Fearing Silence is the Voice of God

Yesterday, I was depressed. Not the "I can't bring myself to do anything but lie here and suck" depressed, not quite. Just the "Trying not to burst into tears or run away for no good reason in the middle of church, because then i'd be humiliated too, and besides they'd think I was being a deliberate drama queen" depressed. The kind of depressed where all the hopeful themes go sour and ironic between the bright pastor's speech and my ears, between the hymnal and my voice. The theme was how God is with us, but sometimes it's hard to hear his voice. That in the dark times, we have to listen even so.

Exactly. I was in exactly that state, and I knew it even before the damn sermon and the bloody songs and being told as much didn't seem to be what I needed. Solitude and silence would have done better than the counter-productive explosions of song and the words of someone else's soul.

So I told a few of the other choir members I wouldn't go to the party that night. Colin said this sounded like exactly what I needed (A self-sacrificing suggestion, since he was feeling miserable in the "I've got a cold and no energy" way). I said, no it wasn't.

This was speaking from knowledge. I'd been here before. I knew the cure.

What I needed was to get something useful done. I felt, not entirely wrongly, as if I'd spent the entire week accomplishing nothing but eating, voiding, and sitting at my desk at work being soul-deadened by the absence of any point to my presence. The house was a mess, the writing had not progressed, and the clay I had set in its bowl with water to reconstitute had been ignored since. Partying would feel like shunning the problem, avoiding accomplishing things, and would make me feel worse.

And I'd just mentioned on a friend's journal how low my artistic output had been for the year -- which had been on my mind well before she mentioned being in the same state (if the entries on my friends-list are anything to go by, this is a bad month for writers to get writing done, and a good month to mope about it), but somehow, saying it baldly, even in what was meant to be encouragement that "I know where you are now." even accompanied by the raw truth, sometimes consolotory, and definitely as true for me as for her, that "This too shall pass" -- somehow it tipped the balance and sent me sliding down to the state where being told God was speaking to me still, wasn't consolation, but sneer. "It's your own fault. He's trying. The fault is all in you." (I know, I know in better moments that's not what it's about. Certainly Jordan would grieve to know her message was being received that way, when something else entirely was meant.)

So I tried the things I could try, since the forcible lifting of my spirits into the presence of the divine, or even the less awesome presence of my Muse, was beyond me. I treated the symptoms. I cleaned the kitchen while lunch was cooking, and swept it afterwards. I sat at the computer, forcing occasional scraps of real work, some editing, some raw text, out, between bouts of trying to avoid the project with other "But this really needs to be dealt with" stuff (IE, the social and the wedding). I'd been reading scraps of the much-dreaded Atlanta Nights through the week, on the incorrect theory that it's supposed to make you feel better about your own writing. It didn't help, though, when I closed the last chapter of Travis Tea's abomination and immediately ran into a line I'd written that felt like it had come straight out of that damn book. Yes, that bad. Most of my prose is passable, but throwing a new doubt in my ability in the middle of an already weighty depression really didn't help.

Of course, the fact that the best album to put on repeat to force words out seemed to be Emmylou Harris's Red Dirt Girl. Particularly the first two tracks of it. Heh. The themes of the song and the scene, and the overall story, a little too close to home. Yes, you have to be in there, feeling what the characters feel - but in ways that makes the ability to put the emotion into words that cut like diamond. Not in ways where you feel as if you can't tell a decent phrasing from an Atlanta Nights blunder.

But I got out of that scene I was in, and through the loose edit of the next, and into the differently dark turns of the mind-walk, by six hours later when I let myself abandon the computer for the purpose of making myself a supper.

In spite of spending part of that time looking for images that would make for more good userpics, because sobbing into my keyboard seemed less productive even than giving my mind a moment to distance itself.

And while sitting before the tv for the rest of the night, I squished my hands through my bowl of reconstituted clay to mix the solid with the slip. It was over-watered, so it felt exceedingly like sludge through and through, but I did manage to produce one lump which, worked separately, started to feel only a fraction too soft to properly model, and got it into an appropriate hollow shape.

All in all, I might have achieved 200 words of fresh text, and a piece of clay that could later on be moddeled into something substantial.

Enough, though, to bring me a bit out of it. And I did the tone and stretch and arm weights part of the exercise routine (another thing not being pushed as hard as it should, where even a tiny bit of progress felt like a step up), before going to bed at a decent hour.

Today I felt pretty good. Except that I'm getting Colin's cold. (Sigh.) Mostly I'm feeling literally light-headed. My head feels as if it's several pounds lighter than usual, and the standard ways of moving it feel off, as if I accidentally picked up someone else's habitual gestures by mistake. No vertigo yet, though this feels like the last cold did a few hours before the vertigo took over.

Fearing Silence is the Voice of God

Yesterday, I was depressed. Not the "I can't bring myself to do anything but lie here and suck" depressed, not quite. Just the "Trying not to burst into tears or run away for no good reason in the middle of church, because then i'd be humiliated too, and besides they'd think I was being a deliberate drama queen" depressed. The kind of depressed where all the hopeful themes go sour and ironic between the bright pastor's speech and my ears, between the hymnal and my voice. The theme was how God is with us, but sometimes it's hard to hear his voice. That in the dark times, we have to listen even so.

Exactly. I was in exactly that state, and I knew it even before the damn sermon and the bloody songs and being told as much didn't seem to be what I needed. Solitude and silence would have done better than the counter-productive explosions of song and the words of someone else's soul.

So I told a few of the other choir members I wouldn't go to the party that night. Colin said this sounded like exactly what I needed (A self-sacrificing suggestion, since he was feeling miserable in the "I've got a cold and no energy" way). I said, no it wasn't.

This was speaking from knowledge. I'd been here before. I knew the cure.

What I needed was to get something useful done. I felt, not entirely wrongly, as if I'd spent the entire week accomplishing nothing but eating, voiding, and sitting at my desk at work being soul-deadened by the absence of any point to my presence. The house was a mess, the writing had not progressed, and the clay I had set in its bowl with water to reconstitute had been ignored since. Partying would feel like shunning the problem, avoiding accomplishing things, and would make me feel worse.

And I'd just mentioned on a friend's journal how low my artistic output had been for the year -- which had been on my mind well before she mentioned being in the same state (if the entries on my friends-list are anything to go by, this is a bad month for writers to get writing done, and a good month to mope about it), but somehow, saying it baldly, even in what was meant to be encouragement that "I know where you are now." even accompanied by the raw truth, sometimes consolotory, and definitely as true for me as for her, that "This too shall pass" -- somehow it tipped the balance and sent me sliding down to the state where being told God was speaking to me still, wasn't consolation, but sneer. "It's your own fault. He's trying. The fault is all in you." (I know, I know in better moments that's not what it's about. Certainly Jordan would grieve to know her message was being received that way, when something else entirely was meant.)

So I tried the things I could try, since the forcible lifting of my spirits into the presence of the divine, or even the less awesome presence of my Muse, was beyond me. I treated the symptoms. I cleaned the kitchen while lunch was cooking, and swept it afterwards. I sat at the computer, forcing occasional scraps of real work, some editing, some raw text, out, between bouts of trying to avoid the project with other "But this really needs to be dealt with" stuff (IE, the social and the wedding). I'd been reading scraps of the much-dreaded Atlanta Nights through the week, on the incorrect theory that it's supposed to make you feel better about your own writing. It didn't help, though, when I closed the last chapter of Travis Tea's abomination and immediately ran into a line I'd written that felt like it had come straight out of that damn book. Yes, that bad. Most of my prose is passable, but throwing a new doubt in my ability in the middle of an already weighty depression really didn't help.

Of course, the fact that the best album to put on repeat to force words out seemed to be Emmylou Harris's Red Dirt Girl. Particularly the first two tracks of it. Heh. The themes of the song and the scene, and the overall story, a little too close to home. Yes, you have to be in there, feeling what the characters feel - but in ways that makes the ability to put the emotion into words that cut like diamond. Not in ways where you feel as if you can't tell a decent phrasing from an Atlanta Nights blunder.

But I got out of that scene I was in, and through the loose edit of the next, and into the differently dark turns of the mind-walk, by six hours later when I let myself abandon the computer for the purpose of making myself a supper.

In spite of spending part of that time looking for images that would make for more good userpics, because sobbing into my keyboard seemed less productive even than giving my mind a moment to distance itself.

And while sitting before the tv for the rest of the night, I squished my hands through my bowl of reconstituted clay to mix the solid with the slip. It was over-watered, so it felt exceedingly like sludge through and through, but I did manage to produce one lump which, worked separately, started to feel only a fraction too soft to properly model, and got it into an appropriate hollow shape.

All in all, I might have achieved 200 words of fresh text, and a piece of clay that could later on be moddeled into something substantial.

Enough, though, to bring me a bit out of it. And I did the tone and stretch and arm weights part of the exercise routine (another thing not being pushed as hard as it should, where even a tiny bit of progress felt like a step up), before going to bed at a decent hour.

Today I felt pretty good. Except that I'm getting Colin's cold. (Sigh.) Mostly I'm feeling literally light-headed. My head feels as if it's several pounds lighter than usual, and the standard ways of moving it feel off, as if I accidentally picked up someone else's habitual gestures by mistake. No vertigo yet, though this feels like the last cold did a few hours before the vertigo took over.