Sarah Manguso - Ongoingness - The End of a Diary

In my twenties I stopped to write every time I happened upon beauty. It was an old-fashioned project. Romances were examined in detail. Each one was new.

My thirties were filled not by romance but by other writing. In the diary I logged the words I wrote and the light or heavy passes I took through existing manuscripts. Virtuous activities such as exercise and housekeeping also were logged. The rhapsodies of the previous decade thinned out.

Toward the end of my thirties and into my forties, entries became further abbreviated. Most of the sentences started with verbs. I is omitted from as many sentences as possible, occurring only for emphasis. I logged work and health — symptoms, medications, side effects. Housekeeping was no longer noted. If I read or looked at or heard something extraordinary, I named it, but as one ages, fewer things fall into this category. Reflection disappeared almost completely.

Of a concert by a band I’ve liked for almost twenty years, listened to most recently about five years ago, but never seen live until this week, I wrote only Still know every word. Twenty years ago, the sentence would have been twenty sentences.

Though I try to log only the first time he does yet another extraordinary thing, the diary is now mostly about my son. ♦

Sometimes the baby fed at seven thirty and cried until feeding again at eight thirty.

My life had been replaced with a mute ability to wait for the next minute, the next hour.

I had no thoughts, no self-awareness, just an ability to sit with a little creature who screamed and screamed.

Waiting for the baby to feed or stop feeding or burp or pass wind or yellow liquid shit I postponed showers, phone calls, bowel movements. I ignored correspondence because I had no energy even to say I am so tired , and no one cared that I was tired — who isn’t tired? Before I had the baby I remember feeling tired all the time. But after he joined me I could spend four days in two rooms, pajama-clad, so tired I was almost blind. ♦

I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.

I was at once softer and harder. The hardness was a capacity for pain that would otherwise have interrupted the soft, almost bodiless calm in which I held the baby. ♦

Soon after his mother died, my husband’s dead father’s best friend’s ex-wife died. The best friend is the only one left. My husband said the man’s name. That leaves him , my husband said. That leaves him, of the people who have known me since I was born. And then my childhood will be truly gone. ♦

Another friend wrote to ask all the desperate questions I used to ask before I became a mother. How old were you? How long were you married? How long did it take?

I wrote back, One of the great solaces of my life is that I no longer need to wonder whether I’ll have children. ♦

Time kept reminding me that I merely inhabit it, but it began reminding me more gently.

In a dream I found an old-fashioned windup metronome on my desk. A man’s voice behind me: Is that really a metronome on your desk?

In another dream an old woman told me that at my age, she wished she’d known that the soul never stops appearing. ♦

Perhaps it was all the years studying the piano repertoire of the great prodigies, or perhaps it was studying alongside some actual prodigies — one of them was blind — but when I turned seventeen I became convinced I had fallen into a life of irreversible failure.

The stench of failure — I felt it coming to cover me.

Now I am old enough to know what I’ll never accomplish. I will never be a soldier, a physicist, a thousand other things. It feels like relief.

Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to.

I use my landlady’s piano as a writing desk. ♦

My students still don’t know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it.

I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. I don’t value that truth anymore as much as I value their untested hope. I don’t care that one in two hundred of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what’s coming next.

I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment.

That beginner’s hope, the hope that ends with the first failure — when I was with the baby I felt that hope all the time. ♦

Trapped in a party conversation with two young people, I wanted to wait with them in the smoky hallway for fifteen years so I could hear what they’d say when they were forty. ♦

In another dream my tiny toothless son had all his teeth. I’d looked away long enough for all the teeth to emerge, even the back molars, the teeth beating time in months, in years, his full jaws a pink-and-white timepiece.

In the next dream his downy hair had grown very long and I needed to cut it off with dull scissors. Again his body had recorded time passing, time that had escaped my notice. ♦

For months the baby woke at seven, fed, fell asleep at eight thirty, woke at ten, fed, fell asleep at eleven thirty, and so on for the rest of the day. I’d made him into a milk clock.

Every hour was part of a ritualized ceremony of adding or subtracting milk. A river of milk flowed in and out and around him. He floated down the milk river toward the rest of his life. ♦

One explanation for the loss of preverbal memories maintains that after acquiring language, one forgets how to access those preverbal memories.

As I watched the baby play with his toys I remembered an orange plastic panel fixed to the rails of my own crib. A round red rubber air bladder the size of my fingertip. A bell. A black-and-white crank that clicked. A blue-and-red sphere that spun fast in its housing and looked purple.

My brain had stored this memory — all the textures and colors and shapes and sounds. If you had asked me six months earlier if it were possible to retain infant memories into adulthood I would have said no, but I carried this memory without looking at it for thirty-eight years. ♦

As I fed the baby with a little spoon I remembered a spoon scraping dribbled food from my chin and tipping it back into my mouth. That dribbled food, already tasted and diluted with saliva, never tasted good.

What else was on the orange panel? The bell and the crank and the spinning ball rang and cranked and spun. The air bladder forced the clapper up. I could see it moving up and striking the silver bell anchored by its silver bolt.

I remembered wanting to press the little red bladder again, again, again. Spinning the ball again, again, again. Wanting to see the purple. Wanting to hear the bell. I liked that it kept ringing.

Then I remembered a mirror.

I believed I was trying to remind myself of how it had felt to be wordless, completely of the physical world — that even before my body was an instrument for language it had been an instrument for memory. ♦