tinyletter #004
Ages ago I began writing a piece that, like many pieces, never amounted to anything more than a few shoddily constructed sentences and a slight hangover birthed from the twelve am belief that drinking like your favourite poet will allow the words to flow like whiskey water, give you the wisdom and discipline of a man of a different age, instead of just his liver.
Over the summer I had taken up a habit of day drinking the preferred cocktails of famous writers, both those I love and those I despise, at a bar in D.C called Churchkey. Churchkey is on the top floor of a nondescript building on 14th Street and has a bathroom that resembles a 1980s elementary school nurse’s office. There is no air conditioning. Every late afternoon when the sun was beginning it’s slow descent I would walk up the stairs to Churchkey, sit at the far end of the bar and, with the box fans buzzing around me, drink until I ceased to notice the sweat beading through the back of my dress. I’d sip mint juleps and read Faulkner. Maybe I will write a novella. I threw back gin and tonics and cursed F. Scott. Perhaps I’ll just do cartwheels on the bar like Zelda. Damn it all to hell, Scotty. I always refused mojitos, Hemingway’s favourite, on principal. Mostly I drank rickeys, Washington D.C’s native cocktail, and tried to write poems with the skill of all three men combined. Gossamer thin lines ribboning down the page and for any reader they’d all spell eternal. I figured that if I’m drinking the favoured cocktails of writers then I can go ahead and drink my own, so long as I actually do the damned thing and write. Which I didn’t.
The piece was about my grandfather, which is to say it was about Vietnam and Libya and Northern Italy in the 60s and about all the ways second hand stories cause us to lay claim to places which have nothing to do with our own lives. It was about Palestine and first loves and all the ways we try to go back to homes stolen from us by time and circumstance. It was about perfume and our vain attempt to make eternal not only time and place but who we were within them, by suspending them in glass and water and spraying them on whenever we wish to be transported out of the current moment. I traced the red thread that connected all of it but I got tied up and I couldn’t even tell you why. I’d find myself deleting “a” and replacing it with “the” a dozen times, instead of writing sentences that explained the irrational demands I am asking of a man who is dying. Nonno, why did you have to eat the rats? What makes you long for Libya and are your dreams still orange like mine? I want to ask for these stories again while we sway and he is still soft, indulgente. But words spoken and written both fail me.
All writers have one piece they can’t get out. The one that sticks in the back of their throat or pinches behind the shoulderblades. If we are a restless bunch this is why. Some stories are a dog-eared page, a recitation bookmarked, and I myself return to the story of my grandfather like an Austen novel, Rumi to the mountains, Zelda to ballet while the glory of the 1920’s faded into the past. She was in France in her thirties and far from her Alabama home when F. Scott, with the help of an eternally drunk Hemingway, began to unravel. By then Zelda knew what all writers know, that we can never go home again, and so she build a ‘bama at the barre, with plies, and torn ligaments and a Russian instructor whose booming baritone could cross the Atlantic and take her back to the training of her youth, that hazy far away sometime where she did cartwheels on tables for a starry eyed second lieutenant who’d use her to invent the flapper. In my desire to write about my grandfather and my inability to do so I worry I have done what so many women who have written of love have. I’ve made homes in men, crawled into them seeking shelter. I adorn them with finery, weave boughs across their backs and call them crowns, make beautiful what they themselves made base.
It is difficult to tell stories right now. We are in a hard way here in the States (though I would argue we always have been, except now white people are affected so the media is finally covering both the inequality and the outrage) and there’s no shame in acknowledging that political unrest often costs creatives their drive precisely when society needs art the most. As I type this the FCC has voted in favour of a repeal of net neutrality and my home base of Canada has abstained from condemning Trump’s attempt to move the U.S embassy to Jerusalem. Outside my apartment Human Rights Campaign is projecting across Trump Hotel the list of words the CDC is banned from using. There are small consistent wins amongst the large losses and it is my duty as a citizen writer to commit them to paper. All art is political and no one knows this more than totalitarian regimes, whose first order of business after gaining power is to burn the paintings, hang the poets. There is an entire database dedicated to art lost during the Second World War, and I’ll often comb through it when I need to be reminded of what’s at stake here, what I risk when I choose to be a cause without a rebel.
The new year is fast approaching and with it comes all the desire and guilt to change ourselves, our bad habits, our self inflicted circumstances. I love setting goals like these; they are inherently hopeful in their audacious belief that tomorrow will even come, might be so bold as to bring a yellow tinted dawn with her. But in a year where simply surviving feels reckless enough I’m streamlining the whole process, distilling it down like bourbon from a long list of goals. The only resolution I’m setting for myself is the same one I set for you here. Put the pen to paper. Remain courageous.