Standing and Writing

The coffeeshop where I work is a high-ceilinged, black-painted, converted warehouse lit with antique streetlamps to give a sense of its size. Commerce in Eugene, Oregon, has fallen on hard times like so much of the country, and so in the last couple years this place has twice been opened as a bar and restaurant, retracting to coffeeshop again when the bottom line cannot be met. The spot I like best is at the bar in the back, where the bottles of liquor glitter amber, umber, green and gold in the light from the high square window above the mahogany bartop worn smooth by martinis and elbows, and the abandoned wine glasses dangle on racks in sorrowful rows, consigned to disuse and emptiness. I arrive mid-morning, when the sun casts a retreating block of gold onto the seat by the window, and I settle into the corner of window and bar, pushing aside the seat because thanks to an old back injury, the price of past athletic inglory, I stand when I write. I unfold the laptop with the battery that no longer charges and that I can’t afford to replace in these Summer months when I make my money with my hands, open to the last page of whatever I was working on the day before, read to find the feeling and rhythm and intention, taking long pulls of a stiff Americano. If I am not immediately into the work, I listen: The best feature of the coffeeshop is its acoustics, no one sound ever resolving to clarity, but the hiss and clank of the espresso machine and mugs on counters and orders called out and conversations whispered and a child’s laughter aggregating to echoic clamor that is dialectic restrung, not the pedestrian day to day but affirmation of being and becoming, of living. I listen until I hear something I can imagine-- not a discrete noise or conversation, but a voice from a distant room I can enter.

This listening, standing at the bar, speaking the words I write aloud (no doubt looking thoroughly unhinged), happens because I write to rhythm and the textural feel of words in a way that has less to do with their sound in terms of rhyme or meter than with the way words follow one another, the shapes and structures they string out. It may sound contradictory to say I am not capable of lyric, but I am so musically disinclined that an early piano teacher gave up on me (and so of course I love music more for my inability to realize it), and so I don’t strain for song, rely entirely on instinct and natural inclination. When I am working, I ignore everything I’ve ever read or been told about writing, the opinions of teachers and peers and critics irrelevant to the process of creation. Recently I found a box of comics my mother had saved from my childhood, and tucked in one was an essay in careful cursive from the September I began the sixth grade, the lined notebook pages yellowed and brittle. I’d written about the only person I’d known who’d died, my Grandpa Thorold, noting:

"He had snow white hair, and always wore black-- at least, that's what I remember, and I could be wrong. He was wrinkled and you could tell he must have been very thin once, for his face never got a double-chin like most old people...The only other time I really remember him was once-- I think it was just before he died-- and he was sitting in a wheelchair, thoughtfully, and I think he was thinking about something important, something he had loved, for suddenly he seemed but twenty and young and spry again.”

The rhythm of the prose, endless dashes and asides, the substance and tone and global observation, the voice itself, even, haven't changed at all-- I'm still grave and reflective, dumbstruck by loss and the meaning and scope of other people's lives, still distrustful of what memory makes of what actually happened. This has been a year with more funerals than weddings: a friend went too far seeking peace, lost to infection after seventy days of exposure in a pilgrimage to the deep jungle; another man I knew from high school and the pool hall, who had long been homeless, decided one drunken night to go up in flames, as easy as fluid and a match, and then the excruciating days until a last end; another friend ‘s battle with leukemia ended abruptly, small mercy that he went quick and painless, little comfort that because he never made thirty, he will always be young. And inevitably, there were many lesser losses: love flaring up and gone for lack of courage, friends leaving town for good, rejections of my novel (a labor of seven years) mounting, the clouds keeping the sun even through June, so much darkness and absence to be mourned slowly and with care, the finally daily of life in the town I was born in a haunted endurance, the past overfreighting the present. The writing this year has been dark and slow, the openings and gifts too few, the clamor inadequately inspired.

Still, all afflictions pass; it is high August in the Willamette Valley, the sky so broad and bright some afternoons that no sorrow can claim the heart, and the opposite ends of everything seem inclined to touch, so that evenings as the sun goes down and the day settles into the orange well of dusk, the ghost moon over the distant hills heralding the emergence of stars, it seems that the words to name the world are there on the tip of the tongue, that all is imminent. And so, each new morning in this abandoned corner beneath a window bright with day, there is again the setting out and recursive return, the immanence of negative capability: to try again and fail better. And standing here with the sound of so much life, is the joy of it—in the seeking that is writing.