In March, I met an old acquaintance for breakfast in Saugatuck, as is our custom when I am single and our gets-together raise no (unnecessary) suspicions. He’s a writer but trained as an engineer and travels the country often for both career needs. He’s an amiable guy, makes for good company. With whom else can I talk about writing and learn about publishing? That’s the format for breakfast: catch up on events either one cares to share, followed by what books we read since and what news of his developing manuscript. This March morning, he surprised me by picked up a conversation from the year prior. We discussed one of his characters -- which is to say that I interrogated him about the character -- while strolling along the Singapore Yacht wharf. The day shone brightly. The sun’s light poured from the sky; it bounced from the water and boat hulls. My acquaintance justified his character’s behaviour, as my mind wandered. Half-listening to an imaginary biography, half-staring across the Kalamazoo River he caught me out: what are you thinking about? Your character is going to kill himself, I said, not directly at him but at a vague point on the opposite shore. What?! No he isn’t.. wait, why do you think that? The tone of his voice, an uncommon mix of scandal and pleasant surprise, should have woken me fully to my surroundings; rather, it made me more introspective, curious of the forming thought I shared prematurely. He persisted through my silence. Do you know Virginia Woolf? No, he says, should I? Yes. Your character reminds me of Woolf’s character Mrs Dalloway. A perfectly normal, good and reasonable person living her good life and doing good things. She’s so normal that when one wonders -- 50 pages in -- why Woolf dedicates a novel to the maudlin personality, *bang* Dalloway says that she’ll kill herself. It’s something nobody in her world will expect. So more shocking for the lack of intended explanation. It simply takes place. No rhyme, reason. Your character reminds me of her. A normal life, no tangible sources of discontent and certainly no suffering; the bills are paid, the lovely accoutrements bought and shown, acquaintances maintained but undeveloped: somebody so suffocatingly good and normal, it cannot survive. Whatever else I said to the poor writer is lost from memory. In all fairness, the reaction came out of Mrs Dalloway than my companion’s character description. I was being unfair again. My character won’t kill himself. I don’t want to kill him, he said. Than give the poor bastard a reason to live. Let him access to something -- anything -- to which he can anchor his life, even if that anchor is a goddamn lie. Shit, give him religion, I said -- again, unfairly.
Return to this March. Return to the mediocre Saugatuck restaurant. Do you still struggle with those feelings, he asks. Not since I read “The Bell Jar.” Do you know it? He shakes his head. It kills me that this writer is unfamiliar with the classics. No judgement implied or intended, simple wonder. He gets a brief review of Sylvia Plath’s novel about a charming, sophisticated young college woman working up the social and economic ladder. Then, her life falls apart. It swings in vicious circles. Her centre cannot hold. The artifices of her identity snap at the joints. She repeatedly fails to kill herself and repeatedly fails to offer an explanation to the one question asked of her: why? Why do you want to kill yourself? Why do you feel like this? Why do you make your mother suffer worrying about you? I read this novel early summer of 2008 and almost entirely on the patio of Lemonjello’s in Holland. At times, the book drove me out of my seat to pace the small concrete space (Paul Mason’s stories collected in Head Cases also had this effect on me). Plath’s book felt from then on like a bulwark to the creeping voice urging terrible action. The protagonist... I read so damned much of myself in her: the tedium of living irrationally in a rational environment. Being a successful person by nearly all objective standards yet actively jettisoning those standards as suffocating traps. The poor, barely white-trash child makes good in the competitive , socially divisive world. No, I tell the writer with confidence. I don’t have those feelings any more. “The Bell Jar” accomplished what the therapy and medication did not. Having said that, this salad is so shitty it makes me suicidal to have to pay for it. We laugh. It looks like a shitty salad, he agrees.
I spoke too soon.
It’s happening again. That clarion voice speaking. You are going to kill yourself. Thursday at Meijer, while looking at peanut butter. It began a month ago, just before I signed the mortgage. Easily dismissed. If I die, who will pay the mortgage? The credit union would be furious. Chuckle, ha ha. Its intensity builds, as each time previous to this. Comparing peanut butter prices, the voice WHY NOT KILL YOURSELF was so loud that my head jerked sideways, the way it does when a fly comes near the ear, and then pinched the bridge of my nose as if to stifle a sneeze. These two movements, in rapid succession, disturbed me far more than the provoking thought. A perverse, psycho-somatic reaction. It keeps happening. The college administration would be furious if forced to find a replacement for my two already in progress summer courses.
I hope that the writer doesn’t ask me about this next time we have breakfast.
No comments:
Post a Comment