Writing Days
Friday, October 24, 2008
The truth is that I can tell what kind of writing day I'm going to have within the first half hour of sitting at my desk. If I have just ordered socks, turtlenecks and thermal underwear for Jacob from the Land's End Catalogue, I'm probably not heading in the right direction. (Best to leave these online shopping sprees for the wee, sleepless hours.) If I have found myself on my favorite fashion website, salivating over an unaffordable pair of Chloe boots (since when did $1200 become the new $600?) I am also, most likely, not heading in the right direction. Ditto, if I am answering emails. Ditto, if I am reading too much of the morning's news.
Lately I have been opening my treasured copy of Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary which I always keep within arm's reach on my desk. I open it randomly, like the I Ching. It always has a message for me. Yesterday, Ms. Woolf had this to say: "Writing becomes harder and harder. Things I dashed off, I now compress and re-state." As so often is the case, I felt a shock of recognition. This is what no one could have told me as a young writer--I wouldn't have believed it. It gets harder. The more I learn, the more I know, the more I am aware of the scope of my own ambitions and the limits of my abilities and that crushing place where the two meet. I am tougher on myself. I don't fall in love with my own words--ever. Long ago, when I was writing my second novel, I used to carry around manuscript pages with me--not to edit them, but (embarrassingly) because I loved them. This love should have tipped me off that I wasn't doing the hardest work of all. Once, Grace Paley said that if she loved a sentence she had just written enough to get up from her desk and go read it to her husband, she knew she had to cut it.
Now, at this very moment, I will open up A Writer's Diary and see what Ms. Woolf has to say for today: a bulletin from 1927, here it is:
"The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity."
Succumbing to Dismay
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Today is Yom Kippur, and probably blogging is somewhere high up on the list of what you're not supposed to do on Yom Kippur. In the Orthodox Jewish family of my childhood--if blogging or computers had existed--this very act would have broken a series of prohibitions. The use of electricity, for one. Writing, for another. Not to mention removing one's focus from the holiness and importance of the day.
But I am actually thinking about the holiness and importance of the day. Last night, Michael, Jacob and I went to Kol Nidre services at a synagogue I've finally discovered in my search for a place to belong as a Jew here in Cheever country. It's been a long (six year long!) road, but finally I have found a sanctuary where I feel spiritually at home. And because I feel so comfortable there, I found myself able to listen, to really listen to the "ashamnu" prayer which is central to the Kol Nidre service. This is the prayer that always scared me half to death as a child, and even as an adult. As God flips through the pages of the Book of Life and makes decisions about the fate of each and every person in the coming year, we beat our chests and admit our sins. The language of this list of sins is disconcerting: we have stolen, we have committed adultery, we have become violent, we have been contemptuous, we have rebelled. We have been wicked, stiff-necked, immoral. Last night, somehow, these words felt the way I think they're supposed to. They were not necessarily my personal confessions, but the confessions of an entire people. An entire community, a world of humanity, admitting their frailty.
Finally, though, it was this sin that popped out at me: For the sin of succuming to dismay. If there was ever a moment to understand this as a sin, or a failing, it seemed a good time to recognize it. To feel dismay is not a sin. The sin is to succumb to it. I held the thought like a small stone in my pocket, fingering it, returning to it on the drive home.
But then we returned from services and walked into the kitchen to discover that Samson the Labradoodle pup had managed to pull the half-eaten challah off the kitchen counter, and had eaten the whole thing. Bits of saran wrap covered the kitchen floor. We called the vet to be sure the dog wasn't in danger. And I tried not to succumb to dismay.
Fork in the Road
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The other day, while messing around on Facebook (one of my new and most favorite forms of procrastination) I went on my husband's Facebook page to see what was new with him, since we barely ever get to talk to each other any more because of 4th grade homework and the new puppy. I noticed that Michael had added a link to a video he had also posted on YouTube, called "Flying Qat into Mogadishu". Qat being a plant found in parts of Africa which, when the leaves are chewed, apparently gives a person a mild, cocaine-like buzz. And Mogadishu, Somalia being the place that owned Michael's heart before he met me. He was flying with his friend Josh on the small drug plane onto a dirt runway south of Mogadishu controlled by the son of an infamous war lord (is there any other kind of war lord?) because there weren't very many ways for journalists to get into the country during that time. As I watched the video below--the laughing pilot, the tiny strip of dirt appearing below them, the men casually holding their assault rifles approaching the small plane--I noticed the date. It was August, 1996.
Michael and I met on the first day of November, 1996--less than three months after the adventure on the qat plane. He was still jet-lagged, having just returned to New York from Africa, where he spent most of his time as a foreign correspondent. We were introduced by a mutual friend at a Halloween party near Gramercy Park, we fell in love on the spot, and now we live with one child and two dogs in bucolic New England. This is what our lives look like now:
I'll never be able to explain it. But that improbable meeting nearly twelve years ago has been the greatest piece of good luck in my life. Still, as I watched the video Michael shot as the plane descended through the clouds toward the dirt strip, my breath caught in my throat. Please land safely, I thought. Come home so we can start our lives together. Please.
