The Write Thing

After a long time without visiting this site, I got my mojo back and here I am, re-inaugurating myself with a new entry…hopefully with something worth saying.

It is a time of reflection, almost silence. It is a time of living frugally, surrounded by bare essentials, saving energy and material comfort for a time when, perhaps, it will finally be shared. It is an uncertain time, an uncertain world, an uncertain life. But wasn’t it always like that? The problem with aging is that one begins to worry about actual uncertainty, so it becomes less of an adventure and more of a concern.

In moments like that, my attention turns more to literature, and that radar that sends me out on bookstore excursions activates itself suddenly, as if it had a purpose. The first finding was this novel by an author I totally ignored called Brady Udall. The title of the book caught me by surprise…The Lonely Polygamist. I read the blurb (which American books do very well with, unlike French books such as Amelie Nothomb’s Le Voyage d’Hiver, which has no indication whatsoever of what it could be about…but does Nothomb have to prove herself before I grab one of her books? No, she does not). Udall’s book is about an anti-hero, Golden Richards, father of 28 children and husband to four wives living somewhere in rural America. The story is about Golden falling for a woman outside the church, outside the Principle, and getting caught in the trap of actually choosing love, instead of letting it be imposed on him. The story is about the impossibility of sharing wifely duties without feeling less worthy than the others, less valued, less loved. The story is about being a lost child in a numerous family that  is stranded in limbo, no longer recognizing itself and its members. Well, I would argue that one does not need to have 28 kids to get lost in limbo and lose track of oneself…it so often happens in the typical four-member family.

It is amazing how a good author can make you feel you are inside the story, even when the environment is totally foreign to the reader. Udall does an excellent job, particularly at entering the mind of a pre-pubescent boy who is an outcast in that world, who is aware of how unfair and deterministic that limbo is, and who will pay the price for wanting to subvert the dysfunctional order set out by others. I related so viscerally to Rusty, that lost child sitting on the window sill and looking out; I understood the inevitable failure of trying to be like the others when you are simply different, beautifully so although you don’t know.

It was a hard novel, a difficult read, perhaps because it was familiar in an odd and undesired way, a reflection of the polyamorous loneliness that I wish I could escape. I can’t, and I am still sitting here, like the viewer of a movie that I know will end badly but I can’t help continuing to watch. Who knows? Perhaps at some point relief will come for me as it did for my favorite character in that book, and my own Trish will know what to do.

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.

Once again, my dear non-reader, you find me revisiting the idea of fate, karma and life psychology in general. I wrote yesterday (yes, two days in a row by now seem almost like I could really keep a blog) about life in sunny and crime-ridden Houston, and the almost technical aspects involved in getting a door glass replaced and a decent internet connection activated in the fourth largest city in the US.

Of course I have not expanded on the Kafkaesque developments that today brought me almost to the brink of despair (exasperation by now is a given for me in this country), and I will not unless you have serious insomnia issues, in which case you can send me an email and I will gladly walk you through the process of not finding things here even when everybody tells you they have them – oh, well, there I go again trying to explain…I apologize.

The fact that I have not expanded on my tribulations does not mean they are not potentially clear to you, or at least imaginable, by now. So let me focus on the feelings instead, the depth of the impotence, the rage, the worn-out patience, the repetition and, eventually, oblivion…I know in the not-so-faraway future I will remember the gist of everything that is going on around me now, but I will forget the reason. Just because that is what life is all about, and sooner or later we all forget.

Prometheus

THERE ARE four legends concerning Prometheus:

According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.

According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.

According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.

There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.