However any of us may feel about the new year coming up, it is a new year after all, with all sorts of possibilities. Like a blank sheet of paper. Of course nothing is really blank. I, for one, have my prejudices, my proclivities, my history hovering over every new thing I write. I’m bent, and that’s not a bad thing. There’s my parents, my timid and kind mother, my brilliant but autistic father, my two sisters, each carrying scars similar to mine. There’s my grandfathers and grandmothers on each side that I can still see and hear vividly, each “side” so different, the halves of me at opposition through them.
Further back, the stories I was told about my family, the successes, the illnesses. I wasn’t told much. My father lived in the present. My mother just coped, which keeps a person in the present.
It’s the new year and I find myself not assessing, but gathering up the past, to move on. Moving on happens every minute, of course, but when the clock chimes, if you have a chiming one, the time is noted in a different way.
It’s a hard time in our history, but there have been many of those. It’s a fragile time; there have been those, too. Not to diminish the extraordinariness of now. I am convinced that the words we speak and the ones we put on paper actually, seriously, shape reality. Of course we have this present splintering into craziness and sanity, into delusion and clarity, and all the gradations in between. But the words we use, what we say, can quickly or slowly turn the tide. I think so.
You think I mean politically. But the minute I start speaking politics, you’ll put me in a box, a box made of your own history, your own proclivities. The work is to break through all that. On the surface sits the easy work, the cliché, the expected words. Under them, that’s where the hard work comes in, where we surprise even ourselves by finding the roots of what we mean. Even word roots are helpful. I’ve been able to look up word roots and find a new direction under the one I thought I had.
I sent back three chairs before I picked this one. I love it. The ottoman, same story. I’m a bit picky.
I think I’m preaching. That’s when I know I’d better return to the concrete. I don’t know anything. I have no sermon worth listening to, other than the sound of our clock, the Christmas lights outside my window, my own fears and joys. The coffee sitting here on its little warmer, my Mac computer, sitting on its clever lap desk that can be adjusted in height. My new writing chair that I picked out this year. Oh, is it a new year? Time is much more pliable than ticking. It’s scary to think, but a new year has been in progress all along. The roots of this new year are deep in the past.
I think what I most appreciate about a good poem is its sense of timelessness. A good story, too. The more specific it is, the more we can visualize it, the more we can take it in and make it our story, in the present. Does that make sense?
What a good year it has been for me, as a writer! But this year was preceded by months and years of despair. I was sure I was finished, had written myself out. I’ve felt that way many times. There’ve been times I’ve sat at my computer putting down words, any words, randomly, as a discipline. If I have nothing to say, I’ll just go on saying it. Nothing nothing nothing nothing over and over. I will die writing meaningless garbage, but I will keep at it. Discipline.
Why don’t you just rest on your laurels? Jerry used to ask until I wisened him up. Because the past is gone. Because what matters is what I’m doing now. Because there is still so much to write. Because I’m getting better, I swear I am. Because I don’t yet know what I can do.
I didn’t set out to “be” a writer. I loved to write, and kept doing it.
I didn’t set out to be this age, in this place, with this life. It’s a surprise to me. Life is astounding. Astoundingly terrible, sometimes, but still astounding [M.E., “to stun”].
Please remember to order “Doctor of the World” before January 24, to get the pre-publication discount. I’ll be happy, because I’ll get a tiny bit more royalties, and the press will be happy.
