Vase in a closet
I keep on with my diary. It’s become my main thing, poems taking a back seat. I have never before taken such a risk, spending so much time on something that I can’t be sure anyone is going to want to publish. Publish, yes. I’m not doing this for my own amusement, or my own therapy as Jerry and I have moved ourselves into this bastion of old age. It’s always creation. It’s always wanting to make something, an object like a vase, to be taken in by other eyes. You don’t sculpt a vase to hide it in the closet.
I think this is May Sarton’s house by the sea.
Of course every poem’s a risk, maybe more so. Who knows if it will catch a spark of light from some distant star and become a good poem? But this months-long project, geez. How many months, and when will it be over? I’ve now read diaries by Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, and May Sarton. How different these three women are! I carry around May Sarton in my mind, her magnificent flower garden, her long view of the sea. It makes me smile. It comforts me the way it did her. Anais Nin—what a raw tangle of neurosis she prefers to study in others! Virginia, however grand, her drivenness couldn’t last. She makes me tired.
It's hard now to separate these Wobblies from my diary, because this is also a diary. Diary-wise, I can say I’m feeling more settled here. Sheer repetiton will do it for you. You get up looking at the same walls, you sit on the same sofa looking out the same windows, and pretty soon it seems like home. As long as you have your things around you. I think every day of people around the world whose homes have been blasted to smithereens. If they find a place to huddle, it’s never home. What that does to the mind and the heart.
When I think of Fayetteville, I think of Dickson Street.
I don’t think I’ll ever feel as settled as I did in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I grew up. Where I lived with my two children until my remarriage and the move to Delaware. I call it settled, but honestly, when I think of it, eventually it was more like clinging to the mast of a ship in a storm.
Settled is like a good marriage. You don’t keep looking elsewhere because where you are is just fine. It’s home.
I’ll never be a native here in Michigan. I’ll never be entirely “home” again. When you leave your childhood place, your adolescent place, your young adult place, you tear yourself up by the roots. And that seems like a good thing. You must leave home. You may later go back home, as some people do, but you’re changed. Same with travel abroad. I suppose same with viewing the earth from the moon. In a way, you grow up. There’s a gap between you and your environment that is a freedom.
When you’re an infant, you don’t know the difference between you and your parent. It’s all one nurturing system. Gradually you see the gap. It’s hard, requires a lot of screaming, sometimes. But it’s all necessary.
Wow, how did I get here with these thoughts?
As I was saying, I can hardly wait to get back to my diary every day. On walks, in the middle of making the bed, I think of what I want to say. I’m living my life in duplicate, which is very interesting to me. When I was in cancer treatment, I was the same way with the Wobbly Bicycle. What to write was on my mind all the time, a way to manage, to shape what was happening to me.
This is similar, but not quite. I wasn’t at all in charge of the chemo, the radiation, the simultaneous detached retina, for heaven’s sake! This time feels like a freedom. I want to write a diary, for whatever reason. It presents itself to me as a new prose form, and frankly, an exciting one. I predict more diaries and journals in the near future. The popularity of memoir opened the door. In what feels like a dehumanized, Tik Tok environment, the deeply human, the deeply intimate, the immediate, is a balm.