A recent email ended with the exhortation that I should keep writing. Oh, sir, you flatter and frighten me! The correspondent innocently employed a mandate which forever haunts me. Others have declaimed that I should keep writing, before devolving into avid resentment that writing detracted from the demanded presence of their rueful expectations. I could not win. If I do not write, I might as well not exist. Yet the process and the product became a source of wild controversy as my attention strayed from daily life to the book which I yearned to create.
I have been asked, how can you write so easily? and replied, silently if not otherwise, I have to bribe myself to do anything else.. Passages crowd my frayed nerve endings and yearn to leap across the synapses. Entire sentences jockey for the flow to fingertips before they can fade. Anecdotes yammer at the gateway: Mine, and those told to me by others. Lofty imagery of flora and fauna vies with tales of flotsam, feast, and far-flung places, some seen on Sunday drives and some which I can only imagine. Tales of tears stand at attention in my mind’s library, awaiting their turn for telling. All the while, I do my job, earn my keep, pursue the mundane events of a fading life. I tell myself, when you get this load of laundry done, you can spend an hour at the keyboard, before scrapping the task list in favor of constructing an account of a tender moment that the universe afforded me in the midst of a tumultuous time.
Keep writing? Of what, to whom? Speak you of this correspondence, sir; or do you know the mad avowals which haunt me? I will be present; I will focus; I will listen; and then, as my reward, I will write. Oh, the chance to write! More precious than a mountain of gold!
I have stood on the edge of a canyon with my young son and watched a bird of prey swoop across the open expanse, effortless and easy, while I stand breathless and panting from the climb. Even as I strained to discern the distant slopes, I composed an account of the experience. I race to the notebook in my car as the light fades across the ripple of the ocean to record the powerful sight of the setting sun. Does a photographer fight these anti-social urges? Does the painter? Is it only because I understand the fleeting gift of the well-formed phrase?
I write in the shower, in the car, in line at the grocery store. I stand tapping my silver ring against the cart handle, willing the clerk to work faster so I can get out to the car where I surely have a piece of paper. When my turn comes, I struggle to recall what I meant to do — oh yes, buy this food! — instead of writing down the metaphor that I might never again recall. How are you today, asks the cashier; but I can only blankly stare into her face. How am I? Rushed, in the main; and torn between my understanding that your importance as a human being surpasses that of the essay that my mind struggles to retain. Mostly I just mumble that I’m fine, and grudgingly accept the eyerolled condemnation of my distant tone.
A high school classmate said she pictured me in my sickbed, wrapped in silk and fringe, a notebook balanced on my knees. Pages of a novel flutter to the floor in this prosaic scene. She presumed the absence of meaningful distraction. Unable to walk, I would not have a life except that of a writer. Like Heidi’s feeble cousin Clara, I would wistfully observe the rosy-cheeked stronger girl and, thus inspired, write about the life I could not have. I listened to her happy, clueless prognostications with horror, rejecting the notion of that creepy, vicarious accumulation of stories to recount with the scribblings of my fountain pen.
Yet it is known, and often lamented, that I would rather write than most other things. What does that say about me?
Keep writing, my correspondent bids me, like one who many painful years ago asked if I would write as beautifully for the rest of our lives. I recalled that entreaty with a definite ruefulness the first time the same sad soul lamented my inability to stop writing to hear about the events of his workday.
Keep writing. To you, sir; or in general? I am not sure that I can keep the one promise, but neither am I at all convinced that I can forswear the other in its stead.
It’s the thirteenth day of the one-hundred and twenty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.
