Melodrama, Perhaps

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When you lift a heavy weight you get stronger in the end. But first it weakens you. My arms are quivering.

I’m not enjoying that all these scribbles are mostly consumed by my small sufferings. Though a bit of self-indulgence may be required to jog the pen. I’m hoping these words metamorphose into a butterfly. But a moth is possible. Likely. Ugly things can be beautiful. More beautiful. I’ve been scribbling among soft sounds: pen scratching; china teacup rattling; the heat blowing through ducts; birds chirping beyond the window glass; the occasional rumble from bombs across the bay in Aberdeen. Though I think a bit of quiet music will tune rumination to reverie… Yes that’ll do hush hush now I can feel again my heart like a slow drip. Drip. Drip. A sip of smokey tea. I am rubbing the skin right off my face and my forehead my temples there’s quite a drama playing out in my head. Melodrama, perhaps. I can’t decide if every fiber of my being is fueled by internal conflict or cliché… I’m back to scribbling about my small sufferings. Or I never left. It’s like my thoughts enjoy lining up at the abattoir. Chop chop chop. Yes melodramatic. Until I roll away from this place in my mid-size pick-up truck to collect one-hundred pounds of ground beef from down the road and head with it across the big bridge to Baltimore. What hats will I don then? Country neighbor. Stoic boss. The light fades…

I offer more than food and drink. Let me cook for you yes yes and always. But let me write for you let me hang a photograph on your wall. Not for you to think of me no no to think of the world how beautiful it is how haunting it is how you swallow it whole how it swells in you and bursts out again in lightness rejoice rejoice REJOICE! The other week a dinner guest asked what I do when the inspiration runs dry. Within this question was the answer I’ve been searching for. EUREKA! This! I said to him, I cook. He did not realize that he had had it backward. The cooking is what I do when I am not writing. Like writing is what Anselm Kiefer does when he is not painting . I suppose this fact causes hesitation in others. They don’t quite believe it. Why would I build such a place if this was not the vision the dream? I’ve been reading a book on Emily Dickinson and the author notes: The intensity of her affections overwhelmed others. Indeed.

And so this story I tell from within these walls is something unique and varying and diverse. Built from a place that functions less as a restaurant and more as a studio a workshop an atelier… with a pleasing view of the river and bay. I am guided by the greater light that rules the day and the lesser light that rules the night*: by higher laws. And as such:

     “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, –you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,–I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.” [Henry David Thoreau, Walden]

I write yes and cook and photograph and document and read and argue with myself while pacing endlessly between sips of strong black tea. Touch of cream. And four times each week this place does metamorphose into something of a butterfly: 12 courses of Chesapeake cuisine for eight souls. I could not tell you why. Unusual yes it is. I don’t know of another restaurant that serves eight and only eight souls each night that doubles as a laboratory of the soul, a workshop, a library, a studio, an atelier… and I know of no author whose workplace doubles as a restaurant… no I don’t imagine there is such a place as this pace someplace else. And I’m only allowing it to become more itself… the bookshelves and books: my precious. I’ve left them in boxes for too long. I want to hold them. Devour them. Written by Man and so long ago. But not all that long ago, no no Henry David Thoreau was civilly disobedient just yesterday—compared to Time—and the soul of humanity has not especially grown since. Yes I think rather it’s devolving. But I’ve no interest in what humanity may or may not be up to. That’s what cities are for. I’ll remain here at the periphery and endeavor to keep humanity out of arms reach. There are nettles and chives and chickweed and cress and wild asparagus and ramps and morels to forage. And books to read and essays to write. And pies to bake and merengue to whip and set aflame… fish to filet and chickens to butcher… beckoning me from the banks of the Sassafras are the loblolly pines. They’re whispering ancient names. The bay winds are carrying ancient rhymes.

Post Script:

…it’s 11:17 now and I am home and in bed. I could say I’ve been endlessly searching but it’s beginning to feel like hunting. Today I’ve read passages from Thoreau, Emerson, the notebooks of Anselm Kiefer, a transcription of an Anselm Kiefer interview, the blog of Maria Popova, half of a biography of sorts comparing the lives of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin… and I finished with novel words from a beautiful man the Nobel Prize winning Jon Fosse. Yes I’m hunting for something that doesn’t exist. I already know this. And simultaneously I am creating the very thing that I am hunting for because I know it doesn’t exist. Though these books these essays and passages and journals and transcripts they feed me I need them they help to formulate my ideas to borrow a small bit of structure. I just dozed with the pen in my hand. I don’t want to give this day up I’m not ready to I haven’t made the discoveries I hoped(ing) for. I haven’t broken through. Though I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Art doesn’t work this way you have to beat it down. And work and work and work and I was at my desk thinking and scribbling at 10:45 and I thought how crazy I am that I do this every day that I’ve been doing this every day for decades and there is “nothing to show for it” but also how crazy I am that inside me the voice is only stronger more convinced than ever of the importance of the work. But why! Yet here I am in bed falling asleep scribbling and scribbling even just now good-grief eyelids heavy and closing. Ok so but wait here is this gem taken from someplace online:

“Kiefer’s own acknowledgement that there is no turning back [from painting to writing] understates the fact that not since Paul Klee has a painter broached so powerfully the topic of his own disappointment of striving hopelessly for poetry in the physical.” [Ethan Perets, Parsing Anselm Kiefer’s Digressive Notebooks]

But EUREKA! Again. That is exactly me but the opposite. I want my words to feel like a two-story tall painting that has been torched and left in the rain. Because that’s how I feel them clawing their way out of me.

Actually I think this is how it was with James Joyce and when someone asks me—indignantly—why his books are so difficult I think the only answer is because they had to be.

*KJV Genesis 1:16