Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

Well, I…I think that…If you…All right.

I’m desperate. Today is the anniversary of this blog. Two years. Two years, friends. And I can’t think of anything I want to write about.

There is that I:

…Am still reading Bessie Head. All of her. She was an amazing intellect, personality. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be her child. She was apparently sort of skittish of other people, new situations. But her smile on the back of all the books doesn’t seem to say that. She looks like a smoker. And she liked to eat. In one of the pictures of her, her eyes are open very wide and the picture was taken mid-sentence. Her mouth was open and the point she must have been making was serious in nature. It was political, I hope. It is the younger of the two main pictures of her you find around. I would like to talk to her child. It is probably hiding somewhere on earth from people like me. Those in love with its mother and who want to suck it dry for information about her that would probably demystify all I feel for her. When I think of her, it makes me angry that not as many people as I would like have read her writing. And then I feel special for being in her secret club. Which my admittance to was a complete accident. The professor who taught her to me only teaches her in alternate years, you understand. So, a friend of mine who took the same course in postcolonial literature (And found nothing of value there, which makes me look at her in a certain way, when I think of this, that paints her as this ridiculously blind person. You don’t take this class with this professor passively. Perhaps she was numbed by a death in her family. Otherwise, I can’t make it out.) …anyway…my friend wasn’t taught her. But I can’t believe my professor deciding to include her in his syllabus was just good luck. I want to believe that she would’ve turned up in some other place for me to find her. I can’t describe what it feels like to read her words. Its too much like trying to tell people who I am. And I have never been able to do that with much truth. It always comes out something like what I imagine people would want to hear. The truth is, depending on who is receiving the telling, much more or much less than would make them comfortable. I know it. So, what happens is that pieces are all any one person gets. Which are just swatches. As in of fabric. But a collection of swatches can make a quilt. And to look at one part could be really jarring to all your senses. And then you incline your head a little to the left and tilt the head down a bit and then there is comfort and love and harmony. And then if you turn your back on the quilt, god only knows which corners will stand up skulk to new places altogether. You may turn around and say, “My God, whose work is this? What has happened here? Why would anyone put these things up against one another into this thing (a girl) that is supposed to be, ultimately, a unit? A single one. An entity. This is madness.” And you might think it ugly. Or you could think it (me–the swatch quilt) is beautiful (which you should NEVER hesitate to tell me). Or you could think me incongruous and refreshing. Because you’re like that. Underneath. But you keep quiet about it. It’s easier. Letting people have the one idea of you means you never have to worry about authenticity. Now where did that come from? Hmmm…

You see. I guess that’s what this blog has been. A place I can say anything at all I like. And there is no reason, though there be echoes. Like mushrooms.

…I began writing about all the Bessie Head in my head that I am reading slowly and completely schizophrenically. I feel like they are all the same story, though, and can’t help myself. I’m learning her rather than any single work of hers, though there’s that, too, especially with Maru. And I’m quite far gone in the memorization. There are these…well let’s only do ones I haven’t done before here…don’t want to reduce the impact in case you seek her out yourself:

The rains were so late that year.

The roar in his heart choked his throat.

Those he wanted or loved became the slaves of an intensely concentrated affection.

And then there is the large one. This one, I claim as my own. I’ve written it in blood in a secret place where blood does not wash away. The lunatic in me has decided that my author wanted me to have these words to explain a portion of my life. And that she would let me give them to someone else. To say, “Hello, there. Look–here we are. We are not the first because she wrote this decades and decades before either of us was born, although you are much older than I am. You see? Things are fine just the way they are. Let’s continue them for as long as we do.” But the words…

They were talking…Soon she stopped taking note of what she was saying, because afterwards she could not remember a word of the conversation , except the feeling it had left behind: ‘Why,’ she thought, ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before, and I’ll keep on seeing him again and again in the future. I’ll keep on meeting him.’ It was the vastness and freedom of it, a friendliness toward another which was always tentative and yet secure. He liked to bang into her…

from “A Question of Power.” I have robbed this passage of its context. It does not actually have anything at all to do, in the story, with how I have fit it into my life. But I don’t think Bessie Head would mind. She would be quite embarrassed of how intensely I feel about these words. And about that roar in his heart business up above. As if men have roars in their hearts, really. See-I was being facetious. Of course men have roars in their hearts! Only they ignore them. Or run from them altogether. Or ration and pace the amount of listening to it that they will allow themselves. Foolish. Completely foolish. But they go on. All signs indicate, as well, that they have every intention of persisting in this way of acting. What to do but love it, right?

I’ll have two servings, please.

All right I am dangerously close to the deadline. I’m going to stop. But I’m still here. Writing. Trying to do some loving. Asking, every which way, for forgiveness. Getting angry about the state of things and trying to put it on paper. Still believe in writing letters…no matter if they go unanswered most of the time. Talking as much as I ever have. But dancing, too, much more. Planning for big reckonings with ballet again, soon.

And, more than you know, tremendously awed that some of you found this pocket right from its inception and still come around today. I am buoyed. And some of you who lurk, and never chime in…I am incredibly anxious about you. I’d love to say hello to you sometime…

Thank you for being here with me. And reading all the way to the end.