It seemed that
we had hardly begun and we were already there |
We see only the leaves and
branches of the trees close in around the house. Those submissive games were sen-sual. I was no more than three or four years old,
but when crossed I would hold my breath, not from rage but from stubbornness, until I lost con‑
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sciousness. The shadows one day deeper. Every family has its own collection of
stories, but not every family has someone to tell them. In a small studio in an old farmhouse, it
is the musical expression of a glowing optimism. A bird would reach but be secret. Absence of allusion: once, and ring alone. The downstairs telephone was in a little
room as dark as a closet. It made a
difference between the immediate and the sudden in a theater filled with
transitions. Without what can a person
function as the sea functions without me.
A typical set of errands. My
mother stood between us and held our hands as we waded into the gray-blue
water, lecturing us on the undertow, more to add to the thrill of the
approaching water than to warn us of any real danger, since she would
continue to grip us by the hand when the wave came in and we tried to jump
over it. The curve of the rain, more,
comes over more often. Four seasons
circle a square year. A mirror set in
the crotch of the tree was like a hole in the out-of-doors. I could have ridden in the car forever, or
so it seemed, watching the scenery go by, alert as to the circumstances of a
dream, and that peaceful. Roller coast. The fog lifts a late sunrise. There are floral twigs in position on it. The roots of the locust tree were lifting
the corner of the little cabin. Our
unease grows before the newly restless.
There you are, and you know it’s good, and all you have to do is make
it better. He sailed to the war. A life no more free than the life of a lost
puppy. It became popular and then we
were inundated with imitations. My old
aunt entertained us with her lie, a story about an event in her girlhood; a
catastrophe in a sailboat that never occurred, but she was blameless,
unaccountable, since, in the course of the telling, she had come to believe
the lie herself. A kind of burbling in
the waters of inspiration. Because of
their recurrence, what had originally seemed merely details of atmosphere became,
in time, thematic. As if sky plus sun must
make leaves. A snapdragon
volunteering in the garden among the cineraria gapes its maw between the
fingers, and we pinched the buds of the fuchsia to make them pop. Is that willful. Inclines.
They have big calves because of those hills. Flip over small stones, dried mud. We thought that the mica might be gold. A pause, a rose, something on paper, in a
nature scrapbook. What follows a
strict chronology has no memory. For me,
they must exist, the contents of that absent reality, the objects and
occasions which now I reconsidered. The
smells of the house were thus a peculiar mix of heavy interior air and the
air from outdoors lingering over the rose bushes, the camellias, the
hydrangeas, the rhododendron and azalea bushes. Hard to distinguish hunger from wanting to
eat. My grandmother was in the
kitchen, her hands on her hips, wearing what she called a “washdress,” watching
a line of ants cross behind the faucets of the sink, and she said to us, “Now
I am waging war.” There are strings in the terrible distance. They are against the blue. The trees are continually receiving their
own shadows.
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Source of the text - Lyn Hejinian, My Life. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987, p. 12-13.
TJB: Self-centoed. Tropes of matriarchs, water images, and plants recur in these sprung sentences reconsidering “objects and occasions.”
