April 23, 2008
Torpor
So it is said, sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that laziness which renders us incapable of doing the thing to which we are most looking forward. As well, perfectionists are notoriously lazy and all artistic indolence is deeply neurotic, a pain, not a pleasure.
If I heard “promise” once when I set sail for life, I heard it a zillion times. Glory me, I believed it all. And then its two close companions sloth and perfectionism sidled up and said, “Promise? We’ll show you promise. Just you watch.”
Sloth, the word, derives from accidie, Greek for negligence and indifference, then it came to convey sadness and spiritual torpor. It made it to the Vatican’s Top Seven in late antiquity and the middle ages and was classically described as a state of restlessness and the inability to pray. Restless, I am, but more or less able to pray. Sadness at the corner of spiritual torpor, now there’s a familiar intersect.
Essayist Cynthia Ozick writes, “letters, those vessels of calculated permanence,” in her collection, “Metaphors and Memory.” Something writers do, she implies, perhaps to avoid writing.
I imagine letters that way. Writing has always come more fluidly with me when there’s somebody “out there.” Maybe I don’t have to get a response. Not that I want to let my intended (youm, thass whom) off the hook. But writing to somebody who doesn’t answer doesn’t make all that much difference, just so that my imagination can think about them. Maybe that’s what Ozick means by “calculated permanence.” Of course, there is a kind of permanence in a reader’s mind once something is read, if memory can be thought to be all that enduring.
But if it’s like the “permanent care” cemeteries claim (there’s some torpor, for you), then one must expect it to accumulate weeds and toppled concrete urns and generally just to weather the wear and tear of time’s seasons watching the ground sink slightly and irregularly over and around whatever’s underneath.
Anyhow, Yogi Berra said you can observe a lot just by watching.
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos