Yes. I am one of the crazy-stupid people trying to do National Novel Writing Month. If I happen to ignore this blog for the whole month of November, know that it’s because I’m writing a novel.
It’s about going from 0 to 50,000 words in the scope of 30 days. And, yes, it’s like working out an atrophied muscle. But, I’m enjoying it. The first few days felt like the uncomfortable burn of running a mile after having not walked for days. Then, the familiar sensation of keys bouncing below my fingers and words coming to mind, buoyed by ideas–wonderful ideas!–has overcome me.
If you want to follow my progress, follow me on twitter: @joeley or check out my NaNoWriMo profile here. Ocassionally, I hope to make some updates on the process here. Wish me luck!
I can feel it, the same as I can hear it. The voice of a mentor saying, “Go and do. Make things a part of you as much as your fingerprint. Know things so deeply and so much your own that you couldn’t separate them from who you are.” It’s that heavy tongue; it’s the dance of fingers on keys, pens on a page.
I can feel it, the same I felt the weight of the air in Katanga, nearly two years ago. That wet, full air in the valley between Mulago and Makerere–that smell hanging there among the beads of water, suspended at eye level, filling your lungs, your nose. It’s unbearable weight, my friend, you can feel it. And, the whole city bears its weight. Its women and children feel it more, and me–I should feel it to. Feel it like it’s pushing down on my knuckles as I tell you, It goes on and on, and it rains. It runs like a river, but it showers like a storm. It’s a force, an intangible force. But, it’s life, okay. And, it wraps us up in its weight, like a blanket and like it’s crushing. But, it’s beautiful life.
And, you and me, it's shelter.
I have dreamed that the tree of life would someday spring up in a place like Katanga, spreading out branches like an acacia tree and shading its world-weary inhabitants from the rain, like a grandmother holding babies under her coat. Her brittle fingers clutching their shoulders, hands wide and swaying in the wind. It could cover us all, you and me in the slums; we’d watch sunrises and thunderstorms. And, we could eat fruit from its branches; find God there; taste the fruit; could go on in being full, sheltered, satisfied.
And, in being satisfied, we could be honest. We could tell the world, tell each other how we feel; how much appreciation and joy we felt when we see each other. How much we could overflow with it, as our fingers glided on a page and over the keys.
If I’m running, it’s going to be a long way; it’s going to be before dawn and I’m going to find the sunrise. And, this landscape is going to be the backdrop for my youth. I’m going to be young, like Dylan, and it’s going to be high-hats and snare drums and strumming guitars. And, they’re going to be you and me, baby. Yeah, you and me.
We’re going to take the highway on foot; fly like airplanes beside sedans. We’re going to be grooves on the shoulder, singing out, “Aw, aw, yeah.” And, we’re going to rat-a-tat like an over-caffeinated drummer over the whir of passing cars. You can hear it already, right? Like you’ve always been hearing it; we’ve both been hearing it. And, we’re taking to the sky, taking to the road, finding back-ways and shortcuts like you’ve known them along. Each trip a self-discovery, every right turn déjà vu. ‘Cause we’re feeling it, the road, the air; we’re running our hands over passing clouds, weaving between mailboxes.
I’ll see you in the sky; I’ll find you on the road.
It’s refreshing to hear the clatter of my own fingers over a keyboard. I’ve recently reclaimed my computer for myself. I have a dedicated computer for work, and it reserves itself for emails with professional signatures and conversations about margins and volume and spreadsheets and numbers.
But, this computer will be for words. And, sometimes, the sounds of words appearing on the screen, like the pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof. This laptop has traveled across the globe with me, making noises like the very noise it’s making now, in places like Kampala and Nairobi and Zurich. And, all the while, you and I have been testifying to what it’s been saying, with every click and clack, about the life I’ve been living. It’s always saying things, and now, I’m listening again. I’ve got my ear to every tap, and it sounds like music.
Let’s do this again. Let’s tell the world how I’m feeling with cryptic blog entries about faith and fear and growing up and cynicism and hope. Let’s sit at computers as the evening wanes and tell you all about the evening as it happens. Let’s show you the inside parts, the doubt and the passion. Can you see it? Or, are you sitting close enough to the computer screen that you can hear it tapping on the keyboard? The smacking of computer keys, of QWERTY confessions, of starting again, fills your LCD screen; let’s try again.
What is it that reaches up through the center and moves towards the fingers to write? It’s equally quiet and powerful. Like the waters of the Great Bay I passed today on my bicycle. You see, I’ve been riding my bicycle more and more often, because I’m tired of being slow. Not being out of some sort of shape, but being unable to keep up with the runners and the cars and the faster things than me.
And, we'll see a very long way
Eventually, I’ll outride them all, when the petroleum dries up in the ground like a sponge left too long out in the sun. When, their arches collapse; it’ll be me and my red bicycle. I’ve started calling him Ram Jam, ’cause he’s got handlebars like horns and he whistles through his nose on long rides overlooking Great Bay and Little Bay, crossing from Dover into Newington, eventually on until Portsmouth. And, I wheeze, yes, and limp, and stagger. But, until the chain snaps, the Ram Jam and I are headed south then headed north to cross over pedestrian bridges while commuters clog the highway until they can’t find a way to tap into the ground any more, like a whole way of life had been forgotten.
Then, we’ll open the car-door, walk down the road until we begin talking, one person to another. Or, we’ll ride atop bicycles like Ram Jam, as it huffs and powers forward, being as strong as a tractor-trailer, finding a way forward through the abandoned cars, as commuters stare out at yellow lines on the pavement for the first time. Or a single white line, that they’ve pasted 300 times in the past year as though it were a new thing. They’re all new things, this speed, the distance, the open water, the sweat, the tension in my thighs. And, we’ll find you–me and the Ram Jam. We’re finders is what we are.
Most of the time when I’m struck by inspiration; I’d rather grab a pencil and the nearest blank space than scurry to my keyboard and rattle out one of these.
But, if we’re going to represent two parts of an argument, things written on the backs of receipts and napkins are rarely shared. Despite all of my incredulity, I like things most when they are shared. (In that way, ice cream and writing are very similar. That marks the only way: end of parenthetical metaphor.) So, the scrutiny I lend the blogosphere, perhaps it’s a front. I really enjoy that you, sitting in a place across the world from me, are reading things were once ideas disconnected from language than WOW! symbols we agreed upon make everything beautiful! and sad! and ironic! and on and on until I’ve encompassed most of what I’m feeling and what you’re feeling.
It’s marvelous that it is shared. And, it is very sad that I couldn’t say these things to you over a beer in an overly crowded pub. And, it’s cool, that when these ideas are made into pixels and sent into outerspace they come back as what you would imagine being at a pub with me would be. I’m loud–loud enough to make you aware of the people sitting around us. I’m exciting and personable. I’ve changed; I’m all the same since the day you met me. I’m more arrogant these days; I don’t speak up.
Until, somewhere two people or a crowd of people can come to know each other and agree that it will take more than pixels to say and do something worthwhile, and drunkenly stumble out into a street shouting against the night that they will do something in this world! raise hell! we’ll make a new order where the things we love make us money and no man or woman would be bound by the sins of history or, or, or the mistakes of his or her past!
We–you and me and all of us–make our way through a dimly lit evening, arms slung around each other reordering the world as we walk, trying to find our bearings as revolutionaries.
these earlier mornings that usher me towards adulthood make me think of all the sunrises and cups of coffee i have missed thus far. the sum-of-stillnesses outside of windows that i shut my eyes for could bring the world to a standstill. yes, to be young and to feel like you’ve missed something isn’t entirely true.
am i missing? am i missed? yes. we wonder if we are missing something or if we are missed. the truth is a squirrel scurrying across the yard will happen whether or not we are awake for it. but, the embodiment of history is nothing without witnesses.
so, we watch as morning develops into day and transcribe the jittery movements of an animal darting up a tree to let those whose eyes stayed closed in these hours, because when they wake, they wouldn’t know.
movement.
am i missing? am i missed? you ask, as a morning moves like commuting cars toward city-centers. you wonder the same, clicking through pictures like passing a slower moving car on southbound strips of highway, am i missing? am i missed? Louder now, like the stereo in traffic screaming a pop song, drowning out the simpler sounds of morning. when we’ve grown so accustomed to conversation like this and words like “Post” and “Share” and “Inbox,” we’re likely to forget what it would sound like to actually hear someone’s voice if it weren’t digitized and sent across a wire. like commuters staring at unmoving traffic patterns, we watch as lives get lived in photo albums and status updates.
I, with Fukuyama, am frightened of that distance. Yet, I continue: here now is this post.
the real truth is there are only a few of us who look discriminately at our availability. would we just assume that to know what someone on the west coast does upon waking to someone on the east coast in their fourth hour of work is a good and acceptable exchange of information?
like this, you assume that this matters. that when you read it, you’re getting a part of me, seeing where i am. and, i used to make it easier on you, by posting my likes and dislikes, my hobbies and activities, all in a delicate row, so you could check me off of your list. Or, you could cross-reference your musical interests against mine, and then with great mathematical potential, the intersection of us could be a grand equation! multiplied instead of divided! our exponential friendships!
but, really, we’re nothing if we’re not embodied. if i can’t bump you on the way to the basketball hoop, if i can’t hear your voice over the din of a restaurant, if i can’t kiss your cheek, are we really calling this reconnection? i worry more that the things someone would say here, in imagined space, where pixels represent words (instead of pen and paper, who have labored to say what we intend them to say), are not the things they would say when seated next to the same person on a train.
gradually, this availability wears us thin. we can watch a seagull land on the jagged rocks along the North Atlantic and think only of how we would describe the serenity of a moment distilled to the static noise of wave against rock to Google Readers and RSS Feeds.
some things stay in drawers far too long, until covered in dust. i worry that my words will become one of those. adjectives underneath matchbooks and batteries that could be filling in the gaps between nouns and verbs aren’t heard or read. instead, they get less use than the drill bits of a junk drawer.
and, like the drill bits when you go back to find them, for a loose shelf in a closet, the words can’t be found. one day, you’ll stare at a brick building in a New England square and have nothing to describe it; you’ll only trace it with your fingers, trying to find something to recreate it for one who is not there. the building disappears, then the square, and one day, you. maybe, it’s the same day that you forget how to describe it to someone else; the same day you lose everything to abstraction is the same day you lose yourself to its intangibility.
i remember a professor’s musings on “the word & the thing,” the symbolic and the actual (though i’m really reducing it by saying that). i think of that now, and think about how miserable an attempt it is to blog and unify words and things.
