Falling

Dear Nancy:

Oh, your last letter!   My favorite one, ever.  I keep reading it over and over.  The Raji story of climbing high into trees without ropes in order to harvest honey.  The man named Bahadur who said simply, “You fall when your life is over.” And us, this western world, where we think the opposite. “Your life is over when you fall.”

Falling.  All last week there was the snow, of course.

 

But your letter brought me so many images and stories and moments of falling.  The first was of when I was in college a long time ago, just a smart-nosed kid.  I remember reading a book, John Paul Sartre’s Nausea, while I was walking across campus.  Literally reading as I walked.  What a nerd I was!  I ran into someone, bounced off of them like I was some round rubber toy, kept walking, missed the sunlight and the beautiful day.  It was autumn and the leaves were just beginning to fall.  I won awards at that college for my smart-kidness.  Poetry awards.  Research awards.  Name-it awards.    But as the years of my education went on, I fell into being quieter and quieter.  I was a teaching associate Wfor a class called Issues and Values, the equivalent of composition and literature, and I fell into being quieter and quieter in there as well.  I remember distinctly thinking that I was looking for some still, quiet spot inside me, that I wanted to push aside all the words and critiquing, all the discussions and examinations and tidy marks in the margins of papers, and find…I’m not sure what.  Silence?  The sound of wind and leaves falling outside the apartment I had on the second floor of an old Victorian house on Center Street.  The man I was an assistant for took me aside, had a little talk with me.  “Listen,” he said. “The more you learn, the more you say.”  He looked at me gravely.  “What’s up with you?”

I am still not sure about that advice, to this very day. What was the real core of all that I was learning?  I wondered that then.  I wonder it now, about my writing life.

I fall behind so often.  All the should’s.  The sending out of work.  The applications.  Jobs.  Conferences.  Contests.  Deadlines.  Missed deadlines.  Lists. Crossed off tasks.  The pages ahead, even while the pages in front of me are still evolving.  It is not that I don’t believe in working hard.  I am from generations of hard workers—farmers, miners, waitresses, mechanics, retail workers.  I’ve worked at jobs in one way or another since I was fourteen.  Jobs of work, as my granddaddy called them.  The notion of stillness, of falling quieter and quieter as the snow falls, as the leaves settle from the trees.  That is alien to my upbringing, to me.

A few years ago, when I was still teaching full time, the director of my program was mystified because a student, a good writer, a hard worker, quit our program.  A dreamer, my program director said of this young man.  I flinched.  A dreamer?  Was that not me?  Was that not all of us writers?

But what if I dream too long?  What if I leave the world behind, crave silence, crave the falling away of the world too long?  What race with time will I lose?

And just suppose, for a minute, that I “lose” altogether?  That writing descends.  Hushes.  Vanishes for a time from the world.  Has nothing to say.  Suffers.  Languishes.  Wants.  Isn’t.  Is trying to be.  Can’t quite speak.  Falls into a time of anonymity, of apartness.  Of longing  to receive.  Of despair and doubt and waiting.

Like you, sweet Nancy, I prefer Bahadur’s take, that the falling is not the cause of a life ending, but a part of it.  Sometimes writing hungers and thirsts and falls, and isn’t that okay?

Yours with much love,

Karen