As I mentioned earlier, this blog isn’t particularly intimate. Yet it has symbolic representations of far too many intimate moments scattered here and there, but cloaked in puzzles, riddles and clichés of all sorts to an extent that an outside, uninvolved reader won’t really know what it is that I was writing about when I was writing it.
The habit, or rather, the act of concealing the true emotion, the true source of frustration by something like “Jesus is the fat lady,” “Just leave…” or “A woman alone in a downtown apartment” is perhaps a pathological phenomenon of hiding true emotions, of the fear of speaking one’s own mind to others, especially to those who are close. Pathological because I believe it to be one of the biggest pre-requisites of all my issues and of course, the damn eating disorder.
For example: I spent a great deal of time today rereading the entries of Life In Slow Motion – an alternate blog that I had dedicated to the early stages of a relationship that at the time was full of all kinds of uncertainties and ambivalence. This particular post especially spoke to me. It is nothing but culmination of the great deal of frustration that I was feeling at that time. But instead of coming clean and asking straight out “Where is this relationship going? What is going to happen to us?” I simply sat down and wrote “A lukewarm, ambivalent, equivocal relationship, with no definitions, too many unspoken words, etc.” Instead of asking from that person for definitions and certainty, I simply named the relationship as “polite, familiar, comforting…”As if by writing it that way, by “pinning it down” and “naming” it, I would somehow come to terms with the fact that the relationship was lacking in certain aspects that were important to me. For I couldn’t just straight come out and ask that kind of question, could I? I could not be that girl, could I? I couldn’t possibly put myself in that kind of vulnerable situation, etc… And this is just one of the many examples.
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Sometime in 2007 this blog shifted gears and became a lighter, more upbeat affair. Partly because I was happier, partly because at the point it was more important to me to make lists of things that were making me happy than write about things that were bothering me. I was reading the Encyclopedia of Everyday Life – perhaps a shallow, somewhat superficial book to many, but at that point of my life I saw some great existential meaning in that – in everydayness (to an extent I still do – I think that’s what I owe my sanity to). So in that light, at that particular point I would rather write about strawberries than the size of my ass. The former was much less problematic, of course. So the loaded, emotionally charged yet carefully cloaked entries disappeared. Perhaps a sign of a healthier mind…
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There are several reasons why my writing lacks the kind of intimacy that Ptitsa speaks about. First of all, there’s culture. Where I am from there are things that people don’t ever talk about – a kind of Twin Peaks of sorts, actually. Sex, sexuality, one’s questioning of it, all those issues that come with it – these things are a taboo, of course. Then there are other things: Petty gossip aside, women don’t really express the kind of feelings that real women feel – they retreat to their kitchens and start washing the dishes, in silence. One doesn’t talk about one’s own flaws – personal fears and insecurities are usually hidden behind the harsh criticism of everybody else’s flaws, or else compensated by other materialistic means. For example, it’s rare to hear someone say “I was a loving, caring, understanding parent… ” or “I may have done something wrong as a parent…” Instead: “I saw my kids through school, I bought them a car, a house, jewelry, etc…” And even though both me and my family have always felt alien to this culture, some of it, or at least the habit of keeping my mouth shut for the fear of breaking those unspoken taboos, sticking out like a sore thumb, attracting unnecessary attention to myself – I cannot say that these sort of things haven’t affected me at all.
Second, there’s upbringing. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s the fact that my family belonged to the Soviet intelligentsia or there was some other sense of “elitism” surrounding me since early childhood, but somehow this has been engraved in my head that unless what I did or thought had some aesthetic value or some higher meaning, it wasn’t worth talking about at all. At school we were taught to write beautifully constructed, lofty sentences. We spoke about “ideas” – everyday existence, everyday thoughts and experiences were trivial. Even my music teacher would often interrupt her class to let me know that I was playing the piano like a бaзаpнaя бaбa (a woman trading in a marketplace- the lowest derogatory comment one could ever expect to receive from intelligentsia). There was hardly any meaning, let alone aesthetic value in my everyday Soviet/post Soviet experiences (or so I thought). The greatest part of my life I considered my thoughts, my deepest intimate fears, etc. trivial. Hell, at moments of utmost despair I would read physics and cosmology just to make myself feel trivial – a therapeutic means of distracting myself from what was bothering me. For what was bothering me, I thought, was something that only бaзаpнaя бaбa would allow herself to express openly, without giving it some aesthetic and refined form –airbrushing it, in short.
So I guess my writing is airbrushed. Because instead of writing “I hate getting my period – I hate it, hate it, hate it!” I would write this. And instead of writing “I ate a pint of ice-cream” I would say “I feel like a bottomless pit…”. Instead of saying “My pants don’t fit anymore – I’ve gotten fat” I would write “I feel heavy and shapeless. I feel like my body is failing me…” I would rather die than say “I’m fat.” Hell, even now I rather write ”I had an affair” than “I’m fat,” even if there are a whole lot of people who would frown at me in moral disagreement for the former statement and a whole lot more people who would relate to the latter. But I’d rather write about the former, because the former usually has a reason or a meaning behind it, whereas the latter is just that – an exasperation of a бaзаpнaя бaбa. Actually, when I read those kind of expressions elsewhere – be it on someone else’s blog or a book, for that matter, I don’t think of it as бaзаpнaя бaбa at all. I admire it, actually, because I know that whoever wrote it had mastered up the courage, the audacity of saying it as is – something that I don’t often allow myself to do.
And lastly – “Literature is analysis after the event…” Even though I never thought of my writing as literature, I always treated it as such. Both in terms of form and content. The form had to be aesthetically pleasing, of course. And content – it had to be in retrospect – sifted and filtered through first. Small details tend to disappear in retrospect. When looking back, one tries to describe the bigger picture. Everyday details, the ordinary fears get swallowed by a sweeping “… but I was unhappy then…” because in retrospect writing “I was unhappy” seems much more accurate, or rather, appropriate then “I hated myself, I hated my marriage, I never felt good enough, strong enough, pretty enough, etc…” Because in retrospect I can see that it wasn’t the fact that I didn’t feel good enough, smart enough or pretty enough that ended my marriage. It was something much bigger, much more fundamental than that. Writing that I was unhappy would simply put an end to those other, trivial details.
Then there is the whole issue of fiction – or writing about one’s own experiences as if one were writing a work of fiction. Consider an entry from way back (1999 I guess?). “I went to see Dina. She is a wreck. I think the source of her problem is... Etc.”. The whole entry then turns into some kind of a story about her. A short story. The actual event behind the entry is: I went to see a friend. We had an unpleasant talk that ended up in an argument. I found it very disturbing. Yet I chose to omit the details of the argument and my own discomfort and instead wrote about what I thought the source of her problems were in form of a story.
There really is that moment in the process of writing, at least for me, when, as Ms. Lessing says, I cease being me. In order to write about something, anything, I have to first separate myself from what it is that I’m writing about – I don’t know how to do it in any other way. In the process something personal and intimate is lost. I end up with the story that doesn’t directly communicate its main idea, but you can feel the undertones. My whole idea of writing – that is, if I were a writer, is to create those undertones.
All I care are these undertones – my reader can do with them whatever she pleases.
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My writing does lack intimacy. I tried to explain the possible reasons for it – I am not sure how successfully. Maybe I didn’t address the key issue at all and instead gave something that was not asked from me or worse - hid myself even more. But this is the only way I know how to write and all I can ask my readers is to fill in the blanks that I leave out, intentionally or not. I am human, just like everyone else. My feelings, worries, my experiences, my flaws and shortcomings – they are all common – something we all share. Some do a better job at directly expressing them, others, like me, choose to speak of them covertly or bottle them up entirely. Both are altogether human. Thank you for filling the blanks for me.
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