MIRAMARE

The semester has called a halt, or rather a crawl, to all activities not related to teaching or caring for my family. The page count of the novel remains stalled where it was in late August. But I can’t shake a sense of momentum in spite of this, a sense that this period of not-writing is pregnant with writing to come that will be richer for the pause.

When I think about the work in progress - when I contemplate the paths of the characters, or reflect on the inchoate personal investments that are manifesting in the plot, or wrestle with specific problems such as the novel’s frame inside a kind of film (is it necessary? what does it add?) - I am inside the pleasure of narrative, of having a second world in which to perform mental ballet or to survey or to float in. This is different from the pleasure of writing, which for me always centers in the shaping and unfurling of lines (in poems) and sentences (in prose). It’s the sense of having a secret life, a double life, inevitably a mirror which I trust (and perhaps fear) will ultimately dump me out again into the desert of the real.

I’m thinking here of the travelers in the portal into John Malkovich’s mind, or perhaps I should say his being, in Being John Malkovich; how after their prescribed period of fifteen minutes inhabitation of the actor’s consciousness visitors are unceremoniously dumped onto the edge of the New Jersey Turnpike.

The single advantage of the Turnpike being that it’s a reasonably quick way of getting somewhere. And obviously, not writing, I’m getting nowhere, a tourist in my own half-created fictional world, collecting snapshots I can show only to myself. Yet this nowhere is a pleasant place to be. And tolerance for not writing has become a necessary generosity, given the realities of teaching and family life. I trust, ultimately, that there is no nowhere. We are always somewhere and in history. Forward progress happens until the moment of abandonment that we call failure or completion.