LOITERING WITH INTENT
December 6, 2015
Today is Epifania (Epiphany) here in Italy, yet another festa. And like all festas here, it’s serious business, which means no business. I doubt there’s a shop or office open anywhere in the land, something my dear Joel, being a New Yorker, finds hard to believe, perhaps even disconcerting. Me? No. Love it. Official permission to loiter.
I’ve actually been loitering for three days. Feeling the desire to write and yet having nothing in mind, I’ve allowed myself to simply do whatever occurred to me next; whether it was making a pot of soup, gluing bits of wood to the bottom of the cutlery drainer in order to cure its soggy bottom or going for a walk along the winter lane.
On Sunday I read a review of a collection of essays by Charles D’Amboise. The collection entitled “Loitering,” was reviewed by another fine essayist, Phillip Lopate, who opened by saying:
“The great promise of essays is the freedom they offer to explore, acknowledge uncertainty, to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction… to engage in intimate conversation with one’s readers….to uncover some unexpected truth.”
In order to loiter one must indeed embrace uncertainty, a state which most of us do our best to avoid as often as possible, which may be why we view loiterers with suspicion. But I prefer to go with the dictionary definition that refers to loitering as ‘waiting around without apparent purpose.’
It seemed to me, on Sunday, that this would be a wonderful gift to myself. A gift of rebellion in the face of 68 years of subscribing to the judgmental warning from parents, teachers, spouses, and peers that to hang around aimlessly is a sin that will lead to a permanent character defect. Well bugger ye off all ye puritans.
One of the great rewards of going willy-nilly through a day is that you stumble on things that might cause an epiphany. For instance, one might discover that apart from being the 12th day of Christmas, the Epiphany was the day the three kings arrived…royalty... always late. But way before they arrived, in fact circa 1996 BC, the Egyptians celebrated the winter solstice on this day. One might also, while loitering through the pages of the latest New Yorker magazine, come upon an article by Adam Gopnik in which he paraphrases the French philosopher, Pierre Bordieu:
A dominant class reproduces itself by enforcing firm rules about what is and is not acceptable, and creates a closed, exclusive language to describe it. Those who have power decide what counts as art, and to enter that field at all is possible for outsiders only if they learn to repeat the words that construct its value.
I couldn’t agree more. And I felt that this observation tied in with the Lopate quote.
Let me try to explain. A couple of weeks ago, I received 2 more rejections from London agents and a surprising thing happened. Their rejections had absolutely no negative effect on me. Quite the contrary; their comments made it perfectly clear to me that they had read my novel as agents, not as readers; that they are part of a dominant group that decides what is and isn’t art, and as the outsider, I wasn’t speaking their exclusive language. An epiphany! Exactly the result I had hoped to gain from loitering.
Of course, there is a fine line twixt loitering and procrastination. Yesterday I made some notes for this essay, thrilled not to actually have to write it. But by this afternoon my capacity for loitering reached its limit and I entered the realm of procrastination. I felt much as I did 13 years ago when I first attempted to write said novel, i.e., that I was not well equipped to explore and articulate its inherent complexities. Yet, with Lopate’s, encouragement I have attempted, this afternoon, “to engage in intimate conversation with my (one’s) readers, to uncover some unexpected truth.” Essay, as a way toward epiphany.
And let us loiter around the word essay for a moment, which has at its root “to try.” For me, the unexpected truth of today’s attempt is that loitering once in a while is a way of experiencing the random quality of a day. The beauty of loitering, is that it distorts the concept of time because it has no aim, and only in aimlessly wandering can we be surprised by the timeless interconnectedness between every thing, and every one...
