It’s a rainy morning, which I don’t mind, not today, but Word Raccoon protests as if I control the weather. I’m placating her with classic Christmas music and our favorite umbrella. I tossed a pair of earrings into the bag before we left. I’m onto her.
Just before walking out the door, I discovered our usual café was closed. No notice. Just a FB post saying they’d be back Monday.
Uh huh.
But since I was already dressed (by WR, obviously) in a pink, liturgical-dance flavored dress (long-sleeved, ankle-length, plenty of polyester movement), and since she’d topped it with a pink and black checked flannel shirt (she knows we are very, very careful about flannel and we prefer flannel on men, but whatever, we reviewed it and it’s pink, so we kept it), and since we had on our silver shoes to protect our toesies, we visited the other writing place.
In a meta act, I read an essay this morning on reading by Mary Ruefle. We’d left the book in the not-our vehicle last week, but we retrieved it and are using it as our jumping-off point this morning. We’re doing that very new poet thing, encountering a new word and needing to write a poem about it now, now, now.
Well, I am a new poet, so there.
The essay, called “Someone Reading a Book,” includes Ruefle recounting how she once threw a book across the room. Same, Mary, same. Mine was Of Human Bondage. I’ll keep this light, though it wasn’t that way for me, but basically, I thought I was finally on the brink of allowing myself to write true to who I was, only to be told that a mundane, artless life was the better option and possibly my duty.
Surely I can speak of Philip without spoiling a century-old novel? In the end, he gives up on art and settles for his little “happy” life. Emphasis on little.
When I asked WHY HE COULDN’T HAVE BOTH, I was told artists didn’t do that. They either had one or the other, back then. There were no amateur artists.
I felt slapped. I felt heartbroken. I took it personally, because I was approaching, for the first time, permission to write from all of me, not just the “sanitized for your protection” small areas.
But I didn’t surrender. I rebelled. I lived the opposite of Philip’s life.
I would write. I would.
I had been writing, but safe, half-color words. Unobjectionable. Reader, I don’t write those things anymore. I also don’t write to shock, though. That implies I know what’s best for someone. And I can say from personal experience, no one does, though some people know you well enough to advise you. There are a handful I trust. Fewer still that I listen to.
It took time. It took stripping away so many, many things. I fought myself, argued, cried. I gave up concepts I had clung to like a floating log, the only thing solid in the sea around me.
Some ideas I stopped wrestling, because I discovered they simply were what they were.
Then one morning I woke up and said “okay.” The storm was over. I was done trying to change what couldn’t be changed.
Just like that.
And I began writing poetry.
Last night I reviewed some poems I haven’t looked at since their first drafts. WR interrogates many, many things. I let her.
Ruefle also mentions never having seen a painting of a man reading. I immediately thought of Sargent’s Man Reading, and a quick internet search turns up more, but her point stands. She says that paintings of women reading tend to be eroticized. As in, the act of a woman reading is eroticized.
I think it’s more that we rarely get the opportunity to witness unguarded moments. When people are not performing, we get to know parts of them that are only knowable when unknown to them.
She also mentions authors she felt she should read, and some she refused to.
I had somehow gotten the impression that Proust was a writer’s writer. Larry McMurtry has Duane, a character in multiple McMurtry novels (Texasville, Duane’s Depressed, more, read Proust on the advice of his therapist when he loses his wife, Carla.
I resisted. If memory serves, that therapist recommended Duane read one sentence a day, because it was just that difficult. It’s not that I’m afraid of difficult books. I’m afraid of discovering I won’t understand them.
Ruefle writes a sentence I don’t get. I think I know what she means, but she uses the phrase mirrored erotics in reference to reading, and I both know and don’t know what she means. And did she notice she used the word erotic twice in the same essay?
She also floats the idea of retiring a word an author overused once they die, as an honor, like retiring a jersey, maybe? But then she walks it back. Says language doesn’t want that. BUT IS SHE USING THE WORD EROTIC SO WE WILL PUT THE WORD OUT OF ITS MISERY ON HER BEHALF SOME DAY?
Is she plotting against the word?
Maybe I’m trying too hard to be clever today. But another group has just descended on this café and I don’t want to go home in the rain, because at least these windows let in more light than our tragically carported house.
Once, in a class, someone brought in madeleines. I was reminded of the Proustian line, which I did know, though I’d never read the book. I wanted to read it. I wanted to love it. What if I read it and hated it?
What if I, who had conquered Woolf’s stream of consciousness, couldn’t penetrate the dense forest of Proust?
Also, it just seemed like a lot of work.
When I went to China in 2014, I decided that was the time. I took the first volume with me. I made myself read it. Slowly. I tried to enjoy the language. There were passages I greatly admired. I remember the plot feeling thin (and I don’t need much plot) and it struck me as a bit whiny and self-indulgent. I could be misremembering.
I was disappointed in myself for not enjoying it. But reader, I did not.
Still, I tried.
Ruefle shares a legend that Somerset Maugham read Proust while crossing the desert on a camel, and that to lighten his luggage, he tore the pages from the book as he went and let them drift onto the sand.
That’s gorgeous.
Ironically, I don’t know what I did with my own copy of Remembrance of Things Past. But I let go of the guilt. I decided my reading list would be my own. I would try a book. If it wasn’t for me, I’d let it go.
Word Raccoon agrees.
But Dear Reader, there are some books she will never give up on. There are some books she will read and re-read with great pleasure on repeat. They’re books that keep revealing new sides to her. She is very pleased with those.
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