The Write Thing

As I struggled with its difficult verbose style at times, ages ago in a small room of my own in Paris, Vita Sackville-West’s The Land became an unwanted axis of a thesis that I would have fancied more gossipy, had gossip been accepted as a literary genre in those days. Perhaps today it should, and people would write far funnier theses.

It must have been that Orlando had been brilliantly coded by Mrs Woolf to give Vita some form of ownership after her beautiful childhood home of Knole was repossessed by the male family line. It must have been that her larger loss of a home with English ancestry bleeding from every wall paradoxically mirrored my minimal family betrayal at the hands of a brother. It must have been the “land” inside the word Orlando, the modern history of Vita as Woolf re-wrote it and installed it as a classic of all times, or simply the fact that I miss those days of piecemeal research and the promise of a finding, somewhere, that would give the work its originality.

Regardless of the remoteness or lucidity of these memories, today it all came back to me, as it can happen at times when some episodes of one’s own soap opera become bad karma. It must be that, years later, I still do not own the land that is rightfully mine, but I do have the vision.

The country habit has me by the heart,
For he’s bewitched for ever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision,
Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves
with sun.

(“Winter”, from The Land)

By the way, for those who want a peak (or an “ear”?) of Vita’s voice, here’s an excerpt of this poem, read by the authoress herself.

Two sister towers stand imposingly at the center of Kuala Lumpur’s downtown, on a hot and rainy afternoon. We made that trip together from Singapore, trying to absorb the contrasts of South East Asia in a symbolic nutshell. The flight was short, but the ride from the airport longer than we had considered. There was little time…there is always little time.

And we crossed the frontier with Malaysia, back into safe, police-controlled Singapore, to catch up on sleep while fully dressed before our early morning flight. And there was a last look at the hotel rooftop, where we had slept the night before under the stars. And I could tell you were already mellow with me, different, as if I had grown into you despite yourself, as if you were no longer fighting that inner battle between saying it or not saying it. And I could sense you drifting away into the land of your own demons.

We crossed a less marked frontier in that trip, and I still choose you. My racing heart betrayed me yesterday as we lay on the couch and you finally told me what your life is really about in that city on the West Coast where I have been banned to set foot, at least for now, the outcast of our love. I knew you were going to say something important, and I still don’t know what else I will be learning about your life before me. Yet, oddly enough, we keep blaming space and time for the complexities in our relationship.

Space and time we may not have, so perhaps it is best to go with what we do have. And that is love, unknown as experienced in this life, flaky and afraid, trying to withstand the fears of us. All we will ask of it is to surmount the great divide between our mirror images, so different in many ways, and see if it makes it through and it finally builds the bridge. For that, we only need to hold on to the walls of the Menara as we climb.

You hurt today, so much, and I love you.

It has been ages since I was last able to sit down and write for me instead of my clients. There is such a dreadful gap between what I promised myself I would be doing systematically once I landed in Houston and what I actually have done that I feel like an addict with no chance of recovery. I have promised myself I would be writing more, but I ended up spending most of my evenings working or deciding on furniture purchases.

It is only for the past couple of days that I have owned a rather pricey but charming desk with a banker’s lamp that I always craved and never quite indulged in. In Woolfian terms, I have only now secured a “room of my own”. So I might as well use it…although I must confess the couch and small Ikea table I got for myself simultaneously in May are tempting enough to write on. Parts of this place that I now start to recognize as my home are coming to life, designed by me and my taste (or lack of). It is a major step towards the overcoming my own homelessness, the snail’s shell inside of which I am finally free at my pace and with my choice.

Yet all of this housing independence — minus ownership — is happening while someone is by my side, albeit still quite physically removed to make anything simple. Perhaps that is the most obvious and challenging side of my freedom, the planning on my own while I know that we both might plan otherwise one day. I know the time for togetherness will come, and it will be the way it is meant to be. For now, my own time is this, set on Houston rhythm, with large roaches that hang on trees (like they did in Buenos Aires), with hot mornings filled with sunlight entering the kitchen, with her sleepy voice at the other end of the line when we can speak, with me retreating into myself for now, going without much thinking of the future, as if I was taking this for granted. It is not, or it may not be, but she and the space she gives me makes it all feel like home.