The roar and hum of the world
Dear Nancy:
Good girl that I am, I’ve been away again, on the road with teaching and conferencing and reading and lecturing and what-all, and so you’ll have to know that, this round anyway, my letter will come to you like a distant sound from the bottom of a well. A sulfur water one maybe, the long ago one from behind the house that used to be my grandmothers back in Floyd County. What I’m saying here. I feel all hollow and full of echoes today. What did Virginia Woolf call it, this echo and sound, this roar and hum from the busy world? Cotton wool.
Let me pick through the sack full of cotton wool and sounds from the last week or so.
Early morning, the day I left home. Alarm from my iphone and bird song out the windows and time for another journey for work and away from home. Coffee makings in my kitchen while I splash my face with cold water at the sink. Driving. Driving. Semis hiss along the road headed west. Long delay on Interstate 68 with jack hammers biting into the hot cement of the highway. Voice of Siri on my new-fangled Iphone. Directions to Buckhannon, West Virginia. Buckhannon and the campus filled with the voices of all the students there to study words. I drag my suitcase up a flight of steps. The day cranks down. Behind the dorm where I stayed for the residency where I taught, railroad tracks. The train going past at 2:00 AM.
In the days after that, there were the students I love, their good voices. Days of workshops. Exercises. Talk about essays and their openings. The sacred ritual of the workshop. There were readings each evening. Lectures each morning. One about Rilke. Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn’t notice at all, so complete was their listening. Nights I was exhausted and want nothing more but to be alone and study the gigantic yellow moon.
One night, I dream my mother. In the dream, she is young again, Alzheimerless. She has removed the sheets and quilts from my bed. And all the little things I love, the shells and bones and figurines, have been taken from the window sills and shelves. When I demand my life back, she tells me she owns me and my menstrual cycles, too. I woke that first dorm night with my own shouting, me telling my mother to go to hell.
But if I remember right, what we were talking about in our last couple of letters was good girls. Good girls who take care of the world, first, and themselves, second. Good girls who take care of work. Who keep a tidy desk. Who always answer the phone. Answer their emails right away. Read every sample chapter sent their way for writerly advice. Good girls like me who spoon pureed pizza into the mouths of the mothers who wounded them hard and then pushed them forward into the great, big world. Good girls who always put the cotton wool of life ahead of their own selves, their own words on the page.
One night at the residency this amazing fiction writer, Gail Galloway Adams, read. Short story writer. Essayist. Gail–a strong, kind, smart woman. I fell in love with her again and again. After she read this guy who always asked things that were piercing, hard, said, “I’m going to put you on the spot here for a minute with my question.” And Gail said, “I might kick you in the shins before I answer.” Something like that. Everyone laughed.
That moment in these busy days brought all the sounds, the clutter, the external world, to a focal point for me. All the work and dreams, the tiredness and roads. All the cotton wool. This is my life, Gail seemed to be saying. What I think. Who I am. I’ll kick in you in the shins if you fail to honor it. My writer’s life.
What I’m trying to say this time around is that I’m getting it. What a good girl must be amid the cotton wool of a crowded life. As Virginia Woolf said, “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”
Some days, oh, push it aside, this world. Take a long vow of silence. Close the door on it. The world. Listen. Art is in there. Claim it. Kick in the world in the shins if it will not give you time to see the pattern amid the cotton wool, the quiet time in the sounds, the beautiful emptiness that lets the words in.
Now that is goodness.
Love you,
Karen
