Other than encouraging failure, a couple other sources of motivation come to mind. I’m storing them here with this context in the hopes that they’ll continue to be useful to me, and maybe you, too. One is Lynda Barry’s idea that “the arts are like an external immune system“: I don’t have to make things because they will be good, but because it cleanses, wards off evil, strengthens the things that make a person herself. (Lynda Barry is amazing, by the way.) The other is something I’ve printed and put on my desk: Frank Chimero’s sketch about “How to Have an Idea.” Approaching fiction, a type of writing to which I’m very unaccustomed, it’s useful to be reminded that an idea is always bits and pieces of other ideas, and that you don’t have to decide whether or not it’s good while you’re still busy exploring it.

So that’s what I’ll be doing with some hours of each day for the next few weeks! I’ll be having ideas, making things. I’ll be failing constantly, and hopefully beautifully, at least a little.

The surprises and joys in the Proust project so far have clustered around a couple themes: the many meditations on how art affects life, and the manifold ways that we all repeat the mental struggles of previous generations in the world. My very favorite example so far, for the latter, is when the narrator receives a phone call from his grandmother:

The telephone was not so commonly used then as it is today. And yet habit is so quick to demystify the sacred forces with which we are in contact that, because I was not connected immediately, my only reaction was to see it all as very time-consuming and inconvenient, and to be on the point of lodging a complaint: like everybody nowadays, I found it too slow for my liking, with its abrupt transformations, this admirable magic that needs only a few seconds to bring before us, unseen but present, the person to whom we wish to speak…

Here I was delighted to find, in both content and tone, an echo of a relatively recent (though ancient to the internet) Louis C.K. aphorism: Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. Like everybody nowadays, the comedian and the narrator both say, we neglect to notice the miraculous things we’ve made for ourselves. This realization – not only does each successive generation iterate through the same complaints, but we each delude ourselves into thinking our particular whines are novel – is one of the bits that buoys me through some long slogs with Proust. Just when you think it’s all a dull dinner party stocked densely with now-obscure French politicians (which seemed like about two-thirds of The Guermantes Way), a parenthetical aside will strike out as a reminder that people don’t really change. We’ll always treat each other badly in certain unthinking ways, baffle those who love us, be ridiculed by those who don’t, and become enamored (a bit irrationally) of beautiful people and beautiful things, however our ages define them.

A peculiarity of Proust that I noticed more clearly this time around is his constant comparisons between art and any action. “Life imitates art again,” said many of my marginal notes. Maybe primed by this, I started noticing how the novel’s descriptions resembled art I’ve seen and heard: a blood-red void of a sunset like one in the Art Institute, a film, a PJ Harvey lyric. One line reminded me of a poem about a painting about Icarus, a poem that always comes to mind at difficult times, for me: imagining any personal tragedy as something small in time, an isolated splash.

Time passes and art’s there to illuminate and focus it: there’s the obvious purpose of something as massive as In Search of Lost Time. It’s right there in the title, however you translate it. One sneaky way that Proust got to me, though: a reminder that art takes people – conflicted, flawed, sometimes wholly un-brilliant people – to make it. In a very meta-hand-wringing bit about writer’s block, the narrator acknowledges “I was merely the instrument of habits of not working.” I recognized myself in that right away: the constant struggle of writing, then not writing; fits of diligence and long stretches of indolent excuse-making. It’s at once satisfying and a little dismaying that we’re all the instruments of our crappy habits sometimes.

After over a month of procrastination, I finally started decorating my office in our new apartment last week. The general decor-strategy is pastiche, accomplished the same way I decorated my bedroom in high school: stringing a string, clothesline-style, between nails on the wall, and using binder clips to suspend assorted pictures and bits of paper from it. All the bits of course are reminders of times: setlists, letters, a drawing of my brother’s from when he was very small.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we remember, how past time morphs and becomes strange as we recall it. (And I suppose it’s summer, despite the unseasonable weather, so I’m due to read another volume of In Search of Lost Time, my yearly summer reading. Proust knows all these things better than I do.)

It seems as though becoming a real adult means remembering differently; attaching oneself, barnacle-like, to a certain narrative of the good old days, but at the same time sailing forward unencumbered (and becoming unencumbered means throwing out some of the sentimental bits that litter my life, and maybe decorating with things other than sentimental bits of paper). Writing and photographing and packratting away scraps of paper are all ways of hanging on to threads of memories without knowing how to organize them any more than I know how to sort out every thought I’ve had about this grand mysterious ontological miasma.

I guess growing up is figuring out a path for all your past selves to take with you as you keep becoming different: more responsible, maybe neater, still sentimental.

Poetry of Departures:

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

The fantasy of the audacious, purifying, elemental departure catches at my footsteps sometimes. I walk the same streets every day and make a constant calculation of what path affords me the most possible turns to my destination, to remind myself that I could always choose a different way. It’s not hard, though, to remember why it’s a fantasy, a reprehensible shadow-thought to drive the sober and industrious stuff of daily life: why I get on the southbound train to work each morning instead of the northbound one that departs the same platform for the airport, to take the next flight to nowhere in particular. Routines are comforting and valuable, and the ones I have are ones for which I’m incredibly fortunate: a good job in a good city with good friends and a good family. But I reckon it’s human to long for stories, and I wonder what the ones will be that I will tell if I never choose the departing path.

There is also a line in a Destroyer song that I’m going to try to tie in here; it seems at least tenuously linked to the poem:

Don’t worry about her, she’s been known to appreciate the elegance of an empty room

If we all hate home and having to be there, I suppose we all appreciate the blank-slate glory of a new home before it becomes the site of personal detritus and the seat of memory. I stood with Nick in every room of our empty new apartment last night and we measured each one in turn, imagining separate and overlapping rearrangements of our furniture. The elegant, paint-scented empty canvas, the dark backyard not yet in bloom, filled me with eagerness for something altogether new. Of course I bring with me everything old; falling-apart furniture and sloppy habits that will mar that pristine surface from the moment I set down the first box there. But moving has some traces of the same potential as the wild choice to hop the wrong train and fly away: to change something, to emerge altered from some chrysalis with something new to tell.

It’s crazymaking to come up with too many mental paths for different selves who left off where you didn’t, but it’s also one of the uses of fiction and poetry, I reckon, to map those other worlds and illuminate their seedy interstices. Anyway, it’s all reassuring in a certain fashion, and I think I am ready to pack all my worldly possessions in boxes again very soon.

When my friend said “I wish I could write like you,” I was a little stunned because it feels like so long since I’ve written, like I’ve exiled that part of me that was once the main thing. That thought became utterly terrifying: what’s a writer who doesn’t write, or a photographer without a camera? Writing, reading, and taking pictures are the most essential selves I have; they’ve been so long hidden by a veneer of busyness that I’m trying to chip away. It turns out the thing that prompted the compliment was my initial post for thing-a-day, an insignificant paragraph that I barely even considered.

The thing that I realized (while writing this, actually) is that there’s shame with utility and shame without utility. The shame I felt for not writing (and the flip-side of its coin, the shame I feel for expecting people to read this unedited word-spew): there’s no utility in those. They’re a kind of lie I use to be lazy, to efface myself in small talk, to hide. If I hurt someone and am ashamed of it, there’s utility in that. Certainly there’s a risk of useless shame leading to actual shame, but being a writer who doesn’t write is much worse than that kind of pointless safety.

So I am in here. I’m listening to “Words and Guitar,” and I’m making the clackety noise. It makes me grit my teeth and breathe a little differently, and, feeling that tension, I think I did it well. I am trying to disentangle myself from useless shame and small talk.

I’m trying.

Now that I’m deep into Week 2, though, I’m backsliding a little into excuse-making. Granted, it’s easy to say they’re good excuses, because here is what has happened, in order, since Week 1: first, I got hit by a car on my bike (my bike, the car, and my person all emerged with our faculties intact; I yelled at the driver some, and he repeatedly said “Sorry!” with the emphasis on the second syllable, “Sorr-eh!”). The next day, along with a bunch of completely amazing friends, who are all wonderful people and should be knighted and toasted with the finest champagne, I moved approximately 97% of my worldly possessions to a new apartment five blocks from this one. This was the culmination of months upon months of worry and teeth-gnashing (real and metaphorical). Afterwards, I took one of the most serious naps of all time.

The final excuse for this week’s lack of writing was that my bike wheel got stolen right from in front of the building where I work between 1:30 and 5 pm yesterday, so in the time that I would otherwise have been catching up on writing not done during the move and subsequent recovery, I was too angry to have thoughts.

And so! I am going to New York the day after tomorrow, and I am hoping to come back with New York stories, and to fill the time when I would otherwise do the crossword or read with words instead. I sentenced myself to get things down on paper, and I ought to, despite whatever circumstances.

I was standing with coffee above the river, imagining the city casting aside its winter garb, boots and scarves and hats like the peels and rinds of vegetables, slipping into the surface of the water, a churning soup of tossed-off color.  We were a nest of snakes shedding our skins at the same time, and we’d do so every year. Phones would go unanswered; everyone would know better than to plan meetings or errands that couldn’t be moved, once the sun crept high enough and the sidewalks sloughed off the ice. Like a parade, we’d fall in formation along the riverwalk, down to the lake, mummified in our now-unneeded woolens. Loudmouthed kids with sticky fingers would marshal us to the water, and together we’d tie up a long rope of bootlaces and unraveled yarn from worn-out gloves. With the rope and our fingers, newly exposed from mittens, we’d start lashing together the winter things into a giant soft raft or a reef of scarves and socks and the occasional balaclava. That’s how we’d send away the winter,  letting layers off to float into the distance.

(This is my first experiment with writing about two hundred words a day, so as to meet the previously established thousand-word goal. I have to keep reminding myself that routines and rituals don’t start out fully formed; they come into their own over generations. Patience is a hard habit to form.)

One hundred forty words (or more), and I’m clicking “Publish.”

It’s striking to me, this time around, how much of the book is about how weird and sad and gross it is to inhabit a body. Whether you’re hideously and improbably deformed, or dependent on Substances, or bound to your fauteuil, you are probably not having a jolly good time with your physicality, in this novel. I have some loose notions of what this all means in the grand scheme or whatever, but mostly it’s just sad: so many cages so eloquently described. There seem to be ways to distract oneself from the trials of inhabiting one’s skin, but no ways out, no means to transcend one’s body. As far as there might be a lesson to take away from all this pathos, awareness and empathy and a certain kind of courage that encompasses those traits seems to be all there is to it. I’m reminded of this speech; I’m sure it’s no accident that one of the AA speakers in Infinite Jest also tells the “This is water” anecdote.

I think that distills most of what I’ve learned and noticed in my rereading. Also if anyone else is a fan of Max Tundra, I met him and confirmed that his song “The Entertainment” is indeed named in reference to Infinite Jest. Also: he is awesome. Also: apparently I am the first person to notice that, or at least to ask about it? This is probably the most geeked-up I’ve ever been about meeting a music-making person, and I am always geeked up about everything.