Carole Maso: Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire

Unfinished and left that way. Unfinished, not abandoned. Unfinished, not because of death or indifference or loss of faith, or nerve, just unfinished.

Not to draw false conclusions anymore. Not to set up false polarities. Unfinished and left that way, if necessary.

To allow everyone to write, to thrive, to live.

The Baltimore oriole returned from its American tropics at the edge of this frame now. I wait.

On this delicious precipice.

And nothing replaces this hand moving across the page, as it does now, intent on making a small mark and allowing it to stand on this longing surface.

Writing oriole . Imagining freedom. All that is possible.

April in the country. My hands in the dark earth, or the body of a woman, or any ordinary, gorgeous sentence.

Whosoever has let the hand linger on a burning thigh, or a shining river of light….

Whosoever has allowed herself to be dazzled by the motion of the alphabet,

or has let music into the body. Or has allowed music to fall onto the page.

Wish: to live and allow others to live. To sing and allow others to sing — while we can.

And hurt not.

Fleeting and longing moment on this earth. We were lucky to be here.

I close my eyes and hear the intricate chamber music of the world. An intimate, complicated, beautiful conversation in every language, in every tense, in every possible medium and form — incandescent.

— for Alvin, Barbara, and Judith

1 June 1995

Like the clarinet with the flute, like the French horn with the oboe, like the violin and the piano — take the melody from me, when it’s time.

25 April 1995

Germantown, New York

A walk around the loop and I notice the bloodroot has begun to bloom. A bluebird, two bluebirds! The first I’ve ever seen, over by the convent. Before my eyes I see an infant clasping a small bird as depicted in Renaissance painting and sculpture. The world begins again. In this vision. In the words bloodroot and bluebird . And the goldfinches too are suddenly back. Today I saw three enormous turtles sunning themselves at a pond. The bliss of being on leave from teaching is beyond description. I recall Dickinson when someone mused that time must go very slowly for her, saying, “Time! Why time was all I wanted!” And so ditto. Blissful time. Writing, walking every day. I am keeping depression at bay, mania in check. All private sufferings and hurt are somehow more manageable here in solitude. The moment seems all now. The imaginative event, the natural event (two wild turkeys in the woods), the sexual event, and the constantly changing and evolving forms in language for all of this. John sends a note to remind me that my essay is due for the Review of Contemporary Fiction on May ι, but that I may have a small extension. I should be finishing up Defiance , but all I can think about are my erotic études — again feeling on the threshold of something amazing and out of reach. I’m extremely excited — hard to describe — my brain feels unhinged…

I must make a note as to where to move the daffodils, the iris. The earth in my hands. A wand of forsythia like a light in my hands. I think of Barbara an hour away, the glowing glyphs coming off the screen in her study. The whole world — luminous, luminous. We were lucky to be here. Even in pain and uncertainty and rage and fear — some fear. In exhaustion.

Too much energy has gone into this Brown/Columbia decision. Where shall I end up? I have only partially succeeded in keeping it all in its proper place. I’ve had to work too hard to keep my mind at the proper distance. It takes its toll. I’ve needed the space to think, to dream other things. It hardly matters today though; another étude brews.

The RCF essay now in the back of my head. What to say? What can be said? How to use it to learn something, explore something I need to explore. When thinking of literature, the past and the present all too often infuriate me: everyone, everything that’s been kept out. The future won’t, can’t be the same and yet…one worries about it. What I wonder most is if there is a way, whether there might be a way in this whole wide world, to forgive them. Something for the sake of my own work, my own life I need to do — have needed to do a long time. Perhaps in my essay I will make an attempt, the first movement toward some sort of reconciliation, at any rate. If it’s possible. To set up the drama that might make it possible.

This breakable heart.

April. How poised everything seems. How wonderfully ready. And I, too, trembling — and on the verge…

T HE AUTHOR WISHES to thank those that published these essays, sometimes in different form: Conjunctions, American Poetry Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Seneca Review, A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Reclaiming the Heartland (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Tales from the Couch: Writers on the Talking Cure (Avon, 2000).

And a special thanks to Bradford Morrow.