I’d love to be the first to admit that it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here, but I can’t claim to be the first to admit to that, as it’s really my dad who brings it up with admirable regularity. There are a lot of things I should write about. I should write about Paris, or London. I should write another list about words that the British pronounce alarmingly differently from us, or about the flight home, about my making it all the way to Heathrow before breaking my Stanford-upon-Avon coffee pot bought for three quid at an antique store in Norwich.
But instead I’m going to write about home. I’ve been home since just before Christmas. I’ve learned the word mansuetude lately. It describes Irvine well--a sort of planned gentleness, some unsatisfying prettiness--but not my feelings for the city. I’ve been commuting for over a year now almost forty miles a day. Irvine feels close to San Juan, now, almost like I’ve never travelled. But the hours spent in the car are as much a part of me as the hours spent in class, or at work. I remember nights after eighth period my last year of high school turning onto San Juan Creek Road in the dark, staring up at a heavy yellow moon, writing poetry. I wrote poems line by line and spoke the lines aloud until I had them memorized. When I got home I’d write them down. During the last two years of high school I wrote over five hundred poems. I look back at them sometimes, mostly to remind myself that I’ve changed incredibly since then and so (thankfully) has my writing. I couldn’t ever look back and pinpoint a moment of change, perhaps. Or change doesn’t happen in moments, but stretched out over time and slowly. I think I’ve had to work for some growth. Other of it has been God-given. Some of it’s by luck, or my own determination.
My parents had some old friends over the other night. They asked me about England and I found it exhausting to talk about. Maybe because I find it difficult to tell a story whilst being consistently and boisterously interrupted, or having portions of the story told for me. But mostly I think it’s because something happened to me while I was there that I can’t say out loud, and not just because I’m selfishly choosy with whom I choose to share the most precious details: but because I don’t know how to say it. But that’s not the point of this post.
Irvine is a luminous place in the first months of Summer. The sun is still white, sifting through low clouds. The grey hills and light grasses are soft. The air smells like grass, sweet, nutty. People start to smell like suntan lotion or tropical scent. The old spice wearers bear their armpits to the breeze. I invest in a gas mask. I love Irvine like home. Not because the city’s straight lines and clean pavements suggest to me the capacity of mankind, or the hills off the highway remind me of a childhood spent hiking neighborhood hills and playing with the cat in the woodsy backyard. I love Irvine because I’ve felt so trapped amongst its yuppie streets and shopping centers that I couldn’t do anything but turn to literature, to poetry, to writing stories. I’ve felt so strange, so out of place, like I’m restricted from the knowledge that would allow me to fit in, to be friendlier, more graceful, more beautiful, better accomplished. Resistance to Irvine’s corporate, business-casual charm, has caused me to emerge from some sort of social cemetery victorious, pages and pages of prose and verse clutched in my closed fists. The writing’s getting better. I’m learning to love it more. I’m learning to listen. To tell a story. To write something that matters. Something that lasts. The act of writing puts something down on paper irrevocably, or maybe onto a computer screen. I can’t untype anything. I can’t unsay anything. But what makes literature immortal is that other people read it and become it. I’ve written to friends about this idea I’ve had, that there’s a way to read something so deeply and intensely that you become what you read. That you write what you read. I can’t make it make sense yet; I don’t have the language. But I think it’s true, and I think that’s why the authors everyone knows have written stories that matter timelessly. What’s true, remains.
I’ve always turned to poetry. My parents had friends over the other night: I mentioned this already. I told them about England. I felt uncomfortable about it. I felt a pressure to tell the story in a way that I thought could matter to someone else. I spend a lot of time alone; I have some difficulty understanding where the boundaries lie between what I find meaningful and what other people do. With some difficulty I told my story. We came to talking about my writing: I was deeply embarrassed when Mom pulled out a poem I’d illustrated and given to her for Christmas one year to show her friends as an example of what I write, because it’s two years old, and I’m so wildly different now--my writing is so wildly different now--that I don’t feel what they read is a good representative of my writing or who I am. But I think they understood that it was old, and I couldn’t tell them they couldn’t read it. I didn’t know if my embarrassment was appropriate, or allowed. I tried to swallow it down. It dissipated. They were gracious. I think they actually did appreciate the poem. I think when you reach a certain maturity you’re probably able to genuinely appreciate things much less than masterpieces.
We talked about what I write. I told them, I write fiction for school and poetry privately. One of the two writes songs and asked me if I ever did. I said, yes, and he asked if I also wrote the melody, and I told him, not at the same time that I write the words. The words first and then the melody. That mattered to me, to make that distinction. I thought that made it clear that I’m not a songwriter. I think in music, the melody is inextricable from the words. The way the song sounds and works musically isn’t separate from the way that the words work. The words and melody both work in the same listening moment, they both tell a story, and work together. So I thought, songwriters must write them both, words and melody, with some thought as to the other. And I said, I’ve written songs, but I’m not a songwriter.
He said, if you’ve written songs, you’re a songwriter.
I didn’t agree. I don’t think I do now, either. That’s a gracious point of view. I am not a songwriter. I am not a fiction writer. I do not even think I am a poet. I think I’m an intense journaler. I’m an aspiring poet, yes. But not one now. I suppose I abide by the Platonic ideal: you can do one thing really well, and many things sort of well. Plato says, many things badly, but I think most people are multi-talented. I also think that both normal people (of which I’m one) and gifted people are born, or can choose, but they are something. You’re a doctor or a mathemetician or a musician or a soccer player, and you can do other things, but at your core, you’re something. Maybe I misunderstood what he meant. Maybe he meant it literally. A songwriter is someone who writes songs. But I was talking spiritual, maybe out of place. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days, and it’s made me think about where I am now. It’s more specific than the US, than California, than Irvine. I’m at UCI and I’m in the creative writing program and it’s frustrating, it’s trying, it’s exhausting, but it’s thrilling and rewarding and it’s gotten me to, and through, the best and worst moments of the last two and a half years of my life. I’m a creative writer inhabiting a creative writing program. As stifling as Irvine is to me at times, it’s also the only place I’ve ever had the experience of feeling truly at home, in my own right.
