She is like the women, starting with my mother, I have tried to keep up with my whole life. You must run breathless just to sit next to them. They prod. They urge. “Look closer; be braver,” they say.
Everything of hers is gone now: the dulcimer, the bells, the music she loved preserved on vinyl — all the books. It’s okay; she’ll grace these halls a long time, I know.
We’ll sit until the light is gone. She’ll ask if I’ve found the asparagus patch yet, seen the mockingbird who lives near the mailbox.
She’ll wonder how my new work is going. She’s stretched out on the chaise lounge, her hand keeping time to some irresistible music. Her beautiful voice drifts through this precious house. She closes her eyes — says she’s so happy about the prize — pats my hand, this drowsy angel, already two years dead on the first day we meet, whom I love.
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND
That nearly perfect lilac-infused existence I am already forced to miss. To in some way already give up.
I am returned to the state of my making. Back to the state of my conception, the very idea of me. Returned to the place of my invention. Home of water and watery memory and pull. I am a little at home. I have come to direct the creative writing program at Brown University. It is perhaps the job that will best allow me to continue doing the writing I need to do. I will only have to teach a little.
HOME
I am a wandering soul — but not an aimless one. I’ve learned well how to listen and I’ve gone wherever my work told me to go. Wherever my work took me, insistent, I went. I have been forced, in order to continue writing on my own terms, to leave over and over again. I who live everywhere and nowhere have built a home of language. I have been forced to create a home of my own making. A home of music and desire. I can at this point make a home wherever I go. I open my large artist’s notebook, I pick up a pen, I turn on the radio; I dream of you — the best, the most mysterious one, the most remote and beautiful aspect of self.
The necessity to find ways to continue, without for the most part the luxury of financial reward, has made it imperative to imagine a home that might be moveable. It has had to be okay to live outside familiarity, outside comfort, outside anything that seems mine. All along I have found it necessary to live with a home that can be conjured within.
Home might be a studio in a loft in Tribeca, a room in Provincetown, an office in Normal, Illinois. Home is anywhere my mind catches fire, my body. Where language trembles and burns.
I am at work now on several projects — a book of rage called Defiance, a book of desire: The Erotic Etudes. And The Bay of Angels, of course. The continued exploration of the possibilities of language is the only real life I know, the only place I’ve lived truly, fully, all these years. I have spent fifteen years of devotion at the altar of the impossible. I’ve spent fifteen years building my unshakable home of language and love. The place of longing and failure (for who could succeed?) where I live recklessly, without concern for the product, or the consequences, or the future. My house of yearning and mystery and peace. A place of grace. My mother praying for a child to be born, to come to term, and another mother singing French songs — and the war. And in the étude I’ve just finished — a woman on a bridge, dressed in white, dipping her hands into the sacred Ganges — it is and is not me. One lives in awe, next to the silence and the strangeness as the lost or hidden or forgotten aspects of self and world, only glimpsed at, are sensed, if only a little. In the challenge, I am at home. In concentration I feel at ease — pure pleasure, pure joy, as I have not experienced in any other way.
After a week of interviews, readings, anxieties, stresses of all sorts — no time to write — I finally can get back a little to some work on Defiance. Having been away, disoriented, without anchor, and coming back, I write the line, “Who will mind my savage goat and pole dog?” and this arrangement of words makes me feel more calm, more relieved, more at home than I have felt in some time. Why? Why does this sentence have such an effect over me? It is because a sentence like that completely embodies in language all of my anxiety and frustration and uncertainty and rage — it is an awkward sentence, strange, off-balance, precarious. Darkly imagined, it seems to break off from the body of the rest of the text it is a part of, to assume an eerie and haunting independence. A splintered, troubling thing. It so captures my emotional state in language that I am no longer so alone, marooned in it: the emotional state is approximated through the physicality of language, mirrored, and as a result becomes company, something present, something palpable…. The language construct is no longer about an emotional state for me, but has become one, and in that way I am no longer utterly isolated in it and without a viable structure. Home is any ordinary, gorgeous sentence that is doing its work.
Home for me is in the syntax, in the syllables. In the syncopations and in the silences. A movement in the mind, the eye, the mouth. Home is the luminous imagination. India haunting me after the Satyatjit Ray retrospective. Home is in Sappho’s fragments, in imagining what was there before the papyrus tore. The imagination providing a foundation, a roof, and windows that let you see forever.
The glowing imagination. The place in the distance, amidst the maelstrom of the blizzard toward which “poets will walk without thinking, as if walking home,” as Tsvetaeva has said. That place, distant, mysterious, ever-fleeting, changing and shifting, but glimmering in the distance.
Home is that drugged, seductive other state — creation not so unlike the dark, sexual descent. Now a house burns on the page. Now I am in flames. This is the aim of my erotic études: to explore those relationships between language and desire, my sacred, twinned notions of home. In this alternate place, this other reality, outside, apart from one’s other life (having moved again, having left, been displaced, been hurt, been diminished and forced to operate in a world so unlike one’s real world). A state so deeply meditative, so deeply sexual, so like music. Home is still the music drifting. My parents whispering. The precious alphabet she taught me. And her lovely body. Home is the bodies of women: safe. And all the songs they sang — and sing.
One afternoon while I am dreaming Defiance, I finally realize, I know, yes, the little girl Bernadette and Fergus, her older brother, will go fishing — that is it — and somehow it all falls into its proper balance: austere, mysterious, impossibly simple and elegant. Yes, that is it. And I am completely elated and then serene. As happy as I have ever been. Who would not choose to live there?
When I write sentences I am at home. When I make shapes. When I do not, I am damned, doomed, homeless; I know this well — restless, roaming; the actual places I’ve lived become unrecognizable, and I, too, monstrous, am unrecognizable to myself. In the gloating, enormous strangeness and solitude of the real world, where I am so often inconsolable, marooned, utterly dizzied — all I need do is to pick up a pen and begin to write — safe in the shelter of the alphabet, and I am taken home. Back into the blinding waves, the topaz light, the fire. Or far off into the enthralling, voluptuous dark.