writer’s block

These everyday meanderings into my memories and feelings have been difficult to capture in words in recent weeks. I have sat to say something, but somehow, the need is gone to express these things, or even to understand them. I looked back for inspiration, back into the archives of this blog, and found so much, so many words that cradled a sad present with memories–bittersweet, but distant–of the past.

A friend recently quoted Dr. Seuss to me, not in nonsense rhyme, but in some moment of surprising lucidity: “you know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” Do I love? I imagine I do. I do. And in this space of wonder and peace, words escape me faster than I can catch them. Perhaps I no longer chase them so hard.

I have had moments where I desperately wanted to produce something, to write, and felt myself unable to let go of my real world enough to escape into the realm where I create my world. It is not always in blissful states–and love is not always blissful, after all. It is in complete states, states where the distances between truth and reality seem to need no translations. It is in moments where the translations seem futile. It is in moments where translations seem to mar the experience–where just being is just enough.. like a camera in the way of an adventure. It is in moments where the beauty of expression–someone else’s expression–overwhelms me.

I find myself reading voraciously in recent weeks, listening to music, simply letting it all be mine. I absorb so much now, so much, and wish for some record to be here, to play back the waves of emotions in all of this, and then chastise myself for not recording this myself. I write now of writer’s block.. my laziness, my acceptance of the world, all its terror and its sweetness together. I write of this frustration of not being able to write, all in some effort at a jump start.. or do I? Perhaps it is more to justify it to myself.

I do write, though not here. I write a story now of the sun shining through lace hung near a window, the shadow on the wall behind it, but this is now what I want to say to the world? oh, if the world reads… I wish to tell a story, perhaps to leave my love alone to grow slowly. My words have always been direct here, related to my own world. But my world now begs for its privacy. Words now come as inspiration, woven from the feelings, but not from the deeds. I return to my story of lace, and love and laziness and lust… the time has come to move beyond the blog. I have known it for some time–and perhaps tomorrow I shall nostalgically return, write of my children, my thoughts of the moment. But no.. the next time you read me–those of you who do read me–it will be as you turn the pages of that book–yes, it is this that I want.

2T

It was still on the hanger, there underneath other clothes at the bottom of a laundry basket. Size 2T, the label said, as if I needed objective measures to remember whose blouse it was. Blue, with a flower right in the center, the same flower that was repeated on the missing pants.

I needed to unfasten a little button on the back of the blouse to take it off the hanger, unbuttoning it, as if to slip it over a sleepy head. Hurry, hurry, I could always think on those endless exhausted days, dressing children who had no particular interest in my urgent need to get their sibling to school on time, to get to a doctor’s appointment on time, to get to the grocery store and home on time, to get anywhere on time. And we never were on time, hardly ever, as I remember it, but I may be wrong. I remember nothing really now of what I was supposed to be doing on those days. I remember nothing but the giggle as a head and hands popped through a blue blouse with a flower on it.

All smiles and curls, running out of the bedroom unbuttoned, pantless, looking back to see if I would chase her… Of course I did–we were late, weren’t we?–and she let me catch her for a hug, silly girl.

The hug and the hair and the crinkled up nose: this I remember of those days, those days I used to hate, when all the world seemed to depend on time, when in fact time never mattered at all.

fig

I found a fig at the Market Basket today. Thirty cents of luxury just lying there, waiting.

Figs are exotic and familiar. My first exposure to figs was in the cookie–those cellophane rectangles of stacked cookies from a yellow box. Nabisco has tried putting raspberry filling in them, maybe other flavors. It just seems wrong. Figs. Dried figs in a market on the Hill… I bought them, pretty as they were strung like a necklace, dried, like dates, Mediterranean sweetness right in my own home. Not a raisin, not a prune, but some promise of Italy, if desiccated, distant, drained of all its vitality.

I never saw a fresh fig as a child. Fruits like that were just not known in our world. Figs like that were on botanical prints, in Gourmet Magazine photos, on Mottadehah, with crème fraîche, all drizzled with honey, on a table, on a patio with a misty blue sea just there on the horizon. They never had things like that in the musty midwest, in the suburbs of perfectly functional cities that perhaps contained past wonders, some glorious past that I must have missed. I was instead sentenced to a mundane existence that was good for nothing, I thought, except my pondering a life beyond it.

A fig is a filthy fruit. Scandalous to eat them, especially as I ate my first one, desperate to try one–a little unsure my French really was a language people understood. Amazing–un demi kilo de figues–they did! and I bought them, a lot of them, and I ate them right there, right there in the market on a September afternoon when I was in Paris and amazed to be in Paris, and aware–quite aware–that I would later look back on those months I spent there as something as glorious as I had always imagined they would be. And I do. Oh yes, Paris was all I ever dreamed it might be, awnings and flowers and coffee. And figs! Oh yes, I really did eat my first one right there in the market, unsure how to do it, so I just bit into it, skin and all. Are you supposed to eat the skins? I still don’t know and I still do, and I still love them that way most, just biting into the skin and flesh and seeds. Nothing like a Newton! Lush and wonderful, lively. And yes, I still imagine those yellow-skinned figs when I eat them now, carrying the few I have left through the streets in a 14e arrondissement in my dreams. They are not a madeleine, not comforting and childlike in my mind, but evocative still, and indecent, and full of sin and lust.

june

It is yellow–yes, bright yellow, because that’s my favorite color—and I would be driving it, of course, because I know where I am going. The top is down on the sunniest of days, and I am wearing a dress, a scarf, sunglasses, and the basket and the bag and the towels wait patiently in the back seat. These things take time, after all.

I take the long route. It drives you crazy, I know, but it is all worth it, this journey. I love to watch the scenery, to feel the wind and the sun and your hand absentmindedly grazing my shoulder, finding a curl that escaped protection, now twirled gently around your fingers, now pulled, a little less gently. We will be there soon.

Summer will come, I am convinced, despite these cool evenings and rainy days. Summer will come, and we’ll find a place to park. We’ll open the doors and run, run, through rocks and sand and water and sun and laughter and the calm that waves bring us. We’ll find it: we’ll find June.

mount greylock

We climbed. It had been too long since we had done this: too many days, weeks, months of living in our minds, far from earth and air. I had nearly forgotten.

My son and I made our way west to the hills, the small towns and the pastures, remembering a time when life was sweeter, simpler perhaps. But then again, no. It just feels that way when you look back in time. You forget the complications that filled the days and remember every moment in just one glorious moment, a boy holding berries in a bowl on a clear Vermont summer day, and you think that this is what life always was back then. You forget the times the electricity going out for days at a time, and the fleas that bit your ankles, and the dirt and the manure spreaders and the people at the town hall who mocked you privately–not so privately–because you were not one of them. You forget the dishes and the laundry and the clutter on the dining room table and the emails, and life becomes nothing but a berry tart cooling on the back porch. It was all right then, all right to be a little different, all right to let the bread rise and to have this life this wonderful life of clear days and berries and little boys.

And little boys grow up. They do! Right before your eyes they grow up and become little men, or big boys, and some days the difference between the two seems enormous; some days it hardly matters. And when we are hiking in the woods up a mountain, it does not matter at all. We are hiking, and the bugs are fierce, so we do not make it to the summit. It is humid, if not hot, and the sweat is sticking to our backs as we make our way through the woods, higher in the green wildness, sweeter still by the faint smell of lilacs, or clover. Oh yes, this I had forgotten, this sensual journey in life, these days now of the best things we find on this earth.

We climbed Mount Greylock yesterday, not to the summit. But we climbed. Then we drove. We stuck our heads out the windows, and looked at the hills, green hills, hills with cows and limestone and ponds. We drove, crossed back up into Brattleboro, across to Keene, and then back down, down toward home, slowly, slowly finding our way through this state, this state where we truly can drive one direction for two hours to find mountains, another direction to find the ocean. We passed the deer crossing, the duck crossing, the bear crossing, and saw none of those animals, but crossed beavers, cormorants, pileated woodpeckers, wrens, and finally, close to home, our friendly heron. And then we found home, a porch and iced green tea. And in the evening I sank into my bath, hills still in my mind clearly then as sleep sank into me, moments to remember, later, when enough time has passed for my mind to play tricks on me, when I remember only the things that really mattered.

streets and roads

It was a heron there, lumbering above the water—always auspicious, or so I had deemed these sightings years earlier. This was a new road, to another person, a home visit, the dispensing of some help, or hope, as the job requires. Sometimes a call comes from a nearby street, sometimes on a road miles away.

Hard to offer hope when life dispenses bad news. Incurable diseases, life-altering accidents, or something gone wrong from birth: this is the world I see day after day, home after home. I offer not hope, though, but options, or so my job says. I offer options for people to stay in their homes, or anywhere out of a nursing home or whatever other institution may beckon the likes of them. I offer options for lives gone wrong, for lives to be right.

What I offer more is time, and ears to hear the stories of these lives, often long, memories entangled among old thorns that grow sharper as the years go. I wish to tell these stories, but to do so would be betrayal. I absorb the stories instead, and hang them to the roads I see, the birds, the trees and paths that lead me to them and away.

These miles are oddly satisfying. Wandering has never been my forté, despite youthful dreams of faraway places. The town, the people: yes! That sort of adventure… But in my adult life, I have sought roots, community, company, laughter, support. For all the wishes for exotic locales, I found adventure, then grew up. I craved what I might have left behind. The lonesome road never held much appeal for me, at least, not as a way of life.

Some hitch a ride with the wayward wind and head off to never-ending adventure. Such is the cult of the cowboy, the loner, the rebel. It is a romantic notion, this wandering, this quest. It may offer refuge, in its way. The road may offer a way out.

And you? Wander on, go, if you like. If you do, your door remains shut, your home ever empty. Perhaps I’ll never find you.

The road may offer a way in. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten the road long and winding that leads not to wandering, but to a door, the door. I had forgotten the odyssey. I had forgotten you.

Perhaps I’ll find you.

unthinkable

The crazy thing about mental illness is that it is so often coupled with absolute and incredible genius.

Phil Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder this week. It was a horrible crime, though not inconceivable to some that Spector could have pulled the trigger that killed Lana Clarkson six years ago. It seems that there was not a lack of evidence that Spector was one troubled individual.

RJ Eskow writes about the verdict in the Huffington Post as the death of “madness chic”. It seems that the man whose first hit came from an engraving on his father’s grave had many demons. Family history, perhaps: Spector’s father got things off to a start by committing suicide. The stories pouring out during the trials and before were often–as Eskow notes–the stuff that celebrity insanity is made of.

But still, I doubt that “madness chic” will ever end. When I heard Spector’s name in the news again, the first thing I did was to dig up a Ronettes album. Guilty or not, Spector produced a sound that at its best is simply sublime. After all, I want a “Marshmallow World” when winter comes around. I want to believe in a wall of sound that is as great in the real world as the space it creates in my imagination.

Mental illness besides, it is hard to reconcile these things, the beauty and the terror. I do not know how we make sense of a world that seems damned to have both, and often so intricately entwined. Abusive relationships thrive on this sort of cognitive dissonance. So do all sorts of scams. We so sincerely want to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. We want there to be a rhyme and reason for all the bad things that happen to people. Somehow, there are no victims, only people who deserve it–if not in this life, then as punishment from a past life. How in our world could a nice guy hurt his wife unless she provoked him? How could a person who produces an eternal piece of splendor also destroy another person without justification? It simply doesn’t make sense, and we will defend the appearance beyond the facts for as long as we possibly can.

Come to find out, there is a term for this. “Magical thinking” (see Psychology Today’s article by Matthew Hutson on this in the Mar/Apr 2008 issue) may well be our only hope. It turns out that at least to some extent, we need to believe in our good world simply to survive in it. But what then do we make of the incongruities when they slap us in the face?

We are shocked. We do not want to believe. We pray the facts are not true. And then, we grieve.

We seek resolution. In the end, life is nothing if not a paradox. In the world of creativity, then, believing in a sort of “madness chic” can make the bad-behind-the-scenes stuff all okay. Rather than pushing the starving artist and the eccentric musician to the madhouse, they go to detox, and reserve their place in our society. It lets us have our beautiful-beyond-belief, never-ending cake, and the devastation of watching as the artist eats at it himself, and with very bad manners.

The concept itself of “genius” was not celebrated before the age of Romanticism. In the Romantic view of genius, inspiration is not for everyone. Certain people have a gift above and beyond the previous conception of talent acquired through diligent practice. Gifted programs in schools now thrive on this notion of thinking “outside the box,” honoring the spirit of schoolchildren who do not sit quietly and learn, but who are bored and doodling strange pictures and tapping the other students because the classroom is insufficient for their advanced minds.

Pushing the boundaries is good, necessary, and hardly new: our world would have long ago become stagnant without it. In the realm of artistic expression, we cherish this creation of something new from nothing. It is the essence of magic, and it feeds our souls. Pushed to an extreme, in a sort of iconic worship of the creator, we may encourage narcissism. We may sometimes leave room for self-justification of criminality in some people–for some very real people, whose impulses good and bad remain all too human. Ah! but are these creators not greater than ourselves to some extent? Are they not immortal, if by the eternal existence of their creations? We do believe in these gods, if in human form. Perhaps genius trumps mental illness, de-stigmatizes it, at least on some level. At least, until something terrible happens.

In the real world, mental illness truly can be a sort of hell. As much as those who do not live with it on a daily basis may accept the illness of a creative genius, we who love a person with mental illness often grasp onto the rose that grows so improbably from the ashes in this hell. The beauty is sometimes the one thing that reminds us of our love. But it is never the whole story.

girl with cat, black and white, c. 1935

It was a quilting party that day, my mother remembers. A quilting party, and she, little girl then, was allowed to stitch her part between two of her mother’s friends. It may have been one of the quilts that are downstairs on beds now, pink fabric uniting the memories of a family’s wardrobe, worn and recycled in this most marvelous of ways. So my mother, lady that she was at the advanced age of four years old, sewed, and then was distracted.

The distraction was a knock at the door. A man with a camera offered his services, and my grandmother, feeling generous that day, as she did many other days it appeared by the cat symbol on their fencepost, let him in. Yes, a picture would be quite nice, it was decided, and my mother positioned herself on the wicker couch. Her mother put a bow in her hair. Inky, one of the black cats (the other being Egbert, not present), jumped up on my mom’s lap, and the picture was complete.

The photographer visited for perhaps three years, and made pictures all of those years. Some of those photographs seem to be missing now. But this one–my mother’s favorite picture of herself–remains on a shelf in her living room, with all the memories of a childhood and a life whose pieces, retold, are precious layers of our own lives.

march, reconsidered

Warm rain Wednesday put me into a more apt mood for the month, a mood of bliss, a reconsideration of the landscape and the season. Who could not be enthusiastic about March’s longer days, the kiss of sun, however short-lived?

This mood juxtaposes that of my previous post, I realize. What a grump! I was gently reminded of the idea that spring could be a good thing just shortly after I posted that last installment, called simply “march”. Well, that hardly sums it up.

The reminder of what the season symbolizes brought me to past years, when winter was so long. By winter, I mean deprivation and suffering, cold isolation and pain. I realize that the season can have its beauty, and indeed, the cold period of my life did have its brightness, too.

In Vermont, spring is a long and tortuous process, as the world buried beneath snow reappears, rusted, aged, rotted, or at least a bit worn down. Sap runs, and steam rises from the maple houses for some time as the days get longer. Ice still coats the surface, until at last the ground softens, oozing, cracking and heaving. Ferns pop up magically, and the hills change from white and gray to pink, then green.

I had left Vermont by the time I found a spring in my life. I looked around at what stuck out as the sun shone upon it, and found myself emboldened to tell a secret that I thought incredible. When the person I told believed me, I ran home and wrote it down. Like finding a precious clue buried beneath layers of dirt, I scrubbed the surface of that life, there all along, and found that the secret was much bigger than I realized. I wrote for many days, and then went back and showed my words to that person again. My words, written, held the truth of my world as I discovered it–there always, only invisible. My words, ultimately, transformed that world. But not by themselves. No, this renewal came only half from its creation; it had to have a reader, a helper, to make it real.

Spring comes here melting and blooming, and brings a summer that we do not yet know. What will grow in this climate? What was planted there? And what will we do in this landscape? The sun will shine, soon, and in the heat of the day, we will watch the world grow, trim it, edit and transform it as if it had never been dead to us. This is as it should be. We will change our growing world, and take it for granted, and love it, even as we create still another season in our life.

march

Why such a fascination with this month, of all months? March. March Hare. Ides of March. It is really not a pleasant month, after all. St. Patrick’s Day. Easter, perhaps. Passover, maybe. Spring.

March is all full of hope and symbols of renewal and whatnot, and still manages to disappoint, to frustrate, to dump inches, feet of wet snow, useless snow melting, radiating penetrating cold, with wind to add to it. What good does it bring us?

Spring promises so much. We embrace that fluke warm breeze, the shadow in the late afternoon. We want more. We want to shed our coats, walk, ride bikes, open the porch door. I want to. I want to be warm again. We have to wait. March makes us long for spring, as if it will never come.

And does it, really? Does spring really exist? Is the gradual warming in our imagination? Is spring anything more than occasional summer-like conditions thrown into the mix of winter itself, offering nothing more than a tease? A stick, a stone. Mud. Águas de Março.

Every time spring comes around, I think of Jobim’s famous song. “It’s the promise of spring. It’s the love in your heart.” And I had an image in these “Waters of March” of things budding in the woods, birds reappearing, snow melting. In that multitude of images (“It’s stick, it’s stone, it’s the end of the road. It’s ..), I always imagined winter ending. At least, I did, before I read the lyrics in Portuguese.

“São as águas de março
fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida
no teu coração.“

No, March is not always the spring it seems. Turn the world upside from where I sit, and March is September.

“They’re the waters of March
closing the summer.
It’s the promise of life
In your heart.”

Here in the northern hemisphere, I find myself mostly in a bad mood throughout March. All that “in like a lion” stuff wears thin as I keep looking for the lamb in the deal. I grump by, just wanting to be done with the month. Now, this is Massachusetts, though. March can be challenging in Missouri, where I grew up, as well. In Vermont, syrup runs, but I never let myself consider spring that early. But fall? It hardly entered my mind.

I remember once getting a letter, in June. It was cool there, grey. Not cold, but on that South American coast, winters were melancholy, but not so bad. Winter, in June… I knew, but never really thought it through, all those holidays that we think of for winter, flipped into summer holidays. Winter, quiet, with relatively few of them… perhaps as winter was meant to be.

And March, a rainy time, ending summer, Carnaval at the end of summer–not winter. And in all that, something seems just right.