I just spent the last half hour or so catching up on my blog-reading. It feels as though it’s been a long time since I spent time reading blogs. It seems a long time since I spent time reading anything at all—anything that wasn’t my students’ essays or my students’ journals or my students’ vocabulary quizzes.
Well, okay. I’ve been reading a little Homer, a little Herodotus, a little from the gospel of Mark.
Oh, yes. And a little Frog and Toad Together to Emma Grace at bedtime.
I haven’t been doing any blog writing lately. Perhaps you, O Reader, have noticed this. I would like to be doing some blog writing; I still have a list of pending posts (nicely alliterative, that). I would like to write for cinekklesia; I have some drifting ideas about several different movies. But when the end of the day comes these days, I find I haven’t got the words for writing.
I haven’t, in fact, got words for much at all these days. What little I do have spreads itself across the pages of my journal on the select afternoons when I have time for such a thing—those afternoons when, having arrived home from school with the children, I excuse myself to the silence and solitude of my room for half an hour. But most afternoons such time is inaccessible: we have various and sundry activities, we have choir practice, we have errands and grocery shopping and errands to do.
I think about writing—the beginnings of ideas or a central one, or even, sometimes, my novel. But that last has returned to a former and hopelessly familiar state: it has sunk into a world aquatic; it is the slippery fish it became after our accident in March of 2005, when my mind could not seize on any kind of hard thinking. That severe concussion clamped down against all my deeper mental processes, netting and engaging only lazy and superfluous thought, holding all creative and academic work at bay.
Of course my mind these days is anything but lazy. Even when engaged in mindless housework such as stacking dishes in the dishwasher, I am reaching for connections between Mark’s gospel and our former study in the Old Testament. I am plumbing the possibilities of how to wrap up our study of Odysseus’s journey and revenge. I am thinking through what these students need next in terms of writing skills in preparation for their next essay.
And during the school day I am talking and talking and talking to them, and listening, and talking some more, so that by the time I get home, my words are All Used Up.
After the accident in 2005, I waited with interest and some trepidation for my novel to find its land-legs. In the end, I had to re-read the entire thing, reminding myself of what I had written and why I cared about the plot.
I don’t have time for that now.
Once again there is some palpable fear in all of this. Will my new work entirely eclipse my creative mind? Will teaching completely take over?
I love teaching. I loved it before. I love it now. And it is still growing on me.
But I loved writing first.
And so it’s back to the water with me, snorkel and diving mask at the ready. I am pulling the poetry books off the shelves; I am finding a new work of fiction to study, to “see how they do it,” as Faulkner is reported to have said. On Friday I am going, for the space of a few quiet hours, to spend concentrated time before the blank screen, or if it’s better, with a pen in my hand.
I know how it goes: the stammering starts; write, don’t edit; keep your eyes open. Take plenty of bait, I guess, though I don’t really know how it works in this metaphor. However you want to call it, I’m going back in.
The fish is a big one, but I don’t plan to let it get away.
