Writing
Spring semester is over and I’m, for lack of a weaker word, bereft. I took Creative Writing and must say that it fulfilled the tasks I wanted it to perform. Because I MUST always have a high GPA, I was diligent. I turned out some adequate prose and some (hopefully) pretty good poetry. One of my poems earned me a small scholarship. Things like that always make me wonder if nobody else applied.
In honor of the Year of Covid-19, I’ve moved my writing to another website that I call It Ain’t Over!
Life goes on, even if it stumbles and bumbles its way along. It’s up to me to make it better. So visit me at the other site to read what I’m writing.
Everybody Has A Story or Be Careful What You Wish For
Everybody has a story, and the longer we live the more our stories seem to loop back upon themselves. Last week, having started over for the millionth time, I was going through papers in preparation for yet another move. I came across my first journal, written in the 1970s when I began searching for who I was. Trite, I know, but for those of us who grew up in the ’50s it was a big deal.
Nice girls of that era were programmed from birth to fulfill one of three specific roles: The role of homemaker, the role of nurse, or the role of teacher. Many of us married very young, either because we got pregnant or we wanted to escape our parents’ smothering households. By the time the ’70s rolled around our first marriage had either become unbearable or was already over. Mine was no exception.
I had never lived alone, had never known the freedom of locking my door at night and knowing that nobody else could enter without my permission. The world was suddenly filled with tasty tidbits, all of which had been off my plate for my entire life. I lived and worked in San Francisco, an original cast member of a musical review called Beach Blanket Babylon, and the world had become my oyster.
The unexpected freedom to be and do anything I wanted was heady wine, but, since I’m an introspective person, I was confronted with the fact that I had no idea who I was. I had always been somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife, and somebody’s mother. I had never even looked at Me.
Introspection can take many forms. Unlike most of my contemporaries, drugs were no enticement. I hated losing track of what I was saying in the middle of a sentence, or falling asleep in my food. Alcohol was there and flowing freely, but I had come from a teetotaler background, and, although I liked wine, I didn’t have much of a stomach for drinking. Sexual experimentation in vast quantities became my drug of choice, but the physical can only go on for just so long. At one point or another we all have to stop and think, to examine our lives.
I began leading an examined life by tracking my emotions, spilling them onto paper in the current style of poetry writing, which disdained rhythm and rhyme. Some of my stuff was published once, almost by accident, but most of it lay where I put it, shared periodically with friends. Some of it I even forgot I’d written.
In addition to doing eight stage shows a week with BBB, I had my own cabaret act, performed regularly in various gay clubs. This was a great outlet for me and a terrific learning experience. Performing in such intimate surroundings taught me that audiences can smell a fake from far away and that authenticity was the way to their hearts.
My brain is a catalog of music. I never forget a lyric and there must be hundreds in my memory. I decided that I should write an original song. How hard could it be? So I put my hand to paper and what did I get? Nothing. Well, I got some trite drivel that sounded as bad as if it were nothing. What was the matter? All of that musical and lyrical information and I couldn’t come up with one good song? Feeling frustrated, but not being the masochistic sort, I gave up music composition then and there and concentrated on singing, dancing, acting, and writing.
The years rolled by and I came to the point where I was no longer in demand for the stage so I moved on. I started a location sound recording company for the motion picture industry, creating with sounds.
When I was forty, I suddenly became a different kind of artist. Never having studied or even done much drawing, I found myself painting and sculpting. This was so foreign to me that it was almost as if I had been taken over by somebody else. Every week I painted in a different style; I sculpted different figures. The art flowed, not from me, but through me.
More years rolled by and I went back to school for my Culinary Arts degree. I worked in restaurant kitchens creating plates of beautifully designed, exquisitely flavored food.
When my age prevented me from continuing to do restaurant work, I taught myself to create web pages and the graphics to go on them, to draw something visible only on the internet out of ones and zeros. And here I am today.
So, you ask, why are you telling me all this? Here’s why. Let’s go back to last week when I came across my first journal. There I found, totally forgotten, a poem written after my failed attempt to compose that song:
_____________________
They’ve used up all the words.
They’ve sung out all the melodies.
I think there are no harmonies that someone hasn’t played.
I want to write a different song, pen poems to help the world along.
But I don’t want the words to rhyme or say trite things that have no meaning.
I want each isolated thought to be clear and to the point.
I want to break the rules that say a song must sound a certain way to be a song.
Still,
All life has a rhythm.
All things follow patterns, too.
I hear life as harmonies that someone made and played.
I want to write a different song, pen poems to help the world along.
And the only way I can reach out and touch you.
To paint you a picture with words that are such
That you hear them and see them and feel them and live them all through,
Is to follow the patterns set out before me.
Give you the same words in different arrangement,
Use melodies, harmonies, colors that others have thought of before.
And still there’s inside me the need to continue
To look for a new word to paint you a sunset.
To search for a color unknown to the palette
To let you hear music that no one around you has heard of before.
I want to write a different song.
________________________________
It was as if, having found it impossible to compose a song, my subconscious decided it would fulfill my dream. It would search for other ways to express itself artistically, looping from artform to artform until satisfied, then moving to the next.
In 1976 with this one poem I unknowingly mapped the next 30 years of my life.
Be careful what you wish for.