Little steps

As you know, I have undertaken an effort to update and revive my blog. That’s two years worth of backlogs, two years worth of life that had passed me by while I was up in my blank gray cloud of psychiatric medicines that are slowly being adjusted to taper off their intensity, being awakened only now and then by Mr. T and the sunshine and music that he brings. Now I am completely off my medication, back to reading (with my brand new Kindle Touch that makes me smile everyday), and I am trying to write again.

It’s not easy. And although I have been able to write sporadically over the past six months or so, mostly for work, I am lukewarm about what I have accomplished then. It was not quite the real me, not quite the complete me. I didn’t feel the fire inside. I didn’t feel the strong, painful gush of water drowning me. I didn’t feel the tightening of my chest, didn’t feel my hands tremble as I wrote down the words, didn’t see that psychedelic swirl at the back of my eyes, didn’t see vast curtains of sound billowing in my head. I didn’t feel like I was in this bright, empty, massive cathedral, all alone in the center of it, writing, with my thoughts echoing all throughout the space, challenging and confirming everything I hold dear. There was no giddy-ness, no other-worldliness, no feeling of strange right-ness in it. It was as if whatever I wrote then was just something to get me by. I wrote just to keep backlogs at bay. I didn’t write because of the passion for writing, since there was none.

 It takes a lot of work. Even when I still used to write they way I should -- if there is such a way of writing -- it has always taken a lot of work as well. The settling in, the gathering of my thoughts, the zoning out of the outside world, the committing of the first sentence down to paper, and the action of keeping at it, writing, writing, writing, writing, until some sensible paragraph comes out, entails a lot of intensity and concentration that need to be sustained for long amounts of time. I end up forgetting to eat, sleep, call people, and charge my phone.

I am not back in that state yet. I’m just blogging for now, and revisiting some old drafts, hoping that they’ll spark something in me sometime soon. But I’ll get there; I just don’t know when. And that’s okay. I can still see far into the horizon, and I know someday I'll be running again.

To My Dear Readers,

I am going to upload back posts into this blog, to cover all the Fridays past in which I was too wrapped up with life to ever write anything down.

And as you wade through this blog to find the new posts scattered all over the good part of the past two years, I invite you to read once more the older posts that have been here for years. And as you read them, please remember the girl I once was, and say goodbye to her, because although she's still here, she is finally, finally growing up.

Thank you.

Love,
Maryanne

Oh, Jack Kerouac

You come thundering into my life quite unexpectedly, with the sharpest and rawest of insights and barely controlled passion, and awe me with visions like these:

The great harsh ragged skies of October were everywhere around with their huge tumultuous clouds and their premonitions of awful darkness, and the winds began to blow all demented with blown leaves and dust and dark fury --

In the closing moments of the final period the piteous songs of the losing side were raised by choirs of faithful alumni, and fifes blew on the field, and muffled drums dolorously beat out the doom of certain hopes and certain destiny.

She promptly came out in a bus across the massive land... two thousand miles of earth and America that she had never seen and that she was seeing now through the brooding eyes of love and sadness and womanly grandeur.

... there were the young wives of with babies in their arms, the young soldier-wives who were beginning to wander the nation, tired and lonely and all wrapped in visions of love and remembrance and desperate devotion, traveling the thousands of night-miles across the continent in search of some pitiable little home or situation that would bring them close to their young husbands, if only for a few months.

In the vividness of the world you have created for me within the 500-odd pages of this book, you have grasped me from the static, somnolent grayness of the bureaucratic routine that I have fallen into, and thrust me back into the world of the living, to return to the things that, after all this time, have been keeping me alive, without my realizing it.

And now I understand why I cause myself to burn, burn, burn, like a roman candle across the night, and why I am mad to live, mad to talk, mad to write, mad to read, desirous of everything, covetous of nothing. This is the only soul I can ever have.

P.S. I thank Mr. T for giving me my first two Jack Kerouac books last Christmas, he, too, who came thundering into my life just as unexpectedly and just as passionately, and who has brought me back to love, faith, and the land of the living.