The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [66]
Adrienne Rich went down into the depths ahead of you. Her dive brought the possibility of language up to your surface. Breathe. And understand the broad shoulders you are standing on to reach the air. Take these objects.
With Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing you will learn to stiffen your spine, when to laugh and throw the drink back, when to weep and with whom, when to pick up a rifle.
Jeanette Winterson will make a small thing enormous as the cosmos.
Toni Morrison will let you cry home the passage.
Leslie Marmon Silko whispers the story is long. No, longer. Longer than that even. Longer than anything.
With Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath drink at the bar. Laugh the dark laughter in the dark light. Sing a dark drunken song of men. Make a slurry toast. Rock back and forth, and drink the dark, and bask in the wallow of women knowing what women know. Just for a night.
When you need to feel the ground of your life and the heart of the world, there will be a bonfire at the edge of a canyon under a night sky where Joy Harjo will sing your bonesong.
Go ahead-with Anne Carson - rebuild the wreckage of a life a word at a time, ignoring grammar and the forms that keep culture humming. Make word war and have it out and settle it, scattering old meanings like hacked to pieces paper doll confetti. The lines that are left … they are awake and growling.
With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words. Stretching out horizonless.
I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. With a blood red desk. A room with rituals and sanctuaries. I made it for myself. It took me years. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. Balvenie. 30 year. I pour myself an amber shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. But there is a line of hers that keeps me well: Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
V. The Other Side of Drowning
Run On
IT’S YOUR SECOND EX-HUSBAND’S BIRTHDAY, YOU KNOW, the one you divorced because he slept with not one but about five gazillion different women, and he calls you at 2:00 a.m. all drunk from Paris where you two used to rent apartments and make art because it’s his birthday and he tells you he’s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 - By the way, I’m switching to second person because if I say “I,” in your head you’ll just picture Heather Locklear or something so-YOU. You are 37 on your way to the big 4-0. You are divorced for the sad sad second time. You are in SoCal. Living alone. Making sure your blonde is blonde. Waxed.
So your second ex-husband calls on his birthday and tells you he’s fallen in love with a woman who reminds him of you at 23 and that they’ve tattooed their ring fingers together and she looks so much like you and acts so much like you and smells so much like you at 23 so you calmly hang up the phone and glimpse the 37 year old skin of your own hand and walk to your writing desk and open the drunk drawer and pull out the bottle and drink an entire bottle of scotch in the middle of the night and drive your car out onto the six northbound lanes of the freeway in SoCal where you now live due to your great new job as the Visiting Writer because you did the strong thing and left him because you didn’t want to be an enabler and so forth and you wanted to rise above it and get on with your life so there you are on this freeway in SoCal in a red car with your blonde hair and your black dress and your stiletto heels to prove to yourself that you are still attractive like a fucking advertisement for Black Velvet and wait a minute, what’s that shiny you see some pretty lights to the right twinkle twinkle little star and WOOSH you are cutting tracks through the thick ice plant between southbound