Slow Twitch

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In the midst of my dark month, I escaped for a bit. On Matt's birthday, we biked out to Hamilton Pool, then tried to find our way down into Pedernales Falls State Park biking on private ranchland roads. We never got to Pedernales Falls, but we did meet some very strange little donkeys.

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I've been missing.  From this blog, from my writing, from my own head. I've been on a little mental trip -- to nowhere.

Sometimes our lives get very difficult. We all cope in different ways. I tend to go missing. It's better than drinking or going violent. But like every other form of escape, I eventually have to find my way home. Even once I've turned around, made up my mind to go back, it's hard to find the way. I get lost a lot.

So I'm not here yet. I'm stumbling around, though.

Today I am (trying to be) writing on the book proposal -- again. It's much better, thanks to the sharp insights of my writing group, which is now just one person. But a good person.  I'm about to finish up this draft of the proposal. Then I head into the chapter that I managed to reconceive -- just before I went missing. At some point I will have to send out this proposal, but I'm too muddled right now to figure out when that should be. I thought it would be this past March. Now, maybe September? October? I need goals, but right now I'll settle for simply getting out of the woods.

In spite of it all, somehow, last Sunday night I magically wrote a complete draft of a little story. Sitting on my bed, with a yellow legal pad, writing in pale pencil by the dim light of my bed lamp. Add it to the pile of little stories about Amarillo I've been creating. This one is better than the others. I have no idea what to do with these little stories. I like their format, but they aren't quite full short stories, and they aren't really designed to be linked together into a longer piece of creative nonfiction. And they aren't anything great. Solid, I think, but not art. Maybe I'll do nothing with them. Maybe I'll use them to paper my office walls--a trail of words encircling me as I work, reminding me of who I am.

Here's to finding our ways home after we go missing.

I realize that "dentate gyrus" sounds like some sort of sadistic orthodontic device. But it's really a part of your brain that keeps you sharp.  It's providing yet more evidence that running helps writing. Apparently running -- and aerobic exercise in general -- causes your brain to produce more brain cells.

Nifty, eh?

Recent research by neuroscientists shows that "after pounding the treadmill four times a week for an hour for 12 weeks, a group of previously inactive men and women, ages 21 to 45, showed substantial increases in cerebral blood volume (CBV)--a proxy for neurogenesis because where there are more cells, there are more blood vessels."

These brain cells are developing in the dentate gyrus, "the very node that [another researcher] has identified as the site of impairment in normal memory loss."

People who do regular aerobic exercise do better cognitively than those who don't, they do better on memory tests, and they have enhanced "neural plasticity, the process by which the brain changes in response to learning."  (Read the full article, which appeared in the 19 May 2008 issue of Time).

I must say, I find this thought comforting. My mind's fitness has often tracked my physical fitness, but I always thought that had to do with my thyroid disease. This research takes the connection to a deeper level: my brain feels the miles I pound, and flourishes.

Oh, and blueberries are apparently magical for your brain, too.

Last night I sat down to work on the book. I drove to my favorite local coffee shop -- a warm, friendly space named the Green Muse -- and settled down with an iced coffee. The space was cozy, the coffee was good. Several people smiled at me. I pulled out my laptop and a draft of my book prospectus.  I tried to work. And . . . I just felt all wrong. Completely wrong.

I fought the feeling for a while, but eventually left the coffee shop and drove home. On the way, I began to sort out the feeling. It was this:

For the first time, I felt that I had lost my scholarly self. It wasn't that I didn't want to work on the book. I just felt so far removed from any of the scholarly practices and conversations -- and the time needed for intensive work -- that had defined my scholarly life for so long.

• I felt, for the first time, that being an independent scholar was an unnatural, impossible thing.

• That you cannot write scholarship in isolation, the way one can write creative works. You have to be at the conferences, in touch with the other scholars, teaching in the field, in a university department.

• And you have to be putting more time into it than I have been willing to commit. I want to write. But I also want to run, to play music, to cook, to spend time with friends, to read other books, to travel, to fix up my apartment. To get enough sleep at night.  To have a child. Good scholarship isn't something one does on the side, unless you're willing to devote all of your spare time to it. It just takes too much time to keep up with the literature, conduct research, write, and maintain collegial contacts.

I feel . . . a little . . . crushed . . . . Though I have chosen every step that brought me to this place, and would chose that path again.

Last week I spoke at the university from which I received my Ph.D. I was one of six grads asked to speak about our "alternative careers in English" to current grad students.

The other five panelists outlined their current jobs and how their graduate work in English had prepared them for those jobs. They only briefly discussed why they chose a non-tenure-track path.

I was different. I had pursued the traditional track, received multiple tenure-track offers, taken one, and then, astonishingly, abandoned it.

And so I had a storytelling choice to make. I could focus on the joys of my new career and how it had lured me away from the tenure track. Or, I could instead tell a more honest story: that I had left my academic post primarily because I was absurdly miserable. My subsequent "alternative career" had emerged only after I had quit the tenure track without having another job lined up. In fact, I was unemployed for nearly 7 months.

I won't outline to you all the reasons I left my 65-hr week job, in a tiny rural Stepford-like town, working with primarily wealthy students, far away from my partner and friends, surrounded by other faculty who worked all the time and thus led identically dull lives. 

The important point is this: I outlined all those reasons to the students (and faculty) sitting in that room. I was by far the most negative voice on the panel, but I had a positive point to make: to pursue the life I had always wanted, I had to leave the tenure track. But I had done it, and I now have more intellectual stimulation, control over my career, varied social circles, and -- no lie -- more writing time.

I wonder if others out there are also telling little fictions about your paths. It's risky. I would rather look like someone who consciously chose her current path, rather than admit that I stumbled into it after having fallen from the hard and narrow way.  But there you have it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 . . . for now.

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Sunday, I ran a 10K trail race called "The Maze." It winds through the Walnut Creek trail system in Austin, TX, which looks like this:

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The course is a labrynth, virtually unnavigable without a guide or directional flags at every branch in the trail. It's full of tight switchbacks, sharp climbs, loose rocks, and tree roots ready to trip you at every turn. Three creek crossings make sure you get your feet good and wet.

Flying over rocks, tripping up sharp inclines, splashing through streams, planting my foot and darting around a sharp corner, swinging on a tree trunk. I can't explain why running such difficult terrain feels so exhilarating to me, in spite of pain and exhaustion and breathlessness. Or why I'm immensely proud that I finished 12th out of 99 women in the race. Or why I feel like Iron Woman today.

But I do. 

I am Iron Woman.

Eureka!  The chapter which I have been hating and wrestling with has suddenly resolved itself!

I finally realized that the focus of the chapter is not one particular genre, but the subject matters appearing in that genre. These subjects were originally formulated in different genres (which I had been excluding but I now see I can include). Hurrah!  Problems solved!  I don't have to pursue this weird little genre of colonial texts; the weird little genre becomes only one of the many lenses through which these subjects were refracted. I can now use the full range of materials, and the same sort of argumentative structure, that I've used in other chapters.

It is astonishing how so many writing problems disappear if you can simply find the right frame for your topic. I was struggling to fit a spiral into a square peg.  . . . Not. Working. (Grunt). In desperation, several days ago I had almost decided to relegate the entire 60-page chapter to a small 20-page epilogue to the book, slashing and burning all the elaborate but ultimately useless work I was doing there.

But now.
Ahhh.
I know what to do.

Apparently, every cell of our body has one. Our skin, organs, bones, blood are a-hum with time, every moment. Even more astonishingly, our inner chronometer "works in perfect rhythm with the finest mechanical clocks [ . . . ] over the course of [ . . . ] an entire life, it is off by no more than a few minutes. Our bodies are keenly aware of outer time, down to almost the exact second" (Klein 7).

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I am reading about time in science journalist Stefan Klein's book The Secret Pulse of Time.  Me and time, we've never gotten along that well. As a child, I dove into books and escaped into an other world's time. As a college student, I tried to outrun it. I carried packets of Vivarin in my back jeans pocket like Skoal. As a grad student, I tried to outwit it, scheduling my day down to the quarter hour, to grasp every last bit and wring it dry.  Lately all I seem to be able to do is to track it, in spreadsheets, like I track the miles I run. At least I can watch its flow.

Klein, however, seems to think that the point isn't to shape and control time, but to sync our our lives to our biological clocks. To create a good fit with time. "There is a right time for each of the things we do. If you try to work counter to your personal rhythm, you will expend more time and energy on the things you need to get done. You will feel weary and wretched, without knowing why."

So for today, I share with you Klein's rough schedule of your biological clock. Use wisely. It may be that we can find the magic sweet spot for writing and running somewhere in the rhythm of our cells.

I have been reading, slowly, Matt Brown's excellent work on the devotional reading practices of early New Englanders, The Pilgrim and the Bee. Mostly for my scholarly work. But his chapter on ritual fasting practices resonates with me at a more personal level.

Fasting rituals needed to be followed carefully, but could also turn into a kind of "theater"--insincere in its motivation, and focused on bodily display. So Jesus admonished fasters to engage in a kind of reverse theatricality by pretending that they were not fasting: "hypocrites . .. disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast. . . . But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly" (Matt. 6.16-18).

You can imagine the contortions which all of this produces: follow correct ritual when performing humility, but be constantly anxious, and try to make sure that you don't feel good about following correct ritual. Because perhaps you are only pretending to feel humiliation. You shouldn't feel good about how good you are at being humble. In fact, you should pretend to be not humble while in reality being inwardly humble. That way you can avoid taking any credit for your humility . . .

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Brown continues to probe this wound: "Inner abjection is always suspect, with an overriding sense of the 'almost' or a thorough troubling of the 'sincere.' " (125-26). As if it weren't enough to be abject, abjection must be thoroughly troubled.

What would it look like if you were successfully abject? Something like this, (and this quotation is from a bestelling conduct book of the period, Henry Scudder's The Christians Daily Walke, 1635):

"The soule is then humbled, the heart rent, and truly afflicted, when a man is become vile in his owne eyes, through conscience of his owne unworthinesse, and when his heart is full of compunction and anguish, through feare of Gods displeasure, & with godly sorrow and holy shame in himselfe, and anger gainst himselfe for sinne. These afflictions stirred doe much afflict the heart."

 
All of that sounds pretty messed up, I realize. When I teach Puritan theology, students are horrified. But these ideas are not relics from the past; they remain alive and are intimately familiar to me from my years of trying to be a "good" but "humble" Christian. What is the appropriate subjectivity of a Christian? How should you feel about yourself, how should you view yourself, how can you constantly correct your natural inclinations to instead "cloathe yourself with humility"?

As a wiser, older adult, I've decided that these are impossible questions to answer. In fact, the contortions of humility can deform your personality. I let go the abjection before the contortions stuck. But I went through that ringer, and so did many of the people I grew up with. A kid preacher from my school gave the baccalaureate service address before I graduated from high school; it was all about Jesus's gory wounds on the cross, and how we killed him, and how we need to feel our unworthiness for his blood. It was a rousing way to gear us up for commencement.

I'm not sure how all this Puritanical humility fits into being a Texan. But boy haddy, I tell you whut. It's part of the warp of the place, and you can bet your britches on that.

Note: The artwork above was created by Jay Morales, a colorblind artist. Read about him here.

Can I count this as a blog entry if all I do is plug someone else's blog entry?

But I can't help myself. Thank you Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar, for blogging about your book proposal process!  A six-point memo, short and sweet, about "how to propose."

Mmmmm. Yummm. This is what social networking is all about!