Wow. This is masterful, and beautiful, and will need to reread later today when there is more time and circle back. But can say off the top that I very, very, very much want to read the Bay Area novel.
There is so much in this essay — am a little in awe of it.
“I’ll admit to something else, too: this novel is my theory of everything.” — if the novel pulls together the different threads of Everything as well as this essay does, it may have a crack at succeeding at what always seems like an impossibility. I'll continue to think about the failure questions and the running towards the problem questions. And yes! to sharing parts of the novel on Substack, when it feels right! I'd love to be an early reader!
I apologize in advance for a piece of probably unsolicited advice, but there is a chance it would help, so I dare to: Keep regular copies of your digital documents. Never ever have only one copy of anything important.
A laptop may break beyond repair at any moment, and any cloud storage is not under your control. A flaw in Microsoft or Google, or Apple software may result in your files deleted, and the best remedy you can expect from them is to hear they are sorry.
Arrange an external hard disk, connectable to your laptop via an USB port, and under a folder with a date, just copy all your documents, once a month, or biweekly. Such a disk will be most likely able to store the most recent and the penultimate copy. Keep the detachable device in a safe place.
Heartfelt wishes never to face a loss of an important file again!
Absolutely, Jacek, and I don't mind the advice. I used to do fanatical backing up with external drives and printouts, and I'm going back to a version of that. I may have let the habit go because I've spent the past few months clearing out old office files, wondering if I still needed to keep so much stuff. Well, I guess, maybe :-)
"Part of acknowledging failure involves watching all my theories and routines fail. As they did when I left the Maine island in a storm on the mailboat ferry, fearful and seasick, unable to focus on the horizon with the window flaps down. Gray waves rolled the hull like giant god hands trying to snatch us under. Spears of pain hit my lower back, the bench rattling beneath me. I tried to hold my body rigid. I failed to be stoic, like the woman near me who said she was eighty, who’d been carefully handed down the wet mossy steps from the dock by a boat hand. With her white hair and open pink face, she seemed unperturbed by asking for help or the rocking boat.
The loss of my physical ease in the world slams me up against mortality. My back is slowly recovering, but I’m not sure I’ll ever recover completely, and the grief does sting: tears spurting when I can’t move a heavy futon out of the way or carry a laundry basket up and down stairs. Following the boat ride, after a long car trip home with a friend in dumping rain (my husband still back on the island), I dissolved into sobs. At home, I heard my son’s hesitant steps up the stairs to my bedroom, where he hugged me wordlessly, as I cried about a canvas bag that remained soaked through."
If I could ever write like this I think I would never be able to come down to earth again. I am in awe of your talent, but it's your take on life that just fascinates me. You seem to have a handle on everything, as if you have an all-seeing eye somewhere and you see and feel things the rest of us just pass by.
Please, Martha, take that word 'failure' right out of your vocabulary. It absolutely doesn't belong there. ❤️
Dear Ramona, you can't know how much this comment feeds me — and how much I respect your opinion. Indeed, I think "failure" is one of those words that needs to be reclaimed as necessary and part of the writing process. And this whole experience has also made me feel that I do need to reclaim the value of failure in a different way, whether it comes to my physical body, computer technology, or the endless novel :-)
Yes, I see what you mean about 'failure'. We do need to recognize it as part of the process, in life as well as in our writing, and, indeed, come to expect it. And be prepared for it.
It just didn't seem to fit as I was reading this today. You're right, as usual. 😏
Oh man. When I was writing my dissertation, I cranked out about 80k words and I just couldn’t bring it together. Everything seemed out of place. I wasn’t advancing a narrative and I couldn’t see how to fix it. So I started over from the beginning, goodbye 80k words. I thought I might refer to them during my second draft, but I didn’t at all.
100k words into my second draft, again, it just wasn’t coming together. Goodbye 100k words.
My third draft, it came together. Only then did I look back on my second draft and start pulling out sections here and there and fitting it into the framework of my third. I wrote another 80k words from scratch.
Something about that loss, recreation, loss, and recreation (I have the most painful writing process ever) gave me the confidence to know that my ideas aren’t on the page. I can lose sthe page. My ideas are in my mind. My thoughts are in my mind, and I can always access them. They’re always there.
So if you’d lost your draft, idk, you maybe could’ve written the whole thing from scratch, quickly, and even better! In death, there is life — that sort of thing.
I really appreciate hearing about your ever-morphing dissertation, and I do agree that sometimes the “everything” just has to be tossed out to get somewhere better (or at least different) 😉
Martha, long ago, when all the poems I’d written, about seventy of them, were typed on a typewriter and kept in a binder and the only way to get copies was to make a carbon, which I rarely did, I lent them (idiot!) to a poet friend who then took a road trip to California without returning them, without letting me know he was going. For those weeks, I despaired. No cell phones. People on the road were simply out of touch. Like you with your file, I did get that binder with the only copies of my poems back, but for those weeks they were gone, I despaired.
Your more sobering concerns are mine as well. I have projects I’ve allegedly been working on for years, on spec, as artists say, with no promise of publication. Am I writing mainly for myself now? With the insane hope that so long as I’m writing I won’t die? You elicit many such ponderings and pull together so many issues in this piece. But then, we’re writers, aren’t we? What else can we do? And, I must say, your novel sounds like something I’d like to read.
Oh, Pat, that missing binder of poems – ! Reminds me of Hadley losing Ernest H's suitcase (briefcase?) with a manuscript on a train. Funny to think the copies of our words were tangible objects in the world that could be lost. That might be something to think about for another piece. Is there something different about everything existing virtually? Not sure.
I do appreciate your thoughts about my novel. It would be nice to have some early readers, so I may think about that for Substack :-)
Oh Martha, this was so beautiful, and so vulnerable. And no, you are NOT foolish! Once a mysterious bug ate half of a play I wrote and saved onto a floppy disk (remember those.) When I came back from my brief coffee break my play was a collection of symbols. A kind person in the theatre went to get me a glass of water, gave me a new floppy disk and told me to get back to writing, while the memory of the play was still fresh in my mind. And I did. So, just to say, I felt your pain! And your novel should not be lost, even if you will still be you and your life, your life. I would love to read it! As for your back pain, you have my deepest sympathy. As a yoga teacher, I always remind my students that discomfort with the new is a good thing, but sharp, burning pain is usually not. It’s difficult to give yoga advice from afar, except the general reminder - to be kind to yourself! I am sending you a big healing hug. Grateful for your beautiful writing, and just you.
Imola, I recall losing files like that in the floppy-disk days - yikes! The odd (distressing?) thing about this time around is that I had a gut-sinking feeling that I couldn't reconstruct the thing any more than I could make my back good as new. And part of writing this piece was to confront the possibility that such losses are inevitable as we get older, but they aren't necessarily the end. I knew you'd understand the issue of how much to push the body. It feels like I've spent decades of my life doing yoga wrestling back my competitive impulses. Now I've been forced to, and that's not necessarily bad, either :-)
Oh Martha, I so understand!!! Every part of your essay and your response here. You inspire me to want to write/ make a video about the topic of being kinder to ourselves through yoga-writing-mothering-just being. Your instincts are absolutely right. A little less pushing, and a little more acceptance? Sending you much love.
This is so moving Martha. I think when our body feels fragile & painful and we are so used to being strong in the world, there's a grief that's hard to articulate.
You wrote about it beautifully without using the word grief. Such a deep loss will always bring up other losses.
I definitely want to read parts of your Bay Area novel. Thank you for sharing such a tender and intimate part of yourself here. 🙏🏻
Jen, thank you, this means a lot, and I am feeling better about the possibility of sharing my big, shaggy novel-in-process. That could lead to a different way of viewing it, too.
Martha, I’d like to say something more penetrating than “wonderful,” but I am sleep-deprived and is there anything better for writing to do than provoke wonder? You’ve started a deep conversation between the aging, increasingly uncooperative body and the solitary frustration of the writing life, which we embrace because it’s part of who we are and to turn our backs would be worse. Mark Strand asks, in a line that I think of almost daily, “What’s another poet in the end?”We get to write our own answer. I’m glad you have your novel back.
Martha, you touched on so many things that I relate to on a deep level. That fear of losing, the grief, the pieces of yourself you put in your novel, facing mortality, and the strange hope that comes with incompleteness, the loss of physical ease.. The way you put it all into words is so beautiful and skillful.
Since my health plummeted the past few years, I've struggled with my loss of independence, especially as someone who has always prided herself on that. I struggle with feeling weak, too, with not being able to do as much as I used to.
Not sure what else I can say, except thank you for writing this.
Tiffany, thanks so much for your response, which is moving and deep. I appreciate you so much for sharing why this connects with you. Losing pieces of self and people we love is not something that can be magicked away with platitudes. I think writing helps, but not necessarily as a means for getting rid of pain and suffering — maybe just a means for honoring what so many of us feel inside ourselves? I'm not sure, because it remains a struggle for me :-)
Yes, writing does help in some ways. I was thinking recently about the extent of that, though. Sometimes I feel more like an archivist of my experiences rather than someone who’s able to be fully present. On the other hand, memory is so faulty that there are things I can only try to make sense of through my past writing. It’s a weird balance. Wondering what you think of all that.
As always, Tiffany, thanks for your support. I agree that it's a very weird balance, one that rarely feels as if *I* have achieved equilibrium. I'm really interested in your observations about feeling like an archivist of your experiences. You imply this isn't satisfying, observing yourself in the moment from a distance, but maybe it's not so bad – ? That could just be the journalist in me talking, but I think witnessing and archiving do matter, if only for my own personal record. Looking back at my past notes allows me to do more than wildly concoct what I remember. It's one of those things that likely makes no difference to anyone else, but it does to me.
This topic reminds me of why Haruki Murakami's essay "Abandoning a Cat" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/abandoning-a-cat) moves me so much. He grapples with coming to terms with his father's experience and what he doesn't know, likening us all to individual raindrops with our own stubborn experiences that collectively merge.
It strikes me that we could have a very fruitful conversation about this — either in text or by recording us talking. What do you think?
I think I spent so much of my life writing down my emotions and experiences, but in the end, they offer only snapshots. Maybe that's better than nothing, and I do think there's something valuable in the practice. I have a weird obsession with memory because mine is so fragmented and unreliable because of trauma. In that sense, my written records are useful. I just wonder if I rely too much on them sometimes.
I had to read this too fast to be able to connect all the threads - a lot there - so will have to read it again before I can comment. But boy am I glad my primary identity (I have fragmented identities) is not as a writer! So so much pressure not to be just good, but great! I am not sure how I handle the drive to be great (which I think I have). Maybe it helps to have split identities, or diverse skills so that any one of them doesn't have to carry such a burden. It helps to have others when you've already failed at one.
Thanks, Heidi. I think everyone has split identities (or we're a collection of overlapping selves), but for artists or writers, the primary label can feel like an albatross :-) Then again, I'd say the issues for me now are not simply about being great or good or successful. They have more to do with what I get from the writing I do, acknowledging that it is for me more than for anyone else, and at some point maybe I can let it go — at least some projects. It's scary to let go, just as it's scary to let go of my sense of having a youthful strong body, but the fear also takes me new places in terms of how I live and write.
Beautiful essay. Thanks Martha.
Wow. This is masterful, and beautiful, and will need to reread later today when there is more time and circle back. But can say off the top that I very, very, very much want to read the Bay Area novel.
Maria, thanks so much, and I may well runsome of the novel on Substack for interested readers. I've been mulling that for awhile :-)
There is so much in this essay — am a little in awe of it.
“I’ll admit to something else, too: this novel is my theory of everything.” — if the novel pulls together the different threads of Everything as well as this essay does, it may have a crack at succeeding at what always seems like an impossibility. I'll continue to think about the failure questions and the running towards the problem questions. And yes! to sharing parts of the novel on Substack, when it feels right! I'd love to be an early reader!
Save to email as a final backup
No kidding! I am implementing the kind of file backups I used to do with floppies and zip drives.
I apologize in advance for a piece of probably unsolicited advice, but there is a chance it would help, so I dare to: Keep regular copies of your digital documents. Never ever have only one copy of anything important.
A laptop may break beyond repair at any moment, and any cloud storage is not under your control. A flaw in Microsoft or Google, or Apple software may result in your files deleted, and the best remedy you can expect from them is to hear they are sorry.
Arrange an external hard disk, connectable to your laptop via an USB port, and under a folder with a date, just copy all your documents, once a month, or biweekly. Such a disk will be most likely able to store the most recent and the penultimate copy. Keep the detachable device in a safe place.
Heartfelt wishes never to face a loss of an important file again!
Absolutely, Jacek, and I don't mind the advice. I used to do fanatical backing up with external drives and printouts, and I'm going back to a version of that. I may have let the habit go because I've spent the past few months clearing out old office files, wondering if I still needed to keep so much stuff. Well, I guess, maybe :-)
"Part of acknowledging failure involves watching all my theories and routines fail. As they did when I left the Maine island in a storm on the mailboat ferry, fearful and seasick, unable to focus on the horizon with the window flaps down. Gray waves rolled the hull like giant god hands trying to snatch us under. Spears of pain hit my lower back, the bench rattling beneath me. I tried to hold my body rigid. I failed to be stoic, like the woman near me who said she was eighty, who’d been carefully handed down the wet mossy steps from the dock by a boat hand. With her white hair and open pink face, she seemed unperturbed by asking for help or the rocking boat.
The loss of my physical ease in the world slams me up against mortality. My back is slowly recovering, but I’m not sure I’ll ever recover completely, and the grief does sting: tears spurting when I can’t move a heavy futon out of the way or carry a laundry basket up and down stairs. Following the boat ride, after a long car trip home with a friend in dumping rain (my husband still back on the island), I dissolved into sobs. At home, I heard my son’s hesitant steps up the stairs to my bedroom, where he hugged me wordlessly, as I cried about a canvas bag that remained soaked through."
If I could ever write like this I think I would never be able to come down to earth again. I am in awe of your talent, but it's your take on life that just fascinates me. You seem to have a handle on everything, as if you have an all-seeing eye somewhere and you see and feel things the rest of us just pass by.
Please, Martha, take that word 'failure' right out of your vocabulary. It absolutely doesn't belong there. ❤️
Dear Ramona, you can't know how much this comment feeds me — and how much I respect your opinion. Indeed, I think "failure" is one of those words that needs to be reclaimed as necessary and part of the writing process. And this whole experience has also made me feel that I do need to reclaim the value of failure in a different way, whether it comes to my physical body, computer technology, or the endless novel :-)
Yes, I see what you mean about 'failure'. We do need to recognize it as part of the process, in life as well as in our writing, and, indeed, come to expect it. And be prepared for it.
It just didn't seem to fit as I was reading this today. You're right, as usual. 😏
Oh man. When I was writing my dissertation, I cranked out about 80k words and I just couldn’t bring it together. Everything seemed out of place. I wasn’t advancing a narrative and I couldn’t see how to fix it. So I started over from the beginning, goodbye 80k words. I thought I might refer to them during my second draft, but I didn’t at all.
100k words into my second draft, again, it just wasn’t coming together. Goodbye 100k words.
My third draft, it came together. Only then did I look back on my second draft and start pulling out sections here and there and fitting it into the framework of my third. I wrote another 80k words from scratch.
Something about that loss, recreation, loss, and recreation (I have the most painful writing process ever) gave me the confidence to know that my ideas aren’t on the page. I can lose sthe page. My ideas are in my mind. My thoughts are in my mind, and I can always access them. They’re always there.
So if you’d lost your draft, idk, you maybe could’ve written the whole thing from scratch, quickly, and even better! In death, there is life — that sort of thing.
I really appreciate hearing about your ever-morphing dissertation, and I do agree that sometimes the “everything” just has to be tossed out to get somewhere better (or at least different) 😉
Wow! This is one hell of a writing process!
Martha, long ago, when all the poems I’d written, about seventy of them, were typed on a typewriter and kept in a binder and the only way to get copies was to make a carbon, which I rarely did, I lent them (idiot!) to a poet friend who then took a road trip to California without returning them, without letting me know he was going. For those weeks, I despaired. No cell phones. People on the road were simply out of touch. Like you with your file, I did get that binder with the only copies of my poems back, but for those weeks they were gone, I despaired.
Your more sobering concerns are mine as well. I have projects I’ve allegedly been working on for years, on spec, as artists say, with no promise of publication. Am I writing mainly for myself now? With the insane hope that so long as I’m writing I won’t die? You elicit many such ponderings and pull together so many issues in this piece. But then, we’re writers, aren’t we? What else can we do? And, I must say, your novel sounds like something I’d like to read.
Oh, Pat, that missing binder of poems – ! Reminds me of Hadley losing Ernest H's suitcase (briefcase?) with a manuscript on a train. Funny to think the copies of our words were tangible objects in the world that could be lost. That might be something to think about for another piece. Is there something different about everything existing virtually? Not sure.
I do appreciate your thoughts about my novel. It would be nice to have some early readers, so I may think about that for Substack :-)
Oh Martha, this was so beautiful, and so vulnerable. And no, you are NOT foolish! Once a mysterious bug ate half of a play I wrote and saved onto a floppy disk (remember those.) When I came back from my brief coffee break my play was a collection of symbols. A kind person in the theatre went to get me a glass of water, gave me a new floppy disk and told me to get back to writing, while the memory of the play was still fresh in my mind. And I did. So, just to say, I felt your pain! And your novel should not be lost, even if you will still be you and your life, your life. I would love to read it! As for your back pain, you have my deepest sympathy. As a yoga teacher, I always remind my students that discomfort with the new is a good thing, but sharp, burning pain is usually not. It’s difficult to give yoga advice from afar, except the general reminder - to be kind to yourself! I am sending you a big healing hug. Grateful for your beautiful writing, and just you.
Imola, I recall losing files like that in the floppy-disk days - yikes! The odd (distressing?) thing about this time around is that I had a gut-sinking feeling that I couldn't reconstruct the thing any more than I could make my back good as new. And part of writing this piece was to confront the possibility that such losses are inevitable as we get older, but they aren't necessarily the end. I knew you'd understand the issue of how much to push the body. It feels like I've spent decades of my life doing yoga wrestling back my competitive impulses. Now I've been forced to, and that's not necessarily bad, either :-)
Oh Martha, I so understand!!! Every part of your essay and your response here. You inspire me to want to write/ make a video about the topic of being kinder to ourselves through yoga-writing-mothering-just being. Your instincts are absolutely right. A little less pushing, and a little more acceptance? Sending you much love.
This is so moving Martha. I think when our body feels fragile & painful and we are so used to being strong in the world, there's a grief that's hard to articulate.
You wrote about it beautifully without using the word grief. Such a deep loss will always bring up other losses.
I definitely want to read parts of your Bay Area novel. Thank you for sharing such a tender and intimate part of yourself here. 🙏🏻
Jen, thank you, this means a lot, and I am feeling better about the possibility of sharing my big, shaggy novel-in-process. That could lead to a different way of viewing it, too.
I'm here for it! 🙏🏻
Martha, I’d like to say something more penetrating than “wonderful,” but I am sleep-deprived and is there anything better for writing to do than provoke wonder? You’ve started a deep conversation between the aging, increasingly uncooperative body and the solitary frustration of the writing life, which we embrace because it’s part of who we are and to turn our backs would be worse. Mark Strand asks, in a line that I think of almost daily, “What’s another poet in the end?”We get to write our own answer. I’m glad you have your novel back.
Rona, I love the reference to Mark Stand and this: "We get to write our own answer." Indeed we do — thank you.
Swimming toward failure as opposed to drowning is what caught me in the throat. Wowza.
I know, it's such a key opposition, one that's hard to hold in mind. Thank you.
I LOVE this. Thank you.
Martha, you touched on so many things that I relate to on a deep level. That fear of losing, the grief, the pieces of yourself you put in your novel, facing mortality, and the strange hope that comes with incompleteness, the loss of physical ease.. The way you put it all into words is so beautiful and skillful.
Since my health plummeted the past few years, I've struggled with my loss of independence, especially as someone who has always prided herself on that. I struggle with feeling weak, too, with not being able to do as much as I used to.
Not sure what else I can say, except thank you for writing this.
Tiffany, thanks so much for your response, which is moving and deep. I appreciate you so much for sharing why this connects with you. Losing pieces of self and people we love is not something that can be magicked away with platitudes. I think writing helps, but not necessarily as a means for getting rid of pain and suffering — maybe just a means for honoring what so many of us feel inside ourselves? I'm not sure, because it remains a struggle for me :-)
Yes, writing does help in some ways. I was thinking recently about the extent of that, though. Sometimes I feel more like an archivist of my experiences rather than someone who’s able to be fully present. On the other hand, memory is so faulty that there are things I can only try to make sense of through my past writing. It’s a weird balance. Wondering what you think of all that.
As always, Tiffany, thanks for your support. I agree that it's a very weird balance, one that rarely feels as if *I* have achieved equilibrium. I'm really interested in your observations about feeling like an archivist of your experiences. You imply this isn't satisfying, observing yourself in the moment from a distance, but maybe it's not so bad – ? That could just be the journalist in me talking, but I think witnessing and archiving do matter, if only for my own personal record. Looking back at my past notes allows me to do more than wildly concoct what I remember. It's one of those things that likely makes no difference to anyone else, but it does to me.
This topic reminds me of why Haruki Murakami's essay "Abandoning a Cat" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/abandoning-a-cat) moves me so much. He grapples with coming to terms with his father's experience and what he doesn't know, likening us all to individual raindrops with our own stubborn experiences that collectively merge.
It strikes me that we could have a very fruitful conversation about this — either in text or by recording us talking. What do you think?
I think I spent so much of my life writing down my emotions and experiences, but in the end, they offer only snapshots. Maybe that's better than nothing, and I do think there's something valuable in the practice. I have a weird obsession with memory because mine is so fragmented and unreliable because of trauma. In that sense, my written records are useful. I just wonder if I rely too much on them sometimes.
Would you like to continue this through email?
I had to read this too fast to be able to connect all the threads - a lot there - so will have to read it again before I can comment. But boy am I glad my primary identity (I have fragmented identities) is not as a writer! So so much pressure not to be just good, but great! I am not sure how I handle the drive to be great (which I think I have). Maybe it helps to have split identities, or diverse skills so that any one of them doesn't have to carry such a burden. It helps to have others when you've already failed at one.
Thanks, Heidi. I think everyone has split identities (or we're a collection of overlapping selves), but for artists or writers, the primary label can feel like an albatross :-) Then again, I'd say the issues for me now are not simply about being great or good or successful. They have more to do with what I get from the writing I do, acknowledging that it is for me more than for anyone else, and at some point maybe I can let it go — at least some projects. It's scary to let go, just as it's scary to let go of my sense of having a youthful strong body, but the fear also takes me new places in terms of how I live and write.