Movement Versus Action

Ernest Hemingway once told Marlene Dietrich, "Never confuse movement with action." (You can read the entire anecdote here. This quote has been taken out of its context before, so I feel somewhat justified in taking it out of context once more.)

I live in Japan where movement is everything and action is nothing. This is at great odds with the society in which I grew up, the US, in which action is everything and movement nothing, a society that worships efficiency, adores speed, reveres personal accomplishment, while despising wasted movement resulting in no tangible change.

Here in Japan, everything is about making the appropriate motion, but not about accomplishing anything with that motion. Efficiency is meaningless here, where workers strive to NOT finish tasks because they cannot leave the office till the boss goes home and they need something to do to fill in that time. Making sure you are in the right slot for your social position, not motionless but certainly actionless, in the right relation to things and people around you, is the key. And everything here can take FOREVER for a girl from a results-oriented society.

Even my mother-in-law stretches out every mundane task in an effort to show how devoted she is to her calling as housewife. For example, she constantly corrects how I hang the laundry. According to her, I need to (one by one) fold each wet item in half, and then in half again, and then clap the item three or more times between my hands, and then unfold the second fold, and then the first. Then I am ready to hang the item on the line. This seems meaningless to me, in my rush to get the chore done. I see no difference in the wrinkles in her clapped-upon clothing and my clapless pieces. But she has stretched the chore out to easily three times longer than it takes me, and is pleased with herself for her movements (and also justified in not having to do anything in the world outside of her home since all her rituals are so time-consuming). (I don't follow her exhortations, by the way, even when she is watching me and tut-tutting my slovenly ways.)

So I am thinking about my writing. Is it about movement or about action? And should it be about movement or about action?

I don't mean in my poems--clearly there is time in certain poems for movement and time for stillness in others, time for action and inaction sometimes, even in the same poem. I mean in my practice of writing--should it be about movement or action? I'm not sure this is even a meaningful question.

I suppose those for whom writing is a ritual--the everyday writers--it's about movement, while for the write-when-inspired writers, it's more about action. Which puts me squarely in the (philosophical) movement camp (but not in the actual movement camp, not as of late anyway). Hmmmm....perhaps my mother-in-law is on to something....perhaps I'm turning Japanese.

Is not the ritual what I love of the writing?

What's Neat on the Net: Academic Version

What's Neat on the Net.

1) This week I listened to a podcast interview of Joe Milutis (hosted by Stephen McLaughlin) at In the Field: Jacket 2. I can't pretend to have followed all the philosophical references, but I still truly enjoyed the discussion of Oulipo, Milutis's new book Failure, A Writer's Life, and many other topics. Milutis also suggested that one's practice of writing should make one happier and more connected to one's world, and that gave me something to think about. There's a very amusing musical performance by Milutis as well, to kick off the show. I recommend this interview as thought-provoking, enough so that I'll soon be getting both the book mentioned above and the author's Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, an earlier book.

2) Last year I posted a link to the Small World of Words project, an online word association project conducted by linguists and psychologists that anyone could participate in by playing an online vocabulary game and thereby generating research data.

I recently got an email from Joshua Hartshorne, post-doc fellow at MIT, who has his own collaborative project with linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists, on the meaning of verbs. They are crowd-sourcing their data as well, so if you would like to play some of their games and add to their data set, you can at GamesWithWords: VerbCorner.  And here is an announcement of the project, in case you want to know more. But be forewarned: I went over there to have a look and spent over an hour (which I don't have as the semester ends in a week) playing verb games.

Hartshorne also has a second language acquisition project at GamesWithWords: TheVocabQuiz. This is a vocabulary game, and I lost some time messing around with it too. But it's all for a good cause: research. (Now, if I could only convince my bosses and professors of that!)

Enjoy.

The Periodic Table in Song

My new manuscript, which I began sending around last November, is called Mendeleev's Mandala. Mendeleev is the guy who discovered (or created, depending on your POV) the periodic table of elements.

So I have a thing for the periodic table (of course I do, what a list: every known thing!). Anyway, I just discovered this video from AsapScience (via Maria Popova's Explore website).

 

Enjoy!

 

 

(And here's the title poem from my manuscript (scroll down) at Thrush Poetry Journal.)

International Funeral Customs

I was very close to my grandfather, and when he died, my mother phoned me up to ask me to be a pallbearer. When I got off the phone, I told my husband about my mother's request, but he wasn't sure what I was talking about, being Japanese and having grown up in a society in which cremation was the norm. So I explained to him that I would be helping carry my grandfather's casket, and that this was a way that I could honor him and his life. I launched into a discussion on what it meant to be a pallbearer and what the duties were and so on and so forth.

"Will you be wearing a special costume?" asked my husband.

While I thought his choice of words was odd, I was used to his non-native-English-speaker slip-ups and assumed he meant a special outfit. I told him that I would wear what I normally wear to funerals, a conservative outfit.

"Well, you'll at least be wearing white, right?" he persisted. No, I said, I would be wearing something dark, although not necessarily black since people aren't so strict about black in the West these days. I then launched into a mini-lecture on how this differed from Japan, where a certain dye lot of black is the only acceptable color for funerals--not just any old black, but a very specific light-annihilating black with its own special name that you must ask for when buying a funeral suit. So I explained that in the West we no longer wore only black, but usually favored somber colors, though not always, and that I'd even seen my second cousin wear a summery floral print to her grandmother's funeral. On and on I went.

When I finished, my husband again asked, "You're not going to wear white?" He was fixated on this point.

I assured him that no, I was not wearing white.

He was still clearly perplexed, and I thought to myself, Well, our customs are really different; I guess it's going to take him awhile to get used to the idea of a Western funeral.

My husband thought things over for another minute, and then said , "Okay, I give up. Why is it called being a polar bear?"

Happy [M]other's Day

Last year I posted some of my favorite poems about mothers,

but this year I'd like to post a poem about a mother/son relationship. I've got two sons, and my 12-year-old (older) son has suddenly become a teenager. I told him in the past few weeks to stand up straight, and when he did, it turns out he is now taller than me. He's started junior high (in April, due to Japanese school year calendars) and really come into his own. So I want to share this poem by Sharon Olds, which was featured here on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry blog.

My Son the Man    by Sharon Olds

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,

the way Houdini would expand his body

while people were putting him in chains. It seems

no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,

guide his calves into the gold interior,

zip him up and toss him up and

catch his weight. I cannot imagine him

no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,

get over my fear of men now my son

is going to be one. This was not

what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a

sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,

snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,

and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me

the way Houdini studied a box

to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

 

 

The otherness of mothering sons has been on mind for a few years, as has another otherness that situates itself between me and my sons, as it does between the sons of the poets Erika Meitner and Joy Katz and their mothers, as discussed this week on the Poetry Foundation's podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, and that is when the racial composition of mother and son (or child) are different.

While my sons and I talk easily about the difference between me as a woman and them as burgeoning men, talking about our races is more complicated. I ask them all the time if my whiteness is an issue for them, and they insist it is not, but I cannot ever know if this is the truth or if this is what they tell me because they love me. I tell them that it would be perfectly normal for them to be uncomfortable with my race at certain transitional times in their lives, but they insist that they are not. And I don't entirely believe them.

At the elementary school, their white mother was a constant fixture from the start, and while we had to do a little bit of educating of classmates, it all became old hat for everyone quite quickly. And our elementary school has children with family members from 72 different countries, so we are by no means unique (which is why we moved into this school district).

However, at the junior high, which my son has only been attending for six weeks, we have yet to see another Caucasian parent (what I mean to say is that there are reportedly other Asian parents who blend in with the crowd, but as far as parents who stand out as racially different, so far there's me....). At the entrance ceremony, you can bet every eye was on me as parents reunited with their kids afterwards; everybody was dying to know which boy had the white mother. I asked my son if it bothered him and he said no. But when I ask if, despite having to take beginner's English with his entire class, he has mentioned the fact that he's already fluent in English, he says no. When a brand new friend of his (from another grade, as yet unaware of the Caucasian mother) told him that he had published a book, my son did not mention that he has a mother who has published two books in English. He doesn't mention his family in America. Is this about race? Is this about 12-year-old boys not talking about their mothers and family members to peers in general? I can't know. I don't know if I will ever know.

On the other hand, last year I colored my red hair back to its natural brown, thinking to make life easier on me (timewise) and on them (culturally), but my sons vetoed the move and wanted it back red. Because my overall coloring and its ostentatious difference from the norm doesn't matter to them? Or because they've only known me with red hair and blue eyes and are comfortable with it? Or because they don't really care and were trying to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear?

When my twelve-year-old son was in the first grade, his teacher asked me to identify which of the 35 fish pictures hanging on the wall was my son's. I scanned them as quickly as I could, but as they were all modelled on the same storybook fish, I was having a hard time finding any that stood out as my son's. "It's that one," the teacher beamed at me,"the only one with blue eyes. Your son said he made the eyes blue because his mother has blue eyes." And both she and I wept as we contemplated the wall of black-eyed fish and solitary blue-eyed one.

I am definitely these days feeling the otherness of motherhood. Of mothering sons. Of mothering (almost) teenagers. Of mother biracial bicultural children in an environment which favors the race and culture I am not part of.

Here's a poem from my book The Insomniac's Weather Report. This poem is about the otherness of mothering sons; I wrote it some years ago when it was the biggest other in my mind. But these days my [m]otherness seems even more vast.


What You Dampen If You Use Water as a Boomerang

Between mother and son
the body as fact comes
sooner than between
mother and daughter.

I had not counted on this:
the polygon of bearing
sons, I did not know you
would hold it against me,

the body, for its lack
of edges, its fluidity.
I did not know you
could not move beyond a thing

without calling it [m]other. The sea
is not a boomerang, returning
unchanged--who boldly inked this
edge of continent on map? As if

blue roofs of ocean
shift and slap in maneuvers--
familiar and chaotic--the body
and its households recognize.