After the Fire, Adventure

One thing I want to do more of in 2012 is blog.  I let it go last fall.  Or it got away from me.  Or I wasn’t very interested in doing it.  Some combination of all of those things.  It’s not a resolution, as I wrote in Yield, “I hate that stuff—any kind of holiday-based decision-making.”  (That, for the record, was me talking.  Not the character.)  This is just a promise I’m making to myself.  Some people eat better or drink less, this is my kind of healthy habit.  Write more.

But that waivers.  I have quit the whole business ten times in the last twelve months.  Or threatened to.  The only reason that I haven’t hung up the whole towel is my friends haven’t let me.  I swear this is the truth.  I’m lucky that way, and I recognize that, too.  I’ve tried talking to people about how miserable this second novel is making me.  And only recently, have I come to realize that you cannot tell people this.  You can’t say “I hate it.”  You can’t say “I hate every second of it.”  You can’t say “I’m ready to quit the business.”  They don’t or won’t believe you.  And they sometimes — sometimes — talk you out of that feeling, making you believe that you can do it.  And then you spend a while thinking it.  And then you don’t.  And you do again.  On like that.  It’s the way it is.

You can see the conflict.

This morning one of the notes in my inbox was about the Brooklyn Fiction Class taught by Rachel Sherman.  It went into my brain and then out.  I felt like blogging, pushing some energy out into the universe — which is really how I see it — and I felt good about living up to my 2012 promise.  Sometimes, when I’m feeling blocked, I steal from my friend Ariel, who usually titles her blog posts: “Today, I am thinking about: _____.”

Usually, the blank comes quickly.  I am a person who generally knows what he is thinking about.  Or, at least, I know how to write myself through not understanding what I am thinking about until it is outside of me, in words and paragraphs.  If I don’t steal from Ariel, or somewhere else, I steal from my inbox.  (This is a terrible, terrible habit for writers, so don’t ever, ever do this.)  Sometimes I say, “Okay, write the post, the chapter, the poem, whatever.  Then go back and fill in the blank.”  You don’t always have to know the beginning.  Sometimes what you know is the end, and you work your way backwards, to where something begins.  You can do this in writing, and you can do it in life.  Unless, of course, there’s a fire.

The email started: “Opportunity walks softly and carries a big stick.”  My friend Clare Dolan sent photos of her house covered, swallowed, by fire.  Walls and door frames made thin black lines in the bright orange.

How could this be?  I was just there, in August.  I drove out past the pond, like she told me, “You can’t miss it,” she said.  I knocked on the door, but learned she was out on a walk, so I promised myself that I’d come back.  I strolled through her yard, her garden, exploding with chard, broccoli, kale.  Flowers rolling along the hills until the treeline.  There’s even a bed for sunny summertime naps and dark quiet stargazing.  Last August seems like years ago — since then, there have been babies and hurricanes, there has been the particular wavering uncertainty, an honest stab at doing better, more and more things.

“In the early morning of Jan 4th, 2012, all humans and animals escaped injury,” is what she wrote next.  After reading the entire email, staring at the difficult pictures, and after I called my friend Laura — to verify, to talk, to wonder and worry — I had to go to the post office, the most horrible post office in the history of history, and send an envelope to Singapore.  I looked at the map of the world, looked at Vermont and looked at Singapore.  How can that be?  How can this envelope go from South Williamsburg to Singapore?  How can Clare’s house be…gone?  There were people in the line — 45 minutes, I waited — screaming at the workers behind the thick glass, who couldn’t find this package, or that package; everyone was furious.  I just stood there and cried.

Clare is an incredible artist, friend, person, woman, nurse, puppeteer, curator, painter, singer, accordionist.  Incredible.  I’m so sad for her loss.  I’m so very, very sad.  She wrote: “Even as the goodbye is melancholy, it carries with it the enormous and singular chance to begin something entirely new. It’s time for adventure.”  So I signed up for the Brooklyn Fiction class.

I want to write more.  I want to write better.  I used to say ‘I want to finish this novel’ but I would even settle lately for ‘I want to get over this weird unpleasant hump’ that I’ve been trying to get over for months.  I have this sinking, horrible, very frightening feeling that what I’m working on is wonderful and vital and meaningful.  I’m going to figure this out, I thought.  Go ahead, I thought.  Leap.

Today I am thinking about: adventure and novels and fear and fire.  And Clare.

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