Armitage euphoria and the figuring things out

[In case you’re worried after reading this, this is NOT a blogger goodbye message. Just a manifesto. I’ll be writing every day, as usual.]

Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) changing clothes in Robin Hood 2.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. Seems like a gratuitous shot, but it’s an interesting identity move that Guy has to change his clothes in order to go to the Sheriff.

It’s NaNoWriMo. I’m not registered and I’m not writing a novel. But I’m trying to finish a project. I referred to it previously as the noose around my neck. I need to be free, and I believe G-d was telling me that he wants my yoke broken. Me, too. I’ve told myself if I can finish this, I can say who I am. I can admit to my identity. It won’t have to be instrumentalized anymore for someone else’s purposes, to push me into a box or make money or make me famous against my will or make someone else who’s bought me on an installment plan seem smart for having made a fortuitous bet, because I will have said what I wanted to have said and damn the consequences. They won’t matter any more. It’s probably a much too extravagant pipe dream, but I’m clinging for the present to the illusion that if I can just do this, I won’t have to feel conflicted anymore about all the pieces of me that just don’t fit together, that have never seemed to fit. Instead of wondering why I’m this impossible mosaic of broken pieces that keeping rubbing against each other interminably, I’ll accept that that’s the case and move on, having left this one piece behind me in a brick that’s part of a larger wall (or what seems to me at the moment, more probably, like a steaming chunk of sh** for everyone else around me to smell, to use a metaphor that the person I’m writing about would have loved).

On a day, like today, when I don’t have to think about things other than research and writing, if things go well and I hit that weird zone I’ve been able to get into more regularly lately, I can write thousands of words. I can type about 140 wpm (one of those most valuable things I learned in high school — I learned on an electric typewriter, and so a computer keyboard is tons faster) and I try to disengage my superego and my supereditor, disable the Meyers-Briggs J, and just let my hands go and follow my thoughts. Academic writing is a great deal harder than blogging, but I can still get two or two-and-a-half thousand words together in an eight-hour day — though that will have to be much more heavily revised before it can see the light of day.

The question is getting into that zone as a writer. Getting there every day, every chance I get.

Are the selves we put on for various practical purposes real? What are the purposes that these guises serve? What do they betray — in either sense of the word? Clothed and ready to go to work in his iconic jacket after he’s changed (above) Guy looks at himself in a wavering medieval mirror in Robin Hood 2.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I’m realizing some things more clearly. The writing has to come from some sort of essential me, if I can find her. She was hidden so long — I hid her, I shamed her, I told her what she had to say was nothing that anyone wanted to hear — but she seems to lurk around the corners more these days, shyly but with a hopeful expression on her face that I might listen if she said something. I’m reminded about what Judi said about the surprising reemergence of someone she calls “the Silent One.” The morning pages help a lot because they pacify the demons that scare her the most, the ones that come out to play when I’m trying to say something important, the ones that say I’m not good enough especially, by allowing them to have their say when nothing is at stake. Writing is different from teaching, I’ve seen more clearly now, though both are flow experiences. Writing involves uncovering something that hides itself again, every chance it gets, the Servetus that disappears around that corner every time I reach my fingers out in her direction. The teaching, in contrast, is a successful performance of the Servetus I decide to be on those mornings. She has a soundtrack that I play on my car stereo to put her in place, and a series of attitudes that she manifests that reflect values of mine, and gestures that go with her, and a quirky energy, a humor, and a plausibly executed sincerity. But she is not me, and even if I wish sometimes that the teacher Servetus were the real Servetus, in the end I would not give up the quirks of the essential Servetus.

Do you hear that, real Servetus? I will not give you up, I will not let you go, I do not want to be all the things that other people expect from me, I love you and I want to be you, even with all of your jagged edges and strange silences.

“Boy, boy, boy,” from Oblivion with Bells by Underworld. Something that helps me find that place for real Servetus.

When I was struggling, before this blog, now, I can see that I was doing a lot of the wrong things for creativity, mostly in self-defense. I’ve had to spend an immense amount of money in the last month restocking my harddrive with music. Everything I was playing for the last three years was gauged to reduce anxiety. I’d go to a faculty meeting or open my email, feel my blood pressure soaring, then come back to my office and play thirty minutes of medieval motets to calm nyself down. It worked for that, but calm is not really where I need to be to write. What I need to feel for Servetus to come out is a sort of edgy desire. She has to feel not just acceptance, but enough pleasure to want to speak.

I have some clues about how to make this happen. Key is that what turns that woman on is a sensation in my body, not just in my mind, or perhaps a sensation that connects my body with my mind. So provoking this can’t be about the reasonability, the rationality that I cultivated for so long so successfully, that generated so many lifeless pages of academic prose from my printer that in the end meant nothing. Richard Armitage plays an important role. I worry that I’m instrumentalizing him in just the way that I’ve been instrumentalized, admittedly. Even so, I’m in the process of cutting a video that’s designed to push every pleasure receptor in my entire synaptic system to the max when I see it. Armitage euphoria pure. Music with percussion and intense bass lines does it, and I’ve bought a lot of that plus digital stereo headphones for my computer that allow the drums and synthesizer relays to ricochet from one end of my skull to the other and back again. Fiction to stimulate my mind. Phone calls with smart people; silence with draining ones. Avoiding obligations that tax me. As much prayer as I can fit in, rocking around on my body, really physical davening. Lots of espresso during the day, enough wine at night. Things I like to eat in my refrigerator that wake up my tongue. I’m not good at taking care of myself in this particular way — I often forget to eat until I’m starving, and then eat badly — but I need to remember the lesson I’ve gotten from the whole Armitage trip, which is that whatever else happens, i can’t allow my senses can’t close down. They need to be opened up and forcibly if necessary, and taking care of the body end of the equation is just as important as the mind end. One reason that Servetus hides is that there is no body for her to inhabit and I facilitated that for too long by pretending I was just a mind.

I don’t know how to integrate all this, but I am going to try. I’ve found a café where Pesky won’t look for me and ordered Internet for home today. I am going to try to create a setting in which my feet are tapping and my shoulders are weaving as my fingers move over the keyboard, and my nostrils are flaring and a little coil somewhere in the center of me says, listen, pay attention, real Servetus is speaking now, she’s a force to be reckoned with, she is moving across that hypothetical dance floor with a seductive look on her face that won’t let you turn away. You will look at her. She will not be silent. Pay heed. You will dance with her, by G-d.

This morning, just before the alarm went off, I dreamed I was dancing. I don’t have this particular dream very often, maybe only once every two years or so, and it always leaves tears on my face when I remember that I’ve had it. For “religious” reasons, I wasn’t allowed to dance when I was a kid. When this is all over, I am going to turn up the music that’s on my speakers now, the rhythms that ripple through my brain and drive the pleasure centers and the mind and ultimately the fingers. Then I’m going to take off the earphones that bind me to the table and the computer screen and keep the motion notional.

And I am going to learn to dance.

~ by Servetus on November 8, 2011.