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.

There are moments in life when silence is all that is possible. In an odd, untimely way, I believe I had a severe case of this almost for the last two months. Lots of things are changing in my life right now. New doors are opening while others have closed apparently in a much more certain way than I would have imagined, or even liked. Oddly enough, it is in those times when writing becomes the obvious channel. However, I have not written — except for work reasons — for exactly 59 days.

I cannot possibly expect anyone who ever read this blog to even become aware of my return. Those generous souls who would now and then glance at the website for a peek into whatever oddity I would decide to indulge my keyboard into by now have probably given up all hope. Yes, lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. You would do the right thing by refraining from trusting an erratic author. Life is much more beautiful when you do not have to be surprised by other people’s changing moods.

If I were a good writer, I would be able to summarize in a concise text my whereabouts since I decided to put this blog in the freezer. Oh, well…I don’t think I can do that. Therefore, I will speak about the future, about new horizons, about uncertainty itself. Houston beckons, this time for a more permanent contract. What this means is a lot and nothing. It means I still have a job, and new challenges, but it does not bind anyone to anything — including myself. A few years ago, Houston had also seemed to be the place where I would be residing on a longer term basis. However, neither life nor I were ready for the jump, so the whole fantasy only materialized in a short story I wrote at the time and which I named “Letters from Houston”. It was written in Spanish…and I’ll never know why. Houston was on hold, and in a very particular fashion, I was coming out of my own personal limbo of indecision and non-living. Many things changed in the two years that passed since a first door to the US was closed, partially by H1-B quotas and partially by myself. I plunged into my own abyss, emerged half-victorious and wounded, and created my own re-birth, as Sylvia Plath would say beautifully at the end of that prodigious scene of The Bell Jar. I played around the limits of desire and succumbed to the demons of dysfunctional relationships, I naively believed it was possible to set free a repressed love and not pay the high cost of its loss, but I also learned to let go. I learned that letting go is the only way of healing, and the hardest.

Yes, I miss her sometimes…her laughter, her friendship, her beautiful eyes, and I secretly know there will be no letters from Houston, and no Copacabana Palace. We are no more anything, and it scares me to think that I always knew…because I wrote the end of my own story throughout the summers of her absence and my pain and I was right, even before she severed the bond to escape a friendship that now she feared.

Oh, but this posting was supposed to be about my future. Well, nothing is really about the future unless it comes from our own past. So I will raise a symbolic glass of champagne and toast to us, to the land of no regrets, to the bitter taste that time will turn into sweet vignettes of a youthful Paris…the world we knew before, dont je ne regrette rien

When celebrating particular moments of being, flowers and champagne become indispensable. I am not an expert in the former, having become almost famous for systematically killing them in their prime. However, I have learned quite a lot about the latter, and have gained my independence on its account. Only a few years ago, I was quite autonomous in meal-related matters  — setting the table, intervening in some light decision-making in the kitchen, and opening a well-researched bottle of wine. However, I was totally incapable of opening a bottle of champagne. I had an irrational fear of popping the cork in the wrong direction, or being second-guessed by the treacherous curved creature standing before me. That was an issue to be resolved by others, more well-versed souls in the field of Bacchus-oriented bliss. I would simply stand back, looking at the lucky volunteer in awe, and wondering if I would ever be able to do it myself. A part of me thought it charming that I should have that “Penelope Pitstop” aspect in me (the mention of this cartoon character is directly related to a very biased category across lesbianhood that I developed, and that I will expand upon in a later post). After all, the inability to open a bottle of champagne placed me in a precarious position of need for a more “manly” figure to take over the opening of life to a series of glass clicks and eyes forced to look into each other as a good luck charm.

In short, regardless of my efforts to make my event perfect, somebody else always had to inaugurate pleasure. Usually, there was somebody willing to take the role, so the need for being the leader did not arise for many years. In the meantime, I attentively listened to tips from the natural openers, who with a secure hand explained to me different methodologies for avoiding accidents and ensuring a clean excursion into one of the most perfect pleasures ever invented.

Eventually, I knew it would happen. One day, the person willing to take the lead might not be there, or I would simply not feel like celebrating the positive or the standard — new year parties, birthdays, etc. One day I knew I would also want to celebrate loss and failure, because they are part of life and we need to take them for what they are, bite the dust, and move on with at least some lesson learned. I also knew that there might not be anyone to accompany me in that venture, for who would want to celebrate the dark? Those who had once led gradually disappeared, absorbed into other obligations or misled into thinking they were happy elsewhere, in comfortable lives that smelled of order and structure more than chaos and growth.

I could not stay in their world, even though I would have liked it to be the only thing I understood. I needed to move on, celebrate my own passion and its hell. It was then that I knew I had to face my fears. The Monoprix was open until midnight, only meters away from the flat I had on rue Maubeuge. Several options were available, and I remember choosing some Taittinger or perhaps a variant of it. I put all the pieces of advice my mind had collected over the years in action, and let them interact to give my hand the gradual twist it needed in order to achieve the desired effect. I felt the cork gradually give in to the upward pull of my curved palm, countering the motion of the supporting hand (a key component in the strategy, according to my ex girlfriend, a former waitress). A soft fizz came out, with the desired intensity and a perfectly balanced mist. I had made it. I had conquered my independence.