Late summer, 2010, I thought it would be great to become pregnant nine months before one’s wedding anniversary (and I blogged about that elsewhere, still there); or nine months before one's own birthday, or nine months before spring—a poetic assertion of one's own sense of home and gardening.
Some weeks later, I wrote a wonderful posting here (if I may say so), worth recalling (though not wholly about parenting).
8:50 am
I can’t (I won’t) start a day at the keyboard without fresh-dripped coffee.
I think I’ll skip going online to see news, but I anticipate wanting to link here to some earlier things as I write today (linking as shorthand coverage-by-citation of a theme more salient to me than I’m taking time today to express), so I now connect to the Internet (which is not really yet to “go online”), but why not check mail; why not see the daily word from Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Day”?...
October 21: “sublimate SUB-luh-mayt.” I’ll keep that one for the archive because it’s so longly important to me.
My archive of recent years’ retained M-W emails numbers 1300+ presently, all words that are evocatively unusual to me and that I want to appropriate; or words well known to me that I shouldn’t have forgotten. I imagine going through the archive one day, free associating each with some project theme or plot point in my trekking.
1:55 pm
‘Sublimate’ makes a good example.
As the oldest of institutions, marriage seems outdated in modern times, when each individual is encouraged to break with tradition in order to fulfill him- or herself.
So begins the book jacket inner front panel of The Love Lives of the Artists, Daniel Bullen, 2011: “Five Stories of Creative Intimacy”—stories of pioneering artistic couples of the early 20thC, telling of “a brave, new kind of marriage, where spouses would be allowed—even encouraged—to fulfill different aspects of themselves in outside relationships.”
“Full moon tonight—,” Jen said as she got into bed, her back to my chest. We become a quasi-fetal dyad. “—behind ethereal haze.”
She was disturbed—creatively so—about how to capsulate her proposal.
Eventually, I said “Suppose now is do or die: You have to say simply what you want to do.”
She sighed.
Silence, except breathing.
Being easily entranced by mental things, I resist surrendering to it all online, because that feels so self-possessive. But I have to write from where I love to live, so I’m gradually dancing away.
“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
Steve Jobs
[end of his Stanford Commencement Address, 2005,
quoting the end of the The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971]
.
I intended today to write the next section of “Elations of solitude,” this time on a sense of inworldness, but the reality of the solitude I love is that I have to go with emergent appeals, which didn’t take me into doing the next section.
Rather, it took me on a wonderful excursion into recent academic work that’s integral to my long-term Project. I’m excited by emerging work of others.