A philosophy of leaving

A philosophy of leaving

I speed down the summer highway in my small green car.

A little girl waves out the passenger window of the car in front of me, her hand lingering in the air: swoop, swoop, she mimicks the Queen's elegant salute. Out the driver's side pokes the head of a full-grown adult panda, laughing. The girl's hand and the panda's head withdraw into the carriage of the Honda and then we all carry on.

Cathunk, cathunk, go the wheels of my car as I pass over the railway tracks. My stereo makes its soaring sounds and I pound, pound the steering wheel in time to its soft beat; my feet tap, tap the floor. The window is down and I put my hand out of it to feel the wind. Swoop, swoop: I wave like the Queen.

Traffic honks, cyclists hurry, buses roar, and my car moves along at its own pace, a green glinting rectangle from a bird's-eye view, a small fish in a large flowing stream. Stop, go: stop, go.

When I leave my door in the morning and step into my car I practice leaving. Stop, go. Go, stop. Return. In my car on the way to, from work I develop a philosophy of leaving, listening to the hum of sun and traffic and watching the creak and glitter of rubber and silver chrome, and hearing the ideal sounds pounding out a balancing rythym. The sounds seem to work together to say--

You can't leave to escape; you've got to leave to arrive. And notice, notice, as you go.

Swoop, swoop, pound, pound: I wave like the Queen, my hands play with air like silk or satin; I let the wind go, and hit the wheel like a drum. In the grass beside the highway at the lights, small elephants move to an African beat; I watch them with interest and then carry on.

Czeslaw Milosz:

Czeslaw Milosz:

Under a starry sky I was taking a walk,
On a ridge overlooking neon cities,
With my companion, the spirit of desolation,
Who was running around and sermonizing,
Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone else
Would be walking here, trying to understand his age.
Had I died long ago nothing would have changed.
The same stars, cities, and countries
Would have been seen with other eyes.
The world and its labors would go on as they do.

For Christ's sake, get away from me.
You've tormented me enough, I said.
It's not up to me to judge the calling of men.
And my merits, if any, I won't know anyway.





"Temptation," from Czeslaw Milosz Selected Poems (1931-2004), ed. Hass.

Creativity flows

Creativity flows

...almost never when sought. The words sometimes fly off the screen or the page and scamper for the door, pushing and shoving in their haste to get away. But worse than not writing is the feeling that one can't write, the job is too huge, the questions are too impossible to answer, and one barely succeeds anyway at the best of times at producing the work one attempts to produce.

I've been reading Virginia Woolf. I read: you are a woman, you are Shakespeare's sister, and you must write her poetry, write it because she couldn't write it. Earn your 500 a year and create a living from your pen. Not only can you do it but you must. And achieve a peaceful state of mind, an androgynous state of mind, so that the two parts of you can balance out and you can listen, undistracted, to the story.

Then I read the critical interpretation at the front of A Room of One's Own and find a different perspective on Woolf, the story of a writer driven mad sometimes by her own demons and unable to present the balanced narrative she implored the students to produce... a woman who lived an ironic life and died too early. I read: she sighed with relief when the lecture upon which Room is based was finally over, and condemned to failure the women who attended it and sucked in her inspiring words like baby birds gobbling nourishment.

It seems that a hundred and two hundred years ago women had larger problems than the prolific and horrifically competitive nature of the publishing industry; they had a basic inability to write for a living, because of social conventions, etc. etc. Worse, women three and four hundred years ago have faded into blank margins of the anals of history, except the Great ones, and none of them wrote for a living.

Now, the problem I face is not whether I am able to write. Of course I can in theory, although economic struggle persists through every age--and for both sexes--and writers have always had a difficult time writing for a living. The problem is what to write. How can a person write who doesn't have a cause? And how can a person write who is still, herself, learning what literature means?

I don't think anyone produces the stories they intend to write, anyhow. Creativity ebbs and flows and when it flows in earnest it becomes Heathcliff and Sydney Carton and Karenina. Were these sought figures, or did they invade? Either way they didn't--and don't--give a hot damn about economically supporting the authors who summoned them. I suppose it's better that way.

Unlikely

Unlikely

A green-striped grinning piece of rind
Stands inside an inch of tea
And bides its time.
It seems to say it knows, indeed,
That almost-emptied glasses
Of almost-lukewarm tea
Are where all good and noble watermelons
Go to die. And neither would I care
To disagree.
All melon graveyards boast a stone
That names the saintly few
Who went to Tea instead of grass
And died of sugar
Not of dew