Been thinking about a lot of things tonight. Like the intersection of personal addiction and blogging. There have been many occasions these last few months when I wanted a drink and was stopped from indulging by the fact of this blog, because I'd feel compelled to confess to myself, here, that I'd broken my vows. Today after work the need grew on me. I bought fancy olives at the co-op deli, drove home and sat in my parking space, eating olives and staring at the brick wall in front of me, the car still running, trying not to pull back out and visit the liquor store. Ten minutes and thirty olives later I turned off the engine, went inside and took a two-hour nap. Woke up and still wanted to drink. So I went out and got whiskey and drank. Am still drinking. A good feeling tonight, I have to admit. Numbness. A physiological eraser, one of those big rubber ones under which everything, even the harsh charcoal of mood, crumbles away.

Still. It's good to blog, because except for days like these, it helps keep my longing in line. Because, you know, I don't want to present myself to my audience as this creature of weakness, undisciplined, sad. So that helps. Usually. I am too honest, perhaps. I could not even mention this at all. Allude to it vaguely. And the intersection I mentioned--the private and public--it's an uneasy place sometimes. Because I don't want anyone to think I'm a queen of stage and song, casting my arms wide for roses every time I finish an aria of angst. It's not that. This is the part where I write about stuff and half believe I'm writing to myself in private, while knowing I'm not. I don't need any gentle touches to my arms, any outside feedback, though it's fine to get it. Even nice.

My role model in matters confessional is Anne Lamott, though the mode of her online diary was different by virtue of being somewhat removed--not so much a day-by-day, blow-by-blow update of current struggles, but a harkening back to the path that brought her to where she was at the time of writing. Anne Lamott simply rocks. Her religious leanings are hard for me to grok on a basic level, but her feelings surrounding them seep into me even so. They move me.

I love revisiting an old CD and discovering some amazing song on it that didn't catch my attention first time around. Am listening to Beth Orton, her Central Reservation Cd, and the song "Blood Red River" is just blowing me away. Am listening to it over and over. Strange how one song of hers can annoy me, the next tug at my heart-strings.

I feel the need also to make a random fic rec--Donna Tartt's The Secret History. A real live book, not fan-fiction. Tartt at this point registers as something of a one-shot wonder. I remember when her novel came out. I was in college, and I read an article about her in Vanity Fair. I still have it somewhere, but don't even need to refer to it for facts; they're lodged in my brain. She was a Bennington prodigy who used to sit with mighty discipline in her dorm room, writing her novel on a manual typewriter. She spent six years writing it. She was given a four hundred thousand dollar advance for the novel. She was from the South, the home of Mark Twain or, no, William Faulkner--someone famous like that. She was, and probably still is, short and tiny and dark-haired and smartly adorable.

A great novel, panned by a few critics for being empty and facile. But her language is astonishing, her control masterful, the plot compelling, the classical Greek references resonant and erudite. In some ways, as in how she contrasts the vulgarly mundane world against that which is exquisitely, classically privileged, she reminds me of Nabokov. I can't really give any representative quotes, because in the end, it's a cumulative accomplishment. But, one quote:

Those first few days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. A group of red-cheeked girls playing soccer, ponytails flying, their shouts and laughter carrying faintly over the velvety, twilit field. Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of them rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them. Commons clock tower: ivied brick, white spire, spellbound in the hazy distance. The shock of first seeing a birch tree at night, rising up in the dark as cool and slim as a ghost. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

I want to remember my life in case I reach the point where I begin to forget. I want to detail all the small corners and cul-de-sacs of my life, the dull college years, the road trips, the lights flashing by as I drive at night, my transient thoughts set down for eternity. It's an insignificant life. When I was young, I vowed I'd be no less than Shakesepeare--an eternal name, living beyond my own life, referred to half a millenium later. Now, I know better, but it still chaps my hide. I want to be the eternal name. Why else would you bother to live? I suspect that sounds like a stupid question to most people, but I have some kind of solipsistic genius complex, I guess. At some point--at the turning of adolescence--I suspected the world existed solely for my benefit, that when I was not around, people sat around bored, reading magazines, waiting for my appearance to play their roles.

I also thought I was an alien.

But...I want to describe the pear trees surrounding my house when I was just a child in Maine. How my house was a mansion to me, the pear tree grove a huge wild place of mystery. The nearby forest a myth. The snow in winter a hugeness that defined the world, ruled by the Snow Queen, a dark presence and a drift of feathers across myself. How I moved and later came to love the sea and marshes, the smell of them like something stirring inside. Snails, rocks, the ocean. How you think fanciful creatures and fairy tales are real when you are young, how they solidify within the outlines of darkness and dreams that will haunt you in later life. And they are. Real. These things.

I want to live in a place of fir trees and quartz-white rocks. I am totally alone on the edge of the world. There is a town nearby, but it is removed from the world, and the world itself is unknown to me. I want to exist in that place. Where it's all strange, a mystery. The ocean laps up against the rocks. I am enthralled by the world, and at its mercy. I don't know what is dream and what is waking, because everything is new. The grey rocks, the border between day and night, dreams and weather and the smell of salt. Lobster traps and beaches as we whip by in the car, the mystery of wind, the limitlessness of time, the way the bridge sings as our wheels roll over it. Tall ship masts in the bay.

Beaches were good places to be. The cold, rolling waves at the edge of the world. The sky. Nothing was understood or even named. It was just its own place, not a vacation, not a special place, but the place where you belonged and dove into the waves and might be swallowed up by that liquid darkness, never to return, as in your dreams.

posted 3.10.2002 @ 3:00am -- right-click here to grab a link