MindSpinner

Did you ever think of what you’d do with your days in a parallel universe where there is actually time?

I think I got my “next action” list down to 15 items once this week. It’s swollen again into the 20’s. Meantime, I’ve been thinking about Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own. And I’ve been thinking about Issa in Between the Acts, weaving a stream of poetry in her mind as she navigates the business of her days, while books authored by men shoulder each other for space on the shelves of the gentleman’s library.

In my own life the endless “next action” list mostly is a matter of earning a living, or something ever slightly short of one, and taking care of a family. Woolf posits that, in order to write, a woman must have money and a room of her own. I’d take it farther than that.

I once helped the father of my children shut out everything else, excepting his job, such that he could write a dissertation in a year. I haven’t his singlemindedness. I will always be taking care of everything else. Self and mind are never fully consolidated and focused. I function in my life like a garden spider (the ordinary brown sort, not one of those striking and horrific yellow and black ones) looking after her web, constructing and reconstructing it, repairing damage, anchoring a part of self to every care, near and far, and navigating endlessly across strands at once strong and frail, here, then there, ever tending.

To write, one has to take a break from web-tending. (Maybe one even has to have the assurance that someone else will do the tending for just a little while when the web is both intricate and largely unprotected.)

To write, one has to have time to collect the self, to be still and let thought come into focus. Now that school has unfurled its annual procession of hectic days, collecting thought and self seems a hopeless luxury, except perhaps for an hour or two on a weekend morning.

So when that weekend morning comes, I am compelled to imagine this parallel universe where there is time for all things - for writing, for painting, for tending my garden, for slow, friendly conversations, for adventuring, for reading. (Witness the mind shooting out in all directions of desire - some admittedly not stated - at once.)

Today, though, when I contract wishing to a single idea, I know one thing I’d shoot for (though it’s never just one thing, with me). I’d devote time to thinking and writing dangerously. I’d like, specifically, to endanger empowered stupidities; I’d like to deconstruct rhetoric that makes puppets of God and everybody and language itself. I’d like to expose that which masquerades as “good,” but only masks quite the opposite.

Problem is, I’m out of time. I’ll have to settle for popping a load of dishes into the dishwasher instead. Given the state of the kitchen, that’s its own worthy cause.