When We Write

My last journal entry was 2/22/09 at 2:02 in the afternoon. That was over a month ago.

Prior to this journal-drought, I filled journals prolifically over the course of a year and a half, starting in September of '07, and filling up five and a half journals before this sudden, jarring stop.

Prior to this prolific-journal-period, I didn't journal. I stopped altogether. I was in an MFA program at Hamline University and yet I wasn't writing for myself. In the first nine months of 2007 there are only two entries. The first, written in January, a list of events along with corresponding months of every adventure, trip, or holiday that occurred since June of 2004, the date of the next most recent journal entry. The second, written in August I guess, though there is no date, is a three-page entry. On the top of the third page are the words "Can I love Shawn Again?" on the second, at the top of the page are the words "Does Love Exist?" and on the first page of the entry, there are no words. There is only a drawing, a collection of images representing the terrible personal crisis I found myself facing. I did not even have words to articulate my problems. I had only a few scribbled shapes, lines, questions marks, and, as I look closer at the image, I see there is one word. Trust. Crossed out so I missed it the first time.

It is significant to me to realize that after being married for a year and a half to my husband whom I had been with for four years prior to the wedding in December of 2002, I suddenly stopped journaling. We separated in August of 2007. Just before the flood of introspection began and I returned to journaling.

Mark Doty writes his memoir Heaven's Coast miraculously in the midst of and on the heels of loss. His partner ebbs out of life due to the increasing waves of illness that come crashing onto him from AIDS and Mark, somehow, picks up pen, and elegantly, records the journey. This both surprises me and feels natural.

His writing is marked by urgency, honesty, and a wish to preserve, to keep, to hold the twelve-year relationship he shared with his partner Wally. His writing anchors him in the relationship. It keeps Wally close.

In the prologue, Doty writes and rewrites, letting the reader see the rewriting. He says on page six: 

If I write about it as if it's already done, that's because so much of it is--W. is less present, each week spends more time asleep, and is less and less capable of involvement in the stuff of mutual life. We're pushed into a different kind of relation.

Then he adds in parentheses:

(Those sentences were true when I wrote them, but this week he's much more alert--still unable to walk but ready to get out of the house, ready to shop for new shoes and  

magazines...

This rewriting lets the reader see the progression and recession of the disease, the push and pull of the waves hitting them on the shore. It shows that the act of writing, of depicting, transcribing cannot but capture what is true in a moment, from an angle, and then let go of that image and accept the truth is new again.

For this reason, I find myself wondering why I am venturing out into this terrain of memoir and writing about what is personal. I don't like to do it. I lose all orientation in my personal writing. I lose my tight grasp of the control on the pen. I sense neither whether my writing is effective or of any importance to an outside audience, and for me, a highly critical reader used to grading, editing, revising, selecting, and critiquing, this is like being out in the deep purple water of the sea with no clue what swims below my thrashing legs.

My writing will not do anything but capture a momentary truth. And that only if I am lucky.

Doty likewise resists writing, a situation that manifests physically in back spasms and chronic pain. He writes on 132:

There is so much I don't want to write.  I can feel the interior pressure of turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in--out?--if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart's desire, the wreck of love's body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to--I begin to write "dredge up" but it isn't at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It's that there's all that grief and anger right there and I'd rather not feel it than look at it directly...

I can relate to this feeling. As I began to write last fall, in October of 2008, about the sexual addiction that started filling up my marriage, eventually drowning it altogether in February 2008, I noticed that my fingers ached. My back ached. My eyes hurt. Writing, an even usually that fills me with optimistic creative energy, instead drove me to my bed. I would write for 45 minutes and then sleep for two hours. The keys pounding me back to that place of grief I was working so hard to ignore.

Why did I continue to write about my grief? About my failed marriage ( a term that leads me to plot many more essays in my head even as I type it)? What compelled me to the writing when it felt so painful?

Doty, too, confronts the push-pull, suck-spew power of writing. His writing, an elegy for his partner, his love, I imagine, compelled him because he wanted to preserve his lover, make an altar of their love. This does not mean it wasn't filled with the weight of pain. He writes on pae 205:

To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of survivng, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to look was also unbearable. And so I'd write when I could, recording what approached like someone in a slow-moving but unstoppable accident, who must look and look away at once.

I am struck by the way he says writing was a way of surviving. In that sense, I feel like it is survival that draws me most to the field of memoir writing. A woman in one of my classes, after hearing yet another piece about my divorce, said to me, "You know, I've been thinking about your writing." I perked up immediately ready for some praise to assuage the anxiety I have about writing the personal. "It must be really good that you're doing it. Sort of like therapy, right?"

Writing as therapy. Definitely, at times. In my journal, when I finally came back to images, to lines, to question marks, and finally words, writing, I believe, saved my life. It was my life-preserver, the rope pulling me out of a sea of depression, a sea I fully believe might have swallowed me forever.

But what I am doing now is not that kind of writing. The comment stung. Especially as a critical thinker about writing, especially as someone who knows the tediousness of a particular type of narrative. I am not writing to soothe only myself. I am writing for an audience, though I don't know why. It is not meant to be therapy. It is not meant to be an account of the way in which I was wronged (far from it). It isn't really meant to be anything other than shared. I know I am writing for an audience, but only because I am compelled to. Only because I can't do anything else.

Again, I don't want to write about this subject, this, the most personal subject of my life. Writing about the pain of living with a sex addict, of seeing him choose pornography over me (a situation I now realize was not about me to him, but the pain of witnessing it definitely is what it felt like to me, not to mention the pain of realizing the choice wasn't even about me for him, that I was secondary, always, to his addiction) feels like returning to sea on the life preserver after making it safely to shore the first time. I know that I am safe, but I do not want to go back to the storm. Bad things happen out there.

Doty writes bravely in the face of death. He writes though it nearly kills him. As he writes about his final days with Wally, the foot-rubbing, the brief smiles, the simple "I love you, babe" he hears from Wally one last time, he asks, "How can this be written? Shouldn't these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in the hurricane?" (259). (Incidentally the tears are running now, down my cheeks.)

After Wally dies, Doty stops writing for a month. He stops.

Grief takes over.

So what I think is this:

We write when we are supposed to, when to do otherwise would mean destruction, when we know we need to; and when the writing would break us open, when we are not ready for the current world to drown, we stop. We wait. We gather our strength.

Then, when we are ready, we pour our story out into the world to swim with all the rest.

How it Feels Now--

It is not often that the past runs right past you. But today it did for me.

While walking the yorkie-poo on a usual Saturday morning route, to the coffee shop, over to the lake, around the path, and back to the apartment, I saw my ex-husband run past me.

He lives two blocks away from me, so I know there is a fairly high likelihood of running into him. Literally. We both run circles round the lake near our places. Who knows? Maybe we're chasing after each other all the time.

Other images and ideas have been chasing me, too. Ideas I cannot string together into any real sort of coherence just now. Labyrinths. Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. Tunnels and holes. The idea of falling down the rabbit hole. Alice in Wonderland.

Twice today while at a book store, (pre-coffee shop), I felt my heart jump twice--the first in the entry way seeing a bargain book called the complete works of Lewis Carroll, with Alice on the cover, and later in the fiction section while browsing past the classics and catching a glimpse of Alice in Wonderland out of my periphery. 

I feel a deep obsession coming on. And how appropriate--I leap out of a marriage with a sex-addict right into a literary obsession on the works written by a pedophile. One who wrote a legendary story about a little blond girl getting lost.

There is something to the idea of the journey of female and child protagonists getting lost in a world of fantasy, myth, and confusion. Doors change sizes. Scarecrows talk. A giant flying dog saves a young boy. A boy lives inside a peach and talks to bugs. A girl falls asleep in the opiate haze of poppies. A girl eats a cake and shrinks. A girl finds herself trapped in a glass sphere, a wild party, where no one looks like anyone she's ever seen. 

The ancestors of these modern stories, the fairy tales, set up the archetype.  Children crave candy and are trapped by a witch.  A girl discovers her grandmother is really a wolf. A girl falls asleep after eating a poisoned apple. A girl is forced to marry a beast.

And further back. Psyche finds herself in a cave hidden underground, told by her husband that she can never look at him. 

In all these instances the protagonist is alone. Separated from family. Separated from the world she knew. There is an energy of seduction. There is an energy of confusion. Disorientation. The surreal. The dangerous. The girl does not understand her enemy, but she knows that following the rules she used to live by will no longer work. The people, the creatures, around her do not operate as she has been taught they will.

I felt disoriented when I saw my ex run by. I recognized his breathing first, subconsciously, so that when I saw his back my thoughts were--it really is him! I couldn't believe it. He looked fit. He was running. He looked healthier and saner than the rest of world. I was at my crumpled post-Friday night best. Raggedy. Disassembled.

Could it all, divorce, addiction, really have happened? Did it need to? Why does he look so normal when I am still lost in a world of confusion? A world of strange shapes? Why do I feel like the one who's gone mad?

He ran right by me. No stopping to talk. Did he wonder at the dog by my side? About my new life? 

He ran right past. Bent on a course he knew well and had planned out ahead of time. I continued my own wanderings, lost, I am sure, forever in wonderland.

A blogger becomes a server and channels Nabokov in her observations...

Well- as a solution to a very concrete problem of lacking personal finances, this particular blogger went out and got herself a job as a server at a nearby restaurant located inside a grocery store frequented mainly by regulars of the elderly, Norwegian variety. They like their coffee black and strong, their lefse thickly buttered, and their seasonings--well, they don't much like seasonings.

As one of the experiences of a new server, I have had the chance to come in at 5:30 in the morning to open up the restaurant and get to know the customers, many of whom order the same thing every day. Lately I have also been reading Nabokov. Speak, Memory.

I know there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between working at a restaurant and reading the autobiography of a Lolita-writing Russian author, but because I am sleep deprived and waking up at 4:00 these days, it occurs to me that it might be fun to observe the "characters" I have met so far through the eyes of Nabokov- or at least give a sort of Nabokovian description as I interpret his aesthetic from his memoir.

Character #1: Older man, regular.

A man walks over to the counter upon which sit the coffee mugs, water glasses, utensils and various other necessities of the initial ritual of fetching a beverage for the customer. This man does not wait for the coffee to come to him, but walks right up and helps himself to a mug turning on the spigot of the regular coffeepot and grinning at me as I struggle to work the cash register and ring up another guest's meal, a particularly difficult moment for me and so he has me at a disadvantage. I greet the man, a man wearing jeans about ten years out of date, an old gray sweatshirt, and a man who, despite the beaked nose, gray hair (complete with morning cowlick) and skin tired of fighting the war on gravity, was probably once somewhat handsome.

I ask the man how he is.

"Do you really want to know?"

Of course, what I want is of little regard to this man who is intent, as evident by the gleam in his eye, of delivering a joke he clearly finds amusing. He proceeds, despite my protests that no, it's ok, I don't need to know and says:

"I'm ornery and horny."

 And with that he laughs at his own joke (non-Nabokovian me laughs too) and walks over to his usual table, a round table in the back of the restaurant where he hangs out with his cronies each morning sipping coffee and complaining about the state of things in general, and in particular, the service at this restaurant. 

Character #2: Woman at counter, ordering large turtle latte.

A woman with faded brown hair that falls lower than her shoulders and bangs that look like they have been pushed hastily aside in a rush to get out of bed and on with the daily routine approaches the counter, bug-eyed or bleary-eyed, it is hard to say.

I greet her, as bound by my new position as server, and ask how she is today. 

"It's too early to tell," she retorts, clearly annoyed that anyone has the gall to pose such a ridiculous question at the god-awful hour of 7:30. She is such a woman who delights in crushing the enthusiasm in front of her, like she delights in squishing an ant when she sees one walking along the sidewalk slowly in front of her and she happens to be wearing some thick-soled pair of shoes, or perhaps her "outdoor" crocs- the pair that will not come inside, thereby trailing ant remains behind them. 

I know she is this particular kind of sadist because her response to her own retort about it being too early goes something like this:

"I suppose you have to be here even earlier, huh?" (she grudgingly concedes that she is not the only one who has to face morning before it is light and I tell her we arrive at 5:30.) "Well, I saw on my calendar that I think it's this Sunday that we shift over to daylight savings.  I guess you'll be getting here at 4:30, huh?" She walks away after smugly tilting her head toward the plastic lid on her drink and taking a big sip.

She didn't leave a tip.

Character #3: Delivery man, Ghiradelli chocolate-sauce delivery man

I greet the man walking confidently behind our counter wheeling four cardboard boxes on a dolly. I say "How are you?"

He says, "Better each time I see you. You know that's why I come here, right? To see your pretty face each time. You know that too, right? I know you got a man who tells you every day how pretty you are, or you better."

The man continues on despite the fact that I am looking away and working on the cash register again and other servers are rolling their eyes. Of particular note is the fact that this is only day three of my time at this restaurant; I have not seen this man, with his glasses and Ghiradelli jacket and black-and-gray curly short hair. He has never seen me either, so it is impossible to take anything he says seriously. Thus I turn my attention in my mind to the Mnemosyne butterfly, the species that I remembered not so much for the moment in which I caught it, but for the moment my Nanny, Mademoiselle O, sat on it and crushed its wings into six lop-sided and broken pieces. I don't pretend to assume their was any connection between the Mnemosyne butterfly and the Ghiradelli delivery man, but the thought serves merely to illustrate how disconnected I was from the conversation he was having with himself in my direction.

The End--of Nabokovian interpretation...

And now- the why of it all. Why did I choose to have a Nabokovian flight of fancy in thinking about the customers I have met? How is Nabokov different from me?

Well, there is the obvious--He was a Russian writer born in the 19th century before the crumbling of Tsars and Lenin's reign on the world who wrote well and hunted butterflies and grew up in a household full of dozens of dozens of servants all taking care of the personal business of his family. I am an American woman born after Vietnam and before Desert Storm part one who took karate and dance and was held accountable for washing dishes at a very early age. But beyond that-- how do we interpret the world differently? What have I learned from his autobiography? From my own life?

Aesthetically, Nabokov holds his reader at arm's length. His visual description of people and places emerges out of a bounty of details that appear on a page like an image beneath an artist's charcoal pencil. He lets us revel in imagery but resists approaching emotion in anything more than a detached and bemused sort of way, such as when he says of his time in college at Cambridge, "Emotionally, I was in the position of a man who, having just lost a fond kinswoman, realized-too late- that through some laziness of the routine-drugged human soul, he had neither troubled to know her as fully as she deserved, nor had shown her in full the marks of his not quite conscious then, but now unrelieved, affection" (261).  It is a lovely passage, thoughtful and intelligent, but certainly not emotionally engaging. The emotion has been put in an aquarium and Nabokov is instructing his readers of its nature much like a tour guide would do in a natural history museum.

I like that about Nabokov, or at least I like it right now. My own writing has been much more the variety of bleeding onto a page as late, and my emotions are too raw to continue. I want a break. I am tired of describing the gut-wrenching pain of heartache and self-exploration.

Aesthetics aside, Nabokov as a server amuses me to no end. Me as a server depresses me a bit. I'm starting to think becoming a server for me, a woman with codependent tendencies and habits, is a little like sending a drug addict to work in a crack factory. How many times a day do I get to ignore my own boundaries in efforts to please the customer? How many times do I get to smile at a derogatory comment all in an effort to keep things running smoothly and also make a tip? Not that I don't understand the playfulness of the customers or the delivery men, but I feel myself slipping into pleasing-mode and away from the self-containment that Nabokov has in such abundance. Nabokov would make no apologies or accommodations for the customers, but of course, I do.

Perhaps that is why I choose to look at the customers from Nabokov's point of view. Even if in the moment I am wrapped up in being charming and smiling and laughing and putting others at ease, I can always come home and rewrite the scene.