Writerly Becoming

All these words that enter me and fertilize by absorption, permeation and then birth me, over and over by sluicing, spurting an inky, wet delight on the page . And I wonder at the taste, the texture, the spice, I am swallowed and I am born. And the new feeling rises, the feeling of bursting at seams, those perforations that hold me whole, they spell out an unfinished sentence, an ongoing mystery of becoming a writer.

I first began to take pleasure in marveling at those shiny blue lines at the little table in my grandmother’s kitchen. The cracked table top under my hands, old paint tugging at my skin, splinters poking out in unruly tufts at the corners, I sat pressed between the ottoman and the stove surrounded by fragrant wafts of my grandmother’s cooking, where everything was squeezed side by side, including people that would gather later for a Sunday meal. There I tidied up scraps of paper in stacks, pretending they were books, and I wrote lines, squiggly lines, just blue lines. It wasn’t until later that my obsession became more serious ambition. At first, in a serendipitous fashion, I wanted to be a dry-cleaner store attendant. My mother would take me on the weekly jaunts to the dry-cleaners with pairs of pants, skirts and all manner of tweed and silk, and there I would watch with an inkling of erotic unhinging as the woman attendant filled out the receipt. The details of the moment swirled the young sapling juices inside me – the way she licked her finger to turn the page, the way she entered a date, name and details with enviable penmanship, the way the pen entered the softly layered pages, indented the pillowed cushion and left lines in the wake of its ingress. How she pressed the tip of the pen into the pages layered with crispy thin dark veil of carbon paper, one side shiny black inky layer, the other side mysteriously white and unmarked, with nothing in between it seemed, thrilled me. The lines used and re-used the black layer until all the ink is lifted to create words. The mystery of this thin, delicate sheet, that fertile space of multiple layers of writing tugged at a core of me I didn’t know I had. A reversal of palimpsest.

It was an ordinary job, which the woman endured to make a living in the grey existence of communist world. But for me, that job represented the deep mystery, the divine secret of the world of words that spill and make a life on a page.

Some years later I have seen an art exhibit that included Henry Moore sculpture. One of the smaller, less known pieces, it seemed, in its simple curvaceous presence, the most touchable of objects, with round surfaces and voluptuous space. Small enough, it was enclosed in a glass case that prevented a close physical contact. The sculpture invited to be touched, but was inaccessible to the body in anything other then the visual register. I didn’t want to just touch the Moore, I wanted to wrap myself around, fit into the shape of it like meat around the bone.

It seems to me that the reversed shape wrapped around a Henry Moore sculpture and the memory reversal of that fragile, skin like sheet of carbon paper, come together in the body, in the skin, the inexhaustible carbon side, in the mystery of writing. I have learned to ease into language, surrender to sudden emanations, simple seductions, divine intervention. But that first knowledge of writing profession, not a profession of a writer, story-teller, but a person who writes, beckoned from a hand of dry-cleaning clerk.