The lake, my lake, is an alternate time zone. It takes only an hour to get here, but it’s on a map in my head reserved entirely for me. This is what I wrote in my essay, “Becoming Mrs. Ramsay.” I was of course thinking of Virginia Woolf’s novel, “To the Lighthouse.”
“I am standing at the corner of the porch, no, just off the porch to the north side. The cedars that have since been cut down when they threatened the porch are still there, their trunks still thin. My angle of vision is low, because I am nine years old. Zip Pixler, as she was called, is standing so that she’s between the shining lake and me. She is still wearing her apron. She has walked down their steep hill to say that nothing will be the same, with Brownie gone. My grandmother. My grandmother who has come to my eyes now in place of Zip Pixler, long hair caught up but coming loose and blowing even though she had it bobbed years before she died. She is standing on the little bit of broken sidewalk between the cottage and the lake, looking out, as she did, watching for my father who has sailed so far out of sight he won’t be back in time for supper. Woolf would have put a lighthouse out there, something visible to yearn toward instead of the blank lake after the sailboat has rounded the point.”*
Floating the Jordan River, close to our lake.
Nowhere else on earth is time as porous as at my lake. But as I get older, it becomes less so. This is interesting to me, because you’d think it would be the opposite. I think what’s happened is that I have gradually absorbed my past. I am carrying it, since no one else can. I suspect any person my age would understand this. There is an isolation, an understanding that you alone know what you know, remember what you remember. It is not actually gone. It lives inside you and when you’re gone it will travel slowly out of your individual self and join the others who are on the other side of the thin divide. This is not to speak of heaven. This is to speak of the plain truth of the transparency and malleability of time.
When you write, you’re always reaching through the veil of time. Even if it’s only yesterday, it has still slipped away from today by an increment that requires invention to pull it back. And why would one want to pull it back? If you’re a writer, you want to make it live in this world a while longer, maybe. If you’re not, remembering makes up part of the bulk of your life. Adds to it. Gives it dimension and richness. Living “in the now” can never really exist because you’re never there. If you’re attentive, you see the “now” is filled with the past and probably thoughts of the future as well.
I’m philosophical today, aren’t I? My back is hurting, and I’ve noticed that physical pain pulls me inward. I walked a little too far yesterday, I guess, although it wasn’t even two miles. I try to analyze what I did, what I should and shouldn’t do. I blame this pain on radiation and chemo eight years ago. I wouldn’t be alive without those two devils, but now I have severe arthritis.
I thought you’d enjoy a photo of my great grandfather at the lake.
See, that’s how it works. You put together a story of how things fit together, because otherwise there seems to be no sense to things. There is no sense to things, ultimately, if we mean cause and effect: this thing caused that. There are so many causes, so many conditions, all working at once, there’s no way the simple formula, this equals that, can account for anything. But don’t you love a story? You can tell it and people will marvel, or cry, or laugh.
Here I am nearly done with what I have to say for today, and I still don’t know what it’s about, what I have to say about anything! The moral of this story is, just keep writing. A writer writes to find out what she has to say. Not to “make meaning,” but to spread life out in the form of words, words that come as close as possible to some reality she’s known, to bring that inchoate world into the world of words, where it’s transmissible. Where it can be shared.
So here I am, propped up by two pillows on the bed at 7:20 a.m., with my handy-dandy lap desk and my hand brace for my arthritic thumb, looking out the side windows at the lake, which is moody now, clouds overhead, but promising to clear up by 11. The lake is already in gentle motion, the wind from the north, which always means it will clear up.
The P.S. . . .
*The essay I quote from can be found in Mortality, with Friends, from Wayne State U. Press.
Thursday I’m going to record an interview with the inimitable John Mauk for his new series, “Prose from the Underground.” John is a wonderful writer and a laser-sharp reader. I’m excited to be a part of his series. When my segment is done, I’ll give you a link for it.