Sunday, March 30, 2003
The cold comes slinking back down, ribsy beast, for what I can only hope is a bitter last smear of winter. It should be gone tomorrow, but it's ill-timed, all the same, seeming to match my internal thermometer. And I was doing just fine on my own, without sympathetic emotional echoes from Nature.
There's a wilting dogwood blossom lying on my desk. The storms last night blew it to the ground and Jennifer brought it in to me.
Dorothy Parker said, "If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."
See, here's the peril of this "blogger," this journal for the public eye. The thing I feared from well before it's beginning. The temptation to be truthful, to take my masks off and show you what is neither persona nor art, but that thing propelling the art and demanding the persona. That vitis that should remain in a little amber jar high on a dusty shelf of my soul. Faced with the same temptation, day in, day out, we are saints or we are sinners, and it's plain enough almost all of us are sinners.
The dogwood flower is looking pretty done for. As a small child, my sister and I were taught that the wood used for the cross upon which Christ was crucified was dogwood. The tree's enduring sorrow, that it was so used, we were told, could be seen each spring when it blooms. Cruciform flowers, the tip of each petal dabbed with a bloody reminder. We show no discretion in the horror and cruelty of stories we may tell our children. I could never look at a dogwood without feeling a stinging sort of guilt, that some man, long ago, nailed God to its branches, and for all history, every single spring, all dogwood trees must share that shame and burden. I did believe it at the time. It never occurred to me that, being rather small and spindly, dogwoods would be a poor choice for crosses, or to ask if they even grew in the Middle East.
Anne Sexton wrote, "All I am is the trick of words writing themselves."
Is that all I am? If it is, what will become of me when the words are done? A river and a pocketful of stones? No, that's been done. The critics would find a dogwood tree and nail me to it.
There is a stigma at the center of the wilting flower on my desk. That's what botanists call it, anyway. A stigma. A stigmata. Botanists don't put great weight in religious folklore passed thoughtlessly along to children. But there it is, anyway. The stigma. The corona.
I should write today. If I am not writing, I am only thnking that I should be writing. It's all a dream. My fingers on the keys, the words across the screen. If I am not dreaming, and I am not awake, if I am neither, what then? And I am not awake. Because I am typing.
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