paula mcconnell

Me, at President Obama's Inauguration. Photo by Nick Widzowski.

I did not write last week. I was traveling to and from President Obama’s Inauguration. I tried to write, however; but the feelings, images, and bitter temperatures left me so overstimulated that it took days before I could think clearly again, and two more days still before I could “rub two words together,” as a teacher of mine would say. It was amazing. 

Amazing. What a cop-out for a writer with some tenure.

It isn’t that I can’t write about the shift that I witnessed – internal and external – I will; it is that our language doesn’t seem to hold enough water for me to spill out in adoration.  It’s probably just too soon. I came across this bit on the Poetry Foundation website by Clive James (emphasis mine):

When reacting to a poem, the word “perfect” is inadequate for the same reason that the word “wow” would be. But it isn’t inadequate because it says nothing. It is inadequate because it is trying to say everything. On a second reading, we begin to deduce that our first reading was complex, even if it seemed simple. Scores of judgments were going on, too quickly for us to catch but adding up to a conviction—first formed early in the piece and then becoming more and more detailed—that this object’s mass of material is held together by a binding force. Such a binding force seems to operate within all successful works of art in any medium, like a singularity in space that takes us in with it, so that we can’t pay attention to anything else, and least of all to all the other works of art that might be just as powerful. We get to pay attention to them only when we recover. 

So there it is. Amazing is the only low-hanging fruit I can reach until I recover. It feels inadequate not because “it says nothing. It is inadequate because it is trying to say everything.”

The National Exhale

I walked around the two-day event (I was also there for Martin Luther King Jr. Day) with my notebook in hand and thought about my two questions,

What are you creating?

When will you create it?

It appeared to me that one reason this event drew two million people was the need and desire to create something new. I felt a powerful vibe toward creation; some called it hope. Everyone had their own wish in the day, and I’ve never felt such a communal push toward creating something new. If I could have asked two million individuals “what are you creating?” I would have had two million individual variations on the same theme. If I asked “when will you create it?”, the answer would have rumbled the ground not unlike the sound from the speakers on the National Mall. The answer would have been NOW. Perhaps I, with Blogishness, am riding a current in this national zeitgeist  (which I dubbed “the National Exhale”) that is ripping open the National Creative Block. Perhaps we all have been creatively stunted and blocked as a result of our governing. This is not so far-fetched; consider the first two definitions of creation in the American Heritage dictionary:

cre·a·tion  (kr-shn)
n.
1.a. The act of creating.
b. The fact or state of having been created.
2. The act of investing with a new office or title.

Now, isn’t that interesting?

I’m not sure I could rightly describe what I experienced that day, not yet; but I think I’m getting a lay of the internal land of where I’m traveling. Yes, it was amazing. How? I awoke to a day, still holding my breath under water but seeing the shifting light above, swimming in a crowded pool and being jabbed with elbows, knees, feet. Hands, so many hands. The pressure in my lungs, in my heart was so great that I could barely stand it, and neither could the others; the pressure that kept us apart our whole lives underwater was finally expelling us to the surface with such a force it brought tears to the eyes. We grabbed for each other and for the first time could gratefully hang on without fear of reprisal, and while holding on to each other an oath spoken was the oxygen we needed. We exhaled. Together.