Paper Piles and Files of Words

As is true of so many of our cohorts, we are lately in a mode of trying to organize, streamline, down-size, and gracefully transition to the next chapter. What we envision for that chapter, if we are lucky, is life in a more convenient location with less maintenance, fewer possessions, and more flexibility.  But my need to get organized is an old and chronic problem. Papers are my nemesis…documents, letters, cards. There’s the Trunk of Pain in the garage, of course…the voices of family members mostly, always sad, sometimes tormented, and forever out of reach. Maybe the trunk is a purgatory for them, and I should release them at last. But I shut the lid and walk away. I’ll deal with this another time.

In fact, dealing with this another time is my general strategy for filing and organization, and therein lies the crux of the problem. Rather than responding in some way, or discarding, I generally put things in piles. I sometimes take the piles and stuff them into folders or envelopes, which somehow gives me the illusion of having done something. I even label them, which is only marginally helpful, I guess because my categories are so, I don’t know…broad? For example, there is a green folder with a tab that says RECENT STUFF. When I pulled it out to see what it contained, however, I noticed I had updated it by writing in marker pen across the front, MISCELLANEOUS. NO LONGER RECENT, ACTUALLY.  This was not helpful, although it did prove true. There is also a file called NOW, which I get confused with the file labeled CURRENT. And having looked through both of these a few minutes ago, I have decided that their contents should be transferred over to MISCELLANEOUS. NO LONGER RECENT, ACTUALLY.

Maybe I need a new category. Maybe I need a dumpster. And I certainly do need to level out the heap of papers accumulating on my desk. This work area chaos is like a testament to the disorder of my own thoughts, and I’m sure it is inhibiting my progress on actual business and creative projects I should be tending to. It’s discouraging. It’s daunting. It makes me want to walk away.

But the weather of the last couple of weeks has frequently been too wet and unpredictable for outdoor escape, and so I have turned to these mundane indoor tasks like organizing and de-cluttering. I have filled up a large trash bag with donations for the thrift store from my closet and drawers, which gives me a satisfying sense of having sort of accomplished something. I started going through our bookshelves to curate and cull but got sidetracked browsing through the many intriguing books I have long ago forgotten or never actually read. Monte tells me that having shelves lined with books has lately been deemed a status symbol and an element of tasteful décor, so maybe we’re good with laissez faire for now. In any case, there is something comforting about the presence of books.

In fact, it occurs to me only as I type this, the extent to which words have been my comfort, environment, and form of expression always. I still have scraps of looseleaf paper on which I penned my innermost thoughts as a young girl, the handwriting touchingly plump and precise. There are ancient journals and letters awaiting their destiny. There is a file of “feel good” mail from students and friends over the years that made me feel better about myself, and there are piles of essays and forays and notes that never became anything more, but still they encircle and shelter me. The words, my own and those of others, connect me to my past and present, prompting me to remember but also in an odd way freeing me to flee. All these words and papers––I suppose I am a hoarder in this way, but they help me make sense and reconstruct the saga and render me less alone. They are evidence of journeys, worthless but often interesting, even the trivial stuff, the curious sundry data: my college transcripts, my account balance in 1979, my cholesterol level ten years ago. (It has gotten much worse.) And the letters and hurried scribbled prose, attempts to capture and convey, sentences dangling, thoughts unfinished, moods becalmed, sights and fragrances lingering on the page. All these words, crystallizing moments in amber, rendering the ephemeral tangible again, giving life to life.

A few days ago, I came across a stack of delicate yellowed envelopes containing letters from my father to my mother written during the 1940s, reflecting all the stages of their relationship from a break-up to negotiations and proclamations and finally an avowal of love and commitment. I first discovered these among my mother’s paltry possessions in the assisted living facility after she died, then stashed them away in a file labeled FAMILY, and now here they are on my desk. What am I to do with these? But I understand I am connected to this story, and I cannot be the one to silence their youthful voices, even knowing all the tribulations that awaited. I have become the keeper of this history, for now.

I am a constant murmur. I need to express, reflect, and document--and I wish I could paint, but language is my light. A few days ago, I hosted a gathering of the Gaviota Writers, right here on the deck, embraced by green hills, just a few intrepid souls reading their words to one another, being friends, connecting. The printed-out versions were inserted into a swollen folder that Jim has kept for years, and I’m glad that it resides in someone else’s house, because it would probably be misplaced among the stacks here at mine.

I’m writing this after returning from a reading by my friend Jerry DiPego, for the launch of his new book, Laketown. Jerry is a remarkable storyteller whose tales are kind-hearted and nostalgic, with elements of sentiment, wonder, and magical realism. Outside, it was raining hard, but inside, we were all listening, like our ancestors in a cave, hearing stories by a fire. The warmth stayed inside of me even after I stepped outdoors into the silver and the wet.

And now there is time and space for a poem. Let us drink to the words, like Pablo Neruda:

The word

was born in the blood,

grew in the dark body, beating,

and took flight through the lips and the mouth.

Farther away and nearer

still, still it came

from dead fathers and from wandering races,

from lands which had turned to stone,

lands weary of their poor tribes,

for when grief took to the roads

the people set out and arrived

and married new land and water

to grow their words again.

And so this is the inheritance;

this is the wavelength which connects us

with dead men and the dawning

of new beings not yet come to light.

Still the atmosphere quivers

with the first word uttered

dressed up

in terror and sighing.

It emerged

from the darkness

and until now there is no thunder

that ever rumbles with the iron voice

of that word,

the first

word uttered—

perhaps it was only a ripple, a single drop,

and yet its great cataract falls and falls.

Later on, the word fills with meaning.

Always with child, it filled up with lives.

Everything was births and sounds—

affirmation, clarity, strength,

negation, destruction, death—

the verb took over all the power

and blended existence with essence

in the electricity of its grace.

Human word, syllable, flank

of extending light and solid silverwork,

hereditary goblet which receives

the communications of the blood—

here is where silence came together with

the wholeness of the human word,

and, for human beings, not to speak is to die—

language extends even to the hair,

the mouth speaks without the lips moving,

all of a sudden, the eyes are words.

I take the word and pass it through my senses

as though it were no more than a human shape;

its arrangements awe me and I find my way

through each resonance of the spoken word—

I utter and I am and, speechless, I approach

across the edge of words silence itself.

I drink to the word, raising

A word or a shining cup;

in it I drink

the pure wine of language

or inexhaustible water,

maternal source of words,

and cup and water and wine

give rise to my song

because the verb is the source

and vivid life—it is blood,

blood which expresses its substance

and so ordains its own unwinding.

Words give glass quality to glass, blood to blood,

and life to life itself.