A week of blog-sobriety and this is what I come up with.
No wait, I will go into the other room, into my office I have abandoned, because that is where one is supposed to write things there, to retrieve a book I had underlined something, I wanted to quote here, no it's not in my office, it was only yards away from me, on that table when you walk in the front door and throw everything. Ahh. There it is. The introduction to Anne Carson's translation of Agammenon in An Oresteia, where she talks about Francis Bacon on painting, and she writes:
Francis Bacon makes his paintings, as Kassandra makes her prophecies, by removing a boundary in himself.
I have carried this line around with me, through fairly useless and impotent days. I clutch this line to my chest, some straws: Ahhh. This is everything informing why I write, not only Francis Bacon's paintings, not only Kassandra's silence and screams, but this idea combining the two, of removing a boundary. Although I wonder if I write anymore. I will have to write, again, eventually. Today I have decided to be like a Bronte, and complain of a chest cold, in order to secrete myself into a space of nothingness. Which reminds me of that time, in Chicago, in that bed in the main room on 18th street, where I had almost-pneumonia but not really-pneumonia, and I went through Francis Bacon paintings and fixated on the monkeys and the dogs, and came up with my idea for Under the Shadow of My Roof, my notebook of a hidden girl, and then afterwards I didn't write that, I wrote O Fallen Angel instead, I think, yes, that is what happened, or maybe that was already written, anyway, I'm not trying to trace out a weak narrative for a penciled-in index card, I am trying to remember.
It looks like I will have a month and a half to myself in the blazing heat of North Carolina this summer, while my darling John pursues an NEH fellowship at Oxford. It seems perhaps this is the world telling me I have to try to write this novel, or explode this novel, or bury the novel, or annihilate the novel, or do something. Write the monkey and become the monkey and remove the boundary like a rib, like a wall, like the roof of a house. Before I have to go be public-polished self for reading from Heroines in the fall.
Always back to myself. How boring is that.
Everyone loves to write about dissatisfaction and unhappiness but who wants to read about it anymore.
