Much more sensitive now to sound, to touch, taste, color, motion, light — and this makes it possible to mistake it for nausea. But it is not nausea — it’s just the whole world heightened and spinning, sort of.
In fact, I feel in the perfect center of health. An incredible surge of well-being. Flushed with blood and hope.
Snow falls in Michigan though it is not yet Halloween. It feels as if it comes from some magic and momentary world. C.D. and I near Ann Arbor to do a reading.
This bath of hormones.
Wideness of the Midwest. Wideness of my heart at this very moment. C.D. is out walking. I feel her life out there. Precious, singular. My friend in the first moments of snow. She has not brought her winter coat with her. I wrap her in my mind’s wool. A new feeling about every creature that lives.
I think of all the snow I’ve walked through — anxious to greet the oblivion — longing for it as I always have. The blinding white. I walk to it still, now carrying a crimson wreath.
The skin does glow — the child shows through. All who see me comment on this, though they do not yet know. It is still our secret. What is luminous is something in the process of forming. The thousand stages of one’s becoming. I am amorphous — even more so than usual — liquid. An enigma to myself — even more so than usual.
Floating in your fluid-filled chamber in silence. Tiny astronaut in your blue world, silent sphere. I wish I could work myself back far enough to that place so as to finally understand — but what? Understand what?
Not so much nausea as a slight queasiness mainly detectable through a feeling of bodily uncertainty, fragility, vulnerability — as if the earth I walked on were trembling.
This slight remove. I am a beat or two outside almost everything — the commotion — one can detect it — particularly here at school — the flurry of academic life and all that means — I am a freshman advisor? What — who signed me up? And yet I am not part of it all, decidedly. Like some Zen goddess, I observe human frailty and foibles, all that is useless or stupid, with affection. Our English Department meetings, for instance. All the buffoons, the dour disciplinarians, the nutty professors, the crazies — all playing their parts — the earnest-to-a-fault assistant professors, the “artists.” That would be Keith Waldrop and me, there at every meeting, don’t ask me why, quietly staring into the absurd. Each and every meeting always of the utmost importance. Full of sound and fury. I don’t mind. They are oddly amusing from this vantage point. I look on with a strange mercy, intimations of total, dare I say it, well-being. The poignancy of the diminishing world. I wave and smile. Harboring a secret universe inside. For once meeting the human race halfway. New feelings for all things born. And all things that will die.
Wish I could finish up my small book on Frida Kahlo. Even though I am nearly done, it still requires keeping my eyes open and that is not really possible to do.
The greatest risk at this point for a woman my age is miscarriage. I worry it in some part of my brain all night and all day.
Only Helen to confide in. She says, “You are a tough old bird. Try and relax.”
Before I knew I was pregnant, on the way to the New York Film Festival, happy as I had ever been, writing a piece in my little Bay of Angels notebook. Off to see the new Antonioni film — a ticket in the second row, where I like it best. Afterwards, part of the way home, I realized I had lost my notebook. What was most interesting was that for once I did not panic. I was not filled with the usual doom. What is this peace? I remember wondering. This unusual grace? I knew when I went back it would be there, and it was. I should have known something had radically changed in me.
What grows in me. More than simply the child. What continues to grow.
The depths of this emotion. The bottom continually falling out.
Until it scarcely seems possible. I am voracious, ravenous, lustful, exhausted — everything heightened, enlarged — not to mention the breasts.
As if being under a spell, more of a trance even, than my usual one.
Close your eyes. The recurring refrain these days.
Students come for meetings and I talk to them with my head on my desk. In the M.F.A. program here anything goes, and they assume it is just another one of those things. I lift my head slightly. How is your thesis going?
It is the longest autumn I can remember. The leaves refuse to fall. They’ve turned extraordinary colors — do I see them accurately? I wonder. In this heightened season. Tenacious — refusing to drop. Use these trees as your example, little one.
I haul huge pumpkins around with my parents at the Grieg Farm. Lifting, I’m told, is no problem. Still, why do I risk it? The desire not to turn into a neurotic invalid, I guess. Lifting huge pumpkins! I immediately regret it. Somewhere there must be still some ambivalence. This holding on and letting go at the same time.
What I have always wanted when I think of some future world without my mother and father in it. What I always imagined might console. To have a little piece of them. To replace. To populate. A crazy, primitive notion, really. In the face of any great loss — to somehow fill up the world. To love through and beyond it, into this.
This.
Day thirty-three is a busy day, or so they say. The hand sections begin to show the outlines of fingers, the nose and upper jaw begin to form. The eyes are dark for the first time because pigment has just formed in the retina. The brain on this day is one-fourth larger than it was two days earlier. Baby, I’m amazed.
I have never felt compelled to keep a journal. On occasion I have with all good intentions attempted to record the flow of my life — only after a few weeks to leave it behind. Why? Depletion, I suppose, in part. Far too many hours were spent composing fiction — every waking hour, it seemed, every sleeping hour. I couldn’t bear the thought of any more words. A journal, while an intriguing notion to me, was only that in the end, and kept very sporadically at best. Making fictive structures so much of the time, journal writing for me simply lacked a certain edge I had come to expect from composition. A journal lacked the tautness. I must say the idea of keeping an ongoing record of my life exhausted me, bored me, even appalled me a little. I could never keep my enthusiasm for the thing going. I never imagined words as a means to knowing how I felt — or to understanding something. And so there was no question of it serving any therapeutic ends, God knows. Quite the opposite, I feel suspicious of that earnest attempt at explanation — it always seems oddly reductive. I can’t make language do those things.
But it is different with this. The perception of time, ordinarily fuzzy for me — I worked vaguely by seasons or semesters — had in an instant changed. I moved out of the blur of my life and was placed into the crucible of time. Suddenly I was counting — week four, week five — and noticing the daily changes. Meanwhile there were all sorts of little books to keep me company — what was happening exactly, and how I was feeling probably and was going to feel. I’ve never felt so — well — so narrated, so attended to, accompanied. Falling into chronology. The consolation of it. And wanting to chronicle it, hold it all, keep it somehow. How strange to feel the explicit workings of time on the psyche and on the body. The dramatic workings of time: to be inside it — intimate with it like never before. To be able to feel its accomplishments.