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[Last week, we posted Brenda Miller's essay about how making
metaphor both removes us from the moment we are in and sets us more deeply into
meditation, helping us know ourselves and our inner worlds. In "On
Thermostats," she once again weaves the outer world of a writing retreat
with her inner world as a writer thinking about her process and how it works.
In this essay, she meditates on the interruptions life insists on bringing and
the way, as writers, we count on them.--Sheila]
On Thermostats
by Brenda Miller
Where I'm staying right now, at an artists' retreat in Virginia, for some
reason I control the heat in two separate blocks of rooms: in my residence and
at the writing studios. The only thermostat lives on my wall in both locations,
and it's up to me to ensure that the heat is set at the "desired comfort
level” for all ten people involved. What, exactly, that level might be for ten
different people has not yet been made clear, and so I've kept the little red
lever, naturally, attuned to my comfort,
which is always a bit on the chilly side, to keep me alert.
You wouldn't think it'd be such a big deal, this tiny responsibility, but I
find I think about it all the time: I'm constantly pinging up from my chair to
check the temperature, imagining the other writers at their desks, wreathed in
scarves, rubbing their frostbitten hands (or wearing those Dickensonian gloves,
with the fingertips cut off), sniffling, catching their death. Or -- since it's
an old system that often seems oblivious to whatever temperature I've set -- I
imagine the writers sweltering, flinging open their windows and fanning
themselves with sheaves of paper recovered from their recycling bins.
I hover over the small rectangular box, and I nudge the little lever to see if
the heat is working, wait for the hum of ignition; I watch my thermometer creep
up and down. Assuming responsibility for someone else's comfort or well-being:
it's what I do all the time at home, and it's what I ostensibly came here to
avoid. Though I live alone, I have a cat to tend to, and friends whose moods
vacillate like a faulty EKG, and colleagues who send a thousand officious
emails adorned with exclamations points and icons of calendars, and students
who are so tender I can sometimes barely breathe in their presence. Whenever I
go on writing retreat, this sense of myself as someone responsible for others
-- someone whose gaze turns relentlessly outward
-- shucks away nearly the minute I step foot in my studio. I ease back to
myself the way you might return to a beloved landscape, recognizing this
landmark and that, eager to stroll down to those hidden places where you've
always felt most at home. When I get together with my fellow colonists, I hear
most often sentences that begin with the phrase: "It occurred to me this
morning…” or "It crossed my mind that….” These prefatory clauses, while
slight in an everyday context, reveal how the mind, given the right conditions,
will become a soft receiving ground, so full of inviting crannies that thoughts,
images, ideas can drift and settle there like pollen. And, like pollen, stick
and fertilize.
But there ‘s always something. A bubble of calm immediately attracts that which
would make it burst; it must be a scientific principle or something, credited
to a guy with a name like Weisenheimer. Calm, quiet,
contemplative silence: it simply can't exist in a pristine state for long, even
(perhaps especially so) at the places designed for such things. Emily Dickinson
-- that poet who went to great lengths not to be disturbed -- once said, in a
letter to Thomas Higginson: "The World is a spell so exquisite that
everything conspires to break it.”
I remember at the Millay Colony, in New York, the gardener made sure we came
back to earth at 6:20 every morning by riding his lawn mower right under our
windows, nosing the big red machine into the flower beds. Construction trucks
rumbled past our studios, leaving a cloud of gravel and dust. At the Vermont
Studio Center, the maintenance man decided to paint the trim on the outside of
my windows during my two weeks in that studio, so I most often spent my time
staring at his belt buckle as he moved up and down the front porch. At the Kalani Center, yoga classes blasted New Age Funk Rock music
right outside my door, and the yoginis gyrated away, whooping and hollering
their hard-won inner peace.
In all these cases I took personal affront, fussily precise about the
conditions necessary to make writing possible. I took any opportunity to give
up writing for the day once that illusion of insularity had been breached. Oh
well, I would grumble, that's it, who
can write in all this racket? I slammed my notebook shut (well, as much as you
can slam two pieces of cardboard
together; it makes a muted whoosh
rather than an exclamative bark), or punched my computer off (though it, too,
is decidedly unsatisfying when it comes to such things: just a delicate push of
a button, rather than the thump and death rattle of an electric typewriter). I
might stalk off to slouch in my chair (well, as much as you can stalk in a room the dimensions of a
large walk-in closet, it was more of a skulk),
to eat chocolate and read an Anne Tyler novel; if I'd had a TV available, and
no shame about plunking down in front of it, I would probably have watched Judge
Judy instead, marveling at her no-nonsense authority in the face of the world's
foolishness. She would never consent
to such a system. She would keep the thermostat wherever she damned well
pleased, and if you're cold, well, sue me.
So, here, after a few days of my thermostat vigil, I settled into my role of
Heat Queen and just got to work. My writing seemed engaging even when uneven,
and I allowed myself those kind of drifty afternoons where I read poetry, wrote
a few lines, dreamed a few more but didn't write them down, just keeping the
brain open to possibilities. I became both alert and languid at the same time,
like a cat on Xanax.
But this morning, Cora, the friendly housekeeper, and Bruce, the maintenance
man, both bustled up to my room where I'd been writing steadily since
breakfast, knocked loudly, and said there was a problem with the heat --
"people have been complaining” -- and after a few minutes of fiddling with
knobs and vents, they left, the little red lever set at a stifling 75 degrees.
I know there's no one else in the residence at this time of day, and the heat
is most likely blowing into empty rooms, but I don't dare touch that
thermostat. Cora said she might come back with the key and lock it up so that
no one (meaning me) can fiddle with it, and I imagine her cheery persona
dissolving into that of a prison warden, clanking down the hall with her keys
at the ready.
I sit here, gazing forlornly out my window, the heat blasting from the ceiling
vent. I'm this close to stopping
writing for the day, though it's only 10:30 a.m. But the landscape -- with the
Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance -- seems not to have noticed the
intrusion; the horizon rolls away from me in the same contemplative way it has
done all week, foggy and cool. The cup of tea steams at my right-hand side. My
keyboard feels warm under the heels of my hands.
And my mind? I'm ready to feel that roiling disturbance , to feel put out, but
maybe because I have a cold, or maybe because I figure it's not worth it, I
just get back to work. I plug in my headphones, return to the soundtrack of
birds and piano made by one of the composers in residence here. She has
captured and amplified the rhythms in which these Virginia birds live: the
swoop of starlings, the red shiver of a cardinal in the morning, the wrens that
hop every which way limb to limb.
Annie Dillard has likened the creative act to keeping a desk in midair by
furiously pumping with our feet, maintaining the illusion that we're getting
somewhere; any chink in the illusion and we'll come crashing to the ground. So
those of us who have the privilege of a few unbroken hours might hang our
little "please do not disturb” signs on the doors, or we scrawl in big
letters, KEEP OUT; we set our faces carefully to give the right cues that we're
thinking; or we plug our ears with
special Brookstone noise-reducing headphones; or we
sit in a quiet room with book in hand, fashioning a crystalline spell of
language around our heads. But these, in the end, are all surface tricks, without
the real bite necessary to keep our lives under control. Something will always
be nudging at the door.
My friend Suzanne once told me about trying to write in her home office when
her son was young; he would creep up to the door and whisper: "Mama, show
you something!” and she kept turning him away with kind and gentle exhortations
to wait just a little while. She finally heard a slight swishing noise, like
wings: he was sweeping a gull's feather under the doorjamb to grab her
attention, and it worked; it was like being tapped on the shoulder by an angel.
Another friend, a student, told me of the elaborate machinations necessary to
get just one hour to herself, with the door shut to her study; she, too, heard
a swishing noise, and turned to find, slipped under the door, a picture
crayoned by her daughter: an image of a huge closed door, with a stick-figure
girl in front of it, big tears falling from her cheeks. I have no children, but
often I'll turn from my computer to a little scratching noise, and there,
beneath my door, I'll see the disembodied paw of my cat, upturned, sweeping
back and forth, trying to snag me. For all of us, we could see these
disturbances as both irritant and blessing: to be so missed that the world
flattens itself out just to slip under the door to reach you.
And maybe, in the end, we just have to learn that there are no perfect
conditions for writing. No perfect conditions for anything, in fact; maybe the best we can do is learn how to take
each bit of the world as it comes, to have no real preferences, only what the
Zen masters call a "radical acceptance” for things as they are. There are
so many thermostats, after all, we try to keep calibrated in this world, and
every single one of them eventually fails. We have that little thermostat in
the brain attempting to keep the amount of information we can process at an
even and steady level. And we have that thermostat in the heart that tells us
exactly how much love we can readily receive, how much we can afford to expend.
Our spirits try to stay on an even keel, no matter how many war dead we read
about in the morning's newspaper; we try to even it out with the story of the
selfless person who jumped in a river to save a drowning dog. We're careful to
keep it all steady, no wild fluctuations if we can help it, but eventually it
all flies apart, the thermostat busted. Or, at the very least, it feels as
though the thermostat is controlled by someone in another room, a person
oblivious to our plight.
So, today, I decide to turn my back on the thermostat, that flawed instrument
designed to keep everything in stasis: no surprises, no fluctuations that would
demand a body to respond. We can never be truly comfortable; that's what I'm
learning as I steer my way into middle age: it's probably best, in fact, if
everything is just on the edge of veering out of control. It's the brink, after
all, where our best work can be done. Cora's footsteps fade, the room becomes
quiet, the only sound the heat blowing merrily through the downturned vents. I
crack open the sliding door, and the cool autumn air slips in, my own little
act of rebellion. I breathe deeply. Then I sit down, on the edge of my chair,
and I begin again. . . .
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