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[sovay]

Because it is lashing rain against our windows even as we speak, the contractors have not been drilling and hammering our porch since daybreak and in consequence I slept and dreamed of the late discovery of an extra novel in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, newly published and illustrated in the style of Evaline Ness. (I had no idea she had taken her surname from her second marriage, to Eliot Ness.) In the way of dreams, it melted into a kind of AU remix by the time I was a few chapters in. The WWII echoes are always easier to see in Westmark, but they're all throughout Prydain far beyond the inspiring geography of Wales where Alexander was briefly stationed on his way to France; I assume someone has mapped them like the ghosts of the Western Front through Middle-Earth. There is presumably a larger project here about fantasy and war literature, crystallizing and changing shape throughout the twentieth century. Query: Susan Cooper and the childhood imprint of WWII, but also the cold white flame of the Light whose calculations and sacrifices would not turn a hair in John le Carré? "It is a cold world you live in, bachgen . . . I would take the one human being over the principle, all the time."

I feel as though I have stopped writing about almost anything that matters: I know that part of it is that the move and then injury and illness ate the month and concomitantly my concentration and my physical health is ground down beyond the question of reserves and has been since well before this time last year, but some of it is also feeling that there is nothing I should be talking about. I had a terrible time walking around Davis Square last night and feeling that I was surrounded by people playacting at 2019. As far as I know, I will never eat inside a restaurant again. I can't hang out all night in movie theaters or all afternoon in museums and I interact with bookstores in quick careful dives and it's no one's problem but mine, why can't I get with the program and pretend I have no medical factors that did not just evaporate when the economy needed to get back on track and ignore how much of the infrastructure around me has disintegrated in the last three years and everyone I know has been scraped past the bone. I don't think this country I live in understands grief.

On the other hand, I just fixed my twenty-six-year-old sound system by stripping and re-cutting the wires of the leads so that the speakers plug in more cleanly than their previous frazzled state and now it makes noise again and I feel a lot more competent than I did an hour ago when I had unscrewed everything and dust was obviously not the issue.

Comments

[asakiyume]

That lashing rain was really something.

You say that you feel as if you have stopped writing about anything that matters, but I'm thinking I need to read behind those words to understand that you're talking about grief and fury at the current reality--the general one, but also your particular one. And man, I stand in wordless agreement with you on that.

... But I want to say that you never have stopped writing about things that matter. Sometimes you write about yourself, your anguish. This matters. You matter. When you write these things, you're writing about things that matter. And maybe you say, Okay, fine, but I mean--- and then in that space you have other topics you'd put in ... but really I want to politely suggest that you continue to write those things too. Poems, reviews, reflections, stories. You've never stopped. Don't let Little Wittgenstein start saying things about optimal levels of production or "but fanfiction doesn't count." Art is art, Little Witt!

But anger and grief over your situation, our nation's situation, the world's situation. That I assent to.

And way to go on stripping and recutting those wires! Practical skills like that, used to revivify something that was apparently dead? THE BEST.

[sovay]

That lashing rain was really something.

I kept hearing it rattle in gusts. Today it has just been gusting, with the clouds blowing on and off. There were dust devils in the dry leaves.

grief and fury at the current reality--the general one, but also your particular one. And man, I stand in wordless agreement with you on that.

I feel like I just stopped talking about the current reality, period. I wanted to mention when enough days had elapsed since the midterms that it begun to feel a little safer to breathe, instead of the conviction of oncoming apocalypse and it was far too late to get out. And I'm not sure why I didn't, except that we were moving and I was tired. And I wish I were writing about more movies and I wish I were writing poetry. But you are probably right that the rest of it is Tiny Wittgenstein and he shouldn't even listen to himself.

*hugs*

And way to go on stripping and recutting those wires! Practical skills like that, used to revivify something that was apparently dead? THE BEST.

Thank you.