This is like dying and being my own executrix. As I dig deeper and deeper into the layers (like rings on a tree) of my (so-called) creative life, I find more and more scraps and messages and ideas and unfinished or not- begun projects. I’ve already been pleased to find a few lists of things (stories, plays, movies) that I actually finished (maybe only the first draft, then not sold, but finished). But then I find stray wisps—why did I keep them? To haunt me. I never liked Joan Didiion’s writing [Joan Didion,. American writer, b. 1934) and I really hated The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), her book of mourning for her husband. I found it self-indulgent, self-pitying but also arch and arrogant, but that was because my own experience of mourning was vastly different. Everyone’s is. However, who am I to criticize? It ended up on Broadway, a one-hander starring, Vanessa Redgrave.
[The Year of Magical Thinking (Original, Play, Solo, Broadway) opened in New York City Mar 29, 2007 and played through Aug 25, 2007. Wikipedia]
Anyway, Didion wrote something somewhere that I liked, about those scraps of ideas. I can’t quote directly but I remember what she said. Keeping these scraps is like keeping bits of string, not long enough to do anything with, but slowly accumulated until you have a ball of string.
And then what?
Well, I have several large balls of string. Reading the bits is like re-living my past intellectual, creative life and what’s left of it. It is, really, as if I were the executrix of my own cultural estate. And I realize, in this strange, isolated time, as I can’t use the time as I did when I was alone, that this may be the “opportunity” to settle my estate. More work, and very humbling.
Matt wants to watch TV now. I can’t get Netflix or YouTube because I am computer illiterate, so I have to relinquish my usual writing space and hide in my office with the door closed and work at the desktop on a couple of reports I have to submit. Not a hardship. I know I am very fortunate.
This is not a complaint, just a bleat, not worth Vanessa Redgrave’s notice. Think of Gray’s Elegy.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
(Lots of us flowers.)
It’s okay….
Hark! how the sacred calm, that breathes around,
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease;
In still small accents whisp'ring from the ground,
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.
No more, with reason and thyself at strife,
Give anxious cares and endless wishes room;
But through the cool sequester'd vale of life
Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.