I use a fountain pen when I write by hand. I like physically touching what I convey. Words are envelopes: I am inside them, the way yellow is inside a lemon, black inside an ant. When I look at a fountain pen, that strange little stick, I wonder why I don’t see it as more stabbing, harder. Why don’t I see it as less flowing, even as a tool for tattooing?
Why, too, I wonder, don’t I imagine changing colors of ink? In some perverse way, the commitment to navy-blue ink remains nonpareil. It covers so much so well, like logic itself. But I should change colors, since I see them—green, turquoise, purple, blue-black, a red, the slightly horrifying color of blood. Why not experiment? Why not give the literary less room? Traces of the old blue would remain if I persisted in merely filling the pen’s shaft and using one nib. I would need a cartridge pen and new gold points. Otherwise, the tone would turn muddy, going toward browns in the end.
I wouldn’t mind changing. So much has been left out. Women’s voices that would have brought subtlety and subversiveness to the page have been dismissed and overlooked. But if I change colors I would also like to play with the flow. I would hope for something closer, more awkward, halting, more urtext. Then perhaps I would need to eliminate the ink. That done, I could get rid of the pen. I would use just gold points to incise and scratch, drag along the paper, signs and symbols, and a dense, tearing crosshatching. It would be a relief. I would be writing from a long silence that pertains to women.
My generation in America are a strange and contradictory breed. Officially we have not lived with veils, and yet because we had little encouragement, we often lived double lives. Most of us were without models, unless it was our fathers. To the extent that we have been isolated, we have explored a palpable inner life. We know well what we see and feel in our own minds. We understand authenticity and linkages to the greater world. Like plants and trees and birds that filled niches with living wealth, now we are out of those fixed niches and, with that, under new pressure from the environment. What is endangered is our moving too quickly away, without recording the acuteness and specificity of the genius that our out-of-the-worldness, our seeing “slant,” allowed. Difference was our realm. We have experience of observation, subtle, fine, ordinary, and engaged, that no one had time for. Born, we were immediately directed toward it in ourselves, society, others. We have observed character until we know violence, darkness, light, and every variation on a theme. Starting from unanesthetized childbirth, we have universes of life and death to articulate before they disappear.
Disturbing silence and reproducing its tissues is a great responsibility. Beyond human silence, though, is a far greater one. I try to remember that and to write toward or from it. Inner silence mimics or contains the infinite one. It is important to imagine writing using all the tools that have not been stressed in books: tattoos, colors—periwinkle, cobalt, robin’s egg, scarlet, emerald, saffron—cross-hatchings, rips. I want pen and non-pen.
We went to the sea, forced ourselves into its renewal, two weeks after Alba died. There was nothing to do, nothing more, and we knew that. At the sea, a few hundred meters from us, was the shifting beauty we hoped would be there to work its rhythms of nothingness and depths into our bodies; the warm sand rubbing, the salt drying and stinging. The waves of the Adriatic were singing to us, each fold an opening, over and over, without end. The blue breathed and yet heated. Behind the hotel there had been a fire. The smoke from the sap of new pines and old scarred oaks still hung around and came into our room at night, when we all slid, aching, back into the feelings of grief.
Burnt, black, unrepentant, and powerful, the hill smoldered and stank. The ash was more than a foot deep. It belched and bubbled. Curious, I left the beige sand one morning and climbed the hill. Clare didn’t want to come. Paolo didn’t want to leave the beach, but he came, as he often does, to keep me company. Paolo wanted to stay on the road, but I rushed onto the land. I wanted to feel the effects of the fire, the texture of the ash, the force of destruction. I wanted to get into the blackened woods and then look back down at the endless sea.
I climbed over the fence, with a pelting of his noes falling on me. The ooze stuck to my legs and shoes. I sank. It was like walking on jelly. Large trees had fallen, one on top of the other. Trunks lay on the ground and stumps were cracked halberds. A stone nearly the size of a man had exploded into four perfect pieces. Energy remained, released from all the broken points.
Nothing was growing in the gray and black except some white stalks rising from huge burnt bulbs, gripping the soil like paws. They were weird and lunar on otherwise felled cover. I stood, and Paolo stood with me in the utter destruction, except for the snaking meter-high white antennae with ivory flowers to come.
Heat still rolled off the ground. All the trees’ life hung as shrouds of burnt organic smell. Pines looked like snapped brooms. The cones had burst like popped corn. The sea, not far off, stretched out beyond a promontory where a collapsed tower of stone butted up. The sea went on with its blue waves—all the way out. Seamless. Puckering. Blue.
Paolo took samples, from one bulb, then another. He stuffed pinecones into his pockets. Later, in Parma, with his books, he confirmed that the plants, those white growths that looked promising, were poisonous. Nature never lies or makes false moves. In all that destruction, hope did not survive. It was too soon for hope. A tough residue of poison gave out the first sign of growth after the fire. The white flowers were deadly.
Returning from the sea was hard. We all still felt bruised. The discrepancy between Alba’s death and the petty repetitions in our lives overtook me. So much had been displaced; yet we were returning to our own ways that had not changed. Soon after we entered our front door, I opened my mouth to say something simple and a scream began.
Let me draw it with a gold point. It was long, sounded terrifying, and has not found space in many books. It was me rushing out into all that is bigger than me, unable to shape it or stop. It was human, deeply human, and under the grief was fear.
It made Clare and Paolo stare. I couldn’t bring it to a halt. It kept coming and coming. I was not observing it, but bringing it up, like a huge fish from the deep being pulled on a line, up and up from the sea it came, struggling, inevitable, and in need of being released.
When it stopped, I left the house, looked up at the full moon, walked the dog, checked myself to see if I was crazy, and looked into Parma faces that didn’t smile back. I was calm and alive: closer to anyone who was afraid and closer to the stoic part of myself. I thought: Paolo, you didn’t expect that of me. Clare, maybe that sound, piercing so much frustration, will help you later on.
How can I convey that scream in words? Why, I asked, don’t women draw more in their works? Why don’t they make that contribution to uncensoring the happenings inside families? Why be overly analytical? Why not just let the force show? And that is why I put down this scream. Not as a suggestion, but as a symbol of participation in a book of common experience inside the hours, each varied, that should return to the page, not as words, but as lines in common patterns So much humanity resides in the eye, in all that is seen and not said. The seeing eye is not the one that watches television or talks without some sense of human possibility. It is touched, nearly to the center of a life and with that link, joined to others. The eye that sees may feel and do or with that feeling it may do nothing but remember.
Words have something of us inside them, after they have been humbled. After the intellect has taken its place as one side of words, they join all that ever was in words. But drawings are closer to symbols and as such always broader than a single language. Saint-Exupéry left us pictures, so we could feel, as clearly as Thomas putting his hands in Christ’s side, the reality of the planets and the frailty of a rose that was only his. The sweetness of his drawings showed us his vulnerability.
Here is the scream. It is like a runaway river. It can’t be stopped. It is part of wounding, tearing life. It covers so much ground.
And then I thought: Why not draw the sun? It touched every grain of sand as we lay on the beach.
And why not draw the sea? How similar their patterns are in my mind’s picture. Both are life-giving.
Here are the poisonous plants of no hope. One must always be aware of appearances.
And two more pictures. One is a black butterfly that I saw rising up over my left shoulder as I looked at myself in the mirror. It rose from the middle of our bed. It was one more butterfly that has come to the house.
And the other sketch is a waterfall that I felt as I lay on the ground. The feeling of water poured from my feet and from my mouth as a friend held her hands over me. It rushed like life from my body.
These experiences emerged like hieroglyphs, to be interpreted, from other feelings after Alba’s death, after the scream opened up the ground.
One supposed physical image of Giovanna is that of Diana over the fireplace
