RANDOM RAMBLINGS

How Do I Write Thee?

She thought she heard the familiar sound of his car door closing. Couldn't be, and yet, better check. "I'll have to clear all this stuff away". She could never let him find all her private thoughts spread out on the table. He'd already said, or intimated, that it was a lot of useless ruminating and delving, not even realizing all the doubts about their own relationship that her books contained. "Gawd, I've got to write something this week, or there's no justification for my life at all.

I wonder if I really have anything to say, but I've got to prove that all my sensitivities are worth something. Please don't tell me my most precious feelings are nothing more than the needle on the stereo amp, responding, fluctuating, hopping into the red once in a while.

I never wanted to be somebody famous. No, I'd hate fame; the idiots prying into your private life, misquoting, painting you according to their own view of things. What is it then? I want to be known for me, as me, as someone who can do something. But anything I do, anyone does, is just a craft. Once you learn the rules, the form, that's it, and anyone who wants to take the time can do it. Then it's lost its special attraction for me; it's not me anymore, just me following a form. I want it to be me, creating what is - a preformed awareness.

A preformed awareness - what the hell does that mean? I want people to see me, have me, absorb me, or something - something that represents me; want them to feel as I do. I want to make something that people can touch, can identify as exclusively mine. "Oh, that's her work," they'll exclaim, "no one else could do it like that! Isn't it wonderful?"

Look at all the writers who slog away day after day. They listen and think and distill, and write and craft and polish, and some of them get published and maybe even acclaimed. "Could I do that and please the fickle populace or will I be left behind for someone they like better?"

Not that that should matter, she thought, as she realized it was not his car arriving and she was still alone. She started washing her home-grown vegetables in the kitchen sink, thinking about how few she had given away when she had so many, and how it had been so unnatural for her to have given the best ones. "I don't normally give away my best ones; I save them for myself." And it occurred to her: that's why I can't make it. I don't give my best of anything. I'll always save it for myself. People only see the second best, while the beautiful ripe and luscious fruit has piled up, rotting, too much for me, and useless."

Poor Mary. She couldn't escape this awful part of herself that moralized over every single incident in her life; the tiniest detail, innocent of all meaning, grew to fantastic proportions in her mind to symbolize the inherent wrongfulness of her existence. The next step in her process would be feeling depressed, then sleeping or eating, to avoid it all, or a session of self-analysis. No matter what the choice, it was one that asserted that she lived where nothing ever happens. "I'm an inward masochistic loser," she thought, "like an ingrown toenail."

Going within yourself should be a pleasure, she thought, reviving, renewing, striving to be in a place of serenity like the holiest of holy people. In her happier moods she could appreciate this trait of self-absorption. She smiled as she remembered one magic moment of sexual ecstasy, a golden circle of light passing through her and a former lover, surprised that she had actually experienced it, but accepting that such gifts, so removed from the norm, had been bestowed upon her. "But ecstasy passes like the most mundane bowel movement," she thought, "and afterwards becomes just one more memory." She stored that one in the warehouse of her mind. As she scurried to gather up the food, she thought "Must put these veggies on, and then get back to my writing before he really is home."