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Pilar, if I could be there, I'd take both of us to the Andes, as high up and far away from the sea as possible. Watch the summer color, bring music off the wind through a flute, bring life to both of us. If you wanted, I'd marry you; your slender hips and tall, slim body. Hold on to the earth away from the tides. Let go of my seed. See summer flowering on the plains.
Now you are a memory. Sailing. A thousand ideas turn around you. You are at the center of me. Ideas go slipping through my fingers. You stay. I take you with me in this heartland of the winter.
Her lips were sensual and soft and her teeth nippy and bitty as she consumed me alive. I could hardly watch her nibble asparagus without getting a hard-on. At the same time her cooking im- proved. The nights we spent trout fishing, camping out, and lying in our sleeping bags on the cots, and she listened in silence as I pointed out the constellations to the girl Orion, Cassiopeia. And the sunsets at the bench and the wild abandonment in the surf, caressing and rolling in the surf. The time under the trees in Muir Woods during the monumental rainstorm when my blue blazer shrunk. The Marina Green with me stroking atop her barely under the arcs of the headlights of the commuters going toward the bridge. I whispered, "This is insanity. We have a house and a bed only four blocks away!"
We turned each other on — no whips or tying up or swinging arrangements with other couples, none of that bullshit. Just the expansion of our love into the physical.
Yes, I might say I have seen a good deal at the age of fiftyeight. I've been married, have grown children, and am not proud to say I'm a grandfather. My kids are raised, the wife has remarried. I have no filial responsibilities. There was a pretty little number about thirty years my junior whom I'd been seeing, but I was jilted by, of all things, a full-blooded American who practices Hinduism and thinks he's some sort of ascetic. He collects welfare— which my salary pays for— and claims he transcends being, a concept difficult enough to formulate, let alone attain. Of course he is thirty years younger than I am also, but he doesn't have half the drive and stamina. Well, then, let them have one another. Charlotte said to me at our final parting, "You're just too nervous for me to be around, Charles. You never relax. You're always on the go. What do you think you're accomplishing, anyway? Tom is so —
"Listen," I said. "Don't tell me about that hare-brained ascetic of yours who sits on his butt all day harmonizing with nature while I feed him. I've got a job to do, and it's not easy. I've got deadlines to meet."
oh god lol
Capitalism, which ceases to exist if it is not expanding its empire, establishes an ever-moving frontier, and its yang conquistadors forever pursue El Dorado. You cannot be too rich, they cry. My realistic fictions are mostly about people on the yin side of capitalism: housewives, waitresses, librarians, keepers of dismal little motels. The people who live, you might say, on the rez, in the broken world the conquistadors leave behind.
But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her waist? I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? [...]
Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me. People who say the body is unimportant floor me. How can they believe that? I don't want to be a disembodied brain floating in a glass jar in a sci-fi movie, and I don't believe I'll ever be a disembodied spirit floating ethereally about. I am not "in" this body, I am this body. Waist or no waist.
But all the same, there's something about me that doesn't change, hasn't changed, through all the remkarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person who isn't only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.
I am not lost until I lose my memory.
My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook - I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing - I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm - I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.
That must be what the great artists see and paint. [...]
[...] the value of the repetitive locutions that mark divisions in Native American oral narratives. Such locutions often begin a sentence, and if translated appear as something like "So, then ..." or "Now, next it happened ..." or just "And." Often discarded as meaningless, as noise, by translators intent on getting the story and its "meaning," these locutions serve a purpose analogous to rhyme in English poetry: they signal the line, which, when there is no regular meter, is a fundamental rhythmic element; and they may also cue the larger, structural rhythmic units that shape the composition.
In a letter in 1926, Woolf said that what you start with, in writing a novel, "is a world. Then, when one has imagined this world, suddenly people come in." First comes the place, the istuation, then the characters arrive with the plot ... But telling the story is a matter of getting the beat - of becoming the rhythm, as the dancer becomes the dance.
[...] the story demanded that I be outdoors while writing it - which was lovely in Oregon in July, but inconvenient in November. Cold knees, wet notebook. And the story came not steadily, but in flights - durations of intense perception, sometimes tranquil and lyrical, sometimes frightening - which most often occurred while I was waking, early in the morning. There I would lie and ride the dragon. Then I had to get up, and go sit outdoors, and try to catch that flight in words. If I could hold to the rhythm of the dragon's flight, the very large, long wingbeat, then the story told itself, and the people breathed. When I lost the beat, I fell off, and had to wait around on the ground until the dragon picked me up again.
Waiting, of course, is a very large part of writing.
for me it's more of a lyrical dance but i can relate to this