8 minute Interlude

This is a mid-morning song to the evening sun. When I see you, I will have something to show you - the basket of finished work from the day. It might have some threads that need tightened, but it's form will be profound. Solid. Complete.

I have been weaving it on this loom for the last six months, and as it stood, inert, ungrowing, I criticized it. Decided it wasn't smart enough. "I can only bee what I am," it said, "I am not big enough to cover over the entire upstairs rooms of your brain. I am made to make you warm in winter, spring and fall, and to make a foot-bridge to the next right thing on your path. Let me be what I am." "But I need you to be magical, and to fly me to the places I think about," I said, "I want you to be a gothic cathedral to my intellect, and to make the children weep because of your beauty and sadness. I sprinkled little sparks of my own life into the threads of your pattern, and so you must be perfect."

"This will never get done if I have to be perfect," the unfinished drapery retorted from it's rack. "I am function. I am meant to be useful, and not an embodiment of your identity. Finish this. Move on." And so, because the design was unarticulated, but all the threads were there, I have been weaving night and day. Sometimes it tells me to use the green thread. Sometimes there's a snarl in the industrial spools, and needs snipped off and re-attached. It has taken on the shape and size that will make it into what it needs to be.

Dear Thesis,

An Open Letter to my Thesis (from the person who intends to murder you, drag you home, frame you, and hang you on the wall):

Dear Thesis,

You have been my partner in a slowly unfolding, and now threadbare relationship. The butterflies are gone. You have become the thing I have to get over before I can get on with my life. While I love the things I learned from the hours we spent together, I’m ready to sign the papers.

I have historically fallen in love with mysterious and quiet ones. You, however, have been both silent and punishing. I have to watch what I say about you, and even if I’m talking about you to someone about how we’re doing, I’m afraid you’re going to walk up and correct me – expose me and my hedging half-truths, since I’m usually casting a sunnier light on our true state of union than exists on paper. People ask about you at church, at work, at the coffee-shop; they encourage me to keep going – remind me that these relationships are difficult.

I don’t always tell them about how, in one day, you went from 42 pages to 15, and most of that re-written the day that I was finally able to force you to show up. Or that I’ve gained and lost the same 10 pounds three times from the comfort eating – since complex carbohydrates bring me more emotional solace than any of your page-long insights into narrative structure or archetypal meaning. 

I thought I loved you. I thought that your topic would bring me hours of unflinching closeness to the ineffable beauty of the world, to the piercing brightness of truth, and that like a close kind friend you wouldn’t let me down – but that my love for you would spur me on to greatness and the great American novel.

Maybe it was the cheating I did that did us in – all those hulu videos I’d watch when I couldn’t think of what to say to you, or the online window-shopping when the monthly stipend was clearly not going to cover ANYTHING either vintage or ebay.

Though it was only window-shopping, those manitobah mukluks did drag little pieces of my heart away to their digital lairs. It also could have been the facebook stalking of myriad ex-boyfriends. I was bored with you like I had grown bored of them (and they of me) – compounding my regret that I didn’t just take the damn comps and get it over with.

So here we are. This is an impasse. An arm-wrestling death-match. One of us will make it out of this alive, and rest assured that it won’t be you.  I have a bowie knife, a passport and a fast car, and all you have are words lined up in the passive voice to avoid what has become an inevitable confrontation. Now I’ll read your leather-bound obituary from within the safe walls of a Canadian MFA program. Because I have loved you, I hope that your death is relatively painless.

Love,

Student

The next chapter

The second chapter of this baby is really the first. The first chapter I wrote has got to be the second hardest paper I've ever attempted to wrap my mind around - the first hardest was the one I wrote last spring on Blake's America: A Prophecy. Though MacDonald was influenced by Blake's illustrations, his son Greville talks about the three he had hanging in his study, one of which, an illustration to (Robert) Blair's "Grave" was appropriated for the MacDonald family crest, if I'm not mistaken. Apart from these peripheral details, the contact zone between MacDonald and Blake is minimal.

However, the structure of Lilith is not unlike the geographical sectors with which Blake lays out the poles of his alternate world in the Book of Urizen, and in his other mythological landscapes. I have only run across one scholarly article by John Docherty that makes any note of the contact between the authors, and his seems a bit tangential, though relevant if you're examining the ethos of Blake's work compared with MacDonald's development of the land of seven dimensions.

But these things are supposed to be about process rather than content.

The process today. . . I work best in the morning, but with all the clearing out, I raided the fridge instead of using my time. Since I moved last week, at least a third of my things are sitting like ruffled refugees on the floor of my parents' garage. I've been going through them and throwing things away.

I'm a recovering materialist, and of the things i've held onto, I've mostly done so out of my infinite ability to be resourceful with un-useful items. So throwing this away is at once a cleansing and upheaving endeavor. So I had an extra cup of coffee with hot chocolate for breakfast, and twice the honey on frozen fruit that I usually have, plus some additional foraging before landing here in the early afternoon after completing my first page of my second-first chapter.

It's going pretty well so far, once I plant myself with the resolve of writing. The gears are oiled. I know what I need to do. I feel a little worried at the outset that my topic is not quite glamorous enough. MacDonald's narrative cycle to me is a rollicking journey and is important because it relates to every human experience - the cycle of fall that requires a shift in trajectory, that is essentially an active and relatable endeavor of repentance, which then leads to redemption.

How kind. How like the savior to invite us on a journey where all of our failure leads us to success if we have the humility to shift when we fall. What a relief grace is. It doesn't take the pressure off, it intensifies the meaning of the straw that is spun - through alchemy - into a substance it might not have been if it hadn't started off as straw. MacDonald had some wild ideas about God, but i think he was spot-on with the idea that everything we do, regardless of how bad or how good our actions, He can use them to make us better and brighter. I'm counting on this. I've got a lot of straw.

parallel structure

Sometimes, that list, the one that you envision will efficiently carry the laundry-list of relevant literary, theological, diegetical data with the mechanical efficiency of a German-made car, somehow at the end bursts the seams, and all together pours itself into a whole other sentence without permission.

I have finished and started two portraits of George MacDonald today in an effort to not write this paper, and also started blogging about the process of writing the paper, have watched an episode of Modern Family, and half-heartedly done a handful of other piddly tasks. But now i've gotten to 14,325, when I started at 13,746, and I've only got another 400+ to go.

I start at the end and work my way to the beginning. It's a trend, but is also indicative of how I engage with reality - and that is to see the thing I want to get to first, and then find a way to get to the beginning so I can get to the end. Deductive sentences. The first Mac portrait was him as an old man, the current one is him at about 45. Well, I wasn't sure about what that meant, but now I have a clue. Thank-you words on paper - or whatever - for teaching me something from my brain about my brain.

Thesis

I'm writing a thesis, and will temporarily use this space as a sounding board for the thoughts whose buoyancy keeps them from immediate absorbtion into the churning class-5 river that is the flow of my intellectually viable outpouring. And here's the place I write when I don't know what to write. I'm writing about George MacDonald's ouevre, or however you spell that damn fancy word, but am covering 3 representative works of his.

My director says that 2 pages a day is pretty good. Sometimes I can get to three. Because writing is writing, and all writing can be practice, this little blogblog might facilitate the greasing of mind-wheels. The people who make stuff and get places are the people i want to be like. In the circuitous process of finding and committing to the intellectual trajectory of this big paper, I have found a number of interesting people on the internet. One of them is a mother of six who lives in the south of France, and the other is a wild-eyed children's book author who wears rainbow-colored sneakers and sunglasses, and rolls around on the floor as he acts out his stories.

The sun is out today, and I'm in the living room of my parents' house on the couch stealing myself to write some pages near the window and above the smooth and muted reflection of sun off of the wood-laminate floor. The life I want is just outside, but this where I am is the process of getting there. It is not the south of France, and I am not doted on by a brilliant husband and surrounded by rosy-cheeked children, but I am safe and warm and living with two of my favorite people on the planet, and getting paid (something) to write. Because of this, I've begun to think of myself as a professional.

When the picture in your head doesn't match the picture you see around you, something in that one-to-one relationship has to change, and you either adjust your expectations to the current outcome, or you put your shoulder to the wheel and pushpushpush that cart from the rut.

These thoughts that I set down here will not always go together, and I will not always attempt to connect them with their tangential threads of connection, but they are all stirring in the same pot, so maybe for now that is enough.

Idea:

this is a seedling, and it may grow, but I don't know...

“I wish every day was Christmas,” and though he did not realize that those words, spoken at exactly 9:57 on a Saturday morning, carried not the ususal resonance of a passing fancy, but because they had been heard by the morning star, who was late going to bed and had overheard this little boy, whose name was Northrop Windsor Elias Polumpus, and having taken a fancy to him for no particular reason, decided to speak to the moon and her fellow star friends about potentially bringing this possibility into the realm of the real.

They gathered on the edge of mid afternoon under the shadow of a Siberian Pine in the middle of a long-abandoned field in the eastern hemisphere, and in less time than it took Northrop, or North, as his mother called him, to blink his eye, it was agreed upon. Christmas it will be then. They had settled on a year, and then would re-assess at the end of the year in the event that humanity had gotten tired of cheerfulness and gift-giving, but stars can be a bit dim in understanding the ebb and flow of human emotions.

North woke up the next morning to have breakfast with his father, who made a terrible face as he drank his coffee. His terrible face was because of what he was reading in the paper. The government had decided in a fit of inspiration that everyday was to be Christmas, and harsh penalties would be applied to any child or grown-up not in possession of a daily gift. The parameters were strictly outlined in the papers across the country, and the world. Each present was to be wrapped with a minimum of 6 folds, and not to exceed 36 creases, unless the design of the paper was made pre-crinkled. Strict taxes would be levied against infractors of the Christmas rules. The morning star did nothing half-way.