Talk, Talk, Talk

Have I ever mentioned I love being a grad student. Yeah...

Here's the result of a free-writing exercise for class last week...(talking about talking about writing):

Life. What we were swaddled in as children, the heartbreaks we've endured, the hope we hold on to, all of our cultural accouterments. To breathe is to be consistent, to breathe is to be living, to breathe is to conversate.
In every space, time, place...our voices can be heard. What's a voice? Such a strong thing that it can be recognized over the phone after years of absence, it can be heard across a crowded room - turning an ear into a homing device for familiarity.

There aren’t topics missing. This is Jeopardy. We’ve been talking about the same thing for years and will continue to talk about it because, like our lives, most conversations are cyclical. I’ll take Great Writers of 2010, Alec. The Long Conversation is us playing a round. Not playing around...but playing a round in this conversation that never began and will never end. We can’t know of every conversation that’s been held or the conversations about writing that will be held so it’s hard to say what’s missing. I think if anything is missing, it won’t be for long because if a writer can’t get it out there, who can? Someone will push, maybe we will all push. Writers live by their senses and pushing is what we do best.

What we talk about is the burden and the beauty. The weight of the world inside our heads. How do you pay bills when you have to will your hand to stop moving, make a conscious effort to take a break from your mind? What if you hooked up a food source and a portable bathroom option, how much writing would we get done then? What makes a writer write? What makes a writer different from a person who is writing a grocery list or a love letter? As we were so often was inspired to ask ourselves in Keith Abbott’s class - what moves the pen to paper? We talk about the disease. Words that keep us awake at night. We talk about the therapy of it all - what our hands moving across loose leaf notebook paper, writing poetry in middle school math class, meant to us then and now. How avoiding fractions healed our tiny broken capillaries of teenage struggle. How now as adults, we do the same thing, only most of us own nice computers or quality journals to hold that self medication.

I was born of ear and mouth, brain and hand. We need to get in there. Stop asking “How are you?” and start asking “How are you not?”
Everything holds a conversation. The engine to the fan belts, the ethernet cable to the modem. Silence even talks with us - silence on the lips of lovers as they move in the dark. Our skin talks, our organs never shut up. We are noisy inside. We create noise, maybe in response to our indigestion and what we hear in our ears when we yawn. Some animals talk with colors, others with vocal chords, still yet, others with text messages. What’s more authentic? What’s the difference between talking and having a conversation? Getting in there. Asking the questions. Giving the answers. Are there answers and if there are, what makes us think we’ve got them? Conversation.

Humans have been having a Long Conversation since the beginning of our time. We’ve looked up at the sky or into our own hands and asked how we got here. Eventually, we started asking aloud and despite a lot of talking and a lot more conversing - whole arenas full of people conversing - we still don’t know for sure. So, then we converse about how we disagree. We like those conversations because they make us feel alive. They let us get angry and be powerful. No one is wrong. No one is right. We just like to feel that connection with each other. Even if we disagree, isn’t it enough that we’re having the conversation? Doesn’t that do something for us all? We participate every day in conversations that will never end. A whole milleu of conversations. Conversations so old if we drank them like wine we’d die of the fermentation.

Our voices save us. From each other (“Fire!”, “No!”) and from ourselves (“It’s okay, everything is going to be alright, I’ll get through this”). We think the sound of a bird singing after a rainstorm is beautiful, but that bird isn’t just singing after that rainstorm, it’s singing after every rainstorm it was ever alive for and for every rainstorm its mother was alive for...on and on. We talk for the same reason. We write for the same reason. I wonder what the first human who ever put a writing utensil onto a form of recording material was thinking. What language was the first word written in? What was our writer feeling?

This Conversation is about that time as much as it’s about this time. We have a lot to say and we need to say a lot more to each other.
About:
carpal tunnel, eye strain, our favorite brand of pens, why we feel so hurt when someone doesn’t give us a reaction.
About:
what it means, really, to be given the genetic disposition to overflow with words and what that says about us.
About:
art, music, film, why so many writers die young.
About:
how to live it, how to make it come alive inside us.
About:
life.