Naturally, I have not accomplished any of the goals I set for myself in my last post. I’ve had the tab with Cortazar’s short story open for the whole week. Sometimes I opened it and read a paragraph but I would get no response and close it. I don’t think I failed, I just think the task lost its relevance and proved to be ineffective. Over the holidays, I felt too drained to produce anything at all so I indulged in laziness. It is Monday and I have been sitting at the library since 7:30 am trying to finish this post because I need to make a presentation about this project today.
I did, however, think about what the hair in the dream could stand for: loss. It was the hair from my own head. It came to me while I was preparing to take a shower and imagined the tidious process of having to gather all the hair afterward. I was trying to listen to O, a new person, but I get constantly distracted with gathering up all the hair I lost before. In the face of the new information, losing O is inevitable, and the dream is me facing something I reject in day-to-day life.
But I also realized that this story needs a bit more time to marinade. Time needs pass so I can look back and figure out what it all meant for me. If the story is a pizza, time is the tomato sauce. Of course, you can make pizza without tomato sauce but I doubt I’d be able to eat it.
To my surpirse, however, I wrote a poem! Or rather song lyrics. The melody came to me probably around seven years ago when I dreamed about becoming singer-songwriter, and ever since then this melody has been coming back to me. Unfortunutely, in one of my emo-depressive-dramatic episodes I deleted hundres of voice recordings of my songs thinking “It is all meaningless! I will never write another song again anyway!”. It always felt like the words were right there at the tip of my tongue but I simply couldn’t catch them and put them in the right order. I have been playing around with it for a week but here is the draft I have now.
fox sparrow
I admire your devotion,
your high cause, your sacred mission.
Don’t deny that in your Bible
my love is inaspicious.
I know.
You’re a little fox sparrow
Surviving cruel winter snow. Surviving harsh winter cold./cruel thunderstorm.???
So I can’t/mustn’t fall for you.
Your fingers … reed
like an oath, like a ritual.
What a shame – in your recital
my song is intermission.
I know.
You’re a little fox sparrow
Surviving cruel winter snow.
So I’m not falling for you.
Your eyes flicker in the darkness,
a portal to the fourth dimension.
I hope behind your hidden silence/battles
My voice/hand is intervention.
I know.
You’re a little fox sparrow
Surviving cruel winter snow.
So I have fallen for you.
The only part I was always convinced about was, “So, I am not falling for you,” so I kept revolving around it. I had certain rhymes or words like “mission” or “unambitious,” but I couldn’t make any sense of them. It turns out that the events of seven years later were to bring all the right words into the palm of my hand and line them up beautifully. However, I decided to make the poem more dynamic – first, prohibition; second, denial; and finally, surrender. Some parts are flaky, and I am still deciding what to do with the others.
This experience made me think about the concept of time in writing. My original idea for this blog was to work on my story daily for about a week, documenting and sharing my experience in a series of blog posts. Life interfered, and things didn’t go as planned in the story. Uncertainty…The question remains: should I regard my failure to achieve set goals as something positive, negative, or perhaps neutral?
Tara Wood, an assistant professor at the University of Northern Colorado, challenges the normative concept of time and introduces the concept of crip time in the Pedagogue Podcast. Wood researches alternative writing pedagogies aiming to make writing and teaching writing accessible and inclusive for everyone. She talks about ableism and how accepted writing conventions privilege the able body and marginalize any kind of disability.
Wood explains that the normative concept of time is “the idea that people produce at certain intervals that are predictable and quote-unquote normal.” I am an able-bodied (and perhaps minded) writer, but I, too, struggle with the unpredictability of the writing process and the amount of time expected to be spent on writing. Although Wood discovers this concept within the ‘writing with disabilities in a college classroom’ framework, I would argue that it applies to all kinds of writing and all kinds of writers. It’s just that people who deviate from the ‘normal’ make us question what and why we even accept to be ‘normal’ and who the hell decides on these things.
The solution Wood offers and incorporates in her teaching practice is changing expectations from individuals and not comparing them to each other or the so-called norm. The crip time means accepting that time works differently for different people; time is not linear like “an uncooked spaghetti noodle” but rather “a ball of yarn.” In a nutshell, time is messy, and there is no way of predicting how your yarn ball will decide to unwind. You might develop strategies for unwinding balls of yarn, might gain experience from unwinding other balls of yarn, might discuss unwinding yarn balls with your therapist but ultimately, you have no control over what kind of ball of yarn you’ll end up with in your hand each particular time. Sometimes, your preparation pays off, and you unwind your yarn ball within a day. Sometimes, trying harder only makes it worse, and you have to put it aside for seven years, and one day, you just pull lightly, and it all goes loose. And you have to be comfortable with that.
Lala 