10, ish? AM
Samstag
Up on the roof
29 Oktobre. PQuill’s birthday.
N tells me yesterday the baby comes on Monday, Halloween. Hear André 3000’s voice on the track Dracula’s Wedding: “You know I’m terr-i-fied.”
Hard to believe how hot it is up here and how freezing it is down in the apartment. Up here in the warmth I am easily willing to drink my cold milk mixed with protein powder; downstairs I was putting water on for tea because I couldn’t think until I had warmed my hands.
Fell asleep last night around midnight. Hear J come in. Called MEQ last night to talk about N’s baby, and drafting a Thanksgiving menu, and JC’s proposal for monetizing my writing and getting me free of the UC. It has stuck with me, and here I am. The idea offers long-term empowerment, to my mind (and literally to my mind). And eventually, if I stick with it long enough to find my 100 subscribers, the work will ‘justify’ itself to that part of my mind that equates monetary compensation with value, with a ‘job well done.’
I have been putting writing to one side like a hobby ever since I have had to make my own money despite knowing its deeper essential signature in my life as a calling. Like most writers, I have had to keep a ‘day job.’ In my hobbyhorse nightworld, I equated recognition (getting energetically paid, feeling energetically nourished) with (nonpaying) awards and publications. Years of wishing to be chosen by residencies and first-book prizes has been embittering. The happy accident of getting fully funded by an MFA program seems to have set up an entitled expectation that has plagued my thinking and poisoned my feelings about my shot at a livelihood via the writing life.
Residencies always seemed like stolen hours – unreal weeks or months dangled for the escapist part of the artist whose life she would willingly leave or uproot to make precious space for inspiration to meet her somewhere designed around just that chance. Until very recently I believed that isolation and utter separateness were key to a writing life. This is so cheesy, I know, but really it’s making one’s already-residence work for writing. I don’t just mean ‘carving out the time;’ I’m still very free, the schedule of a graduate student who is not muscling to join the academic job market has available hours, it’s been too free and the structure needs to body forth, to use N’s phrase, from within, but that requires motivation.
After the MFA I took a long break from identifying as a poet; I moved abroad, and as I met people, I did not tell them what I was or did. My faith in the consolatory effects of that identity had become so weakened by the program that I instinctively sent it underground, stashed it in witness protection. I still wrote—rabidly—nonfiction and poems—I just lost interest in sharing it. (Entering the PhD program doubled down on this burrowing instinct.) On a deeper level, I was licking my wounds, processing the heartbreak of my hopes for community and ‘being seen’.
In Vienna, I was finally alone; that first month especially, before teaching started, before I made friends, before I started seeing anyone, was like a polar plunge into the exhilaration of aloneness I had hitherto assumed could only be purchased dearly, in anxious two-week doses at bougie residencies (the social feature of which always stressed me to the point of my automatically assuming a persona at meals and workshops and in the cabin common rooms, draining most of my energies, leaving me less able to write). Maybe this is just what it is to be 25, but also everyone was always sleeping with everyone else at those things, which was very distracting. It’s not coincidence that the first place I ended up in Vienna was a literal cloister (Schottenkloster, Freyung). André 3000 goes off in my head again: “You’re—all I’ve ever wanted—but I’m terr-i-fied of you.”