So Far

St Petersburg preparations

February 18, 2007
Today I watched Man with a Movie Camera.
I am reading Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and listening to Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. I have purchased the latter from audible.com, and am listening to all 33 hours of it on my iPod. However, listening to a book on an iPod is a tricky business, as I have this tendency to be lulled to sleep by even the most vivacious reading voice, if I do not get lured to the consideration of ideas suggested by the narrative I am listening to. The former happened last night, and although I began listening to AK at hour two, I woke up at hour six, not recalling any details at all of the story, and so had to find the spot where I must have fallen asleep, which I believe was when Kitty realized at the ball that Vronsky and Anna were attracted to one another, and that Vronsky was not after all going to ask her to marry him. The last I remember is Kitty’s horror and humiliation at having had her long, adoring and loving gaze into Vronsky’s face met by his remote and unresponsive face.

The former problem, the one whereby I find myself, when meant to be listening to a story being read to me, thinking about something completely different and unrelated to the story, a something likely suggested by some idea or image or event from the story which has sent me off into my own reveries. This latter problem happens so frequently that I wonder that it doesn’t happen to others, and how can it not? I wonder if I have some problem with my attention, my focus. Why do I drift away from what I know are excellent stories, read by even more excellent readers. To avoid drifting off and having to rewind my way back to where I became lost in my own story, I keep checking myself as I begin to wander, remind myself to pay attention to the story. The former problem, of falling asleep, is a bit more easily solved: adhering to the “rule” that I not listen to the iPOD while horizontal!

February 22, 2007
It happened again; I fell asleep just after Anna succumbed to Vronsky’s overtures, and is hanging off the side of a chair, apparently just having been debauched. I wake up a few chapters later as she is telling him that she is pregnant.

I can’t read right now; I’m sick with a cold. Not so horrible that I couldn’t go to for a massage today, though, with Larissa. While she was massaging behind my right ear, I imagined myself walking up a set of stairs inside a tall black tower, and when I got to the top of the tower, I looked back and felt myself getting a massage, but I wasn’t inside my body. It was great. I decided to walk back down the stairs and rejoin. Larissa told me that as she was massaging that part of my head, she smelled cigarette smoke. Trippy.

Does Tolstoy conclude every chapter with a pithy sentence that comments on how the chapter is to be understood, or comments on what is going to be read next? He doesn’t use many descriptions of things in his writing; rather, he describes what people do, and what they think, and what they say. I must listen for his descriptions of things, because I don’t think that there are many; maybe occasionally a brief description of a person.

I watched Russian Ark the other night, a Sukorov movie. I also watched the documentary about the making of the movie, and think I should also watch the movie again, this time with the voice over commentary, which I’m guessing might explain much of what I’m seeing. I remember watching the movie a few years ago, and not really understanding it at all, so when I saw it the other night and could understand who was who and why they might be there, I felt as if I have learned at least a little bit about Russian history. But I’m also aware that there is so much more to learn.

As I get ready for this trip, I experience a combination of excitement, seriousness, and sometimes fear. The excitement comes from the prospect of being able to go somewhere I have always wanted to go, but have not really had a reason to go, other than my own curiosity. This situation, going to a place for a reason, and for a long enough time that I might actually begin to get the feel of the city, is ideal for me, although going for even longer would be even more ideal. The seriousness comes from my need to learn as much from this trip as possible. I don’t want to “miss” anything. I want to know as much about Russia, its history, its literature, the city of St Petersburg, before I go, so that what I learn when I get there can add to that basic knowledge.

This feels like a serious thing to me, because there is a part of me that doesn’t want to blow this. By blowing it I mean that I don’t want the trip to arrive without me having put adequate thought and effort into my preparations such that when I get there I am underprepared and then perhaps overwhelmed by what I see and hear and experience. I want to have accumulated a ground of knowledge upon which to build my experiences. I also have the memories of having returned from places without having fully experienced them, so that when I return my memories are thin, incomplete, insubstantial, and cause me to wonder if I was actually in the place that I visited. Writing is one way to “capture” experience, and since this trip to St Petersburg is centered around writing, then maybe I will be able to live and relive the experience. The fear that I feel about going to this conference is the fear associated with being overwhelmed. There will be a lot of people around me, many activities, a “coming and going of feet”, to use Olive Schreiner’s words.

Will I get overwhelmed, over-stimulated? I am aware that I need to be aware of the ways that I can avoid getting overwhelmed, overtired, over-stimulated. And then I need to plan for ways and strategies to manage that tendency to get overwhelmed. I don’t need to do everything; nor do I need to avoid everything.

Those are the things I’m thinking about right now. And now, I need to go and watch a documentary about Stalingrad.

February 28, 2007
Standing in the lineup in the grocery store today, I tried to look at the world around me through the eyes of a traveler. I tried to see the people around me and their activities as if I had never seen them before, as if their activities were meaningless, had no context. It was not difficult, really. I noted that the man in front of me in the line-up paid $114.17 for his cart of groceries, and that he had opened one fruit stick for his daughter to eat while pushing her around in the cart.

I pretended that I didn’t know what a fruit stick was, that I didn’t recognize the wrapping, and was puzzling through a problem-solving exercise, imagining that I was already in Russia, trying to decode and understand what was going on around me. This made me think about how much I assume I know what is going on around me on a daily basis. I decode automatically, ignoring or attending to the activities around me from a practiced distance, not really needing to decode much except to ensure that I can safely cross a street or turn a corner without hitting someone or something. I decode to ensure my basic survival, and the familiar packaging of day to day living has nothing to do with my survival. Does it?

. Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore is one of the books that Dan mentions in an email, so I have ordered it for a read. Is this a post-Russia read? I’m intrigued by the prospect of entering into another research intense year after I come back. Will it be too soon, though? Will I, in preparing for Greece, forget to fully “process” what I have observed in Russia? We’ll see where this goes, if anywhere. If nowhere, then perhaps I can build my own course…a travel writing course to Russia? Hah! Not many goddesses and heroines in Russian literature and history, unless you count Catherine the Great, or even poor Anna Karenina, who is more likely a martyr than a heroine.

And here I go, sliding into a discussion of Anna Karenina, who is about to be squeezed into oblivion by the selfish and self-serving actions of Vronsky and Karenin. As I think of Anna right now, I imagine her as a tiny barque, barely breaking through the tumultuous surface of wide ocean on which she is floating, as the waves of her passion, in response to the possessiveness misinterpreted by her as love, cut across her bow, her stern, so that she is now leaning leeward, and now starboard, about to sink without ever really knowing the name of the sea. It’s painful for me to read her, painful to hear her confusion, her helplessness, her ignorance.

Tonight I went to the SLS website http://www.sumlitsem.org/russia/ and started to read the biographies of the faculty and guest lecturers who will be in St. Petersburg, and I began to fret a bit that most of them appear to be younger than I am. That isn’t in itself a problem, except for the fact that it reminds me that I have not pursued my writing as perhaps I should have. But, I keep going, I keep writing, feeling somewhere that as long as I keep writing now, I will be still writing when I get there, and will have developed by then some stronger sense of myself as a writer that I can build on from there. Writing, writing: this is perhaps the most I have written in many, many years, perhaps ever, as I try to write daily, as I practice this discipline, as I let come what will come, not worry about the ideas, thoughts, words, phrasing, just writing and then observing how the activity of writing, of trying to express in this way what I have seen or been thinking, how that activity of writing then feeds back to my observations and makes them the observations of a writer, that person who lives inside of me and who has hidden somewhere behind my heart, lurking, waiting, frightened.

The more of a writer I become, the more I recognize my self, the self to whom I made that commitment described by Donald Justice in his essay on oblivion. Yes, and writing despite the possibility of oblivion, that is the promise now. Yes, my desire, my need to write, is, has been perverted by wanting to be read, to be published, to make a living from writing. But that is a perversion, and that is all. Writing is something that I needed to do when I was younger, it was a form of survival and beyond survival, a form of existence, a way to inscribe, literally, myself into the world. While others see themselves reflected in their friends, their sports, their dancing, their politics, even their mirrors, I can see myself inscribed only in my writing. That is where I show up, when I recognize myself, the particular order of words, delimited vocabulary that speaks my name to me, turns of phrase that I recognize from things I have said, or thought, or written before. In my writing, yes, that is where I am a madwoman, and so that is where I should live so that I don’t become mad. And in here, only, will I escape the perversions that I spoke of earlier, the perversions that contort writing from making a life to making a living.

Still, though, I struggle with that part of me that says: you can’t do this, you will give up, you are not good enough, and on and on. I am frightened. I have never been frightened about this, in this way, before. Not a terror kind of fright, but the kind of fright that comes with standing on the brink of something. As I engage in this, I wonder if I have the stamina. Energy. It’s a stamina and energy thing. Discipline. I can read my writing and think, yes, okay, you can write adequately. But, I can look at my practice of writing and think, yes, okay, maybe you can write adequately, but writing well means writing frequently, and growing my writing means feeding it. Do I have the stamina for this? Or, will I be able to swing myself through the trees from where I am now to another, higher treetop? That’s what I want to see. I want to see development and growth. In myself, in my writing. In my understanding of what it takes, and in my understanding of what I need to do to make this happen for myself.

What do I see? I see writing. Poetry and essays, mainly. Go back to the Ekstasis website and get that book of essays that I saw there. Keep writing essays. Note to self…etc.

March 1, 2007
Tonight, well, tonight. What reflection? I sat in the tub tonight thinking about my trip, this after reading a passage in Doctor Zhivago which stopped my breath, and I had to stop reading, just so I could think about it.

In answer to the challenge of the desolation brought by death into the life of the small community whose members were slowly pacing after him, he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funneling downwards, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty. He realized, more vividly than ever before, that art has two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

And two pages earlier:
Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor of death; everything in the world, each thing in it, was named in his dictionary. He felt he was on an equal footing with the universe…now he listened to the service as if it were a personal message to him, affecting him directly. He attended to the words and expected of them a clear meaning, as of any other serious communication.

These two passages stopped me as I read them, and I couldn’t read any further. That is what happens now, as I’m reading. I’ll read something, and I’ll have to stop, as if any more reading may negate what I have just read, or worse, maybe, accumulate more beauty on top of what of I have just read; in either case, I’ll lose the voice that has spoken to me, the words that have been spoken, and the feelings that I have been communicated with about things that I understand, that I experience, that I long myself to speak about, write about, but can’t. It’s as if, in some strange way, Pasternak, as I read him, is teaching me how to write. Is that possible? I feel as if I am reading this novel, and Anna Karenina, as if I am deliberately taking lessons on how to write a novel.

Another thing I realized for the first time as I was reading
Doctor Zhivago is that Yura is a poet. Why did I not already know that? ‘”A candle burned on the table, a candle burned…” he whispered to himself – the confused, formless beginning of a poem; he hoped that it would take shape of itself, but nothing more came to him.’ So, I read this, and I think: this is a novel about a poet. Are there other novels about poets? Have I read them? I think this is a brilliant way to write a novel, poetry, philosophy – all in the same breath. A novel about a poet.

Probably the simplest idea, but as I continue to read this novel I continue to feel as if I am being taught how to write:
When his mother had died ten years earlier he had been a child. He could still remember his tears of inconsolable grief and terror. In those days his self was not important to him. He could hardly even realize that such a being as Yura existed on its own or had any value or interest. What mattered then was everything outside and around him. From every side, the external world pressed in on him, dense, undeniable, tangible as a forest, and the reason why he was so shaken by his mother’s death was that, at her side, he had lost himself in the forest, and now suddenly found her gone and himself alone in it.

This is a brilliant description of the experience of self in childhood and a familiar and therefore startling description of the impact of the loss of a mother on a child.

Reading Pasternak makes me want to write. I want to write a novel about a poet, a novel that includes poetry, philosophy, and a story: the story of a person, a contemporary person, who is in life, who is a poet. This novel tells me that such a novel has been written. And I’m not even intimidated by the fact that it has already been written. It’s as if the novel is instructing me by its very existence.

Those were my thoughts after I stopped reading Pasternak earlier today. That, and oh yes, the thought that Tolstoy is also teaching me. What I learn from both of them is what I conceptualize as “blocking”. They seem to write in blocks of story; several short (?) or what I remember as short chapters, each somewhat self contained, and followed by another chapter that may go to a completely different set of characters, situations. He is telling me: just keep reading, have faith, you will get it. These apparent gaps are not gaps. What did I picture? With Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I pictured a storyteller picking out highlights of peoples’ lives, people who live apart from one another and it’s as if I’m flying, sailing, soaring overhead and then occasionally dropping in to a particular set to watch what is going on there, with which characters. Once we have found out what we need to, we can leave, and go and visit some other characters elsewhere. Sometimes we stay for a long time, working alongside Levin as he mows with Titus, or ponders how he should live the rest of his life: the husband of a peasant woman, or of a cultured lady; sitting with Vronsky as he does his quarterly accounting which results in him having to sell his horses…sometimes the visits are shorter, as Anna writes and then tears up letters to her husband, changes her mind about what to do.

Tolstoy’s blocking seems to be “bigger” than Pasternak’s; I wonder if Pasternak took instruction from reading Tolstoy. But while Tolstoy is large and epic, Pasternak is tighter, and his blocking is denser, shorter, and his observations deeper (oh, I hate that word “deeper”, but what I mean is that his characters’ concerns, especially Yura’s and Lara’s, transcend the social concerns of an Anna Karenina or a Kitty – even if I did laugh out loud when I read about her particular attraction to the good works of teaching criminals to read – and, for me, at least, hold a greater interest: Pasternak’s attention to how the individual is to solve the problems of the soul, in part exemplified by the quotations I have chosen above, is more compelling than Tolstoy’s focus on the individual’s concern with social standing). Maybe I shouldn’t be too judgmental about that, though. Is there a difference in the development of the self, of the individual, at that time and place, that I should be aware of? And/or are their respective goals different? Pasternak is, after all, writing about a poet. Tolstoy, at least as far as I can tell so far, is not.

So, here I am, wedged between Tolstoy and Pasternak, and reading so slowly that I feel I shall never finish reading either one.

Observation: I have never in my life written so consistently (not this blog writing, but the other, "real" writing) and with so much interest. What I notice is that my writing is changing, my thinking about my writing (and about writing in general) is changing, and when I am working on what I now think of as “blocks” is changing. Somehow, the patchwork, the many many blocks that I am working on, will combine. This is not unfamiliar to me. When I think of the book of Merville poems that I wrote a few years ago, I realize that I wrote in blocks, in different genres, and that I mixed them up and moved them around.

As I began A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity I started doing the same thing, and even for my dissertation I did the same thing. I shouldn’t be, and am not, really, surprised, that I am doing the same thing again. The difference, now, is that I have Boris and Leo standing in the shadows (and I know they are there for me: they have written Kitty, and Anna, and Lara…) with cheerleading pom poms, and they’re jumping up and down calling: go, go, go! Oh, the thought of that makes me laugh and cry at the same time.

I understand this now, I understand that they would, if they could, cheer on the living. That is, after all, what they are all about as writers, they are people who have meditated on death and created life, and they know intimately about that meditation, its importance, its continuance. They want others to write, as they wrote. Their generosity in this matter is epic. They don’t want me to be satisfied with a little story. They want rivers in my writing.

Listen to me! Writing about what they want me to write about! Boris and Leo.


March 6, 2007

Now, back to Russia preparations!

It has been a slow few days, and I find the most difficult thing is to keep on top of my teaching work, AND continue to prepare for the travel by reading and writing. It’s not impossible, but it is a challenge, and sometimes I don’t have much to say, but feel I must continue to keep this journal and to write the “creative” writing. But I haven’t done any new creative writing for a while. I think I should try harder to do the creative stuff in the mornings and the journals in the evenings. That means that I need to go back to hauling my laptop back and forth to work. And then I need to ensure that while I am at work I am also doing work there, so that when I am at home I’m not fretting about the work that I haven’t done at work.

March 21, 2007
Last night I read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog, a 1925 novel in which a physician, Philip Philipovich Preobrayhensky, whose main interest is rejuvenation scoops a mongrel from the streets of Moscow and switches the dog’s pituitary gland and testicles with those of a man recently dead. The dog soon thereafter begins to speak, stand upright, wear human clothes, demand a name other than “Sharik”, and to get married. It is only when the dog, who decides to name himself Poligraph Poligraphovich, comes home with a betrothed, that the doctor and his assistant, Iva Arnoldovich Bormenthal, decide to put things to a close, and at the end of the novel, the dog turned man begins to turn back into a dog again, having, we assume, had his pituitary gland returned to him.

Today at work Helena told me about the subways in St Petersburg, which when you descend deep under the marshes above give the appearance of being not a subway train but a bank of elevators. When the subway arrives, the elevator doors open and people exit and enter. It is forbidden to take photographs in and around subways.

Brent told me about the show trials, and that is something that I need to read more about, but what I gathered from what he said is that they were the “trials” that some of the people around Stalin were forced to endure leading up to what they knew would be a death sentence. I had been telling him about the documentary I watched last week about the millions of people whom Stalin had had executed and how that prior to their execution their photographs had been taken and subsequently stored in the archives in Moscow. Now, looking through those photographs, it is like looking at the modern day equivalent of the “death mask”.

The documentary I watched also told the story of a woman who when she was seven years old had been selected to present flowers to Stalin. A year later, Stalin decided that the girl’s mother should be executed in case she were to decide to leverage favors from him as a result of her daughter’s connection with him. Press coverage had been extensive and a sculptor had created a statue of Stalin and the girl. In fact, 2 million copies of the sculpture had been distributed throughout Russia. Stalin not only ordered the death of the girl’s mother, but also the execution of the sculptor.