Abelard and Writer's Block

I think the biggest cause of writer’s block is too much to say, not too little to say. We hear of writers facing a blank page and nothing to say. When I am blocked, it is not that I feel blankness inside, or openness, or silence – it’s that I feel clamor, stuffiness, a scramble of voices all blocked and mired in each others’ push. There’s too much wanting to say . . . therefore I just walk away. Go feed the birds. Check the emails. Wash some clothes . . . much like leaving a noisy billiard parlor.

And this comes from not writing something every day, from ignoring the little things that seem unimportant and unworthy of the paper or the time – saying to myself, this is unimportant – this is just complaining – this has already been said – worst of all, who cares anyway? Letting things build up and get blocked.

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I think of a book I’ve been reading, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, the twelfth century monk and nun who left a trove of love letters behind when they died. You see, they had had a torrid love affair while he was studying for the priesthood – and she was his precocious student, 21 years his junior, who never intended to take vows herself but just loved learning (from him; he was quite handsome they say). Abelard had been hired by her rich Uncle Fulbert to teach her the scripture in their original languages, Greek and Hebrew. But once the uncle found out about the goings-on under his own roof, he had his henchmen castrate Abelard in his sleep. After much pain and remorse and a lot of secrecy, Abelard took his final vows, but not before ensuring that Heloise would do the same – so they should “forever be together in spirit” – that is to say, so she would be unavailable to any other man (my opinion).

 Then, after each had taken their vows and was embedded in separate monasteries, I suppose the hormonal changes began to set in from the castration.  Abelard ignored her, took a more fatherly tone in his letters, and made little attempt to see her.  That’s when she writes one of her most straightforward, insightful, and beautiful letters to him:

“Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can –“

Did you not love my soul? Was it the flame of lust rather than love that bound you to me? I took the veil for you! Those are her very words, though I’m taking license to extract and scramble them together from several pages of text – a letter that rankles even 900 years later.  She details all her young school girl passion and hope in him.  She reminds him that she even bore his child in secret at age 17 and gave up the baby just so it wouldn’t taint his reputation or stand in the way of his career (vows).  Yet after she took the veil, forever marrying herself to God, as she puts it, he neglected her! “In truth I have done none of this for God but everything for you,” she laments. “Tell me, I say, if you can.”

His reply is a 20-page discourse on female complaining, “. . . a recital of your misery over the wrongs you suffer,” and “your old perpetual complaint against God concerning the manner of our entry into religious life and the cruelty of the act of treachery performed on me.”  This one pivotal letter seems to be the turning point in their relationship.  I know I think differently of Abelard forevermore after reading this letter.

The way I see it, his 20-page letter is nothing but fancy rhetoric meant to act like mirrors that deflect light into crazy patterns on the ceiling. I hope she saw it that way. He never answers the question of ‘why have I been so neglected and forgotten by you.’ Instead, he performs a sleight of hand – he angles the mirrors to cast shadows on Heloise.

After that game-changing letter, she stopped the complaining – but she also stopped writing heartfelt letters. Maybe she got her answer, maybe she believed she was wrong to complain, maybe she just gave up. The female in her was vanquished, just as the male in him had been. “I have set the bridle of your injunction on the words which issue from my unbounded grief,” she writes in reply. That’s it – her letters become short and to the point, mostly questions about how the nuns ought to conduct themselves under the Rule of Saint Benedict which was written for men – the cowls, for example, she writes, “What are we to do about the cowls?”

And then he answers her about the cowls. That becomes their relationship after he had secured her in the convent and told her to stop complaining.

It is difficult to finish the book now that Heloise has been shushed – a shushing which endured even through the two decades she lived after his death at age 63.  I wish she had written something in the privacy of her monastic cell about all that she really felt. We will never know – not because there was nothing to say, but because there was so much – and who would care? she must have thought – and so she walked away from saying it.

The Occasional Virtue

I read a newspaper article entitled “Study: College Kids More Cocky.”  The woman with the credentials to be quoted in such an article is Jean Twenge, author of the book Generation Me and a psychologist at San Diego State University.  She has published a new study concluding that college students “feel far more superior than their elders” – at least 60 percent of incoming freshman rate themselves as above average in all areas, compared to about 39 percent in 1966.  “It’s not just confidence. It’s over confidence – narcissism even,” she says.

“There are some advantages and some disadvantages to self esteem, so having some degree of confidence is often a good thing,” she begins.  But, as she sees it, too much self esteem can cause ‘a disconnect’ between self-perception and reality.  The Greeks called it hubris, as I recall from my own college days – and it was the downfall of almost every tragic hero (and more than a few modern day politicians, I might add).

I could have composed such an article myself last week, if someone had been with me to write it down while I was driving – when a very young teenage blonde, way too sexy for her age, made a stupid move in her BMW car while chattering wildly and laughing enthusiastically on her cell phone.  The stupid move put her ahead of me with no apologies or acknowledgment of the life or mishap I had just saved her by not asserting myself and rather deferring to her blind stupidity.  She will never know she was wrong – she will never know what she could have lost or what might have happened.  And so, I felt for just that time like a silent guardian angel who had watched out for her life (and mine) while she plodded along in the insular world of her own self importance – unconscious of me, of others, of danger, of wrong, of cost, of invisible forces to which one ought to be grateful . . .

I possibly saved her life, mine too, and certainly much inconvenience at the least.  Two cars did not collide that day because one of us deferred to the other who was in the wrong. Farther up the road, we two strangers sat side by side in parallel lanes at a stop light, and I looked over to see if the young driver might at least acknowledge the guardian angel who saved her – but she was still swaddled in the bubble wrap of her own private cell phone conversation and the climate control of her car and the slightly tinted glass and probably the stereophonic sound too – protected from intruders like me, immersed, disconnected from reality – just as the author had explained. “A disconnect between self-perception and reality.”

She did not look at me from her controlled environment.  And if she had, she might have been offended by the middle aged intruder trying to make eye contact through her tinted glass. She might have called her mother to report me.  She might have made some awful sign or mean look at me.

I don’t generally speak on cell phones when I’m driving because I’m not confident of my ability to do both without mishap – but I will never shy away from talking aloud to myself.  In those ensuing moments I recounted the young driver I once had been – always two hands grasped firmly on the wheel at 10 and 2 as I’d been taught, my neck and back muscles tense with the knowledge I could die while doing this, a foot and mind always poised to break on a dime if necessary.  I was not confident as a young person – in driving or in any other aspect of life.  The driving analogy might transfer to everything I did as a youth – sure of danger, only myself to blame, poised for sudden stops, and aware that others were probably right and I was probably wrong – always.

There’s a lot to be said for a lack of confidence at times.  I said this aloud to myself as the young blonde driver accelerated to the green light and sped beyond me into the sunset.

My own children were young and growing in self esteem in the late 80’s when Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers told them daily how special and wonderful they were.  I used to think, passing from room to room with a load of laundry or a wet mop or fresh baked snacks from the oven, I used to think, “Wow, no one ever told me that when I was young . . . how nice.” But then in later years I began to notice – and I’m not talking about my own children or their friends because I think that a moderate dose of confidence is a necessary thing and I wish I’d had it, and all that – however, I began to notice an over confidence and false importance and entitlement in some members of their generation.  I could see it regularly in the malls or neighborhood setting or my children’s schools.  They deferred to no one; their kind of confidence seemed to outshine my hard earned variety in every instance – and I began to think that the self esteem inducers had somehow over shot their mark. They had aimed the arrow at healthy self esteem, which needed to be done, but they had somehow landed it in the insular world of narcissism and self importance.

I never talked about it back then because I was afraid I was wrong or just getting old – but after reading this article and seeing the data that confirms my hunch, I’ll say what I’ve been thinking for many years – that Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers might have done well to add this caveat to their daily message:  “. . . and not only are you special and wonderful, but so is everyone else – and don’t forget it!  That’s the part they left out.

Understanding Piles

I devised the strategy of “Piles” last week as a way to inspire me to begin the annual routine of ‘clearing out clutter’ from the house which is a task I am well overdue for doing this year.  Instead of the usual plan of going from room to room to clean out drawers and shelves and closets and such, I decided to jolt myself into it by trickery.  I said, “OK, I am uninspired – so I will tiptoe into the thing by the strategy of piles.  Wherever there is a pile in any room,” I said aloud to myself as I moved from the kitchen table where I have been equally uninspired to write these past few weeks, “I will work through that pile.”  That is, I would dismantle it, shuffle through it, purge it, file it, memorize it, or trash it.  I would confront the stagnant energy that sits there on piles – unread newspaper articles, clippings of things I want to do or places I want to go, scribbled ideas to write about, books and magazines I intend to read, recipes I mean to try, warranties to be mailed, and user’s manuals to be figured out.  But it wasn’t just paper piles weighing me down, I soon found out, but piles of clothes that ought to be mended or ironed or done away with altogether – piles of stuff.

I began to understand Piles as I shuffled through its energy and smelled its mustiness, saw its ghosty offspring (dust balls) scuttle away under beds and heard their flat, stale cries.  We were not so different after all – they too had lost their fizzle, their inspiration, and their drive.  Piles are prostrate things; they have no humph; they prefer corners or shadowy hideaways, never the limelight . . . their only job is to take up space and gather dust unto themselves.  Dust is the embodiment of procrastination . . . and dust will beget more dust . . .

 It’s a wonderful thing to shuffle through old energy and make it stand upright – whether in a file cabinet or between bookends or on a wall – it becomes revitalized that way.  I want to stand upright too, I thought.  And I love tossing things into a trash can that I no longer need – like cleansing the mind of obligations and leaving open space for new ideas to come in. There were piles of recipes that had been limiting me while presiding on the kitchen table where I write – Prince William’s chocolate biscuit cake, real lemon curd, and tea cookies. “The wedding is over,” I said, and tossed them in the trash.  Some promising recipes I filed away in a drawer to be forgotten and perhaps cleaned out next year; at least they are no longer on the kitchen table where their stagnant energy becomes nagging energy every time I sit down to write – pulling at me and draining me.

 I thought the job of dismantling piles might be done in an hour or two, but it took the better part of Memorial Day weekend.  I had been inspired.  My trickery had worked – not only were the piles disrupted, but the books on shelves were sorted, the drawers purged, the closets stirred around and given light, the vitamin cabinet reorganized, the refrigerator and freezer cleaned out, and the birdbaths washed and refilled.  Clothes were thrown into category piles for either donation, or washing, or tossing.  Karen Kingston, the author of at least two feng shui books which I like so well, writes in her monthly e-newsletter, http://www.spaceclearing.com/html/blog/ that we wear only 20 percent of the clothing we keep.  An honest assessment of my own closet and drawers proves her right.

There was one persistent pile, however, that held more energy than the rest; it protested loudly each time I moved it – to the floor near the trash can, to the floor near the recyclables, to the floor near the donations – nothing seemed right.  It was my pile of mostly unread "Poetry" magazines which I had habitually stacked up since early 2009. I kept waiting for the perfect quiet evening to read them with diligence and focus, to digest them.  But that perfect evening (without tiredness) never came.  Having saved the best for last, they had soured.  So I carried them back to the room where I read, spread them out on the floor, shuffled them, stirred them, made them go out of order – and then left them that way, on the floor to breathe, for the rest of the day.  That night, Memorial Day Monday night, I cracked them open, one at a time – not reading every word, but selectively perusing them for the things I liked.  It was the third-to-the-last book I picked up (the July/August 2009 issue) that made my holiday weekend of cleaning and bustle all worthwhile – in it, a poem called, “Poet as Housewife” by Elizabeth Eybers, translated from the Afrikaans by Jacquelyn Pope:

Always a broom leaned against a wall,
meals never on time, if they come at all.

Days without dates through which she moves
empty and stubborn, slightly confused.

Ironing hung dejectedly over a chair,
gestures that come from who-knows-where.

Old letters unanswered, piled together,
papers and pills stuffed deep in a drawer.

Thankful to be part of your heart's great whole
yet devoted to the limits of her own small skull.

O orderly biped, take heed,
leave her alone -- let her read.