For quite some time, I have wanted to start blogging again. However, I did not know what form I wanted my blog to take. Years ago, when I'd first heard of blogging, I did what I always do. I was "fixin'" to start a blog, but kept putting it off. Other things to do, pressing life concerns, work, relationship, singing, traveling, money, living, yada yada, you know how it goes. But as John Walton said to John-Boy on an old episode of The Waltons that I watched last night, "Well, son, plannin' ain't DOIN'."
That's why I love that American idiom, used especially in the South, "I'm fixin' to" do something. It's such a wonderfully descriptive phrase. It's a very particular verb phrase to describe a very vague action. If you are "fixin' to" do something, then you are in the hazy, most foggiest beginnings of a project. You may not even know what you want to do. You are "fixin' to" means you are thinking about maybe starting on some project, that is not particularly pressing and that you are still pondering, and you are quite content to hang around in the "mulling-over" phase for awhile.
I guess it is the equivalent of the Spanish verb vacilar that John Steinbeck writes about with such admiration in Travels With Charley In Search of America. As Steinbeck explains so fondly, vacilar and its transitive, vacilando, do not translate into English as "vascillate". Rather, vacilar is a verb used to describe an action that is very particular and very vague at the same time. It is traveling about, in a seemingly random way, but still having a purpose to your travels. He gives the example of going to a part of Mexico City, and then deciding with a friend that you must find a particular item in that neighborhood...an item which you most assuredly will not find in that part of Mexico City.
I love that concept. How many wonderful afternoons have I enjoyed after engaging in a vacilando? (...if that would be the way to work that Spanish transitive verb into my sentence.) Those days when, on a whim, usually after a meeting or appointment, I have some time to kill before I really need to get home or do anything else productive, and I have no other pressing engagements...at least, not ones I'd like to actually engage in. Yes, I could go right home and do a load of laundry or clean the birdcage. However, my acupuncturist told me that there's a pharmacy in Belvedere Square that carries Calendula flower ointment! Why don't I mosey on over there? But in the meantime, I think I'll stop at the Pikesville Barnes and Noble for a quick cuppa tea. No, what am I thinking? I'll get some tea and a little nosh at Atwater's in the Market at Belvedere Square. And I decide, on the way, that I want to stop off at a few shops along York Road - shops I'd never noticed before or have been there for a very long time and I used to frequent them, but haven't been inside them in a very long time. So I meander through the streets and shops, looking for nothing in particular, wanting only that cuppa tea promised at the end of my ramble on a beautiful spring afternoon.
That is the very purpose of this blog.
I realize, of course, that I digressed, as usual (those of you who know me are not surprised). And I never finished my story I started above, about how I first learned about blogs, and "piddled around" as my mother always accused my father and me, and when I finally did decide on blog content and title, I found that The Anarchivist had already been taken! And was a fine little blog on the archival profession, indeed. Dang!
So I've had a few blog since then, the most prolific one dedicated to my haiku. I will find that blog, and perhaps my "Signs on Trucks" blog and link them from this blog.
But I never did start the blog I wanted to start. The one I couldn't figure out in terms of content and scope and subject matter and title. Every blog needs a "hook" is what successful bloggers have told me. And I seemed to lack any creativity in the area of coming up with a "hook" for my blog.
So I'm reading Travels With Charley, and I like the way Steinbeck meanders through topics of his interest (and the readers') just as he meanders along rural and small-town American roads in his trusty Rocinante. And I'm unable to sleep tonight, going over in my mind all the beautiful prose I've been reading in Steinbeck's book (I'd forgotten how much I love his writing style!).
And my mind turns to an idea. I want to journal about some of what I'm reading in Travels With Charley. After all, I missed the book club's discussion of it this evening at the Towson Library! Oops! Too busy with finding a place to live and a job so I can eke out more of a living...that whole "life-getting-in-the-way of art" thing that seems to be a recurring theme. That's why, I suppose, all the "great" writers said that they set aside a certain time of day and simply WROTE. For as long as the time allotted them. Or rather, that they'd allotted to themselves, if they were/are so fortunate.
So again, as I did with my haiku blog, I resolve to write for a certain amount of time each day. Perhaps, even better, to write at the same time every day, for a specified amount of time. This is what all the great writers have done. I've read thousands of interviews with them and books on writing, and they all say the same thing. Ray Bradbury said that he wrote for 2 hours first thing in the morning. Then, he knew, he would not get sidetracked by life and then end up having a day in which he'd written no words at all. Kind of the way I always vote when the polls open, lest I get hit by a bus, and my vote doesn't get counted! I know Isaac Asimov and Isabel Allende both said they wrote/write at the same time each day, although I have forgotten what time of day they said was best for them. I believe, if memory serves, Allende wrote in the early afternoon, after she'd eaten breakfast, done some household chores, perhaps taken care of her family. Then the afternoon was hers.
I hope to GOD that my "usual time of day" for writing will not continue to be the hours between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m. I know I'm not alone, being a writer who also suffers from insomnia. But that doesn't mean I need to necessarily write in the middle of the night. Although, I remember that, in my teens and early twenties (in high school and undergrad), I wrote all my school papers, poems, short stories, and the like, in the middle of the night. I very rarely wrote during the day.
However, during grad school, I was older and needed my sleep, and more importantly, I was medicated (finally! Thank God!). So I wrote my papers during the day, when I was going to school full-time, because I was teaching assistant for morning classes, took some morning classes of my own, and then took evening classes as well. And I only had one car, which I shared with my then-husband. So I was stuck on campus all day. I had plenty of time to read my assignments and write my papers in the afternoons, before I needed to turn them in at night classes or the next day (or next week, as the case may be) at morning classes.
Then I finished my coursework, and started working full-time at the Archives, and I'd finished my thesis research and it was time to start writing (couldn't put that off forever! There are time limits, you know! 5 years from the date of your enrollment as a grad student to complete your thesis and graduate...or, in my case, 6 years, with a one-year extension). So I really needed to have a set schedule for writing. My adviser recommended a very good book to me, The Clockwork Muse. That book really helped me finish my thesis! I took the advice in that book to heart, and got a big pad of paper used to chart project management, and I wrote out my writing schedule: 2 hours Monday through Thursday, from the time I got home from work until it was time to eat dinner. (Thank God I had a husband who not only was a good cook, but loved to cook as well!) I even wrote down the topic for the 2 pages I required myself to write in those 2 hours each day. That way, I would never have writer's block!
I don't know...in fact, I doubt very highly that I will assign myself a topic for this blog, for each day. However, I am assigning myself a certain amount of time and a time of day (to be determined later) to set words to, er, I was going to say "paper", but that's not quite right! To set words to the ethernet, as it were.
Finally, a quick word about the name of this blog: "Die Gedanken Sind Frei" is the name of a German folk song written and sung while the Nazi Party was in power. It means, "Thoughts are Free." I just realized I capitalized "Free". Which is a Good Thing, I think. "Free" should be a capitalized word. I just capitalized it because I was translating from German, a language in which ALL nouns are capitalized. So it was force of habit.
Anyway, I was lying awake in bed, thinking about what I'd read in Steinbeck today. And at the same time I was singing songs under my breath, because I still can't avoid multi-tasking, even though my brain is not nearly so good at it as it once was (and for good reason, and also good riddance! to multi-tasking, which is very taxing, to almost make a pun, on the brain!). After singing some Sacred Harp songs ("Plenary" and "To Die No More"), out of nowhere "Die Gedanken Sind Frei" popped into my head and I started singing it, quietly under my breath so as not to wake poor John.
I suddenly realized that I'd stumbled upon the name and the purpose and the content of my blog! "Thoughts are free", of course, in the sense the song conveys: we have freedom of thought, even when governments try to take away our freedom of expression. But this blog will also demonstrate another meaning to the phrase "thoughts are free": that thoughts meander from here to there, hardly ever in a straight line, going from one topic to some altogether different topic, and yet somehow related...and even if not, so what? It is the way our mind works. Not to compare myself by any stretch of the imagination, but I believe that is what James Joyce and Marcel Proust were going for in their works. John Lennon and Jack Kerouac too, in their "stream-of-consciousness" writings.
And so begins "Die Gedanken Sind Frei", my small contribution to the freedom of our thinking (as the German anti-Nazi song says, "my thoughts give me power") and also to the manner in which our thoughts "freely flower", as the German folk song says.
