Embracing the Fuse Box Dwarf

First of all, before you ask:  what about this title, then?  Tenzing’s Boots?  Isn’t it a little….random?

Well, yes, it is, and that’s part of the reason I like it, since I anticipate that as blogs go, this one is likely to be more random than not in its content.

But the main reason I chose it is a slightly longer story, and, having as it does a certain randomness of its own, seems like an appropriate place to start.  When I was a very little girl in New York, there was a touring exhibition that came through town about Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest (yesterday, by the way, May 29, was the 60^th Anniversary of their achievement, which is a nice piece of synchronicity), and one of the things on display was the pair of boots that Tenzing wore to the summit. This is one of those things that I can’t be sure I actually remember, or only think I remember because my mother told me the story so many times, but somehow this phrase, “Tenzing’s Boots,” caught my attention, and delighted me so much that for days I marched around the apartment chanting happily to myself over and over, “Ten-zing’s Boots.  Ten-zing’s Boots.”    Looking back, I think that although of course I didn’t know it at the time, this may have been the first glimmer of understanding in my baby brain that if words are combined in a certain way, they can create a kind of pleasure that goes beyond, or is independent of, their literal meaning.  Even today, the phrase “Tenzing’s Boots” makes me smile, for reasons that have nothing to do with mountain climbing, Sherpas, or footwear.  I just like the way it sounds.   

This is why a stylishly written novel with a lively narrative voice is more pleasurable as a reading experience than a textbook, and poetry functions almost entirely on this dual level.  Take a look at some  e e cummings or Dylan Thomas if you haven’t lately:  the way that we comprehend a phrase like “When I was green and easy under the apple boughs….”  has at least as much, if not more, to do with the way those words are put together, with the rock and flow of the sound and the lazy stretch of those long EEs, as it does with what they actually word-for-word mean.  There’s a world of difference between how we respond to “Whose woods these are, I think I know” and “I think I know who these woods belong to,” even though both phrases mean the same thing.

But we’re straying a bit from our sheep – something which, if you keep up with me, you’ll find I have a tendency to do, and if you’ve ever had an extended conversation with me you’ll know that we can really sometimes go all round the houses before getting back to the main point.

And to that end: this episode with the boots, which you’ll remember is where we started, may also be the earliest recorded indication that writing might turn out to be something I could do.   I’m too old to be coy about it:  words work for me.  They always have.  The ability to put together a sentence that not only had coherence and content but was also articulate, reasonably stylish, and pleasurable to read was certainly instrumental in my being accepted at my first-choice university (and yes, I went to Yale – to quote Darren Nichols, deal with THAT), and crucial to my getting the financial aid package that made it possible for me to take up the place that was offered.   I wrote thousands of words on my way to a degree in English Literature, and hundreds more about theatre and film as an arts stringer for the venerable Yale Daily News.  Right up through the end of my college years, everyone I knew – including me – assumed I would be a writer.  They also assumed, with equal assurance, that my sister, who is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction and teaches both at Skidmore, was going to be in the theatre.  Life is funny, huh.  (Although honestly it would be funnier if some of these people would stop expressing their profound disappointment at my failure to do what they expected and be happy that I’ve spent my life doing something else that I love and feel passionately about.)

Writing has, however, continued to be a considerable value-added skill for me.  I write primarily now for the theatre where I work as Casting Director and Artistic Associate – artistic statements, essays for the show programs, promotional materials of various kinds – which keeps my hand in.  For the better part of 25 years I was a dedicated journaler (and I mean really dedicated, like pages and pages every day for years), until one day I realized that I was so busy narrating my life that I wasn’t, or so it seemed to me, actually living it; I was never fully present in the experience of any given moment, because part of my mind was always working on how I was going to write about it later, and this seemed to be in my case not a particularly healthy situation.   While to write about something is, for me, an important and effective way to process things, to fix them in memory, or, if I’m feeling at the mercy of random event, to gain some traction in getting back in charge of things (and maybe later when we all know each other better I’ll come back to that last one and talk more about why it’s an important issue for me), and I still sometimes use it in all of those ways, it had begun to be a kind of barrier and something that instead of connecting me more to the world, was distancing me from it.  And so more by instinct than through any conscious decision, I started to back away from the journaling and eventually, about ten years ago, stopped altogether.  It was a hard impulse to curb for a long time, and then eventually, as with human friendships, it was so long since I’d done it that it was just awkward and overwhelming to think about taking it up again, and after that it was much easier doing without.

And other things took the place of the journals – emails, Facebook (which I very much enjoy, although I’m careful not to let it take over my life), and from time to time, if I’m traveling – which always tweaks the writing urge -, letters to friends, which as some of you can attest are sometimes on an intimidatingly epic scale.  (I think it’s a great loss to civilization, and to human communication, that so few people write letters any more.  Will anyone curl up, in future years, with someone’s Collected E-mails?)  Increasingly over the last few years people have suggested to me that I should start a blog, and I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, but I haven’t quite been able to cozy up to the idea.

There have been a couple of reasons for my reluctance.  One is that I guard my privacy very closely.  I believe that being known is a privilege that should be earned, we owe ourselves that respect, and it unnerves me, in this age of universal access to everything, how readily we are throwing it away with both hands.  (Anyone who’s ever had to listen to a cell phone conversation on the bus about some stranger’s last pelvic exam, the death of their mother, or the terms of their divorce will know what I’m talking about.)  The other, which is at least as significant, is that it seemed to me there are more than enough people sharing their unsolicited opinions on the Internet, regardless of whether they have any interest or importance for anyone else.  I’m not talking about the many wonderful and often very helpful blogs that are out there (I think of the late Guy Adkins’ extraordinary account of his battle with colon cancer, or the parents who write about how they’re meeting the challenges of everything from bullying to homework to sexual questioning in their kids, or my friend Morgan’s marvelous chronicle of her travels in India and the accompanying  exploration of her own spirituality and sense of self), but about the other kind:  the relentless, esturine flow of pointless personal minutiae that has no possible significance or interest for anyone other than the person to whom it’s happening.   It is a great failing , I know, I should have more compassion for such people; it’s hardly surprising , after all, that as our feelings of alienation and anonymity grow in proportion to our numbers and to the influence of the Internet itself, people should be more and more compelled to assert their individual existence, to say, somehow, Look at me! Listen to me!  I exist!  But I can’t help it.  I’m reminded inescapably of John Bellairs’ Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who “popped out from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed ‘Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!’”  (The House With the Clock In Its Walls)  That is how I picture cyberspace:  a vast whiteness stretching into infinity, filled with people each one standing on an egg crate and screaming “Dreeb! Dreeb!” at the top of his or her lungs.   I could not imagine adding my voice to the cyber-clamor, or very much wanting to.

But here’s the thing:  I miss it, the writing.    I miss writing for my own pleasure (as opposed to writing to order, which is mainly what the last several years have been, although that has its own rewards), and I miss writing for the pleasure and entertainment of a reader, the particular satisfaction of finding just the right combination of words (“Tenzing’s Boots”) that might give someone else not just the description of an event or a place or a person, but the feeling of it, and to do it in a way that’s elegant and enjoyable.   (I know there’s a school of thought that says a writer is a writer even if they only put all their short stories in a box at the back of the closet and never show them to anyone, but I can’t agree with it.   What would be the point of that?  For me, a writer implies a reader, and vice versa – can’t be the one without having the other.)   This feeling has been getting stronger over the last couple of years, and recently escalated during a trip to London (travel, as I said, always sparking the circuitry for me) to where I finally thought, I really need to make a place in my life for writing again.

And so here I am, finally putting the first tentative toe out into the blogosphere.  (A terrible, ugly word by the way, we must think of another one immediately.)   I’m taking the Fuse Box Dwarf as a cautionary figure in this new landscape, and I’m hoping to stay committed to the notion of posting only when I feel like I have something more or less interesting or entertaining to say, current or retroactive (for example, I’ve written a lot over the years about theatre productions and performances, some of which may be of some historical interest)  or when I can’t ignore the twitch in the brain and the itch in the fingers that says “I have to write about that”.  I’ll try not to talk about what kind of sandwich I considered having for lunch, or the salad I decided to have instead, unless it’s some kind of metaphor.  I can’t absolutely guarantee that there may not be, just very occasionally, a faint whisper of dreebish-ness now and again, but should that happen perhaps we can all agree to be tolerant of one another, and accept that dreebism is to some degree  an inevitable human impulse.   Even a handprint on the wall of a cave can be viewed as a kind of prehistoric cry of “Dreeb!”   At the end of the day, if we’re honest, there’s probably a little Fuse Box Dwarf in all of us, and perhaps that’s as it should be.