Nora Robertson

This is a manuscript I ran across tonight while digging through old papers from when I was maybe eighteen, the kind of thing you do when you’re packing and don’t want to take anything unused or unnecessary with you into your new life. I liked some of this though. I took a few pics to go with.

The man is dark-haired and round-faced with a square jaw, but I’m not sure. It’s always the same. Nameless, at least to me, with dark lids looking into me, stroking tenderly and lightly my hair. Sitting down below the house stilts, beside the river gully, we’re talking wild, but none of it remains to remember. Only his long eyelids and brown eyes, Russian brown it seemed to me now, eyes full of soft black like broken pencil lead. I’m scared now to think about it, but I don’t think I was scared at the time. This was my mother’s house, remember. I lived there, in those wood-paneled rooms.

One time I sat with a guy in the cab of his truck and he offered to let me steer if I wanted to but I should probably sit in his lap so as to make it easier, but I refused seeing as some natural restraint was telling me to be uncomfortable. This is not to say I didn’t stay up at nights thinking about maybe someday when I grew I might still know him and maybe we could marry seeing as I’d only be ten years younger. That wasn’t much, was it? Mama went out once with a guy nineteen years younger than her. He used to read her love poems by Kabir behind closed doors. I used to read the book, but couldn’t figure out what was so great about it.

I liked novels. Mom also used to buy Pepperidge Farm cookies for this guy. At least novels were stories, and stories you could get lost in. She was trying to fatten him because Scott was young and starving-ass skinny, and still lived with his mother, and washed his hair with detergent and was a haunting failure at being a composer. We didn’t really know if he was a good composer or not because it cost a lot of money to hire an orchestra.

And then there was an altercation between my mother and his brother regarding the money he apparently borrowed to pay our electrical bill, and he lied about having beaten his brother for her, and then one of her paintings got mysteriously slashed, and we always suspected one of them had snuck in and done it. He didn’t come around for a long time after that.

And then cold and cold and lonesome cold and gone and reminder now of trips spent chasing something I couldn’t figure out, and that which I long for is so shifting. Frozen-cold, hard pavement-cold, yes fuck-cold, the witch’s marrow that twines you in and makes you want to swallow. Oh, I’m so tired. Start at the beginning. Sometimes I think I spent my childhood in a darkened room. Through a white-sashed window through six separate panes, I can watch a broad, leafless tree. We live on the edge of a gully. A ravine, really. It’s a hundred bodies high, it’s very high, and the river runs through heavy with melted snow. Sometimes, the room opens and I can walk to the far shore of the river over footbridge, under dangling swooping telephone wires.

I don’t bring any food. It isn’t worth it. I know I’m going back. I know I’m deconstructing an essay of temperance, a lifetime obeying what I don’t understand. I think I’ve sensed that man floating in mother’s dreams, floating in mother’s dreams, spinning mid-air above her broad queen bed. I’m not sure whose man he is. I’ve suspected he really should be mine. His hands are dark and dark-haired and strong-nailed and I’ve wondered what it would be like for him to touch me with these fine long fingers.

My bed is thin. My sheets are flannel and itchy with balls from long use. My bedframe is square planes of pine. It was a bunkbed before they separated my sister’s bed from mine. No one else can really fit in this bed. It’s under the molded ceiling I dream of floating up to soft wings wrapping me, bearing me upwards.

I lie though when I say no one else can fit in my bed. I imagine him. I never fill in the face though. My man is tall, dark and faceless. And I will someday perfect me so that I can be perfectly desirable and there will be no question or anguish. I will have perfect clear skin and wear designer clothes and never say anything that’s wrong. I will have a thong bathing suit that fits snug over my toned hips. No one will be able to resist me, including him. I picture myself at night, outside of me, and watch what I look like breathing and wrapped in a twisted white blanket and hopefully looking so compelling and beautiful. I judge my beauties against my imperfections and decide I’ve got twenty years, surely I could master my faults. Surely I could remedy that stricken look in the mirror, and the habit of looking in the mirror all the time itself. Although then I wouldn’t know what people see when they look at me, whether the guy with the truck sees my blue eyes, my mouth which Mama always says is rosebud. You see, I need the mirror so I can check.

The only way I have any hope of knowing I’ve improved is by looking. Mama looks in the mirror this way too. I’ve seen her. Sometimes I try to imagine what I’ll look like with breasts, breasts like hers, with great cherry-gumdrop nipples and pale veined skin, breasts that seem to droop a little like fruit that’s just overripe. Breasts with stretch marks from doing all that hanging there. Real woman breasts. I can’t imagine how these tiny circles will ever grow.

It’s at night I most feel him spinning there. He lays down besides me in the bed. He does not slide between the covers and come to rest lengthwise next to me; he materializes there. He lays there and so gently runs his finger along my ribcage, sliding his nail along thin nighttime cotton, up the hipbone and down, down the slope to my stomach resting on its side, and he cups the tender mass of my female belly. The cold blue light fills the bathroom window. I lower myself into the sink, he slides his hands down my spine, my eyes are white, my teeth are blue and rotting with fungus, moss growing in the crack in our backs with abandon, he raises me, he lowers me, and all the while fingers are seeping round thighs, thigh bones, I can almost feel his vibrational warmth, I can almost make it real. I can feel the nape of his neck bristling, it’s one on one in one.

The mirror is cracked from side to side and beaded with dew, with steam from bathing, there’s a limelight from the mirror and I wait for the mist to clear so I can see myself. And all this time, we never leave my bed. All this time, the covers rest lightly against the frame and cold of winter, and I never leave my bed.

My friend Todd Cobb, who just moved to New York leaving me without our rambly writing gabfests, was surprised I’d never read On Writing by Stephen King. I have to admit to having some anti-genre fiction prejudice (aside from my narrow but intense interest in mystery/noir), despite the fact that I know several people who publish/webdesign/write pretty cool sci-fi:—the silliness of taste, that we like one thing and not the other, what can I say? So, have actually never read any Stephen King before this book, shockingly, though I may have to remedy that.

The cool thing about this writing book is it’s mostly not a writing book in the typical sense. It’s not like John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, which begins by talking about aesthetic principles and the impossibility of aesthetic principles, that they “prove relative under pressure.” Which is no doubt true, that there are Things to Think About When Writing Fiction and Things To Watch Out For, that we’ll kill our intuition however if we get too rigid about following aesthetic absolutes which are so abstract as to be useless in practice. Of course, Gardner’s entire discussion is in itself pretty abstract—not to say that it isn’t insightful, but as Gardner himself said, that kind of abstraction is not always useful if what you want to do is simply tell a good story.

I am aware, mind you, that this post itself is somewhat abstract.

Which is where King’s book really shines, because it just takes us along for the ride with him in a very practical, humble manner. I wonder if this is in part because he writes genre fiction; he does say in the first section of the book—a short memoir of his life as a writer—that his HS principal found a copy of a self-published book (a proto-zine?) and asked him why he wrote this “junk” when he was so talented. Perhaps writing fiction that is meant for a general audience helps a person avoid some of this abstraction about technique?

Literary fiction tends to use a lot of fancy pants technique. At a Tin House lecture on defamiliarization by Anthony Doerr this last Wednesday, he talked about Victor Shlovsky’s theory about avoiding received language. Shlovsky encourages us to make “objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception” in order to keep described objects (people, things, events, what have you) from the automatization of perception. This happens to be a pet theory of mine, something I first heard about in an undergrad lit theory class and was corrupted by, that to find a more physical way of describing things makes the reader experience them more directly. It also relates pretty directly to Julia Kristeva’s semiotic theory, her idea that a way to subvert the abstraction of the symbolic aspect of language—the signified—is to work more on the level of the signifier, or the rhythm and melody of the words themselves. In a word, the language. Gertrude Stein can be read as working primarily on this level, as can James Joyce. I also think you can do this through figurative language. Kate Braverman is a great example of this. The problem, of course, is that there’s a limited audience for this kind of thing.

Doerr ended his lecture by saying that there’s a balance there that you have to make a choice about as a writer, how accessible you want to be, which I think is a way of saying that using less received language makes the language fresh, but you also have to consider how much you want the story to tick along. Sometimes you kill some darlings.

This also seems to be King’s opinion—tools basic to a writer are character and situation. And not plot, actually. He believes the spontaneity of creativity is incompatible with careful plotting. For him, the situation comes first, and then the characters. Like many novelists report, characters often take off in unexpected directions once he starts writing. “For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing…if I’m not able to guess with any accuracy how the damned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety.”

He also, however, says that vocabulary is the most commonly used tool of a writer. “The word is only a representation of the meaning; at best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.” Given that, use the most fitting word you can find. Wow, overtones of Shlovsky here? So I think we come back to the relativity of principles under pressure—sometimes you gotta stick to the story, and sometimes you gotta revel in language. Thank god. I do love to revel in language. And there’s only so many darlings I can bear to kill.

I woke up this morning with all these images in my head.

Long strands of seeds dangling from the center of giant palmate leaf structures. I’m alone and this is who I am alone. Waist deep in weeds. The mud is sucking at my toes. This could be the Nile. This could be Sumeria, and my husband’s waiting for me to return with a basket woven of rush so he can go fishing. We have nothing in the house, not a grain. Something has happened in the family, a disaster. Maybe our child has died, and we have to pay the sorcerer and it’s sucking us dry. But for right now, it’s just me, a slim brown arrow, a succession of triangles, belly-hip, shoulder-belly, naked and caressed by the tender nips of the not-yet-caught fishes. The not-dead fishes, still alive, still alive! Maybe this is where one of those stories about a magic fish granting all our secret grandiose desires would come in.

I remember standing in the Sacramento river with my mother when I was about ten. We’d been to visit a guy friend of hers. Oh boy, here we go again, was my main thought at the time. (Single mom, dating, not favorite topic of child.) But he turned out to have a very cool stained glass making studio and allowed me and my sister to play around wrapping the edges of colored shards in copper tape, just so happening to asorb us completely for nearly an hour while they disappeared somewhere.

In the river, we were naked, the warm mud sucking at our toes, cat-tails hanging ponderously around us and I didn’t even remember to be afraid. My sister was, I think. She refused to go in and sat continuing to wrap glass on the bank. My mother’s breasts floated slightly. The California sun masqueraded as tropical, sub-tropical, perhaps even the sun of a delta. A fertile crescent, as I’d just been learning in school. Even at that age, deltas reminded me of that other delta. I wondered what it’d be like when I had breasts, if they would bounce around in the water like that. The mud seemed as fertile as anything out of time and I was not afraid of whatever might be crawling around down there. I was not not afraid either though.

The man lasted a couple visits more. I think we broke something valuable and that was that.

Part of what I plan to do here is to document to some extent some of my process of writing and performing, all those strange alleyways of inquiry. Why? I guess in the belief there may be some universal points of experience - and I hope today was one of those universal days. Please tell me it’s so. Everyone I know seems to use wordpress, and I mean non-techy people. It took me literally seven hours to get the template working. Question: am I an idiot? Perhaps it’s one of those background knowledge things.

At any rate, here it is, the launch of the good ship Solanova!  I plan to write a little poem thingy to explore what is Solanova, like what is the metaphor there exactly, but basically I imagine it as a vessel, a container on and for the stream of cool stuff I run across: happenings in Portland, triggering towns, books that jumpstart conversations, random obsessions and of course, my log of just the hard graft of writing, the application of behind to chair, and observations forthwith.