Whatever the words, 9/24/11

Did you circle all of them? she asked in her sleep. My daughter often dreams aloud as if in some way the stories swimming and flowing through her skull were always aimed at the verbal, the spoken. In their pronouncement they find freedom from the heavy tapestries cloaking the inner mind from the outer world: two wildernesses brought together by unconscious speech, the speech act itself a righteous  act. A declaration, no matter what the words, that the mind can deliver.

Did you circle all of them? she asked, her voice raised as if talking to a group of friends or an audience. She was deep asleep but there was the hint of a giggle after the last word: delight. Perhaps a survey was going around and she along with her classmates had been instructed to “circle one best answer.” Perhaps she looked over at a friend’s paper and noticed all of the answers circled and in surprise, she asks her question, incredulous that anyone could break the rules. 

Breaking the rules. Now for some reason I am thinking of years ago, riding the ferry after one of our trips to Lopez  Island. I had walked through one of the passage doors and two youngish  guys were occupying the booth next to the door. “Keep the door open, bitch” he said. I’d never been called bitch before and found the insult to be intoxicating, fresh in its simplicity and intent. Who was this guy? What had I done for him to assault me this way? I decided it didn’t really matter, but these many years I’ve often wondered what happened to those guys, and what, after I did not comply to the command, they may have thought of me then.

There are times that I remember that drift in and out of my own tapestries like shades or half formed identities. They slip into the room when I am not thinking of anything else, as if welcomed by absence. These are the memories that I need to hold onto, keep in touch with because it is these memories that have something to say. A memory is like a character in a story or an image in a poem, something that has to be expressed; it can’t not be. When I recall, for instance, riding on the weather amma of Drum, watching the rush of seawater below me, and feeling a sense of freedom I had never known, I know that sense is what I continued to crave later in my life: the rush of freedom, the one true thing. It is an image that won’t leave me.

And other images from other memories, my father moaning in the room next to mine, lying beside my mother in his own low place of cancer induced agony. There I see him in my mind, even in that moment as I lay in my own low place, I hear his struggle moving out of him with his breath, a guttural utterance of dismay and dread at the impending end drawing near. I lay in my bed and hear the groaning become louder and more insistent and I know it is time to get up and give him my shoulder to the bathroom, sit with him as he squeezes my hand though the excruciating bowel movement, wipe the shit from his ass like his own mother. I sat with him through those movements; it was a sadness too large for the room, the house. The sadness was something we breathed. It was a nourishment, the sadness. To feel it like a fresh cut or the impression of a sharp stone under the sole, to feel the sadness was to be human and to be human was to be doing this.

Doing this is why I got up this morning. I am going to try to write at least a page every morning, whether it is automatic writing like this or whether it is something with more direction, a story or poem, I need to do this. Writing is like wiping the shit from my own father’s ass, like climbing the tallest tree and feeling lost up there but somehow much more aware, like dreaming I can dive like a fish or fly, finding the light smile of my wife in something she is reading, like the sound my son makes when he’s eating ice cream. Whatever it is, whatever the words, it will be something.