Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou?

5:00 PM

My friend Charles wrote about momentum in his blog http://wellnessvillage.blogspot.com/ the other day, and that's on my mind as I sit down to write this entry for July 4, 2009.

Charles chose this definition of momentum: "the power to increase or develop at an ever-growing pace," as his favorite. I like this definition too. Here's what I have to report.

I left town for two days and missed writing several posts. I said when I began this blog that I intended to post morning and evening everyday until August 1, and Jennifer had this to say about my lapses:

"....as your blog follower, I have to say I am a little let down. Promises broken. Have we no laptops? have we no wireless?"

I detect the ironic tone of affectionate prodding here, so this entry won't be dedicated to guilt and mea culpa, though I will say that I didn't do what I said I would do, and I plan to do better.

What I do want to mark about this couple of days' absence, is what it did to my momentum. I was moving right along there while I was showing up here twice a day as promised, excited about the possibility of WRITING MYSELF THIN, ideas popping, confidence rising, momentum.

When I let it go, forgot about what I said I would do, busy with other things and other places, momentum deflated like an old balloon. Here's what MARY OLIVER says about showing up to write when you promised you would:

"If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to met, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet--one or the other lagging, or afraid or busy elsewhere--there would have been no romance, no passion, none of the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different--it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

"The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem--the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say--exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself--soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.

"Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? BUT WE DO KNOW THIS: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo" (A Poetry Handbook, M. Oliver).

This is important advice if you are intending to WRITE YOURSELF THIN.