As she went from one tedious job in one awful law firm after another, she knew she was not going to come true. She was already mourning. She didn’t even know whether there was any real writing in her — but the denial of the chance — the negation of. Yes, but what have you written? Nothing, of course. Not much.
Give up your childish notions, your silly daydreams. Hurry up, it’s time. Conform, conform. Date. Marry. Work at a real job — not writing for Chrissakes — grow up.
In part it was this I suppose, in part something more — impossible to define, even now.
Look at that woman, once the ecstatic child, who walks slowly but undeniably further and further into her remoteness. Not so lonely — not so lonely there really.
A young person’s struggle. She felt the terrible weight of convention on her and the magnitude of its demands. The methods were subtle ones — but the message was loud and clear—give up your life for mine, step into line.
Who is that woman who asks for one hopeful thing — and tries (it’s a little pitiful) to console herself, or erase herself, or something — with recklessness, with sex, with anything she — what in the world is she wishing? A kind of rage, a fast moving inside, surfeit of electricity in her head. And after awhile, after a few weeks usually — she would sink back one more time into speechlessness, dug deep and snug, it’s dark in there, she is, look, she is unable to lift a finger from the bed, or form a word — unable to form a word — oh yes, you’ll be a writer some day! The world flat and drained of color — only shades of gray and then and then—
E. M. Ciorin says, “The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.”
How to describe the place where the woman takes up residence? She waves from the distance to the ones she loves, stranded now. Cut off. Frightened by the gap. How she still sometimes wanted to reach them, touch their faces, say their names, have a glass of wine with them perhaps. But the world was losing its vibrancy, its color, its feeling. She felt herself in a shroud of white. And how the sound seemed muffled. The snow — not possible to move through anymore. And the cold.
The remote hand holds the vestiges of the might-have-been — but forgetful, indifferent, or finally just too tired — you let go of it — that last recognizable part of you — you let it go. And you forget finally completely.
And she steps into numbness without much of a fight, without much of a fight after all. Estrangement and distance become her, don’t you think?
Can’t remember much anymore.
How to describe that white world where from time to time she might make small trips out into a terrible, animated rage, doing awful things, and then fall back into speechlessness, a sorrow so pervasive—Is anyone there? Is anyone in there? Doctors are saying, lovers are saying, friends are saying. Helen. Increasingly difficult. Is anyone in there? Increasingly difficult to know.
Once she did, she dreamed in brilliant green…Wildness of the child. Audacity of the child. That passionate, vibrant place.
Look we already know the artist is despised — and it’s not too harsh a word, despised. Really? You think you are a writer? Even if you were it would be treated with dismissal — (and you’re no writer because, let’s face it, a writer writes, does she not?)
Of course the real contempt is reserved for the real writer, the real artist. She hears the scoffing of the bourgeoisie, the trivializing, the diminishing, the belittling of all that mattered most to her, whenever she’d come out for a little foray into the 1980s.
It is well past time to mention her father in all of this. The only one who purely encouraged back then. He was the only one as she moved toward adulthood who never asked of her or expected of her the typical, the conventional. Exerted no pressure. No will over her. The least patriarchal patriarch in the world. She should become an artist. Whatever that would mean. He had been a trumpet player, an artist — and he had felt, though he never said it of course, every day the gravity of disobeying that thing. He had been a musician — but now deprived of a sustainable art form (for how could a trumpet player with five children survive?). He had withdrawn from the world. The price had been high. He lived in ice. She felt she was going there to join him.
Daddy.
Once the original, wild, insistent self is lost — how difficult it is to retrieve.
They lie in the amorphous dark and listen to music.
Somewhere she must have, certainly she must have still longed for that thing — wanting to hear as she once did — perfectly through water.
The parts that got lost.
She felt she was expected to follow the normative, asked, over time, since high school really, to put away the world’s strangeness, its silences, its dark, its mystery and melancholy and fall into mindless, cheerful line — until the intensity of the strangeness — fear and awe, wonder and sorrow and everything you felt in silence, in the depth of your being, the power, the oddness, the truest, most important, original part of you — the part you could least afford to lose — was lost, socialized, little by little, almost entirely away.
She was asked to conform in absolutely every aspect of her life. Even when it did not appear so. Even in one’s artistic choices — the place of so-called freedom.
Male editors at major houses are saying — female editors, who have embraced entirely the whole nine yards are saying:
Exactly what one should write. If you want to get published at any rate. And exactly how. So that even one’s creative life was prescribed. In order to be published you must…orders coming down as if from on high. Place a character in a conflict and then resolve. Get the reader’s attention through blah, blah, blah… Engraved on a kind of tablet. Serious fiction is. Serious fiction must. If you want to be reviewed. If you want to be taken seriously. If you want to publish with us. The promise of publication keeping everyone in some useless line. Everyone is gray and sounds the same.
Even the book is a box.
Do not take even this. Even this away. The one hopeful place. Even the book.
How to imagine shedding convention then? As insidious as it was, as ingrained. As ubiquitous as its message. Coming from every direction at once. What a novel is — what a family is — what a life is — what a woman’s life must be — where was this voice coming from — it seemed it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. An admonishing figure.
All the diminishment. Her pale white universe. Slipping into a white shift, against white skin, and the hair prematurely turning white—don’t go, someone whispers, but she can’t do anything else really…
The thousand inappropriate ways one tried to get free back then.
The thousand less-than-perfect, oh yes, less-than-effective ways to try to wriggle free — or if not that — at least to forget a while.
I went to therapy finally as the result of an ultimatum. Helen said go or I will leave you. She said someone could help you. She said. And I could not fathom the idea of the world without her. She said. And because I loved her I said yes. Though she did not understand. Though I did not believe there was help for me. Though the very idea of therapy made me cringe—all that talking—I loved her. She said we can’t live like this anymore.