How possible went*
so the good day begins with reading. before I left I cleaned my desk to its whitest last layer. Put all the books I had been navigating in stacks back on the shelf in roughly alphabetical order. Pull down and sit down with Joanne Kyger, There you are.., Scalapino’s How Phenomena Appear To Unfold, and reading interviews and essays Orlando White and Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, preparing for writing circle this friday, which led me to Richard Hugo’s essay Writing Off the Subject and Santee Frazier’s Mangled. I needed to swirl in words.
Shift among deluge of emotion celebrating my parent’s 40 anniversary and standing in the back of Wilson’s memorial the next day. The grief wash does work. The tobacco starts that he potted up I put in a box to take across the border and yesterday I moved the ground cherry and the jalapeno and I made a raised bed of concrete risers in a rough circle and today I planted the tobacco plants before the sun had come out over the oak tree, around noon.
The word becomes before the idea. The emotion comes before the thinking of the emotions. I can not think myself into feeling, I can feel my way into thinking. I needed to be active so I was active after I moved the tables and got others to set up the string lights over the food.
There are two birthdates of our life: the day we come out our mothers and the day we pass on, in the spirit world he is every time, every place all at once. Martin, and Dawn, and Lee, and Mariko, and Eduardo spoke and song songs and the child came onto stage to think him for the cacao beans “and I liked that.” My parents danced in a circle of their friends linked arms built wind around them. They collected the tissues of our tears to burn in ceremony our waters that were Wilson as well. I had told my dad the vollyball net was not important and then spent three hours playing. after the stories I realized the volleyball net was to bring it full circle.
I regret the times I didn’t join him on his adventures, I am grateful for the time I spent with him. The day we came home a cramer moth, was for the first time, sitting on the brick wall to the left of our front door and stayed there for the rest of the day.
I am long winded. a barn with both its doors open, a parking garage at night in green light. before the wind howls.
the word comes before the subject. I will not force these words to what I want to write. just like the stone tells you where it wants to be, if I am listening. if I am listening. There is much to cover or “that is is spilling over” as eric just wrote me. We each have to face the blank page, the blank screen, each day and work ourselves up to the first line, to the point that it finally becomes easy usually just when those other drudging parts of life file in.
the writing just has to happen and it makes very nervous not to be doing it.* I must not sit in its way. not kill the thing with editing. this is a direct encumbrance of me into what ever the space this blog is (a sandbox filled with words, vowels, consonants, and plenty of blank space, I hope).
The writing as simply a mode of seeing what comes up in a time period.
-Leslie Scalapino writing about Philip Whalen’s work
*Philip Whalen
