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Letter From My 48th Year (Mar 3)
“Let me end here, on a plateau of happiness, rejoicing in my world as it turns inward once more toward creation.” — May Sarton, The House By the Sea
I’m not at an ending, but I am turned inward, and have been since the wind woke me up hours before dawn yesterday morning. It’s been a relief to talk to few people—texts with Katy D. about the nor’easter stealing her power and buying—finally—a digital copy of CMBYN, a few words with my favorite waitress Beze when I braved the wind yesterday for chocolate chip pancakes, assorted pleases and thank yous at Rite Aid, at Starbucks, but no real conversation.
I love being social, and I love sitting on my bed as I am right now in a pool of sunlight, finishing finally the last few days of Sarton’s journal for publication The House By The Sea. She, after all, inspired this project though she herself didn’t write everyday. (I know myself well enough to know I must take the extreme tack of writing every day in order to only miss a few days, as opposed to saying I’ll write every week or every other day in which case I’m sure to give up the project in a month or two.)
I thought I would write more about my daily goings-on in a more concrete sense, but it seems, as always, my concern is the emotional landscape, the past. I often ask artists when I interview them to tell me about their obsessions, the questions they return to time and time again. Mine is clearly how the past shapes us into who we are, and how its fingers—visible or not—have long reached into our futures. I suppose too I’m also interested in the question of forgiveness, and love too, but every artist is interested in the question of love one way or the other, don’t you think? Whether it’s love for a person, or a particular way of thinking and working, or particular materials. Is it fair to say we express who and what we love by the very nature of making art, whether that’s in affirmation or opposition to the beloved?
If I succumb and close my eyes and curl myself into this patch of sun—is it any wonder I’ve taken to describing myself as a cat in some of my poems?—this will be my second nap of the day. It’s occurring to me that allergy season has started and though the immunotherapy has, for the most part, ameliorated the worst of the symptoms, there is still always this lassitude as one season gives way to another, and my body puts up its dukes against new invaders, even as I keep telling it, Stand down, friend. There’s nothing to see here, nothing to fight. My body, as per usual, refuses to listen and/or cooperate.
Have I already told you that my favorite thing to do on a lovely day is to lie in bed with the windows open, the sun streaming across at least half if not all of the bed, lightly dozing and just listening to the world be the world—snippets of conversation, the grinding sounds the freight trains make as they pass through Silver Spring station, clapping and “Happy Birthday” sung at the Tex-Mex restaurant across the street, the burbling of the water feature in front of my apartment building all drifting up to my window in fits and starts, so I’m gently rollercoasting waves and waves of sound?
And you, your Saturday, how is the world being the world for you? Tell me dears, and I’ll like here in my little patch of sun and read all about it. I promise…
Learning Curve
“When I began writing those poems I had had the dream that I would celebrate my sixtieth birthday with a book of joys, a book speaking of fulfillment and happiness. But on the final re-reading I saw clearly that is an elegiac book and that the seeds of parting were in it from the beginning. This is where poetry is so mysterious, the work more mature than the writer of it, always the messenger of growth. So perhaps we write toward what we will become from where we are.” — May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
A poem for me begins with a phrase that swims its way up from deep within my body, or a snatch of conversation that tumbles over and over on my tongue, or sometimes even a method—a collage poem or something excavated from someone else’s text. But it never starts with an idea. There is no plan for what I will write. Though I know I will discover something in the writing, I do not know until the words are secure on the page what my question is. Writing poetry—and actually all of my literary writing—is like speaking in tongues: I let go and let my better self takes over, the part that never strays from its intimate conversation with the Creator. I remember when my first chapbook was published how shocked I was when everyone said that the poems were so sexual. It took years for me to see that the poems I thought were just a celebration of music and musicians who moved me were also poems about hunger, about longing, about wanting to be touched. In retrospect it’s clear that the person I was then—caught between my fear of intimacy and my equal fear of being in relationship—would puzzle that out on the page. Writing is my way of thinking, it is my safe place to feel and my safe place to reveal myself to myself.
I have always thought my best poems were the ones I didn’t understand. I instinctively know that the logic of them makes sense, that they are “right,” but I usually can’t articulate why I feel that way, what is so right about them, or even what I am trying to say in them. Over time I’ve found that those poems, the ones where I almost can’t decide if they are successful or not, are usually the ones in which I’ve made some huge leap forward—in style, in understanding—and it may take months, and sometimes years, for me to understand what the attempt is.
Poems are mysterious creatures to me. I am suspicious of high school teachers who claim that what is going on in a poem can be assessed with multiple-choice tests. While I agree that there are many poets who are better at probing the mysteries of their poems than I am—I am not the type of reader (or writer) who needs every metaphor to be logical or every motive to be crystal clear for a poem to be satisfying—I also think that even the most ardent sleuths of their own work are, at most, just giving their best guess of what the poem is about. And that to me is the most joyful part of writing, that the more we write, the more still there is to be discovered.
My imaginary life
We were going to be late for the party, but then M said, Why don’t we just see if we can tag along in G’s helicopter, which was both great and weird. I mean, how did this become my life? The view was gorgeous, though I had a few glasses of champagne and I’m glad we went home the old-fashioned way, hopping a ride in P’s limo. P and I had a long talk on the way about the difference between hip-hop lyrics and poetry and I think I’ve convinced him to write a guest post for the blog.
At the party, Meryl told me she liked my new book, which was sweet. M kept introducing me as his wife the poet, and it was funny to see how everyone reacted. All the Brits (and Scots and Irish and Welsh) wanted to know more while the Americans got a scared look in their eyes. Except, of course, for B and MD who started telling me dirty limericks when I told them I’d lived for a while in Boston and across the river too.
I’m actually glad M says I’m a poet cause when you tell people here you’re a writer, they think you’re about to feverishly press your most recent screenplay in their hands, and really, I don’t know if I could even give M a screenplay if I wrote one. He loves me and I’d still feel desperate. I like it here a lot but you have to have a high tolerance for plastic and desperation. I thought I’d feel more pressure to be “on” all the time, but it’s actually easy to hide if you just stand next to the person in the room who’s got the most wattage. And I like to watch M work the room anyway; he’s funny and charming and it’s good people-watching.
I think M is getting serious about quitting smoking, and maybe he would’ve quit sooner if I hadn’t mentioned that once I used to love a boy who smelled like Drakkar Noir and cigarette smoke. M doesn’t wear Drakkar Noir, but he uses this really good soap that smells great on his skin and makes me not mind so much the cigarettes. And he only smokes 1 or 2 a day when he’s with me but when he’s working, I’m sure he’s a chimney. (I’m realizing as I type this that I’m old enough that I remember when Polo was what all the high school boys wore then they went to college and wore Drakkar Noir. I don’t know what came after that.) When i feel myself getting mad about it, I hum the tune from Facts of Life: You take the good, you take the bad… Cause that’s what we’ve both signed up for.
For a while I wore CK One, I think because it was androgynous and smelled a little bit like a man. I tried Angel, too, but that was too sweet. It is nice to have a husband who can keep me in Jo Malone. It’s just nice to have a husband, and maybe I think it’s nice cause he’s away so often but it’s good when what you want lines up with what you have, right?
No epiphanies tonight, no ahas, no lightbulb moments. Just sweet contentment and gratitude and star-struck wonder. Think tomorrow for my morning write I’ll use as a prompt May Sarton’s quote about how we must make myths of our lives in order to understand them…
Ordinary Sorrows
Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method. Image found at filmoa.com
Tonight I mostly want to say a huge thank you to everyone who’s starting following my blog recently and to everyone who’s stuck with me as my blogging has waxed and waned. I don’t have much to talk about today; it’s been a day of mostly transcription so someone else’s voice is currently buzzing in my head. But I do want to share with you a double quote—May Sarton quoting Carl Jung—which stuck with me when I read it this morning. It’s about suffering, not with a capital “S” but the ordinary sorrows that give life their texture. Sarton and Jung believe, and I agree, that suffering is necessary to growth. And by choosing to avoid suffering, or as we do in many cases, choosing to not acknowledge our suffering by squashing it deep down inside through opiates (both dangerous and benevolent) or sheer will power, actually arrests our growth and keeps us from walking fully as the people God has made us to be. But Mmle. Sarton and Messr. Jung say it much better than I do:
“We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but is actually the door into growth. And growth does not cease to be painful at any age. Jung says, ‘The possession of complexes does not in itself signify neurosis, for complexes are the normal foci of psychic happenings, and the fact that they are painful is no proof of pathological disturbance. Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it.'” — May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
Old Conversations
“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and ‘the house and I resume old conversations.'” — May Sarton, from Journal of a Solitude, September 15th
This may not be how it happened but this is how I remember it: I was browsing the Kalamazoo library bookstore with my friend Danna when she handed me this slim volume, a paperback with a black-and-white cover photo of a typewriter and a lamp seen through a glass door. “Journal of a Solitude,” it said, “The intimate diary of a year in the life of a creative woman.”
I don’t remember if I’d heard of May Sarton before. I was perhaps not yet thirty, I had perhaps not yet lived half-a-year in Provincetown where I wrestled with what it meant for me to be an artist. The years of “undefined depressive disorder” brought on my finally getting into therapy and raking up the hot coals of loss and anger I’d long buried were still a half-decade in the future. I had no reason to suspect that this sixty-something Belgian emigre New England writer, typing up these daily entries in the autumn of 1973 through the autumn of the next year, could have anything to say to me.
I remember the shock of recognition when I read the opening paragraph, that quiet voice that understood why I loved long nights of cocktails and blues bands, but still hungered for long stretches of hours hidden away in my apartment with just a pen and a notebook and perhaps a pile of books. “I have written every poem, every novel for the same purpose—to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”* How did she know that the only sure reflection of myself I knew was on the page? That it was the poems hidden in my body that helped me understand my wants, my desires, my griefs. Line by line I would tell myself my own secrets. Word by word I learned to recognize myself.
When I met Sarton, I didn’t yet know I was an introvert. Surely someone who regularly organized the company happy hours and spent two or three nights a week out at her favorite bar was an extrovert. I didn’t understand then that one could be a social introvert, enjoy the company of people immensely, but still need solitude in order to refill the well, recharge, refresh. Sarton helped me to understand the anger, the frustration I felt when I’d spent too much time in motion, when I’d not gifted myself one of those days when I was out and about but didn’t speak to a soul other than to pay for a purchase or say “excuse me.” She helped me to see that there was a difference between a day given over to contemplation and the completion of tasks that I wanted to do, and those days that weren’t restful even if I lay on the couch all day because of the endless loop of “I shoulds” running through my overcrowded brain.
I have re-read Journal of a Solitude countless times since that first discovery, and I buy copies when I find them to pass on to woman artist friends who too might find themselves struggling with that need for solitude that seems at odds with what women are supposed to want—to be at the center of family, blood or otherwise—even if we are, as I am, single and childless. I find myself craving Sarton’s voice when I feel lost, when I need to re-establish my sense of self because of some crisis or simply because I’m juggling too many projects at once. I have since collected most of her non-fiction, and I snatch up her novels when I find them though I’ve only read two so far—Kinds of Love, and The Magnificent Spinster (I think). I’m not a fan of her poetry though I buy those books too when I find them as it pains me to think of her voice disappearing, unheard by a woman who desperately needs it, and somehow I think that I will eventually grow into her poems, be able to see past the easy rhymes and “old-fashionedness” to appreciate the pure spirit behind them.
Did I mention that Sarton loved Mrs. Woolf too, and even went to visit her, Mrs. Woolf cool and in her declining years, Sarton eager, still a theater ingenue and not yet bloomed into the writer she’d become?
No matter how many times I’ve read Sarton, I find myself scribbling down her sentences again and again. She is my guardian angel leading me home, back to the quiet center of myself, where I rest alone. where I am equal to the task of honesty. She takes me by the hand, leads me to the blue-and-white couch, whispers forcefully, “The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.” **
* Journal of a Solitude, September 15
** Journal of a Solitude, January 18th
A Picture a Day (1/30/10)
“The Other Room” (Debbie’s soon-to-be-old house, Charlotte, North Carolina)
I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. . . I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it. (May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude)
Paulette Beete, Writer 
