Got books?
Why we think we should read more and don’t.
I get a lot of flattering feedback on my readership.
Funny, as it is such a solitary activity, so who knows how good it is? Also humorous is that I am terminally bad at solitary activities.
You know how there is talk of ‘object permanence’? As in, if any object is out of persecution or mind it ceases to exist? In a literal sense we can think of the way babies are thought to perceive the universe- once a toy is tossed off the highchair or outside the crib, it is gone. Forever to never be found. More metaphysically, and thereby fun, is the concept that said object perhaps never was at all. That the reality was and is connected to the sensory – touch, smell, sight, and sound - experience of it.
Empathy in this vein could be the acceptance of another's witnessing of an object. Or, if you will roll with me here, memory or telling of an instance. One can lie that they ever had the teething toy or slept with said celebrity – sure – but trust is making room for that thing that was and likely did happen if we recall ourselves or are told of it.
The point in this is my personality is kind of like that teether. I have a tendency, habit, commitment to an identity so deeply linked to sharing and discourse that I am terminally terrible at doing anything that is not communal or does not result in some kind of showing off or performance.
Great example: the life of my all too tolerant husband and my disruption of his evenings and chaos of his mornings. All thanks to me and my completely blind and not the least bit self-aware way I wake with a start, reporting all the things I will do in the day. That onslaught upon the soul of peaceful and slow-going Mr. Bullock begins at dawn. I wake hours before him and most sane roosters to complete a series of busy body fitness and domestic tasks. Each one taking me past the bedroom – a door I would never think to kindly close as I blast NPR and pop music alternatively – where I yelp in reports of what my plans are and what I am doing:
I fed the cats!
Benedict enjoyed his walk.
Changed the laundry, babe.
Oh, I am taking out the trash.
Going to do my work out now!
Hey, look at how strong I am- can you see me flex – look at those guns, Baby?!
Can you see?
Oh, oh I am doing a handstand now – look, look!
Changed the cat litter.
Going to run the vacuum, OK?! (Note: I am not waiting for an answer and running the damn thing. The sun is not even up, and the neighbor’s souls are ever more broken. The warm white noise whishing through the floorboards to mangle their dreams with my unreasonable need to be seen and do and do and do and do even an extra more.)
Robert lays there, not moving. He knows the roadshow will end in time. I will be off again and out of his hair. A big body beneath the pink and purple- hued duvet at the center of our deco and ballet print peppered boudoir. He moves and snores and mumbles “Good job, baby.”
And so, after so much jumping about and sprucing my ass off, I am red lipstick applied and off again. Dog in tow to the office to talk to people and spend very little time in between sessions and client, friend, and family (the latter I rarely answer…) texts and check ins. Nearly each instant a time to be beheld by another.
To behold is not to be beloved. No, that for sure it is not. Yet it serves as a reality I am firm in and fond of. Independent work is too performance and deadline based. Each effort – this article as well – will be seen. Hated, perhaps? Yet to be loathed is to be known and thereby real.
Ask my therapist: I have very little ability to remember things I experienced alone, nor childhood memories not accounted for by another or captured via a camera.
Did you know the hours after our sessions, dear Clients, I am no more? Rising again only when our calendar alert strikes again, or an email reply is requested.
Obviously, I am making fun, yet only marginally. Something I have and, likely, always will struggle with is personality permanence. I am no chameleon, no - very steadfast Tracy I am for sure. Alone time, too: I actually love it. Why? Because I can disappear and not remember or recall or do or make. By myself I am not good and beyond repute. The universe opens up and I swim through. Not the socially identified me but a blissful being, who, when she emerges again into relationship is hard up to tell you how she spent the time. A lot of reading happens in that time.
The times between doing and doing again is so often filled with words – not my own, mind you. My own language is a plague I am happy to forget the symptoms of. Rather I seek to succumb to words birthed from the brands of books written to be read vs sentences to be responded to. Reading, for me and I would say in totality, is not a dialogue, but a servitude. The patient practice of beholding the breakdown of ‘the’ or ‘a’ World by another.
Oh sure, you best get an opinion. Does that stanza suck? Character falls flat or impactful plot point a stinko? Note that, but perhaps not at the moment. I would encourage you when reading this or anything – fiction most particularly- to do only one thing:
When reading - think only if you wish to continue or not. Oh, and do not question your answer!
In retrospect – the time in which you may emerge – is that time for critique. Yet at the temple of the words, I say the only question to live in your mind is this – am I to stop or proceed? That approach speaks to the peer to peer dynamic between reader and scribe. Do you wish to walk these lines together, or not ?
That is how I read a lot. I do so not to speak of the work, in the moment that is, yet to test the kinship of me and the author’s creation for the duration of our lives we may share if all goes well. This is where I go when the phone is off and the camera dull. It is at night. I am sleepy and not thinking too much about ‘what’ I am reading, but that I am. I let it be passive. I choose to trust this big show off of a brain that if there are lessons and recollections to come with me after the book is closed and the drool from my sleepy lips begins, it will. I retain what I like -what comes up again in the daylight of my days, as well as what particularly blows.
Like worship, I say reading is somewhat submissive. That takes trust and courage on all sides.
We think we read more for the same reason that we kick our asses to pray or meditate . For the belief that there is something bombastic that occurs there. Well, there isn’t. Any benefit is incremental and moreover, silent. We need not read Chaucer nor Hemingway. Memorize a psalm nor mantra. You can: there is a whole lot to all that. But what draws from the guts and realms of interest is just as powerful. A practiced worshiper, like the regular reader, can and does gain just as much from the checkout line as they do at the temple.
Pick up a volume that strikes you and try it as long as the interest holds. Allow it to be simple and free of reporting on. Talking about a book and being a studied reader is NOT the same thing. Apples and oranges, friends. One is study, the other voyeurism.
It took me a long time to choose to take on the active choice to talk about the books I read and have read. And in that, I do it with reason and to external ends. Not to flirt with overwrought scholarship, but towards wonder. The book clubs that occur under the SDYD banner are to engage attendees in both nuanced and broad understandings of a given book and books in general. All reading is good reading, and all readers are good readers. Wanting to read is of great value, too. Why? Because it is quiet and personal and impulsive. Thus, we, the SDYD Dream Teamsters, use our book clubs to get loud about lit. We back into the less worldly, invisible times where it is encouraged to look and listen.
Think of our reader events as meditation groups: a check in together and a go forth alone.
Take the staff, pick up the paperback, here is my hand, the signup info, no safety belt nor fee. Only a full glass of why not and big slice of what if!
See ya in the stacks!
