coldhearted scientist وداد

FIRST HEAD

And the theme of this weekend is, it seems, Against Artificial Limits. Now I am in a restaurant in a town not my own, because there is a café in this town I had been eyeing as a good writing cafe. I finally decided to try it out, and the experiment failed. Although it looks beautiful and funky, the café is full of prissy, pampered teenagers and bourgeois senior citizens. I knew this would be a danger and I was prepared to face it, but I was not at all prepared for a $3.50 cappuccino in a paper cup. A paper cup! No china cups available! I paid for it but pushed it back at the barista – you drink it then, I will neither return to this cafe nor recommend it – and left, not before receiving a dinner invitation from a shoe shine man, of course. I this town I am officially beautiful.

I took refuge in this nice restaurant which I did not know also functioned as a café, and now I am drinking cappuccino from a china cup. So something worked out, although I do not think that in this very restaurant-like atmosphere I could sit and work for hours as one can in the more library-like atmosphere of a café.

The conclusion I draw from all of this is, once again, is that it takes a great deal of ingenuity and creativity to try to make do up here in the country, and one’s best efforts often fail. Ultimately it less economical than simply going to town, although this would not appear to be the case. To try to be sensible and stay up here merely cuts off my energy flow and carves into my work time.

SECOND HEAD

In any case, I am at it again, which is why I am trying to find a comfortable work environment. At it means, at finishing one of these articles on a topic too close to my father’s subfield for my comfort level. And the problem is not the subfield or my father, it is that Reeducation thought it should be a problem.

In those days it seemed I was being constantly informed that my survival depended upon being someone other than myself. This was what was so utterly frustrating about that whole period. “Write, but suppress your thoughts and develop ours,” said one and all. Had I read Three Guineas then, I might have known that some were only asking for “adultery of the brain,” and I could have taken them less seriously. “Write, but without confidence,” said others. “Never drop an idea, because you may never get another.” I would have done well to realize that they were giving this urgently concerned advice not because they had seen me on some precipice I was unaware of (as I deduced from their tone) but because they wanted to give this urgently concerned advice to some listener. And there I was, gagging on their words.

***

I spent a long time being embarrassed about having become so blocked. Then I deconstructed Reeducation for having been so destructive, and the block mostly lifted. I really have nothing new to say on these matters. But I ran away to the cafés today to write because in my house, because of the topic I am working on, I could not shake the images of red wine flowing and my father’s booming voice. It was too hard to get the sentences out from under all of that.

Before Reeducation I fought those images off by saying, that is a field in which many people work, and you are there for your reasons, not for someone else’s. Reeducation, however, said I could not have such a mature attitude. That would be “denial.” The shadows must grow. They were real, not anything else, said Reeducation, until the shadows engulfed and choked me.

That is all over now of course and long ago, and yet I still get embarrassed when I struggle over writings in this particular subfield. Especially now, it would seem I should be able to just get it done in a businesslike manner. But it is still hard. And so I was thinking this morning, perhaps instead of being embarrassed and impatient about it, I should consider it a good thing not to want to walk into those shadows.

That then leads to an interesting conclusion: perhaps it is not that I must remove these shadows from myself, or power through them as one does through a tropical storm, shifting into four wheel drive on shell roads. Perhaps it is instead that I must rescue the work from them, for I have set the work in shadow. Perhaps wine does not always flow around this work as voices boom and men sit up late in patios, debating poetics and Allende. Perhaps the work also stands in daylight, amid pungent country smells, or in surf grape-blue and diamond-clear.

Axé.