On writing: The song of my music box heart
Posted on | February 24, 2012 | 7 Comments
The snow is wet, but it’s falling. The first snow, really, of this entire season. Flakes like goose down drifting from the torn featherbed of the quiet nigh time sky, yet I’ve already seen the robins with their fat vermillion breasts, and even though it’s a leap year, February is almost spent.
I have until April. Until the twentieth, to be exact, to pull off something bright, provocative and well-researched for my thesis, and I have dozens of articles in a printed stack beside me; sheaves of evidence; proof of where my focus should be in every spare minute; in every fragment of time left at the end of the day.
And yet the only thing I want to do at the end of the day is write.
Like this.
I can feel myself, in the weeks when writing is scarce, become like a Bread and Puppet specter; a disjointed creature with long limbs and dark circles under her eyes.
Then, everything in me resists the pre-determined course I’ve vowed to take at 8pm: research, interviews, and organizing paragraphs to defend a logical conclusion. I become like a vintage music box too tightly wound: impatient, stuck, off key. It is the practice of writing; the meter of showing up; the tempo of reflection here, at the page, after twilight has been tucked into the soft dark pocket of the night, that unwinds the thin filament of my soul, and aligns the brass pins of my music box heart so that it can play again its winding calliope of song.
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7 Responses to “On writing: The song of my music box heart”
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February 25th, 2012 @ 12:46 pm
I can totally get this- the writing with the different voices. I also do academic research, have to switch between the free and the structured, the defined and the open. The research work teaches me order and precision, but the fiction writing takes me to another place, ‘unwinds the filament of my soul’- that’s very beautiful. Been reading ‘A writer’s Diary’ by Virginia Wolff- do buy it- think you’ll love it!
February 25th, 2012 @ 1:11 pm
Love this post!
February 25th, 2012 @ 1:49 pm
TOTALLY get that. I’m finishing up a diploma in digital photography (more technical than I anticipated) and all I want to do is move my pen across a page. I related to how William Blake describes himself feeling when he doesn’t draw and write: like he’s being devoured by wild hyenas. Hope it gets better.
February 25th, 2012 @ 3:42 pm
Kim, that Blake statement is fantastic. Thank you. Some days it feels just like that.
February 25th, 2012 @ 4:04 pm
I love your words. You harvest them so beautifully. I tend to want to do what I have no time to do no matter what it is. Write? Clean?!? Exercise?!? Geez. No time right now. So I have to give my self little treats, like coming here and basking in your eloquence. Good luck on that thesis thing. I remember that, even though I loved it. STRESS!
February 26th, 2012 @ 8:09 am
So many many things to do, and as always, so little time. I, for one, am thrilled that you prioritize this space so often. We are lucky lucky people
February 26th, 2012 @ 2:21 pm
I have just jumped back into writing — my own writing, pouring what is in me onto the page — in the last few months, after a 10-year absence. I have found this to be so true — if I don’t write for several days, I feel blank. If I write every day, I feel like my ideas and inspiration are moving so fast I couldn’t possibly write fast enough to get them all down. Winding up the metronome is what keeps the music playing, after all. These are beautiful words and an apt metaphor. Loved it.