War-torn Vienna
Jul. 16th, 2003 05:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSome kind of cosmic nadir yesterday. Today I'm crawling out of the wreckage, looking around at the city I used to live in and wondering how I'm going to survive…
"It's not yr fault," Annie kept telling me over and over again on the phone yesterday. "Deep in yr soul you equate betrayal and pain with love. Look who you had for a mother. At least my mother had the grace to abandon me before she could do much damage."
Generally I get through bad times by fixing my mind on some vanishing point in the future. One way or another, I think, I'm going to get there. It's a passive act, really, because time is a treadmill and it drags you there. You don't even have to break a sweat. But this time, I'm not sure I can see that far ahead.
"I understand the temptation of God," Tony Stigliano wrote me several weeks ago. "Resist. It is too easy a solution."
I guess, then, that leaves me to my own narrative devices. On the agenda for the day – wait for the Cannery Row folk to yea or nay the lease, tunnel back down into my book. Two things I do well – I'm a good writer, I'm a good mother. Everything else is writ on sand…
"It's not yr fault," Annie kept telling me over and over again on the phone yesterday. "Deep in yr soul you equate betrayal and pain with love. Look who you had for a mother. At least my mother had the grace to abandon me before she could do much damage."
Generally I get through bad times by fixing my mind on some vanishing point in the future. One way or another, I think, I'm going to get there. It's a passive act, really, because time is a treadmill and it drags you there. You don't even have to break a sweat. But this time, I'm not sure I can see that far ahead.
"I understand the temptation of God," Tony Stigliano wrote me several weeks ago. "Resist. It is too easy a solution."
I guess, then, that leaves me to my own narrative devices. On the agenda for the day – wait for the Cannery Row folk to yea or nay the lease, tunnel back down into my book. Two things I do well – I'm a good writer, I'm a good mother. Everything else is writ on sand…
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 07:42 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-07-16 08:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 09:05 am (UTC)The treadmill image is hard to accept for me, maybe a conveyor belt? Like in the airport?
I like to stick to the image of Frost's path less taken, personally. Forging my own way through the thicket, buoyed by the occasional glimpse of my shimmering dreams (or the mirage of same) tantalizingly close. Wielding my silver machete, fiercely determined to get............somewhere nobody has been before me.
Creatively, I mean.
P.S. Your writing is SO clear, like a dive into a cold, clear pool.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 07:54 am (UTC)What did he mean? "I understand the temptation of God."
Tony and I had been doing the where-are-they-now? thing in email. Mostly, "they" (the vivid personalities we hung out with in our twenties and thirties) seem to be dealing with health crises of various sorts. I suppose that's what happens in middle age. Anyway, I'd written him that I thought our own generation was particularly ill-equiped to contend with the spectre of its own (inevitable) extinction on account of the erosion of spiritual and philosophical frameworks during the period of our youth, but that there was a certain utility in believing in God. That was his response.