Journal Excerpts
Because we have just passed into a new decade—leaving 2019 behind for 2020—I thought it would be revealing to look back at my journal entries from the same season twenty years ago. At the time, my husband Steve and I had only been in Maine for four months. We had used the last of our savings to put a down payment on a house. Steve had just completed his first semester teaching. I was working at Borders Books in the Bangor Mall, and freelance typesetting for the National Poetry Foundation. We had only a landline, and we still rented movies from the video store.
31 December 1999 Friday 10:07pm
The last day of the millennium and I feel so sad. Why? I can’t quite figure it out. Is it because I love the twentieth century and can’t bear to let it go? Is it because I went to work at a bookstore, came home (stopping on my way home for milk and cigarettes) then cooked dinner for Steve (steak, baked potato, carrots) and then went upstairs and watched television? Is it because I still feel lonely, lost, out of it? Is it because I can barely hold this pen in my hand, I feel like I’m going to break down crying? I told Steve I felt as if I was on a little raft floating away from the big ship and in it was everything I knew, everyone I loved. I feel “at sea.” Circe sleeps under my lamp (behind me). I simply feel like going to bed . . . and waking up in the year 2000.
1 January 2000
I was nearly comatose when I wrote that journal entry last night. Exhausted and having drunk too much red wine. I did stay awake to have champagne at midnight. We watched the festivities on television—a medium I find increasingly boring and hard to pay attention to. I wonder if I stopped drinking if I could read more—like Keith. Today I spent several hours reading the diaries of David Wojnarowicz. They amused/interested me at first, and then I grew bored by the lack of reflection (mostly he relies on description). Ever since I skipped those parts of The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve known that I can’t bear too much written description of either landscape or actual events. Also he almost never writes about literary or artistic things, though there are endless descriptions of cruising the waterfront (and even those, none too erotic). Anyway, maybe I’ll finish it tomorrow, maybe not. Kafka awaits, after all, and now I’ve grown interested in reading Third Factory.
Steve spent his day reading the contemporary landscape: Lytle Shaw, Leslie’s rant against Marjorie, Bivouac. I can’t bear to look at it, I must turn away. This morning in the shower I realized that there are only two weeks until my Boston reading. I thought to write a poem to Anselm, to “A. B.,” I thought, about the ambition of art, shame, and the feeling of helplessness in the face of utter deceit (naked ambition). Thinking here of course of ___________. I had almost begun to miss her enough to think of being in contact again and then Lee Ann and Anselm each arrive with a gruesome tale of her creepiness and ethically bankrupt lifestyle. I feel a great desire for Anselm. Not a physical desire, though his beauty takes my breath away, but a desire for communication. Everything about the connection between us is implied, can never be made fully manifest.
I make errors in this journal whether I write fast or slow. Steve brought me a book on Sade from the library by Marcel Hénaff. I don’t like Sade lately (the idea of him, I mean, the “fashionableness” of torture) but I am somewhat interested in Hénaff’s chapter called “The overthrow of the lyric body.” Desire is lyrical, or rather, its frustration is lyrical, its satisfaction narrative (because endlessly repetitive). As I write those words, I think of a million exceptions to them. I was excited this morning at the thought of writing a poem and believe my desire for poetry may hold the key to my resistance to returning just now to my memoir. I am not yet ready to be engulfed by that old story. I feel distant from everybody and critical, Steve included (I think those diaries dropped my English down a notch).
I feel as if there lives a still fog in my brain which will take endless hours of writing in here and reading to clear. I can’t believe we live someplace with no used bookstores or cafés. It is so incredibly quiet and still here today. I feel like simply locking myself up in this room and reading through all the books we have in the house right now, spending no money, slowly crawling out of debt. I thought my poem to Anselm could be fourteen pages long. One page for each day in January before the reading—not likely since it took me weeks (or that’s what it felt like) to write the three-page “Behind the Orbits.” I cannot stand the thought of my “poetic voice” right now. My stomach feels empty and I want to stop.
2 January 2000 Sunday
I just woke up and find I’ve a strange ache on my side, under my right breast in the neighborhood of my ribcage. Plus a hollow tube running from my throat down to my stomach. The stomach feels like an empty gourd with one pea rattling around in it. I’m drinking café au lait, the café weaker than I’d like. My teeth hurt as usual. This week I must go to the dentist, I must find a dentist. I slept nine and a half hours last night. It felt good. Right before waking I had a dream filled with insecurity and paranoia. In it was Jasmine (the pretty redhead studying to be a nurse who I work with, she’s an airhead) and Josh (dark hair, small silver wire-rim glasses, he who watches Transformers during lunch and works in music). I’m never going to remember these people in the future. I don’t feel like writing out this whole dream, for I’ve a feeling it’s pretty insignificant, but the gist of it was that Steve and I had been in a group reading after which someone told me that Jasmine said, “Steve will be remembered, he’s the real talent,” and “I don’t know what anyone sees in Jennifer’s work, it really sucks.” Or something to that effect. During the milling period I had to break off. I wanted to get back to where I was staying and eat some dinner. I left Steve with a group of people and got in an elevator. The lights went out and the elevator began slowing down, it seemed it wouldn’t make it up any more floors before falling so I got worried, smashed the “door open” button with the palm of my hand and crawled out (it was stuck between two floors). What I crawled out to was a dark wet street—night time, some street lights. I ran to the room where I was staying and there were Jasmine and two other women sitting on the bed (it was a motel room) watching T.V. nonchalantly and sucking on orange pops. I asked if that was all they were going to eat for dinner, and they looked at me with an “of course, what did you think” expression and then I said, after looking in the freezer and seeing nothing but orange pops, “I want a steak.” I ran out across the street in search of a supermarket. Later in the dream Steve and I gave another reading, after which Jasmine proclaims Steve’s first reading to be much better. I am aware that she has desire for him (here she turns into Christina, his tall Italian student) but I don’t care, I do not feel threatened by it. At one point I plop down next to Jasmine and say in a snotty, hysterical tone: “so I heard you don’t like my poetry,” (holding the sheets in front of her face) “what don’t you like about it?” Everyone is embarrassed for me. Later I’m in an interactive game where every few seconds a zombie-like mechanical human with real flesh steps out of a closet covered by a curtain and my task is to stab them in the back with a large kitchen knife. I do about three (they fall down dead) until I realize that I do not have the strength to force a knife into the back of a human being (I imagine the flesh, organs, as dense layers, I think of wet paper) and suddenly I can no longer do it, my knife will not penetrate the skin and yet the zombies keep exiting their closets and pretty soon I am surrounded. At some other point in the dream I have to pee and am wandering through a dark city street looking for a bathroom. I am in a nightgown. I see an old woman with her friend and realize that she too is looking for a bathroom. I find a convenience store and see the bathroom sign and relieved I run toward it (happy that I found it before the old woman—my physical need destroys my manners). I sit on the toilet and then realizes it is in the middle of the store, free standing, with no stall or even a room around it. Then Josh, who works there, walks over to see if I need anything. I look down and see for the first time that I am bleeding. My underwear has a blood-soaked pad attached to it and the blood has gone over on the edges of the panties. I try to cover the sight with my hands. I say “I’m fine” to Josh, and after he turns to go. I begin unravelling wads of toilet paper to try and clean the blood [end dream].
Last night I started my poem for Anselm. I called it “The Ambition of Art.” Its spontaneous structure is more like “Stem of the Tree” than anything else, but that may change. I was thinking as I wrote it that I don’t think about form at all anymore, only about “what I’m trying to say.” Perhaps this explains my interest in metrics . . . something structurally complex to push against my message. I need a structure for this poem. Something new. Perhaps analogous to the idea of freedom/family.
3 January 2000 Monday
Last night, after roast chicken et son jus, mashed potatoes (again! I grow so tired of them), and peas, I called Gabe. He was very warm, friendly, “happy that I’d called,” but still he didn’t want to talk long as Jim was there. Then I convinced Steve to watch The Sound of Music with me, during which I enjoyed every minute, after which I lay in bed (5:00 a.m.) feeling horrible pangs of guilt for wasting my time in sentimentality and not reading or writing. God forbid poetry should become a chore, a duty, as I’ve felt many times when I think I must “produce” a second book on some kind of Stakhanovitian time schedule. Those first poems I wrote were never a book, they were just poems—otherwise I may end up writing books like C________ S________, “projects” of 45 pages! Anyway, I felt guilt and then I felt disappointed in myself for feeling it and not simply enjoying my life—or doing what I set out to.
I keep thinking I see a person in white out of the left eye but it is only a small puddle of reflecting water in the backyard. I don’t know what I’d do without the view of our backyard. As I write this, flashes of a dream come back in which there was my father (perhaps because I reread the section of chapter two about his death), a zoo (the zoo, over near the camels and dromedaries), and I can’t remember what else. My coffee got cold so fast. Who am I writing this for? I could say it’s for me,the me of the future, but somehow I always imagine someone else, a stranger, reading it—but with my knowledge and while I’m still alive.
Yesterday afternoon while I was working on my poem for A. B. I was overwhelmed by a desire to fuck. I went upstairs and got Steve (he was willing) and we had this radical afternoon sex. The older I get the more I feel that my own sexual desires are a source of humiliation to those around me, and yet they drive me and I cannot control them. Lately I feel waves of sensual pleasure/desire at the most inopportune moments. Yesterday—no reading. We did some errands, Staples, Car Wash, Shop ’n Save, and then ate left over bean soup. In the afternoon I worked on my poem and then put the changes (the blue ink ones I’d made last September) on my memoir into the computer with the final goal of printing out a completely fresh draft and giving it to Steve. Looking over my pages I felt very hesitant to “plunge in” to the narrative logic of the book again, I worried that the amount of unfinished work I would find there would overwhelm me, and right now I want to think about poems and reading, pages and pages of reading.
4 January 2000 Tuesday
Against my will I spent the afternoon designing a postcard to announce my reading with Damon next week. Everything about me was bored by the prospect, but I did it anyway. Now, after a nap on the couch with Circe hiding under the comforter, I am freezing cold and biding my time until dinner: peanut butter and jelly tonight—due to a lack of supplies and the cold slushy weather outside into which neither Steve nor I care to venture. After our dinner we are due at Ben and Carla’s for dessert. Some fancy chocolate torte sent here from Sicily by Carla’s mother. I suppose it will be good to get out, though I can’t exactly remember where they live.
This morning my flamingo desk lamp, purchased so long ago at All That Jazz, finally died. As a consequence I am writing in here under the diffuse harsh glare of the overhead, with no warm desk-lamp glow. My “scholar’s lamp” has been moved next to my computer. I worked on “The Ambition of Art” today. It is thick now, like “Soleil” but perhaps full of gobbledygook, and I cannot tell where it might go structurally. I don’t think I can thin it down, but neither do I think it can keep sustaining itself under such weight. And, worst of all, I seem to have an aversion to any sort of radical formal shift mid-poem. This is definitely a disadvantage because it means total commitment to whatever form I begin with, and it may very well be the wrong one.
6 January 2000 Thursday
I missed a day. All my stability thrown off by chores. We did a huge grocery shop yesterday and we have to account for everything since we never eat out. Last night, to accompany a disastrous roast, we drank a half a bottle of Côtes de Rhone and then we rented Cruel Intentions, a high school version of Dangerous Liaisons and consequently I went to bed full of self-hatred (why didn’t I work on my poem? why didn’t I write in here?) and as I lay there I felt I could see the number “40” glowing mockingly up ahead of me and so this morning I look like shit and I’m cursing again: my job(s), this house, this time, this place. At least I could rid myself of caring for 9 rue Quinault since it wasn’t mine and it was so small (I’ve forgotten how much I hated the noise of the printing downstairs). I miss the Waldrops. But most of all I miss my freedom.
I suppose I should record that the visit with Ben and Carla on Tuesday night was pretty fun. The “Savoya” was dry and Carla was very stressed out at not being able to cut it neatly. The hard chocolate shell cracked and split like a fault along the edge of a tectonic plate. And then the slices were so thick and hard we could not get our forks in them but instead broke off pieces with our hands and chewed them while drinking pink champagne and then port. Later in the evening Ben got all excited about Merrill again and motioned for me to follow as he pulled books off of the shelf. Now, as I turn to look at my little yellow bookcase my eye falls on my copy of Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, which I didn’t even know I owned, and yet here it is among the many books in our house, one of the few to make it into my office.
Ben writes all of his drafts of poems on little scraps of paper and then stuffs them into envelopes. He told me that he got the idea of “making an archive” after speaking to a friend who was at work on Joyce’s archive at the Lockwood library in Buffalo. And here I was thinking archives were something that happened naturally. Then he told me about all the women he had done collaborations with, including Jean Day, with whom he claimed to have had “one of the great love affairs of his life—unfulfilled of course.” I realized, as Steve and I drove home, that I am quite a solitary artist. I have never valued my collaborations as much as my solitary compositions.
8 January 2000 Saturday
I tried to get a hair appointment with Emily, who I don’t entirely trust, and she won’t be free until Thursday. I thought about trying to find another salon but then I could feel my entire day being taken up in pursuit of a haircut and I don’t want that to happen. I don’t really like the Picasso salon anyway. It’s dark, cold, the music is bad and the receptionists aren’t very friendly. Last night we watched Michael Moore’s The Big One on video and then I dreamt that I discussed the workers’ needs with Terry the music manager at Borders (again a broken elevator). Very strange. I had long blonde wavy hair again. Which reminds me: Elly looked so pretty last night. She had her hair pulled up into a pony tail and a bright red scarf around her neck. Yesterday I felt fine, relaxed, today I awoke feeling tense. All of a sudden it feels like the Boston reading will be “upon me” before I know it (ugh, early morning syntax). I don’t feel ready and my poem, “The Ambition,” has stalled. I don’t know how to finish. I do not want to, or can’t make a big statement at the end. I want to build but avoid closure. [Ugh. I have a horrible energy, I can feel it, it’s hungry and it won’t allow me to concentrate. Maybe if I run around all morning I can dispel it by afternoon.]
9 January 2000 Sunday
What an awful night! I sweat and sweat, and then had chills. I dreamt unproductive and disturbing dreams. Steve felt like a burning hot coal next to me, he was clammy and uncomfortable and Circe kept jumping up and down, kneading us, purring loudly and meowing insistently. When I stood up this morning, I felt delirious. I want to blame it all on the MSG in this wretched Chinese meal we had, at my request, yesterday lunch. I was served an Egg Foo Yung that was nothing more than a greasy mess of onions, old chicken and limp bean sprouts drenched in a disgusting beef gravy. Why I ate any of it I don’t know . . . but I had a few bites . . . like an idiot. I insisted on getting my hair cut yesterday and so ended up at the mall Salon, but as they couldn’t take me until 3:30, Steve and I had time to kill (what a stupid state of affairs for a poet)—I can barely hold this pen in my hand I feel so wrong—we went to Staples and I bought a new desk lamp, with a Tiffany shade, it’s quite cute. Oh! I can’t visit that excursion anymore. (I’m drinking the best café au lait).
Last night before bed I showed Steve the finished draft of “Ambition” (title must go). He gave it the thumbs up, with only a few minor adjustments. I was, theoretically, happy. Then I sat up in bed, where it is very nice to read, and finished the first volume of Kafka’s diaries, which made me feel like a self-conscious and simplified artist who will never create anything of worth. Steve came down from his office to smoke a last cigarette with me and when I shared some of these feelings, he made a point of telling me that Brecht never felt any self-pity, he simply did his work . . . even when in exile on a farm in Sweden. I have got to find a way to get interested in the materials again . . . maybe if I re-wrote the Rosa series and added a third part? In Steve’s pep talk he also reminded me that we’ve had to make our own challenges, even in Paris. But there every street has a plaque recording the life of somebody who rose above the norm. I don’t know how quite to describe it, but I feel at my limit, as if I can see greatness over the fence and yet I cannot reach it—and instead of feeling the usual stubbornness, the “I’m as good” feeling, I feel that I’m really not. I don’t have the discipline neither do I have the vision. And I cannot foresee how we will ever be out of debt on Steve’s salary, so I will always have to work and thus I will never get any work done.
Oh, self-pity! Why won’t I take on the challenge instead of looking for an escape route? Because I am tired? Because I have no friends? And what’s more . . . it’s getting to the point where I barely care. (Though I do miss the Waldrops). I think I can still feel fondly toward Damon because he is not part of the poetry world. I just can’t take that discourse about career and promotion anymore, and I cannot “keep track.” I don’t care which magazine people publish in anymore as long as they write something worth reading. I can’t bear to look at my proofs for Liège, that’s the kind of work that drives me nuts, but I must do it today, that and finish [typesetting] In the American Tree. I will move on now to Kafka’s next volume of diaries (1914-23). I’ll read a little bit every night before bed. And I must read Rosmarie’s book this week. Perhaps I should stop and read Merrill’s memoir quickly in between, it won’t take long. I must remember to buy notebooks in Boston.
10 January 2000 (oh! how I miss that “1” before the beautiful “9”)
I’m reading James Merrill’s memoir, prompted by Ben’s insistent references to him and a desire to complete what was so long ago begun. It filled me with the desire to be rich, to eat caviar, which I love, drink champagne and think of nothing but my literary career, which, it seems, is only beginning. Right now I feel I should work on my memoir continually with no thought of publication until after I’m forty. Ever since last night I keep seeing a lone thin light line of verse in my head, partially rhymed and at all costs observational and descriptive. But . . . what would I describe? That’s always the trouble. My eyes are filled with floaters, its beginning to snow outside. The winter so far seems so gentle. I must finish my education. Right now all I can think about is quitting work so that I may do so. But on the other hands, all I can think about is making and saving as much money as possible that I might free myself from this situation. Once we pay our property tax our bank account I fear will drop down again. I should quit obsessing. We are fine. Anyway, back to Merrill. I feel so jealous of men. Male poets and the ease with which the literary life must come to them. I hate this place and its lack of ambition, I must imagine it as a retreat, a gift of solitude and time. I feel, for the first time since the New Year (even before ) that ambition and goal-making-desire rising up in me. This year I must draw on whole new stores of discipline to accomplish what I need to. It will be a challenge. I should record that I finished typesetting In the American Tree and that last night I had a wonderful and refreshing conversation with Tom Griswold. He made me laugh and laugh and that felt very good.
11 January 2000 Tuesday
My glasses are in the bedroom but I’m too lazy to go get them and I don’t want to risk an interaction with Steve which would distract me. Finally a good night’s sleep! Was it because I worked? Both he and I lay still (as did Circe) and everything around us was quiet. Yesterday we had the gasket on our furnace repaired, or rather, replaced. Something we’ve been meaning to do since we moved in. Now there’s just the roof and the galvanized feed pipe. Ugh!
Yesterday evening at work I began reading Merrill’s strange epic The Changing Light at Sandover. It seems very readable, if a bit . . . so . . . . so what? I love that title. I can’t get it out of my heard, it seems so infinitely “poetic.” I almost wrote in here “I can’t believe I have to write a new poem by Friday.” For it seems that some part of me believes I must. But that’s crazy, one cannot compose under such circumstances. I just can’t stand the thought of reading through all that writhing emotion one more time. How much I would like to write something calm and descriptive. I am at great risk of writing a “mainstream” poem now that I own property. Tonight, work again, 3-11pm, with sweet Elly who gave me two squares of Cadbury chocolate filled with caramel yesterday. In spite of them and after my lentil soup dinner I was still hungry when I got off and so ate chips, apricots, peanuts, drank two Budweisers and smoked.
12 January 2000 Wednesday
I really am getting sick of Merrill. And I’m only half way through the memoir. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it has something to do with his attitude. Even when he, the older man looking back, writes “oh, how young and callous I was, how naïve of other people’s pain,” he is not convincing. It sounds like an act and what I really hear is “Oh! how young and charming I was, how exotic and filled with adventure my life . . .” And, ultimately, I sense in him a nostalgia for that period and those people that he does not register save for his occasionally wistful tone: “oh, what must they have thought of me!” About literature and “the writing life” he barely writes at all. Poetry just seems to be something he does in the order to have something to do, like exercising or collecting baseball cards. Of course this can’t be true, he dedicated his life to it, but I must read the poems to find out [I need to write in here in the afternoon or evening one day for I fear these sleepy early morning entries lack coherence and/or interest. I am more bent on taking sips from my coffee than expounding on the limitations of Merrill’s poetic].
Last night Elly seemed very young to me and I didn’t feel any desire for her. She told me that she would have me to tea at her new apartment, if indeed she gets it. Last night I got to shelve the fiction/lit section for the first time and for the first time I was overwhelmed with the desire to buy books. I saw a copy of C. S. Lewis’s youthful diaries and they looked terrific. Plus Kristeva’s book on Proust, and Henry James. I must store up all this energy for next Saturday when we go used bookstore shopping in Boston. I want to buy bags and bags of books!
1:10pm (post-lunch)
Steve at meeting for Sagetrieb. Two good quotes from Merrill:
“Freedom to be oneself is all very well; the greater freedom is not to be oneself”
“From the givers of physical tenderness no evaluating insight is feared. While from those who appreciate your creative gifts, love is the last thing you are able to accept.”
13 January 2000 Thursday
Last night, slept poorly. I felt that Steve was pushing his body at me and I had no room. I was both too hot and chilled at once. I had had a very nice day. I just lay on the couch reading Merrill’s memoir until I finished it. Then I shopped and made dinner (Pasta with sauce Raphaël). I’m not going in order. First of all, I finished Merrill. In addition to the quotes on the facing page there was a passage near the end that I liked very much: “Wouldn’t I, too, turn, word by word, page by page, into books on a shelf?” A sort of slow and painful (thoughtful?) metamorphosis I suppose. After all was said and done, I’d have to say that I didn’t regret reading the book nor did I ever feel terribly inspired by it. I cannot transfer onto Merrill the way I could Kafka. There was always something too easy about him and his feeling for culture never seemed absolutely necessary. I don’t know. I cannot give a full analysis here because I’m dying to go elsewhere. At one point in the book his mother burns, “destroys” all of his letters. This reminded me of Gabe’s callous destruction of all the letters I’d ever written him (1988-1997?). Except one. I can barely write about it, it pains me so still to think of it.
I was looking at Ann Waldman’s Fast Talking Woman the other day at work (someone had special ordered it) and I suddenly saw (how ignorant am I?) how much of a protégé of hers Lee Ann was and is. Even the outfit Waldman wears on the cover is something I can imagine Lee Ann in. The thought of my reading tomorrow night sickens me. When I expressed something similar over the dinner table last night Steve said, “you always say, two days before a reading, that you aren’t going to read.” The difference this time being, however, that it is not a poor performance, turn-out, or rejection, that worries me. I do not care whether anyone wants to bother to like my work at all. It is rather the whole “promotionary” quality of the thing. And the thought that the audience might mistake me for someone who is asking for their approval. Also, my work is not ready. It is not good enough. When I think of Joyce! Oh how I wish I could write a long, lulling work, beautiful, meaningful, with dialog. Yes! Dialog. Is this what is missing from Anselm’s poem? Does he, as I imagine he does, feel and understand the way I do? It is not that I believe my understanding superior or, for that matter, even healthy. But it is unique in its relationship to why I am an artist and completely connected.
2pm post-lunch
Steve is at H________ K______’s. I begged out. I just couldn’t face “job talk” and politicking. Also, I awoke in what I would describe as an exceptionally contemplative mood and thus did not want to waste it in idle chit chat with virtual strangers. I was feeling calm and in a good mood last night until we watched Living in Oblivion, most of which, I realized, I’d seen on French T.V. It wasn’t so much the movie that depressed me, it was pleasant enough, but something of an atmosphere of tension and frustration that had surrounded the entire evening—Steve’s emotions, not mine, that is not until later. He had been out of sorts at the aperitif and then he went upstairs to check the e-mail and discovered, via a stranger’s inquiry, that Burt had agreed to do a Festschrift of Marjorie Perloff in Sagetrieb—four issues down the line (after a Williams, a Blaser, and an Oppen issue)—meaning that Steve’s editorial say would be postponed yet another issue down the line. But a Festschrift for Marjorie! I like her very much, but such a sycophantic, so politic, a gesture! What a nightmare for the young scholar and how unlike Steve! Though we did not discuss it, I think we both felt how demeaning a project it would be for him at this point in his career. I felt like we’d just received a telegram from Berlin “requesting” that Steve show up for active duty in the enemy army . . . and I wished, though I said nothing, that he would turn to me and say, “we cannot stay here now, we must leave as soon as possible.” Because, while “I cannot ask him to be lesser than he is,” I feel that that is exactly what the U of Me is doing. And then of course there’s my own work to think about and this place has not been terribly good for it either.
Last night I dreamt I’d had a tracheotomy and was smoking out of my throat. It was disgusting, but it reminded me of the part in my memoir about my paper route and the hospital in chapter eight. I looked it up and read some five pages. They were fabulous! I cannot believe how much doubt I’ve been made to feel about that book! And then, coupled with the overwhelming desire to return to work on it, I realized that the reason I’d gone to all the trouble to write it in the first place was because I wanted, I needed to keep my past alive and to remember, not only people and places, but sensations—all those feelings pre-death and pre-poetry, feeling without which I doubt I would have survived. Now I feel a bit as if I can no longer get close to people, but part of me wonders if in fact I ever have been able too. Perhaps I am as isolated and solitary as Robert only I put myself into social situations in order to mask it.
My! Steve is having a long lunch with H________ K_______! Right now I feel that there is not enough time in the world for all I want to write and say, for all I want to read. I hear the semis going by rattling the house and I wonder how I could’ve taken the noise in the summer when all the windows were open. This country is a soul-killer. I do not want to be in another situation where we are waiting for Steve to “write us out of it.” Nor do I like the option of getting the academic job myself—though I’ll begin teaching in just two weeks. But for the $600 a month I wouldn’t have done it.
There’s a passage I read in Merrill, him quoting someone else, which moved me quite a bit. I cannot find it now but I think he quoted it apropos his mother. It went something like: “It is less a question of whether you’ve had a sad or happy life, but whether you’ve faced your life with energy and purpose.” (Much mangled) but that gets the gist. I felt very condemned when I read those words.
14 January 2000 Friday
I will read tonight in Boston with Damon. Giving the reading itself sounds fun—last night I read my new work into the tape recorder and I was very happy with the way it sounded, especially and to my surprise, “Ambition.” Then I listened to my Orono reading, or at least began to listen—it was awful! My voice is hollow, it sounds like I don’t even recognize the words I am reading or their meaning. Anyway . . . something fell away, some anxiety or doubt, and I even began to work on my memoir again (Chapter 3). The writing came easily and I felt identified with it, held up, supported. Last night we both smoked too much and now our house stinks. I can feel the pressure of Steve: hurry up! The way I see it, what difference does it make if I miss my reading? These things happen all the time. I want to bring my memoir to work on it in the car, tapes, a blanket. Now, breakfast.
17 January 2000 Monday
The first thing I realized when I open you up, oh journal! is that we forgot to buy notebooks in Boston or Providence and thus when I finish you I’ll have no place to go! We are back now, snowed in. I’m sitting at our dining room table and all around me is white, white, white! I have nothing to wear out in the snow. No boots, no proper coat. I will be obliged to stay in or tie plastic bags around my feet. Arthur is out there plowing. I wonder if he’ll do our driveway again. Last night we were stuck in the street (or, more specifically, in Betty and Arthur’s driveway, and he cleared it for us so we could put the Saturn away. I’m finding it difficult to concentrate this morning, wondering . . . how am I going to get to work at 3:00pm? How home at 11:00?
Our trip south was emotional and strange and, in the end, not relaxing at all, in fact I feel right now as if I need a couple of days of sleep to recover from it. We drove down on Friday the 14th, straight into the setting sun, the glare of the insistent orb making visibility quite limited. The temps outside were in the 10s and below, so that even cracking the window enough to have a cigarette was uncomfortable. I felt bad in my chosen outfit and could think of nothing but changing it as soon as we arrived. Upon arrival, Dan fed us some Cincinnati 5-way chili over pasta, and beer. It was delicious and warming. I was distracted and laughing and thought little about the reading.
When we arrived there I was shocked to find the bookstore much less formal than I had pictured it. There were bright fluorescent lights and two yellow café tables serving as lectern. Bill Corbett and Joe Torra were there, but no one from Providence (no MacGregor, etc.). Beth and John were there, though I didn’t see John until after the reading. A________ K________ was late and I immediately disliked him, he seemed flighty and disrespectful. He had a friend with him, Sean Cole, who seemed very nice and looked sort of like the young Bob Dylan. As I think back I realize Boston has always had a supremely strange vibe. (I have to break and finish this later, as I feel I need to eat and I wish Steve would get up and call Dana Smith to come plow our driveway)!
20 January 2000 Thursday. Steve’s 35thBirthday
I worry that it is my journal that will suffer with the upcoming semester. Yesterday, after what seemed like months of denial, I finally “faced” my responsibilities. I corrected my proofs for Michel Delville, answered Vincent’s translation questions, and hammered out my syllabus. Today I must continue on in the same vein—and the day after that. I’m still in a quandary as to what to do about my Borders job. Part of me can’t imagine going there now (the lack of freedom)! But then again I hate breaking with things, the quitting part, ugh! I hear Steve’s belt-buckle rattling, he must be getting up. But perhaps he, too, would like a little quiet time to write in his journal. No sooner had I begun to feel the urge to decorate rise up in me than Steve brought the financial news down to me: $700 (after property taxes). No carpet or bookshelves for a while longer. I can’t believe I bought a coat and Steve boots—we can’t afford either, but Steve got worried about my lack of gear. The charm of these café au laits is wearing off. In the distance, Joaquin des Prez’s Motets. I keep putting my pen down, turning my head and staring out the window into the snow-plowed driveway upon whose slightly muddy surface my thought wanders off to various duties.
Peter called last night and we had a nice chat. He acts as though he believes he and I have an especial connection. As poets. Now as “people who have lived in France.” He said he’d written a series of love poems while in Marseille called “From the Provençal.” Plus a long poem is begun. He says he wrote the love poems for Liz, but I can never tell if they are really in love or not. The page just seemed to move beneath my pen. My feet, or rather my toes, feel like ten little individual popsicles. Perhaps this spring my grown-up life will come back.
21 January Friday
I only have time for a quick entry before work. I haven’t been to Borders for a week and a half and, after today, I doubt I shall return there for a while. My “contingent” schedule reduced to one or no shifts a week. The timing is perfect as I start teaching on Monday and Betsy handed me a load of work for Paideuma.
Steve’s birthday surprises were a hit. I bought him a computer chess set and a pair of slippers (suede moccasins). I made filet mignon, herb roasted potatoes, zucchini and chocolate mousse (which turned out a bit too heavy and thick) and we drank this gorgeous bottle of St. Emilion Grand Cru classée that Rosmarie had pressed into my hands just before we left Providence. Then we watched Searching for Bobby Fischer.” Overall the evening had a “chess theme,” for while we were watching the movie Steve’s dad e-mailed in his next move in the electronic game they’ve been playing for some weeks now.
It is snowing again. I cannot write “The snow is falling . . .” lest I think of Joyce. It’s as though he owns those words. The snow is pouring down, so quickly that it hardly has time to drift. My new “toggle” coat arrived yesterday from L. L. Bean as did Steve’s “Bean boots.” (Mine are on back order). My coat is so warm that I no longer fear the snow and cold—I feel as if I’ve been freed from some sort of soft prison now that I can finally go out again without suffering. Clearly, the way to live in a place like this is to have the right gear. And if our garage worked! Wouldn’t that be heaven?
I should note that not a day or so ago I felt the desire well up in me to write out another five-year plan—the very same desire I could not find for the life of me one year ago in Paris. I told Steve that I’ve decided “one cannot make five-year plans or have goals in Paris, for the city itself is the answer to all desire—and thus one cannot improve upon oneself within it.” But—here in Maine, there is much to “rise above.”