why am I writing about the moon?
And meanwhile my thoughts escape me, disintegrating before I know what they were.
1.
Monday 9/12
Any sentence I write is only provisionally true. How could it be otherwise? The world is in flux, and so am I. Yesterday it rained, today the sun shines, and tonight there may be storms. I haven’t seen the moon in so long that I’ve lost track of its phases and don’t know where to look to find it. Most likely I’ll see it one morning, a pale waning gibbous looking down on us as I walk the ten-year-old to school. The ten-year-old! In his last year of elementary school! My last year of ten years walking those six blocks to that school!
Why am I writing about the moon, about the morning walks to school? Because I wanted to write about the sounds coming through the open bedroom windows, but I can’t quite identify them—the whir of the neighbors’ air conditioners, but also possibly a chorus of insects or frogs, chirping somewhere in Flatbush—and anyway the hum of the fan in my bedroom drowns out most other sounds. And meanwhile my thoughts escape me, disintegrating before I know what they were or can give them language. And so much else is happening right now that won’t make its way onto the page. The sighs of the buses on Cortelyou Road—buses full of people trying to get to work, trying to get home, but to me in my bedroom about to turn off the light, they are like ghosts passing in the night.
2.
Tuesday 9/13
I can’t fix reality in language: it is both too large and too ephemeral. But though what I write may be partial, provisional, it’s not worthless. In any given sentence, I do the best I can to say what I believe is true. And then I keep seeking the truth that’s out there—never quite captured on the page.
3.
Wednesday 9/14
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other, but with the living world.” She also writes, “I’ve noticed that once some folks attach a scientific label to a being, they stop exploring who it is.” I want to use writing to build relationships with reality, not as a stand-in for reality.
And what I mean by using writing to build relationships with reality is that after I wrote on Monday that I hadn’t seen the moon in a long time, this morning there it was: a waning gibbous hanging high in the sky just over the elementary school. I’m not saying that my writing conjured the moon, but that it helped me to see the moon, and it was just as I said it would be, but not as I imagined it: not pale but bright in a cloudless sky, and farther north than I remember ever having seen it before.
4.
Thursday 9/15
Thursday afternoons I travel from Flatbush to Queens College, taking the Q to Manhattan and then the N or W to Queens, switching at Queensboro Plaza to the 7 and taking it to the end of the line, and then getting the Q25—a limited bus if I’m lucky—and riding it down Kissena Boulevard to the entrance of the college. Last semester I would take the LIRR from Atlantic Avenue to Jamaica, and I find I like taking the 7 train better: the trip requires only one fare and no schedules, and the bus ride from Flushing is faster than the ride from Jamaica. Also, though I change trains twice, the trip by subway doesn’t interrupt my reading.
Today on my way to class I read a few chapters of Living in Data by Jer Thorp, and this quotation from Richard Powers caught my eye: “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.” Yes: when I call my writing provisional, what I mean is that I want to resist being too satisfied with any story I might tell.
5.
Sunday 9/25
I have again lost track of the moon; I suppose I might see it next tomorrow afternoon, the slightest sliver somewhere near the sun. I lost track of my writing, too. I was exhausted, and I had so many other things to write: a draft of a critical essay due last Monday and an annotated bibliography for one of my classes due last Wednesday.
I lose track again and again and find my way back again and again because actually I am never satisfied for very long. Do I write to resolve my dissatisfaction, or is my writing the source of dissatisfaction? Or am I restless because the world, too, never stops changing, and its variability is a cause both of great delight and of sorrow—the sun setting now before 7pm, and the cool nights, and tonight more rainfall.
