A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity: a Meditation on Selfhood

 A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity

A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity

By

Anne Cumming

Dedication

To Adam

Prologue

“…do you think you can do this for one second…open the doorway into that state of mind that you are looking for? (where your mind becomes clear and you become in tune in a certain way?)”

Adam

October 23, 2006

Chapter One

Three Friends

Part 1 – ViaItokasha – Silence and Abandonment

Don’t assume that the characters in this story have white skin, that they are speaking English, or that they necessarily live anywhere close to where you live. I am assuming that if you are reading this story, two of these things are true of you -- that you live somewhere in particular, and, because I am writing in English, that you are likely a reader of English. Your skin, however, may or may not be “white”.

I am not going to describe any of my characters in terms of physical characteristics. One of them is named EvelyEris, another ViaItokasha, and a third AnanMinus7. All three of them have dark hair. Will I tell you what kind of dark hair, perhaps hinting at ethnicity or racial origin? No. I leave that for you as a reader to decide. Will I tell you what they are wearing, or where they are living, or perhaps even toss you an image of a sand dune, an ocean shore, a mountain peak? No. In fact, I leave that up to you as well. Pick your skin colour, ethnicity, setting -- I’ll just tell you the story. The story is about the people. They could be anywhere.

They could be speaking any language. While it is true that I am writing in English, that is only because that is the language available to me. You can decide what language these fictional people are speaking. It may be that you are yourself bilingual, or even multilingual. Pick any one of your languages for these characters, or you can even mix them up. Even if your only language is English, you can still pretend that these characters, EvelyEris, ViaItokasha and AnanMinus7, are speaking a language you cannot speak or understand. I’ll do the work for you in English, and then you can pretend whatever you like.

And so we have these three characters, EvelyEris, ViaItokasha, and AnanMinus7. They are sitting together – no -- they are squatting together and leaning their backs against the side of a building. I won’t describe the building, exactly. I will let you do that. You describe the building for yourself, now, and my instruction to you is that you pick a building that provides you with the setting you would like to see. There are many choices open to you. You may, if you wish, select a building that you are familiar with. That may be a building in the village/town/city/rural area that you live in. Or you may prefer to choose a building in a part of the world where you have never been. Perhaps you have seen pictures in a National Geographic magazine of a Bedouin tent, or a sod hut, or on a kayak trip to Greenland you saw a winter home with a whalebone roof. Those are just a few ideas, but you pick your own. How exotic and unfamiliar do you want this story to be? It’s up to you.

So, it could be a barn, a warehouse, a post office, an igloo, a gas station, a tent, a high-rise: premodern, modern, postmodern. You get the idea. You are a good reader, so are able to fill in what you like. You may even decide what material the building is made of: stucco, brick, concrete, wood. And so on. This is, after all, your job as a reader. You will do this anyway, regardless of what I tell you. As I said before, I will provide the characters and you will do the rest of the work.

EvelyEris, ViaItokasha and AnanMinus7 are friends. They have been friends for a long time, and all three of them have long painted fingernails on the fingers of their right hands, and carefully trimmed finger nails on the fingers of their left hands. Beside each of them, leaning against the wall, is a guitar.

EvelyEris is a guitar maker whose guitars are exquisitely made and whose guitars make exquisite sounds. I won’t tell you the nature of those exquisite sounds, preferring instead to let you imagine what “exquisite” is. I can’t describe the guitars, except to say that they are not electric guitars. I can’t say either what kind of wood those guitars are made of. But they are made of a wood cut by EvelyEris. If you are familiar with guitars, here is your chance to see whichever type of guitar you would like to see. And now that these guitars have appeared, you will expect them to somehow play a part in the story that is about to unfold (and you are also hoping for a story). And so expecting such a thing to happen, you might also imagine what type of music you would like to hear. Take a moment now, before reading the next paragraph, to construct these three guitars in your imagination. You can make these guitars as well or poorly constructed as you like. You can also decide, perhaps, to have two of the guitars to be in better shape than the third. Which of our characters, if you do that, shall get the lesser guitar? Let’s make that EvelyEris, because EvelyEris is the guitar maker. As a guitar maker, EvelyEris is likely to sell or give away the better made guitars and keep only the poorer ones. So, EvelyEris has the older, shabbier, poorer guitar, and ViaItokasha and AnanMinus7 have newer, brighter guitars.

EvelyEris, ViaItokasha and AnanMinus7, these three old friends, are leaning against the side of a building, and they are squatting, their knees in front of their chests, and a guitar to the right side of each of them, for they are all right handed. Or at least they all play guitar right-handedly.

How old would you like them to be? They can be any age, unless you interpret the fact that they are “old friends” to suggest that they can’t be in their teens. However, if you have a tendency towards seeing most statements in relative terms, then they could be teens, and the fact that they are “old friends” could mean that they have known one another since childhood. But maybe you, my reader, are in your 60s, and as soon as I said they were old friends, you started to think of a couple of your own old friends, also in their 60s, and you have already constructed a scene of you and your two friends, squatting against a wall, guitars at your sides. Or maybe they are each from a generation. Yes, that fits best for me, and what I am imagining. Three friends of quite different ages.

I am growing ever aware that these three friends, whoever they are, have been squatting against a wall almost since this story began. I suspect that they are getting impatient, and that they may want to be doing something other than squat against a wall, silently. One of them should speak, I am thinking. Or do something, gesticulate, or spit, or laugh.

Just as I write this, ViaItokasha, who is sitting in the middle and looking down at the ground, looks up at the sun, which is high in the sky. It is midday, and the sun is hot. There is only a very thin strip of shade on the side of the building where the three friends are sitting. The shade covers the ground close to where the building meets the ground. ViaItokasha, who having looked up, also stands up. EvelyEris and AnanMinus7 look up to watch as ViaItokasha walks away from them.

ViaItokasha slumps, and falls to the ground. The body looks like a crumpled bag and would not be recognizable as a body if we had not seen him fall. ViaItokasha is dead. EvelyEris and AnanMinus7 take ViaItokasha’s guitar and move it off to the side. AnanMinus7’s guitar is placed off to the left, and now there is no guitar between AnanMinus7 and EvelyEris, who are now sitting closer together, with a guitar on either side of them: EvelyEris’s guitar to the right and AnanMinus7’s guitar to the left. There are barely 4 inches between EvelyEris and AnanMinus7, and they seem to need to be sitting closer to one another now that ViaItokasha has died.

They watch as ViaItokasha’s body is removed by six people wearing plum colored hoods. AnanMinus7 catches the eyes of one of the removers, and tosses a hand towards ViaItokasha’s guitar, which is on the ground, not leaning against the wall. As ViaItokasha is on the ground. The remover comes and takes away the guitar. For the first time, AnanMinus7 notices there are no strings on ViaItokasha’s guitar, but does not say anything to EvelyEris, the guitar-maker.

Now there are two of them, and the world seems smaller to both. The removers have gone and ViaItokasha is gone and ViaItokasha’s guitar is gone and the world seems smaller, and although ViaItokasha’s guitar had no strings, the world seems also quieter. EvelyEris and AnanMinus7 don’t speak, but at 8 o’clock they both rise, take their guitars, and start to walk in opposite directions.

I was going to stop here, but as I was preparing to stop, one of the characters, AnanMinus7, called out to me. – don’t stop, said AnanMinus7. I have something to say. Surprised, and wishing instead to stop writing in order to go to my chaise and resume marking first year composition papers, I demurred. Do I really prefer to mark papers? Apparently not, as I immediately became curious about what AnanMinus7 wanted to say.

I’m waiting.

AnanMinus7 stands perfectly still, looking back at the wall and sees the outline of a human shadow there, still, as if the shadow has been burned into the side of the building by a hot sun. - I was there, says AnanMinus7, pointing a crooked index finger towards the wall. That is my shadow.

I have to agree, that is AnanMinus7’s shadow, and I wonder what significance there is in that shadow.

I am worried about the sun, says AnanMinus7, moving the guitar from where it rests against a sunburned leg to a higher position, as if AnanMinus7 is about to play. There are strings on AnanMinus7’s guitar, I can see, so I wait for the playing to begin. All of AnanMinus7’s fingers are crooked, like wild ginger root. (Ah, finally I have been able to describe fingers like ginger root, and that pleases me, because always, browsing through grocery stores, I have seen ginger root and imagined the gnarled arthritic hands of a crone.) AnanMinus7 has those hands, and places them on the guitar and begins to play.

AnanMinus7’s playing is not deft, and I would not recommend that you go to Google to find that name, or to Bit Torrent to search for songs. No AnanMinus7 is what I might call a “mood” player, not partial to melody but certainly partial to finding that right combination of right hand and left hand that creates a melancholy note, and then another, and another, until after many notes I know that I am listening to the deepest sorrow that a human can express. AnanMinus7 plays briefly, abruptly stops, and turns and walks away.

The sun has now fallen behind the horizon and the heat has subsided somewhat. I find myself standing in the middle of an empty street, AnanMinus7’s simply expressed sorrow overwhelming any thoughts I may have had, or have been about to have. I am just standing alone in this street, AnanMinus7’s shadow burned into the side of the building and the last notes of the guitar echoing on the inside of my brain.

I decide to follow AnanMinus7. AnanMinus7 has walked away from me, down this street, and past other buildings that I will not describe. I will follow AnanMinus7 because I don’t understand anything about what I have written so far. I think I deserve an explanation of the sitting, the guitars, ViaItokasha’s sudden death, the guitar playing, the shadow burned into the side of the building, and if you are curious, reader, then you, too, deserve an explanation. You are welcome to join me as I follow AnanMinus7. However, you may prefer, it occurs to me, to follow EvelyEris, the guitar maker. Maybe you would prefer to take your chances with someone less known than AnanMinus7, who, after all, was fairly cryptic, what with those comments about being worried about the sun, and playing that mood music. Just saying all this has made me more curious myself about EvelyEris than about AnanMinus7, so I will make the arbitrary decision to have us follow EvelyEris, and perhaps we will meet up with AnanMinus7 again, given that they are old, oldest friends.

As I turn to follow EvelyEris, I notice a large piece of ragged edge, acid-free paper behind me. It is as wide as it is tall, and reaches up about 30 metres. The ragged edges of the paper are slightly charred, and look like the just-burned end of a cigarette. Through the paper, and closer to the left side, is a large, vertical sluice, whose edges are bent towards the other side. I can see a hand print on one side of the sluice, as if someone has grabbed the edge of the paper while walking through. I realize as I look back at this piece of paper, that I have just walked through it. And in walking through the paper, I have transformed from narrator into being one of the characters in this story. I walk back over to the paper, and look back through. On the other side, I can see myself sitting hunched over my laptop, dressed in my white housecoat, a just-heated beanbag wrapped around over my right shoulder, just under my ear, where my neck is sore from poor writing posture. I touch the paper carefully, not wanting to tear it any more than I obviously already have. I hear a very faint crumbling sound, and some of the paper falls to the ground, landing on my shoes. My shoes. As a character in this story, I must be wearing shoes. It’s not good enough to be wearing that shabby white housecoat in the story. So, I am wearing my black shoes, slightly scuffed, but protected against too early demise by many coats of clear shoe polish. The paper that falls is actually ash, and as the ash lands on my shoes, it turns into powder, a pink powder. I look around and notice that everything around me is coated in this pink powdery substance, and I am reminded of the scene in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency where the electric monk sits on his horse, surveying the landscape around him, and sees a pink dust covering everything; meanwhile, the horse beneath him thinks about how much more the horse knows about the rider, than the rider about the horse. And here I am, standing on the threshold between narrator and character, looking back as a character to me as a narrator, and I see the same rose colored dust falling onto my shoes. Is the character the rider, the narrator the horse?

What happens now? I wonder. I am still looking back at myself sitting at the computer keyboard, and I know that I was about to follow EvelyEris, before I realized that I had become a character and not the narrator of this story. Should I walk back through the paper, rejoin myself at the laptop, or should I follow EvelyEris? I could send AnanMinus7 to follow EvelyEris, and remain safely at my desk while I watch the action unfold before me. I would still be able to see everything, but, oh, what a different experience of agency I would have. As a character, well, as a character, I would be able to make things happen. As a narrator, I can only report what I see.

Thinking only for a moment longer about the charred edges of the paper, I turn to follow EvelyEris. But by now I have forgotten which direction to turn, which way EvelyEris had gone. I am alone on this street, and all around me now on the street is rose colored dust. I lift my hand to my hair, as if to check if it has turned steel-grey, but there is no mirror around, and I soon forget my concern. I see, not far from me, about 10 metres away, another group of six purple-cloaked individuals, and they are carrying a dead body. Another dead body, or is it ViaItokasha? I squint, but I can’t tell if the body is ViaItokasha, or someone else. Who else it could be, I don’t know. I only know of two other people in this story, AnanMinus7 and EvelyEris, and I know it is not either of them. But are those the same six hooded figures as took ViaItokasha away earlier? That I can’t tell, either. I begin to walk towards them, curious, and see that they are not carrying ViaItokasha, but some other person who I don’t know. And I can see that person is dead.

Right now, I have this desire to return to narration. I am not enthusiastic about the puzzle of two dead bodies, and would rather leave that work to EvelyEris, or AnanMinus7, but they have both left the scene, and now that I have walked away from the punctured paper, I am not sure even that I walked through that paper to begin with, or if that is the way back out to narration. Without deciding on this particular action, I start to follow these six “removers”, who are removing the second dead body, and as I do, I realize that these six are not the same six. I realize this because as the seven of us turn a corner onto another street, a side-street, I see several other groups of six purple-robe clad monk figures, each carrying a dead, or apparently dead, body. There are, I speculate, probably at least 48 of these figures, whose job, it appears, is to remove the dead. I decide that I must start to refer to them as Removers, with a capital letter, as they seem to have an official function requiring capitalizing. Apparently, the original six removers were not an anomaly, never to appear again in the story.

So, reader, are you still here with me, the character in this story? Or are you sitting in the warmth of the narrator’s office, the dog now on the floor, snoring and waiting for the narrator to become tired, or to decide to go back to the microwave to reheat the beanbag?

I’m feeling tentative at this point, as I am not sure what to go next. I know I said I wanted agency, but I’d like some sort of sign, some sort of indication from somewhere telling me where to go next. Should I approach a group of Removers, and demand to know what they are doing? Or ask more politely why so many people are dying? Or should I try to find EvelyEris or AnanMinus7, who thus far in the narration have been benign characters and perhaps approachable?

What I get for my tentativeness is the realization that now there are no Removers on the street, and no one to approach at all. So I am left standing here, in this unknowable place, because, if you remember, at the beginning of this story, I provided no real setting, no real description of anything, because, I said, I was leaving it up to you to provide the details. That seemed fun at the time, but now that I am a character in this story, I realize that I need something more. I need some definition so that I will know who I am and where I am and what I am supposed to do. And you, reader, appear to be silent on the issue. I can see you sitting there, wherever it is that you sit, holding on to that information, gleefully or dubiously watching me stand in this dusty rose street in the middle of nothing, as I try to create an identity that goes beyond one pair of recognizable black shoes and the ability to use the pronouns “I” and “me” and “my”. I’m relieved that I can at least use those pronouns, but I’m not sure, you see, exactly what I mean when I say them. I’ve left that narrator behind, who looks an awful lot like what I thought I looked like. But if the narrator is me, then who am I?

The street remains empty around me. Only the dust sitting still on the surface of the road. I experience a silence so deep, so intense, that I cannot hear my heartbeat or feel the breath moving in and out of my lungs. And now everything is still and I am the same as the pink dust, and I am here thinking: this is not so bad. No, this is not bad at all. It is nothing. It is not good. It is not bad. And then, well, then, I just stop thinking.

Part 2 – EvelyEris – What Happens to all the Souls

To my left, just inside of my peripheral vision, I see a small flame. At first I think that the flame is a flicker in my eye, a visual anomaly, but it continues long enough that I see that it is real. A real fire is burning just off to my left, and I turn to face it. As I watch the flame, it grows larger, although I can’t see what is fueling the fire. The fire is as small as a campfire on a beach, but then it starts to travel, and it turns into a 300 metre long fire fence, burning just a few feet high. The flames are orange and red, occasionally intensifying to white. I face the fire, and my face becomes hot. The ground is too dusty to burn, and there are no trees around. The paint on the sides of the buildings is scorching, and the temperature of the air around me is climbing. The ash on the tips of my black shoes becomes lighter again, or perhaps is being carried away in the drafts caused by the fire. The fire doesn’t create new ash; it is burning hot and everything is burning, creating only energy.

Six Removers come from behind a building; they are not carrying a dead body, but each of these Removers has an enlarged belly behind the purple robe. As they walk, I can see a small, curved shrimp-shaped body rolling and squirming in each of the bellies. The robes are not translucent, or transparent, but the small bodies are phosphorescent blue, and they gleam through the robes. These blue bodies appear to be suspended within the bellies. The Removers do not appear to be aware that they are carrying these tiny blue babies. They walk towards me, the tiny bodies bobbing in the bellies. It is not that I see the bodies; it is that I can see each bone of each body, floating within the womb of the host Remover. The bones are apparently not connected to each other, yet as they are tossed around within the wombs, the bones remain coupled to one another. Each movement of a Remover leads the package of connected bones to shift, and each shifting bone leaves a trace of the path that it takes to shift. What I see is a combination of the blurring and solid phosphorescent blue bones. It is clear that each package of blue bones is a baby, a small person, waiting to be born.

As they get close to me, I see that the Removers have no faces; buried within the folds of their hoods is an infinite blackness that hides neither smile nor grimace, and astonishingly, I am not frightened, but curious. -- open the door, says a voice. I expect that the voice belongs to one of the Removers, and I reach out my left hand towards them. As I do so, my hand gets drawn as if by a magnet back to my chest, and I find myself holding my left hand against my lungs, trying to hold my breath in. The air is hot, and I’m starting to choke on the heat, on the absence of oxygen. The voice is mine. – open the door, it says again, and I turn back to the piece of paper that I have walked through. The six Removers are standing between me and the paper. I am reluctant to move towards them, so I stand still.

Behind me now is the fire burning steadily, in front of me the charred paper and the Removers. Where is AnanMinus7? Where is EvelyEris? I could use something more tangible in this story, something that can jar me away from this dream-like state that is not a dream.

There are no doors that I can see. But behind the Removers, beyond the piece of paper, I can see the narrator dropping her head to her chest. She is tired, and I’m tempted to go back out to help her, maybe take over the writing for a while. But it’s too late for that, as the fire is starting to lick at the edge of the paper that I walked through and soon the paper will burn, I will be stuck here in the story, with no sluice to walk back through, and no other world to return to.

After I wrote that last paragraph, I went upstairs for a break, and ended up watching the first hour of Captain’s Courageous, a movie in which Spencer Tracey plays a Portuguese fisherman fishing from a boat off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. As he is floating in the fog one evening, he finds a pretentious, intolerable 10-year-old son of a millionaire bobbing around in the water as a result of having fallen off an ocean liner. I started to watch the movie as a documentary: the fishing scenes, with massive codfish being flung about the schooner named “We’re Here”, fish-knives flashing in the mist, the fishing dories hanging inside one another on the deck. And Spencer Tracey, doing his best Portuguese accent, sprawled on the deck of the boat, playing his hurdy-gurdy (or veille a roué), and singing. It’s the first time I’ve seen a hurdy-gurdy, and Tracey lay there, resplendently exotic and sensual and languorous and very, very pseudo-Portuguese, turning the hurdy-gurdy crank and singing of little fishies, girls, and fathers. His songs didn’t come close to fado, but the hurdy-gurdy, well, all I wanted was to hear the hurdy-gurdy, and watch it and watch Tracey turning that little crank and listen to him make up words to songs.

I’m hanging on to this story by a thread. Sometimes it’s like that. There’s a story, and I’m barely telling it, and I barely even know that there’s anything left to tell. Each word is extruded from the tips of my fingers, and I feel like I’m trying to ice a wedding cake with icing enough for a cupcake. But sometimes it’s like that, isn’t it? You’re just making do. Putting in the effort, hanging on to the edges of a life, figuring that if you’re lucky, your fingers won’t give, and you won’t plunge into the end lurking behind the next disaster.

Today, all I can think of is Spencer Tracey and his hurdy-gurdy.

But Spencer Tracey, who won an academy award for that role, is now dead, I don’t know where to find a hurdy-gurdy, and I must find EvelyEris. There are no Removers around any more, just the burning fire, and the charred paper, waiting in the background for me to finish writing about Captain’s Courageous, the “We’re Here”, and the hurdy-gurdy. I’m finished now.

The fence of fire now looks like a river. A river of fire is burning from the entrance in the piece of paper across the pink dusted street and down another side street where I am sure that I will find EvelyEris. Beside the river, close to the base of a mountain that rises directly out of the ground, with no foothills leading up to it, stands AnanMinus7. I decide to approach AnanMinus7, and ask where I may find EvelyEris. As I draw beside AnanMinus7, a hand reaches up and grazes softly against my cheek, and I startle to the touch, then follow AnanMinus7’s fingertips, which point towards the top of the mountain. AnanMinus7 disappears into the river of fire, and although I haven’t asked AnanMinus7 about EvelyEris, I decide to climb the mountain. Will EvelyEris be there? I don’t know, but I have no better guesses, and this world seems to be one of no words, only gestures and death.

I start to climb the mountain, which is directly in front of me now, and as I begin to climb I see that the robed monks are also climbing. Some groups of six are carrying a dead body, but none of the monks with the blue bones in their bellies are carrying bodies; they are walking now in ones and twos. I fall into step beside one of these monks, and the mountain is steep and the air is getting colder despite the burning river that flows uphill beside us. The monk is accustomed to this steep climb, judging by the pace at which she is ascending, and to make good time, I try to keep pace with her. There are no trees around us, as they have all already burned in the last Burning, and there is only the burning river and some boulders and smaller rocks scattered around us, between us and the river, and on the other side of the river. A slight rain begins to fall, but the drops are phosphorescent and blue, the color of the babies’ bones, and I know that they will not be enough to quench the burning river. But I am not sure either that the burning river needs to be quenched, and am aware that I have a certain knowledge about the river, that I have not possessed before. At the same time, I do not recognize the knowledge that I have, and I cannot name it, give words to it.

The monk beside me is as faceless as all the others. I am getting tired trying to keep up with her, and I am getting cold as the air gets thinner. This is a steep mountain, and my thighs ache and my calves ache and my bare feet ache. The monk hands me a robe, and because I am cold, I put it on. I continue to walk, but I have fallen behind while trying to figure out how to pull my face through the hood. I can’t find the hole in the front of the hood, and am forced to walk in the darkness beneath the heavy wool robe. I am frightened. I can’t see where the edge of the burning river is and am afraid that I might walk into it and burn. I can’t see any other monks now, and can’t see anything except the inside of the hood and that is blackness. But I keep putting one foot in front of the other, and while I am cold and tired I keep climbing because I don’t know what else to do. I decide to gauge my direction by ensuring that the degree of effort needed to exert in order to climb remains at a steady pace, that way I will always be climbing and will not step into the river of fire. – I would prefer to know where I am, I say, to nobody in particular, but wondering if perhaps the monk I was walking beside is still within hearing distance. A voice answers me, but I can’t tell if it is the voice of that monk. The voice says: -- yes. And that’s it. Yes. That’s all I get.

I hear a barking dog, and then a voice calls out – EvelyEris! EvelyEris! EvelyEris! The voice continues to call out that name, over and over, with an increasing desperation and fearsomeness, and I am curious to know who else is looking for EvelyEris. Does this mean that EvelyEris may be nearby? But no, if EvelyEris is nearby, then why is there no response to the voice? I follow the sound of the voice, but my steps don’t seem to take me any closer to the source of the sound. I have no other logic to use to decide on a direction, and I can’t see because of the closed hood, so I walk towards the voice which begins to recede away from me. Suddenly I become hot, as if I have walked into a pool of hot air, and I remove the robe because instantly I am unable to bear the wool against my skin which is now no longer cold, but hot, burning from the inside and the outside. When I remove the robe I see that I am standing beside the burning river and my skin is green, a bright green the color of leaves newly emerged in the spring. I am standing on the summit of the mountain and while there is ice and snow on the ground around me, I am surrounded by the pool of hot air that shimmers just above the surface of the ground. The burning river curls around the outer edge of the hot air and continues its journey around the summit and down the other side of the hill towards a large burning yellow lake in a valley on the west side of the mountain. A sunset sits over the lake, and the sun is so deep in the sky that it looks as if it is sitting in the lake and there is no difference between the yellow lake and the yellow sun on the edge of the sky. The river, the lake and the sun are all burning and I know now that another Burning Time is coming and that the green of my skin will soon also char.

EvelyEris is sitting on a boulder on the west side of the mountain and I continue to walk in that direction. I am naked now, with only my green skin and the robe left behind me in the heat of the burning air pool and although I walk out of the pool of hot air and back into the cold air of the high regions, I am not cold as I carry the memory of heat with me and that is enough to warm me. I call out to EvelyEris, who looks towards me, smiling and lifting a hand towards me, outstretched. I walk faster, because I can’t believe that I will reach EvelyEris before something happens. EvelyEris picks up a guitar, and begins to play. The music is simple, like the music played by AnanMinus7, just before AnanMinus7 walked away from me. The closer I get to EvelyEris, the louder the music and the more I realize that the music is not simple, but complex, many notes, many intertwining and overlapping notes that sing their own story and the words and colors and ideas of the story appear in my head with each of the discrete sounds of the notes. I close my eyes, I begin to utter syllables that are the words of the stories that I see in swirling colors of orange and turquoise, yellow and blue.

These are not my words, these are not my sounds. These are from somewhere else, from someone else, and EvelyEris smiles at me because the sounds come from my mouth and I repeat them over and over as EvelyEris plays the guitar and the bones in my head begin to crack and the cavities in my head begin to click and the fluids in my body begin to move and flow and there is just the cracking and clinking and the sounds of the syllables over and over, and I realize that I am dead.

Part III - AnanMinus7 – Baby’s First Steps

I am prepared for this. I told myself a story once, a story in which I buried myself deep into the ground, in a coffin of my own making. I even shoveled the dirt over myself, and experienced the darkness and silence of death, at five years old, four years old, some time when I was very young. So, for this death, I am prepared. I’m embarrassed to admit this, now. This story, which has lived me all my life, is now more than a story, but it has come to be real. Is that why I was not afraid of the burning river? Is that why I climbed to the top of the mountain with my eyes covered by the dark robe? Now that I am dead, I am carrying my own phosphorescent bones in my womb, and am wearing a dark robe once again, my eyeless face invisible behind the folds of the hood. There is no one to see me, and now I also know that the Removers are also dead, have always been dead.

What does all this mean? Does it need to mean anything? I look beside me and I see that I have given birth to phosphorescent blue bones and that the blue bones are forming into a physical body, an infant with a curious face and pudgy hands. As I look, I disappear, and now I am looking from behind the eyes of this blue infant. I can no longer talk, and I begin to cry. Oh, this is a different kind of crying, unaccompanied by any thoughts or reasons to cry. I let the tears come from the deepest part of my soul and I feel them covering my face with their wetness until my face is watery and becomes cool as the air evaporates the tears, and then wet again as I continue to cry and the coolness and wetness pass over my face over and over again like so many small clouds passing in front of a sun. I am lying on my back and my arms and legs are moving, each limb to its own rhythm, as if each arm and leg belongs to a separate being. My feet are reaching out for solid ground, but I am on my back and my feet are punching the open air, my clenched fists jabbing at nothing. I feel as if I am floating and my arms and legs moving to ensure that I don’t sink, but there is nothing to sink down to or away from and I am just floating and jabbing and punching and breathing and crying. I hear a voice calling; it says, AnanMinus7, AnanMinus7, AnanMinus7, over and over again until I find myself looking down at my fat blue toes that are flat on the ground, and I am no longer crying and my limbs no longer jabbing but I am looking around me with the same curious face and a woman is calling me from across the room, AnanMinus7, she says, beckoning to me with her long polished fingers and smiling. AnanMinus7, she says, and I stumble towards her. That is me, I think, that is my name. I am not crying now, but chortling as I watch the miracle of my blue feet and feel the dizziness of imbalance and grasp towards my mother’s embrace.

I understand that she is beautiful and she laughs and the music of her laugh excites me and I start to move faster towards her, tipping and lurching and reaching out to her: catch me, catch me, I ask her from the interior of me. And she is reaching out her arms towards me and laughing and saying: Look at you! Look at you!

Letter to Adam 1

Hi Adam,

October 28, 2006

It's quite amazing, really, that I have been writing every day for an hour each

day since last Saturday.  So, I have pulled back from the initial all day burn, and

concentrated on just writing for an hour at a time.  Sometimes that has

extended beyond the hour, but what I tell myself is that I am just going to

write for 10 minutes, or 20 minutes, and then that turns into an hour. Last

night I had become tired before I was able to make it to the computer.  I was

lying on my bed, thinking that I would just go to sleep instead.  Then I

remembered what you said in your email about Kurosawa:  didn't matter how good

or bad was his writing, what mattered was that he did the practice.  Right.

Same principle as meditating.  Doesn't matter whether I meditate "well"; what

matters is that I take the time to pay myself that time.  So, what is helpful

to me is to remember those sorts of thoughts about time and effectiveness.  My

tendency is to put off doing things until I can do them perfectly.  (I just re-read this sentence tonight (Sunday night), which I wrote some time last week. It really resonated with me in the re-reading, as if I had understood or heard for the first time something that I had myself written. This happens frequently when I write. I will write and later when I return to what I have written, I barely recognize my “self” in that writing.) If I can remember that that time will never come, that I will never feel perfectly rested, perfectly content, perfectly creative, perfectly ... whatever, then I can get to my writing with whatever constraints, real or imagined, are there. So, one of the factors that can support me getting to my writing is remembering to be compassionate about myself. Also, if I can remember to think about the following: whether or not I write on any particular day, the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, the next decade, will still happen in the future. If another day/week/month/year/decade goes by and I have not written, I will not be able to forgive myself for letting that time go by without using that time to develop and grow through my writing, and for letting that time go by without using that time to develop my writing itself. If I can remember those thoughts about time, that is helpful.

I think what has happened is that the first time I sat down to write, whatever

dday that was, I sat down at the laptop and asked of the air:  who or what is

out there needing reification?  Three characters appeared in front of me, and I

just started writing them.  I sat down having brought to mind that flowing space

of the writer that you reminded me of, and tried to connect that state of mind

with the characters, AND I tried NOT to control what images and ideas were

coming to me, but just wrote what came without trying to edit on the fly.  The

process was productive.  Even as I write that the process was productive, I'm

laughing at the poetic justice of the paradoxical productive process.

Once I got three days into the piece, I started to think about the characters

when I wasn't writing.  So, I would be driving to work, or lying on my bed, and

wondering what was going to happen next in the story, as if I had no will or

agency in that matter.  So, in thinking about, anticipating what would happen

next, I became excited about the prospect of writing which would also be an act

of discovery.  Another thing that is happening is that sometimes I DO think

about what will happen next, and then I have to make notes to myself for when I

will be writing.  That is exciting too.

Common to both of these attitudes is the notion of deferral and anticipation and

fulfillment and finding the balance so that I keep playing/writing.  Deferral creates

tension, yes, and anticipation is the excitement that the tension may be

released by the exercise of my imagination, and the fulfillment is the flow and

the walking away from the keyboard so that I can sleep without the negative

stress of not having done anything.

Sometimes as I'm writing I lose the flow, but keep writing.  Worse, sometimes

when I am writing, or when I think back on what I have just written, or when I

think forward to what I am going to write next, another critical voice starts

to intrude.  The short version of what the voice says is:  don't bother, it's

not that good anyway.  I have to battle that voice by telling myself that

"good" isn't the point.  The point is writing.  But then another aspect of that

same discussion is the fact that I want to write to be read.  So "good" DOES

matter.  I can work myself into despair about that whole issue, and it’s as if I

get way ahead of myself vis-a-vis why write, when I know I should just be

resting in the safe hollow of the imaginary writing world. Maybe this is

related to your comment about high expectations and immediate goals.  This is reminding me for some reason about when I quit smoking (11 years ago),

quit eating sugar and wheat (1 year ago)... and how I did those things. I did the first, quit smoking, by concentrating on myself ten years in the future and not being able to stand the fact that I might have to face myself, ill, knowing that there was something I could be doing in the present to avoid facing myself ill in the future. I created a cognitive dissonance in myself, a dissonance strong enough that enabled me to quit smoking as soon as I realized that the dissonance was there. It was stunning to me that I could be so powerful, or that I could use my mind so powerfully to affect my own behavior. The second, quitting sugar and wheat, well, that was a bit more convoluted. Last fall I took 6 yoga classes, and in those classes my imagination was stimulated to picture the cells of my body as they are fed by my bloodstream. I imagined the toxic foods that I was putting into my system, and “saw” those toxins entering every cell of my body, and I became revolted by that. I was able immediately to stop eating sugar and other processed foods, and began eating raw foods, which I have been eating ever since. The results, both physically and psychologically, have been dramatic. I have dropped many of the extra pounds that I have been carrying around on my physical body. I have also experienced a heightened awareness of the world without and within. I think that I have opened up the pathways within myself and have experienced a resurgence of the creative impulse that I remember from earlier in my life. But up until I sent my initial email to you, I was not able to respond to that impulse in any meaningful way.

I began this email by talking about how I have begun to write daily. I began this email earlier last week, and am continuing this evening, having gone through a few days of not writing, and then a couple of days of writing again. The writing can lag, I can feel disconnected from the writing when I am away from it, and scared that I will not return to it, that I will abandon it. My desire to abandon it seems to be related to the fact that if I abandon it, I won’t have to finish it, won’t have to do it, and if I don’t do it, don’t finish, then it won’t be read and I won’t have to face any external judgments as to whether the writing is any good. I think that I feel that I am deficient in imagination, that my images will falter and die, that my narrative will trip over itself, or run out. But then I can also think about my reader, and think that there are many kinds of readers, and that yes, for some, my writing will falter. For others, it won’t.

So, you asked me in your last email: in relation to establishing a consistent writing practice, what are the factors that will be supportive and what are the factors that will be interfering? Supportive factors are my own reading. I read a lot and widely. My imagination is stimulated by reading, sometimes over-stimulated by reading fiction. If I keep reading, I will be supported in my writing. If I remember my mind’s time trick, I will keep writing.

Interfering factors could be family and work commitments. I am busy. I have a busy life. I leave the house early and arrive home late a few nights a week, and on those days I can’t write. I think writing for an hour a day is unrealistic for me. I need to write in the evenings and I need to write at home on my laptop, and I need to write when I have finished everything else that I need to do, and I need to write before I get too tired. Sometimes if I have a pile of marking to do, I can’t write. I feel guilty about writing, as writing feels like a luxury that can only be indulged in once I have completed my marking. If I mark, I become drained, and then I can’t write. And, of course, when I am marking papers I am frequently reading poor writing, and that poor writing drains me of any creative impulse.

In my last email to you I mentioned two dreams, and you pointed out that they were connected as a kind of iterative evolution. Then you asked me what I thought was the inner face of the calling that I experienced in those two dreams. I have been thinking about that question for most of the week. It seems to me that that question is the one that I really need to answer, and I can’t come up with an answer. In fact, I can’t even begin to understand the question at all. Yes, I feel that there is a sense of a calling in the first dream when the woman touches my cheek and points to a distant hill; in the second dream, when I am seeking the One Dream, … well, all I can think of now is that there are two complementary things happening in the two dreams. In the first there is a calling, and in the second there is a looking. But they don’t otherwise seem connected. In other words, I don’t get the impression that I am looking at or for what I am being called to. Even as I write this, it occurs to me that I should just keep writing the bizarre piece that I’m working on, which seems to be counterpoint to what I am writing in my emails to you. These words appear to be denotative, and the piece I am writing seems to be exploring the same issues more connotatively. What is the difference, or should I say, what is creating the difference? With these words, I have an audience, an “Adam” who will be reading and responding. With the other piece, there is no audience and I can be less direct, more suggestive. With you, I am writing about a “problem” (ironically described by me as “writer’s block” – ironic because my written emails are long). In the fictional piece , I draw on metaphor, image, and inferences so that my reader has to work harder. Or maybe the reader needs to work differently.

I think I have said enough for this email. How many exchanges do we get? Is there a word limit on me for this? A time limit? What will I do once we have reached that limit?

Regards,

Anne

Chapter Two

The Burning Time 1

Many people are running around in different directions, and there seems to be no pattern in their running. They are running away from something, I know that much, and because I am there, amidst the runners, I am running too.

The Fires are burning all around us, even on the surface of the lake. I had thought momentarily of getting into the lake to escape the fire, but it looks as if there is a layer of oil over the surface of the lake, and the lake is burning and it doesn’t look as if it will burn itself out.

I am running, too, with all these runners, but I can’t remember where I have just been, before I realized that I was running. One minute I didn’t exist, and the next, I was running, aware of my self, feeling the sweat pouring down my face, and wiping my blood stained nose with my bandaged right forearm. How do I know that I am if I have no memory of having been, if my only memory is of the moment when I first became aware of my existence at the sound and vibrations caused by my feet hitting the ground? I know that I am running from The Fires, but how do I know to call them The Fires?

For now, all I know is that I am running, and that somehow I am surrounded by The Fires, and I don’t know how these Fires started, or how extensive they are. The one possible escape route, the lake, is also burning, and all around me I see frightened people running and calling out to one another. I try to catch one man’s attention. – What are The Fires? I ask. He looks at me, but his eyes are emptydesperate and he is apparently not able to understand my question, so detached is he from any kind of reality. I start to run alongside him for a while, hoping that he will be able to talk to me, but we approach and enter a large group of people running en masse, and I lose sight of him as he blends into the others. Somehow, running with a larger group seems safer, so I start to keep pace with them. As we run, I realize that we all look more or less the same. Our clothes, mostly ripped T-shirts and jeans, are black with soot, and any exposed skin is also coated with soot. My skin is not green.

Sometimes life is like this: I suddenly perceive myself as I move from unconsciousness to consciousness, as I wake up from my sleepwalking and find myself in a new psychological place, or thinking new thoughts. How did I get here, I think? Have I been asleep? What happened around me while I was sleeping? This life, it is like dreaming. You know how dreams seem to be episodic, missing the transitions and connections that we create in our minds to give meaning to our lives? Sometimes, if I forget to create the transitions and connections in my life, I can experience a waking up. And sometimes that waking up is like a sudden jolting, as I hear my name being called from a far off place by an unidentifiable voice, or it comes from the sound of one roll of thunder.

Sometimes life is like this: I look down at my feet and see that they are running and I don’t know where I have just been. And now, I look down at my feet and see the soot and ashes on my shoes and on my clothes and my bare arms and I know that I am running from The Fires, but I don’t know what I mean when I say that. So I just keep running. That is what everyone I can see is doing and I continue to run among them, keeping my chin tilted slightly upward so that I can see what is happening around me. Everywhere around me, in the distance, I can see fire burning, and the more I run and the more I see fire burning, the more I learn about The Fires.

The future lies burning on the lake.

Chapter Three

The Burning Time 2

The Freezer 1

It’s a chest freezer, rectangular, about six feet long, three feet deep, and three feet across. I can see through it, and inside I see rows and rows of frozen salmon wrapped in plastic and, over the plastic, brown paper. Their heads and tails are still attached, and their wide eyes bulge against the plastic as if they had remained sighted until completely frozen.

The Burning Time

I left the characters running around in circles, surrounded by fires. I couldn’t move on from those circles, and I was also running in circles with those characters, both as a character myself and as the narrator. It was if there was no escape from circles. I kept trying to write a way out of the circle of fire, but there was no exit from the fire. I think that was the point. During the Burning Time, there was no exit. People ran around in circles and were burned, sooner or later. Some of them tried to escape by walking into lakes and rivers, or the oceans, but the heat of the fires was so intense that the water boiled. That’s what I see when I see the Burning Time. I see grasslands drying up and spontaneously burning across the prairies and over to the forestland where the pine beetle infested pine trees begin to burn and the fire spreads into the northern forests and down the coast and across the passages to the islands and I just see these great fires and people incapable of stopping them. That’s what I see. That is the Burning Time. And that is just what I see in Western Canada. I can’t see what is happening any where else in the world, or in the rest of Canada, but that could be because the media has been cut off, and I haven’t known what was happening. But the burning time has happened, is happening everywhere and looks different and is caused by different factors everywhere else in the world and if it hasn’t actually happened yet, it will, because it is just a “matter of time”. As I struggle to describe the Burning Time, and what I mean by the Burning Time, I think that the clue to understanding what I mean is Monbiot’s book entitled Heat. I haven’t yet read this book, but I’ve read a review that describes the gradual impact of global warming, beginning in the southern hemisphere in low-lying countries that will first be affected by the rising seas. I see drownings, and a kind of apocalyptic widespread human panicked reaction and many people running, and I also see a man in a mountain cave meditating and watching through half-closed eyes as the flames climb towards him and he is not running because he sees he believes that this is the price. In the Burning Time, when it really happens, there is no place to hide, no underground retreat immune from the heat and flames, there is no reprieve from the burning except a random rainstorm falling on whomever happens to be there and the new race of people is not chosen, not special, not selected by a god, but is a race of random survivors, the recipients of luck (if living in a charred world is lucky), of chance, the winners of the race. There is no privileged class. There is no privileged person. But everything has stopped. And the people who are left sit and stand and walk like the walking dead and they can’t even mourn, they can’t regret anything, and do they even have the opportunity to decide what to do next? I think there is not even any decision to be made, so focused are they on survival and waiting for what will come next and clean water. There are so few people that there is no chaos and they don’t need to fight one another for survival. They don’t need one another, and they don’t need one another to be gone.

That was the first Burning Time, and the Burning Time I am trying to describe now is like the first Burning Time, and comes not long after the first Burning Time was thought to have ended, have been the Burning Time to end all Burning Times. What more can burn? thought and said people in every part of the charred world. It is then, when you wonder what more can burn, that something new becomes combustible.

The Freezer 2

Do I need a freezer full of fish to imagine the Burning Time? The fish are all salmon, and even that is almost as surprising as a freezer full of cod. These are miniature museums, and we must ensure that the power stays on while the world burns. Will we be able to extract DNA from the frozen fish? Will it matter? Do we need fish to survive just so that whoever is the next “we” can eat, or do fish need to survive for themselves? If we take people out of the world completely, and leave the rest of it to do what it will, what will it do? Are we too obsessed with the idea of humanity? Is the urgent need for the survival of the human race a kind of collective hubris? Maybe we should let ourselves go, martyr our race so that a new one can come. Maybe we should let ourselves go, martyr our race so that we leave behind no species with grey matter and tool-making ability. We claim to value nature, life, trees, the oceans and rivers, and we take photographs and beautiful glossy postcards and we travel over canyons and fertilize the atmosphere with fossil fuels in the pursuit of seeing that beautiful place over there and far away, or bathing in that warm ocean, consuming exotica as if, as if what we don’t know, what is not familiar to us, is yet another requisite part of a full life. We capitalize on the human need for uniqueness, and in doing this we look more and more outwards and farther away from our individual and collective selves as if we are some sort of dark energy pushing back into the earth and away from the dark energy of our universe.

A freezer conserves matter in time.

World Wars

There was the Great War, and then there was another war. That other war, which in the minds of the western world was a second great war that changed their world, converted the Great War into a World War and the second great war into a World War. My question is: by numbering the wars, are we expecting a third one?

Chapter Three

The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy

EvelyEris: hello, Hummingbird. I was surprised to see you, and hear you, on Friday night. You showed up to me as the sound of your wings beating behind my head.

Hummingbird: The sound of my wings is one of the first sound memories you have.

EvelyEris: Yes. I think I was three or four, sitting under the apple tree in my back yard. I heard you before I saw you.

Hummingbird: You were so small then. Just three. But so happy under that tree, and alone.

EvelyEris: Where was my mother?

H: Your mother was sleeping. She was very sad.

E: Why was she sad?

H: She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant., to have another child. She was very proud of her physical body, and her body had been damaged by pregnancy and birth before.

E: I didn’t know that.

H: So after you were born, she fell into a deep sleep and left you under the apple tree.

E: Wasn’t she concerned about me, me being so young?

H: Your sister looked after your concerns.

E: Yes, I remember my sister from my childhood. She sang to me a lot and she taught me the alphabet. She would come home from school and play school with me. She was very smart.

H: You are very smart, too, you know.

E: Yes? But that doesn’t matter.

H: What you are is who you are. If you say it doesn’t matter, then you are saying you don’t matter. That you are of no matter. That you have no matter.

E: I never…

H: Wisdom is not something that comes from the mind folding in on itself.

E: So why are you here?

H: I am your first auditory memory.

E: Okay, then why were you my first auditory memory?

H: You were alone and lonely under the apple tree, and you were sitting so still there, with apple blossoms fallen on the ground around you. I didn’t see you at first, and I was attracted to the blossoms still on the tree. It was while I was busy doing what hummingbirds do that I saw you, and moved closer to see if you were alive, so still were you.

E: And that’s when I heard you by my right ear, just behind my head? I turned to look and I thought you were a fairy. I remember, because I had never seen a hummingbird before and had no word to describe you. But I had a record that I used to dance to. I played it on a square brown record player with a red metal arm and a thick needle. The record was made of pink vinyl. The music was “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy”. I used to play it over and over, having learned how to pick up the arm and move it back carefully to the edge of the thickest outer part of the vinyl record. I played it over and over again while my mother slept, and I imagined fairies, and wondered what sugarplums were. e…wWhen I saw you, I thought you were the sugarplum fairy. And when I first saw you is the first time I fell in love.

H: [Hovers next to E – wings batting gently, and not moving away]

E: You were incandescent, you shone and hummed and I thought that you were magic, that I had magic in my life, as I sat quietly under the tree. I remember not moving, not daring to move, in case you left.

H: [does not speak but continues to thrum wings as if suspended in air beside E’s ear]

E: It was as if you had emerged from the pink of the vinyl record, flown through the music and outside beside me under the tree. Why did you stay so close to me then? [stops talking for a moment, to think] And why are you here again now?

H: [thrums, suspended]

E: You aren’t going to tell me?

H: My gift is not the gift of speech.

E: Okay, what is your gift?

H: Do you know why I am here?

E: You are the magic of my life.

H: [flies away]

Very Recent News about Hummingbirds

A pair of scientists at the University of Alberta, Dr. Doug Wong-Wylie and Dr. Andrew Iwaniuk, have discovered that the hummingbird’s lentiformis mesencephali nucleus, a nucleus in the brain of all species that is responsible for detecting any movement in that species’ visual world, is two to five times larger in the hummingbird than in any other species, relative to brain size. It is this nucleus that is responsible for the hummingbird’s ability to remain stable and hover without being affected by the 75 beat per second of its own wings. Wong-Wylie points out that at that rate, hummingbirds must be really “jerked around”.

In November 2006, a hummingbird was seen in Connecticut. It should have been in Mexico. Also in November 2006, a hummingbird was seen on Cortes Island, British Columbia. Hovering beside a hummingbird feeder, the female rufus-sided should have been in Mexico, but instead had just survived a three-day snowstorm and minus 7 temperatures.

The January 2007 edition of National Geographic tells me that hummingbirds are only found in the New World (the Americas). The hummingbird’s “stout” heart is the size of a cranberry, and “accounts for about 20 percent of body volume, a higher proportion than that of any other animal” (123). The hummingbird’s heart averages 500 beats a minute and can reach 1,200 beats during “high-speed chases” (123).

Letter to Adam 2

Hi Adam,

November 5

Last evening I completed the first story in what appears to be a collection of short pieces that will be thematically connected. This morning I pulled out something I had written last spring and typed it up, a short “dialogue” between a girl and a hummingbird.

When I start to doubt the value of what I am doing (writing), I interfere with my doubts by telling myself the following messages: (1) others write in this subjective way (2) I don’t have to worry about whether I am any good (3) I can have faith that I will continue to write, even if I miss a day or two (4) expecting myself to write every day is unrealistic from an energetic perspective and a readiness perspective. There is an optimal amount of time within which I need to return to a writing project and that time is more than 24 hours. Aiming to 3 to 4 times a week is realistic for me, given my other commitments. (5) I tell people (friends) that I am writing. (6) I try not to worry about whether I will “finish” the current project (7) I “believe in” the current project (8) As ideas occur to me at times when I cannot act on them immediately, I keep notes in my occasional book (9) I think about genre, but when I start to wonder what genre I am writing in, I pull back from trying to figure that out, and try to focus solely on writing what I have to say, how I want to say it, and trusting that genre considerations will take care of themselves. (10) I know other writers, and when I start to compare my writing to theirs, I stop myself from making those comparisons, wherein I will always come up short, as the comparisons are false.

I have looked back over our email interactions and asked myself: have I been completely honest in my emails to you? I see our interactions as being like a time-limited opportunity to look at this one thing, the part of my life that I have always maintained is integral to my identityto who I am – the desire and need to write – and the part of my life that I have frequently denied myself. I see this opportunity here in front of me and I think that I have finally asked the right question of myself and of you: why, if I say I am a writer and want to write, am I not writing? Of all the questions I have ever asked, this seems to be the only one whose answer is worth pursuing. This is THE question for me. None other seems to count, or at least all the other questions I may have been distracted by and attempted to answer over the years are really in the service of this question.

I think that the written nature of this opportunity is miraculous. Why, of course, I should be asking myself (and you) this question in writing, as it is a question about writing. As I engage in this written dialogue, the questions I am posing, the questions that you pose to me, spin off like fractals into other aspects of my writing life. I can pick up on the rhythms of the questions and the thinking and the connections and carry the thoughts on words that spill out and on to the page, and if I start to get distracted or sidelined by something else, which often happens in conversations, then I can immediately see that I am heading off in a different direction AND I can see by referring back to what I have already written where it is I had been intending to go.

Another thing that I have observed is that what I think and write about in addressing this one issue has its applications in other areas of my life, as if the inability to engage in written narrative is so central to who I am, that unless I am doing that, I am not able to engage (successfully) in the day to day narrative of living.

That’s all I have to say for today, but now that I have said this, I worry that that is the end. That is as insightful as I have ever been, will ever be. The voice says: okay, so what?

A bit later

Okay, I’m thinking that I am writing about something that is significant to me. That somehow I have landed in or on my self and I am expressing that self without mitigation. And then I ask myself: well, have you never done this before? The closest I have come to being in and of my self was this past spring when I visited an ashram in the Kootenays for 10 days. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to the ashram. What I knew was that I would be doing “yoga” for ten days, and I hoped that I would be able to, in my spare time there, find some time to explore my creativity, maybe do some writing. What I didn’t know until I got there was that an integral part of the yogic practice is creativity, and writing was required of me two – three (or more) times a day. I had taken pencil crayons, charcoal and sketch pads with me. I am not a trained artist, but a few years ago, when I felt so disconnected from my writing that I doubted my ability to put together a coherent thought, let alone a sentence, I started to paint and draw. This was my way to allow myself to be a child, to do something that I did not know how to do. Whenever I went out to my “studio” (a converted barn) to draw or paint, I would stand there in front of the easel and say to myself, not “how must a horse look?”, but, “how does a horse look to me as this child?”, or, what aspect of “horseness” can I use to represent horse? Or something like that. Drawing and painting helped to bridge me through to the present, helped to sustain me on some level. And I refused for a while to work with words at all, and cowered away from projects that required words.

So, I went to the ashram with my paper and my pencils, and I went there thinking that I would allow myself to be taught what there was to learn. I kept in mind my own “best” students, those who allow themselves to be taught what it is I have to teach them, who do not struggle with their egos as they are learning. And I thought that I would be that type of learner, for once in my own life. An egoless learner.

The experience that I have had, then, of previously being in and of my self was at the ashram, when I let go of my ego. On the last evening, each of us was asked to stand up and address the community. I said, and I had not planned to say this, nor did I even know that I felt this way until I said it, I said that in all my years of education, what I had experienced at the ashram was the first time that I have ever been taught anything that I had wanted to learn. It was a startling realization, as I spoke this. It was startling to realize that the learning that I had done up to that point in my life had now been relegated to a kind of preamble to what was really significant to me, what I had learned in the ashram.

November 9

I received your email yesterday and took your advice and made myself comfortable before reading it. In fact, I printed it out, picked up a pencil, and annotated as I re-read it several times. Then, last night as I reflected on its contents before meditating, I realized that everything that I am doing, everything I am thinking about, and everything I am writing about is related to identity. Is it possible that “writer’s block” is encoded “self block”?

This is what I experience in and from these interactions: I sit down to write, whether it is in my email to you or in the chapters I am working on, and I focus myself so that I only write what is completely honest and true for me in that moment that I am writing. If something occurs to me, some image or some idea, I write it down, trusting that the honesty is what is important. Before every word, every phrase, I ask myself, what is it that I want to say here? I am striving for complete authenticity, and I am not thinking about content, or impact, or effect. And then, in the case of my writing for myself, I just save the piece when I have reached a point where I feel “finished” for the day, and move on to other parts of my life. When writing to you, in response to your emails, or to try to reflect on the process that I find myself in, I try to do the same; that is, I try to represent as clearly as possible the actions, reactions, objections, thought processes that I am experiencing in working through this “problem”. At some point, I feel finished with what I need to say in a particular exchange, and I send it all off. And then I start to fret, imagining that what I have said in my email to you will somehow be too much, that I will somehow cross the line. I don’t know what I mean by crossing the line, but somewhere inside of me there is a voice that says to me something like: Okay, THIS time the answer you get to your ramblings will point out to you that you are crazy; or this time someone else will answer you, because you’ve just taken this interaction off in some unsustainable direction…well, that’s all very murky as I try to write it down, but essentially what I am trying to say here is that because I have written a complete truth, I start to fear that the complete truth of what I am feeling will somehow be too big, too overwhelming, too convoluted and that your response will be along the lines of “okay, let’s rein this in here, and focus on something that we can actually fix”, and that type of response would not be recognizing the value of the “fix” inherent in the exegesis. Or something like that. And why is that a fear? Well, it’s a fear because I have experienced that before, especially with “counselors” from whom I have sought help. [ …] I wrote a few lines where these brackets are, but removed them. I was going nowhere with them. What I really want to say here, rather than go into past experiences and expectations, is that this current experience, this dialogue with you, is more significant to me than I ever thought possible. In fact, when I first approached you with the “problem”, there was a part of me that didn’t believe that I would be answered, or, if I were answered, the dialogue would be stale and predictable, perhaps focusing on 7 habits of successful people. … So, what I get, instead, is a dialogue with someone who sounds like he hears, recognizes and understands what I am talking about. I experience your responses to my emails as echoes that reverberate and enrich my words. You take the mostly fragmented musings, and reflect them back to me in another form, allowing me to see what I have said.

This is powerful and overwhelming to me, because this is a new experience, and, to use a word favored by a friend of mine, I am gob-smacked, and have experienced over the past few weeks a surge of creative ecstasy that I have not experienced in years.

When I got your most recent email, I sat with it for a few hours, working through the passages and matching them up with my email. As I do this, I experience myself paying attention to the qualities and value of the interaction in a way that I only experienced once before in my life, at the ashram last spring, and I am acutely aware that there is something very important and significant for me in what I am learning from this. I am not familiar with this feeling, except as I described above about the ashram, and I can hardly believe that I am finally (again, and so soon) being taught something that I actually want to learn. This is also frightening to me, and after I had read through your email a few times, one of my reactions was to email you back immediately and tell you that I have had enough, that this is all too overwhelming for me and that I need time to draw back and reflect, that I want time to move away from writing to you and just spend my time writing another chapter. That reaction led me to wonder why I would react that way, and my thoughts led me to believe that while I thought that my block was a writer’s block (which, of the course, was one of the ways the block was manifesting), it is, in fact, a block of something more essential than writing; it is a block of my own personal energy, of which writing is only one manifestation.

November 12

One day last year while standing beside a railing and looking at the salal and Oregon grape at the edge of a cedar bark covered path, I suddenly realized that my life at that moment was perfectly good. I realized, without trying even to think of this, that everything I had done, experienced, and had had happen to me, had been what brought me to that exact point in my life, and that that point was perfectly good, and that I was exactly where I should be and that nothing about me or my past was wrong or regrettable. I had this strong sense that had anything in my life been otherwise, I would not at that moment have experienced such a feeling of perfection. I experienced an odd combination of thought and feeling and perfection that I had never experienced before. These thoughts and feelings included forgiveness, relief, and an immediate sense that I was standing completely in the present. I was and am puzzled by this experience because I have never before experienced such a feeling of self-forgiveness, nor have I before experienced apperception of my concept of self without deliberate effort. I felt as if this realization, which has stayed with me, came from outside of me, as if there is something or someone outside of me who was taking care of me, to ensure that I continued to grow. Perhaps this is one stop in that walk through the lush vegetation of the rainforest that you mentioned in your last email.

Even as I write this, I realize that I have always felt this way, as if there is an aspect that looks over me and guides me. When I was very young, it manifested in the form of a loud bell, almost like a fire alarm, that would ring inside of me when I started heading in a “wrong” direction. That didn’t mean I never did anything “wrong”. It just meant that I always knew when I was doing something that wasn’t in my best interests. [As I am working through your last email to me, I see that I have annotated your paragraph that says: “The inner face is radiant because it is writing from the inside out. Also, the inner face has the smallest frame of all – this moment, now. In contrast, the outer face of expectations and perfection has a framework that reviews the past with an eye to the future, and turns every experience of the moment into a finished past judged by the future”. At the end of your paragraph I have written “I like this”. This comment is just one example of what I am experiencing in our ongoing conversation: I tell you things, you respond by rewording/reflecting and taking me one step (or a few steps) further into the discussion. I can’t tell you how amazing this is to me…well, I think I tried to earlier in the email, but I had to say this again at this point.]

(The experience of feeling the perfection of my life can be visualized as a moving through the narrow part of an hourglass. If the hour glass represents the entirety of my life, and the sand represents the time that I have to live, then the point at which I realized that my life was perfectly good was the point at which it appears that the sand is starting to move more quickly through the narrow neck of the hourglass.)

Now I’m ready to address some of the points that you made in your last email (finally!). What I believe is happening for me, aside from some of the points that I have already made in this email, is that I am sifting through and understanding and integrating and letting go of so many ideas and beliefs and values that I had or thought I had. This is all part of writing for me. Writing before meant artful construction, setting a purpose or goal that had to do with trying to impress, trying to fit in to what I thought might sound intelligent, or might fit in with good literature, good academic research, good whatever. Now, all that doesn’t really matter. And that’s not to say that I don’t care. It is to say that the direction of my care is self-focused as I locate the object of my discourse as authenticity and honesty. I focus on what it is I have to say, want to say, regardless of its intrinsic value to anyone else, rather than on worrying about the value of the whatness. I just read the last sentence, and it doesn’t really express what I mean. What do I mean? I mean that the less I think about my critical reader and the more I acknowledge the loving reader, the more likely I am to allow my voice to open up and write. There. That does it much better. Is that the key to my “writer’s block”? Is it really that simple? Maybe conceptually it is simple, but in practice, I still need to be able to sit down at the computer and move myself from critic to creator. All my training relates to critic and researcher. The next few paragraphs will probably be choppy as I work through the comments that I made in the margins of your last email.

Also in your last email, as you explicated the meaning of the koan regarding the inner and outer face, you asked “What was your face before you were born?” As I read that question, I felt a chill move through my body as I realized that the story that I have been working on since starting this interaction with you a few weeks ago is all about my face before I was born. Well, not literally about my face.

I am also curious about your observation about having seen goals that “inhibit greatly”. I would be interested to hear more about what that looks like when you see it.

As I reread your paragraph which begins “the inner face is the essence”, I see that my marginalia says the following: “okay. I see what’s happening. The writing is an expression of the interior flow – so it’s [and here, by ‘it’s’, I mean this whole dialogue that I am having with you and the process I am working through in parallel to this dialogue] not really about writing at all, but about me.” I think I actually expressed different aspects of this in various places earlier in this email.

November 16

I have just reread what I have written above, and I think a few lines willwill suffice to bring this interaction to a conclusion. The clearest impression I have of the contents of this email is that I have expressed some tension between being afraid of being pushed away by you, and wanting to push you away before that can happen. This is significant to me because this is a clear pattern in my life: getting to a point where something is “working”, and then pushing it away before it spins away from me out of my control, so that I become a character in something that I have authored, losing control of my destiny, instead of remaining the author.

A final note: I have not written since November 9, which means I have not written for a week. That is too long. How I feel about that right now is a bit panicked, and I imagine the narrative drifting away from me, so far that I can no longer reach it, so that I will not be able to pick up any of the threads that are left hanging. I think I will try to do that right now.

Regards,

Anne

Chapter Four

The Removers

This is what I know about the Removers. There are at least 48 of them, but many more than that. They wear purple robes, and their faces are not ever seen. They are silent. They don’t speak, but they act. They have at least two functions: to remove the dead and to carry new life through which they rebirth themselves.

Happiness

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Calgary I knew a woman, a music student. She played the piano, or cello. I don’t remember what she played. We didn’t talk about music much; we talked about other things, abstractions. One of the things we talked about one day was happiness. I must have been complaining that I was not happy. Happy? She asked me. Yes, happy. I am not happy. I don’t know how to be. I don’t even really know what that means. She thought for a moment, then told me that twice a year she went to Vancouver for a master class with a musician who she has known and who has taught her since she was a very young girl. His name was Jurek. One time, in fact the last time she had gone to see him, she had complained to him about the very same thing, her lack of happiness. I want to be happy, she told him. And Catherine, that was her name, Catherine told me that he just looked at her incredulously, and said, Happy? Happy? You want to be happy? Why would you want that? If you are happy, then you are not a good musician. You must forget happy. So, Catherine told me this in a way that indicated that she still didn’t really know what he had meant by that. I wonder if she does know now? She’s probably about 42 now. Catherine? Are you happy? Or are you a musician?

The Removers

I woke up this morning thinking about the Removers, which have been a problem for me. This is what happens. I frequently wake up early in the morning, or in the middle of the night, and I lie in bed thinking about “my problems”. These days my problems are things like what to do with the Removers, or how to understand the Burning Time, or how to connect the hummingbirds to all the rest of this. What happens is I wake up, and I’m already working the problem as I’m waking up, and I lie in bed, and as I come to consciousness, I realize that the Writer is already at work, and if I’m not careful, the Writer will think past the writing place, will think through to the solution of the problem without writing it down. This morning, I woke up thinking about the Removers, and before I thought too much, I got up to write. What I learned was this: the Removers are a silent metaphor. Yes, their function is to remove the dead and to carry new life, but their function is also so much more. They work metaphorically. The Removers are also Movers. They move silently and often unnoticed through the dusty streets of the unconscious, looking for wrongful thinking, and as a group, the six of them in concert will budge up against those thoughts and try to move them. They may work within an individual, or they may work within a society, a nation, a culture. They are faceless because what’s important about what they do is the outcome, not who they are or even why they do what they do. I can’t even tell you who they are, because they are nobody; they are Removers and Movers and they are their function. Maybe they are like antibodies, the antibodies to wrongful thinking. They observe foreign thinking in a mind and they move in to correct it. They move silently, and in groups of six, and the only action they can take is to lean up against the wrong thought and try to move it along, move it away, to make room for better thoughts. The Removers are a manifestation of dark energy.

The blue bones are a metaphor for embryonic thoughts.

Chapter Five

Blue Bones

The blue bones are the bones of a new life. Bones have always (no, not always, but ever since I read John Berger’s essay, And Our Faces, My Love, Brief as Photos. ), been important to me. Is this not the most beautiful passage ever written in the English language?

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

(p. 101)

Vintage International, Random House Books, New York, 1984, 1991.

Chapter Six

Dark Matter & Dark Energy

Einstein came up with this first, but discarded the notion because it did not agree with the big bang theory. Understand? No? Dark matter, it’s to do with the expanding universe, and the dark energy pulls the dark matter of, or dark matter, that is pulling the universe outwards. Maybe the universe will be pulled outwards until the whole thing snaps, and that will be a dark matter indeed. The idea of dark matter was first proposed by Einstein as a means of explaining how the universe could resist collapsing under the pull of gravity.

I read about dark matter, and the associated concept oflso referred to as dark energy, in a newspaper article in the Globe and Mail. The article concluded by suggested that this dark matter allegedly pulling the universe outwards at differing rates over time is a “wrinkle in the laws of gravity”. There. Not a foundational metaphor, but a metaphor, maybe what some people might refer to as a metaphor for postmodernism. Gravity and the linear predictability of its presence and effects (Hubble’s Law?) might be seen as modernist, unchanging, clean. But dark matter, speculated as being perhaps an essential property of space, pullsing the universe outwards away from its centers of gravity, changing the expected rate of the expansion of the universe; , that must be postmodern, unpredictable, dirty, and not even exponential. We know that the universe is expanding outward because of the existence of the Doppler Shift for light. The Doppler shift for light tells us that an object moving away from a point emits a red light; an object moving towards a point emits a blue light. Astrophysicists have observed that all the bodies in the universe emit a red light, which mean that they are moving away from us. The universe is expanding.

Dark matter and dark energy can’t be directly observed; the presence of dark matter is inferred from its effects on what can be observed. There is more dark matter in the universe than there is observable matter. In fact, 90 - 99% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but that dark matter is also “missing”. Scientists don’t know where it is, they can’t observe it, but they can measure its presence.

Does dark matter communicate with itself? What does that even mean?

Dark matter particles travel at 9 km/second.

Chapter Seven

A Man with his Daughter

I had been walking and laughing with my friends, and after we left Michelle, who was vomiting into a bag and insisting that she would only be throwing up another 4 ½ times before she would be ready to join us, we went to the hall where a party had just ended. Several people from the party were still there, tidying the hall. Various pieces of jewelry sat on the window ledges, and I started to look through the pieces to see if any of it was mine. Toad stood beside me, close beside me, and suggested that I should only wear gold jewelry, but I told him that I didn’t like gold jewelry and that gold didn’t look good beside my skin. I’m a silver person, I told him. Or platinum. He lost interest in me, then, because I think he just couldn’t wrap his mind around a person who did not love gold as much as he did, or maybe he associated the love of gold with other valued characteristics which he then assumed I also didn’t possess. In any case, he lost interest in me, and wandered away, that look in his eyes that he gets as if he is searching for something that even he can’t pinpoint. It’s a slightly hungry look, but not quite predatory, although in that vein. As he meets peoples’ eyes, he looks directly into them, almost throws himself into them, and looks for a pool to throw himself into, as if he wants to drown himself, to get lost in the eyes of others.

When I first met Toad, he jumped into my eyes. He caught me unaware, as I stood beside a railing looking across a cedar bark covered path towards the purple berries and ruby leaves of the Oregon Grape. I was thinking about the perfection of my life, when Toad looked at my eyes in that way, and I thought, well, sure, come on in. There’s plenty of room in here. So he dove into my eyes and drowned himself there, until he realized that I do not covet gold, am uncomfortable with its sheen, am chilled by the stroke of gold across my skin, am untouched by the look of gold against my olive skin.

So Toad wandered off, and I left the hall. Much of the jewelry was tangled together, the necklace chains wrapped around broaches and rings, bracelets indiscernible in a garble of anklets with tiny silver bells and garnet and amethyst decorated amulets.

I walked down the hill towards the river, and as I walked several people passed me as they made their way home. I knew none of them, but didn’t expect to, as the hill I was descending was not leading in the direction of my own home. These people would be strangers to me, because they did not live where I lived. I stopped beside the river at a point where something or someone had dumped landfill into the water at the river’s bank. A small promontory had been created by the extra dirt and gravel that had been dumped there, and I stood on the right side of the promontory as I faced the river. The promontory, while small, was large enough and the dirt piled high enough that I couldn’t see the other side of it, but I could see the river, which was turbid and fast running. I was curious to get closer to the water, as I had never seen this river run so quickly, so I began to descend the river bank to the right of the promontory. As I descended, I started to slide rapidly towards the rushing river as the landfill sunk under my weight, and I soon found myself up to my knees in the water. The weight and force of the moving water put a great pressure against my legs, and I started to fear that the earth that I was standing on would give way even further, and I would be swept away. But I turned to my right and grabbed on to a larger rock that was embedded in the landfill higher up on the bank, and pulled myself out again. As I sat on the firm bank, just downstream from the promontory, I saw a man and his daughter. The daughter was standing in the river, but the pull of the fast moving water seemed to move away from where she was standing, so the water around here was still, although turbid. She was wearing a long blue dress, and was bending over so that her arms were reaching into the water up to her elbows. She pulled out some plants, which hung wet in her hands as she held them out to her father for his inspection and approval.

No, no, no, he said kindly. Spartinaati alterniflora is to be harvested from the other side of the promontory. On this side, you will find only sadarasaltwort. . It is not as good as spartina alternifloraati, but we can use it.

The daughter lifted her long skirt out of the water until the hem was above her knees, and she backed out, having passeding the satispartina alterniflora plants to her father. He put the plants into a basket, and then reached out for her hand. Together they walked across the promontory, to the other side, until I couldn’t see them anymore.

I continued to sit on the landfill at the river and watched the water.

The landfill starts to smell, and I realize that it is filled with wood pulp from the nearby pulp mill. I am sitting beside the St. Lawrence River, and the salt in the water is on my lips. Although the man and his daughter have moved out of earshot, I now recognize their voices as I see the ferry arriving at the nearby wharf. And there they are, traveling on the ferry, just because. Do you want to go to Matane and back with me? the father had asked his daughter. Why? she responded. Just because, he said. Just because I want to sail over the water. And she thought that if they took the ferry to Matane she might meet the girl whose eyes she had always imagined looked back at her from amidst the night lights of Matane, exaggerated and magnified by some trick of nature. By day, the width of the river faded into the horizon, and the girl lived in her town far away from towns she couldn’t see. By night, the lights rose, and she talked across the air to that imagined girl, who looked back with equal longing for a something else. She thought she might meet her, or at least see her and recognize her, maybe they would recognize one another, if she traveled with her father to Matane, and so they waited in line for the ferry to sail and she watched while three boys threw an orange kitten into the water, over and over again, until it stopped swimming back. This all happened before she would have realized that the two hour ferry trip across the river was her father’s way of going back to sea. And so, in that brief crossing, there is a briefer time during which no land can be seen, and despite her tears over the kitten that she hid from her father, they had a good time. He told her the names of all the parts of the ship, and arranged for them to visit the bridge and the engine room. They didn’t get off the ferry, and by the time they got to Matane, she had forgotten all about the girl from the night, and the ferry turned around after a while and went back home. And her mother asked when they got home, Where have you been? And her father said, We took the ferry to Matane, and her mother just gave him a strange look.

And so I sat at the edge of the river and watched the ferry ride happen all over again although it had already happened in just that same way 40 years before. And what is it about the father, the best teacher, who gave her the graph paper and the pencils and asked her to sit quietly in his office down at the wharf while he spoke on the phone in his Swiss French and sounded important compared to the careful numbers and letters of the alphabet that she formed with mechanical pencils. And what is it about the walks out of the office and on to the wharf, where the ships from the Canadian UK Conference Line that took the aluminum back to England sat moored to the dock; where the grey Guinean Bauxite or the reddish British Guinean bauxite were piled in almost perfect cones; and Caribbean Steamship Company ships were held by thick, taut mooring lines to the bollards on the dock, their deep hulls protected from damage by massive truck tires bigger than any she had ever seen, and the red paint reaching deep into the dark greasy water, and dark eyed men leaning on the railing, cigarettes stuck in one side of their mouths, or between a thumb and forefinger, watching her but not waving, and her wondering why they were not friendly, these Russian and German and Jamaican sailors. But there was more wondering than asking because the father was busy with his phone calls and talking to those people he called stevedores, and she walking safely away from the side of the dock away from the dark water.

And I sat at the edge of the river and saw the little books that he pulled out for the girl to look at, one pink and one blue, and they were filled with numbers and words and when the girl asks him what they are about he tells her they are contracts, the pink one for girls and the blue one for boys. When she learns to read, she reads the contracts, and now I sit at the edge of the river and remember that reading, those contracts, those rows of numbers, and the greasy water and the thin layer of sooty dust that covered everything, everything, and the sulphurous pulp all over the beaches, and the smell, the charred forest around the pot-rooms, the growing number of smokestacks billowing from the paper mill, Manicouagan, Manic 3, Manic 4, Manic hydroelectric power, seaplane rides into remote fishing camps, moose corpses on truck hoods, and I sit on the river edge and wonder: what does all this mean?

Of course, it means nothing. Those places that I watch the man and his daughter visit no longer exist. They make a quick stop on their way home at the statue of Colonel McCormick who squats bigger than life bronze in his canoe, the end of the paddle in his left hand, and the daughter gets out of the car to watch her friends’ ghosts climbing on the Colonel, hurling abuse at him, looking in the empty sockets of his eyes in futile attempts to get some sort of reaction from him, but of course he has long returned to Chicago, taking his newsprint with him, and he, too, has long ago died.

I sit by the river and watch those imperfect images get carried along in the turbidity and the daughter gets back into the car and the man and his daughter are off again on another adventure and the daughter thinks, I know this because I can hear her in my memory, the daughter thinks: I like to discover.

There are many places to visit the river, and the man and his daughter only visit the river where he works, and sometimes on Saturdays when the office is quiet but the wharf noisy with loading and unloading, and sometimes when a storm blows in so that the waves rush up over the rocks that protect the shore and over the road and the wind is rough and that’s when the man gets that look in his eyes and the daughter knows without knowing that in that weather, the man is on his ship, sailing the Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, tossed in the possibility of his own demise at the same time as he looks forward to the new people he will meet at the next port.

I sit by the river and see the daughter at other places by the river, without the man, that big river that seems like an endless sea. There are rock walls along the water and rocks in the water and she climbs across the rocks and feels free and strong, agile. She looks for writing on the rock walls, a sign from Samuel de Champlain, a secret message scratched out by him, from the past, to her, in the present, but even now as I sit by the river and see the daughter I see that the history is all wrong, that my geography is mixed up, and I might just as well have wished for the daughter to find a message from Cortez, or Columbus.

Letter to Adam 3

Hi Adam,

November 19, 2006

I woke up this morning with a very clear image in my mind, and as the image continued to build, and I began to expand on it and think about it in terms of how I would write about it, I recognized that I frequently awaken in this way. I wonder: when I awaken this way, am I waking up as the writer? Is that my cue for writing? Other days I wake up with my compass set to teaching, marking papers, shopping, etc, but some days I wake up as the writer, and I have this longing, or need, to express myself. I mentioned in an earlier note to you that it is unrealistic for me to expect to write daily, but could it be realistic for me to take direction from what I’m thinking about as I wake up?

I tried that this morning. Upon realizing that I was working an image, I pretended that I was a writer awakening with an idea, and I got up and started to write. I’ll just focus on today.

Before I wrote to you the first time, I had been watching a documentary about Gabrielle Roy, Canadian writer from Manitoba whose most “famous” book was called The Tin Flute. I hadn’t known much about her life, having read only a few of her books, including The Tin Flute. And, I usually avoid biographies of writers, as I usually feel uncomfortable when I watch or read them. However, I did watch this one. At one point in the documentary, the narrator reads a piece from one of Roy’s books, in which Roy is writing about how much of her life is spent, both in her thoughts and in her writing, trying to find exactly the right words to express an image or an idea. She goes on to describe the passion with which she does this sort of work; or maybe it is described as an obsession. In any case, as I listened to these excerpts of her writing, I recognized that I do the same thing: I spend much of my waking life observing and trying to think of the right words and expressions that would capture the essence of whatever it is I am observing. As I was having this recognition, I started to weep, as if I had realized some painful truth. After I “recovered” from my weeping, I began to process with thoughts what I had just experienced as feelings, and speculated that there is some unmet need in me to take another stab at writing as a vocation.

I would prefer just to be writing, but that is not to be my experience of writing, and these letters, which I now seem to address to an abstract “Adam” of my own construction, a sort of idealized reader/audience, are my genre.

How is this “abstract idealized reader” possible? Several years ago, I read a book by Victor Frankel; he’s written many books, but I think the one I am referring to was Man’s Search for Meaning. What has stayed with me from that book is his description of how, when separated from his wife while both were in concentration camps, he continued to imagine her and have conversations with her in his imagination. If I am remembering correctly (and I read this book about 20 years ago, so I may have altered my memory to suit my own purposes), I believe that he attributes his ability to keep her imaginatively alive as crucial to his own psychological and physical survival. Two aspects of this memory are significant to me. One aspect is that ability to construct in the imagination an entity who seems to be so real that it can be interacted with and experienced as vital and life-giving regardless of its ongoing existence (and that is what I suggested in the previous paragraph vis a vis my letters to “you”; Frankel’s wife, he learned much later, was killed soon after entering the camp), and the other aspect is separation and the longing and desire created by that separation.

November 20, 2006

I love this.

This is what happened this morning. I got up early, at 5:30, to prepare for my 8:30 class. As I’m sitting and reading through my notes, I recall that in my last entry to you I mentioned Victor Frankel, and I further recall that I have one of his books on my bookshelf. I get up from my seat and go to find his book, The Unheard Cry for Meaning: Psychotherapy and Humanism. I start to browse through it and see my notes and underlining in this ancient book. I have the habit of putting the month and year of when I read a book on the front page, under my name. I note that I read this book in 1986. Twenty years ago, and I probably have not picked it up since, except to put it in or out of a packing box. I read the preface and then turn to the table of contents to see if there is one essay that appeals to me. I see one entitled “Paradoxical Intention and Dereflection” and decide that is appealing. I turn to that essay and read the first section on paradoxical intention and realize that I frequently practice paradoxical intention in my life, recognizing that the first time I did this was as a four or five year old. I think about that for a while, remembering awakening terrified in the middle of the night, possessing the certain knowledge that I would someday die, and that I did not want to. I began to cry, and my mother came to my room to see what was wrong. I told her; but as I told her my fears, I could see her face changing from impatience with my crying to anger. When I was finished, she pulled the covers up to my chin, turned away from me, turned out the light and stood at the door where she looked back at me and told me that I was to stop reading my brother’s comics. While it was true that I did read his comics, or at least look at the pictures of mud-covered monsters emerging out of swamps, or grey-clad soldiers shooting wildly at the ghosts of dead enemies emerging from empty stone buildings, I knew that it was also true that those comics had no connection to the fear that I was feeling about dying. I just wanted to be consoled. For the first time in my life that I can remember, I felt abandoned. As my mother turned her back to me once again and closed the door behind her, I found myself lying alone in the dark, still frightened, and now abandoned.

I lay there for a while, and I remember wondering how I was going to manage to continue living in such paralyzing fear. And I distinctly remember deciding, in my logical little mind, to imagine myself dead. So that’s what I did. I imagined that I had died, and I visualized putting my small dead body into a coffin and closing the coffin so that I was lying in the dark aloneness of a closed coffin. I also remember taking my time, letting myself experience the full effect of being dead, of being placed in a coffin, of lying in a closed coffin. My method was to examine each step of this process of death in minute, imaginative detail, so that nothing of death would be a stranger to me. I then lowered the coffin into the ground, and began to cover it with dirt, listening to each shovel-full of dirt as it hit the top of the coffin and and the sound of earth hitting a coffin lid reverberated around me as I lay within. I filled the empty space above the coffin with dirt until there was no empty space left, and I lay in the dark, quiet coffin and let myself feel what it was like to be dead, to have no sound, no sight, nothing. I remember starting to float, and I remember thinking that death, if it was so still and comfortable and silent, was not so bad. I remember these things so clearly as if they were yesterday, and I have carried this memory with me for all of my life.

After finishing the chapter section on paradoxical intention, I then flipped to the first essay in the book entitled “The Unheard Cry for Meaning”. I read the first sentence: “A literal translation of the term ‘logotherapy’ is ‘therapy through meaning.’” Later in the same paragraph: “…logotherapy is a meaning-centered (psycho) therapy.” I stop for a while to think about the syllable “logo”, which for some reason I had come to understand as meaning “word”, and not “meaning”, as Frankel was using it here. Frankel goes on to distinguish “therapy through meaning” from “meaning through therapy”. He describes the latter, meaning through therapy, as therapy that focuses on fixing neuroses so that “you will be happy, you will actualize your self and your own potentialities, and you will become what you were meant to be”. And, he does not agree that meaning through therapy is useful, suggesting that in this type of therapy, the meaning and purpose of an individual’s life are reduced to fake values. Something about what he was describing as the difference between these two things struck me as familiar, but again, as with the familiarity of paradoxical intention, I could not immediately identify what was familiar.

I stopped reading this essay after two pages, mostly because I felt I had enough to think about from the section on paradoxical intention, the childhood memory of burying myself in order to accept death, and the vague feeling of familiarity about the difference between “therapy through meaning” and “meaning through therapy”. I wanted to sit with these thoughts for a while.

Besides, I had a class to prepare for and teach.

By 7 pm I am back home, having prepared for and taught a class, met with some colleagues for lunch, attended a meeting with my Dean, and gone grocery shopping. (During that meeting he looked at me and asked me point blank: Do you do any writing? I started at the question, and merely said yes, I’m working on something.) When I get home, I greet and am greeted enthusiastically by my 14 year old arthritic pug who I note has not eaten today, and after talking to him for a few moments (despite his deafness), I take a fifteen minute nap, pull out my “letters from Adam” file, and start to read through your emails. The first one I read, which is the last one I received, uses the expression “paradoxical intention”, and there I have it – the circle is closed. That is where I heard the expression recently - from you – referring to my writing strategy – sitting down to write for ten minutes (something doable) and actually writing for an hour or more (it’s hard to keep track of time, not that I try. Once I start writing, I actually do lose track of time, so grateful I am to be so firmly established in this part of my being. It’s where I live. It is the place in me where everything happens, where everything gets processed and sorted and discarded or maintained. It’s the place in me where words and ideas live, where passion coexists with nihilism, where I am logically inconsistent, internally incoherent, externally introverted.). So you named that paradoxical intention for me, and then within days I read about paradoxical intention in a book by someone who I first introduced into this conversation because of what he had to say (as I remember it) about the ability of imagination to construct an individual who could be interacted with as if they actually existed, when I read about paradoxical intention I remembered again my own initial use of paradoxical intention as a young child (And this is not a vague memory. It is what I think of as the foundational metaphor of my life.) .

I love this.

[I can’t believe that it is 10 o’clock, now. What did I do with my time when I wasn’t writing? I need to remember this feeling; it’s the one you reminded me of in your first email when you suggested I imagine, just for a second, the feeling I have when I am writing.]

November 23, 2006

Humor. I wanted to remember to comment on the humorous bits in your emails. To let you know that I had “noticed” them. Just slid into the interstices of your more serious responses, they sit there as acknowledgements of comments or descriptions I had made in one of my earlier emails, and make me smile as they slip out of their hiding places and into my own hiding places.

The real reason I wanted to write to you tonight was to say that I believe that it is really time to conclude these conversations. Not because they are not helpful (for they are, and nothing has ever been more so), and not because I want to push them away (as I described in my last email to you); rather, I think it is time to conclude because I think that I have gained what I originally was looking for, which was to open the portal to writing. I (we?) have far exceeded that original goal, and I realize that I have moved from being completely stuck to being completely engaged in writing. Even as I say this, I wonder: maybe your next email to me will be provocative, will take me in a new direction, will open up new insight, s…and I will feel compelled to respond. So, what I plan to do is this: I will hang on to this letter until I have received your next one, I will respond to anything outstanding in your next one, send it off to you, and then I will assume that we have concluded. And even as I say this, I feel that I have achieved more than I have set out to achieve, and it’s time for me to move on “alone”.

However, having said that I will be moving on alone, the fact is, I won’t be, am not, alone. I have two files in a folder on my laptop, entitled “Anne’s Writing”. One of the files is the working title of the novel I am now working on, A Wrinkle in the Laws of Gravity, and in that sub-file are seven further files, each of which represents a different chapter of that novel (in fact, I believe there are seven inter-related short stories). In the other sub-file, entitled “Letters to Adam”, I have filed my half of the ongoing dialogues that I have with “you”, or the imaginary construct that you have become, my ideal reader/audience/listener. (Your letters to me are elsewhere, separate from my writing.)

Somehow those two files, the novel and the letters, are connected. I don’t need you any more. You provided me with a witness, and now I know what it feels like to write to that witness, and I have abstracted the real witness into something that exists only in my experience of my imagination. In other words, I think what I’m saying is that I’m “writing you off”! Oh, I hope you have the ego strength to withstand this! Or maybe you are currently thinking something to yourself like, “ah, a successful outcome! Hurrah!”

November 23, 2006 (a bit later than the last entry)

After my last entry, I began yet another chapter for my book. It’s now up to 8, but I’m trying not to think of that. I’m trying just to write. Just write and don’t think. So I write and write, and then after I wrote the piece entitled “A Man and his Daughter”, which spilled out all 1000 words of it at once, I thought: here it is November 23, and I see that that is 20 days after November 3, and in those 20 days I have written and written. And I started to think about time. Those 20 days are immense.

Ritual. You mentioned the importance of a writing ritual. At the time when I read that, I thought, no, not for me. I’m not a ritual sort of person. But I am, because I’ve been watching myself out of the corner of my eye. My ritual is to read. I’ll read something good until the pressure becomes so great that I have to write. These days I’m reading so many different things that the ritual isn’t associated with a particular novel, or even a particular novelist.

Here is my “old” writing ritual, not now used because I no longer have a copy of Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. I have only ever read the first two pages of this book, because every time I picked it up to read it, I only read two pages before I felt compelled to start writing. The compulsion to write has something to do with the mood he creates in those first two pages. I can’t find my copy of A Sentimental Education, so I should get one, or at least find one in the library and photocopy the first two pages.

November 25, 2006

It didn’t make sense to me that I no longer possessed Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education. Maybe I had just put it on an obscure bookshelf somewhere in the house, where it awaited discovery. I couldn’t accept that I might have thrown it away. I pictured the book in my mind: a small, old yellow and used paperback, both front and back covers and the spine missing. So, I would be looking for a spine of dried glue amongst the colophons. Easy enough. I went to the cases and began looking, and it wasn’t long before the beige spine revealed itself. I pulled the book off of the shelf and began to read. This is what I read:

On the 15th of September, 1840, at six o’clock in the morning, the Ville-de-Montereau was lying alongside the Quai Saint-Bernard, ready to sail, with clouds of smoke pouring from its funnel.

People came hurrying up, out of breath; barrels, ropes, and baskets of washing lay about in everybody’s way; the sailors ignored all inquiries; people bumped into one another; the pile of baggage between the two paddle-wheels grew higher and higher; and the din merged into the hissing of the steam, which, escaping through some iron plates, wrapped the whole scene in a whitish mist, while the bell in the bows went on clanging incessantly.

At last the boat moved off; and the two banks, lined with warehouses, yards, and factories, slipped past like two wide ribbons being unwound.

That was as far as I needed to read before I felt compelled to sit down and start writing.

What is it about these three paragraphs, not two pages, but three paragraphs, that push me with such insistence to write my own words? I resist the impulse this time, because experience has taught me that my own writing will pale in comparison. Instead, I force myself to read on, and to pay attention to the writing, to look for the writing that causes me to lose my interest, to lose my focus. That happens in the next paragraph, and continues on until I reach the following paragraph, two pages on:

The sun blazed down, glittering on the iron bands round the masts, the plating of the bulwarks, and the surface of the river; and the prow of the boat sliced the water into two furrows which spread out as far as the meadow banks. At every bend of the river the same curtain of pale poplars came into view. The countryside was deserted. Some little white clouds hung motionless in the sky, and a vague sense of boredom seemed to make the boat move more slowly and the passengers look even more insignificant than before. (17)

And what is it, I ask myself, about this paragraph, that makes me stop, that makes my heart stop? It is, I think, the pure honesty of the description. It seems so exact, yet at the same time, the description doesn’t lapse into the technicalities of boat talk, suffices with, instead: iron bands, plating, furrows. And in the first passages quoted above: funnel, steam, smoke, baskets of washing. So complete, so unadorned. I suspect that this type of description, using as it does such simple language, (ah! No adjectives! I get to supply my own adjectives!), and the introduction of the phrase “a vague sense of boredom” provides a reason for the images of the bands, plating, furrows, banks, and poplars as it connects those images to a watcher, and the watcher-narrator becomes conflated with the reader, with me. I can feel vaguely bored and insignificant as I become a passenger on this boat, perhaps one of the people who arrived earlier, breathless and then eventually agitated by the incessant clanging of that bell.

December 9, 2006

So this brings me to the end. To the present day. I think I have said all I have to say. I now get to return to the 20,000 or so words of my “novel”, knowing that all I have to do is keep writing, that the process is more important than the product, that writing for me is a means of survival, not something I do for other people. Is it as simple as all that?

I’m looking for a copy of another book that includes a passage that I also find inspiring. I can’t find my copy; it’s probably buried in a box somewhere. But if you can, you should read it. It’s by John Berger, and it’s an essay entitled “And our faces, my heart, brief as photos”. Towards the end of the book there is a passage that includes the words: “With you I can imagine being calcium of phosphate as enough…” or something like that. The passage goes on to describe the bone material of two people buried together. You read that and tell me that that isn’t the deepest profession of love that you have ever read.

As I finish this, I am aware that there are many threads that are not completed.

Regards,

Anne