The Write Thing

‘You’re full of shit’, she says, as I struggle to understand where the trigger was in my last phrase. Google talk keeps warning me the party at the other end of the screen is typing, then deleting text. What is she controlling? Probably, the only thing she has been able to control in her life: words. It is now that I think I should be in awe of people with a talent to do that. I may have been drawn to literature myself because words failed me…or found me. Whatever, this is a crazy story. Here I am, explaining myself to someone I scarcely know as if I really had to apologize for any behavioral mishap. Why are we doing this? Perhaps because we met without really meeting, we touched without really feeling, and we dropped in that cesspool of human confusion that connected us with no direction. At least I thought I knew we were not going anywhere, but I got sidetracked from anywhere when I heard my copilot saying that she knew. Perhaps that’s my problem. I listen.

I don’t know how long ago this happened, but somebody (other than spam-generating software) recently left a message on a blog I discontinued long ago. You see, I used to have another self (blog), which now I have been neglecting for a while to pay attention to the sexier, paying WordPress. So, upon leaving a comment in one of her blog entries, I realized my former blog was linked to my profile, so she had peeked and written. I am glad she did. The note referred to my reluctance to acknowledge full lesbianism in Woolf’s Orlando. I am thinking whether it was good and to the point.

This comment triggered the literary wheel for Bloomsbury, and now it is rolling. I recently got hold of a copy of Portrait of a Marriage in DVD and book format, so I had a look at an arbitrary page, and read Vita:

Mother scolded me this morning because she said I wrote too much, and Dada told her he did not approve of my writing. I am afraid my book will not be published. Mother does not know how much I love my writing.

Writing…oh la la! What it does to one!

People struggle. Some struggle with awareness, which is there but escapes them as they move forward in the vacuum toward the encounter with their better self. Others simply struggle. She started struggling only a while ago, but it was always clear that she was ready to put up a fight to her own struggling. She would stop and stare, only to seek asylum beneath the pages of a prayer book that might put words in her mouth she would be otherwise unable to pronounce. In that lonely and borrowed way, she struggled. Will she go on struggling? Maybe. When she crosses the bridge to the other side of the continent, many truths will possibly be there, waiting, to haunt her. Perhaps they already haunt her now. So she prefers to react by hiding behind the lock in the metal door that leads to the house upstairs. She prefers not to deal with more, she cannot handle more. She wants to be right, something inside her tells her she is, but she is not. She is simply struggling, against herself.