To enter that rhythm where the self is lost,
where breathing : heartbeat: and the subtle music
of their relation make our dance, and hasten
us to the moment when all things become
magic, another possibility.
The blind moment, midnight, when all night
begins, and the dance itself is all our breath,
and we ourselves the moment of life and death.
Blinded: but given now another saving,
the self a vision, at all time perceiving,
all arts all senses being languages,
delivered of will, being transformed in truth
for life’s sake surrendering moment and images,
writing the poem: in love making, bringing to birth.
Muriel Rukeyser
I started this blog June 10, 2007, which, as I write this, was yesterday. At the time, I had been a stay-at-home mom for a total of 10 1/2 weeks. For the first time in 10 years, I was waking up in the morning without having any particular place to be and with no particular time to be there.
I had been a high school English teacher for 10 years before I had my son in March, and soon enough. I’ll be a high school teacher again. I’m looking at this year ‘off’ as a transformation from full-time teacher to full-time mom and part-time writer. As I write this, I’m wondering if that transformation is possible, how I’ll do that, and what that means.
This blog chronicles that transformation. And, yes, this blog takes itself too seriously.
So the Muriel Rukeyser poem is a good place to start. I used to have this poem written across the top of a room in my old apartment that I had painted orange. Frankly, I painted the room and the poem at the top of the room out of desperation. I had been living in the same mid-western town for three years and was discouraged by my inability to move on from that Midwestern town and the small progressive private school where I had been working. I was stagnant. I had moved to the city for my job, and knew no one when I first got there. I floundered as a teacher, had to fend off the sexual explicitness of my department chair, and was generally sad much of the time. I endured destructive relationships, fell for the sermonizing of egomaniacal, but well-meaning colleagues, and sought the help of a hack psychotherapist. I began to think I’d leave teaching and entertained the thought of being alone the rest of my life. A handful of very close friends saved me from total desperation and helped me realize that the entire experience was a kind of personal and professional gestation.
Around this time, I was writing journal after journal about poetry, about wanting to write, trying to write, failing to write. I was in creative limbo after a creative writing professor in college had called my poetry ‘cacophonous’ and had said he would be ‘embarrassed’ to have his name associated with the poetry I was composing for my honors project. It took me four years to say “fuck you” to this memory and realize I was using it as a ‘good’ excuse not to write.
When I finally got around to writing poetry again, it felt like what Rukeyser describes in this poem, retreating to the place where ‘the self is lost.’ It felt like a kind of birth.
Just recently, I’ve experienced a literal gestation, or ‘cyesis’ (hence the name of the blog) that resulted in the birth of my son. So, I’m trying to figure out how all these processes of transformation (teaching-writing-mothering) coincide. Also, each process is inherently political, as I’m finding out. This blog is about that, too.
One of my favorite writers is Rainer Maria Rilke, and one of my favorite texts is On Love and Other Difficulties. In that series of letters, he beckons his reader to “live the questions.” This is about realizing that there are no satisfactory, perfect answers, and that the real sustenance is in the asking, the seeking, the coming to be.
I’m coming to be, so to speak, through teaching writing and mothering. And here I’m writing about it.
We’ll see how this goes.…
6/11/07
