Yesterday it seemed warm. Not beach weather but warm enough that you didn’t have to button your coat to survive the 30 foot walk from your door to your car without frostbite. Good enough for now.

I talk about the weather a lot, I know. Friday at work Cincinnati, it was raining and cold as I rode with a photographer down a steep grade that dead ended at a cross street. He said he wouldn’t want to negotiate this road in the snow. I agreed as my thoughts inevitably turned to the south. “One thing about Florida is that there are very few hills,” I said. “There are also very few days when there’s ice on the road.”

A moment later I added, “If there’s ice on the road in Florida, it means someone spilled his drink.”

The weather mirrors my mood. In December, it's usually miserable.

Saturday I spent a couple of hours in the Lexington Public Library reading from a book of collected essays titled Writers on Writing. I sat with my notebook, writing down quotations.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

To be a writer at all, it seemed to me, is to be to some extent Jewish -- outsiderish but chosen, condemned to live by your wits.

-- John Updike, explaining why his fictional author Henry Bech is Jewish though Updike is not

With each story -- and by story I mean anything I write -- I am simply trying to work something out for myself.

-- Roxana Robinson

I carry these things around inside my head until I’m compelled to write them down and get rid of them.

-- Roxana Robinson

I copied those down because they explained how I feel, even Updike’s. My spell checker tells me that oursiderish is not a real word but no other one could better describe it. These quotations articulated my own reasons for writing. I’ve done a lot of it lately and I seem to be using the keyboard as a scalpel, trying to cut into myself until I’ve laid myself open to the bones, splayed and vulnerable, with the blood spilling directly from my pulsing heart.

I have ideas in my head that I can only see pieces of because the rest are hidden, elusive, in corners of my mind that I can’t quite reach. If only I could pull those pieces out and put them together, they’d be brilliant and beautiful and profound.

Sure.

Written out in front of me I’d be able to make sense of them, make sense out of my life.

Sure.

What I want my soul to grow into, I don’t know yet. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to work out for myself. Maybe I have too much spare time for reflection that would be better spent doing something useful.

Blame it on the poet Sylvia Plath. It’s her Unabridged Journals that got me started on this introspection. Now, hold on. Before you mistake me for someone literate, I should confess that I had never heard of Sylvia Plath until one day I was wandering around the library and noticed the The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath sitting on a shelf. Having my own journal of sorts made me curious enough to pick it up.

Some quotations from the first 50 pages of that book might explain the trigger.

And so I go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

To know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing.

And you will (study), although you’ve already wasted two hours writing stream-of-consciousness stuff in here when your stream isn’t even much to brag about, after all.

Searching, seeking, unsure, insecure.

And what do I want from these pages; wisdom, insight? Do I believe there must be magic in the words because they are put together in a way that is pleasing to read?

The author of these is a woman who killed herself -- stuck her head in the oven, inhaled the gas and died as her children slept upstairs -- long before I was born after living fewer years than I have now lived. (In 1963 at age 30) Who are these people we ask to tell us things about human nature that we can't recognize ourselves? What meaning do we want from them? Do they feel the weight of our expectations, is that what drags them down?

More likely she thought she could never reach her own expectations. Living in fear of failure was worse than dying. But who am I to guess at her nature? Perhaps she will tell me herself later in her journals.

Is it healthy to be inspired by a suicidal poet or should it disturb me that I understand and even identify with so many of her moods and depressions? In one journal entry she sounds euphoric and in the next inconsolable, the clichéd emotional roller coaster. I have ridden that ride, babe. I have felt irrational elation knowing that I was only peaking for the moment it took to go over the hump into the screaming descent that would plunge me into the deep sea of blues.

It is December again.

E-mail John

[ Journal Index ] [ My Music ] [ Video Clips ] [ Resume ] [ Site Map ]

©2002 John McQuiston