Issue 42, containing: The Perils of the Artistic Temperament; The Self, On Reflection; Commonplaces, &c.

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SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

What is a new year?

Arbitrary, really. The change from one state of being to another, shared with many, based on time rather than choice. Sometimes a melancholy alchemy, depending on how unfortunate the past or future might seem.

Either way, it’s an auspicious time. So let’s try and be auspicious.

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THE PERILS OF THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT

It’s been difficult to write, these last few months. My draft folder is littered with thousands of words and more than a few figure captions, but the galloping pace I managed before my surgery in September has come up against a fence that I simply haven’t had the energy to jump.

(What surgery, you ask? An extremely interesting one, the story of which is yet another few thousand words that have not yet come to fruition.)

There are several reasons why I might be blocked, not least of which is that I am still, quite literally, in a state of change from the Before to some uncertain kind of After. Energy that might be spent on writing is instead burned up in adjusting to whatever my new normal is becoming. And on top of that, I am fighting against the agoraphobic patterns I developed while spending eight weeks in recovery at home. I deliberately invoked the homebody habits of lockdown, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now– during winter break, when I have no office hours to force my hand– I seem to have forgotten how to find a world outside my apartment.

I twist, round and back again, on the subject of forgiving myself for this backsliding. I have healed remarkably well. I wish to continue doing so. Every day it seems as if there is a new thing to learn about my changed circumstances– my body behaving in ways unexpected, my inner cues disrupted, anticipated results upended in favor of disconcerting revelations. For eight weeks at home, it was the same– except that I was forbidden (by both my surgeons and, very often, my screeching viscera) to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk. That particular precept is gone, and so I am thrust back into the world… but that is the only thing to have changed.

What is normal now? I don’t know. It’s still shifting.

I discovered yesterday that a quarter of my belly button has no feeling. I am tired in the evening, more tired than I have been in years, but I wake easily in the morning. Dairy has never been a particular friend, but now I can hardly stand the feel of bloated fullness. Coffee? No, no need. I drink a small cup of cold boxed coffee in the morning, along with all my other medications, and don’t seek out any more than that.

Is it better to rest? Is it better to move? How far must I go before I find myself again?

These are the things that stop me holding still long enough to write. Or, at least, to finish writing.

The arc of my recovery seems set on proving perpetual motion. I know the principle doesn’t exist; but the machine keeps running anyway. Until I can find the hidden lever that lets me come to rest, I am here, in flux, adjusting, learning, testing, recovering.

Someday I will know myself again.

This is something I must remember.

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THE SELF, ON REFLECTION

One of the many things I did while recovering at home was work diligently on my website. It involved reconstructing who I am online a bit– integrating new aspects of my academic life into my fiction-writing one, for a start, and deciding who I am (or rather, how I wish to be seen) when viewed digitally. Bringing things I’m proud of together into one spot; organizing them; reorganizing them; redefining them until they fall into categories that make sense both to me and to, hopefully, those seeing them for the first time.

It’s been interesting to do. “Cathartic” isn’t the right word, though it’s close. Much like the changes to my body that I am slowly learning, these changes to my sense of self are ones that I am finally examining and trying to align to some logical progression of Then to Now.

(Because: I would rather there was a slow shift that I ignored or missed– but was nonetheless an “aha! Of course, what else could have happened but that” path of change– than a radical, cataclysmic readjustment with no presaging cause. It would be disconcerting to discover a Different me, or a Me that had always been there but I had never recognized, or a Me that never was, and isn’t currently, but is rather just a flashing mirage on the journey to Someone Else, an interesting snapshot but not a Self to hold up as a permanent reflection.)

(I am, perhaps, overly interested in being only ever Me, unchanging and always accurately drawn. It makes doing some things more difficult than they ought to be.)

To that end, and in trying to improve my more tepid shortcomings: I still love this little magazine for personal and household thoughts, for diaryist entries, for LiveJournal-like navel gazing. But I think I want to move the articles of research and experimentation out from under its wing and let them fly free as blog entries all their own.

And so if you’re looking for further stories of soap, they are forthcoming– but not here, Gentle Reader. Not here.

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COMMONPLACES

From Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men:

She wasn’t being brave or noble or kind. She was doing this because it had to be done, because there was no way that she could not do it. She thought of:

…Granny Aching’s light, weaving slowly across the downs, on freezing, sparkly nights or in storms like a raging war, saving lambs from the creeping frost or rams from the precipice. She froze and struggled and tramped through the night for idiot sheep that never said thank you and would be just as stupid tomorrow, and get into the same trouble again. And she did it because not doing it was unthinkable.

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

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If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line:

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print.

Alternately, commenting on this post will get you a similar result, with much less fuss.

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-Until next time, be safe.