(JOURNALS OF KATHERINE ELGIN)
‘I’ll tell you why I’m not writing,’ I said.
But his attention had begun to wander, as it often does these days, and since he was no longer listening, I didn’t tell him. He was reading the paper but pretending not to in that infuriating way he has, half smiling, his eyes flitting absentmindedly back and forth between my face and the newspaper. I stopped speaking and waited to see how long it would take him to notice. After several minutes I gave up and pushed back my chair. ‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘what did you say, darling?’
If he had listened I would have told him that creativity is energy, which, if he had cared to hear, he would have understood.
Creativity is a bodily energy, I would have said, ‘And I no longer have the muscles for it.’ I would have added: ‘I have lost my nerve.’
I might have said: ‘I no longer have the energy to pull out the proper length of gut and hammer it to the page.’
And: ‘I’ll tell you why I’m not writing. It’s because I no longer have the necessary energy to grow my own hair.’
Once, he might have laughed.
Actually, I am too tired to explain anything.
I wonder how I grew so tired, so muscleless. I am so very tired. I wish to sleep and never wake up.
Once I had the energy of a thousand girls at play. I could demolish time, run through space, eat up the world. I kept the pulse of movement along my legs; the backs of my calves were full of waiting motion. I remember my body being perpetually braced, as if everything inside me was primed and ready to spring. My body was my gift, a seam of girlish courage ran the length of me, lighting my days.
This inexhaustible energy was also in my head, in the ringing cells of my brain. I walked as if floodlit, alive with ideas, blossoming with stories. This energy was a form of happiness, and for years and years I believed it was simply a matter of casting out a shapely net to haul it in. O, once I was a ball of fisted, happy energy, a roar of love.
I have been tired for so long. Somewhere I have always been waiting, and waiting is an enervating habit.
I have used up my teaspoon of hours.
I have lost my muscles.
I have lost my face.
I am forty-five years old and the dirt of the grave is fast upon my tongue.
Once I lived in some perpetual present moment, never thinking of the future, wilfully refusing to imagine what lay ahead. Now I am stranded in my bleak future, everything behind me, everything spent, a clock that has used up all its ticks.
These thoughts passed through my head last night as I lay too long in the bath, idly watching the soap growing softer and more waxy, a bloom of cloud. The January heat sends me to the bath morning and night; last night I lay there for perhaps two hours, the water growing colder, knowing I should get up. Yet I could not rise and thought instead: I would like to stay here and slowly melt away. I understood that I was comforting myself with thoughts of my own extinction, yet the idea of melting away seemed exquisitely peaceful. I lay there fat and dumb in the cold milky water wishing I could pass away, without having to lift a finger to assist. Pass away. Such soft effortlessness, such dreamy pleasure.
A clock, a disappearing block of soap, I am sinking beneath my own metaphors. I cannot help myself—on the desk in front of me is a ball of twine and it occurs to me that my life is like that balled knot and I have come to its end. I can imagine the feel of the frayed, rough end of the string between my forefinger and thumb, pulling hard but finding there is no more string. David has always been scornful of my metaphors, his own writing is leery of them. I remember in London when I was learning French I was thrilled to discover that the French language was a sea of metaphors—for example, there is a phrase you can use when someone dies that translates as ‘he felt the lead under his wings’. I suppose it prosaically refers to a bird felled by a hunter’s pellet, but nonetheless I love the image of the translucent weightless wings of some breathless angel becoming heavy and cold.
David has always loathed, too, what he calls my air of ‘restrained hysteria’ and I thought of this as I lay in the cold bath last night dreaming metaphorically of my own death. Months ago, when I could still work on The Broken Book and it seemed for a fleeting moment as if that poor flogged character Cressida Morley had finally sprung into breathing life, I furtively passed him the first few chapters. I hate anybody reading my unfinished work and it is a measure of my despair that I gave them to him at all. He said he found its tone off-putting, florid, ‘resonant with a beseeching quality’, entirely too overwrought for his tastes. ‘Your Cressida veers perilously close to purple,’ he said, ‘I’m not convinced the faux melodramatic tone works. And I think The Broken Book is a questionable title. It’s too explicit.’ Is he right? Should I change the tone? The character’s name? After David’s reading I looked at it again—Christ, what was I thinking? I planned to write an imaginary autobiography, a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a story that revealed a portion of our hidden selves. But where does autobiography end and fiction begin? Is Cressida only an etiolated version of myself when I wished her to represent the whole of evanescent, amorphous life?
I don’t know any more. I seem to have lost the art of judgement, the ability to know my own mind. It was cruel of David to ask why I wasn’t writing if he already knew the answer. He is still writing, he is still sailing on the ship, while my metaphors capsized long ago. His book is already safely bound for the shore, almost finished—his rendering of me, of the girls, of our shared life, all carefully stowed. His Cressida Morley has breath, muscle, gut; my Cressida has died upon the page. I don’t know why, only that I cannot move the story forward. I should have changed her name. How did we end up both writing about a character with the same name?
Too late, too late, for us and for me. I am becoming undone, I am becoming beseeching—and I cannot imagine ever finishing a book again.
No longer can I attempt to unravel the knot, on the page, as I have always done. I cannot write, I cannot write to save myself now. I cannot even remember how it was that I came to lose my fists.
And this: once, on the island, Panayotis told me his most secret dream. We were drunk, it was late, and David had gone home in disgust. Everybody else had left the taverna and it was just Pan and me, drinking and smoking, telling each other everything. I remember he was wearing his blue fisherman’s cap, even though he wasn’t a fisherman, and that the first cold fingers of winter were upon the air. For some reason the thought of winter panicked me—I felt frightened, full of foreboding. It wasn’t cold enough, though, to move indoors and we were at a table facing the harbour, a new bottle between us.
‘Do you know, Katerina,’ he said to me in Greek, ‘my dream is to sit down at the table at lunchtime and eat a whole chicken by myself. I will not cut off the finest part of the breast for my wife, I will not slice off both legs for the children. I will sit at the table and eat every last bit up, the whole chicken, by myself.’
He looked at me with an expression of such longing that I was pierced by a vast, unfathomable grief.
Pan would be an old man now. I wonder if he ever realised his humble dream.
Did I ever eat the whole chicken?