Struggling to Stay Awake in the Haze
Maybe every writer hits a point in a project where everything feels useless, your efforts stale and stupid. Where any energy you have, period, falls away and leaves brain and heart, soul and limbs feeling suffused with viscous lead. That’s where I’m at right now, where I’ve been for the last few days. Torpor, lassitude, call it what you will: I haven’t managed to maintain interest in or pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes at a time, in spite of my constant background hunger to read all the books and write some of my own.
Part of the pervasive sluggishness surely has to do with some misplaced discouragement about a manuscript—or rather, lack of communication about where it is in the editorial queue. When am I supposed to hear anything about next steps; what should I be doing until then; has the editor really been trying to get in touch with me all along, and all the messages getting veered off into the ether, out of reach even of my spam filter? It’s all useless paranoia, I know; and I realize the good folks over at the publisher are busy. Trying not to be That Person, though, is taking up an idiotic amount of energy.
But I’ll chalk up most of this slump to the weather. I hate the heat, the heavy wet air that comes along with it in this part of the world, where the mere act of stepping outside feels like trudging through a vaguely malevolent blob. Seasonal affective disorder comes for me in the summer, and the vitamin D deficiency that plagues normal human beings in winter is mine to deal with during the hot portions of the year.
Add noxious wildfire smoke to it all, and being stuck indoors adds even more imagined ballast to this mad stasis. I’ve never seen or experienced the somatic punch of skies this bad, and that’s including my few years in the greater LA area. In air whose quality the other day was more than 100 points over the threshold of “hazardous”—the government’s worst, dark-purple classification—it’s no surprise I dipped past feeling down into being outright ill; the masked-up minute or so I took to take out the garbage left me with eyes that stung for the next four (!) hours.
So sure: weather. But a new, now regularly expected weather of catastrophe, the cause of which—us—adds an extra weight of depression and dismay, of futility, to the whole sordid scene. Because we’re not going to stop driving or flying or plunking down data centers, and the monarch I saw the other day on the milkweed can’t really be taken as any sign of hope in the face of that onslaught.
But of course, keep trying to write your books and blog posts!
All the same—why not? What else are we supposed to do with our lives, other than tread as lightly as possible? Sitting still in an effort to do no harm won’t really do any good; making the gesture of removing myself from this earth, as did Plant Patty in Richard Powers’s The Overstory, won’t change anyone’s mind about the terrible ways we inhabit our planet.
Weirdly enough, what’s sparked me is what feels like an unearthing of one person’s mostly forgotten work. Thanks to my friend Dirk’s musings, I’ve gone in search of the East German writer Margarete Neumann. Other than some podcast episodes devoted to her and a brief archived 1960s TV interview, though, I’ve only found one university library in the area with any of her books, and those tucked away in some repository that will have to be opened up if I can find someone with the credentials to get in. I can have a few things of hers shipped from Germany, but the cost of doing so is pretty unappealing. And still: the discovery has pulled me into an upright position and sent me musing about the ways in which the spirits of a lucky few manage to be rescued every now and then from total oblivion.
Maybe something like this literary detective work is what will fuel me for a while: the attempt to hold up something good as the smoke and fire go indiscriminately after all our harms and contributions alike.