Waiting for reluctant thoughts
I’ve got a bunch of half-drafted posts and further topics to write about, but I think I’m going to go easy on the posting for the next little while. I need some time to quiet down and think. Among other things, I’ve just joined an unofficial poetry workshop comprised of MFA students, former MFA students, and the occasional oddball non-MFA like myself, and it’s making me want to spend more time working on poems. Also, I’ve been feeling kind of lousy recently about assorted aspects of Real Life, and I suspect that I’m not doing myself a big favor by brooding over the current state of academia. It’s time to think about something else.
A few days ago, I was reading the title essay in Nicholson Baker’s The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber and this paragraph caught my eye:
All large thoughts are reluctant. I don’t think this is intentional on their part. It follows from the unhasty, liquid pace of human thinking. As an experiment, overturn half a glass of wine onto a newly starched tablecloth. Watch, wholly absorbed, as the borders of the stain search their way outward, plumping up each parched capillary of cotton, threadlet by threadlet, and then traveling on — a soundless, happy explosion, with no moving parts. Thought moves at the velocity of that stain. And since a large thought seems to wish to pierce and acknowledge and even to replenish many more shoots and plumules of one’s experience, some shrunken from long neglect…, its hum of fineness will necessarily be delayed, baffled, and drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities — one pauses, looks up from the page, waits; the eyes move in meditative polygons in their orbits; and then, somehow, more of the thought is released into the soul, the corroborating peal of some new, distant bell. (The Size of Thoughts, 12-13)
So I’m going to spend some time waiting for the slow spread of whatever thoughts are brewing. I’ll be back before long.
nick baker rocks.
briefly mentioned
http://members.aol.com/vlorbik/tenpage/tenbooks.html
in this book list from my zine.
long live household opera.
Thanks, vlorbik! I only recently stumbled across The Size of Thoughts, but I think I’ll add The Mezzanine to my to-read list. Baker also had an essay that I really liked, on commonplace-books, in Harper’s a couple of years ago. I can’t remember exactly when, though.