6. Oscar Wilde and portable hard drives

(This is the one with no sex in it. I'll be neither hurt nor judgmental, if you skip it.)         

    I keep an Oscar Wilde quote pinned to the wall above my writing desk. It says “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” This is the section of my unemployed life that was, to me, the highest pinnacle of luxury. Yes, there was still laundry to wash and fold, there were still errands to run, but I had woven my sex life through all of it, so that it was decadent instead of irksome. I was getting thoroughly laid all the time, so I was in a happy mood more than ever, and in the rest of my hours, I was revising poetry. My husband had been on me for some time to back up my documents, so it was a joy I didn’t even have to feel guilty about – it felt like I was getting something done, by getting everything rewritten and categorized in subject files where they could be saved properly. It was blissful and serene. I wrote until 11:00am, did some chores, went to the gym, ran errands, and came home, with various delicious little bits of debauchery sprinkled throughout. It became a routine. A weird one, though. It turned into a sort of existential crisis – though crisis is the wrong word, because it has such negative connotations, and this wasn’t really all that alarming. That’s sort of what made it an existential crisis, though: Nothing was alarming. I came to realize that there was no outside stimulus influencing my life, at all. It was a strange sensation. Nothing happened to me. Everything I experienced, I created for myself. If I stopped doing things, nothing happened. I don’t mean that nothing happened as a consequence of my having stopped doing things, I mean nothing happened. There was no external impetus. There was only me, and whatever I did was whatever occurred. If I thought too much about it, I began to wonder whether or not I actually existed, or if the world had simply sealed the gap I’d slipped out of, behind me. It was like being the main character in a Dostoyevsky novel, which is more than a little unsettling. So I didn’t think too much about it. Plus, I had ten full years of poetry to make just-so, and the deep throating blow job hobby was happily out of control… I was truly a woman of leisure.
    And then my computer crashed.
    Remember that I was revising everything in preparation for backing it up. This is an unwise course of action that I do not recommend. Because it was gone. All of it        was                 gone. It wasn’t just the poetry, either. It was all the work documents I’d written over the dozen years of my career, that I’d need again if I ever came back to my senses. It was the novel I’d started and never gotten around to writing. It was every short story and memoir I’d written since grad school. I’d been living in a bubble into which the world was actively not intervening, and then the world intervened. With a bolt of lightning. Literally. There were days and weeks of attempted recovery. There was dismantling of computers and there were hard drive rescuing devices, there were experts and non-experts, advice givers of all sorts, and every last ditch effort possible, but even though I remember all of that, it still feels to me like it was instantaneous. Like I was sitting at my desk while it rained outside and the lights blinked off and on again and it was just done, leaving me there in that hands-poised-over-the-keyboard stance we all take when something goes suddenly awry. You know the position; it’s called “Woah, what just happened…?”
    I didn’t actually freak out. Because I had been living with that creepy consciousness of existing without outside stimulus, the abrupt reversal of that condition was the most significant thing to me. I kept thinking Huh, well THIS is interesting. I think I knew immediately that it was hopeless, so I set about my acceptance of it right away. My noble husband took much longer to give up, and I remember sitting terribly still next to him, when he finally did, and announced to me that it was officially done for. The first thing I did - because I am belligerent - was pick up the paper next to me and write a new poem. It wasn’t good, but it was new.

will in the off position

spine straight

shoulders back

legs crossed at the knee

arms at the wrist

my stillness is absolute

there is no tension in me

not in my jaw

nor in my mind

I am engaged

in the holy act

of letting go

And I let go.
    A couple of years before, I’d bought a small, extra cool whiteboard, so that I could try out what it would be like to write poems (that I actually liked), and then erase them. I had wanted to experiment with the emotion of that, and the fleeting nature of poetry… I never succeeded at it even once. Until now. I couldn’t do it with one, single poem, so I did it with all of them. Funny old world. I’m exaggerating, of course. Some things trickled back in when I reached out and re-engaged some of the more human external forces in my life – my sister had a chunk of my poetry, one of my former coworkers had a chunk of my work documents, somewhere on my green bookshelf I knew there were hard copies of a couple of short stories from years before. But the bulk of the poems simply no longer existed, except in a different form. I am a scrap writer. A margin filler. And on that green bookshelf, and at the back of my desk, and in my nightstand, and on all the tables and counters, and in every bag I owned, there were notebooks. Notebooks and folders and torn out pages and index cards and the backs of old lists and documents that printed improperly and napkins from the local bar and staff meeting agendas and Power Point presentations, where were scrawled the zygotes of many, many, many a vanished poem. They were not the poems they had become; not at all. They were the first inklings of the proofs I’d been revising for years, Oscar Wilde style. But they were there. If I could really, honestly let go of them as they were when the lights went out, I could get back something else. New plants from the old seeds.

So I bought a new cube of sticky notes, made stacks of every notebook and folder and page I could find, and I began to seek and pursue poems. It took days and days, and when I was finished, there was an Aztec temple of a tower on my desk, bristling with sticky notes like the leaves on a summer tree. It sat there for weeks. Every once in awhile I’d pick up the little notebook on the top and turn to the first marker, shudder, and put it back. Mostly knowing it was there was okay. I could look forward to getting back into the leisurely process of rewriting, without actually doing so, but after awhile it began to glare at me, and I was at risk of beginning to put other things on top of it – burying it so I wouldn’t have to face the starting over. Then one day in the quiet of late morning calm, I sat at my writing desk, opened up a word document on this dusty, hand-me-down lap top (along with my brand new, cloud-based storage platform), and I picked up the top notebook again.

Then I put it back again and typed

Laundry and Blow Jobs

                                                                     at the top of the page.

(Yeah, it's cliche, but hopefully you skipped this post due to the lack of sex, anyway.)