Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.
I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekov: “…and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and posibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation.
— Raymond Carver, ‘On Writing’, Call If You Need Me
The curious case of the office in the nighttime
Night sky over Newborough
The tide
She pulses like the tide. Urgent. Quick. Reaching out for something beyond you and then in a moment rushing back clattering over shells and tumbling kelp, draining in retreat, leaving wrack and foam. Curling back in a small defense.
And even if at first you step away on toe-tips there is an eventual moment when she touches and from that inevitability, with each new visit, you begin to contemplate the immensity of what is offered, the frightening expanse. Each leaving, after water runs and sand mirrors sky, a moment of relief. The detail from absence and the outline of what is left behind.
Should you embrace her (you should), remember the unexpected cold, the way your feet look and how she changes you because by late-afternoon there will only be the faint grey of grubby shadow high on the beach, no footsteps left. Below at the darker edges, where tide runs sharp against the sudden depth, water prepares for night. What you are left with: memories of things that you didn’t think important.
On a couch in someone else’s house. Watching her tend a plant. Tired eyes. That dress she wore, those shoes, that soft perfume long gone. That painting she thought looked like you (how gently she considered you). Idle moments. Tired gladness. And still you want to remember certain things, shape the whole like a half-waking dream, content with its forced conclusion.
There may be pictures but what of them? There is that tin of praslins now filled with artifacts (the dried head of a rose, a shell, a butterfly wing, pebbles, polished glass, a silver ring, a broken piece of jade, a folded tram ticket). But these drift-things will mutely nod to what you forgot to remember.
Instead you understand how your own blood is tide-like. The fluttering of it when you press against a pillow echoes every longing and ache, everything that you wanted to do differently. Whatever reservations you have put them aside. Fold them, and fold them once more, slip them into a book and abandon what holds you from her. Even the bittersweet water is better than nothing. But know now that you can never be everything to anyone.
An earlier version was published August 26th, 2009
Tooronga
Patersons People
Wilson at Budgewoi
…where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again
“You know, what makes the prison disappear is very deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn’t have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again.”
