I remember it so clearly, the moment in which I remembered that I could think, that I was allowed to be interested in things.
When my mother got sick, I was driven back to writing because nothing else made any sense. (I refuse to write a dead mother memoir, but my goodness do I understand why people do it.) And in that moment, when my life was wildly upside down, and my tenuous strings of words were the only thing keeping my sanity together, I remembered myself. The self who had wanted to go to graduate school in the first place. The self who knew things and who cared about ideas. I re-learned how to think, when it wasn’t for a conference paper or to impress some students or to frantically demonstrate that I belonged in a graduate seminar.
There is magic in a certain kind of thinking. Something that reminds you of something, which reminds you of something else, and then you understand something that you didn’t understand before. The stars become a constellation, the constellations adhere into a galaxy. It is wildly heady stuff.
And I have lost it.
I would blame the pandemic, but it was already gone. I don’t know why, or how. There are a few posts here from 2019 that still have it, but by mid-year my notebook entries were starting to fret. And the pandemic certainly didn’t bring it back.
I can make the case that I have outgrown it. It is, after all, a legacy of academia; a fancy version of the three part enumeration. Perhaps that version of my self no longer applies; I have moved beyond connect-the-dots.
Or, perhaps I have merely outgrown the novelty of it. It was, for a long time, so remarkable as a phenomenon that I dropped everything to write down whatever I noticed, and I noticed a lot. Now I’m more likely to simply pause the TV to explain to my irritated spouse what a “Damascene conversion” is or to talk about how Arnold Bennett’s book of advice on how to live more fully included instructions to make one’s own tea. (Bennett also said that one should not waste one’s train journey on the newspaper; one should use that valuable time to consider the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I think about that a lot.)
That is, maybe I simply stopped being so impressed with myself. There was a time when your every step was applauded; now they (probably) aren’t. The standards of being change. We habituate. In that context, it is difficult to understand what has truly changed–the facts, or the observations of the facts?
I titled this post with a question I don’t know how to answer. I still write every day–I wonder, sometimes, if that sheer dedication to habit hasn’t, in part, obscured the keen edge of why I write–but that writing is mostly about the structures of life and being. It doesn’t feel like thinking, which I miss dreadfully. Maybe it is thinking, anyway. Maybe if I rediscovered the habit of writing more things down, I would realize that nothing had actually changed at all. Or maybe somehow I will synthesize something new, in a new direction, and this tiresome doldrum will turn out to have been generative.
Sometimes the difficulty of a moment is that we don’t, and can’t, have the tools to interpret it, until the moment is gone.
Jessica Thinks 