a guy who correctly guessed where the Internet was going, how our usage would increase, but also who cracked up attempting to life his life entirely exhibitionistically on-line. The filmmaker urges us all to hold something back.

The update on my first week of having Rainer in school is that it slowly dawned on me that the number of things I have to get done each day, the loads of laundry, the meals, the running and emptying and reloading and running again of the dishwasher, has not diminished at all, and if I have ambitions for Getting Something Done while the house is quiet, I must be strict with myself about using the Internet, which will take as much time as I will feed it, but sometimes doesn’t leave me feeling any more deeply connected. Which, I don’t know what I mean by deeply connected, but I think it has to do with thoughts that don’t fit neatly into 140 characters.

For instance.

September 20 is my half-birthday, the earth as far as it gets from the position it was in relative to the sun when I was born. Not that the solar system has ever returned to the place it was when I was born. Not that I think my mind really does well trying to grasp absolute cosmic distances or place as something fixed. I am pleased my desk is right where it was yesterday.

But if you think about it yesterday is all relative too. On day to hold a washing of sheets, a bringing myself out to write, too much time on Facebook, even. Yesterday as a spin of earth on its axis in addition to its moving nearly another degree on the arc of the ellipse it travels around the sun, which is traveling its own lonely cosmic path out from the center, the dance going on even when we cannot hear the beat. Yesterday the first rehearsal of the season for Aodán and Xander’s orchestras, Raven patiently chauffeuring while I got on the elliptical and listened to podcasts.

Yesterday was crowned with dinner with friends, but its vividest moment from today was when I squeezed out some time to read James Wood’s How Fiction Works and paced the house looking for a quiet place to read, with Raven working upstairs and the younger boys playing video games in the living room, so I sat at first against the wool by the back door, coats and backpacks hanging from hooks around my head, but eventually sprawled on my stomach in front of the book, reading about use of detail, and Flaubertian tricks of taking in details that couldn’t all be happening at the same time by one person, the encompassing repeated actions of women yawning and street sweepers sweeping, dirty children fallin and crying, and the discussion of ’significant’ details and the ones that lounge about for mere verisimilitude, citing some Roland Barthes.

At this point I lay bathed in an ocean of details, the reflected boundary line between trees and sky in the rainwater on the porch boards as I looked out the cat door, water filling the tarnished copper bowl fireplace with the charred wood in it starting to float, puddles on the cushions of the seats on the chairs, chips in the painted floor of the hall, fresh new skin growing where blistered skin peels off between my thumb and forefinger, souvenirs of last weekend’s yardwork. And at the same time, I am pricked by the need to whip out the iPhone and add Barthes to my goodreads reading list. And also a few other books run into in other places, discussions I habitually lurk at the edge of, wary of contention and being overly-sucked-in.

And when I finished reading Wood and went upstairs, opened the computer — there in my blog feeds pops out, from a friend of a friend’s blog Barthes again, lovely, copied into my journal. And I remember another Barthes link from a friend’s Facebook page a week ago. Mercury in retrograde, or whatever. Last week I wondered if I was being haunted by John Keats.

If I look up from reading and writing I get discouraged by all that I do not know, the unread canon, the knowledge that there is no catching up. And I suppose that, absent a systematic approach, one really can do worse than to trust the serendipities that thrust the same name in one’s face three times in an hour. Yesterday evening at dinner with friends, I’m telling her how Wood’s discussion of ‘free indirect style’ helped me understand something that was wrong with what I was writing, and I suddenly remember her husband was an English major, and I blush that things seem like big revelations to me that he can take with an “of course” attitude (not that he is ever anything but gentle and courteous, it’s all me and I feel so underqualified).

But before the conversation moves on there’s this moment of talking about having always read for pleasure, without paying particular attention to how things are put together and how they work, I have sometimes a fear that a newfound attention and knowledge will diminish the pleasure, like knowing how a magician’s tricks work. No, no, we agree, knowledge of what a writer is doing in a passage can only enhance our appreciation. But I think about it more today. What if it were like having perfect pitch and suddenly finding poor or merely out-of-tune performances intolerable? I remember a stage in playing violin when my own insecurity made me listen mostly for other people’s mistakes. But my listening seems to have grown again more generous, perhaps from the daily work with the boys, and I find I have more of an appreciation for other players exactly where they are at. I don’t know to what degree a magnanimous appreciation is based in knowledge, in disposition, or in willingness to be generous. In any case, I hope I am read generously, kindly. I rely upon it.

In my head is a long list of the various purposes a blog can serve: updating people who care about the things going on in one’s life, keeping a record of one’s thoughts and feelings in a more searchable version than the towering stack of notebooks, a way of curating the life of the mind, keeping a place open for drawn-out conversations with friends whom one might not have the opportunity to have many in-person conversations, practice with putting one’s more polished writing out for the scrutiny of others. I think my blog has taken turns with each of these, but the dormant blog is none of these, right? And the irony is that it is a positively received entry that sometimes scares me into silence because I imagine the next thing I write will be so disappointing in comparison.

Still. I summon the patience with myself to put to it once more, not apologetic, not even with pure presumptuous gratitude that anyone is still listening, but with the courage to reclaim the blog because I do still need it.

I walked Rainer to school for his second day of kindergarten this morning. Friday the parents of kindergartners seemed terribly marked, I described a cloud of anxiety hovering over all our heads, but maybe it was just that only the parents of kindergartners were walking their kids in to class on Friday. I count on my fingers, four preschools, five elementary schools — we’ve done being the new kid thing a lot now, and you would think it would be getting easier.

I didn’t cry until we were almost to the car Friday morning, and Raven quizzed me on what it was — the end of an era? worry about him? anxiety about the quiet in the house? And each of those a little — I miss all of my kids’ baby selves, I still will fold one of Rainer’s shirts and marvel that it is like a miniature of a full-sized human being shirt because I interact with him as a person and don’t always register the smallness of the package that full-sized will and personality come in, if that makes any sense. And not being there to speak for him, to help make sure he is understood, because it still requires a little work to understand him sometimes, the baby speech belying the startlingly clear mind he has. There’s guilt that I am not quite sure in the confusion of adults and children which adult is the teacher, but I trust that with time it will be made clear — the thing that matters is he is comfortable and happy saying goodbye, happy to see me when I pick him up, even if he doesn’t have a lot to tell me about his day.

And how do I feel? Loving and solicitous, holding my hand out to the car, Raven managed to ask what I planned to do with my day while being reassuring that I don’t need to give an account of the hours to myself unfolding all of the sudden, that I don’t need to rush to make any plans for the rest of my life right now. And that reassurance would have been crippling if he didn’t already know the paths my brain treads well enough to know that I would need it.

And to some degree, there are elements of my life that stay the same all year round. I feel like I mention these too often, but I have a hard time explaining myself without them, and the embarrassment is fearing that I sound like I think everybody should have such things or that I don’t know how to function without them, when really, they are just about an ongoing attempt to figure out exactly what works for me, the balance of head and body, inside and outside, self and other, habit and freedom. I cling to the routines of journal and exercise and musical practice, trying to give myself the structure on which I recognize myself as being very dependent, without becoming so rigid that I am breakable and brittle. So I struggle to make this transition work. All summer the knowledge of fall’s quiet house loomed, that I was on the one hand aware of how much I was craving some quiet and on the other hand terrified it would be a pressure to do something, be something, that I would rattle around, clean obsessively, watch the home shopping network for hours ordering thousands of dollars of things we didn’t need or decide to become the queen of Facebook and see if I could make thousands of new online friends to keep from feeling alone. Or something. Rashly agree to chair the PTA, volunteer to work in the school five mornings a week.

It has been thirteen years since I have had regular hours of quiet and not attending to needs of small people. Even now I sort of glance at the phone expecting a school to call and tell me my kids are being sent home for a week for having lice or terrible behavior or some such. I pinch myself to make sure it is real. I make myself a deal. I drop off Rainer at 8:45, am home by 8:52. Between 9, then, and noon, I lock the house and hie myself out to the studio where there is no internet connection, no housework. I can read, write, compose a blog entry, listen to music — and that’s about it. At noon, I am free to meet people for lunch or jump on the elliptical, throw a load of laundry in, do grocery shopping or go to the library until I pick Rainer up at 3. In other words, half my time I will dedicate to space for words, and the other half gets rendered to Caesar. Or something. We give it a few weeks and see how it goes.

I re-read the journal now, weeks later, grateful for the things I did capture, which may have been only a fraction of what was there, but I caught the rightness of resonant familiarity, from the silvered boards of the fence with yellow and purple flowers arrayed in front of them to the things I don’t think of when I think of home that nonetheless are braided into my oldest memories, the Catholic church around the corner, the people on city busses who cross themselves when we ride past it, the fruitless mulberry and the elm that were the first trees I knew and stand in my head as the archetypes of all trees. The fact that the dirt is the color I know as dirt-colored; not as dark or moist as the dirt of Oregon, dustier, redder, but precisely the right color in my head for dirt. And it’s that when we are out at the ruins at Qurai and I know from the line of cottonwoods where a stream must be that it occurs to me that this is what it is to belong to a place, to read things you don’t even know you know in the landscape. I wonder if I will ever reach this degree of familiarity with the Northwest, knowing what berries you can eat, being able to read berry bushes as a sort of calendar, for example, or recognizing and avoiding nettles and poison oak.

And then, to return is to measure yourself against the unchanging and see how you have changed, but also to note the changes from a distance, the ones that you don’t live with every day. Where I sat and wrote I could see where my parents had buried their beautiful black lab, Beau, the month before, and remember the puppy he was the first time I brought Xander to New Mexico, ten years earlier. It was difficult to approach their kitchen door and get the dutiful low whuff of protective greeting.

I had done my best to prepare the boys, and on the plane Søren checked in with me, “You’re going to” — how did he put it? –” try out life at your parents’ without Beau for the first time? Are you sad? Or more excited to see your parents?” I had to muster patience, he was pleased with himself for grasping some emotional nuance, and eager to connect with me, and I was trying as much to teach him tact as recognition of the emotions. Rainer rehearsed “Beau is dead. He died and his body is buried” requesting, politely enough, that my mother show him where.

It doesn’t matter that the yard is filled with different plants than when I lived here, I still see the shadows of my sister and me on on the front lawn running through the sprinkler and imagining that each drop reflecting the sun was a living being, a fairy of sorts living an entire lifetime in the arc between sprinkler and grass. I remember evening games where my mother would say “Find the Russian olive” and we would run to it and she would say “Good. Now find the yarrow” and we would run to that… how many plants could my children name in our yard, and will they remember them as friends when they are grown? What color will they think of when they think of dirt?

Because I’m running around in the manner of the newly decapitated Gallus gallus domesticus in preparation for flying with the four boys to Albquerque on Saturday, only this is the week one set of boys has camp in the morning another set has camp in the afternoon and trying to keep track of where everyone is/ought to be feels like patting my pockets for keys and phone every few minutes and flying into a panic when things aren’t quite as I think they ought to be. Plus I just got summoned for jury duty and need to deal with that before I go out of town, as well as emailing my parents my children’s dietary preferences (which are varied and contradictory), renting a viola for the second child since violas are technically too big to be carry-on on Southwest airlines, finding performance outfits for each of them, coming up with a plan for the fourth child’s birthday while we are there, and dealing with things like library books due next week and regular lessons and the food in the refrigerator which I am just going to have to throw out.

But that’s not what’s preoccupying me, anyway.

Which is ancient. Actually.

The wrestling that I do is with where one comes up with the humility to strive at the limits of one’s abilities even if one feels completely mediocre?

If you were here sitting across from me, and we were to have the leisure for a real conversation, this is what I would want to ask you.

I have been wrestling with the acknowledging that to apply oneself to a Discipline is to come to terms with the Discipline having degrees, to having better and improved Practicing, which I keep getting stuck with logically meaning some practitioners are better at the Discipline, and with only a little more logic, meaning some practitioners are worse.

And that practicing a Discipline involves wanting to get better at it. And that this does involve both refinements, abrading the bad habits, adjusting Technique for desired results (I somehow see Discipline as being composed of Technique and Expression; I would love for you to digress and argue with me). But all of the incremental bits of improvement may result in the apparently sudden “quantum” ascent from one plateau to another

And because the practice and application of one’s deepest self to the Discipline is Work and sometimes — often, in fact, is something other than rewarding — I mean, tedious, exhausting, precariously doubt-filling, lonely, sweaty, achey or terrifying — it must be driven by a sort of desire. My first identification is that my desires are for glory/respect/approval/acceptance or, (sigh) sometimes ass-kicking competitiveness and Showing Them vengefulness, but I recognize some ‘pure’ desire beyond these little insecure self-based ones. For the Discipline itself. For the smudging of the boundaries of self within the perfection of the Discipline itself, as if the Discipline itself were doing the desiring, and it is no longer the self. I trip over my Ancient Greeks and the notion that happiness is the cessation of desire, and yet believe in the deep happiness of communing with the Discipline.

[Here my religion creeps in, and the closest I can come to defining my religion is as a sort of awareness of the self as created and separate from the Creator, a place where humility lives, the ardor and longing of the creation for Creator, for reunion.]

When I cannot manage humility I remind myself too much of myself as a little kid, really struggling against doing something imperfectly — learning to ride a bike, where there is one major plateau to jump to, and all of the attempts that are not riding a bike eventually are followed by the attempt that is riding a bike; but this little kid in me gets frustrated at doing it imperfectly, wants to kick the stupid bike and go do something safe and satisfying like riding on my old very fast Big Wheels which can make it down to the dead end of our street and back past the frightening dog and no skinned knees, no wobbling, no toppling. The little kid in me is all about “Why should I practice in order to be a mediocre violinist?” This feels almost intolerable. And there’s strategy: if there is something I would be great at and something that all the work in the world would only make me mediocre at, shouldn’t my energy go into the one and not the other? I’m like the Russians x-raying the hips of potential gymnasts to see who is put together with the native flexibility to be a great gymnast, in order to appropriately invest time and energy in THEIR training, rather than some other. I flirt with this discipline or that, wondering if I’m not supposed to be great at something.

But now I argue with myself as if I were one of my children. We do not practice each day for the sake of some future career, we practice each day for the sake of this day’s practicing, and if by some freak roller skating accident one of the darlings were to lose all of the fingers on his left hand this afternoon, I wouldn’t see the time we have spent practicing as wasted. Furthermore, every great practitioner was once a mediocre practitioner, once a beginner.

But another argument occurs to me today, about the trickiness of judging oneself (or discerning, Dana?) However high the plateau one is on, there is no practitioner who has reached perfection. And it’s like math. Infinity minus two is the same as infinity minus nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. The person striving at her seventh appreciable plateau is at the same time closer and as far from some Monolithic Perfect Practice of the Discipline as the child who has just made the struggling leap to the first appreciable plateau.

It just occurs to me that what humility means to me here is a sort of longing for the Discipline’s perfect expressionso  that one puts forth one’s best effort with a sort of detachment and longing to keep struggling and even though it’s never going to get all the way and it’s not futile, or if it’s futile, the futility is beside the point, it’s the longing of the lover for the Beloved who loves the Beloved for the Beloved’s sake and not his own.

Not that I come back to the blog and think everything I want to say fits neatly here. Some (but, we note, not all) of my favorite blogs have been dormant or nearly so recently, and not to be one of those annoying people who thinks that whatever their friends are doing is a trend, I’d wondered if blogging had peaked for me. That the best part of blogging has been the sense of deep conversation. (And as I compose this over-long entry on an overcast Sunday afternoon when I have isolated myself from my family, one of the friends who has been faithful with his own blog emails me a question, saying he would get my “inner blog going.” Which reminds me that the conversational responsibility flows this way and that.)

A few weeks ago my domain name registration lapsed and for a few hours I had the ambivalent relief of thinking it might all be gone, which, oh, I’m attached to some of what I’ve written here, but oh, the fresh start — the fresh start has all of the mendacity of any good fantasy, the gauzy glamours obscuring harder reality. That even the fresh start still requires a first sentence and a second, that it might in fact be no easier to open this window and frame a first entry than it is to open it and note the one sparse entry for June, the space between that one and the one before, the quiet.

Not that I don’t appreciate some quiet.

But I want to skip the awkward apology or over-explanation or even the presumption that anyone notices the frequency of the blogging or not. I would just skip to the recent preoccupations.

First off Infinite Summer, and that Infinite Jest is that great a book, not a silencing, dwarfing sort of greatness, (except maybe the silencing “Oh, dear, I’m incoherently spouting the same appreciations that I’m sure other people have already done better elsewhere…”) but a compassionate, self-aware greatness that makes connections between aspects of the modern condition, as if there were such a thing as a monolithic modern condition and I weren’t hopelessly self-conscious trying to talk about it or my perceptions of it — and yet, in reading Infinite Jest, I am again and again noting to myself “Oh! Exactly that! Yes!” and have become attendantly No Fun at Parties for it has left me prone to a babbling. Which I try to cut short out of consideration and so on.

In fact, if you aren’t already reading it, if you have felt put off by its legendary thousand pages or the fact that one of its themes is addiction, which is, admittedly, a downer, or have — I’m trying to think of all the reasons why I had put off reading it for as long as I had — annoyance at the hype? the fact that if it was going to be so great, then wouldn’t I have the same sort of possessiveness over it, over my experience reading it that I do over, say, Salinger, thus rendering the reading it as part of an anonymous internet-organized reading micro-movement like Infinite Summer as perverse and — more, a little like NaNoWriMo — somehow less special and no less work, because look at how thousands of people I don’t know are all doing it together on-line and it makes no difference to anyone but me if I am somehow a “part” of that and when have I ever been a joiner? Give me The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner over the Boston Marathon any day. And yet. If you have these, and better reasons for not reading it and make time to follow this here, I suggest you go read that instead, really I’ll understand. In this morning’s journal I note that there are certain types of action and description I’ll skim every time (the list starts with use of illegal substances, goes through hand-by-hand descriptions of poker games, any sports sequences, combat scenes and battles — even on-screen I mostly just want the skinny: who wins, how it all comes out.) In Infinite Jest I don’t skim. I care about every word, every sequence, every character. It means reading a little more slowly and neglecting a lot of other things, but it’s savorable.

So yeah. The journal. I still fill those up. Only I find myself annoyed that I want to remember how I phrased something to myself two weeks ago and wishing they were searchable, because I am never patient enough to re-read them, and, frankly, my handwriting is atrocious. Which is another reason to try and at least capture the highlights of the journal electronically, the stuff that, if it isn’t written to entertain, or explain, or meet my anticipation of other people’s expectations, is at least not going to be offensive or hurtful because I’m trying to work out why I don’t feel the things I sort of think I’m supposed to feel which are always so much worse unarticulated and stuffed down than when they are exposed to air and sunlight.

I had this realization that because so many things I read online have convenient little “share on facebook” buttons that I could use FB almost — not solipsistically — but as my own personal record of what I was reading and responding to, and if anyone else wanted to have a conversation about anything, that was just icing on the cake. Only I started wondering if my link to Sandra Tsing Loh’s sad Atlantic Monthly piece on the dissolution of her marriage or the reviews of Christina Nehring’s Vindication of Love were going to give people the wrong impression. And then suddenly I felt all scopophobic on facebook, the ancient fear of being seen in ways that I had no control over, without full space to explain or make myself clear. I’m not sure the blog is better, but if you care enough to wade through all of this, then I’m less worried about you making a hasty judgement.

So other preoccupations. In the journal, strangely where things are most personal, I find myself freely enjoying the use of the third person “one finds” which, one notes, is almost an antidote to the narcissistic third person of FB where, in the third person, one feels like the star of an endless series of fascinated headlines, a singular tabloid. The voice, here, one fears is precious or affected sounding, and yet, oh the liberation of being able to make observations without it being all about the endless, wearying “I” or the presumptuous “you”!

Also, it now amuses me in the journal to insert notes to the literary biographer, having perhaps read too much literary biography this spring and summer. My favorite note — oh I paraphrase because, in the last hour I just wasted much time reading entries from a month ago which are still painfully vivid but do not contain the bit I want:

“Dear Literary Biographer, this morning I rather resent you for knowing how all of these ambivalences get resolved, for having an aerial view while I blunder through my labyrinths. Maybe one could find a sort of comfort in thinking that what feels painful and difficult from right here will be seen in retrospect as the shaping force that led to all sorts of growth and development. One could, maybe, but one doesn’t.

I would like to remind you that retrospect lies. That when one is past the stage of being dewy and having countless strangers extolling one’s “potential” one forgets that all of that possibility we see for someone just starting out tends to be the good possibility, the success following success. One ignores the fact that when one was twenty the possibilities seemed to include living in cardboard boxes and embarrassing not just oneself but one’s family and friends as well as the possibilities of greatness and producing stunning works. In fact the only possibility one seems to really overlook are those of the not-so-notable ordinary life, the nice kids, the functional marriage, the bake sales for the PTA and the endless driving (the minivan!) — perhaps because at twenty one has the harshest condemnation for the selling out and the compromising and the complacency one detects in one’s elders.

So maybe I don’t just resent the future ghost of my literary biographer, but also I resent my twenty year old self. All a little Dickens for me, sorry.

On an unrelated note, but among recent preoccupations, I wasn’t just going to blather on about Infinite Jest, but one of the bits I most appreciated was a character commenting on the state of “humble frustration” that allows one to proceed from one plateau of development to another, and the character was talking about tennis, but I could immediately see it in music and in writing, and the friend I have who teaches yoga sees it in yoga and dance, and her husband in aikido practice and this tiny remark was one small thread in a lot of really great conversation last night, and I was happy to see he had written about it here.

I know that that I have a tendency to get promiscuous with the metaphors, to lose track of tenors and vehicles, referents and antecedents, but — beyond gratitude for people we can have dinner with who don’t look uncomfortably away, re-folding their napkins on their laps and glancing at their watches as I get excited about an idea, I love that they got excited about parallels between their own passions and disciplines and my specific ones, and being struck by this notion that the work of being a human being again and again boils down to the same stuff, and it’s not that one just does Rocky-style training (cue the inspirational music and the running against different backgrounds, doing sit-ups and punching a punching bag montage) it’s that humble frustration is the only way to get anywhere, the slow learning of the things I’m working on with my kids, ideas of patience and generosity and compassion and persistence, can be developed with a pen or a tennis racket or yoga mat or the wedding ring or the football that Aodán and I throw at each other when all other communication fails us — and it’s not that there aren’t great violinists or great tennis players or great writers who are assholes, it’s just that the work required of us in our various disciplines puts us all up against the same obstacles, and that seems to me to render open and honest discussion of these obstacles as especially important and helpful.

Which all comes out as a little more facile and easy than my thinking abut it. But music has gotten more hours than anything else this summer, the kids being out of school and all wanting me to be part of their practices still and finding someone to do duets with for myself and finding myself — because the kids are involved maybe? willing to — not settle, exactly but willing to be a struggling-competent-often-frustrated-by-the-limits-of-my-ability-as-a-musician (oh to call myself a musician is even more uncomfortable than calling myself a writer) — and yet in the process of learning to treat myself with the gentleness with which I would treat them, it’s that struggle that seems to have value, to leave lasting marks more than the ringing of a note very nearly in tune. And still the terror of being a dilettante forever, of standing on the edge of all sorts of disciplines able to appreciate them without ever approaching any mastery of them for myself…

Finally — seriously, this is like doing laundry, after a month of the washing machine being broken, and discovering things one has forgotten owning, much less wearing. Some preoccupation lately with the subject of miracles. There was discussion between Bahà’ís and non-Bahà’ís on the occasion of this Holy Day this week, the Martyrdom of the Bab, which is probably the only miraculous thing to get much play in Bahà’í history. And the thing is there were the miraculous sorts of things in the lives of the Bàb and Bahà’u'lláh, but they weren’t supposed to stand as proofs. In an age of special effects and sleight of hand, we are supposed to rely more on the integrity of Their teachings, to be convinced that a religion teaching the agreement of religion and science, the equality of women and men, the oneness of humanity, the oneness of all the religions, is more persuasive than watching somebody fly around the room. There’s even a lovely story of Bahà’u'lláh offering to perform any miracle that a group of clerics asked that would constitute proof to them that He was who He said He was and their subsequent utter failure to come to any sort of a consensus n the matter.

Sitll. In my experience as a Bahà’í — more than once I’ve gotten to sit and listen to people tell stories of things that happened that couldn’t be explained by science or the laws of chance or whatever, feelings of being guided, or having significant dreams. And I get sort of ambivalent about this. One of my friends turned to me and said, “Surely there are things that have happened in your life that you cannot explain!” and I was surprised at my prickly response. I didn’t say anything rude, but I paid attention to the prickles because I wondered what bothered me.

It’s not just that I value my skepticism, because that would not lead to a sort of defensiveness I suddenly felt. Maybe it was like our friend sitting there who wasn’t a Bahà’í, but has been coming to these discussions since last fall — that on hearing that there were miracles suddenly seemed to take seriously the notion that this really is a religion we’re talking about and not just a nice philosophy? I think the notion that the people who have these inexplicable things land in their laps as a sort of proof might then have some greater degree of certitude or faith may be what makes me a little bananas — that the absence of such an experience might be saying something about me?

So I affirm for myself that the absence of miracles is not the same thing as the absence of wonder. The explicable and orderly is enough for me, golden means and Fibonacci sequences, titrations where measurements conform exactly and uniformly to the numbers predicted by the rather abstract molecular weights, complex ecosystems, and the dance of light through leaves and the smell of fresh air — harmony! the circle of fifths!And in the human-er realm? Courage and sacrifice and kindness, a good joke, a nice turn of phrase? Not so un-wondrous either.

The curious thing abut a skylight is that the sky reduced to a small rectangular patch suddenly seems so much further away, so much further up. I lean back and am nearly overtaken with vertigo. How different this is from lying on one’s back in a broad and grassy meadow where the world seems evenly divided between earth and sky, where the same breeze pushes clouds from horizon to horizon and passiving waves of sunlight along the bowing tips of tall grass.

Only it never worked. I got dry and empty too soon and it was no good trying to force the tears and the observation of myself crying was not conducive to getting good and worked up.

But this twelve-year-old stuff is different, because I look at my kid and I see myself at that age, remember this as a place where the divide opened up between my insides and my outsides, between the way I intended things and the way they actually came out. This is the age where I would try to be sweet, try to be good and be so irritated that minutes later I was again fighting with everyone in my family, the age where labels of “sensitive” and “princess” were sort of teasingly given, only they still chafe like scratchy tags sewn inside tight shirts. This was the age when it felt like something was really wrong with me, that things weren’t ever going to be okay, the age when I ached with being misunderstood. It was the dawning of self-consciousness, of looking around at how everyone else was doing things and realizing I didn’t measure up, that my clothes were wrong, my body awkward, the braces, my skin…

So when my sweet first-born does start doing the things that are tormenting his brothers — teasing or taking things — it isn’t that I see him as blameless. I see his threshold for tolerating them acting like, well, themselves, doing things that shouldn’t bother him, but do, tremendous crimes like chewing wrong or licking their drinking glasses, lowered, see how this builds up into the explosion when he tells a brother to stop, the brother screams in indignation, it escalates. And I haven’t figured out how to make the conflicts, torturous as they are, go away. But I know that I cannot tolerate how much it hurts him when he feels like everyone in the world is against him. I don’t want to endorse his prickliness, but I think he needs someone on his side. Of course he seems to recover much more quickly than I do, I’ll still be brooding over a conflict when he’s moved on to another mood entirely.

We go for walks. He talks about feeling excluded at school — not actively excluded, just more, not-included, and this one I remember too, feeling like everyone else was spending all of their time with everyone else outside of school and I never got to see anyone. That I was safe, sure, invisible, on the fringes of a large group of safe friends, but it was not the same social order I had known before and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it. I wish I could hand him the books that helped me survive it all, but he hasn’t found his way back to books that way yet. (Anne Frank that’s what he needs! And then maybe Catcher in the Rye before it’s assigned in school and an English teacher has the power to ruin it for him.) He’s got music. I miss him when he retreats into headphones, but I’m so grateful he’s found something he needs there.

At his cello recital I watch the high school seniors play, seeming like grown-ups next to him, five years older, the assurance they project, their comfort with themselves up on stage. I sort of long to see him safely through to that point already, to skip all of the agony between here and there — except, of course I keep being hit with how quickly it’s all going and how I don’t want to miss a second of it. It’s the knife-twist of birth order, everything is the most intense with him, his capacity to surprise me, my anxiousness about the next stages, the blind spots I’ve got, the tremendous amount I still have to learn, the difficulty in untangling myself from him.

I write things down, partially I want to convey this amazing unfolding to the grandparents, aunt, uncles who don’t get to witness it first hand, but also for myself, knowing I take it all for granted but I won’t remember this stuff clearly by the time I’ve been through it three more times. He’s so quick-witted, he notes a traffic sign “Construction Zone Fines Double” and says “Sometimes life is like a giant board game.” That he combines a wit( which I’m not completely recapturing here) with a serious-mindedness, a commitment to justice and projects and idealism seems to me the loveliest combination of qualities. I am simultaneously charmed and exasperated by his insistence on wearing the same corduroy jacket and hat all year, regardless of the weather. And touched that he wants to wear fingerless gloves like one of the cellists in the band Apocalyptica, which — oh it seems like the marker of a new kind of having a hero for him. A year ago everything was superlative “best movie ever” “favorite place to go for dinner” and since his birthday it’s all just “it was okay.” He is cool. Or he wants to check what all of his friends think. And yet he does think for himself, is independent-minded. None of this captures him, of course, but I don’t stop trying. I hold on in order to let go.