The illusion of including, of having it all. So many desires. A mélange of influences, techniques, pressures.
As a child my favorite book was the poetic, mystical Wuthering Heights. A somber, lonely, ecstatic meditation. So much solitude in the midst of everything. Three girls in the bedroom. Many children. So much going on. Why was I always so lonely? And still am. In the midst of much joy, such estrangement. How to get some of that down right.
As I take what I perceive, what I see out there, and abstract it, returning with a coherence, a solace of form, a shape.
The challenge: To turn the world, and the workings of the world, into song.
I love the things that continue. That never end. I love the long haul. Is this the novelist’s disposition? The forever.
The ancient consoling tradition. The impulse to sing. The impulse to tell a story, to want to know insatiably, at times, what happens next.
That said, I must admit that conventional storytelling bores me silly. The analytic bits, the dreary descriptive impulse, the cause and effect linearity, the manufactured social circumstances.
To create whole worlds through implication, suggestion, in a few bold strokes. Not to tyrannize with narrative. Allow a place for the reader to live, to dream.
All of sex called up in an apartment vestibule. All reckless, incandescent desire. As in illuminated manuscripts, an emblematic approach to narrative.
Careful of the intercom.
Now in America they call this coffee, but I remember coffee. Let the reader linger there. Go where she will.
The novel is something, even when stopped, which is continuous.
I wanted to be obliterated by light, stunned, dazzled, stopped, and also to never die. To go on.
Each word a boat.
I wanted in my books prayers, bells, arabesques, dervishes, a doomed blood, a remote chorus, the static of cats, the way you looked that night, turning away — modulations to other keys. I wanted it alclass="underline" the moment and the elongation of the moment, and then another moment, and the cumulative pleasures of an intensifying, building content. I was greedy. I believed it might all be possible.
Not to forget the lost songs of the troubadours and the unfixed relationship between words and music. A way in prose perhaps of speaking to some of my extraordinary solitude?
To fail. To miss the mark. To not even come close.
In the midst of ecstatic possibility, sometimes, even then, no way out.
No longer the hunger for figs. The hunger for an arrangement of anything.
Shattering of glass.
Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge is like my American Woman in that both, as lyric novels, move image by image toward intensity. Images follow a progress through interplays and modulation until they reach a level of nearly unbearable intensity. Action is a concern, but a secondary one.
The beauty and terror of silence intrigues me. Poetry reveres silence. Fiction too often tries to fill it up. And sound, voluptuous, reinsisting itself against that backdrop of silence, takes on a different quality.
As we form our first words after making love.
Not to take anything for granted.
But digression seems more built into the potential of the novel. Is true digression more possible in fiction, in that one may completely forget one strand of reality, having replaced it by an equally compelling and lengthy one, which might wipe out for awhile, obliterate what has preceded it? And then to be returned to the first world again, bewildered.
And so we get to the notion of home. The move towards home and the longing called home and all that memory, imagination, desire, belief, doubt can conjure as we circle and circle on this extraordinary journey. The novel filled with acting out, rehearsals, meditations, games from childhood, melancholy rainy afternoons or bright sunlight where you bounced a little ball and picked up glittering stars called jacks in one hand.
Where you bounced a large ball, “A,” and you went through the precious alphabet. A my name is Alice. And yes,
It is true my name is Carole Alice.
Perfect the action in your mind that will keep the hula hoop up, or the brother safe, or the dress red.
Allow, because you must allow, the broken glass to speak.
And sometimes when she wasn’t sad, but was furious and wanted to get away from all the brothers and sisters, she’d turn herself into a horse.
Time passes: It’s shocking. You change shape. Your parents age and eventually die. You remember your mother in a bathing suit, beautiful on a dock at a lake. And when you put on your bathing suit now, she is exactly back at age thirty-five, in you.
Time passes. I digress.
A progress. A child is born. Grows. Learns to write. One day has children. Those children too sing the old songs, teach beloved things to the next children. A progress of numbers. They grow old.
My father playing his trumpet in the moody half-light.
I got to dance in a circle. I got to kiss you on the cheek.
The left-handed boy lived.
I wanted—
The pleasure of accumulated meanings, of accretion, which is the narrative act. A fragile constellation, through time and space, of relationship. An architecture of stars, of—
The joy has been in watching you grow. The joy has been in loving you.
I talk to a faraway friend and ask what will happen next. How did she find out? Who will leave whom? Where did the other woman go? And what about the child? She’s not sure. My dear friend, a glass artist, tells me she is making glass books. Will there be further fractures?
One makes shapes.
K.
I wrote you one thousand love letters. You probably never got them all.
I imagine the progress of the glass books as she speaks.
The fragility of her voice trembling over the thin wires.
The relatives place the white ravioli on the beds to dry. I open my mouth to receive the host. Where have you gone?
And when she was joyful as well — she remembers now — ecstatic, she would turn herself into a horse. So that the horse took on many meanings.
The desire of the girl to be a horse. The novel to be a poem. The desire to change shapes again and again.
Is the lyric Orphic voice reliant for its energy and power on an insistent and intense sexuality?
Careful of the intercom.
As I write these notes to myself, I traverse the country “promoting,” as they say, my American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Right now I am flying from Los Angeles to New York. We’re going fast, at some 33,000 feet. The nose of the plane is already dipped in night. At the tail, where I sit, last day. This tells me something important, but I don’t know what yet, about novel writing. There’s movement and stasis. The sun setting at my side.
I’m reading a magazine with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain on the cover in between jotting these things in my notebook. I’m flooded with memories, associations, the history of a lifetime, my lifetime — and these things make Kurt Cobain’s suicide even more painful today. Without my points of reference this pain could not exist in this way. The novel can create these responses, these states by the gradual, leisurely building up of moments though space and time. The novel possesses the sound, the structure, the spaciousness, the heart to get some of it down. Let’s hope.