What Happened on the Train

A few things happened on the train Tuesday morning.

1) I started reading again.
A Book of Common Prayer is my favorite of Joan Didion's novels, and whenever I've been struggling with concentration, with having no interest in anything written, with the desire to disappear into the games on my iPod--which I have been doing for the last 6-8 weeks--I go back to this novel. Every time I read it, I find new things, or things I'd forgotten re-appear. Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator, is stronger this time for me than she's ever been before; perhaps foolishly, I always thought it was a novel about Charlotte Douglas. Perhaps this is what happens when you read a good novel--but I started wondering if Grace and I are any different. We, Grace and I, seem to view the world as an accumulation of evidence. I could be projecting this on Grace, as well. I still feel that it's true.

2) I reconsidered my notion of bandwidth.
The circus takes up all of my energy: emotional, physical, creative. It uses up all my patience. It uses up all my critical-thinking skills, my sense of aesthetics, my concentration, my ability to simply decide between the lemonade or the Coca-Cola. This is not the first time I've discovered this, but it seems that every year I am re-learning it anew, as if part of what drives me (us?) forward year after year is the ability to forget what happened last year. There must be some medical term for this, some psychological condition--I think it has to do with the drug making you forget the reasons you need it, or something--although this drug is a hugely-important, amazing part of my creative and social existence. Not damaging, just exhausting. Anyway, all these things are the facts of the situation, without interpretation. And most of me would rather leave this story at that. Because, for me, the facts are the interpretation. (Just like Grace in A Book of Common Prayer.)

The other part of this idea of running out of bandwidth, was that, feeling all these things that the circus makes you feel, (plus a huge sense of accomplishment and joy,) I thought again about this argument I'm always having in my head with Virginia Woolf. "A Room of One's Own vs. The Truth of Modern Life." Think of working mothers, I always say. Think of those refugees who write memoirs in crowded, foul-smelling camps covered in barbed wire. (Hers always felt a bit like the argument delivered from a place of leisure. But yesterday I began thinking that maybe she's right. Maybe I'm being a bit too too.) I've not written anything of any substantial merit in months because I just didn't have any room of my own. My brain was full, the bandwidth had expired. Okay, Virginia, you win this one. For now.

3) The writing came back.
Poof, like magic. The words aren't pouring out of my fingers yet, which is the real work, of course, but the sounds of my characters talking, the textures of their pants, the lengths of their dress hems, the leafy, worn ends of magazines stacked by the toilets--all that came back. Quietly, insistently, easily. As if the fog just blew away.