April 18, 2009

Paul Revere’s ride, and all that.

Charlie’s dinner last night (the first of two, as it turns out) was sweet, subdued, convivial. Sat beside the new Bennett coordinator, Ralph, whom I liked instantly and whose potential friendship I will regret, for a few days anyway. Dwelling in a place like Exeter keeps a man a big boy, which is lovely. A number of former Bennett fellows were in attendance. I am amazed repeatedly by my lack of the kind of literary talk that rules the tables at such a time. I have no amusing publication anecdotes (at least, I don’t think they’re amusing) and I don’t know any gossip about illustrious cultural figures, or KNOW any illustrious cultural figures, for the most part. I might be able to reel off a list of credits and honors, but I can’t think of them until the moment’s past. Charlie and Joan look as they always did, if even more spare and pared down and essential. Talking to Charlie again after all these years was wonderful. He is the subtlest of mentors, and one doesn’t realize on the surface how much effect he has really had.

Drove to Hampton, a horrible place in so many ways, with its arcades and fry dough stands, but dear also, crass and American and full of some kind of indefinable hope. I watched a little boy for a long time, getting his kite into the sea wind.

While I was at Hampton I had a revelation of a fairly blinding variety. What I had been doing all morning was trying to find something, to discover something. I went to a bakery that just opened yesterday and had coffee, while all around the rock-voiced New England family was congratulating son and nephew and brother on his new enterprise. I walked along the Squamscott until I had seen enough waterbirds. I went to a lecture at the Lamont by a photographer whose photos of authors is the current show. She is staying here at the Inn, and has been a snippy bitch to the staff, though her public persona at the lecture was open and intelligent and wildly interesting. I drove to Hampton and walked up and down 1-A, the morbid acuity of my attention sweeping every doorway and passing face. All the time I was looking for something. I was looking for someone. I was reminded, by myself, fifty times this weekend that I didn’t do the work here I was probably meant to do. But I had assigned the wrong cause. It had nothing to do with the actual conditions of the Fellowship. I have to be settled to do important work. Six months, a year may not be enough. I can’t work in a new environment well, and when I can, in Dublin or Galway, it’s because I’m sitting in a bar or park surrounded by the life of the city. I must explore, I must experience. I could not sit still for half an hour this morning, though I have two intriguing projects on the computer screen. What if it passed in the street while I was typing away? What if he was waiting for me on the windy beach and I never came? My life divides over a clash of destiny, the end of one being art, the end of the other being identity. When I explore, I am looking, often subconsciously, for something very particular: the one I am to be with; the place we are together to be. I am looking for myself. It has always been this way, and though I knew it on several levels, it never occurred to me that it is why residencies and fellowships do not work well for me. I could hardly sit in my room on Tan Lane for wondering what might be happening outside. This is why I washed out at Johns Hopkins. I walked the streets of Baltimore hour after hour, and believed that was a symptom of loneliness and unhappiness, when in fact it was the cause. If I thought that solitude was good fortune, allowing me plenty of time to work, precisely the opposite is true: it makes me wild to be in contact with that which was absent or elusive, so that time is devoured in questing and dissatisfaction. I set down the pen and turn the doorknob, thinking it is one more opportunity, perhaps the golden one, to find my life. I was an imperfect acolyte of art, abandoning it for life without fully knowing what I was doing. And utterly without success.

Most big life discoveries come too late. Who knows, though? Something of value may arise out of this. Maybe to understand is as good as to transform– though I don’t really think so. If I had married–or whatever version of “married” was available to me-- and settled down, would I have achieved all that I was meant to achieve as an artist? I believe the answer might be yes. What I have to say in my defense is, I looked. I was diligence and inspiration. I opened to every knock on the door. No alley was so dark I did not walk down it.

A psychologist might say I perversely compromised what I did well in the vain hope of achieving what I was manifestly meant not to have. A poet might say I knew what was mine by right and destiny, and my fury when it was stolen from me could not be fully sublimated.

Anyway. . . Exeter. . . even what I wrote, the big, purple novel, was a stab at life.