Poor Performance

Say Love Blog: Poor Performance

“On flights from the west coast to the east, pilots spend about 90 percent of their time off course. The rest of their time is spent making small corrections.” Luis Garza, Dance Teacher

Sometime ago, I resigned myself to the fact that I had never gained a vital life skill: how to learn something difficult. Now I know, learning how to learn something challenging is key to a happy life.

After all, I’ve made most of my academic and career choices to hide the fact that I never mastered basic math. As an undergraduate, that meant art school instead of a university and thus giant holes in my knowledge of the sciences and foreign languages, subjects I now find beautiful, if only from afar.

As a child, I happily spent hours drawing, dancing, reading, and writing. Even when I experienced difficulties there, I made quick improvements or received affirmation that made the risk of continual effort seem worthy.

Math was never like that. At its most basic level, I didn’t understand how it worked, and I didn’t like things that had propensities for right and wrong answers. I felt I might be more easily found out in disciplines where there was no room for nuance or gradation. What secret parts of myself I felt necessary to keep hidden as a child, I do not know.

I was competitive, yes, but I lacked the commitment required of actual competition. I wanted to win without hard work and without being seen as a failure. That meant if something didn’t come easily or I couldn’t learn it quickly, I pulled away.

Thankfully, life presents many opportunities for failure. Repeated failure, I’ve discovered, is necessary for a life of richness and depth.

Two memories

In the third grade, Mrs. Giovanetti gave the class a short story assignment. Afterward she called me over to Thomas’ desk. “Show him how not to begin every sentence with ‘and,’” our teacher said. I took the task of helping Thomas as a sure sign I had written my own story well.

At that age, it never occurred to me to think about how Thomas might feel. Perhaps he was the budding Donald Barthelme of our class and his ands were a grand experiment, mining the power of repetition and narrative expectations. My role: help him cross out every one.

Second story (a memory which makes me cringe to recall). I once spent a summer in Malaga, Spain enrolled in a language immersion course. I was a terrible learner, lacking both the ability to easily recognize language patterns and the willingness to memorize them. Spanish became the language I was dumb in.

I sat in cafes, for hours staring blankly at my homework, once something about the subjuntivo. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what we were meant to do with it; the teacher gave all instruction in Spanish. I cried in frustration and panic. Imagine that: an adult woman; an American woman; in a café; crying over a textbook. I was ridiculous and knew it.

Later with tear-stained cheeks, I walked under palms lining the beachfront promenade where I recognized a family I had seen more than once: an elderly couple and their adult son, a retarded man, who looked like someone with Down syndrome. As they walked a few feet ahead of me, I listened to the family’s gentle chatter––a breezy elegant Spanish.

“Fine,” I thought. “Sure the parents can speak it. I get it! But the son? With his condition! My envy was no joke. At that moment it consumed me––its constriction as hot and thick as a blanket.

After that I put aside dreams of linguistic mastery and stuck to things I already did well, or at least things I thought I did well. But somewhere in my middle age, a life spent doing things acceptably, competently, seemed like a very small kind of life, indeed.

It occurred to me that even though I might never know how to speak Spanish well, with enough effort, I might learn to read my favorite authors in their original voice, or at least enjoy sounds their words make in my mind.

Even if I lose every came of Words with Friends, a game at which I’m abysmal, there might nevertheless be a strange joy in trying.

And then there’s tango: of all the social dances, surely the most difficult. I now take pride in learning how to learn something at which I’m just not very good.

To not be good, and to do it anyway is a true freedom. The hours I’ve spent breathing in the hot-cabbage breath of an equally beginning partner, who guides me around the floor while simultaneously cataloguing every error in my footwork, are hours I now treasure.

What freedom to stick with lessons long enough that I can now be guided by similar partners and no longer focus on their breath or critique.

Finally, I have learned to simply enjoy the music. And strangely, every once and awhile, my partner and I meet each other in its rhythms, inside a twinned gentle movement, which feels very much like actual dancing even if, as of yet, it is not quite the tango for which I am still yearning to learn. 

Read this Book!

“Without my parents here, it was a place of broken beauty.”—Reyna Grande The Distance Between Us: A Memoir

I came across TheDistance Between Us: A Memoir, by Reyna Grande, because I thought it might be a good choice for students in my community college reading classroom. Thus, upon opening it I sighed a bit, scanning its pages with a sense of duty and the weight of a teacher's analytical equipment.

Moments later, however, Grande's deceptively simple book broke through all that and started speaking directly to my heart. In fact, I spent its last forty pages in tears, followed by hours of reflection and mourning, trying to integrate all her book allowed me to see.

I learned how Grande’s parents’ decision to emigrate from Mexico affected the children they left at home. It helped me see immigration as part of a larger economic pattern and better understand its effect on both Mexican and US culture.

In this book, Grande is rigorously honest, reflecting a child's eye view in its early pages and in its latter ones an adult's courageous, and more nuanced, perspective of familial love and longing.

The Distance Between Us: A Memoir is about class, and the complexities of class, capturing what it feels like to be economically impoverished and the slender borders between poor and even poorer. This is an area rarely reflected in American prose, especially from the point of view of someone who has lived it this directly.

Once opened, The Distance Between Us: A Memoir, is nearly impossible to put down because Grande is very adept and harnessing narrative force. Her short chapters generally focus on small images and details that unfold onto larger truths. The images multiply over the course of several chapters in a manner that at first feels like a kaleidoscope. Only later do these images begin to form an ordered picture of an entire economic phenomenon, one that includes family violence, trauma, and abandonment as well as the power of education and the difficulties far too many have in accessing it.

Rejection

“Naturally he is a failed writer.”––Roberto Bolaño “Henri Simon Leprince”

Maybe I didn’t get held enough as a child because every rejection my writing receives generates depths of unpleasant emotion for me: anger; embarrassment; shame. I become bereft in an entirely childish way. It starts with a pain in my chest and the gnawing sense that I am a fool, a fool to think all that time at desk with computer means anything to anyone but me.

Funny then that I should choose a writer’s life.

After all, as a young woman I briefly flirted with a life in the theater before thinking better of it; I couldn’t stand the rejection, I reasoned. In college, I helped with student films and became acquainted with the kind of actor who would stand under a hot sun for most of a day, submitting to an inexperienced director’s vision, a vision often dependent on cultural stereotypes, emotional cliches, and embarrassingly wooden dialogue.

Later still, in my position at a small non-profit film company specializing in AIDS prevention videos, I’d seen first hand the desperation of the open casting call––a line of young people winding out the door and down the hall. Each had big actor dreams, and waited patiently, trying to gain a small part in a low-budget production with nominal distribution. My heart broke for them. The director had basically already decided to cast members of a theater troupe he already knew well.

The poor actor: he needs others to practice his craft––lines to memorize, actors with whom he can perform, an audience, a stage. Thankfully, a writer can write with only herself, paper, and pen.

Even so, at some point, I found my writing felt unfinished if its only readers were my mother and a few friends. I wanted an audience and hoped my work would join in conversation with that of writers such as George Saunders, Lydia Davis, and others who take big risks and play small games with language and story.

So I sought publication, experienced a new form of vulnerability, and faced “NO!” Well, more like, “No thank you,” and sometimes even a gentle note of encouragement. Even on my best days, the nos sting.

Nevertheless, I keep submitting and sometimes, thankfully, a “YES” arrives.

Both experiences have taught me the following:

• New work must be created even as old work is being submitted.
• Re-submit rejected pieces to different publications as soon as possible.
• Submit many pieces at once, so many you can’t possibly track them and therefore, aren’t pining away for that giant thing and find sleep is no longer possible nor remembering to eat.
• Don’t fanaticize about what it would mean to win. (i.e. Don’t consider the logistics of moving across country if you were, for example, to earn the big fellowship. Don’t plan what you world wear the night of the dinner they’d surely hold in your honor. Don’t spend imaginary prize money on imaginary trips to the West Coast of Africa, Buenos Aries, or Laramie, Wyoming, which you last visited as a child, and which you suspect will soon show up in your fiction. Nor should you allow yourself to get giddy thinking about what publication in such-and-such journal would mean for your career and how Lydia and George might greet you at the lectern just before your big reading begins.)
• Instead keep writing! Even when you feel you have lost all hope––write.
• Talk to other writers about how they experience rejection. Encourage them to go into great detail. Notice their facial expressions and the gestures they make with their hands.
• When publication does occur (and it’s bound to, if you keep submitting) celebrate.
• Celebrate and notice how little publication changes your life. Apparently, you are still the same person waiting for things, pining, trying to let go of your fantasies, and avoiding your writing desk.
• Nevertheless, whatever glee you feel upon publication, ride that feeling into the creation of new work.
• Keep writing!

Roberto Bolaño’s fiction makes this terrible dilemma––the search for audience––seem equally pathetic and heroic. He created a recurring character, a man who shows up in different guises throughout his work—the minor poet, the failed writer, the artist others don’t see. Whenever I come across these men, my body trembles. Bolaño’s talking about me, says the feeling, someone who writes, and struggles to write, even though no one waits for my words. The words come (or don’t come) and it’s nothing to no one but me.

But sometimes, strangely, recognition of such “failures” brings comfort. I am in community with other artists, writers, much like myself. Together we face obscurity. After all, the likelihood that any writer will be celebrated or remembered for any length of time is so slim as to be non-existent.

What’s it to Shakespeare that we read him today? Who can say that 10,000 years into the future, humanity, should it exist, will even remember his name? If a great writer like Shakespeare could create in the face of such total obscurity, why then can’t I?

Absolute Cooperation

“It seems right for me to say here that I come to this dancehall to see the monsters, I know of no other place where you can see so many of them at once.”  Julio Cortázar “The Gates of Heaven”

Someone steps into your space with gentle, but nevertheless, unmistakable force, so that you, in acceptance, quite naturally step back, accommodating your linked and increasingly rhythmic footfalls, while maintaining constant connection between your chests, now separated by mere inches, your bodies flowing together in a smooth wandering across a wooden floor, and your partner, in order to create ever more union and play, shifts his or her weight, twists his or her torso, so that in order to maintain connection at your chests, you are guided, again and again, to pivot here, then there, and because your free leg is loose at the hip and are therefore moving with maximum efficiency, past and future are suspended, you know not where each step might take you, which allows fundamental physical laws to be harnessed as never before, a free leg whipping and twisting below your torso like the limb of an independent animal, a phenomena your partner demonstrates, again and again, using principles covering torque, centripetal acceleration, force and momentum, and the simple grace of bodies in motion; your joint walking thus increases in intensity, via the union of rhythmic walking, even as spines remain slow moving sources of fluidity and restraint, time softens as you drop and retrieve steps to a sad kind of yearning music, which even now somewhere plays: the rasp and whine and ting of piano, violin, accordion, and a gray-faced singer, and all the motion: the slow gliding side steps, the circling of your partner, every step at his or her indication and invitation, while the arcs carved in air by first your left leg and then your right, are at your own pleasure, but without doubt, all of it an inevitable result of absolute cooperation between you and your partner, a union so pure it holds no longing, not one person ahead of the other, not one person pushing from behind, each responsible for his or her own balance, even as weight is shifted and bodies and axis transposed over and across the floor, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, so that really you are only about the breath, and not the thought, no longer wondering what the next moment might bring nor the next––every footfall instead singing now, and now, and now but softly, sliding, gliding, well then, you dance, and the dance you do is the tango, and if tango is a dance of monsters, as Cortázar suggests, then surely it is also divine, a divine dance done by demi-Gods of on wooden floors.