Our front lawn after yesterday’s snow.
It’s almost Thanksgiving. I’m sending this early because we’re flying to Richmond, which I dread. Not the visit, but the flight. It’s all so uncertain, and the wheel chair for Jerry is always iffy, even if it’s been promised. And short turnaround time. All those things to think about. I have been thinking a lot about uncertainty. I’ve been in a lot of it, writing-wise. I have this “diary” I’ve been writing, but it feels like the end of it after 46 pages. There’s a rounding out, a settling. It was all about my adjustment to this radical change, this move, wasn’t it? But what I have is too short for a book, too long for an essay. The daily push, though, has been good for my writing. You never know what’s coming, but you keep the keys moving. When you work on poems, every day is slow. The words don’t show up quickly.
It's been good for my writing to hunker down inside Virginia’s mind for a long time, her poor mind so tortured and driven, writing being the only ballast against madness, which finally of course got her anyway. But in the meantime, so much brilliance. She might not be your taste, I get that. I am slogging my way through The Years, which she and others felt was her best book. She sold many thousands of copies of all her books before they were even available! My quarrel with The Years is that it isn’t a long poem and isn’t a novel. I am willing to grant Orlando and The Waves honorary poemdom.
The bump-out area is our living room. It was originally an operating room for the state mental hospital. Many windows, including clerestory ones high up. (You need light to operate.) It bumped out from the rest to avoid the risk from explosions from ether.
Oh well, enough of that. It’s true that I’m feeling more at home here in our senior residential Club. It now feels uneasily good. It doesn’t quite feel “normal,” but it doesn’t feel “abnormal.” either. It’s been quite a week, the 8th anniversary celebration: a meal prepared by the chef from La Becasse restaurant, another special meal by our own chef, a year-in-review slide show and champagne toast, a video and talk about the restoration planning and construction of our building. All this is in my “diary.” But of course the diary is more an attempt to go under the surface, to pick up resonances and tones, feelings. In that sense it’s like a poem.
Molly just came out from under the bed! And it’s morning. She usually stays under there until after lunch. A sign of progress, of her feeling more okay about things? Then she went back under. Sigh.
This is important time, this in-between of writing projects. I say “projects,” as if writing were an erector set. There are several ways to live within this time. (1) Agonize and declare I’ll never write another good thing. (2) Forget writing and just read. With this method, every line I read suggests to me what I could be writing but I’m not. (3) Put any words at all on the screen, just to keep my fingers nimble. (Remember, I have arthritis in my thumb joint, so I no longer write by hand.) Each of these methods is deeply infused with the kind of despair apparently necessary to move on.
Writing has a lot to do with despair. One can never say what wants to be said, because words are not it. The “it” cannot be identified, cannot be contained. Cathedrals and monasteries have been erected to try to contain it. Or at least to try to explain around the edges of it.
I finished Virginia Woolf’s diary, the condensed version. The last entry is dated less than a month before she walked into the pond with rocks in her pockets. I leave her then, and look for another diary, autobiography. There is a fellow-feeling (what’s the gender-neutral of that?) in reading what has gone on in another writer’s mind. And also an encouragement, like sitting in a library where others are studying. All those books and all that quiet (one hopes) is a bit like a cathedral. You know where it’s pointing—to more reaching, more exploration, more dedication.
One corner of the library.
We have a decent little library here. I like seeing what others are reading, since many of their books end up on the shelves. I may eat these words, but at the moment I feel done with the kind of novel that offers “a good read.” Meaning, you’re entertained, as in “When Harry Met Sally.” You’re soaked into it till it’s over, then it disappears from your thoughts. I say that, but sometimes I need that sort of book. Or a mystery. An escape. But you (meaning me) can only loll on a tropical island so long.
Meanwhile, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving—my favorite holiday because it’s all food and people and no presents.
The P.S. . . .
I’m thinking there may be more to my diary. It just hasn’t come to me yet. Patience, I say to myself.