Wizardry

"The room I came into was very large and high...

The many chairs and tables had been used for a long, long time. Books lay around the room, but could give it no sense of life. I felt sadness hanging over everything. No escape from this deep, cold gloom seemed possible.

As I entered the room, Usher stood up from where he had been lying and met me with a warmth, which at first I could not believe was real. "

From "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe

**********

Dear Alex

I am writing a novel - your words from last blog on a starry, starry night.

Why do we need another novel? For profit or people? To be read at funeral or birthday? In smoke or spotlight?

I suspect Poe understands the mind and heart through his stories transcending history, persona and culture. His house is crumbling, mise-en-scene in lively decay, hope in flight. A wizard writing and pining for meaning in marshes and pits, he spreads before us the room, chairs and tables - his interior life in tumble, furniture and friends detailed in dreary array, his syllables rapping on decrepit wood and walls, stool and halls large and high, limp legs in lobby.

A colleague is grieving today. She is still here to help with our work project. Her face is a house of sadness hanging on drapes and folds in expression, a sonata from long long ago, a novel mishandled to hand over an account of hers ours yours in romantic realism, the public bared in private. She cannot return to her room with chairs and tables, books and albums brilliant in memory cold as summer alone. Lying around the office is warmer in distraction. She cannot come to my room. I need to go to hers.

I do not see Poe as king of macabre. To me, he is a room - very large and high of love, small in ego, infinitely sorrowful, wings from old pages, beautifully human.

Writing a novel in starless nights is to speak of this room,
  its color cracks and scale seemingly unreal,
    your largely improbable life in fine prints,
      encounters surreal as a 13-page script,
        living words staggering in wind,
          longing for sea and desert,
        yacht capsized,
      engine stalled,
    tongue cropped,
  javelin pen,
heart on moor.

I will not miss the wizard writing.

Yours, Kate

**********

Dear Kate,

Today I am going to share with you a passage I've written as an exercise, not part of my novel but to get me ready to write it.  It might eventually show itself up in a different dress, with a different smell, and stare back at me in a different way.  Who knows?

_____

They fought, I remember.  Back and forth there were a few issues, some I started to register as they were allowed to trickle out of the adults’ discretion and travel my way.  The word coffin was unmistakable, a vocab as part of the know-how in growing up, now actually being used and used repeatedly and with rising unrest. In Cantonese there is not another word like casket, no synecdoche, no metonymy, and, as far as I know, not even a metaphor.  Chinese don’t like to talk about death. When they need to they talk hard and cold.

Who was fighting whom about what matters and mattered a lot when it was happening. My dad’s mother was not an easy person, but I wouldn’t know until she moved in with my family after grandpa’s funeral.  I am sure her uneasiness had something to do with the fighting. Names of my father’s sibling were mentioned as subjects to unpleasant predicates. I could see my father handling a few irons in the fire with his gloves off and heart on sleeve.  I would love to say my parents conducted themselves gracefully, but find nothing like this in my recollection. That’s only because my idea of grace has no context.

I have two big fears growing up: one, to go off the edge of the plank when boarding a ferry (allegedly once that’s what one of my little shoes did), and, two, to bury my parents.  I picked the fighting words off the floor, tried to piece them together and weigh myself against them. The undertaker, the newly important person in the adult world, will he still be around to undertake my burden when it’s my turn to bear it?  But I don’t even have his number! And I have no money and can’t see how I can soon get some. I was angry too about the whole thing, the inconvenience of having someone die on you. Going off the plank is the easier way out.

Was Adam, the first man, aware of what was becoming of him?  Did he make up new words to speak about the increasingly various, mind-bending and body-killing deviations from the expectation of his innocent childhood?  Were there clues, fighting words, shiny objects in his tilled soil for him to pick up and shape himself a sensible way forward? Or was it actually to his advantage to know no deep water beyond the plank?

_____

Hope you like it.

Yours, Alex