fractured ovenbird I came to the following idea from Lisa Baraitser (who writes about maternal subjectivity and the ethics of interruption) through Julie Phillips’ book The Baby on the Fire Escape, which was, in turn, quoted by artist Kerilynn Ming Ho at an artist salon yesterday. All three of these writers/artists are interested in questions of matrescence and what motherhood means when set against the desire to live a creative life, and all three are worth investigating in their own right. (I bought Julie Phillips’ book immediately after the salon and may have to acquire Baraitser’s too!) Baraitser writes that mothering is complicated by “the constant attack on narrative that the child performs: literally breaking into maternal speech…as well as [the mother’s] own self-narrative which is punctured at the level of constant interruptions to thinking, reflecting, sleeping, moving, and completing tasks. What is left is a series of unconnected experiences that remain fundamentally unable to cohere.” Phillips notes that “Instead of wishing for more coherence, Baraitser looks at what could be gained from embracing a shared self. Against the solitary writer in the tower she places a subjectivity that, itself interrupted, is alert to the questions that interruption asks of “normal” life…In fact, Baraitser argues, psychoanalytic theory has been saying for some time now that the unified self is an illusion. To recognize that well-boundaried self as a retrospective fantasy, rather than an indispensable writing aid, might help writers and artists cope with the “attack on narrative” that they suffer in caring for a child.” I had to take a serious second with all of that. Or maybe a few seconds, because my own train of narrative thought was interrupted three times during the salon by my oldest child sending me text messages because he HAD to know when his Amazon order was arriving. I suddenly realized that one of the biggest sources of distress over the past fifteen years of mothering has been a lack of uninterrupted time. I naturally pivoted in some ways. I started gravitating to art projects that could easily be picked up and put down because I was never guaranteed more than a few minutes at a time to engage with something, but I have mourned the lack of continuous quiet hours which allow the mind to enter a flow state. I have not done a good job of embracing my fractured subjectivity. Instead I’ve been yearning after uninterrupted time. One of my most persistent fantasies is having an entire day where no one asks me for a single thing and I have complete agency over how the hours are used. I’ve had a handful of days like that since having children and I salivate when I think of them. Creative expression and innovation requires stretches of protected time. Or so I believed. But Baraitser challenges this notion, insisting that there might be creative potential in a life interrupted. Maybe the fragmented nature of the narrative can be put to some use that pushes against the archetype of the poet who spends dark hours alone by candlelight in a locked room. Which brings me around, as so many ideas do these days, to Red. I’ve frequently wondered why this place has managed to hold my attention every single day for eighteen straight months when no other creative practice has stuck so consistently since having kids. And I think Baraitser points to one possible answer: Red itself is a fractured space. It is, by its very nature, interrupted. As you read you can interrupt every narrative by clicking on the internal links. Blather is built around the idea of creative interruption. Our voices cut into each other’s stories. Nothing is alone. (Or very little is alone. I think “taco_dip” is still alone, but that could change at any time). Blather rejects sacred solitude in favour of noisy collectivity, and because of that it makes space for shards and fragments of text that might not find a home elsewhere. What I’m seeing is that Blather’s own form reflects the interrupted narrative that Baraitser points to as a fundamental state of motherhood, and so it makes a lot of sense that I would find this place endlessly appealing. It is a space that not only tolerates fragments, but invites them. This essay, or whatever it is, is unfinished. In other spaces of formalized thought this would be considered a draft at best, and might not be much more than some rough notes. But here I feel that I have permission to let thoughts be unfinished, unpolished, unstable. I can come back to it, or not. It will take on a life of its own in conversation with whatever it links to and whatever words are added at some future date. Blather makes art of the fractured so it should appeal to the questing minds of those who do not have the luxury of unbroken time and must make what they can from the crumbs at the bottom of the bag. 260927 ... raze though i've never been a parent, this is all so deeply fascinating to me. not to mention resonant. i think blather (and this red place in particular) has allowed me to write in a way i've never felt i had permission to anywhere else for precisely the reasons you've articulated better than i ever could have. especially now, when exhaustion has sapped the fuel i once had for longer, more involved pieces of writing, something as conventional as a blog feels like a complete impossibility. here, i can show up exactly as i am. i can try to make something meaningful out of what words i have, however few of them there may be. and whatever i've got to give on the day is always enough. even if it's just a tiny poem about patio_furniture. (also, i'm kind of hoping eighteen months turns into eight hundred. please stay and blathe forever.) 260927 what's it to you? who go blather from