Esmé Weijun Wang

TROUBLE

by Matthew Dickman

Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the hollywood sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

This is part of a larger piece that I am currently working on.

My elementary school library kept what I imagine to be a stranger variety of books than most other elementary school libraries; or perhaps it only seems that way to me now, looking back in adulthood, at my childhood spent plucking from the shelves mid-century books about subjects such as soap carving (which I attempted, poorly, with a butter knife), sculpting clay busts (resulting in postmodern monstrosities), and other how-to books that caught my eye. In particular, I began to check out every survival manual the school had, which was, for a school located in a mostly white, affluent suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, about three or four too many. In these survival manuals — also, I suppose, from the 40s or 50s — there were instructions on how to survive in every landscape that Mother Nature could try to kill you with. Armed with such books, I learned that human ingenuity could thwart such murder; if you were lost at sea, you could drink from the eyeballs of sea turtles, and slit their throats for blood, which made catching sea turtles seem much easier than I’m sure it is; if you were stranded in the desert, you could dig a funnel-shape in the sand, line it with cling film, and condensation would niftily accumulate until there was enough water to drink at the bottom of the funnel to keep you alive.

I don’t know why I was so interested in these survival manuals. I hated camping, having done it once with my Girl Scout troop, where I attracted all of the mosquitoes in the entire wood, although I did enjoy telling the other girls that I’d seen the fiery numbers “666” in the outhouse — an incredibly mean trick in retrospect, not knowing if it forced any of my fellow Scouts to relieve themselves on the forest floor. I had never been in a desert, nor was I planning on being in a desert, and even though I lived within an hour’s drive to the Pacific, I was certainly not going to be lost at sea anytime soon. But I continued to be obsessed with survival manuals, renewing them over and over until my interest expanded to first-aid manuals, which is how I learned to create a tourniquet.

Was I afraid of death? I had never been to a funeral, or lost anyone I loved. I did go through a period, common enough in children, when I cried and panicked regularly about the fact that my parents — and my mother, in particular — were going to die. She reassured me that she was not going to die anytime soon. She told me that when she was old, which would be in the distant future, I would be an adult, and therefore ready to accept her death. She also pointed out that people tended to die in a certain order, and both my grandmother and grandfather, who I thought of as very old, were still alive. I was an anxious child, but these reassurances sufficed to keep me functional.

My obsession with survival, with how to catch fish and the differences between a first- and third-degree burn, made it all the more confusing when I first heard of suicide. It is one of the few childhood events that I remember without a record or a retelling by someone else. I was older than six, the year we moved from San Jose to the suburbs, and I was sitting in the living room of our second house, the one I would live in for twelve years — which was, in the beginning, very 1970s, with orange-brown carpeting, enormous gold-framed mirrors. I was watching television with my parents. According to the television, a man had jumped from a building and died. I was baffled.

I began writing again today. In the back of my mind is the idea that my physical ailments are because I have gone for so long without writing, which seems melodramatic, but I have been trying medications and poultices and acupuncture and herbal Eastern soups from pouches and a little electric machine that sends pulses through sticky pads, which my mother mailed to me from Taiwan, so why not try to write a new novel, or an essay about love and food, or more updates here. At least it makes me feel useful in the old, familiar way. So I will have to commit myself to learning how to use this dictation software in earnest, probably this weekend, as I still find myself having to correct every sentence, and I don’t even know how to get it to recognize my name.

The red gorgeousness in the above picture, by the way, is a shawl I purchased from Tuhkimo Shawls on Etsy, which I highly recommend. I have been wearing it everywhere, and it honestly brings me a feeling of deep comfort. How amazing, to be able to make things like that.

This week I had to remember a lesson that I’d forgotten: what looks like it might work best does not necessarily work best. I don’t remember much about Stephen King’s On Writing, but the one thing I do remember is that he is adamant about having a steady — if I remember correctly, daily — work schedule. Anything else is just excuses. When I was churning through the first draft of TLW, I got up at 4 AM every weekday and wrote till I had to go to the office at 9 AM. In the last few months, though, since I’ve been fixing up TLW for the next go-round (due in early-to-mid-December), I haven’t been able to wake up at 6 AM, let alone 4. The old way didn’t work anymore. Still, I tried to squeeze work out of those two hours, which more often than not resulted in nothing but frustration and a crummy mood.

Then I remembered, with Chris’s help, that big expanses of time are what work for me. (That’s why I love residencies so much, as infrequently as I get to do them.) Now I’m setting aside weekends for nothing but writing. My weekday evenings will be for family, friends, reading, cooking. Whatever I like. Then on the weekends, I clear off the kitchen table, set up my little arrangement of a candle, water, and so forth, and go.

I’m writing this three hours deep (with the help of Freedom) into a day-long writing session. After the three hours, I went down to the corner coffee shop and bought myself a vanilla milkshake, which will be lunch for today, and I sipped on that while watching an episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” (We all need breaks.) Above you can see my set-up, including an enormous canvas bulletin board, ice-cold water, Daphne lounging in her crate, my laptop, and a lavender candle. Flowers. It’s 11:49 AM. In other news, I received a letter from Yaddo stating that I’m on the wait list for 2013. This year has gone by so swiftly, and all I want for it to do is slow the heck down.

I know I’ve been away for a while. The longer I’m away, the less inclined I am to write here, as is the case with most habits best kept regularly. My radio silence is, for once, not indicative of poor mental health; I’ve been working closely with my team, am on new, better medications, and have been feeling better than I have in over a year. With the reawakening of my formerly “mudgy” and deranged mind comes an urgency to catch up on everything I’ve missed out on, including figuring out next steps for my job, making semi-major revisions to THE NOWAK CONFESSIONS (note the new title), and spending time with my little family of three. Among other things.

Autumn is here. My co-workers, most of whom are from out East, marvel/complain about the lack of seasons in San Francisco. It’s true that there are no obvious demarcations of time passing, except for the light, which will soon visit less often. I’m not looking forward to that, but hopefully I’m stronger now, and the darkness won’t affect me as much as it usually does.

I go jogging with Daphne in the mornings, which she seems to enjoy. Afterwards she curls up on the couch and naps for hours, which is not a bad way to live, I don’t think.

I was in the car with P the other day. She was dropping me off at home after one of our writers’ group meetings. She said, “I have a friend who just moved here, and she’s upset with me because I’ve only seen her once the entire time she’s been here. She said, ‘Is it really that hard to make time to have drinks once a month?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I just can’t do it right now.’ She doesn’t understand. It’s the writing. It consumes everything.” I nodded. I do understand, and at the same time, I worry that this is an unhealthy way to live.

When I repeated this story to Chris, he said, “You’re like that, too. It’s only because you finished your book that you’re not like that now. And you’re much easier to live with, because of it.”

I hope you all have a beautiful, beautiful day.

Because I am having so much trouble writing something new, I find myself reading more than usual, and with rapidity. Recently I read The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk). Then They Came Like Swallows (Maxwell). Now I’m reading A Sport and a Pastime (Salter) — sex scenes and descriptions of France. The new Sheila Heti comes out tomorrow. My female-writer book club is reading it next, and then Cruddy (Barry), which I still haven’t read — I know, I’m awful.

I have hopes that if I inhale enough books, and if I let them ferment inside me, I’ll have something to write. I have ideas for something having to do with farm animals and a Russian-American firefighter and China declaring war on Taiwan, but these are just notes in my Filofax right now. I have, what, 300 words of it so far. I’ve been taking pictures again with my Polaroid, using expired Polaroid film, because I don’t have a dry age kit and all of the old Impossible Project pictures I took crystallized and changed color — very frustrating, but I’ll have to bite the bullet and start using the dry age kits eventually, I know…

Chris is off for the summer (he works at a school), and he’s been impossibly patient with me these days in a way that bewilders me and fills me with gratitude.

I am chewing on the insides of my cheeks in my sleep again, and have agitated mornings…

But what beautiful brambles in the jar on our coffee table. What bright evenings. Cashmere cardigans in June.

I sent off my manuscript, a timeline, and a list of facts checked (thank you, Sara Carbaugh, superstar VA of Your Creative Ally, for the fact-checking) to my agent this morning, and then I promptly fell asleep on the couch for an hour, which is very much unlike me when I wake up, as I do, early-early-early in the mornings. But it felt like a fitting “ending” to the first of many “endings,” when it comes to this book. By the time I’d woken up, A had written me back, saying that she was bringing the materials on a scouting trip with her, and that she’d let me know when she thought she had something of a timeline.

While all of this is going on with Delusions (we’ll see if I get to keep the title when this is all through), I’ve been playing around with my “new” Polaroid Spectra and the packs of Impossible Project film I bought. The first few shots came out decidedly awful, but slowly I started to come out with shots that I liked. I’m taking a nudes class with Chloe Aftel next week, which I’m quite chuffed about; my pal Kristin, photographer extraordinaire, is also taking the class. Perhaps I’ll post some of those NSFW shots up here when the time comes!

It’s important, I’ve decided, that there’s something in my life right now that is not writing, that can sit in my hands and heart and let my life be full of making and seeing things in new ways, to learn a new skill, to play with this film that is so fun that I actually had dreams last night of shooting with TIP film last night.

This is the bedroom-in-progress. The blush pink dress is one that I love so much that I wore it to tatters; the plant is from Lowe’s; we are getting a bed frame, but until the bed frame is delivered, the mattress will be on the floor. Chris put up curtains yesterday and felt so proud as a result — to the point of sending pictures to his father, who replied: “Good job!!”

I worked steadily on editing the last chapter today. Rarely do I ignore hunger to do anything, but I was caught up in work and kept putting the whole Eating Food thing off until I had a reworked version. Oh, how editing is so much more fun than drafting. So it seems. And then I read half of it out loud into Voice Memo on my phone to listen to, for the sake of smoothing things out. (I recommend this. It’s helpful.)

    The roads turn to highway and they are moving quickly again with the valley all around them, hills the color of awakening grass, Gillian’s head turned with a wet face, pretending to sleep but really looking and thinking, There is so much of the world. Again one of the Nowak books, the World Atlas, comes to mind; Eden was a place, and so, too, were Greece and Rome; so, too, were Africa and South America. And here she is seeing the spaces in between the only places she knows. How much more of it can there be? The possibilities feel unfathomable and infinite. She pictures herself playing her piano and peering over the top to see William, his head bobbing, his ecstatic fingers leaping, and she remembers him pressing his face against the warmth of her back in the sun in the endless meadow, and she remembers her father and mother and William and herself sitting around the dinner table with golonka and a broiled fish and mustard greens. In her memory William pelts an insult at her when she was being grumpy: “The crabbiest crustacean of them all.” — from today’s work

I was so pleased when H made coffee upon my arrival and then poured it in the above orange mug, a mug from Finland, because that was the mug that I used when we were in graduate school together and spent hours and hours writing in her apartment, making pots upon pots of coffee, and we are doing the same thing here. The above is a Levenger, a new red one, that I bought specifically for the edits and the rest of the life of Delusions. You can’t read them in the picture, but those are my notes about my agent’s notes about the first round of edits; H received her book cover in the mail yesterday and today we talked about her second book, a novel, which is already big and beautiful and stunningly ambitious.

I do not like Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked Valentine’s Day. I was somber for most of the day, and my cold seems to have transitioned into much hacking coughing, but without the Hallmark trappings, etc., if this is a day about love, I should be ecstatic to celebrate it, and I believe I will be having Prego spaghetti and fine wine tonight.