From my journal for November 17, 1995. \u00a0By this time I am regularly questioning why I keep writing. \u00a0I am typing up roughly a year later, and sometime next year I stop typing completely. \u00a0I thought I might stop writing, but I didn’t.<\/p>\n
I seem to have completely lost interest in my own writing at the moment, finding it hard to read, can\u2019t see that there\u2019s any value there that would make it worth typing up.\u00a0 <\/span>Well plod on.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Except that I have a suspicion, maybe even a hope, that this is another one of those thresholds of blankness, that I will arrive on the other side, some day, with a new awareness and new appreciation for my life \u2014 though I suppose it\u2019s possible that some new clarity would change my relationship to my writing.<\/p>\n
Well, why am I still writing?\u00a0 <\/span>It gives me something to do, a discipline of noting what\u2019s around me and jotting it down.\u00a0 <\/span>I write the daily details because I know that, in the past, something I\u2019ve never suspected \u2014 a physical symptom say \u2014 will reveal its importance.\u00a0 <\/span>Often I\u2019ve been glad to read about what the house looks like, or a series of mundane errands, because it gives such a sense of my real life in this house.<\/p>\n
Went out to fill bird feeders, crunching over the snow.\u00a0 <\/span>Chickadees coming singly to the one outside my window, and a larger nuthatch.<\/p>\n
Something about the depression and the way it\u2019s brought me to a new place, new questions about my life, and this sense of contacting child-pieces that have been lost behind frozen barricades.\u00a0 <\/span>This seems like important work, an important place to explore.\u00a0 <\/span>Would I even be here if I were on medication?\u00a0 <\/span>This is the major question I have about taking it.\u00a0 <\/span>On the other side is the way in which airplane phobia depression has wrecked the last few months, and I see that I couldn\u2019t even get to this deep place of knowledge, \u201cexploring the bottom,\u201d until the planes had been stopped for long enough that I could begin to feel safe.<\/p>\n
\u201cWon\u2019t you look down upon me Jesus
\nYou gotta help me make a stand
\nYou just gotta see me through another day \u2014
\nMy body\u2019s achin\u2019 and my time is at hand
\nI just can\u2019t make it any other way \u2014 \u201d<\/p>\nWoke this morning with that song<\/a> in my mind.\u00a0 <\/span>I remember how well it expressed for me that cold dark time when I was living in Portland and was so depressed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
From my journal for November 18<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve finished reading Doris Grumbach\u2019s Fifty Days of Solitude<\/a>, and I\u2019m a little disappointed.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s not a journal but a memoir.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s very literary, black and silver, on the surface, or perhaps I should say that she\u2019s on the surface of the depths.\u00a0 <\/span>I think she\u2019s reached that frozen layer that I\u2019ve been writing about, and failed to pass through it to any kind of real joy, real communion, real pain.\u00a0 <\/span>She acknowledges passion, but in a dry cold way.\u00a0 <\/span>I have a sense of someone saying \u201cI\u2019m an adult.\u00a0 <\/span>I know that life is cold and lonely and hard.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I know what it is, there\u2019s no heart here, no soul.\u00a0 <\/span>There is awareness, she doesn\u2019t try to shut out all painful realities, acknowledges her lack of interest in the painful realities of the contemporary scene, her compassion is the kindness of a liberal intellectual, it\u2019s not heart deep.\u00a0 <\/span>I think of Etty Hillesum<\/a>\u2019s fire, of Rilke\u2019s rivers of blood<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>I feel chilled by Grumbach\u2019s writing, want something that breaks through that frozen layer to something real.\u00a0 <\/span>(I don\u2019t know how to define \u201creal\u201d except to say that it\u2019s the fire that lives under the ice.)<\/p>\n
And that brings me to the poets.\u00a0 <\/span>I love the story of the person who said that the first thing to do after a political revolution is \u201ckill the poets.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Because the poets remind us of deeper truths than those of politics, that it\u2019s not so simple as good guys and bad guys, that what is more important than political power are the urgencies of the heart.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cMore important\u201d is the wrong phrase because it suggests that political maneuverings and the urges of the heart could exist on a continuum, in the same dimension, when the truth is that they inhabit or constitute vastly different worlds.\u00a0 <\/span>In the political, social, historical realm, the urges of the heart are invisible behind other urges \u2014 for power, for sex, for revenge, for possession, for security \u2014 and I don\u2019t know to what bodily or psychic organ to attribute them.\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps they are the urges of the glands, though in the political realm they look\/feel like urges of the heart, because the true urges of the heart are like the stars that can\u2019t be seen from the brightly lit streets of the city.\u00a0 <\/span>The true urges of the heart are for love, not sex or possession, but as appreciation and support of a being\u2019s uniqueness, for creativity and generosity instead of power, for understanding and healing instead of revenge, for life open to the wild spontaneous winds of the great powers of the universe instead of the dull safety of \u201csecurity.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>This is the reminder that the poets bring to me, that being a failure in the social-political-economic world does not matter, that it\u2019s only by attending to the urges of the heart that we can construct or grow \u2014 or create \u2014 a life worth living.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Actually, now I would say urges of the reptilian brain stem<\/a>, instead of the glands. Otherwise I’m amazed at my writing from so long ago. 28 years ago. Cycle of Saturn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From my journal for November 17, 1995. \u00a0By this time I am regularly questioning why I keep writing. \u00a0I am typing up roughly a year later, and sometime next year I stop typing completely. \u00a0I thought I might stop writing, … Continue reading