Color/colour

Our philosophy professor, Jamie, challenged us to think of an instance of color without shape.

'There is no color without shape,' he said, 'just as there is no mass without matter.'

People called out various suggestions. The sky, someone said. Closing your eyes. The idea of color, or color as a Platonic form.

Most people in our philosophy class spoke before they thought, making it very noisy in there indeed.

'Can you have shape without color, though?' someone wondered, and again the room was abuzz with speculation.

The best part about that class was that it didn't matter what was at stake in the discussion. Any topic would do. The whole color-shape conundrum was introduced to illustrate something about contingency, I think, and here we were, scrounging for counterexamples. The whole class was bent on arguing about whatever we talked about, and nobody could say 'You're missing the point' or 'That's irrelevant.' Anything even tangentially related to the topic is fair game, because it might be the brick that holds up the whole argument. Being nit-picky is an advantage in - what was that class again? - epistemology.

Most of what I remember about epistemology (TR 3:30 - 4:45) is fragmented,  isolated incidents with little relation to the lesson; much of my memory revolves around the mannerisms of the erudite, scatterbrained professor. Jamie was the most endearing teacher we could possibly have had. He was so absent-minded that he continually had to be reminded what we were talking about, though he could jump back in with reasonable acuity. He even had the tendency to look off into the distance when he got distracted, which I thought was charming. Once he put his coffee mug on the shelf inside his podium, and forgot right away; he leaned forward pensively on the podium, tipping it forward, and dumped all his coffee on our term papers. Oddly, he was only in his late 20's, just a few years older than we were.

Anyway, the color-without-shape discussion stayed with me, even if most of the principles of epistemology didn't. Sometimes I look at something and it takes me a few minutes to account for its shape. Darkness doesn't really have a shape, and neither do the streaks in a sunset, so some people in that class weren't too far off.

I wonder what I was supposed to have learned from that class. It's odd how school makes you spend so many nitty-gritty seconds memorizing and ruminating and processing and internalizing, and what you're left with is random flotsam.

One day I found a box in my hall closet, on the floor beneath a tent, two sleeping bags, a vacuum cleaner, and other boxes. It was filled with textbooks, notes, and papers from college. Naturally, being incredibly vain, I had to read all of my old papers. There was one on Frank O'Hara and his ostensible relationship with Rachmaninoff, Protestant poetry from Northern Ireland during the Troubles, nature imagery in Hopkins, and one on Aristotle's approach to epistemology.

They were fascinating. Not because they were particularly groundbreaking, though they weren't bad, either. They were fascinating because there was something of myself in them that I had forgotten, or perhaps not known at all. I remembered writing the Hopkins one - I'd been sick, and heavily dosed with pseudoephedrine, which I'd augmented with energy drinks. The result was a manic, scattered, long-winded but quite passionate argument on behald of Hopkins' nondemoninational spirituality, despite his having been a Catholic priest, which I recall feeling very strongly about. The paper on the Troubles was more sober, but I don't remember writing it, so I have no idea whether that's because of the content or my state of mind.

The strange thing was, they didn't all sound familiar, although they were my words, and from just a few years ago. I don't remember reading that many Hopkins poems, and I certainly have no recollection of ever being that acquainted with Aristotle's syntax. And yet, here, staring me in the face, were the papers that had given me my final grades, and thus, my degree. And the most I remember about one of them is some spilled coffee, a really likable man named Jamie, and a debate about color.

'Turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it.'

We started a dreambook. It would be a plain black unlined journal, which I brought home and put on our coffee table. Every night that one of us had a vivid dream, we decided, we would record it in the dreambook.

On the first page I wrote the word "delusion" in red marker and put a red box around it, because that's what I dreamt - that the word "delusion" was written in red on the first page of the dreambook.

I did not have a dream the next night, so I used the second page to write a letter to my friend Katya.

Dear Katya, I wrote, do you ever listen to Ani Difranco? She's one of my favorites, and you always reminded me of her.

But then Jamie came out of his room and needed the dreambook, and beneath my aborted letter to Katya there began to appear a crayon rendering of an ocean scene, with people swimming and diving and breathing underwater. Jamie has never liked drawing, but apparently this dream was so vivid that he had to try. He used six different shades of blue.

I started a new letter to Katya. I don't write letters much, because I never quite know what to say in them - it's like having a one-sided conversation, but I feel weird talking about myself for too long. And I never call people, so I am awful at staying in touch. But anyway, I needed to write to Katya, because this was the first I'd heard from her in six months. Her phone had been disconnected and I did not have the address for her current rehab, or the name, or anything. I had thought I would never hear from her again. And then I got an email from my old work, saying she had tried to contact me there, and she'd left her address.

So Jamie sat with the dreambook on the couch and I sat next to him watching him color. He picked up each version of blue and made a careful design with it involving curly Q's that interlocked with the ones that came before it. He had his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth like a kid in a cartoon.

I knew what I wanted to tell Katya, but I had no idea how to say it. If it wouldn't sound creepy I would say 'I think about you a lot, and wonder how you are or sometimes what you would say about a given thing, for some reason, maybe because I like the way you think.' I wanted her to understand that she is one of the people in my life I consider special, who I think about when they're not around, even if years pass in between. In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut talks about people being on your karass, or 'team,' people to whom you are divinely connected. I think there are some people in life with whom you just feel connected, for whatever reason, even if they're strangers, they feel closer than some friends, even if they don't know it. That, I am willing to bet, is one of the hardest things to convey to someone, because you can tell a friend anything, in theory, but there are different parameters for talking to strangers or acquaintances, and even some friends wouldn't really understand how serious you are about saying this.

Jamie is still coloring.

'Jamie,' I say, 'have you ever read Cat's Cradle?'

'Yeah,' he says, not looking up, 'a long time ago.' He is shirtless and skinny and wearing red flannel pants. He still has his glasses on, which means he probably hasn't brushed his teeth yet.

'I think we might be in the same karass,' I tell him. 'You and I.'

He nods. I can't see his face because his head is bent low and he has shaggy hair. A little orange fish is coming to life inside one of the curly Q's.

'Yeah,' he says. 'I could see that.'

He gets it. It is easier for me to talk to people who have read the same things I have, because so much of what I talk about comes from them. I don't think Katya likes Kurt Vonnegut. I have only ever seen her read Danielle Steele.

One of the reasons I like reading so much is that I almost always get the feeling that the author wants the same thing I want, to feel connected to someone. The strange part is, I am fairly certain that I would not get that impression from talking to the author, because talking so often gets in the way of connecting. I never know what to say to anybody and I usually say things I don't care to talk about, like 'How have you been' and 'I like your hat,' when really I mean something wordless, like 'Let's not pretend we have to talk about boring things, when really we just want to connect, and share how we feel about something.' But even that can come off as shallow or false, and thus the connection is lost.

If Jamie can spend so much time drawing his dream when he does not even like drawing, surely I can put some effort into writing Katya's letter.

'Dear Katya,' I begin again, 'Sometimes I listen to Ani Difranco, and feel both comforted and depressed, because I can totally relate, i.e., I know what she's talking about, but I also know that if I ever met her I would not be able to convey to her that I know, and I'm not sure she would care all that much anyway.'

This is far too cerebral for a casual note to an old acquaintance, but by now I am thinking way too much, so there's no going back.

Eliana and Charlie have both woken up and are rummaging through the kitchen. The smell of frying egg wafts out into the living room, and they follow.

'Morning,' says Eliana, and they sit down with steaming mugs. 'What are you guys up to?'

'I'm trying to write a letter, but I don't know what to say,' I tell her.

'I'm drawing my dream,' says Jamie.

'You could write a haiku instead,' Eliana suggests.

'No, I have to draw it,' Jamie says, which makes me rethink Eliana's intention.

'It's too early to think about that,' says Charlie, and in a small way I agree, but I don't know how to say that without sounding like I am agreeing for agreement's sake, and so I just nod my head, and then go get some tea.

Breathing it out, breath in and out

Last night I went through all my old saved documents from the past couple years. Most of them are fragments of or ideas for stories, which I must have abandoned at some point. For some, I remember getting excited about them at the start and then gradually getting disillusioned. But I didn't delete them, so something must have made me think they were worth keeping. That, or I just forgot about them.

The post below this one, "Miriam Finley Travel Writer," is one of those. I'll post more in the next few days. I don't know what to think of them. There are some that I really like and think are worth pursuing, but strangely they all have one thing in common, which is that I have no concept of whether they're finished pieces or total rubbish. Maybe that's why they were all relegated to the back burner in the first place.

What makes a story be "finished"? Anything other than the writer's decision, which I imagine comes from the writer's gut, can't be right.

I'm all for writing workshops, but one danger of them is the students who try change a person's story. What I mean by that is this: even if David Foster Wallace submitted a published story to one of the workshops I was in, the other students would rip it apart. It seems to be very easy for people to criticize someone else's writing, as long as it's unfinished. Almost whenever I show a story of mine to someone, they have more ideas for how it could be changed than what they think about it. Why do we treat published work differently than a draft? I read literary magazines and am constantly amazed at the garbage that gets published. A lot of it reads like someone's first outline. And yet, it's there, in prestigious and widely respected journals.

This has gotten off-topic, sort of; mostly I'm wondering what to do with all these unfinished (?) pieces. Honestly they don't seem that different from what I read in lit mags. But they don't feel finished to me. Thanks for indulging, if you've read this far.

Miriam Finley, Travel Writer

Todd was telling a story that involved some poorly executed roleplay and the properties of cats. Miriam had stopped listening almost an hour ago and was looking around for a polite exit.


‘So the doctor said to me—did you know that orange female cats are rare but almost always nice? But anyway, at that point I still thought we should look at a farm, not a breeder—’

Behind Todd’s buzzed gray head appeared a man, concave like a parenthese, with smooth clothes and wrinkled skin, leaning heavily on a cane. He didn’t see Miriam as he walked across the empty café and chose a seat a few tables from her. Sitting down he was still bent over. The points of his wool bow-tie stuck up around his cheeks. He sat still, waiting patiently, hands resting on the tip of his cane.

Miriam pulled out a pen and a coffee-ringed napkin and allowed Todd to think she was taking notes on his story. What she really wrote was this:

Mr. McDonald, celebrated high school English teacher who retired after forty seven years, has now returned home after a long and eventful stay in India. The trip was a gift to himself and to his wife, who so faithfully helped him inspire generations of students here in Freeville, NY. It was during his Regents literature class in the class of ‘74’s sophomore year that one most promising pupil, Ms. Miriam Finley, decided once and for all that if she would do anything in her life worth doing, it would be to be a travel writer.


Tragically, she didn’t. She spent a long time in Freeville after graduating, eventually settled down with a Mr. Todd Laringer, but couldn’t even commit enough to marry, so here she is, listening to another tedious tale of Todd’s, having just watched her octogenarian teacher from forever ago surpass her in adventurousness. Good doing, Miriam.


But enough about her. A look into Mr. McDonald’s exciting Indian excursion:

And there she stopped. She couldn’t even pretend to know what people did in India.

‘Todd,’ she said, her throat phlegm-y and rough from milky coffee and prolonged silence. ‘Todd. I don’t want to get a cat.’

Todd looked up, looking surprised to see her.

‘You don’t?’ he said. He had the innocent credulousness of a little boy.

Her original idea had been simply to inform him of her intent. Now she said, ‘Todd, I think I’d like to go away for the weekend. Maybe more. Will you come with me?’

He was staring at her with perfect transparence. ‘Why, of course. I’d go anywhere with you, Miriam.’

She felt like crying; she felt weak inside, and dismayed, and saddened and afraid at what she’d almost done.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

On the way to the bus station, Todd was silent. In a plaza the block before, she saw something too fitting to pass up: a pet store next to an Office Max. Miriam turned in. They bought a cat collar and a notebook, and then went the next block to buy the bus tickets.

The Time Keeper

The sky is big and dark, like an enormous cereal bowl turned upside down, with an entire world under it. It is black, but has some pinpricks, that don’t quite reach through the orange haze that reflects back the city lights.


In one building, not looking at the sky or thinking about it is a man, bent low over a table. He wears a musty brown sweater and his gray hair is wild. His glasses look like telescopes, lens piled over lenses, until his eyes are several times their size. He has a large round nose and his mouth is a down-turned, concentrating gash, pursed but forgotten toward the maze of cranks and latches and metal wheels that are so tiny and precise as to require the comical glasses.

*

I remember a toy I had as a little girl. It was a yellow plastic tray with pegs on it, and it came with a dozen colored gears. You could click the gears on the pegs and the teeth would interlock, so you could make them all spin, all across the yellow tray, by rotating any one of them.

*

The orange haze over the city starts to lighten. On the expressway, the red and white dots of cars whiz toward the horizon like lightning bugs. If you were to look down a residential street, say, on the south side of town, by the overpass, you’d see lights coming on in houses, a few at a time, curtained window squares turning from black to yellow.

The man in the basement, still hunched over his tools, notices a kink in his neck. He does not see first light because there are no windows where he is. The lights in his empty room are low; only those necessary for his project have been employed, and he works under the yellow glow of a desk lamp. His fingers are thick, the nails trimmed down to the quick, and they smell like stale tobacco. The gray stubble on his face was not there when he started. Around him are rows of tables, each equipped with the same flexible black desk lamp and an array of tweezers and widgets and hyper-lensed glasses, but each one is dark.

*

I don’t know what makes me think of the toy this morning. I am in bed, but no one knows I am awake yet. The soft gray light from the window above my sister’s bed prevents me from falling back to sleep. I can hear my mother moving around in the kitchen; the rattle of pots and dishes is muffled by the door, but in the silence they are audible.

I don’t know why I remember that toy at all. It had no special meaning for me. I almost never played with it, and never for more than a few minutes. Even as a toddler, before I could articulate this, the toy seemed to me completely devoid of possibility. So you rotate one gear, and around go the rest. There was no imagination in it.

I pull a sheet over my eyes and manage to fall asleep briefly, seeing not so much a dream as disconnected images of churning wheels and knitted cogs, colored circles rotating fruitlessly across my eyelids.

*

In the basement, in the desk lamp’s periphery, the old man’s kink begins to scream too loudly for him to ignore. He sits up straighter, keeping his magnified eyes trained on the end of his tweezers, trying to maintain his concentration. But he has shifted position, acknowledged his discomfort, and now the floodgates are open.

He removes his silly glasses and picks up the piece he has been working on all night. It is heavy, though small. Its metal is warm from spending so much time in his hands. He turns it over. It is a timepiece, a gold circle around a simple clock face, with a gold handle arched over the 12 for affixing it to a chain. Under the delicate dome of its glass, the Roman numerals read 6 o’clock.

If that’s the right time, he knows it is by coincidence, because despite the amount of work he has put into this he has not yet fixed it. Through the glass pane in the room’s door he sees a light from the hallway turn on. There are voices, and sounds of locker doors latching shut. He places the timepiece back at his workstation and leaves quietly, through the back door, whose window pane is still dark.

*

I wake up again when my sister steps out of bed onto the creaking floor. The light from the window is stronger now. The dream of the rotating cogs leaves me feeling ill at ease; the images fade, but leave behind their vague sadness. The yellow toy, I remember, was a gift from my father, and when I was old enough to think about these things, I only played with it on the rare nights he came home from work, to make him think I liked it. My sister never pretended such things.

Strategy versus Inspiration

It's come up a few times in recent conversation that there is debate over whether "true" art, whatever that is, must be made purely by inspiration, and not by cold strategy. But the latter might be more successful; if you can pinpoint a gap in the market, and create something catered to fill that gap, to meet a need, then you're already ahead of the game.


Unrelatedly, it has also come up in casual conversation how unfair it seems that some people seem to slide laterally into a success that you have spent years climbing up the ladder to reach. Like Jack Johnson. A world-class surfer who got injured and started pursuing his "second" hobby, songwriting. So unfair.

But I wonder if those two phenomena have something to do with one another? That is, maybe people who care less about a particular pursuit (not saying Jack Johnson isn't passionate about music) have the werewithal and the clarity of vision to a) use objectives in their creation, b) accept and utilize feedback, and c) recognize and follow patterns. Maybe there is such a thing as trying too hard.

If you have all of one (i.e., pure, unharnessed passion) and none of the other (business sense), you might turn into that disheveled hermit whose art nobody ever sees and few people who do see it understand. Bummer. If you have all of the second and none of the first, you just might be Nicholas Sparks.

Just kidding. (About the pseudo N.S.-jab, I mean. For all I know he is secretly very passionate about formulaic romance novels.) I'm sorry, I feel like this post is a landmine of judgments. I don't mean to judge anybody's art or presuppose their motives or anything like that. I'm just thinking how it might be useful for me to tap into that second thing - the idea that art can have method; it is not all free-writing and feelings.

So, what does that mean for me? Maybe the reason I've gotten so stuck with Chimneys for years now is that it's ALL the first thing, all inspiration and no strategy. I think I need to step back and look at it as if I were a cynical Notre Dame accounting major trying to make money by writing The Notebook. Ah! Stop it! I mean, I need to step back and look at my novel as if I didn't care about its content.

The Naming of Things

I remember one night at swim practice when I was in, I don't know, sixth grade, there was a girl in my lane who was usually quite reticent, but tonight she kept repeating the line "The naming of cats is a difficult matter; it's enough to make you go mad as a hatter!"

What a weird rhyme. But it would be hard to name cats, wouldn't it? (That's why Poster Nutbag is so great.) But not as hard as naming a story.

A perfect title sets the tone of something while also drawing attention to one or some of the themes in the piece; it sets itself apart by being outside the story, separate from, but still privy to the story's inner secrets. It is the reader's entranceway and can also have the final word, if it is summational enough. It should also sound interesting.

I am hopeless at coming up with good titles. All of my titles, for anything I make, are mundane and worthless and probably deter people from entering any further into my work. Apropos: the three stories I've had published are called "Joel & Heather," "Piano Lessons," and "The Experiment." Boring! Three of David Foster Wallace's stories are called "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," "Incarnations of Burned Children," and "Church Not Made By Men."

(That said, I know tend toward long, involved titles for many things, my favorite album titles being Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Creek Drank the Cradle, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Spirit They've Gone Spirit They've Vanished, So Much Crowding So Much Laughter...I could go on.)

Today I was trying to name a story I wrote a few months ago that no one else seems to think is anything special but I happen to love. I've called it, alternately, "If that's what it takes" and "Receiving Line," both of which are stupid and I hate.

Here is a list I made of possible titles for it:

'‘Someone Strummed a Banjo’
‘Aunt Harriet Rescinds her Threat’
‘Coxswain!’
‘And She Never Looked Back’
‘Miranda Somehow Benefited’
‘Looking for Inner Peace, Anny Makes a Break for It’
‘Weeping J.J.’
‘This Would Have Been a Huge Wedding'
‘Conflicted Anny’

I like that a list of potential titles can set the story's tone, and, if expanded and done right, could even be a story itself. But that is for another time.

I wouldn't call it writer's block, per se

I mean, that's just so darn cliche. And it's not that I can't think of anything to write, or whatever W/B technically is. It's that I can't think of a way to give form to the idea I have. I used to think, without really articulating it, that if you have an idea, you have a way to express it. Le sigh. I am learning.

Backstory: I have a story in mind, and also in a Word document, but I really hate how it's turning out, in part because I think it can be really good. In its unrealized, Platonic form, it already is really good, and I just need to find it, like the statue in the rock. But my tools are not sharp enough!

No, that's not true. "If you can see me, I am already there," says the Star to the Little Girl in the poem, the one from Chicken Soup for the Soul. A mixed metaphor but apropos: I do believe that if I have the idea, I have the capacity to actuate it; it just might not come as quickly as I'd like. I wish it was already done! I've put enough time in to the story by now. Maybe. And I'm avoiding it like the plague. I've cooked dinner TWICE this week.

I also believe, as I may have mentioned before, that I don't believe that success is only 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I don't think it helps to drudge over something you're not feeling. There may be 99% work, but there needs to be at least, I don't know, 20% inspiration, or else what you're creating isn't art, and it's not going to sound, ahem, inspired.

My point which I am reaching ever so circuitously is that maybe I need to give it a break and do something else for awhile, and then come back and put more work into this particular gem, this story, and then it will be great.

Unrelatedly, I LOVE Amnesiac; I'm even willing to opine that it's better than Kid A.

Unrelatedly #2, I miss Chimneys. I've taken a month-and-a-half break. When I get it back, will I be able to make it what I want it to be?