Graf #8: B M E
I used to wonder what price would be tallied when I made the choice to return to school and study physics. I knew there’d be some price, there’s always a price. I am beginning to think that the writer in me is footing that bill.
I look for her in here. She used to stand so close that I rarely had to peer further than over the top of my glasses. The last few weeks I’ve had to file missing person reports. I think she's just gone. Oh, I’ll find some words here and there and tack them together to adequately describe a thing or a moment but I hear you all yawning. Hell, I’m nearly asleep writing it!
She carried the ideas, she brought them forth, and I took the credit. It was a good relationship. Now every thought is a struggle. Every sentence feels forced and trite and oh so blah blah blah. Anything that comes out even mildly okay is an accident. There’s no writer’s craft in there. Just remnants accidentally put together in a coherent turn of a phrase.
I love physics. I love writing. Even writing about physics these days brings no relief. Dull. Dreary. And yes, it is very much drollery, the process. Am I just lost in the understanding of vectors and magnitudes? Did Xcomp and Ycomp suddenly become the only language that I speak or will she move back in when I make room for her?
Maybe I’m just learning to build a bridge between my passions based on the tools that I’m being given in both. That would make for a rather lovely foundation.
I don’t know what the end result will be but I don’t see this as fatalistically as I did when I sat down to write. I am the sum of my passions. I am a writer and (eventually) a physicist. I am certain that in the final analysis each of my pieces will be made more beautiful by its knowledge of the other.
I look for her in here. She used to stand so close that I rarely had to peer further than over the top of my glasses. The last few weeks I’ve had to file missing person reports. I think she's just gone. Oh, I’ll find some words here and there and tack them together to adequately describe a thing or a moment but I hear you all yawning. Hell, I’m nearly asleep writing it!
She carried the ideas, she brought them forth, and I took the credit. It was a good relationship. Now every thought is a struggle. Every sentence feels forced and trite and oh so blah blah blah. Anything that comes out even mildly okay is an accident. There’s no writer’s craft in there. Just remnants accidentally put together in a coherent turn of a phrase.
I love physics. I love writing. Even writing about physics these days brings no relief. Dull. Dreary. And yes, it is very much drollery, the process. Am I just lost in the understanding of vectors and magnitudes? Did Xcomp and Ycomp suddenly become the only language that I speak or will she move back in when I make room for her?
Maybe I’m just learning to build a bridge between my passions based on the tools that I’m being given in both. That would make for a rather lovely foundation.
I don’t know what the end result will be but I don’t see this as fatalistically as I did when I sat down to write. I am the sum of my passions. I am a writer and (eventually) a physicist. I am certain that in the final analysis each of my pieces will be made more beautiful by its knowledge of the other.
posted by millay at 3:32 PM
1 Comments:
I can definitely say you're a straggler in the great campaign known as ENG 101, since there ain't no way this puppie is about a person, much less does it have that sharp-edged, black 'n' white, tripartite form so beloved of English teachers who find so little else in life to love and whose attainment was my fond dream for this assignment
Ah well, I guess you leave me no choice but to deal with it on its own terms.
Of course, it is about a person: the new and old you. And it does have a structure, a dynamic one working off the tension between first and third persons--the narrator loses herself very quickly, becomes 'she,' the object of a mising persons hunt, but then--as all good writers do, the narrator writes herself out of her pickle and her funk, and by the last grafs refinds the full thoated 'I' ('she' is subsumed, reswallowed by that potent 'I.')
All is new by the end, all is different, all is stronger, order and sense have been restored to another miserable soul by the power of words. The sun has set, the sun has risen to a new day: different, some things lost, others gained, and the physics-lover makes clear her final understanding that no energy is ever permanently lost.
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