KUKRIS

Another dream where I woke up before resolution and I can't remember the main plot now. But two sets of symbols stand out.

One is that I had a study full of desks and worktables, but also with a spare bed in it. Every surface was cluttered, all the drawers were full, and I couldn't get around in it because I was definitely mobility impaired in this dream. (In some dreams I'm a crip, in some dreams I'm not.)

I was living with my family again. For some reason to do with the plot I can't remember, I needed to go around the house and gather up all the kukris that were stashed in various places. Kukris are curved knives indigenous to Nepal, used as tools and weapons, and when I was a child we had an assortment of leather-handled ones on our walls, a relic of our years in India.

In the dream, as in real life, the kukris ranged in size from massive to tiny pocket versions. All of them had dulled, rusting blades and dried-out leather. I needed to get them in good shape, and I began struggling to run hot water in the tub to soak them first. I was struck by the curve of the blade, and in the dream (a la Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), I realized the matching curves "meant something" -- but I can't remember that revelation now.

I needed a rasp and saddle soap to finish the rehabilitation of the knives, and I knew I had both somewhere in my study, but I despaired of being able to find it. Neverthless, as the water ran in the tub I laboriously made my way to the other end of the house, to my study, and began searching.

On the piled end table next to the spare bed, under magazines, I found two handguns, one a large gleaming Colt .45 revolver and the other a blue-black .32 automatic. I realized my parents must have slept in the room and left the guns behind. (Yes, my parents each routinely slept with a handgun until each of them died, it was a fact of life in our family,)

As I searched, I kept finding more pistols, but not the items I was looking for. I was feeling pressured by the water running at the other end of the house. I woke up then.

I know the knives as a symbol are connected to an online conversation I had yesterday, but the India connection is/must be significant. As is the presence of disability, my parents' guns...The clutter I think is a symbol from the conversation about writing that Jesse and I had right before I went to sleep. I began rereading Ginny Bates this week, and while I'm sucked back into that world, I'm a very different writer than I was 4 years ago and for the first time, I have a dim inkling of how it must be edited.

In Pya, I'm writing with the same technique -- character driven, character developed through conversation, family based in the midst of cultural revolution -- but I know now how to do it much more succinctly. It will be brutal to take a scalpel to the delicious conversations of Ginny Bates, but that is what is in my future. At some point. If I can find the rasp and saddle soap.

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PALIMPSEST

A bit of a hard night going to sleep, physically, but slept long and solid.

I dreamed I was in the second or third story of a huge, beautiful old house, shabby but in good shape, that was mostly an archives. I was working in a room with a massive library table covered with my writing and art projects. Kate Clinton had just arrived. [Note: This is because of something I read about her right before I went to sleep.] She was stuck in our town unexpectedly and a friend of mine had asked me to put her up for the night. It turns out I owned this house.

I gave Kate an upstairs empty bedroom, told her where the kitchen was, and returned to my writing project. I felt shy around her, didn't know much about her. She kept asking me questions about that I was doing that felt interrupting to me. I began to feel defensive about the fact that I wasn't famous yet for what I've done with my life, that my writing isn't very published, I have no academic credentials, my activism isn't credited out there. I wanted to argue the working class viewpoint but she had on expensive clothes and kept making clever jokes, and I didn't know if could translate.

It was dusk, and I stood, preparing to leave the house. She asked me where I was going. I knew I should be a better host, ask her out to dinner, but I was going to eat at my favorite diner and I didn't want to share it with her. Instead I lied and said I was going somewhere else to get materials for my writing project.

My large sketchbook lay open on the table, thick paper filled with handwriting and color pencil drawings. She reached for it, to read it, and I reached to take it away from her. She said "What is this, a palimpsest?" as I woke up.

After I was awake, I coudln't come up with any clue in my head as to the meaning of palimpsest. I turned on netbook and looked it up:

Noun
Etymology: Latin palimpsestus, from Greek palimpsēstos scraped again, from palin + psēn to rub, scrape; akin to Sanskrit psāti, babhasti he chews
(1) : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased
(2) : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface

WTF? All yesterday evening I kept thinking about how the one writing goal I most want to accomplish before I die is a complete memoir -- not the pieces I keep writing but an organized, coherent autobiography. I also kept worrying about my disability doctor visit next week, what the exam will show, how I nearly passed out last time, and the fact that I only have enough money from donations to pay basic bills, meds, food and Barbara for 30 more days. After that, it's patchwork again, only with me less mobile and strong than ever before. I don't think I can commit to the writing I want to do while this fear hangs over me. I feel bad about it, like I should have done more before now.


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JUST US CHICKENS...

(Lily near Trinidad, California; photo by Easton D. Rankine)

I fully intended to make pasta for dinner, roasted grape tomatoes with caramelized onions, peas and alfredo over the last of my whole-grain penne, but instead I went quick and easy: Reheated burger with a massive plate of carrots. I'll do the pasta tomorrow.

Last night after I posted the Ginny Bates chapter which is the penultimate climax of the book, I realized I had to lie down. Fatigue hit me like a freight train and I crashed into sleep for three hours. When I got up, dreaming about my late beloved main character, I came in to talk with Jesse for a while before doing some paying work. I slept in two chunks today but feel rested.


It's been incredibly hard to write this last month's work of the novel. I had an original draft, which one of you (Kat) read almost two years ago now, but by the time I got back to revising it for posting, I rewrote it almost ten words to one. The characters had grown so much, the story had gotten so rich, it deserved the best I could give it.

The sentence where I ended last night's post was the exact point on October 16, 2006 when I stopped writing to sob uncontrollably about the loss of this main character, whom I allowed to die only because she insisted on it. I cried for 15 minutes, wiped my face and began writing an e-mail to Liza about how I'd spent the weekend writing the death of this character. Before I could finish the note, my phone rang, at 8:30 in the morning. It was my father's caller ID, so I answered. But it wasn't my father, it was my older brother, telling me that my father had died 15 minutes before.

It felt like I'd killed my father. In some aspects, it still feels that way. My grief for the loss of the character overshadowed my grief for my father. I hope you don't think less of me for admitting that.

My friend Martha reminded me this week that we are still, in fact, in the Age of Aquarius, which was/is not just a golden era, it's a time of millennial change. I prefer historiography which studies the lives of "ordinary" people and sees how their connections and growth forces the so-called leaders to make important decisions -- bottom-up power dynamics, in other words. As frighteningly unstable as my day-to-day life is, I'm thrilled to be alive at this point in history.

I just went looking for a quote from Annie Dillard about how and why we love our own generation best. I think it's in An American Childhood, or maybe her essay "The Book of Luke". I couldn't find it, but instead tripped across this:

"There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been."

I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while driving with my best friend Jean and a couple of women we literally picked up along the way (Miri the Israeli hitchhiker who drove like a maniac and Dawna the extraordinary teenage runaway who sang like an angel) from Texas to the second annual Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The festival alone would have derailed the course of my life, but Annie's writing was a double punch. From that point on, I've wanted to write the way she does. I'm beginning to close in on that goal -- not as well, of course, at least not yet, but definitely on the trail she blazed. How extraordinary to see the unimaginable within my grasp.

And, I'm reminded of another quote from her, this one from her excellent manual The Writing Life: "Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world." Well, that sums me up in a nutshell these days. As I remember it, she wasn't casting aspersions on that lifestyle choice, merely ruefully acknowledging its truth.

Today I'm remembering and grieving a woman I created out of my own imagination, and a father I still don't entirely understand. I am full of carrots, and my right thumb sends a jolt of pain up my wrist every time I use it to push the space bar. My left shoulder burns (the rotator cuff got aggravated by how I slept last night) unless I sit at an angle. Obama is playing politics with our right to privacy and our very soul with regard to torture. There's a meeting in Austin this week of emergency responders from all along the Gulf Coast, trying to get a head start on the hurricane season. But it's good to be out there, to be alive in this world, from what I remember. I'll take my vitamin D and keep writing. See you in the gaps.

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