Thursday
I’m doing my face/with magic marker.
I’m in my right place/don’t be a downer.
Christine and the Queens, “Tilted.”
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9:00 AM
I wake to the doorbell. The exterminator is here, and I am still in my pajamas, my teeth unbrushed, hair puffing around like a bird’s nest. “Hello,” I say meekly. As soon as he goes to the backyard, I get dressed. I already know: This is going to be a chaotic day.
And a whimsical one. I best wear my new dress.
Looking back on the day, I think that maybe it was a good idea to wear that dress. It is champagne colored, wavy with layers of fabric swishing around my legs, with tiny plastic pearls sewn into the neckline that I always worry about when I wash it. I found the dress in the sales section of Savers. Sometimes, I put red lipstick on or put a black hat atop my head for the same reason as I sit down to read a poem: I like the small act of creation in a world that needs as much beauty as it can manage to put into its outstretched arms.
I thought about this while I sat down with my mathematics journal and my textbook. I scribbled in the first page of my journal the lines of one of my favorite poems by Sarah Williams:
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.
I put that in my math journal over another poem about the promise of hardship leading to the promise of victory because I like doing math at night. I used to pour myself a glass of red wine, put some lectures on YouTube, and simply exist in my happy space, a place where the possibility of failure goes away with the scratch of my fountain pen in the margins of my textbook. There are people out there who turn numbers into gold, and I want to be one of those people.
And mathematics is hugely important for the type of research that I want to do within cognitive scientist, especially because I am so keen on computational methods. Part of what I am doing with my days this week is to recover some of my skill with Java and R. I studied these languages as an undergraduate — stumbled over them, really — but I do like to simply execute a Hello, World! program over and over.
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Today, I flipped through my flashcards with the alphabets of Arabic, Persian, Icelandic, and Russian. I have mentioned this repeatedly on this blog before, but Russian is the most difficult language I have ever studied. Normally, one can sit back with a rum and Coke and swish some ice cubes around the glass and sit and review grammar with feelers toward an inevitable relaxation. With Russian, that soothing relaxation has not yet come — ha! — because I have such a hard time pronouncing tvjordi znak. The words trip and fall out of my tongue, even still.
To my great amusement, I have three exactly same copies of a Russian dictionary. I don’t remember when and where all three of them entered my life, but it is such a great addition to my foreign language shelf, as it makes me laugh to see them. To borrow from Red from Christine and the Queens: I’m in my right place. Sometimes, being in my library, surrounded by an epic wall of books, I am in so strongly in my right place. Language is the great love of my life. In fact, I want to build my entire life on it.
If you are compelled to make literature, if it is something you must do, then that act of being in your right place becomes even more essential. It’s almost like a vantage point, a slab of stone jutting out into a rushing river, where you can situate yourself to write above the abyss. I think in some way, it gives you permission to decide if you want to put yourself in your story or not. On the other hand, I remember when I first realized that Joseph Campbell’s theories of the Hero’s Journey applies to our actual lives — not exclusively our fictions, but our experiences —that was the moment when I realized that I can be the hero of my own story.
For that reason, I must make literature.
