coldhearted scientist وداد

I enjoyed Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird, wherein one is allowed to have an otherwise lackluster day if one is writing and still call it good. In this book writing can be messy and it has to do with life. In that way I find Lamott more interesting than Robert Boice who wants one to do things mechanically … although I might like to read this Boice tome.

I think what Lamott has to say applies more to creative than to academic writing, and I also think she assumes and emphasizes neurosis too much. She is Christian and in “recovery,” and elements of those cultures contribute to her insistence on — immaturity I suppose. Still, I like the book because it insists you must write in a disciplined way but does not insist you become a machine.

*

So Lamott emphasizes neurosis too much, and Boice does not enough, and I get tired. And I do not read fiction for recreation, I read essays, so I am truly delighted to have found Working It Out, an anthology of essays on women and work which I have only started but which is so packed with information and insight I believe it may send me directly into the stratosphere.

This is an old book, having come out when I was in college, and it describes what it was like then and before then, and what people say is more incisive about the situation than what many say now. And I could explain all of this but then I would not write all the other things I need to write, so I am only recommending it.

*

But the reason I dislike all these tomes on procrastination and block because they miss the fundamental question: are you interested in the task at hand or in the rewards you might get from completing it? Because you do have to be interested in both. Also, if the task is unpleasant, so you put it off, why is it unpleasant? I do not think the Boiceans consider this enough — they assume one is just putting off what is difficult and has uncertain rewards. They do not consider whether one is interested in what one is doing, or in the rewards one might get, if one got them. They do not consider the passions one may have renounced to force oneself to work in what one is.

*

In my first instances of block, in graduate school, the issue was writing seminar papers that would not support what my father would say on these issues. I had vivid nightmares about being my mother driving a steamroller over me, flattening me to two dimensions, because nobody may disagree with my father. So in the end I cranked out both papers in the Boicean manner, saying what my father would say he would say. I needed help then dealing with the family, not dealing with work or time management.

My next instance of block had to do with planning a class I had too much material for, and that I thought I had to cover. I was paralyzed. I asked my department chair about this — I was young and new — and he said, you do not have to cover all of that and indeed, your course will be more successful if you do not try to. And I unfroze.

Then I had a conference paper to write that was out of field (then), but that I was very interested in and whose idea my colleague, who  had organized the panel, really liked. I was blocked because I had been told never to go out of field, it would fragment me which would be very dangerous. I was frozen in terror of what might happen to me if I wrote the paper, so I gave it without writing it — which feels funny but which I can do — and I am still writing it now.

*

Then there was the famous book manuscript where I got blocked because, essentially, I knew I did not have enough time to do what the editors wanted. Perhaps I could have rushed it through had I had any interest in the project at all, but I did not, so I needed to take it at a reasonable pace and plan time to discover interesting aspects of the project. But I was told to be quiet and rush. And so it was not my book, and I could not write it for this and other, more serious reasons although the material rewards of doing so would have been very great.

*

But I think that in terms of psychic development it was very important — an achievement, in fact — not to write that book. Had I been stronger it would have been the book in which I broke from the family and made my career, but had I been weaker — and this was my fear — it would have been the book in which I bowed to the family, made a little career, and lay down before that steamroller forever.

I took a middle path that looked like failure but was a way of going on strike — I wanted to retain some of my own brain, some of my own blood, and not give it all to the markets and the family. So I have paid great prices for obedience and also for disobedience, and also for not having the strength and confidence to simply strike out more strongly on my own path, but I think it is really worth considering that there was something postive, and not just the set of negatives we already know about, in my not having been able to write that book.

In any case, I have been frozen since — it took a long time to realize I did not want to write that, and the shame of it has made it difficult to work in any kind of consistent way since. The way out of all of this, then, would be to emphasize pride in what I was trying to do. I wanted to write my own book, not my father’s book or the book his enemy (the outside reviewer I agree with more than I do my father, but with whom I do not agree entirely) wanted me to write. I wanted to support myself, not lean on the approval of others. I wanted to explore other ways of thinking about this field, and I wanted to explore other fields.

*

There was also a negative reason I could not write that book: one of the authors it dealt with was a sexual abuse victim, so Reeducation decided I was, and so I was assigned to be hypnotized so I could recover memories and so on and so forth. I did not believe this and did not think it was a good idea, and I was willing to renounce interest in these authors for the sake of rescuing myself from this form of psychic harm.

I think that was good, too; that is, it was good that I rescued myself. Still, I tend to think I was blocked for that reason only, when really it was that I was absolutely insisting, in an inept way but still insisting, upon writing in my own voice.

And so that is why I rail against Robert Boice, even though he is right about many things, because I do not know whether his ideas apply when one is working at psychic levels this deep.

Axé.