Clutter

Dear Nancy:

Once again, I’ve been on the road with writer’s conference teaching—this one with friends like family and the mountains around me with their embrace of the past, the stirring up of my psyche. So this letter comes late. But I’m at home again at last, resting, healing some family sadnesses. I’m sitting in bed with tea and cats and a letter to you.

Ah, but first and best! Such a good moment. Sunday evening when I got here, I held your book, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson, in my very own hands. Thank you for sending a copy to me, and all my love and congratulations to you, my friend!

Actually, your last letter to me sat with me all week while I was away. Your letter and your question. What, you ask, do you do with research materials (from finished work)? You describe maps of New Orleans, layouts of a sugarhouse. Notes on how slave owners punished their enslaved people, notes on the architecture of Louisiana plantations, barns and outbuildings and the quarters. Notes on steamboats and river currents, on how many buffalo hides the Comanche used to make one average tipi. A locust invasion in upper Texas in the winter of 1873.

“Your closet space,” you say of the research you’ve done. You call the notes you’ve kept, your shrine to self, and you describe your deep hesitation to leave them behind. I understand that hesitation so well, especially these days.

I’ve just moved to this new house, the first home of my own I’ve ever had. And with me come the boxes and files and envelopes and books and letters and general writer’s trail of years and times. I’ve moved over thirty seven times in my life, you know. Thirty seven moves and thirty seven unclutterings. Each move, a sorting through the notes of the life of a writer.

In one box, I found notes on my last novel, The Motel of the Stars. Notes on vortices and hidden extraterrestrial research stations in the Sedona desert. Notes on black holes. Interviews with Stephen Hawkings. Notes and notes on the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, on the Mayan Calendar. Notes on a Marine helicopter crash off the coast of North Carolina. On Marine Corps training procedures.

And that was only THAT box-of-research. I have other such files. Other books which meant research on everything from the Book of Revelations to state laws on adoption records. Like you, notes on the past are my closet space, my psyche’s home, and my own new house is much too small to contain it all, yet, like you, I mourn and hold on tight when it comes to shedding any of it. I mean, I’ve gone to the trash can and thrown thing away, then hurried out there in the middle of the night to take back what I’ve thrown away! The files, the research, the times of my life that made the books, all? Living beings in and of themselves, really.

But as I write this letter, and as I’ve thought about it this week, I’ve taken your question in another direction in my heart. Surprised?

What do I do with research materials from finished work? Finished work. The real finished work? This is a hard one, so bear with me.

I think that the true research, the deepest sort of researching I’ve done over the last ten years, has been about sorrow and joy. Light and dark. Most of my life, the “research” I’ve done for my work as a memoirist, my work as a novelist, is sadness, pure and simple. I’ve gone down the darkest of rabbit holes, entered the most difficult byways and highways, the back roads of grief. I’ve opened veins. I’ve taken the deepest dives into what hurt the most. I’ve written beautiful pain. I’ve written about my son’s relinquishment. My mother’s OCD. Madness and visions, visions and despair. I’ve plunged into it all, the pools and seas, the oceans and caves of fecund loss. I’ve taken so many notes.

I’m in the midst, somehow, of learning to empty out the files and boxes and materials of sadness in my life. Learning to empty out that source of writing and find ways to fill myself up with joy. I just wrote this in another letter to a dear friend: I’m done. I really am. And that grieves me so much. Being done. I wish I’d been done a long while back and not wasted so much time on grief. Convoluted logic, huh?

Is it possible? To clear away the accumulated ways of a life? To release a way of seeing the world and open my eyes again to ten thousand ways of seeing anew, of realizing joy?

Yours in love,

Karen