My Writer's History (or why not blog?)

                                                My writer’s history

I have none. I am a blank slate, a wind-swept plain, a undecipherable cipher.  I have never put pen to paper. I am a newborn, crying soundlessly into space.

I open this journal and begin the hard journey—pen slashes against a thicket of silence. Pen pushing back against doubt. 

I write into the corners of things. I hem myself into the folds. I climb too high, then I can’t get down. I yell for help, but no one comes.

So I write myself a ladder, a pair of scissors, a map of the world.  I write fast, like a soldier being strafed, running for cover. I write slow, a book-child dropping pebbles, breadcrumbs, hope-words to eat after dark and to follow back home.

Home is the dead space near the baseboards. It’s the place behind the radiator. There, under the stove, I find myself; dustballs and grease are the stories I know.

I trace my life in the linoleum’s griming cracks, dark lines that run through my head going nowhere. . . . .

I see myself drip in the sink again, ride the slick basin

Down through the cold mouth of the drain

into darkness. I see myself drip in the sink again.

Ride the slick basin down

through the cold mouth of the drain into doubt…

I write to remember. I write to remember

to re-member the world; I write to rescue,

to know, to hear myself think.

I write to invite, and to invent—to forget and

to lie. I write to live

or to know that I live

or to pretend that I live I write

to I hear myself brumbling under the floor.  

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I’ve kept a journal since I was nine.  The first one was a small, flip-top spiral notebook that I wrote in with a short, bright-pink mini-pen with a rounded top.  I remember the feel of it, the small weight of it, the blare of the hot-pink ink: “I sit near the pencil sharpener. K. sharpened his pencil SIX times today! I think he likes me.”  Secrets and a place to put them…a cover to close….the sense that I was collecting something: evidence, data, feelings, truth…? I remember the smell of the ink.

I had the feeling, almost, that that diary was ME. I had the sense that I was creating a self, a self taking shape in the letters on the page. “Dear Kitty,” Anne Frank’s diary entries began, breathing life into paper—breathing sentience and compassionate, attentive listening into the inanimate world. 

I read her diary and I cried. I got a better diary, ripped the pages from my one and tucked them into the inside flap of the new one and rubber-banded it all together with a red rubber band. I began again: “Dear Journal, I think I feel too much that I don’t have words for. I am still a kid, but not one, either. Do you know what I mean? I’m changing so fast. All of my friends are like this, too.  I wonder who I will be when I grow up?”

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When I was even younger, I drew things. Like Harold and his purple crayon, I made things.  I made things real.  I pictured the world before I “worded it” and sometimes they scared me. I drew things I didn’t like, that I was afraid wouldn’t like me. I was afraid they might come and get me, like Frankenstein’s monster turning on their creator (though I hadn’t read the book, didn’t know the story). I stuck my pictures into the dictionary --It was the fattest book we had--then I pressed them down even harder under the weight of three or four stacked encyclopedias to keep them in at night. Or I drew an arrow from the ugly picture I’d drawn and wrote beneath it “From this”------à “To this,” giving the drawing a new version. All the plain girls got eyelashes, and curving perfect mouths.  All the twist-nose boys with poinky hair got straight, patrician noses, and sleek, dark hair the looped across their foreheads in perfect glossy arcs. I made the devils into angels. I made the monsters into maidens. I lied.

*            *        *          *          *

I still do. I lie. I lie because I am afraid of what I make and how I word the world ---The Voice in my head says: “Your work here is to word the world.”  But what does it know? “Luckily Harold kept a hold of his crayon!”  Harold and his crayon is an existential nightmare. What if I drop mine and can never find it; what if I hold onto it in sleep and draw what I dream? I fear—deeply, viscerally, primally —this power I have to MAKE. . . .  So, why not blog? as Nietzsche said, whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger . . .