Photo by our patient and talented friend, Myrna Yeakle
Molly’s been peeing on the floor. Her litter box may not be to her liking. Or she may have a bladder/kidney infection, or she may just be stressed from the move. Moves. We just moved back from the lake, yet another dislocation among several in as many months. Cats are homebodies.
Me too. I’m not peeing on the floor, but my emotions feel dislocated. It’s not that I have writer’s “block.” Not that I can’t think of anything to write, not that my imagination’s run dry. It’s that I just don’t WANT to write. Well, poetry, anyway.
“What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do,” says Aristotle. I’ve been writing almost daily for so many years. What’s driven that? Some pleasure in making the words fit what I’m feeling. Some instinct to burrow into what I don’t know, to see what’s there. Some jealousy, some competitiveness with other writers, dead and alive. Some excitement, some anxiety at being alive.
What lies in our power not to do. It does feel at the moment a bit powerful, to choose not to write. To abstain. This has gone on for a couple of months, at least. In the meantime, I’ve been catching up sending poems to journals, a task I don’t enjoy. I’ve written a couple of essays with friends, using the friendship as a way to at least get a few words on paper. No poems. I don’t much want to read poems. All the young writers besotted with each other’s poems, I smile indulgently.
Molly is going to miss our little fireplace in the condo. But there are new advantages: many windows close to the ground.
I am old enough to know myself. I’m famous among those who know me for saying I’m not writing anything, that I won’t ever write another good thing in my life. I am not being dramatic. It’s that I believe this. I think I have to believe it to get back to the beginning. I somehow have to believe I’m finished.
Maybe I’d be better off with more optimism. I don’t think I’m depressed, just unwilling. If I thought of it as gathering my forces, then here I would be, at work again, plotting. It’s not that. You could say, well, you published two books in the last year and you have another one ready to go. No wonder. It’s not that.
Let’s call it a return to the roots. What if I’ve been blindly chasing the poem, writing because, you know, that’s what I do? Who would I be without that? From whence comes authentic writing? From whence comes authentic living?
From underneath.
Underneath the words is raw feeling, the shapes, the rhythms, that raw feeling creates and responds to. I suppose there’s no more “point” to writing than there’s a “point” to living. That doesn’t mean both aren’t glorious. That doesn’t mean they’re meaningless. They create their meaning out of themselves, on the fly.
But she does have this, a nice spot on the desk where she can see the bird feeders.
Today I’m going to buy a larger litter box. That will be the last try before I take Molly to the vet. My hunch is she doesn’t like the one we have, or she doesn’t like being penned in between the cabinet and the toilet. Oddly, she used it when we were in our temporary apartment for a month, no problem. I don’t understand cats. That’s what I like about them.
I don’t understand why I am the way I am right now. Is this what it’s like to be authentic? To feel the temporariness, the insecurity, of not knowing what’s next? In my best moments I see it as exciting, or at least interesting. In my worst, it feels kind of awful. The word awful. Full of awe.
The P.S. . . . . Since I wrote this, Molly has been to the vet. She’s okay, no physical problem, but now has her larger litter box and is taking calming chews for a while. She is using her litter box. She’s still skittish, but slowly beginning to calm down, although, I have to say, she’s an anxious cat. You would be, too, if you’d been a stray for months.