Guest post by Lisa Lopez Snyder
Disruptions of Circumstance
Recently my laptop went into a spiral: Web sites were re-directing themselves
to other sites and my email was working half the time. Worried I had a virus,
I called a repairman who then came to the house. He did a quick analysis,
grumbled something about the hard drive, and took it home to work out the kinks.
Most of my work was saved on a flash drive, I had access to another computer and
I was without major deadlines. Yet after he left, I suddenly felt paralyzed. I
paced about the house. I was uprooted, without routine. I felt momentary panic.
I was reminded of Carl Sandburg and how he dealt with the disruptions of
circumstance. When Sandburg and his wife Paula moved from the northern
shore of Michigan to Connemara, a spacious home in the mountains of Flat Rock,
North Carolina, he was in the midst of finishing his second biography of Lincoln,
working on a screenplay for MGM, and had not yet started three other pieces of
writing that were two years overdue.
“Moving is a terrific business heavy accumulations of note and manuscripts so
much of it unfinished and irreplaceable,” he groused without punctuation in a
letter to his sister Mary, “and of course it aint the work—it’s all the goddam
decisions that wear a fellow down.”
To minimize any disruptions, Paula, a breeder of prize-winning dairy goats, had
replicated the layout of her husband’s study from their previous Michigan home
in their new place.
Still, a self-proclaimed “eternal hobo” and a frequent traveler, Sandburg
always went back to his routine of quiet, paper and pen when he hit the road.
He wrote about these times in “Galuppi.”
Give me a quiet garret alone
Where I may sit for a few casual callers
And tell them carelessly, offhandedly,
“This is where I dirty paper.”
Thus each poet prays and dreams.
The eternal hobo asks for a quiet room
with a little paper he can dirty,
with birds who sit where he tells ‘em.
In another instance, while in a Hollywood hotel that MGM put him up in,
Sandburg complained, “I’ve been here three days now in all this elegance and
I can’t do a lick of work here.” Shortly thereafter, the poet moved in
temporarily with Lilla Perry, a friend who let him stay at her house in a third
floor room, where she placed two empty wooden apple crates, one on top of the
other, for his typewriter, to make it more “homelike.” Sandburg and Perry
had a good laugh about it, but later Perry noted that Sandburg indeed used the
crates, and that he worked “with tremendous zest and interest.”
So with those stories in mind, I put away my ridiculous worry. I grab my
notebook, I get the flash drive to plug into the other computer. I am not lost.
I have paper, a printer and options. I have choices about “where I dirty paper.”
-- Lisa Lopez Snyder