Pointless and True

On Tuesday I saw a play set in a room in Idaho, just two people talking. All those half-glowing heads facing the same direction, and I there among them. A cough, rustling, laughter. References to Rupert, Orofino, Twin Falls, thinking of all the open spaces, mountains in between, rain on the Clearwater River and pulling over alongside it to turn around.

Then I was walking with my roommate back to 42nd Street: people, dogs, pizza boxes. The blur of a Door Dash driver bicycling through the intersection with his square backpack in the photo I took, bathed in pink light from the advertisements rising hugely above us. It was warm, or almost, and I opened my book on the train, read Moyra Davey and texted Jade something corny about loving the city.

We got off the train, walked ten minutes toward home, I stopped at the restaurant where trivia was just wrapping up. One of our regulars gave me a hug, everyone was yelling, drinking negroni pitchers; I sat at the other end of the bar trying to avoid the mayhem, trying to concentrate, trying to sit up straight though the bar is too shallow for my knees. Thinking lately about Leslie Jamison’s idea of the complexity of joy, “happiness as something that might sharpen our thinking into focus, rather than blunting it.”

The discipline of making art, how constant the pressure to work, to wake up early and sit at the desk, to leave the comfort of a person or a room or an evening. “Life is a sinking ship,” I read in an interview somewhere, “and work is the lifeboat.” Annie Dillard, on writing and schedules: it is “a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

How rich and engaging and loose my reading has been lately, all these diary forms and meandering critiques. Writing always misses something. On the train, the A/C blasting though it was only 65 degrees outside, my face swollen and itchy from all the sugar I’ve been eating, I underlined this by Aldo Rossi in Davey’s Index Cards: “I felt that disorder, if limited and somehow honest, might best correspond to our state of mind.” Davey’s book a collection of half-formed ideas, fragments, tracing the mind in process, in conversation—attempting to be, wanting to be—with other writers and thinkers. Jean Clair quoted by Davey: “Talking so as not to die.”

And life interrupts, becomes part of the intellectual pursuit; the intellectual pursuit impure, broken up by the body and people, the man asleep in bed next to me, his feet sticking out of the blankets, and the dog sighing. These competing desires, how foreign they are to one another. “The discipline of doing what you want to do,” Sheila Heti said in a Zoom talk. “It’s very hard to do what you want to do.”

How simultaneous, expansive I felt sitting there at the bar at work among the voices and inebriation but not quite a part of it. The noises of the dishwasher, colored lights reflected in my water glass, Dylan wiping bottles down. I underlined passages, got distracted, wrote this. “Artiness squelches,” Davey writes. Dylan said I should get it tattooed.

Thinking the other day about the embarrassment of the notebook, how I find writing in public (by hand an important caveat—technology renders the act masculine and serious; writing in a diary is girlish, primitive, frivolous) somewhat humiliating. As though it doesn’t matter what one writes or who reads it, the act of journal writing reveals something. And yet it’s this form—personal, plotless—that I’m most interested in reading lately, and writing myself. “Pointless, and therefore true” (Gene Youngblood, via Davey).

But also the embarrassment of commitment, of taking oneself seriously when no one is asking you to. You don’t work tomorrow; can’t you sleep in? my friend asked, and now it is tomorrow, morning, the ceiling fan dizzying in the coffee shop, a man outside in pink pants, the careless solitary movements of everyone and their irretrievable interiors, my huge coffee cup.

Or I don’t take myself seriously enough: another kind of shame, and panic. At work the other day I made frozen margaritas for everyone, and then we tried frozen negronis which weren’t good but of course we drank them. And in the morning I meant to write but sat in bed on top of a pile of clean laundry and took pictures of the dog’s nose pressed into my red underwear. Tomorrow, Saturday, I’m serving brunch and bartending dinner and picking up a bicycle from a friend in the morning; no time to write, so these early hours now are essential. Davey: “Stopping signals a breach of identity.”

But, yet, also, etc. the joy of regular laziness and lunch, of seeing a bad movie and eating popcorn and spilling it in my lap. The ordinary happiness of staying up late talking about nothing in particular. Elisa Gabbert writes: “Notebooks achieve so much of what poetry tries to achieve, but organically—they begin and end arbitrarily, in media res. Ready-made erasures with an offhand effortlessness, abstractions interspersed with specifics. Fragmentary profundity. No forced closures. The epiphanies fall where they may.” How the diaristic form allows space for normalcy, mundane details, that which is insignificant and real. All this open space to think freely, circle back, question—the process itself, the precarity of it, as Kate Zambreno calls it, and the way in which this uncertainty and fragment is so often assumed unfinished or unserious. I guess maybe it is.

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Things I Ate

• A huge plate of prosciutto, olives, bread dipped in oil (my ideal meal, always)

• Movie theater popcorn

• A very good veggie rueben from a deli in Carroll Gardens

• One bite of an Idaho Spud, found in the aforementioned deli right here in New York City

• Spiced rye carrot cake on the menu at work, made by ME!