Writing, Thinking and Healing

A Facebook friend through Living with FSHD, Cara McDonald's post on Julia Kristeva, French philosopher and psychoanalyst was interesting research. Through Kristeva, I got the title for this month's blog.

I had to get a new living/dining room, hall floor this month due to wood under my carpet so old, a hole pushed in near my computer chair. My mom and step-dad decided to go ahead and talk to a neighborhood guy, Micky. He took one look, said we can get all this up and new wood laid in a day. Then there was the decision should it be new carpet, wood or linoleum that looks like wood? We went with the latter due to costs and it has that clean, new feel to it. Now I don't worry about my chair wheel getting sucked into the old wood vortex.

At the same time, I got a new wall unit air conditioner. It was a little crazy because my step-dad was just getting out of the hospital and I had to have my kids (all grown) come help move furniture onto my back porch for the flooring. Names not given to protect the innocent.

What else happened this month? One of my older daughters needed to move some of her furniture into the store on this property.. She was leaving the state in a few days. How do you write about painful situations and family? Get their permission? Some authors don't. After Erica Jong published a book, her mother said “you're writing my obituary”. This is something I'm learning about writing.

Memoir is writing about what's happened to you. And that includes my family. It's what I know although I don't know everything about them. There's no certainty about what any one feels or thinks in a situation. At least it's not static. If I write about what I remember from almost forty years ago, why am I doing it? It's exposing your life. Why does that particular memory need to be “out there” in the world? It's part of our past. Also, it's changed for the better.

I'm still looking for work under these conditions: My car/energy is going to limit me to work in my own town, not the nearest city. I need my P/C. Again my energy can only be stretched to part-time work. I'm getting help at SC Works and SC Voc Rehab.

Reading over my writing practise for the month, I thought; why don't I just publish it all and show how I do it. Part of this blog is to show how I'm learning to write. Suffice it to say there was twenty-eight pages of needing to pee, my butt hurting, and all the twenty-nine million distractions that led to one good line; " I am the cold Grand Canyon and have the capacity for loneliness."

This month, I've finished Sartre's “Nausea”. I noticed his detailed descriptions of every person's face in scenes. That must have been hard work! Not only does he describe facial characteristics, but their mood also. Describes their thoughts reflected in their faces. But did he really know what they were thinking? Every movement around him. So aware.

“The idea of the passage...(of time)...was still an invention of man.”

“I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: (the wind), everywhere blossomings, hatching's out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning.

“Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon.”

I'm still reading James Baldwin's “The Price of the Ticket”. Looked up the origin of Caucasian, and in my daily living, found myself thinking; did Jimmy Baldwin do his own dishes? (If I may presume to call him Jimmy.) To be able to write and think as he did, without the MFA...

What's interesting to me? Things that strengthen the writing and knowing.