flemmings | (no subject)

I've been suffering an attack of Silence. I get them every so often- have for decades, only in uni it was in regards to letters and now it's in regards to fic (and email and reviews and blogs and all that, but mostly it's about not-ficcing.)

Silence is very persuasive. It reinforces itself. The more Silent you are the more likely you'll stay Silent; the longer you stay Silent the less likely you are to break it, and the more inclined to go play Yukon solitaire instead of writing. I'm a fan of the more usual silence, just in a general way. I don't like having music playing in the background, I classify most noise as din, I can't function if a TV is on anywhere near me. That may be why I don't fight Silence tooth and nail when it starts, but slip into it as something natural, even though I vaguely sense it's not desirable.

And of course it's not desirable at all. It ranks up there with moderately severe hayfever in making one scratchy and unhappy and ill at ease in one's skin. It makes everything else look difficult and too much trouble as well- bills, vacuuming, income tax, laundry. I welcome having to go to work because it breaks the monotony of being me at home. (I am passionately grateful that my work is not merely necessary but fun. How does anyone manage a desk job, I often wonder.)

But I only know what awful things Silence is doing to me if I sit down and make myself write; and then, if I'm lucky, the ice shifts and suddenly I see that clear passage of water ahead of me and the boat starts to move, jerkily perhaps, but at least I'm under way again and I think Oh yeah right this is how I'm supposed to feel. The sun shines and all sorts of things become possible.

If I'm not lucky, of course, it's just a slog through the hardening floes and so much easier to go play solitaire instead, than churn out this crap that isn't going anywhere and that I'm not interested in anyway so why am I doing it when I could be playing solitaire on and on and on. That one I don't know how to get over, because yeah, if it's too much trouble to tell a story why tell it? And I suppose the only answer is, Because if I don't write this I'll never know what happens in it, and something wonderful might happen but I won't know if I don't write it. Hope, I suppose, is why I keep writing. Hope sometimes gets like margarine scraped over bread, a bit too thin for sustenance, but until and unless one of those divine intervals of inspiration and infatuation descends, it's all one has.

(I will mention as a total non sequitur that my icon is the background to Hiroshige's woodblock print Foxfires at Oji, of which I actually own a copy. In many of the printings the little group of houses behind the foxes meeting on New Year's Eve is invisible, but not on the one I have. I cherish it for that reason.)

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And I suppose the only answer is, Because if I don't write this I'll never know what happens in it, and something wonderful might happen but I won't know if I don't write it. Hope, I suppose, is why I keep writing. Hope sometimes gets like margarine scraped over bread, a bit too thin for sustenance, but until and unless one of those divine intervals of inspiration and infatuation descends, it's all one has.

It's true. You're right. Something truly wonderful could happen, and you won't know until you try. Maybe it won't happen now, but maybe in the next moment or maybe the moment after that. Footsteps forward, silence surrounding, never knowing when the next wonderful will come.

I think it's scary, scary and exciting and fantastic, and at times, mind-numbingly frustrating, and other times, very depressing.

But it's true. You're right. Hope is why you (and we all) keep writing. And Hope is why you (and we all) keep living, even if it's only on butter sandwiches, which all and all, aren't too bad.

I don't think silences, whatever kinds, last forever. If we don't make noise, then someone or something will do the favor of making noise for us. And maybe sometimes that will offer its own inspiration, even if it only inspires us to get up and close the door.

Hugs. Solitaire is fun, and nice when you win. There are little ones that glady await you to remind you that they can make lots of noise on your behalf. The weather will get colder, but that's what warmed bean bags are for. It won't stop the greige, but on the "bright" side, cloudy days seem clearer because you squint less.

And dragons come and go, but that's part of the treasure in their visits. Until the welcoming lantern by the little cottage on the hill is lit, until the next poem is shared, I will gladly sit and enjoy this here butter sandwich, and the next one after that, and the next one after that.

That weariness with the sound of one's own voice, as well as all other noises . . . I think I know what you mean about how it feels when the ice breaks and the river moves, though. That sense of possibility, of direction, of a gift.

Though maybe I'm a bit the other way round. I could tell stories in my head to myself forever. It's telling them to other people that takes the effort.

I live hard by a freeway and so I rarely get silence at home. In the rare moments, in the wee hours of the morning, that there are no cars on the freeway for a short time, it'll wake me up. When I was younger, I had an aquarium in my room, and it would wake me up when there was a power outage and the air pump stopped.

At work there is the noise of the air system. I have a radio tuned to a classical station at my desk. Other co-workers listen to their own styles of music and pretty much don't care if everyone else can hear it too. Then there's phones and cell phones and pagers and all the other general noise.

I miss silence sometimes.

OTOH I find it helpful at times to have something I /must/ write, for whatever reason. A review, an essay, even a translation. It gets the voice going; and once I'm talking more-or-less 'other people talk' I feel less inhibited about talking my own talk. Of course being a student is overkill in that direction. There's so much other-people-talk that there's no time for your own, even if you can find your voice in the cacophany.

If I have stories in my head it's usually not a huge problem to tell them to others, unless they're so very clearly the kind of story you don't tell. Even then the Silence will sometimes hit- 'why bother?' 'who's interested?' 'it's too much work.' Then it's merely a matter of slog, putting clumping words to one's delightful airy fantasies and gossamer delicate emotions. ^_^

But when the story itself exists in Silence and has to be written down before you can even see what it's about, it's deadly. I have a situation in my head but no story attached to it. I can't in my waking clear-eyed moments tell what happens next, or is likely to happen next, or will happen next. Any attempts to do so meet a blank wall- I don't know. Forcing a plot on it feels wrong- making the puppets move arbitrarily and for no good reason. If I write this situation something might come of itself and things might become totally clear. Then again they might not. It may be that I have only a situation and no story to go with it, which is depressing at the very least. And so.... 'wouldn't it be easier to play solitaire?

City silence is a relative thing, of course. I live in a silence of white noise- computer hum, fridge hum, air purifier, window fan, the drone of cars and aeroplanes through the window. Those I need and can't sleep without. Anything more immediate and in the foreground (phones, agh. Cellphones, double agh) is an intolerable distraction *if I'm working with words.* There is absolutely no silence in the daycare where I work, but who cares?

Sweetness, if this one gets written it'll be dedicated to you. Your last paragraph is now cut'n'pasted at the top of the Word doc, just to remind me what I'm writing for. Thanks. (And what a bitch that one was to write, yes, even if it reads so seamless now. The unconscious does occasionally work miracles.)

Usually having no-one to talk to is very conducive to writing because I can hear my own voice so clearly. Being turned outwards in interaction all day tends to make me too tired to write by evening. Clearly one wants a balance.

But the insidious thing is that something in my cultural background insists that silence is a virtue, the preserve of superior people. Empty-headed chatterers use words and lots of 'em, but those 'pale as water' Chinese types A. talks about were *obviously* sparing of their speech. The idea may be Zen taken to an extreme, but I knew about it before I knew about Zen, or French feminism ('language is a male error, the heresy of choosing those lies called words to express multifaceted reality; the true female language that expresses all is silence'), or any of the sources I can name. I have to tell myself that 'silence is golden' really came from some bloody Greek-influenced father of the Church who thought women should be rarely seen and never heard, because then it's my manifest duty to make a noise. But otherwise-- a lifelong elitist is hard put to resist the temptation to retire to a serene wordlessness and watch all the people who don't know better putting clumping words to their airy fantasies and gossamer delicate emotions... ^^;;

And there can be the temptation not to do anything in the hopes that it will sort it out by itself. "Perhaps if I leave it to simmer in the metaphysical stock at the back of my mind, I'll work out how to handle it, or the next part of the story will fall into place, or the first line will come to me." And when you look back on it later, it's faded and gone dusty, and that first sweet sugar rush of gossamer emotion has faded on the stalk.

As a little kid, I had this clock that was a black-and-white cat with the clock on its tummy. Its eyes opened and closed, and its tail went back and forth. It also made a quiet sort of gears-turning, grinding noise that, over the years, I came to find very pleasant and soothing. I guess we all get used to some level of noise. Where Kagenami lives is one of the few places I've been to where there's complete silence most of the time. As much as everyone loves the ocean (including me), that's hardly quiet either with the crashing of the waves.