Motion Sickness

Last Saturday, I went to my sister-in-law's fiftieth birthday party, held in the barn behind a friend's house. The Birthday girl hired a contra band (not to be confused with contraband) and a couple of musicians from a small town south of Indy. A young women played the fiddle and used her foot to drum out the rythym on a wooden platform at her feet. The caller, an older man with patience that wore very thin by the end of the night, instructed us in the moves of a series of dances. We do-si-doed and almandered and bowed, to our dance partner and our neighbor. We swung each other round, we sashayed between two lines, and we convinced ourselves we had it down, just as the caller sped up and we went the wrong direction, smiling and laughing the entire time.

The dance floor only started to spin when I stopped moving.

We sat down, heaving for breath and trying to steady ourselves, both feet on the ground. I gulped water, and took small sips from the whiskey and coke that I made earlier that evening. The dizzy feeling was frighteningly reminescent of drinking too much, when I would lie down in bed, one foot on the floor to stop the room from turning on its axis.

Sunday morning, I woke with a headache. My body felt heavy and stiff. When I sat up and asked my husband why I felt like I had been hit by a train, he said, the dancing, in a calm voice. He, of course, was already up and showered and dressed, and like a good husband, presenting me with a cup of hot tea.

What does this have to do with copying a manuscript by hand? Well, for one thing, the physical feelings are strikingly similar. I spent most of yesterday catching up my AK pages. I got behind due to a writing conference that backed right up a Thanksgiving week where we welcomed home three of college students,children, cleaned house and prepared for two family gatherings, one for my side, one for his. I baked pies (an activity which also had to be doubled when I forgot to put spices in the first batch), brined a turkey that only days before had been running around on a farm just out of town, and mopped floors. Okay, my husband did the mopping, alongside 13, who for some reason, inherited a recessive toilet-cleaning gene from me. All this to say that I had not copied pages for almost two weeks.

Monday morning, with everyone gone, I sat down with a cup of tea and a leftover-turkey sandwich and put pen to paper. I coped seven pages, which is still behind schedule but edging me closer to my next mile-marker of page 150. I hope to reach it by the end of the week. I have not timed myself as I write, but my best guess is that writing my daily two pages takes just over an hour (without interruptions). That means I estimate that I spent close to four hours writing yesterday. When I stopped and looked up, my stomach gave a lurch. I pushed my glasses to the top my head to acclimate my eyes, then moved to the couch to lie down.

An hour later, I opened my eyes and managed to walk upstairs. I still felt nauseous, but I needed to head out to pick up the kids at school. In the car, I turned on the radio and sang along to Christmas carols. I stopped at Target to buy rabbit food and green beans to serve with macaroni and cheese for dinner. After checkout, I bought a bag of popcorn at the concession and filled my water bottle from the fountain. By the time, I stepped outside into the cold wind, I was feeling fairly normal again.

When I copy pages, I am physically engaged in the act. My shoulders, my neck, my back get stiff. I stretch and move, try to remember to tighten my core muscles, sit up straight. I cross and uncross my legs. Sometimes I stand up and move behind the chair, crossing my arms across the back of it and folding my body forward at the hips. I stand back up and twist side to side, swing my arms wide. When I began this project, I had no idea that it would be such a physical process, which may sound stupid, but I thought only of my hands, how they might get tired, my carpal tunnel might be aggravated. I have been surprised by how exhausting this work is. I cannot help but wonder at what we have lost, creatively, by removing the physicality of work from our daily lives, not only for writers, but in other areas too: the swish-swish of the spatula and the flicking in my wrist as I smooth the frosting on a cake, the squaring of a shirt when I bring in the arms and fold it in half and smooth out the fabric, the pull at my midsection and in my shoulders when I sweep or rake. At its very heart, this project, like so many things in life, is about the physical act of creation.

Last night I sat down on the bed, tired but not ready to sleep. It had been a productive day.

"Why is it that the more I do, the more I want to do?" I said to my husband, who was already lying in bed with his book propped on his chest.

"I don't know, but it's true."

I was dressed in pajamas, but my body was not quite ready to rest. It had a momentum going, like when I was on the dance floor and I had put my hand up to meet my partner's and we twirled round each other without even trying.

 

Posted with Blogsy