Another Beginning

Cleaning out my desktop just now, tossing old files, I come across a brief piece I once wrote—my ticket in, as it turned out, to a Jayne Anne Phillips workshop in Prague. The question we applicants had been given to answer was, Why do you write?, and this was 12 years ago, when all I formally knew about writing was what I'd learned during a ten-day workshop conducted the year before by Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown in Spoleto. Everything else was impulse and desire, whatever I could glean from books, whatever I had the patience to learn from the editors of literary magazines, who wrote cryptic rejection notes and sometimes (bliss) said yes instead.

Why do I write? Then as now it was dance and words, it was hollowness and the urge to fill it. I'd forgotten that somehow, until today, when I was emptying parts of my history out:


It has the impact of a first memory, though it isn’t, there were years that came before this, there were seven. I sit with my mother on the living room couch, a gold weave whose chocolate-colored medallions are going darker and darker. My brother is upstairs, my sister’s asleep, my mother says Summer, I repeat it. Sue swims in summer, she says, and dreadfully obedient, I repeat it. Samson is stronger than Sara. I hear her, I answer, I say it. Sugar is sweeter than salt, Cindy is sewing a sweater, Superman sits on the sound, Something special is slipping by Sally. I believe in all this. I say every word. Every word, but minus the S’s.

In school I go through the same exercise with a woman whose face I can’t remember in a room I would be afraid of now, if anyone closed me inside it. A stock room, maybe, a strange cold storage for torn parachutes and punctured dodge balls and the boxes of chalk that won’t write. It seems to me that she is using a machine, this blank woman, that there is metal between her S’s and me. But how could that be? Only the tongue gives up talk, a maneuver of muscle between teeth. Only the tongue, but then also the page, a page where one writes down the S’s.

Maybe this is a good a start as any. Maybe this is why I write but poorly speak. Though I don’t like it. I think it’s too sentimental. I think perhaps it’s not true, perhaps I write because I dance, write because if there is one weak muscle in my mouth there is strength in my legs, my thighs, the space between my hips, my heart in its cage of ribs leaping. There is strength in me and music in my house, turned up so loud that the wood floor sweats and the guitar that no one is playing is shaking and aching in its chest. There is music and I have to dance, I have to dance, I have always had to dance, my body like shattering glass, like a collision in the glare of a song. I write because I dance, because later, when the music is gone, my heart still leaps and my hollows ache and words spelled out in rhythms are the cure. I can close my eyes and be perfectly tame and still feel the fist of the dance in my brain.

I should not write. I should dismiss this habit started too many years ago. I don’t have the disposition, I don’t have the vocabulary, I don’t have the patience, one needs so much patience for all these words, one after the other, the only order they’ll flow in, the only sequence they’ll take: I am impatient. I should do manual labor; you don’t need a strong tongue for that. I should be out on a farm in the sunshine, running my body, lengthening the days, losing my mind in the animal instincts.

Why do I write? Why do I do it to myself every day? Why don’t I have conversations instead, just sit and tell the stories that keep twisting, knocking, clanging, bleeding, splitting in my head? I have mastered my S’s. I have learned speech without machines and I should not have to write it down, I should be finished with the page, I should be through.

I'll be returning to this blog on Friday.