Five years

Esquisse for the "petite maison"

Five years. Five years is a very long time, in dog years and in blogs. Two years is already long. Two years since I last posted. Once. Once in five years. It has been a long five years, and, in some respects, it has been a good five years. They group in various ways: the year I lost the weight I'd always wanted to lose, and the five years I have maintained that weight; the year I got strong; the year I learned definitively, and forever, how to keep my horse, and any horse, from bolting on me; the year my mother spent in a nursing home, and died; the year of working on the house plans, and of practically not seeing my horse. I can look forward to new headings for periods of years, the first one being the year we did the renovations. That one is coming, after 17 years. 

There are many reasons I got quiet. There are few to begin again. More importantly, why did I ever start in the first place, and what was I trying to accomplish? The invitation to write my memoirs, the opportunity to practice writing, outside of my journal, and the exercise of learning to make the personal universal, while pacifying my outbursts of temperament and most difficult emotions by remembering that they are exactly that, and not my personal enemies. I enjoyed it; I was embarrassed by it; I learned its futility in earning me a publishing contract, and even a following; I got some practice writing, and I am far from Jane Austen, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf and The Shatner Chatner. That last was really tough to take. 

I didn't even do a very good job of keeping up in my journal. That felt futile and embarrassing, too. I am not here to document my life, but to have one. Everyone wants attention. Even my favorite Instagram accounts reveal themselves as efforts in marketing, with the curation that requires, and I look at my own gallery and realize I don't get it. I might even reject it. It also takes a lot of time to do it that well. Hats off. 

Expectations. I don't want to set myself up to fail in them. I want praise, not constructive criticism (thanks, anyway). I want to be honest, and I just don't have that courage. I want to be a writer, but I just don't have that, well, courage, nor creativity of imagination. I am adequate, which is enough for life, but a bit disappointing for me personally. I would like to wield more power in my pen writing, and my pencil drawing architecture. I have sudden ideas that are pretty good, actually, but they do not come from that incredible place that leads to really great stuff. I don't really want good enough stuff, but if I am doing it for myself, that is what I am going to get. Budget hurts, naturally. I am talking about our renovation now, by the way. 

I didn't return to talk about that, though. A disembodied friend from across the virtual social network universe said she missed it. 

"Do you update your blog? I loved reading it, and your [renovation] adventures and your bike tours and your horse riding and your adventures."

"No. I think it's totally gone. I never even saved any of it," I told her. 

It's true. I had googled my blog a few times over the past few years and found another page in its place, something on writing the perfect college term paper. Sisyphus for term papers. That made sense. It also meant that my domain was gone. That's what happens when you don't update your credit card information. But, she had gotten me curious, motivated me to dig a little deeper, and so I opened Blogger. First, I tried with the app on my iPhone, and I learned that it had gone the way of the dinosaurs, sometime along with Google+. So, I tried from Chrome, and nothing showed up. I Googled -- I am a total Google customer -- the possible reasons for its disappearance and learned that no, Google does not automatically delete inactive blogs; if I had never deleted it, it was still there on Google's servers somewhere. 

By now, I realized I actually cared, a little bit. A little bit more than I expected to because it was important to an audience of one person half a planet away, who I had never met in person, and who writes better than I do, I'd like to add. Her recall of details and her use of them in recounting personal anecdotes that convey emotion blows me away. That probably helped motivate me to search enough to figure out which Google account I needed to sign in to find out that all I had to do was update my credit card information and remove the custom domain name that wasn't mine anymore, and there it was, what you are seeing.

I felt relief. I was attached to it, after all, or some of it anyway. 

I sent her a message, "It's all still there on Blogger." 

She replied, "So glad you found it. Sometimes it is good to remind ourselves how creative we are. Your blog was/will continue to be a place of beauty, looks at life's foibles, and astute observations."

"I have no idea how anyone else could ever find it."

"I got it from that address. It's just as I remember it. I hope that you continue it."

I considered migrating it to WordPress (the obvious and up-to-date thing to do), and decided I didn't have ambition enough for it to bother. I'd also have to know what it should look like, and that energy must be reserved for our house. Maybe later.

So, here is the beginning of a continuation. I have been measuring, drawing and getting estimates for a year now, the day we returned from a failed bike trip (justement) across the Alps to Croatia that turned into a week with our sick cat in an AirBnb in Languedoc-Roussillon, visiting the châteaux Cathares, Carcassone and hiking, and I said, "Now. Start now."

I'll note in passing that not 10 days after we returned, a nun living in the convent less than 500 meters away, across the field with the two donkeys, who visited us at the fence behind our little wood deck, was buried in the mud from the devastating storms that destroyed parts of the villages we crossed every day that week. The place we rented was filled with that mud. Which alone is pretty strong indication that God doesn't save you because you led a lifetime of prayer and good deeds. It might even argue that chance exists and that there is no heavenly rewards system in place, and that you have to just be a decent person here in this life for the sake of yourself and everyone around you. 

So far, that work led to the repairs on the leaking roof because the first thing is to keep water out of the house, and to the replacement of the old oil furnace with an Hitachi high temperature heat pump system because the new generation of heat pumps work in renovation with the old cast-iron radiators. Hallelujah .We were able to get a new heater for the pool as part of that contract. I cannot tell you how happy that made me. Out with the old, the inefficient and the broken! In with the new!

And never do I stop marvelling at how easy this really is -- for anyone with the means for a comfortable, and even a reasonable, budget. I know because I did it for such people. For years. All it took was a phone call to a trusted contractor, and it was done. Not so when every penny feels stolen from your retirement and last years, when you are left to wonder if you will be afford to eat the food that won you that wonderful weight loss, and what feels like a brand new and functional immune system along with it, but a lesser quality of pet food than you presently feed your animals. Not that I haven't been putting us in that situation for the 6 years now, already!!, that I had had Fibs, who I now think of as "poor Fibs", so little do I see him in the run up to final decisions and signing contracts.

I imagine, then, a future in which my chosen contractor comes when promised, stays on-site and works beautifully, my plans rising up off the paper into exactly the volumes and spaces we need to make this house a delight, and a valuable asset (probably the biggest delight). I will have asked every question possible and sought all opinions helpful to deciding how best to spend every centime of any future leisure budget we might have enjoyed, had we not decided not to sell this place 17 years ago.

And, the secret is that I dream that this work will do more than earn me a contract for my memoirs, but the possibility of doing such work, even better work, for others. Of course, my degree being from the US, I cannot practice in my own name here, but I don't let that stop my brain from concocting fantasies in which other architects line up to sign my drawings.

And, right now, I am vibrating, and not from anxiety for once, but from excitement because I think that for the given the contraints, I have found the best solution I can. I can see it. The roof is in folded dark metal ( like zinc, but cheaper). The walls are clad in wood, treated in the Japanese technique of Yakisugi, or burned wood. The floors are concrete, the walls in white drywall with birch or poplar plywood cabinetry separating some spaces and making some objects, like the Japanese stairs. The windows are black-framed aluminum, 30% cheaper than wood, sometimes covered in slats of wood to obscure the view and play with opacity and transparency and create a lantern effect. I imagine the lighting having a photovoltaic control, bringing the lights on in the evening as the sun sets, and bringing up their intensity as the night darkens around guests seated on the terrace around a table covered in candles.

I almost forgot the wood shop and lawn tools storage. I guess we'll just have a woodstove and a few easy chairs in that space. It certainly will encourage me to get out and mow the lawn.

I'll keep you posted, whoever you are.
....

Pulp fiction

"If Jon-Jon Goulian did not exist," asserts novelist Benjamin Kunkel on the backflap of Goulian's book, "it would have been necessary to invent him."

And I might agree, if only for the color he achieves on the wall against which he is leaning, and his "hermit tendencies", were I not paralyzed psychologically by the weight of that statement. I mean, about how many people can you honestly say that, starting with yourself? Maybe one or two of your children, but I'll bet that's about it. It is certainly not how I have been feeling about myself, and if anyone said it about me, you could be nearly certain that they were worried about what I might do if they didn't.

This as been one of those times when writing is not an option, mostly because it is not possible, or seems impossible.

My garden? How much can you stand to hear about the digging of holes, the moving about of plants and the blossoming of the promise held in the sepals of the buds?

My life? How much can I say without getting in very big trouble? And I never have been very good at applying Anne Lamott's excellent advice, "Write as if your parents are dead." I'd need quite a few others to be dead, as well.

How does it feel to wake up in the morning knowing that if you did not actually already exist, Benjamin Kunkel would be feeling the need to make you? That you would be necessary to the improvement of his life?

My plants could honestly say that about me had they any form of consciousness we might recognize, my son would actually be required to, my dogs might even be thinking this already in their own doggy way, but I know my husband is telling stories when he says anything close to it, and as for his children, or most of them, the thought would never cross their minds, although every time my stepdaughter mounts a double-pony to ride, she ought to. She is the one, aided by her father, who can bring me to acting just about the way she does, while being completely aware of what I am doing, and wondering why I can't just stop.

I don't particularly care that it is undignified. The only person judging is someone whose opinion I already disagree with so fundamentally as to occasion the fit in the first place. Worse is that it worries the dogs to no end to see me like that. They imagine their world falling apart, and they are right. I have begun to understand the number one reason given in court for divorce: unreconcilable differences. There are, it happens, differences that do appear to be unreconcilable. It came to mind as a possibility when we entered our 9th year of having the same argument, without appreciable progress made by either party toward better understanding, or even understanding at all, of the other's position.

This might be indicative of an element of unreconcilable in our differences.

The next big question that appears is which is worse? Accepting them and find a way to live with them, or accepting the futility of it and moving on? This is why it is a terrible thing to have a wedding album made. You were happy, for a day. At least until his youngest son made it his business to stare all his hate and fear into you while you tried to be gay and dance at your reception, and you realized that no one was coming to his or your rescue. Nor ever would.

You were on your own.

This begged another question: can one hope to be happily married while not liking all of one's stepchildren very much? Jon-Jon Goulian probably knows the answer to that, and I don't have to invent him to find out. I have a rough idea of my own answer. It is no. Children take us to the realm of the visceral, the irrational, the animal and the ugly in us all. In every parent, there is a mother grizzly bear just waiting for you to not appreciate their children, deserved or not, and if I had one single piece of advice to offer anyone considering marrying someone with children, I'd say to make sure you love them at least as much as your intended spouse and include them in the wedding. If they refuse to attend, that's probably a bad sign, one that indicates that you ought to probably reconsider; it isn't likely going to be worth the upset, because even if they do chose to attend, they will probably reconsider sometime later on anyway, and you will be the first to know when they do.

In fact, their mother or father should probably also wish to join the celebration because if they hate you then, that isn't likely going to get better either, which brings me back to the stack of books on step parenting and loving being a step mother.

I have been accused of thinking that I have done everything right and that the problem lies outside me. Shouldn't it be obvious that I am willing to consider the possibility that I might be mistaken in my presumption when my bedside table is groaning under a weight of paperbacks explaining How to be a Happy Stepmum step by step?

[I just saw the pun. Forgive me. Actually, it should be included in the title and I get copyright.]

I might as well read How to be a Happy Architect (yes, it exists), for all the good that comes of reading how to be happy in what makes you miserable.

Please note that my husband's bedside table groans under the weight of his reading glasses (the kind that magnify and that you can get at your corner grocery store), Robert Ludlum novels and dust.

In all fairness, I have as much dust on mine.

But all this has been pointing in one direction: blogging is sometimes not appropriate. There are subjects that cannot be contained comfortably in a blog, or in anything nonfiction. The most difficult thing is to find yourself faced with the monolith of The Novel. The actual need to create characters who live your stories and express your pain, who make the discoveries you are afraid to and find the courage to act, when you cannot. Not when there are so many that are not worth the dust on their jackets, filling whole bookshelves and as quickly forgotten as the Chinese take-out eaten earlier in the night, leaving a trace of themselves, like the oiliness of the inside of your mouth and stomach, but nothing substantial until you go back to George Eliot and forget them altogether.

I would not want to read one of those novels publishers find publishable because they are airy and easily forgotten as you move onto the next one and the one after. I would not want to find that I had written one, wasted my time making meals that coat the tongue and cause regret, but The Sisyphus Journals has begun to feel like it is not the time, nor the place.

....

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it

The New Dawn roses

I have perhaps been wrong. I have been told that I have been, and I am prepared to acknowledge that there is a greater likelihood that I was than that I was not. I checked a reference for my conscience, and it leans toward my being wrong more than right. It concerns a couple of my entries here, a place that is very important to me and which I will protect for whatever reasons are behind this importance.

I have always written. Many blank page books have traveled in my bags and had their pages filled, until it started to seem pointless. Whiny. I started to write here because there was the chance that someone else would read what I wrote, be it about my labors in our garden or my political thoughts, or my life. Writing here taught me to concentrate on what is important and treat the page like I have an audience that might get bored with the level of irrelevant detail and self-absorption a journal takes without complaint. It requires me to edit, just a little bit.

Recently, I have treated the most central issue of why I suffer. I did it because it matters so much to me, and there is so much I want to know and to understand so that I can live with greater peace and showing more kindness, so that I can let go of the anger and the resentment that prevent me from offering what others deserve, and what I am required to give.

Below is a part of, and perhaps it will be all of, if I cannot restrain myself, the last chapter of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life. It pertains directly, and I will use it as best as I can as the measuring stick for my own writing because Anne is the sort of person I wish to be, and her writing is the sort of writing I could wish to produce.

If a lawyer out there feels that I may be infringing copywrite, in addition to having written out of vengeance, but not done it nicely enough, please let me know.

Part Five: The Last Class

There are so many things I want to tell my students in our last class, so many things I want to remind them of. Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act -- truth is always subversive.

Ethan Canin insists that you should never write out of vengeance, while I tell my students that they should always [italics hers] write out of vengeance, as long as they do so nicely. If someone has crossed them, if someone has treated them too roughly, I urge them to write about it. Two of my students, in different sessions, decided to write about the switches their parents selected from backyard trees and with which their parents used to beat them. Use these memories, I told them. They are yours. This should not have happened to you. Personally, I would write about this partly out of a longing to make sense of it all and partly out of vengeance. And this, I tell my students, may be as good a time as any to discuss libel.

Libel, she writes, is "defamation by written or printed word. It is knowingly, maliciously saying things about people that cast them in a false or damaging light."

I knowingly, but not maliciously, cast some people in a damaging light. I wrote about my truth, and I tried to do it nicely, and I did it because I am trying to make sense of something that happened to me that never should have. I have gone back and removed names. I have edited and erased details that have been corrected by the concerned parties or caused anger and a sense of betrayal in those who were not central to my story.

If one day I should write my story and it should appear outside of these journals, I will think long and carefully about how it should be done.

I apologize if I cannot accept the version of events or the interpretations of the actions and the motivations of the actors of my life that you choose. It is not, it was not, intended to harm you. It is that I do not agree with you.

I will let Anne continue:

Maybe this is not only vengeance; maybe it is just wanting to tell the truth as it really happened. Maybe it is also about trying to find some meaning in the suffering. Well. Whatever. Here is a poem by Sharon Olds, called "I Go Back to May 1937," that I pass out to every class:

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it -- she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like ships of flint as if to
strike sparks of fire from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
....