Thoughts for Early November

This weekend Zan and I drove to the Shenandoah Valley to attend a wedding.  A really lovely wedding, with vows that got me to tear up, and a ring ceremony that invoked Frodo and Samwise.  The cake topper featured a silhouette of Jack Skellington and Sally, and the bouquets were red roses mixed with paper flowers made from pages of Shakespeare's plays.  The whole evening felt very relaxing, like a house party with good food and friends that I don't see very often.

The drive away from D.C. always feels like breathing a giant sigh of relief.  Out past the clog of office buildings, tiny cramped streets, metro stops and then the strip-malls at the very outer edges... the world breaks open into fields and streams and farmhouses scattered in the valleys.  Mountains rise up on either side, and stretch into the distance and at the farthest prospect look blue.  At this time of the year the drive becomes a sunburst of reds, oranges, and browns-- the mountains and hills like an autumnal bouquet, and the few trees that turn bright yellow stand out like Queen Anne's Lace or sprigs of Baby's Breath.  I thought a lot on the drive, about my thesis, my life.  I've been struggling to find meaning, because it often feels that everything is so meaningless.  Part of the problem with the thesis is that it doesn't feel like meaningful production to me, right now.  Things that feel meaningful are material: cooking, growing food.  Sewing.  Painting.  Giving gifts to people going through hard times.  That's what I want to do.  My job feels meaningful, too, because processing collections for future use feels like helping people (academics, students, other Special Collections users); it feels like growing the base of human knowledge.  The thesis, I suppose, should feel like growing human knowledge-- but right now, it doesn't.  It feels too amorphous and self-indulgent.  But then, thinking of the poems that I'm actually working with, they seem important in some way.  They resonate inside of me after I read them, but I'm not sure how to form my thoughts into something coherent, or academic, or new.  I don't know how to write about poetry intelligently; at least, my writing doesn't feel intelligent to me.  I've read a few secondary sources that make me 'oo' and 'ah' and fall more deeply in love with the poems, but then I feel that they've been explicated, and I don't know why I should write on them anymore.  I feel unable to add to the conversation at this point.  But I need to need to write twenty pages soon.  Then forty more.  I need to feel capable.

We drove back to D.C., the beginning of the drive feeling like anything is possible, the end again cramped with high rises and office buildings.  And now it's time to write.