In quiz shows, people are mostly rewarded for knowing obscure things or picking the right thing, but also those who fail are cast into some outer darkness of exile. For this to become a nightmare you just have to imagine that, say, the arbitrary, heavy-handed punitiveness of your parents, or the mockery of your peers, or the violence in the news is attached to these scurries after information that puts you in the safe and rewarding spot of being right.
This seemed, in my mind, to have something to do with Chinese emperors, perhaps from accounts of the old Chinese civil service exams that required extensive memorization. I suppose one of the reasons I squirreled away information was anxiety about this infernal inquisition and the possibility that if you knew the names of the pieces of armor, that if you knew the etymologies of words, the cast of the Wars of the Roses, the routes of pilgrimages, that if you knew which swans are mute and which are black and that eohippus means the dawn horse that is the diminutive ancestor of modern horses—a useless amulet of information I’ve carried around without using since I was a child—that knowledge could protect you from a punitive, incoherent universe.
Perhaps it can, in another way, not by warding off your enemies but by leading to the recognition of patterns and meanings and friends who share your eclectic interests or by making friends of your curiosity and what it finds. After all, Aladdin opens a cave with the right word. And sometimes ideas and sentences and facts are your friends in themselves.
I read, I daydreamed, I wandered the city so ardently in part because it was a means of wandering in my thoughts, and my thoughts were runaways, constantly taking me away in the midst of the conversation, the meal, the class, the work, the play, the dance, the party. They were a place I wanted to be, thinking, musing, analyzing, imagining, hoping, tracing connections, integrating new ideas, but they grabbed me and ran with me from the situations at hand over and over. I disappeared in the middle of conversations, sometimes because I was bored but just as often because someone said something so interesting that my mind chased after the idea they offered and lost track of the rest of what they said. I lived in a long reverie for years, went days without much interruption to it, which was one of the gifts of solitude.
I dreamed of flying over and over. In one dream in 1987 I fled a violent man on railroad tracks and then remembered that I could metamorphose and became an owl with a moth’s dusty wings. When the man lunged for me and grabbed my feet, I flew low over the water to drag him through it in the hopes of shaking him off. But mostly they weren’t violent dreams, just dreams of being alone, above it all, in the stratosphere, lonely and free. Perhaps being free of the weight of depression and expectation. Of the weight of a body. Of the weight of animosity.
The beauty of those places I soared over is with me still, and in all my dreams as in my waking life was a love of place, a sense that places were embodiments of emotions, were anchors, were companions of a sort, even protectors or parents. Once at the Pacific, I thought to myself Everything is my mother but my mother, and I recognized how the ocean had been a mother offering power, constancy, and solace. Many years later when I began rowing a scull, I realized that out in the water, I was out of reach of men and dogs, and that, as well as the beauties of water, made it serene, dreamy, the eighteen-foot span of my oars being as close to having wings as I could come.
But long before that, I flew. Even in the dreams my logical mind wrestled with how this was possible, anxious that it be possible. In one dream I had learned to align myself with the earth’s magnetic fields, in another I drew my strategy from a sentence I had read describing how the great dancer Nijinsky seemed to hover in the air a split second longer than gravity made possible, and I too was airborne for that kind of interval in a theater. I was in a world where levitation was normal but I tried to exceed the bounds and go higher. I tasted the cold of the upper stratosphere. Or I streamed across green landscapes.
Sometimes I flew to prove that I could. I was the girlfriend of the poet John Keats and I demonstrated I could fly among blackberry bushes whose fruit the size of street lamps suggested I was, we were, the size of songbirds. Other times I flew across the rooftops of the city and the view was dazzling, as was the sense of having all that space under you, like the sense of all that water when you swim in clear lakes. It was the beautiful spacious side of loneliness.
I wondered what this flying meant. Sometimes it seemed to be dreams’ impatience, a jump cut from here to there without filling in the space between. Sometimes it was escape. Sometimes it was a talent, and like talents sometimes do, it set me apart, usually literally, since I tended to fly alone, to be the only one who could fly, though sometimes I showed other people how to do it or carried them along.
It was an experience of not belonging to the ordinary world and not being bound to it. I thought sometimes that it might be about writing, about being a writer, and now I wonder why I didn’t think of it as reading, as that constant, chronic activity that had taken up so much of my waking hours since I’d learned to read, as being in a book, in a story, in the lives of others and invented worlds and not my own, unbounded by my own body and my own life and my own time and place.
I could fly, though now I wonder if the problem was how to come to earth.
Freely at Night
1
One day in 2011, I got a Facebook friend request from someone I’d been in college with when I was seventeen and stayed in touch with for a few years after, someone I cherished then as a person I could trust and talk to, perhaps because of who he was or because of who I imagined he was, or how I filled up what I didn’t know about him with what I needed. I accepted the request with enthusiasm and curiosity about what the years we’d been out of touch had brought and who he might be. He replied that my political views were abhorrent, but that he would like to send me copies of the letters I’d written him. Once I found out he was conservative, things that had seemed mysterious or exotic about him when he was young suddenly made sense. I didn’t find out more about him, but I did find out from him more about me.
A manila envelope came through the mail slot a few weeks later. I had a little queasiness about meeting that teenager directly, and so I waited several years to open it. In the photocopies of letters written on lined yellow legal pads in a small neat handwriting that is no longer mine I met a person who didn’t know how to speak. By that I mean several things. The young writer I met there didn’t know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate. But also, she was a jumble of quotations and allusions and foreign phrases and circumlocutions, of archness and pretense and avoidance and confusion, an attempt to use language that kept her so busy that hardly anything got said, or major events were mentioned in passing in sentences busy doing other things that didn’t matter. She had collected a lot of words, phrases, syntaxes, tones and was trying them out, like someone at the very first stages of playing an instrument, with squawks and clangs. She was speaking in various voices because she didn’t yet know what voice was hers, or rather she had not yet made one.