 |
| photo by Vo Minh courtesy of unsplash.com |
I've found that most bad things that happen seem to happen in two phases. There's the initial shock as an event passes through us: a phone call, a visitation, change in someone's expression, sun going behind a cloud. The moment that the bad thing comes is usually awful, but though the confusion and anxiety it causes seem to last forever while they're happening, it usually passes in a short amount of time.
That's when the second phase, the hard part, begins. The waiting.
In waiting rooms, or sleepless by the lit nightstand, or on hold on the phone, we wait for the world to turn rightside-up again, or at least to get used to its hanging over us, unsettled. It's this waiting that wears away souls, that gets into your heart and can do the real damage.
It's waiting that stories so often help us escape from. You're stuck at the bus stop, you get out your paperback. Your number hasn't been called yet, the line is long, the book is in your pocket or in your purse or on your headphones. We're compelled by circumstance to spend time doing nothing, until our names come up on the list and we're called in to see, to speak, to help if we can. It can be a wonderful comfort, to have another life to dip into and get away from being ourselves for a while.
In his too-unknown opus Little, Big, John Crowley gives us Sophie, the sister/aunt of the hero family who spends much of her life in the book's early movements asleep, seeing her real life as the life she's dreaming. In a passage embroidered with the subtitle "Sophie's Dream," Crowley writes,
"I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn't want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor's office, or coming back from someplace you didn't enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus—all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised at all when I told them I'd learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story."... "I got frightened then," Sophie was saying. "I had this big dreary envelope stuffed with unhappy time, and I didn't know how to get any out and use it when I wanted it without letting all the dreary waiting and stuff out. It seemed maybe I'd made a mistake starting this. Anyhow . . ." (first published 1981, copyright John Crowley.)She goes on to describe a turn her dream takes for the worse: she is unable to stop time from folding up, the trick goes too far, she can no longer control it. Anyway, this quote is out of context, and abridged, and its meaning doesn't completely correspond here.
I bring it in to this post mainly because in the years after I've read that passage, and re-read it, it's recurred to me any number of times, waiting for the train, for an appointment, for sleep that seems far off. It seems like every time I think of it, the meaning is a little different, what Sophie (and Crowley) is getting at is a slightly different thing.
At first I thought he was talking about stories, like reading them, and the danger of feeding too much time into them and losing touch with reality, or of not spending enough time living your own life instead of other people's.
Then I thought it might be about writing, about making up stories with your time. I've certainly fallen into that habit, albeit largely unproductively; I have my baseball card ideas of the characters of my Big Main Novel well-worn and shoeboxed in the corner of my brain, and I whorl them out and deal them into a grid and read them over whenever I get stuck somewhere, but lately that never seems like more than a nice way to mull over my own personality, in an odd but familiar way. It might be time to just write the thing instead.
Then I thought maybe it was about her dreaming itself, since later in the book she loses her capacity to sleep and has infinite difficulty filling in her own time, seemingly stuck waiting forever, living never.
Now I'm not so sure. It could be an abstract; Crowley always has an odd way of saying things you're really not sure are supposed to be universal to humanity or even to consciousness itself, or particular to that character at that time and place and no further. Good writers are able to dance that kind of ambiguity into their words: they leave the choice of meaning up to our own hearts and eyes, not to theirs.
Alright blogger, what's the point of all this so people can move on with their day.
Waiting wears you down. It wears everyone down. Your tailbone gets tired from the drab cushion in the wooden-framed chair, you get up, pace a bit, get some water in a plastic cup, then sit back down and, what else, keep waiting. You wish you could change the channel on the community TV to anything but the news. You wish you could get home and take a shower or maybe change clothes, or at least get a more comfortable seat. But all you can do is sit.
What I've decided to try to do, the next time that happens, before the exhaustion of suspended animation creeps inevitably in, to try and listen to what's going on around me and get some ideas from it.
I don't mean anything mysterious by this, or anything creepy. I'm not talking about eavesdropping or about meditating, not really. More like simply paying attention to the thoughts that come to mind while I can't do much more with my body than think, the memories and ideas that seem to become important. Try to use the uselessness of the hour as a lens to bring other things into focus.
I don't know, it's late, and the idea is apparently getting away from me.
The time is my own, and I won't get it back, even if I have to spend it in a useless way.
Maybe this is a post that poses a question without answering it; I will have to come back to this topic after more thought.
What I mean to say is I wish, and will try to find, a way of taking the time back and making the most of it, without giving it over to someone else as an automatic first option.
Of course, on the other hand, if we can't rely on our friends the books at times like these, then what are they really good for?
No comments:
Post a Comment