How does your mind work?
Chili's comment to my previous post got me to wondering about this.
While my father drives he builds buildings in his head. When you get to know
him you'll know that I don't mean this superficially. He has been known
to arrive home from a 1200 mile round trip and sit down with a pencil
and a straightedge and draw a COMPLETE SET OF CONSTRUCTION PLANS
(including dimensions, cost estimates, architectural details, material
specifications, etc.) from memory. This is how my parents have a house
in Canada now... many quiet hours driving. This skill requires a level
of concentration that I have not attained.
So now I'm jealous, jealous like a zombie. I want his dad's braaaains!
As I wrote the other day, I've been pretty happy about the zen-like trance I can sink into these days. It's a nice change from my younger self, who was constantly churning over material from philosophy and literature classes, and an even nicer change from my older self, who burned all his spare processor cycles on one irrational anxiety after another. It's peace and quiet, at last.
But compared to Chili's dad, peace and quiet are a huge waste of time. Wouldn't it be nice to draft entire houses in my quiet time? Nah, my wife would like that better than I would. But it would be nice if I could plot out my novels.
I've started a new one, by the way. And this time I'm doing a bit more outlining and research before I settle down and start churning out manuscript. One step at a time, right? And little steps should lend themselves well to long quiet stretches of introspection; a 90 minute drive should have me putting out character sketches and plot points like nobody's business.
But it doesn't work like that for me. I'm never able to come up with more than a single idea during my drives. For example, yesterday I worked out how I'm going to incorporate the narrator's POV into an epistolary story structure. A significant achievement, but it took all of five minutes of focused concentration.
Getting any real work done--it just doesn't happen. I need to have a computer, or better yet a stack of paper, in front of me. Words just don't come without media to record them. And they don't linger in my head without it, either. Anything I wrote yesterday--it's gone if it's not in front of me.
(Gene Wolfe wrote a lovely thing about a similar condition.)
So what's the problem? And is there a problem?
This is a new anxiety--the fear that I'm wasting my silences.
* * *
I've always loved emptinesses. I don't know why. A bare, undecorated room is where I'll feel most comfortable. I could never be a Catholic because the churches are too fancy. There is too much detail in them.
Woods are nice but a craggy mountainside is better, with lots of open air below me.
I'd like to see the desert.
I may not have a paperless office, but when I'm not working on those papers they need to be tucked in a drawer, out of sight.
I can't drive a cluttered car.
Too many books on the shelves make me claustrophobic. CDs and DVDs are better tucked away, but at least they're not as bulky as VHS tapes. Files on a hard drive are best.
Time should be pristine, too. A crowded schedule makes me feel like I'm drowning in a tank. I hate making plans. Plans are too much like furniture, heavy and bulky and hard to move around. For the rest of your life you're making paths around them.
Official letters, insurance declarations, mortgage applications, financial statements--what a waste of pristine, white paper! I threw away a ticket into Harvard (from the retired head of their biology department) because their application was too long. Harvard! How would I have lived around a piece of furniture like that?
The text of stories, at least, has a uniform gray blankness when seen from a distance. Still...
A blogger once kindly asked me (it was either Scamper or Outer Life; they're both great), "Wouldn't it be nice to just wake up one day at the end of your life surrounded by all the words you've written?" I didn't have the heart to reply that that's a nightmare of mine. I'm a compulsive diarist who's happiest when there's nothing to write about. "I want to be bored." I'm disgusted by all the soiled journals I've left behind. All that blank potential whittled down to a few words about what actually happened.
Paper may be cheap but toner is expensive. I always shudder over the "print" button.
* * *
So that's the trade-off, I guess. Make plans with your free time and it's not so free any more. Put something in your open spaces and they're a little less open. I've probably thrown away a lot of opportunities by clinging to all the things I didn't have.
I probably would have dated that red-haired girl if I'd kept my car in high school. I probably would have done some interesting work if I'd gone to college. I probably would have had kids if...well, all I can say is all my ex-girlfriends are mothers now. That red-haired girl is a mother, too.
So it turns out I'm still pretty happy about the stuff I don't have. There's still room for the stuff I care about, and some space left over, besides.