I sit down to a much-overdue edit of my newest book this morning (after a few weeks of mostly-just-parenting-and-house-projects), and the first thing I want to do is…not edit. I think after a period of time of not writing, things kind of get squished up inside me and want to be unraveled on the page; at least to some degree.
Okay.
Life feels so much like a dream to me, quite often. Or rather—is constructed of a dream-like substance.
Unravel.
How often I’ve thought of my dad, who taught me my way around a workbench, and who’s been with me while I painted bedrooms, bathrooms, furniture. I think sometimes I paint as much to blot out the old as to make something new.
The ghosts of whoever-came-before in this house seem the thinnest, gossamer-est veil away.
Veil and evil. Just rearrangements.
Unravel.
But my own past is closer.
The last several years have changed everything. In many, many ways. I can’t go back, and sometimes I don’t see the way forward. Micheal Jackson called his final tour, This is It.
Rearrange. Unravel.
Everything is here, and yet we can’t seem to stop imagining the past, the future; these frontal lobes often leave us hanging, searching for a map.
I set a print of Michaelangelo’s painting of God on the Sistine Chapel on my dresser because I liked the frame. But now it’s framed so much else—the moment Life is infused into a particular body, where it came from, where it goes…
Unravel. Rearrange.
I keep going back to Ricardo Piglia. Over. And over. And over. Where are the disappeared? What has happened to a moment ago? Sacramento? Last year? 2019? L.A.? Seattle? L.A. again?
Oddly, when I turn to search for Piglia: Baudrillard (S&S), The Absent City and Joan Didion’s Blue Nights sit side by side amid a hundred, two hundred books on my bookshelf. I gather them together and set them on my lap.
They speak in several tones but in one voice.
Dreams can always be looked back upon, interpreted, understood, wondered at, remembered. Not so Now. Now is sharper, rougher. I sometimes lay the dream of before over the Now to find the pattern, discern the shape, unlock the code. But mostly find nothing but more gauzy dreams.
Unravel.
Rearrange.
When I think of my mother, she appears in different guises: laughing, slightly unhinged. Boiling under the surface. Silly. Enraged, speaking in simmering, measured words through clenched teeth. Peaceful, reading in a meadow. How do we ever know another person? How do we ever know ourselves?
And so I pay attention to my daughter. I learn about who she is—but nothing is constant. Everything is fleeting. I am fleeting too. I am…something out of nothing.
Vapor.
The words on the unwelcome page I need to edit are calling me in their blunt, stunted, charcoal voices. It’s hard, sometimes, to spend time with the dead.
Life
Is
So
Short.
And constantly wants rearranging, unraveling.
Unravel.
Rearrange.