Notes from the Death Cleaning...
Notes from the Death Cleaning...
...Which is now done. With no death, just feelings of lightness and gratitude....
By the time you read this, I should be back in California and the Oneonta house, that beloved house, will no longer be ours, except in happy memory. And the new owners are, by the way, lovely young people, artists, big-hearted, happy and excited to be living in such a beautiful place.
So, as they say, it’s all good.
And it really is.
But I hope you’ll forgive one more chatty, photocentric, perhaps sentimental post before we get back to work.
It was interesting, while cleaning out the basement this week, to get into these old drafts and see how little I understood the stories at the outset. I mean, of course, that makes sense, but once a story is done and out, the accounting of how it came about can sort of hardens into shtick; it gets reduced to a few pithy lines of explanation that improperly, inevitably, make it seem that you, the writer, knew what was going on all along.
But look at this early note-to-self from “Victory Lap”:
So, it would appear that Allison was once called Adrian, and that her would-be abductor was named…Rick. Who knew?
I can feel the sense of honorable confusion in the above, like, “Well, what’s the best thing that can happen? Is this is? How about this? Is this stupid thing even going to work?”
Going through my old drafts, I see that I do a lot of this type of “note-to-self” thing, in which I am trying to tell myself the story, mostly to see if it’s simple enough. A narrative should be able to be relayed fairly simply, in terms of its action (my theory goes), and we should be able to recount the causation to ourselves without too much propping up or theorizing (“this is necessary because of my plan to contrast light w dark” and so on). Just….what happens? And how are the things that happen related? How does A cause B?
Trying to write it out as above will often tell me where there’s a hitch - where I’m missing an important beat, or when two things in sequence aren’t in relation yet, or where I’m forcing something, just because I’m fond of the writing just there.
I also do a lot of “here’s what’s going on” type outlining, just to check the efficiency of the story. Just a listing of the sections and the main action of each. (“Lincoln returns to crypt. Bevins and Vollman see him.”) There were dozens of these outlines in the files for Lincoln in the Bardo, but I was racing through the pages so quickly, there in the basement, that I neglected to take any photos, and now those drafts are all nicely tucked away:
Shifting to another topic, look at this bit of madness I found, on some sort of tissue paper, reverently tucked away by me, in a file folder: an involuntary look inside my head, from…I have no idea when. I saved it, which is weird. I seem to remember I was stuck on a long and boring and frustrating phone call, in our kitchen back in Syracuse, with…someone.
Such is time and memory, hoo boy.
Finally, I want to say a proper and public GOODBYE and THANKS to one of the best non-sentient pals I ever had, my writing shed here in Oneonta. It was very good to me. I remember finishing Lincoln in the Bardo in there the fall of….2016, maybe? I was out here alone, driving to Syracuse to teach Wednesdays through Thursdays, but then the rest of the week I was racing to finish the book, sometimes fourteen hours a day, feeling everything falling into place in this crazy way I’d never experienced before (all the bowling pins coming down on their own, smiling at me, all of them meaning something, something extra, that I hadn’t anticipated), racing out of the shed to walk the trails when I needed a little time to think, or going over to the house for the excellent creativity blend of Graham crackers plus Wilco or Sleater-Kinney…and, by the end of the semester, the book was done.
And most of Tenth of December was written in there too.
These places, these places, this short and sacred life…
Goodbye, old friend,
I know I’ll dream of you often.
.
Notes from the Death Cleaning...
"These places, these places, this short and sacred life…" Indeed.
Thank you for sharing these remembrances, George. To my bones, I understand how a place can be a pal. Your encomium to your home, well loved, lived, and worked in, has been beautiful and moving. I hope that it’s been useful to you to share this process and some of the gold you’ve mined with your finds.
The involuntary look inside your head is amazing. I’m so glad you saved it. What strikes me most is how all those characters -- varied as they are -- seem to posses what is a hallmark of not only your work but your way of being, that is, characterized by a sense of well -meaning and kindness. Even when your characters are doing things that will not serve well, there is always the sense of their fundamental striving to be the best they can be and the interconnectedness among people despite their differences. I’m not sure if what I’m saying makes sense but to my sensibility, it’s all there, in the look inside the makings of your mind.
Time and memory, hoo boy, indeed.
For reasons I can’t exactly explain, the phrase that comes to mind is “life and the memory of it,” from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem called “Poem,” which is about a pretty worthless painting that’s been handed down (as Bishop herself was) from family member to family member. In the poem, the painting (done by an Uncle) is given to her. At first Bishop can’t warm to it; a painter herself, she can appreciate the technical details, but it’s not until she “recognizes the place,” that the poem changes and we feel her nearness to it and to the uncle who painted it. I hope the poem, below, resonates for you and others herein.
Warmly, and with gratitude,
Robin
POEM
About the size of an old-style dollar bill,
American or Canadian,
mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays
-this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?)
has never earned any money in its life.
Useless and free., it has spent seventy years
as a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners
who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to.
It must be Nova Scotia; only there
does one see abled wooden houses
painted that awful shade of brown.
The other houses, the bits that show, are white.
Elm trees., low hills, a thin church steeple
-that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground
a water meadow with some tiny cows,
two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;
two minuscule white geese in the blue water,
back-to-back,, feeding, and a slanting stick.
Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh-squiggled from the tube.
The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring
clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky
below the steel-gray storm clouds.
(They were the artist's specialty.)
A specklike bird is flying to the left.
Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?
Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!
It's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.
Would that be Miss Gillespie's house?
Those particular geese and cows
are naturally before my time.
A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath,"
once taken from a trunk and handed over.
Would you like this? I'll Probably never
have room to hang these things again.
Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,
he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother
when he went back to England.
You know, he was quite famous, an R.A....
I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided-"visions" is
too serious a word-our looks, two looks:
art "copying from life" and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
-the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.