Silent Morning, Unbuttoned Thoughts Rattling Around

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Stream of Consciousness Archive, Writing

The Apostrophe Blog

Musings on Writing and Life.

Sometimes the questions get asked and asked and never find answers. Sometimes the questions get asked, run out of steam, peter out into utter irrelevance. And sometimes, time does its magical work and makes the asking of the questions less than urgent, even relevant. What is below was written a good while back. I would like to think I have made peace since then with some of this angst and churn. And age fifty now begins to seem like a long time (nearly two decades!) ago…

Dateline: Corvallis, Oregon, July 2005.

Silent up here in the trees this morning. Occasional tire-on-Oak-Creek-Road sounds but not many. Soprano buzz from the iBook, chirp of finches and chickadees outside. The trees stand sentinel, tall and unmoving. They thrive on silence, I think. It’s their preferred medium of communication. Meanwhile, I bog down trying to read Gertrude Stein’s book, Tender Buttons. Any distraction is better than her attempt to cubistically? fracture words so that it’s all about sound (I think) and not meaning? Here’s a random sampling from a bit called, “Roast Beef”:

“In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is pinching.”

I actually like the titles of her pieces better than what’s written underneath. Things like: Water Raining; Malachite; A Cold Tumbler; and Suppose an Eyes. So, is she a genius or what? Was she only able to do this writing way back then because she was independently wealthy and Paris was pretty affordable at the time? Is she only looked at today because she was friend and mentor to famous writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald?

I don’t want to think this way but so much is the serendipity of who and what you are born into. The equation of Gertrude Stein goes something like this: family money = artistic options and adventures. As opposed to a writer like Tillie Olsen, stuck with a passel of kids and endless ironing, and her slim volume takes years to get written and luckily finally gets out. Where do I see myself on the spectrum? I really ask myself, days like this, am I really an artist? Or merely a person who appreciates art, is enchanted with creativity? I wonder if I’m not selfish enough to be an artist, if I don’t have a strong enough ego. If I like daily life and its simple pleasures too much—order and sunlight and running errands, crossing items off my list. Soon the classical music show “Performance Today” will come on the public radio station from Eugene. I like having that in the background, a murmur I half-listen to while I fritter away time, ask these questions about what, really, is MY work.

I begin to think writing—poetry, stories, shorter nonfiction pieces—is, for me, becoming avocation instead of vocation. How can I get to a place where this doesn’t feel like surrender, or some kind of failing on my part? I love words. Always have, always will. What I don’t love is the business of getting words into print. Maybe I don’t even love the process of writing, revising, writing, revising—over and over and over it can seem endless—that seems to be the received wisdom of how it works in this 21st century creative writing biz. I am supposed to know my purpose, to have a mission for this new, improved phase of my life. How does one know when it’s time to revisit long-held myths, a long-idealized idea of what I wanted to do and to be in my life? That’s where I sit now, less than five months from turning fifty. Asking questions. Forgetting to simply breathe instead.

The public domain image above is a 1922 photograph by Man Ray called Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.

Nancy Flynn
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