This will all disappear, will fall eventually back into abstraction, or remain forever in my heart unarticulated and then, after a while, lost altogether. This book is a chalice. And my body now is a chalice — holding the most sacred, most precious… Keep this. Memorize this. Hold this time close, regardless of the outcome. I don’t want to lose this. For I have never felt this way before and will never feel this way again.
And at once, the utter timelessness of the experience. I feel as if I am floating in some sort of blue suspension. I look out the window. Another train trip from New York to Providence. Providence to New York.
The upper curvature of the uterus. Nesting there.
Extreme delight these days in the body and all the body can do.
The upper curvature of the uterus. I imagine I see that shape now wherever I turn.
“She moved in circles and those circles moved.”
To simply record, without embellishment, without conscious intervention or formalization, as much as is possible. Free for once of fiction’s incredible demands.
To be freed for once of the burden and joy of making artful shapes. To just write — as if, after all these years, one could.
How to describe these feelings as they now come on — they resist description. A humbling experience — yet again — what refuses to pass into “writing.”
The child I had written of again and again. More and more in the last few years. Let her enter these pages now unadorned.
Without the press or need for invention. To not invent a single thing. To have this be enough. More than enough. Of course. To live and write purely, in naiveté with you. A whole other way of being on the page.
Utterly mysterious, miraculous, and simultaneously mundane —this world.
I’d like in a spare minute to re-read Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time. The hardest thing about teaching and directing some days is the lack of a private life — the ability to read whatever I like. And in a way to be who I really am.
All that escapes the page, alas. As usual. Do your best.
The arms as long as exclamation points(!!) have hands with fingers and thumbs. The ears take shape. They form in unison as do the hands and the feet. The legs have knees and ankles and toes. “The time schedule for the formation of the body is generally so consistent that it has been possible to set down the agenda of development for each day of the first forty-eight days of life.”
And so it is possible to say, when asked what you have been doing — made two human feet today.
Do not pretend, Carole, that you are not frightened.
That a human being’s birth dooms it to death is a truth impossible to escape.
My life now a double secret. My life a double mystery. A silence like no other. A silence magnified.
The pure violence of nature. The godlessness of it — pure force, the drive to live — the desire to take shape — anything to be made, to stay. I feel it running riot in my body. It is part of the enormous exhaustion.
An odd state. Presence and absence. Between sleep and waking. Speech and speechlessness. The God and the not God. The celebration of his absence. The inkling of his presence.
I feel astounded today by my own beauty, which is not an ordinary beauty but something else. Astounded in the end by my own resourcefulness.
I’ve got to say I’m really quite pleased with myself. I am no longer someone I entirely recognize. A kind of wayward halo — least likely to become an angel or a chalice — and yet…
To be myself and yet to be so much greater than myself.
Last summer after our trip to Italy, a few days back home, and there was a dead rabbit on the garden path. I remember it precisely. Back in the old days wasn’t it when the rabbit died that one was pregnant? The so-called rabbit test. I took it as a sign. Immediately called Helen at work. Its dead bunny fur blowing in the wind. The next day it was completely gone, disappeared, eaten by animals or birds.
It’s a sign, I said. I swear to you. It won’t be long now, I tell her.
Carole, you are crazy.
Pray the baby holds.
Stay. Be mine.
A drop of blood. Not even a drop of blood but a pinkish color on the toilet paper. This happening during the break in the graduate workshop. I considered canceling the rest of class so I could sit at home and worry in peace but decided LaDawn and Mary-Kim, two of my students who are mothers, will protect me.
Read brand-new work from The Bay of Angels to a very nice group of psychoanalysts last night. A long question-and-answer session afterward. Felt the enormity of the book. I need uninterrupted time. I need more than all the time in the world in order to pull it off. A pinkish stain on the tissue.
I have waited until the last moment to conceive a child. Filled with ambivalence. What about the book? How badly I need to write this one. Different than the others — though of course there was urgency with each project. Do I let these feelings in now as protection against the drop of blood? Should things not work out.
To hold the two simultaneously. To not deny either. Writing has taught me as much. An endeavor of utter discipline and utter playfulness. Rigor and recklessness. To control and to relinquish control.
Want. Dread. Resignation. Extraordinary hope.
I worry about the book I have waited so long to write, prepared my whole life to write. Have I subverted myself? And does this bring on the pinkish stain? Ten years of note-taking. My first extended break from teaching in seven years coming up next year. What have I done?
How to describe the blur of being pregnant? The frame holds a moment longer than it should, and I am left behind a fraction of a beat, always a fraction of a beat. But it accumulates — accretion of the beats — lagging slightly behind — until suddenly I am out of the loop, and I can’t imagine the way back — the way of catching up anymore.
For years I believed I would have a child. And then for years I believed I would not.
And now this. I am close. Miracle, Aishah says. Gift from God. I know when she says it, in that voice of hers, that she is right.
Aishah says it is a miracle and also the most natural thing in the world. I tell her I live in dread of miscarriage. Don’t act like such a white person, she says. Relax.
Why does it surprise me so? I have been writing her for years now. Conjuring her. Loving her. This little one.
This horizon of child.
Soon the skeleton, still cartilage, will be replaced by bone. I have been very busy today making bones, I say when Helen calls.