When I wash the dishes I think about writing. Not the writing so much, as the lumpy figures who rise in the back of my throat, the ghosts (true, now) who need me to tell something about them. I've read all the books and been fondled by the modern poets. But I don't want to write shit, I want to write something that moves people, the way I was moved by the people that swim through my memory.
Thank God I'm not a poet. I toy at it here, I poke. It's fun. I used to think, before Skoog fingered my earring, before Rosenblatt's terse self-eval, that the modern poets were the real deal. The pinnacle of suffering, existentialism, creativity, art. But get older, go back a little further, and the modern touch becomes mere tickle. I think it was Hopkins (not even that classic of a classic) who awoke me from such intoxication with the cloying scents of these times, where we writers magnify, glorify, exalt the mundane moment, the hair in the butter. His "More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder ring," and his "the rainbow shines but only in the thought," hurt. I mean, really hurt. Something bigger than Cisneros' "thing in my shoe."
While I know now as a suburban mother-of-three who has literally been there, done that, that emotion seems to curb out over time, and resign itself to parenting, I also know that the pangs are still there, thrumming underneath this seemingly predictable life, making it worth it. Promising better. Sublimation at it's finest, ? One day?
I was seventeen when I got on my first plane to Hawaii. And let me tell you: travel was not our way of life. We were scared, we were safe. Poor, I suppose, though my parents were remarkably tireless in their endeavors to expose us to the arts. But they were very angry, too: dad loud, mom silent. Who wouldn't be? Our God said He hated us, but loved us once we had been drenched [washed] in the blood of Christ. I'm shortening the entire thing, but suffice to say there was a lot of toying-with-rats-in-a-cage feeling.
Now, to be completely transparent, I am still trying to be religious. Through a series of unlikely events, my best friend (husband, frenemy, lover) and I converted to Orthodoxy, attending the very same parish whose Greek festival and bake sale used to mean nothing to me. My main connection was staring down at people shooting up meth in their parking lot from where I lived in the Glen Ellen on Denny and 13th.
But then I saw them once, when they went on this midnight Easter parade around the block singing their Greek hymns and tossing rose petals into the streets and alleys, carrying a (seemingly ridiculous to me at the time) rose-encrusted, framed picture of Jesus around with them. (I was in my apartment parking lot pumping up an air matress via my friend's jeep. I had just moved. We had no adaptor except for the one that fit the car lighter).
Seeing the crushed rose petals the next morning, remembering their stoicism, it hurt, like a fist around my heart. A lot of unanswered questions about love, and a very anger-colored sense of longing.
When the Greek people came by singing their songs, even the children singing, and tossing their petals I could feel that. Stately beauty. The beauty of a statue—perfect, poised through all of time. That my steps, decades later, would lead me back to this very parish where I would convert and baptize my children—Hopkins' "pangs schooled at forepangs." Only, why did I interpret those lines as negative pangs when I first read the poem? Sigh. I knew know nothing about life.
Hawaii. That's the ghost that haunts me. That's the writing that snarls and waits like a cat in the doorway, to catch my ankle. But I can't find a beginning. On that airplane, I just know I wanted stories. Greedily, nakedly. I remember thinking "finally, a story will begin." But now that I am almost forty it's just one big swim, a drift from iceberg to iceberg, licking the snow, wondering how to conjure what's beneath the surface.
Wish me luck.
