Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

Words And Music Etc

Orchestra last night was like a train wreck. We all should have just stayed home; I mean, for goodness’ sake, we played the Grieg better the very first time when we were sight-reading it. Collectively, we appear to be at the stage where we know a bit, but not enough, so it’s falling apart. The only thing more dangerous than not knowing anything about a subject is knowing a bit about it.

And, on a completely different topic, here’s an example of why I love the English language:

Verse feet in the romances are predominantly iambic, but anapests and trochees that appear should often be taken as welcome prosodic variations.
–from the introduction to Middle English Verse Romances by Donald B Sands

And this morning I found this in the writing diary of Virginia Woolf:

Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither.

And that’s it, really; when you think about it, and conceive of the finished product, it seems a piece of cake. Actually doing it, though; wrestling the language into some semblance of gawky order… now, that’s anything but cake. More like cement and traffic-light brownies or something. Or whatever you can think of that describes hard and heavy and not what you were expecting when you put it in the oven at all.

Oh, and I saw the four Animatrix shorts plus Final Flight of the Osiris last night; a colleague of my husband’s recorded them for us. I enjoyed them all for different reasons. I already had every intention to pick up the compilation DVD next week, but now I have even more motivation to do so.

On Coincidence

I had the joy of spending Victoria Day outside with a few good friends at a spontaneous picnic. Simple pleasures: roast chicken, a few different kinds of fresh bread, warm strawberries, grapes, cool drinks, and total relaxation. All stresses were forgotten as we nibbled and laughed and played with my lovely goddaughter, who had more energy than the adults lazing about. Plus, I got a bit of sun, which, if you’ve seen my milky-pale skin, is a blessing. I no longer look like a creature of the night.

I happened to stop in at the secondhand bookstore around the corner and brought home quite the find: a copy of Connie Willis’ Lincoln’s Dreams. I’m a huge Connie Willis fan. I am not, however, a fan of charging $9.99 for a two hundred page book, and for some reason I never picked this one up when it was cheaper. (Actually, I know the reason: I’m not a Civil War fan.)

Well, apart from being immensely smug about scoring a Connie Willis book secondhand, I discovered that this book fits right in to my life at the moment. It’s not about the Civil War. (Well, sort of, but it’s a means to a different end.) It’s about dreams.

Now, I love how Connie Willis examines the whole what-is-real perception of reality, and time-travel, and life vs death. At this particular point in time, however, when part of my attempt to solve my sleep problems involves recording dreams, this particular book becomes even more fascinating. Especially since I’ve started noticing that every once in a while, I “dream true” – I’ll write something down in my notebook when I wake up, and a couple of days later something very much like it happens in the real world.

There’s no such thing as coincidence, I’m fond of telling my students, since everything’s connected by energy of various sorts. I’m also a Jungian, which means that I subscribe to that whole collective unconscious idea. I also think that our human concept of time is a construct to make our lives easier, sort of like democracy. So, why can’t someone start picking up the dreams of a man involved in the Civil War? What’s to stop me from having the odd dream about something that (in our childlike perception of “linear time”) hasn’t happened yet? Why does man stubbornly insist that memory only stretches backwards, because he has experienced it? We know the future exists, because today was yesterday’s future. By extension, we’re living in someone’s past.

Mankind places a lot of weight on what is verifiable by sensory proof, and yet is incredibly subjective about other concepts that require faith. Some are inviolate – of course it’s true, even though it cannot be proven – and others are flatly dismissed without even a second thought – that’s impossible. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how uneven we are, and how strongly we’ll defend certain ideas, yet obstinately push away others. Man’s a hypocrite. A loveable, frustrating, contradictory, inconsistent hypocrite.

Restless

I’ve been strangely restless the past week or so, and full of contradiction: I’m tired, but I can’t sleep; I don’t want to be alone, but I don’t want to be with people; I want to do something, but I can’t settle down and concentrate on any one project.

“It’s spring,” people tell me, but I’m not satisfied with that.

“Maybe you feel unfulfilled because you no longer have a defined nine-to-five job,” my husband suggested. That’s not it either. I’m very happy to make my own hours, thanks.

Last night as I lay awake in bed, I think I might have hit on it. My spirituality is evolving again. True, spirituality is by definition an eternally changing process, as you grow and redefine your connection to the Divine. This time, though, I think my focus is shifting away from Celtic mythology where it’s been firmly entrenched for the past eight years. This doesn’t mean that all the work I’ve done so far is to be discounted; not in the least. I’ve grown and learned and exercised certain mental and spiritual muscles, so to speak, and I cherish every day of those eight years for the connections I’ve made and the knowledge I’ve gained, both spiritually and lore-wise. It simply means that there’s another area of focus to which I now need to direct my attention. This isn’t as sudden as it might seem, either; it’s been nibbling at me for about five months. It’s taken me that long to figure it out.

Well, I’ve figured out there’s something I need to focus on. Now, figuring out what I’m supposed to be focusing on; that’s the hard part.

In Which She Considers a Mission Statement

I woke up last night and my head was brimming with ideas for stories and novels. I marvelled and cheerfully went back to sleep, anticipating waking up the next morning to The First Day Of The Rest Of My Life Never Having To Dig For A Story Idea Again.

Of course, when I awoke, I remembered the part about my head brimming with ideas, but not the ideas themselves. I could have kicked something.

On Tara’s website, she mentions developing a Life Mission Statement for herself. That idea (okay, that and all the delightfully funky little owlies) reached deep inside me and ripped something awake in a rather painful fashion. For the past year, I’ve been struggling to figure out why I’ve been unhappy, and what I want out of life that can/will bring contentment. Perhaps a mission statement is what I need. Nothing so structured as a five-year plan; goodness, no. Instead, I want a personal manifesto that inspires me.

So far, I know it will include the exististence of cats in my life, sharing company with my lovely god-daughter who brings tears to my eyes, music (both listening and making), feeling the sun on my face regularly, encouraging freckles, laughter, art (appreciation and perception), believing that I have something to share with the world at large, love on every single level I can think of, and a perpetually renewed joy in the sequencing of language in various ways.

Needs work, I know. And specifics. I have to fit warm bubble baths in there somewhere, too.

Family Visit, Virginia Woolf, Brief Miracles

We had glorious weather all weekend in Oakville until a wonderful thunderstorm during Sunday dinner (mmm, rack of lamb). I saw my grandmother from the west coast, old family friends, and all in all enjoyed a lovely trip. I wish we could have spent another day or so with my parents, but both my husband and I have to work today.

I managed to get a thousand words or so written on Saturday afternoon, too. I’d been dithering about a chapter in the Great Canadian Novel, unsure about how to handle the next step (or, rather, to choose what the next step should be from a pool of four different events). I plunged in and finished the chapter, and even started the next one.

And then, I crashed. Why, you ask? I picked up a secondhand hardcover copy of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. When I read work like this, I wonder why I even bother. (Yes, yes, I know: different styles, all kinds to make a world, different tastes in readership, blah blah blah. I’m sharing. Be quiet.) I despair of ever becoming capable of painting word and thought, of arranging language to convey a depth of emotion with only a few words.

I’ve read scraps of Virginia Woolf’s journals, and she too uses sparse language, and yet conveys something so much larger than what the words say. Is that what genius is? Everything I read of mine seems mawkish and heavy-handed (though not as heavy-handed as some of the published stuff I’ve read, thank all the gods), no longer as airy and bright as it seemed when I set it down. I’ve ordered a copy of Woolf’s journal so I can read the whole thing, not to further depress myself, but to try to understand how it is that she manages to succeed at what she does, even in her own private notes.

When I moved I found a humour coloumn that I’d clipped from the English department newsletter during my BA. It’s an “Ask Your Author Agony Column”.

Dear Author:
Lately I’ve been feeling that my life has no meaning. What should I do?
Signed, Pondering the Meaning

There are several witty samples of what various authors might have responded (“Get your archetypes straightened out,” recommends Robertson Davies), but here’s Virginia Woolf’s imagined response:


Life is just a series of brief miracles. Stay away from water
and for heaven’s sakes get a room of your own.
– Virginia Woolf.

Life’s just a series of brief miracles. This comment was meant to be fun, but it says something important. Juxtaposing the words “just”, “brief” and “miracle” creates a tension that Woolf’s work displays as well. How can something be “just” a miracle? Is it a miracle because it’s brief? Shouldn’t miracles, by definition, be life-changing? Or is it our observation of the miracle and how we choose to be changed by it that defines it as brief or enduring? If they’re brief, is it the knowledge that life is made up of miracles that keeps us going?

More people should see the miracles around them, however brief. And more people should remember that life is a series of miracles; we just have to find them.