epiphanies that freeze in your mind

E.M., my writing professor, just sat me down in her office after class. she told me i was brilliant, service-oriented, and a have a gift for writing. but that if i live to serve others, if i keep trying so hard to please other people and what they would like, i will wake up at age 45 and ask "what the fuck happened?"

to which i replied, ive been struggling with it for a while. and then mentioned these three quotes from the narrator of Baron in the Trees:

"This he understood: that association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one’s best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people’s other side, the side which makes one keep one’s hand always on the hilt of one’s sword)"

"There can be no love if one does not remain oneself with all one’s strength"

"I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all men"

E.M. then told me that this division i have in my mind, between what i might really want and what others might want for me, is false, an illusion. and that if i look into my own Quaker faith, ill find that it is only by following my own desire and self that i can best serve the world.

as i read in an anonymous quote a while back in time, back in Amazonia, something along the lines of, "don't do what you think the world needs. do something that makes you come alive, because that's exactly what the world needs"

its now a year after i came back and grew from that trip, and i dont know how to snap out of this cycle of juggling desire. why is it so hard? do i think i wouldn't be good enough? is there just too much im interested in to narrow down?

i love my ethnographic fiction class (not so much my nature writing course). i dont think of myself as a fiction person, but maybe its traditional novels that i dont care for. but i loved invisible cities, i loved the emperor, things that play with structure and how a novel might read. hell, i really liked V.K.'s timothy, notes of an abject reptile, and i dont even know what genre you'd place it in. maybe that's part of it. not liking to be placed.

i think im afraid of settling somewhere, feeling tied and trapped.

doing good things. im writing a collection of short vignettes, in the spirit of Ryszard Kapuscinksi's The Emperor, about Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century amateur entomologist who traveled on a four year expedition to Amazonia to collect insect specimens. im writing from his own notebook, published as Naturalist on the River Amazons, from the perspective of those around him, his assistants, residents of Para state, workers on his ship, etc. its fiction, but ethnographically based:

J. S. :

Took us a month to cross from Liverpool. I kept the stoves below deck going hot. Two of my mates down there got scurvy, but in a month we arrived in Pará state. Across the Atlantic, a long way from England, but the naturalists needed to come here, to get specimens. The Mischief needed more hands, and a job's a job, eh? Better than working the mines.

Our first stop was a small jesuit village off the coast. Too hot and humid, made the stoves and the mines seem fair. Those two, the scientists I mean, they began talking to the natives, using their translator, asking about insects. The next day we sailed up the river, finally arriving in that port city, Belém. We helped carry some of their things to the house, passing the merchants and shanty dwellings. I remember the one, the younger one, early twenties, the way he eyed those dark skinned women as we passed by. But then again, there were more than enough plants growing around the place to keep him occupied.

on another note, i was brainstorming and decided to list my top classes ive taken at Bard, in terms of how much ive taken out of them. it was surprisingly easy to generate a list.

ecology of infectious disease

photography, history & news

writing the world

ethnographic fiction

political ecology and poetics

the gift of literature

hooke's micrographia

history of technology of economics

biology of infectious disease

doing so gives a good idea of what interests me now, and the direction i am trying to create for myself right now. i once said to somebody that i wanted to write, and hemmingway said to write what you know, and that im never going to content with what i know in any given moment. always wanting more, learning more, expanding. and so i didnt become a writing major. and i dont immediately want to write. i want experience, outside of academy, outside of programs. i want to travel. i want to experience mundane detail. i want to work and toil for some time. i want something to torture me in the back of my mind so much that i know i need to follow it. i want to go back to brazil, i want to do work in global health, i want to keep interviewing about Lyme disease and organize support groups, i want to mediate conflicting opinions and stances. i want to learn poetics, i want to explore the microcosm. and extrapolate.

today my adviser made a point to remind me of the shift in ethnography: away from order and "making sense," and embracing the realism of chaos in form. i keep it in mind both for senior project (with which i feel a heavy obligation, in the motivational sense, for this group with which i am working) and for my fiction-nonfiction hybrid writing i hope to do.

if you took ryszard kapuscinksi's the emperor, italo calvino's invisible cities, and deniel defoe's journal of the plague year and combined them, i think it gives some image of what id like to do. its not fiction. but its playing with fact to accomplish something while still conjuring representation of some kind. one of the greatest lessons i've teased from anthropology and ethnography is that all writing is a fiction of sorts: all texts include and exclude, omit something, order information. there is no completely objective recording of reality. social scientists refer to this as the politics of representation, and throughout 4 years of anthropology and history classes, its the one thing that has held my interest. i think some fiction represents better than nonfiction. the hungry tide by amitav ghosh may be one example, the brothers by milton hatoum might be another.

im eager to see where next year takes me. each step forward i take better shows me what will or will not make me happy and grow.