(x)
PLEASE.
(via savethehour)
Last night, I went to hear Nick Hornby give a talk at school. Needless to say, he is one of my eternal favorite authors, I re-read his books almost every year, and devour any new projects ASAP because his voice is unpretentious, relatable, and really hits the mark on a kind of modern shrug-your-shoulders optimism.
Writers are often woefully inarticulate in person, but that wasn’t the case with him (can’t say the same about his co-presenter, however). And hearing him talk about how one of his favorite characters in his own work is Marcus just made me feel so incredibly sad. This man understands what it feels like to have all these disparate elements of life come together in a natural manner, and express it with equal amounts of humor and pain, without flowery language, without needless drudgery.
These days, I feel as though I am barely myself. I know it’s just the temporary (well, let’s hope) drain of law school and possibly the most uninspiring group of people (as a collective) I’ve ever met. Sometimes I wonder if I ascribe strangeness to them because they actually are weird or if I just have a compulsive need to make people more interesting than they actually are.
I fear that my priorities have been so misaligned that momentarily stepping back into the person I always believed myself to be is bittersweet rather than simple. And where has that simplicity gone? I was never as out-there as Marcus, but I don’t want to lose the few good things about myself to conform to a boring world of straw man high stakes and stress for the point of stress. I thought I was a person who found joy in writing, in art, in connecting with people. Now I feel as though I’m going through the motions while my mouth runs off on nonstop complaints about school to the point where I want to slap myself. My biggest fear is that when I do snap out of it, I will emerge, post-law-school lobotomy, with a false recollection of the person I was before. That I will have convinced myself that I’m not this superficial, antipathetic person who thinks she has passions but stares at them blankly through frosted panels while worrying about the dumbest shit imaginable. By which I don’t even mean office politics or high-stakes corporate dogfights. It’s the ache of self-importance superimposed on a quivering blob of insecurity. I don’t want to be a part of that. But how does one avoid it while maneuvering through professional advancement…?
Well, what can I say. Growing up. It’s a challenge.
as I’ll be in Boston for the summer, one of my two favorite Boston ladies… Anne Sexton
In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign -
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.
I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant’s teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.
Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was…
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger’s seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.
I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.
Pull the shades down -
I don’t care!
Bolt the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?
Not there.
I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.
45 Mercy St., Anne Sexton
Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.
— Michael Ondaatje, from Divisadero (via growing-orbits)
