Betwixt-and-Between

by Jenny Boully

  There is a type of daydreaming that can foretell the future, a type of dreaming that explains why nothing is being written. She turns into a sheet of paper. When does the dream stop being a daughter and start being a sheet of paper? At what point are you mine and then not mine? At what point was she my baby and then not my baby? It was and then it was not. What the season brings us to suffer (because seasons, no matter how lovely, will bring us to suffer), it brings when we are not looking.

  I know the look of a cracked landscape, winter in black and white, flat and finite with a sunset on the horizon like a red heartbeat suffering there. It will take me longer each morning now to go out and face it. The CAT scan has been scheduled for Wednesday.

  How is it that I came to be here this way, with the wind a suggestion that it was, indubitably was, autumn (already and again)? What I want was in bed; he kissed me and said good-bye. And at three o’clock in the afternoon, the world takes on a stormy look.

  The X-ray technician asks if there is any possibility I could be pregnant, because if I am, harm to the fetus could occur, might occur, should occur, would occur, could have occurred, might have occurred, should have occurred, or would have occurred.

  Don’t move, she says.

  For some people, the pain never goes away.

  Forecast Essay

  Everyone is dying

  Everyone is dying. I must remember this always but especially whenever I am on the phone with my mother and she is telling me that her mother has died. I must begin to treat everyone I meet and visit as if they are, very soon, going to die. I too am dying. I need to begin believing this, especially whenever I have a goal of spending the day in my study concentrating on nothing but my writing and do not spend the day in my study writing. I need to begin treating my thoughts, observations, and inclinations, that find themselves manifested as rhythms, that then suggest words and paragraphs and landscapes of syntax, as if they too are dying and will not be remembered again, will never again present themselves with the opportunity to be written down. In order to be a better writer and better reader, I need to believe in my own death and in the death of others.

  I will grow into madamhood

  Last week, returning my library books, a gentleman passes quickly in front of me, pauses to say, “Excuse me, Miss,” before moving on. Today, in the deli, the worker asks, “Can I help you, Miss?” It occurs to me that I am a miss, and I wonder when I will no longer be a miss and will begin to be a ma’am. I am not even quite sure what ma’am is; I think it must be an abbreviated version of madam. In French, instead of miss, there is mademoiselle, which means little or young madame; therefore, I am a little madam. I will grow into madamhood, just as I grew into miss-hood. A miss is someone who is addressed. A girl child is never addressed. (I knew for certain when I ceased to be a girl child, because I was suddenly being addressed.) A madam, on the other hand, addresses. I see these women in the deli, and they are not afraid to say what they want before they are addressed. One ma’am in the drug store today even went so far as to address no one in particular, saying loudly, “Hello! We need a cashier here!” while I, a little madam ahead of her in line, waited patiently to pay for my goods. Perhaps madams know that time is, for them, beginning to become compressed, or perhaps time has already gone from them. Perhaps they believe, as misses do not, that they are dying. I will grow from one who is addressed into one who addresses. Perhaps I should not wait any longer to be addressed; in writing, I should always be the impatient and demanding madam, however prema-ture I think this might be, and address, even if the addressee is no one in particular.

  Everything will become so compressed it will exist no longer

  I am wondering where the great libraries are, those libraries that, were they to catch fire, scholars and bibliophiles would be gravely sad, depressed not so much over the loss of the vast amounts of knowledge and history, but rather the loss of books themselves, the binding and stitching and engraving.

  The brittle nature of things makes us love them and wish to preserve them. Only when your grandmother is old do you begin to wish that she would live forever. Only when a keepsake begins to show signs of decay or when a beloved sweater begins to fray do we want to treat it more tenderly or perhaps handle it less than we should like.

  I am wondering where, in the future, the great libraries will be, as everything is moving toward a state of obliteration. Due to our desire to preserve information in the most compressed form achievable, we may eventually, however inadvertently, erase the very information we are striving to preserve. In my short life, I have seen the compression of the technological means of memory, but I have also witnessed the loss of those memories. Desktop computers have shrunk into ultra-thin laptops; tube televisions have flattened into panel screens; vinyl records have been replaced by compact discs that were then replaced by digital music files; DVDs took the place of VHSs; floppy disks were replaced by tiny memory chips in the bodies of slim computers. I have seen technology break down; I have seen families grieve the loss of their family photos and videos, which were only saved digitally. I have had personal e-mail accounts wiped totally clean by corporations I had entrusted with the preservation of my correspondence. One can only surmise, given the trends of memory compression, that everything will become so compact it will exist no longer; or, the data and information and files will exist, only they will be inaccessible—in other words, they will exist as myth, ghostly, in the realm of the afterlife.

  Our drive to keep and preserve seems to have achieved only the obliteration of self and memory. I know someday our technology will have made possible a world that is no longer 3-D; everything will be flat and thin and unperceivable. To live in such a world, humans too will have to transform into beams of light measuring in micromillimeters. Writers, it seems to me, have been ahead of this technology since the beginning of information storage, as it is they who have always, in efforts to live forever, transferred the whole of their beings onto paper, attempting to take the soul—that very spacious thing—and install it into the finite space of a book.

  How writing differs from violent weather

  The inhabitants of the earth can do nothing to alter the immediate weather, although they can forecast what the weather might be like. In situations where weather poses an imminent threat to life and shelter, residents, the news stations tell us, should “brace themselves.” For a long time, I have known what systems of weather were heading toward me. There were essays churning in the dark overhead, gathering and threatening: an essay on the anatomy of lotus flowers; one concerning the ecology of ponds; treatises on capitalism, slavery, and language; the story of my mother being sold into slavery for bags of rice; the story of my father in cotton fields; a visual essay on celestial bodies; an essay on kelp seahorses. In writing, I want to blend the factual with feeling—not just the speed of wind, the amount of rainfall, the damage of floods, but the emotions of the woman who has just learned that, due to the weather, for which she did or did not brace herself, she has lost everything. To brace myself from the storm of the essay on lotus flowers, I imagine I will have to surround myself with botany illustrations, use nothing but lotus-scented beauty products, visit botanical water gardens, try to remember the taste of the ripe lotus seeds I ate over five summers ago. Perhaps I should not, as residents facing a hurricane, brace myself, but rather take the boards off my windows and let the storm in. Perhaps “bracing” is merely another way of saying “waiting.” I should do better to face the storm unprepared and deal with the aftermath—writing that is distraught, malformed, imperfect, ugly, unsuited, soiled, ruined, lost, and irrecoverable—when the storm passes, in those moments when I pretend to but do not really revise anything. How writing then differs from violent weather: in storms you have not where once you had; in writing you have where once you had not.

  On Writing and Witchcraft

  When I was thirteen, I was attracted to witchcraft. I wasn’t so much interested in the outcomes of the various spells, b
ut rather I was fascinated by the seemingly arcane and beautiful tools of the craft. It seemed to me that witchcraft was like a really serious spa session, not that I had ever been to a spa. In movies, you see knives and blood, but in the books I stole from bookstores when I was younger, I read about sea salt and candles, catclaw and cowslip, mandrake and lovage, rose hips and wormwood, lavender and thistle.

  I knew some kids who really believed they were witches; I also knew some kids who really believed they were vampires. The witches were often suicidal, had the scars to prove it, and didn’t appear to have any parents. In biology class, I cut the foot off a frog during a dissection. I let it dry, and when it was dry enough, I pierced it and hung it from a necklace. The witches thought it was a talisman, and they wanted me to give it up. They met me as I was getting off the bus and asked to see it. They went through my necklaces one by one and demanded to know which one was the talisman because, they said, I was not a witch, and I wasn’t allowed to have it.

  There is a difference between a talisman and an amulet, and although both can be made through witchcraft, my frog’s leg was neither a talisman nor an amulet. It was just that: a frog’s leg preserved in formaldehyde hanging about my neck. But the witches, who never appeared to go to school and perhaps because of this didn’t know how I might acquire a frog’s leg, apparently thought that I had captured and killed a frog to make a talisman.

  I wanted to begin, initially, by telling you about a textbook representative who came by my office one day. He asked what I taught. I said I taught creative writing. He said his company had many books to help me teach creative writing. He opened his catalog and highlighted many handbooks that were written or edited by important writers. These books would help me teach my students the craft of poetry or the craft of writing, and I suddenly realized that, although I had been forced during my undergraduate education to use such handbooks, I have never used or even considered using such a book in my teaching of writing. I politely feigned interest, holding back my horror and shock that such tools, like medieval medical devices, were used and still being used to teach writing.

  Once, I performed a spell to get a boy whom I wasn’t in love with to fall in love with me. Unlike most spells in the books, this one only required two ingredients: a pink candle and rose oil. The spell book instructed me to rub the rose oil on the pink candle while envisioning the love this boy and I would share. I was then to burn the candle for three nights, and whenever the candle was burning, I was to keep envisioning this love. I didn’t have the rose oil, but I had roses growing outside in my parents’ garden; I took the petals and soaked them in water, and I used that water instead. I had many differently colored candles acquired from Wicks ‘n’ Sticks, a small candle-shop chain located in a mall, where I would also run into and try to evade the witches who thought I had a talisman I should not have.

  Perhaps it was because I used rose water instead of rose oil that I had such a terrible time with this boy. He did fall in love with me, and one night, when I refused him, he tried to stab me with a butcher knife. Like many things, I never told my parents about it. I blamed the craft: my motives were insincere; the spell soured.

  The witchcraft I read up on was considered white magic. Black magic was dangerous, or so the books said. I read about the terrible things that might happen to you if you performed black magic, usually spells of revenge or spells that would otherwise harm others. To practice black magic was to make a pact with the darkness in the universe. Some books called this darkness the devil. If you practiced black magic, you had to let the wickedness in.

  Coincidence or not? When I was twenty-one, I made a pact with myself: my writing should always be sincere.

  Although I was horrified by the idea of using a handbook in my writing classes, I thought back to the exercises I was subjected to as an undergraduate. Many of them involved thinking about past situations and then writing through them. In this way, the exercises resembled therapy: confronting an experience with the goal of moving beyond it to free oneself from buried trauma. The writing handbooks seemed to suggest that one could not be a writer if one had bottled up emotions or had not properly dealt with those emotions. Other exercises I remembered had to do with envisioning or making manifest the unknown, giving shape to the unknown. You had to imagine a hypothetical scene and then write through it in order to discover the plot, the drama, the motivations of characters, and, eventually, unlock the ending. In this way, the exercises resembled witchcraft; in witchcraft, you imagine in order to achieve, and it seemed to me that the writing exercises had the identical goal.

  Witches are supposed to make an altar in the home. They are to sanctify the altar and keep it sacred by warding off negative feelings and forces. The goal is to purify.

  Today, it’s eight degrees in Chicago. I left my husband with my in-laws in New York City and returned to Chicago before my teaching semester began so that I could write.

  This seems puzzling to others. Why subject myself to a harsh Chicago January when I don’t start work again until the end of the month?

  In witchcraft, there is something called the threefold law. It means that everything you do has repercussions, and those repercussions will be threefold. So when, with insincerity, I made that boy fall in love with me, I faced, threefold, a very bad repercussion.

  I know I’m supposed to be talking about the craft of writers in this essay and not the craft of witches, but I want to do what I’m doing now, and I suppose that this is really what I’m trying to say about writing: it isn’t about what you are supposed to do but rather what you want to do, and that is why I have such a hard time with those writing manuals.

  So how do I craft? How do I write? It depends on what I am writing. My projects are usually long and considered “book-length,” which usually means, at least in the poetry world, more than forty-eight pages. Lewis Carroll said that he believed in “periods of intense work followed by periods of perfect idleness.” I hate to admit that I also operate in this way. I may work on a project for three months and then do nothing for another three months. I wait for the moment; I wait for the conditions to be right. I have to be allowed to be quiet, to mentally hibernate, to clear the clutter in my mind. The more I interact with other people, the more rusty and encumbered I become. In “Levels of Reality in Literature,” Italo Calvino writes, “The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work.” I find myself spending many months inventing this “I.” It is a bit like witchcraft: staging a certain sacredness before the sacredness can start.

  When I do get to that sacred place, I work daily there. I make myself write a page a day. I regret that I cannot really speak about craft, that is, about the particulars of fleshing out a sentence or a line or revising it to meet my needs. It may seem absurd to say that a certain mystical dream cloud covers my writing time. The time lasts for about an hour. It begins immediately upon my waking in the morning, and once that cloud has lifted, I find that I can no longer write. I don’t force myself, but usually the page has been written before the cloud has lifted.

  A talisman will bring things to you, such as power or luck or positive energy or whatever it is you want to come to you, while an amulet will guard and protect you from bad spirits, evil, negative forces, or whatever it is you don’t want to come near you.

  The writing manuals always remind you to think about the reader, but I find that when I do so, I relinquish sincerity. The spell sours. The lover whom you made love you will come at you with a knife.

  Perhaps, in writing, I leave out a simple fact: that the boy whom I wanted to love me was embedded within the group of witches and was older than me—eighteen—and also a proclaimed Satanist who had carved pentacles and upsidedown crosses into his skin. I still do not understand why, at thirteen, I wanted someone who loved the dark to also love me.

  In writing, too, there exists the struggle with sincerity and wanting someone t
o love me. There is a craft in that, I do think: the craft of writing as the craft of getting someone to love me.

  I am watching snow blow or else melt into icicles on the various roofs around me. It is twelve degrees. I have no desire to leave my house; I haven’t felt like leaving my house in days. I am the happiest I have been in months. I wish for more snow; I wish for a blizzard; I want the blizzard to last for days.

  But let’s say I’m not writing something very long; let’s say that I’m writing a short essay. Then the essay may begin this way: it may begin with a suspicion. I follow that suspicion until it gives me something I might have been searching for. I let it stay that way all day. I get up. I sit down to write again. I see a hole here or there, and I fill it in. I see a connection here or there, and I make the connection or else try to. I rearrange my block paragraphs. I may write from the middle out or pick up from the end again. I let this go on for days sometimes, but rarely more than that, finding that the intensity diminishes after too much sitting.

  To prepare for a spell, a witch needs to take a bath in water that has been through some process of purification, which can be done through meditation and sea salt. Depending on the type of spell or ritual to be carried out, certain oils and herbs should be in the bathwater. During the bath, the witch must, in addition to cleansing her body, cleanse her mind. After this, the witch can put on her special robe and chant under the moon that is in a particular phase and throw salt and herbs upon the earth. When I was thirteen, this all sounded like such beautiful fun, but I never had the herbs, and I never was able to cleanse my mind. I made a very bad witch.