25 July 2006

some things

come full circle.



(a year later and i feel the same.)

15 July 2006

Ero

Sylvia Plath would have admired my self-pity this morning. It is a season of remarkable constancy. Each morning is the same, waking up far too soon to crashing knives and dropping spoons, forks falling on the tile floor and the deliberate tap of Dad's footsteps in the hall outside my door. Andrew crawls in at the foot of my bed to tickle me and Lydia is right behind him, giggling mockery, “Hannah-banana, the day is almost over!”

It's 7:23am.

I've been singing Over the Rhine and driving all around downtown Coventry this morning, collecting passport photos and money orders and standing in the sluggish line (twice) in the bleak corrals of the Coventry Postal Service. Thinking helplessly, beneath all my motion, that I have no ambition, and am doing miserably at finishing my summer credits, stopped up in my writing as well as in my spirit, the remaining days pressing in miserably, suffocating me.

A year ago I was dragging my heels, pulled closer and closer to a return to school. Today I am counting the days and the pages to the completion of my project and my true release from academic demands. But finishing credits won't release me from the burden to become. And I think that is what weighs on me now. Who am I becoming? I am so disillusioned about who that is supposed to be. I remember a conversation last fall with Dr. Mitchell.

"You do realize, he asked, that the life of a writer is hard and often sad?" I nodded.

Is it worth being a writer only to posses the moment of vision, the sharp instant in which your potential creation hangs in the air before your eyes, rotating in perfect completion? Is the vision a curse or a gift? Glimpses of what ought to be, do they discourage or encourage me? Is the vision my torment or my hope?

"Is it worth it?" is the wrong question. If you have the vision it will burn you until you release it.

This week I set up study in the library basement at a round table that I scavenged from the storage room and placed behind a broad chimney pillar. It is quiet underground, pulled back from the street, beneath humming fluorescent lights and blowing air conditioning ducts. I sit between the yellow walls and green-painted shelves, surrounded by tables covered in trays of discarded romance novels and the uneven bindings of donated hardcovers. I feel like a secret down here, because the door at the top of the stairs is locked and sometimes they forget about me. I am hidden like the tiny shelf of twenty-five cent paperbacks in the literature section, forgotten in a basement. The windows are above my head and ankle high on the sidewalk, they blink dustily out into the daylight between the overgrown shrubbery.

I feel almost guilty when people do come down, because no one can see me immediately. I shout out my presence the instant the door opens. But most of the time they lock up the library while I am still downstairs, I emerge into the blue light of a closed library.

I complain about these credits, but they are purchasing me one last summer of freedom. They justify a six-hour workweek, teaching swimming lessons at a private pool and riding jetskis afterwards. They're the reason I can take off for the ocean late at night, to sit on the rocks with my friends, sharing bottles of wine and conversation. The writing can be forced out in library basements or drawn out reflectively as I sit in tea shops and coffee bars. After I have written myself bleary-eyed, I can stay up in Providence for rooftop dinners and spontaneous dancing.

And the people here are wonderful. Come up and meet them.

The journals of my favorite authors, Plath and Camus and Hemingway, all said that it is best to write out of the midst of life. It is best when you are exerted on every front, watching real people live and living yourself, spending time outside watching both the night and the sunrise. I think I have that this summer, more than any other time in my life.


I am excited, and a little bit afraid, that I know there is more to pray for...

Discontented with everyone and discontent myself. I would gladly redeem myself and elate myself a little in the silence and solitude of night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me, support me, rid me of lies and the corrupting vapors of the world; and you, O Lord God, grand me the grace to produce a few good verse, which shall prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise.

- Baudelaire

14 July 2006

dear jules,


i even miss morning runs.

08 July 2006

He smiled understandingly--

Much more than understandingly.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

06 July 2006

she was incurably dishonest

for some reason i keep thinking back to this post.

01 July 2006

Adam's Complaint

Running alone out of my road beneath the new leaves that surprisingly have grown wide and deep green since I came home this spring. There is shade at midday, despite clinging humidity, and a sun that burns through the haze.

Run because you remember that at another time in life, when you had finally accepted the frame of things and learned to want what you already had, you were running every morning.

My life shifts and changes and I begin to go back, to retrace, the times and places I was most happy. I read my journals from other summers and try to pick out the fragments that composed other glad summers, then I try to reenact them to regain them. The last summer that I threw off uncertainties and drove away my apathy and denied my bitterness and forgave my enemies and found God, I was running every morning.

I've been running again, even though I would rather walk slowly.

Life is composed of pieces, books and songs, individuals and institutions, moments and moods, inconstant and fluctuating.

You were born insatiable. This is how it has always been, you find the thing that makes you feel alive and you kill it with your overzealousness. You choose an idea or a person and you strain them beyond their potential, you make them your entire world. You are so eager to taste the fruit of the earth that you forget and choke on the seeds.

Without a center I will seek to find a center. Without perfection I will seek to name something perfect. And so I am flung, dissatisfied, from passion to passion, forever a youth in my never-stilled appetite.

Connect the most hungry part of yourself with the single Immortal Constant. Moderation is impossible without God. All the pieces of life must be fluid, turning on the Unmoved Mover. All your love must really be given away, with no expectation of return. The love you receive must be accepted as it is, not demanded again, recognized as a gift.

You have to understand that you have always been loved enough, and that while you didn't deserve that in the first place, it is all you need. Any love beyond that Love is lavished abundance.

Some people,
no matter what you give them,
still want the moon.

The bread, the salt,
white meat and dark,
still hungry.

The marriage bed
and the cradle,
still empty arms.

You give them land,
their own earth under their feet,
still they take to the roads.

And water: dig them the deepest well,
still it's not deep enough
to drink the moon from.

Denise Levertov