16.11.22: continued cold & clear
“Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs” —from Chapter 119: “The Candles”
Feel pressure to write quickly, before J wakes up. Think of Louise Erdrich and her four babies, how she did not stop writing unbelievably excellent novels and poems while raising them. Think of N in her chambers east of here, the soft carpeted floors and the apricot, peach, rose, champagne palette of the nursery and new-mommy home. She changed my life when she told me about switching almost exclusively to writing in her Notes app on her phone. There is nothing and no one like a lifelong-love to ‘give permission’ for changes that make things easier.
I worry that it’s ‘cheating,’ for example, to pull anecdotes out from the past and try to weave them into the present, make them play. I am thinking of the Encinitas one from which we got our inside joke “That’s not the energy”— AB came up the stairs from the water, lugging her longboard with hibiscus painted on it over a bright blue base. She related what had just gone on down there; that Walls had been dropped in on, i.e. not had his position on the wave or in the lineup respected, and so he had paddled over to the offending person, stuck his hand into the water, grabbed the guy’s leash, yanked him within reach, and punched him in the face. AB shook her head at this point breathlessly, then fell into laughter: “I was like—that’s not the energy!”
This line was immediately canonized in J’s book of How People Talk In California, and duly repeated in any analogous contexts that followed that day. “I mean, she was right – it just – was like – so not the energy.”
Rereading Moby-Dick and living up here in the cold and away from the water may be triggering nostalgia for the summer down south. The four elements of overcoming a nervous illness: facing; accepting; floating; letting time pass. The Saturn return of 2020-2021 could be characterized as a nervous illness. Set and setting: vanlife in your hometown. The other-state ex-pats, as it were, plashing about in the waves, browning themselves, blissfully unaware of the psychic effects of drought and fire in the long term. N, Californian many generations, grew up in a town with snow on the close hills, and horses. I grew up gold and shirred smooth by the sand. AB and J and others have their own locales that bred them that they fled. It’s just harder to flee somewhere that everyone, at some point, wants to be.
And as imagination bodies forth
the form of things unknown, the poet’s pen
turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
a local habitation and a name.
(Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.)
