This morning I am engaged in an elaborate pantomime of forward motion. It looks a lot like walking against the wind, but it sometimes involves crooning to my rented cat.
I am, as it turns out, ahead of the game, and said aheadnessitude applies to both the wee and the big pictures. I’ve got about 40 essays to grade and two exams to design over the next few days , but I’d say that puts me in fine shape for the last week of classes for the semester. I also had my annual Article Six meeting yesterday, which involves a professional progress assessment, and both the associate dean and my chair indicated that I could probably ease off the accelerator a bit and start thinking about applying for early tenure and promotion. Encouraging words at what is often a pro forma meeting are always welcome.
I’ve been chipping away at a short story, too, but it’s been fairly slow going. Part of the problem is that rendering the Nunavut province in Canada realistically is pretty challenging; I need to do a bit of spot research for just about every paragraph. The main issue, however, is that my skull is full, and not with nougat as you might expect.
Thoughts of my mother’s welfare and futures both with and without her regularly intrude, of course, but my thoughts have also begun to oscillate between three sizable projects, all of which will require a significant stretch of my undivided attention. Add in a brewing infatuation, and you’ll find a mind bedeviled by gnarly notions intertwined. The internal rhymes, at least, are free.
Whether I like it or not (and I’m a smidgen ambivalent, but only because I had a candy-colored vision of finishing six stories over the course of the fall semester and Christmas break), my squash is also telling me that it’s just about verse o’clock. I know this because I’ve been reading Stephen King’s short stories to prepare for a spring seminar and jotting down lines and phrases rather than ideas for promising plots. I am of the learned opinion that any time a story about a demonic laundry machine suggests to you a sonnet, you should probably be writing a poem.
What is especially interesting to me about this moment is that the ideas I have in mind have become organized despite the cranial overcrowding. The pattern isn’t perfectly obvious, but it has the shape of something like a constellation, an image I can perceive with a little focus and imagination. I think this is the consequence of knowing the shape of the collection I’m preparing, of feeling that I’ve found the link that will give much of the work I’ve written thus far coherence, consistency, and integrity. It’s one thing to notice a throughline that unites some of the poems you’ve already written, but it’s quite another to write with that thread already in mind.
The kicker is that I had a double-dip epiphany last week: I suddenly recognized the necessary complication that must end the novel pentalogy I’ve been secretly plotting for roughly 114 years. As is the case with the poetic pattern, having a destination in mind has allowed me to begin fleshing out the developmental steps that will carry me there. I think that might be a project for the other side of the tenure line, but it’s brewing with a certainty it never had before.
Right now I need to focus on one thing at a time, starting with a batch of essays that need grading. Though I don’t like to think about it, I also probably need to make haste, since chances are good that I might be called home at some point over the holiday. Come December clarity can be hard to come by, and I’m fully willing to concede that my strong need for sleep nowadays might have something to do with actually being tired. It’s a crazy hypothesis, I know, but I have science to support it.
I’m betting, however, that is also has something to do with those moments of vacancy I have upon waking.
