Walking with an Essayist
by Bonnie J. Rough
Posted: December 19, 2006
It is gray and frigid outside. I have accomplished
little at my desk. I have plans, when I return home, to draft an
essay about love. So I want my walk around the lake to go quickly.
I pump my arms and my strides go longer.
But the Essayist says, Think of Brenda Ueland.
This lake holds her ashes.
Tell me, the Essayist prods, what she wrote about
walking calisthenically.
“‘When I walk grimly and calisthenically,’”
I recite, “‘just to get exercise and get it over with,
to get my walk out of the way, then I find that I have not been
re-charged with imagination. For the following day when I try to
write there is more of the meagerness than if I had not walked at
all. But if when I walk I look at the sky or the lake or the tiny,
infinitesimally delicate, bare, young trees, or wherever I want
to look, and my neck and jaw are loose and I feel happy and say
to myself with my imagination, “I am free,” and “There
is nothing to hurry about,” I find then that thoughts begin
to come to me in their quiet way.’”
Bravo, says the Essayist with brisk applause.
But still I want to move quickly. There is so much I need to do
today.
If you must, the Essayist pants, but at least remember
Ueland’s words about duty.
“‘We have come to think that duty should come first.’”
Yes. And we will our work to come. You know that if you will
it to come, it will never come. This is like the advice you give
your single friends: “You’ll only find a man when you
stop looking for one.”
Essayists are full of metaphors. When I lock my sight on a lamp
post an eighth of a mile ahead, planning to race toward it, the
Essayist says, This is like working on an essay. You set a goal,
and you push toward it.
I finish a small curve in the path and see that the lamp post is
beyond the marker with the orange-painted tip—not in front
of it. My pace slackens.
Don’t be discouraged, the Essayist says. This
is like when you see that you have more research to do, or discover
that you must make yourself cry in order to feel deeply enough.
Just before I reach the lamp post, I shift my eyes to a new target:
two distant women with a spaniel apiece.
Tsk! the Essayist hisses. You are forgetting to celebrate.
Finishing an essay requires a bottle of wine, and reading out loud,
if only to an empty living room!
I’m surprised to hear my essayist acting so festive. From
what I’ve seen, essayists are perennially brooding and frustrated.
But I switch my focus back to the lamp post, and when I see it slipping
past me, I feel unaccountably happy. And, through its black paint,
I notice tiny blooms of rust.
This is like red-lining a draft you thought was final. You
see all kinds of new things—but they are small and manageable.
All of the hard work is behind you.
The women and the dogs are approaching more quickly than I expected.
I’m still thinking about the rust.
This is like having a deadline, the Essayist explains.
Deadlines are wonderful, God-given things. Approaching deadlines
make you rush, and when you rush, you act intuitively. Intuition
is an essayist’s gold.
The women are having a giggling fit. I think they are laughing
at my essayist, because she is wearing ruffled gauntlets under a
purple cape pinned by an enormous brooch. But it turns out they
don’t even notice us. Between hysterical gasps, they cough
out words to each other. The spaniels are intoxicated with glee,
crisscrossing leashes and sniffing everyone’s leavings.
Not far beyond them, I take an especially long stride to miss a
smear of dog poop. My essayist says nothing. I turn to look at her,
and she’s holding her chin up like a countess.
“So?” I ask. “What is a smear of dog poop like?”
The Essayist sighs and shakes her head. I had very much hoped
you wouldn’t notice that.
But I had noticed it, and I was now thinking about it. I was thinking
about the fact that in the icy cold, I couldn’t smell the
dog poop. But if the dog poop came home with me on my boot, then
it would smell in the warmth of my house. Which made me wonder why
poop stinks. I guess nature wants poop to stink so that we won’t
eat it. Imagine if it smelled like pizza or fajitas or hot brownies.
But then I remembered that dogs eat poop all the time, and once
at the zoo I saw Malaysian sun bears eating poop, rolling balls
of it on their long tongues and spitting it back into their paws
and patting it and eating it again, so either nature thinks it’s
fine for dogs and bears to eat poop, or it’s fine for everyone
to eat poop, and it’s more a question of taste . . .
. . . and that is what we call Artist Brain, I hear the
Essayist finishing. It is frenetic and full of perils, often
repellent, but also unavoidable. A type of diligence, I daresay,
required of those who make curiosity their business. This is also
the thing that makes it difficult for artists to go to parties with
normal people.
Without telling the Essayist, I set my sights on something too
far ahead to see. The kiosk at the end of the lake, perhaps half
a mile away, where people hang found car keys and flyers for yoga
classes and advertisements for babysitters.
This is like doing a big project you have never done before,
the Essayist says. For you, it is writing your first book. You
are considering a third rewrite. You can’t see, just now,
what your book will look like. But you know you will get there.
It is cold at this end of the lake, always windy and sometimes
snow flurries here and nowhere else. Despite the fact that her cheeks
are awfully red, the Essayist loosens her scarf. This is like
when it is cold, she sighs, in her own world.
So I take a minute to see some birds. A naked tree full of starlings
putting up the usual racket, and two ducks whistling past, surprisingly
high, silhouetted like bowling pins against the white sky. And then
suddenly, whirling around, I realize that I have walked right past
the kiosk without even noticing it. It’s a good fifty yards
back.
This, the Essayist says with a proud warmth in her voice,
as if her protégé, by staring off into space, has
done something wise beyond her years, this is like writing a
better book than you ever imagined. At some point, the book you
thought you were writing will disappear, and you will not even notice.
“But how will I know when I’m finished?”
You will never be finished. That is what deadlines are for.
“You mean that’s what book contracts are for,”
I say, annoyed.
Two concentric trails ring the lake. In the winter, the parks department
leaves one unplowed. For most of my walk, I use the cleared trail.
But at one section, the messy trail touches the lake. I always switch
paths there, to get a good close look at the ice, and, today, the
cracks and the slush. It is the wrong time of year for the ice to
be melting. The lake should be covered with fishermen’s huts
and figure skaters and cross-country skiers. But it’s quiet.
My essayist is quiet too.
I listen to my feet crushing through the icy old snow, which is
mashed together in hard ridges and packed down under other people’s
footprints. Crush crush crush. Even if the Essayist said
something right now, I wouldn’t be able to hear her, I think
to myself. Crush crush crush.
I look over at the smooth trail, where white-shoed runners bound
silently past. It takes me a while to realize that I’ve forgotten
to switch back. But I decide that I like the noisy, slow-going trail
with all of its bumps and slippery spots better. It’s satisfying.
My boots feel like they’re doing what they’re built
to do. And even though these paths seem much the same, the truth
is, they cover different territory. And they never cross, which
means that they lead different places.
The Essayist is just behind me, picking along in her delicate button-up
boots. I’m trying to decide whether to take a detour. This
is the bakery, I would tell her. It’s like when you
need bread.
But I’m confused, because I needed this walk to move me along
on the essay about love, and now this conversation is getting under
my skin, and wise old Brenda Ueland would know very well that this
is the essay, and the essay about love might have to wait. Or no,
this: Oohhhh, but my child—this is your essay about love.
Either way, now this piece has me curious. I’m skipping errands
and going straight home to write it. Where could I send it? Who
might like to publish it?
Stop, says the Essayist. How can you describe a walk
before the walk is finished?
So I begin considering our walk, and suddenly I can’t remember
where we’ve been. Was the lamp post first, or the pair of
women with dogs? Something came before the lamp post, and that was
the thing that started all this, but did it have to do with a tree
trunk or just general stress? I want to get it right from the beginning—
You are grinding. What does Ms. Ueland say about grinding?
“‘And when you understand a thing, don’t grind
over and over it, to grind it into your memory, as children play
scales on the piano, or students cram for examinations. The moment
you understand it, know that it is a part of you forever.’”
Exactly!
“But I’m not so sure I work that way,” I say.
“What if I just have a really, really bad memory, and I forget
the kinds of things good writers remember and jot down whenever
they get around to it? Thoughts fly out of my brain like bats from
a belfry. Except they don’t come back.”
The Essayist is holding up her skirts, tiptoeing past some kid’s
sodden Cheerios, flung from a stroller. Sorry, what were we
talking about?
“Let me show you something,” I say. “We’re
getting close to my house.”
Ah. This is like the writer’s creative cycle. She slingshots
away from home, into a distant orbit. There, she gathers stardust,
arranging the pieces into something beautiful and never before seen
as she swings back toward Earth. She then disembarks her journey.
Finding what grounds her, she gathers strength for the next excursion.
“Okay,” I say, pulling off my coat and hat, and taking
off my shoes. “But look here. Wait—can you take off
those boots? The sand and salt wreck the floors.”
Do you have a buttonhook? she asks.
“Never mind. Here’s what I want to show you. Here are
three lamps in the living room. This is like when it gets dark before
you were ready so you come downstairs fumbling, and that’s
when you realize it’s time to think about dinner. So here
is the kitchen. This is like when you realize Shit, I forgot
to defrost the chicken and so you start looking through takeout
coupons but you realize that it’s not right to pay so much
for takeout until one of these essays makes some money. So here
is the refrigerator. This is like when you have Swiss cheese in
one hand and a stalk of celery in the other and out of the corner
of your eye you see that the cat has no food in his bowl and no
water in his other bowl, and that might explain why he’s been
eating the plants in the dining room. And this is like when you
realize that you haven’t watered the plants in three weeks.
Anyway, carrying on, here is the cat himself, and as you’ll
notice, he is very soft and fluffy and if you hold him still long
enough he might lick your face, and this is like when you want him
to do it again, and you want to show someone else so you start wondering
how soon your husband will be home, and whether it is worth keeping
the cat just like this in front of your face to show your husband
when he walks through the door. Next we have the television set.
This is like adoring all of the characters on Desperate Housewives,
even Bree, and wishing the show was on all the time, and even though
you know it’s only on Sunday nights, sometimes just secretly
checking to see if they made a mistake and aired it right now. Over
here is my e-mail account. This is like when you are addicted to
cocaine. Here is the bathroom, and here is soap scum all over the
sink and pink residue from bubble bath in the tub. This is like
when people come over and feel offended by visible germs. And this
is my desk where I still have to write that essay about love, because
I’ll feel like a quitter if I don’t.” I take a
breath. “Do you see what I’m saying?”
But she’s gone.
_____
Brenda Ueland. If
You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit.
Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1987. (Originally published in 1938.)
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