The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (41 page)

When I had a hysterectomy, I worried about my writing, because sexualist reductionism had scared me. But I’m sure it wasn’t as bad for me as losing his balls would be for a man like Norman Mailer. Never having identified my sex, my sexuality, or my writing with my fertility, I didn’t have to trash myself. I was able, with some pain and fear but not dreadful pain and fear, to think about what the loss meant to me as a writer, a person in a body who writes.

What it felt like to me was that in losing my womb I had indeed lost some connection, a kind of easy, bodily imagination, that had to be replaced, if it could be replaced, by the mental imagination alone. For a while I thought that I could not embody myself in an imagined person as I used to. I thought I couldn’t “be” anyone but me.

I don’t mean that when I had a womb I believed that I carried characters around in it like fetuses. I mean that when I was young I had a complete, unthinking, bodily connection and emotional apprehension of my imagined people.

Now (perhaps because of the operation, perhaps through mere aging) I was obliged to make the connection deliberately in the mind. I had to reach out with a passion that was not simply physical. I had to “be” other people in a more radical, complete way.

This wasn’t necessarily a loss. I began to see it might be a gain, forcing me to take the more risky way. The more intelligence the better, so long as the passion, the bodily emotional connection is made, is there.

Essays are in the head, they don’t have bodies the way stories do: that’s why essays can’t satisfy me in the long run. But headwork is better than nothing, as witness me right now, making strings of words to follow through the maze of the day (a very simple maze: one or two choices, a food pellet for a reward). Any string of meaningfully connected words is better than none.

If I can find intensely felt meaning in the words or invest them with it, better yet—whether the meaning be intellectual, as now, or consist in their music, in which case I would,
¡ojalá!
be writing poetry.

Best of all is if they find bodies and begin to tell a story.

Up there I said “be” somebody, “have the person,” “find the person.” This is the mystery.

I use the word
have
not in the sense of “having” a baby, but in the sense of “having” a body. To have a body is to be embodied. Embodiment is the key.

My plans for stories that don’t become stories all lack that key, the person or people whose story it is, the heart, the soul, the embodied inwardness of a person or several people. When I am working on a story that isn’t going to work, I make people up. I could describe them the way the how-to-write books say to do. I know their function in the story. I write about them—but I haven’t found them, or they haven’t
found me. They don’t inhabit me, I don’t inhabit them. I don’t
have
them. They are bodiless. So I don’t have a story.

But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I
have
that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story. Then I can begin writing directly, trusting the person knows where she or he is going, what will happen, what it’s all about.

This is extremely risky, but it works for me, these days, more often than it used to. And it makes for a story that is without forced or extraneous elements, all of a piece, uncontrolled by intrusions of opinion, willpower, fear (of unpopularity, censorship, the editor, the market, whatever), or other irrelevancies.

So my search for a story, when I get impatient, is not so much looking for a topic or subject or nexus or resonance or place-time (though all that is or will be involved) as casting about in my head for a stranger. I wander about the mental landscape looking for somebody, an Ancient Mariner or a Miss Bates, who will (almost certainly not when I want them, not when I invite them, not when I long for them, but at the most inconvenient and impossible time) begin telling me their story and not let me go until it’s told.

The times when nobody is in the landscape are silent and lonely. They can go on and on until I think nobody will ever be there again but one stupid old woman who used to write books. But it’s no use trying to populate it by willpower. These people come only when they’re ready, and they do not answer to a call. They answer silence.

Many writers now call any period of silence a “block.”

Would it not be better to look on it as a clearing? A way to go till you get where you need to be?

If I want to write and have nothing to write I do indeed feel blocked, or rather chocked—full of energy but nothing to spend it on, knowing my craft but nothing to use it on. It is frustrating, wearing, infuriating. But if I fill the silence with constant noise, writing anything in order to be writing something, forcing my willpower to invent situations
for stories, I may be blocking myself. It’s better to hold still and wait and listen to the silence. It’s better to do some kind of work that keeps the body following a rhythm but doesn’t fill up the mind with words.

I have called this waiting “listening for a voice.” It has been that, a voice. It was that in “Hernes,” all through, when I’d wait and wait, and then the voice of one of the women would come and speak through me.

But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.

THE WRITER ON, AND AT, HER WORK

Written for Janet Sternburg’s 1995 anthology
The Writer on Her Work
, volume 2
, New Essays in New Territory.

Her work

is never done.

She has been told that

and observed it for herself.

Her work

spins unrelated filaments

into a skein: the whorl

or wheel turns the cloudy mass

into one strong thread,

over, and over, and over.

Her work

weaves unrelated elements

into a pattern: the shuttle

thrown across the warp

makes roses, mazes, lightning,

over, and over, and over.

Her work

brings out of dirt and water

a whole thing, a hole where

the use of the pot is,

a container for the thing

contained, a holy thing, a holder,

a saver,

happening on the clayey wheel

between her and her clayey hands,

over, and over, and over.

Her work

is with pots and baskets,

bags, cans, boxes, carryalls,

pans, jars, pitchers, cupboards, closets,

rooms, rooms in houses, doors,

desks in the rooms in the houses,

drawers and pigeonholes in the desks,

secret compartments

in which lie for generations

secret letters.

Her work

is with letters,

with secret letters.

Letters that were not written

for generations.

She must write them

over, and over, and over.

She works with her body,

a day-laborer.

She labors, she travails,

sweating and complaining,

She is her instrument,

whorl, shuttle, wheel.

She is the greasy wool and the raw clay

and the wise hands

that work by day

for the wages of the worker.

She works within her body,

a night creature.

She runs between the walls.

She is hunted down and eaten.

She prowls, pounces, kills, devours.

She flies on soundless wings.

Her eyes comprehend the darkness.

The tracks she leaves are bloody,

and at her scream

everything holds still,

hearing that other wisdom.

Some say any woman working

is a warrior.

I resist that definition.

A fighter in necessity, sure,

a wise fighter,

but a professional?

One of los Generales?

Seems to me she has better things

to do than be a hero.

Medals were made for flatter chests.

They sort of dangle off her tits

and look embarrassing.

The uniforms don’t fit.

If she shoots from the hip,

she hears the freudians applauding—

See? See? they say,

See? See? She wants one!

(She wants mine!

She can’t have it!

She can’t can she Daddy? No, son.)

Others say she’s a goddess,

The Goddess, transcendant,

knowing everything by nature,

the Archetype

at the typewriter.

I resist that definition.

Her work, I really think her work

isn’t fighting, isn’t winning,

isn’t being the Earth, isn’t being the Moon.

Her work, I really think her work

is finding what her real work is

and doing it,

her work, her own work,

her being human,

her being in the world.

So, if I am

a writer, my work

is words. Unwritten letters.

Words are my way of being

human, woman, me.

Word is the whorl that spins me,

the shuttle thrown though the warp of years

to weave a life, the hand

that shapes to use, to grace.

Word is my tooth,

my wing.

Word is my wisdom.

I am a bundle of letters

in a secret drawer

in an old desk.

What is in the letters?

What do they say?

I am kept here a prisoner by the evil Duke.

Georgie is much better now, and I have been canning peaches like mad.

I cannot tell my husband or even my sister, I cannot live without you, I think of you day and night, when will you come to me?

My brother Will hath gone to London and though I begg’d with all my heart to go with him nor he nor my Father would have it so, but laugh’d and said, Time the wench was married.

The ghost of a woman walks in this house. I have heard her weeping in the room that was used as a nursery.

If I only knew that my letters were reaching you, but there is no way to get information at any of the bureaus, they will not say where you have been sent.

Don’t grieve for me. I know what I am doing.

Bring the kids and they can all play together and we can sit and talk till we’re blue in the face.

Did he know about her cousin Roger and the shotgun?

I don’t know if it’s any good but I’ve been working on it since September.

How many of us will it take to hang him?

I am taking the family to America, the land of Freedom.

I have found a bundle of old letters in a secret compartment in my desk.

Letters of words of stories:

they tell stories.

The writer tells stories, the stories,

over, and over, and over.

Man does, they say, and Woman is.

Doing and being. Do and be.

O.K., I be writing, Man.

I be telling.

(“Je suis la où ça parle,”

says la belle Hélène.)

I be saying and parlaying.

I be being

this way. How do I do being?

Same way I be doing.

I would call it working

or else, it doesn’t matter, playing.

The writer at her work

is playing.

Not chess not poker not monopoly,

none of the war games—

Even if she plays by all their rules

and wins—wins what?

Their funny money?—

not playing hero,

not playing god—

well, but listen, making things

is a kind of godly business, isn’t it?

All right, then, playing god,

Aphrodite the Maker, without whom

“nothing is born into the shining

borders of light, nor is anything lovely or lovable made,”

Spider Grandmother, spinning,

Thought Woman, making it all up,

Coyote Woman, playing—

playing it, a game,

without a winner or a loser,

a game of skill, a game of make

believe.

Sure it’s a gamble,

but not for money.

Sorry Ernie this ain’t stud.

The stakes

are a little higher.

The writer at her work

is odd, is peculiar, is particular,

certainly, but not, I think,

singular.

She tends to the plural.

I for example am Ursula; Miss

Ursula Kroeber;

Mrs. then Ms Le Guin;

Ursula K. Le Guin; this latter is

“the writer,” but who were,

who are, the others?

She is the writer

at their work.

What are they doing,

those plurals of her?

Lying in bed.

Lazy as hound dogs.

She-Plural is lying in bed

in the morning early.

Long before light, in winter;

in summer “the morning people