A Writer
Backwards is my Answer
On becoming a writer
When left in the company of small kids, which I try to avoid like the plague because they ask questions that are far too sensible, I’m always tempted to ask back but never do, and what do you want to be when you grow up, you clever little asshole.
Kids are disconcerting company, spending their playtime shamelessly scrutinizing you. Fearful of the honest answer, they might say, I want to be an artist, a writer. I haven’t decided yet.
Really? But my mind goes somewhere else. But your family wants what’s best for you. You know they do. Otherwise they would have poisoned your breakfast. And yet…and yet…
So, what are you going to choose? You can be anything you want, you know! That’s what parents say. So. What is it?”
A writer.
You can’t be that! That’s silly. You don’t look that dumb.
You might wonder where I’m going with this thought. Backwards is my answer. It is not hard to remember when I last experienced this. It is like the first time you catch a girl you fancy kissing another boy behind the classroom. There were thunderclaps. And when the quake was over, the ground was no longer beneath my feet.
In a roundabout way, I said something to Dad, feeling sick and lifeless, as if I had felt what love was for the first time. Dad explained it was about ‘growing pains, those early disappointments when shock is mitigated by the confusion and pain of losing innocence.’
He was right, of course. I seldom, if ever, knew him to be wrong about anything. The most destructive disappointments are the ones that come when I think I’ve seen it all and I’m supposed to be blasé.
School is suitable for many things, and I will be the last person to demand these day prisons be abolished. School was where I was forced to confront everything directly. On my way to school on the bus, I imagined barbed wire fences around the schoolyard.
I wondered if this only happened on my island home. Many years on, I read Keats. When the subject of writing came up while I was in the town’s library, I mentioned to the cardigan-wearing, pleated skirt, flat shoe librarian with thick stockings that I loved Keats and spoke this line to impress.
“From forgotten ages we breathe human air and don’t sicken.”
“Excuse me, but that should be, she corrected… ‘From unremembered ages we/ Gentle guides and guardians be/ Of heaven-oppressed mortality;/ And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought.’ It wasn’t John Keats who wrote that, um, it was Percy Shelley actually.”
‘Shelley, Keats, my fucking pet goat, who cares anyway? Nobody does!’ I thought but didn’t say.
The blinkers did eventually fall away. But there was that interim. The groping around time when nothing seems worth doing except much boozing, fornication, smoking, sulking…whatever? Pick your diversion.
I don’t know what day it changed. Call it a Tuesday. I found a book atop a dad’s desk and the lights being turned out. I took it to the window.
“On blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths, getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass: in a dream, I shall feel its coolness on my feet. I shall let the wind bathe my bare head. I shall not speak; I shall think about nothing, but endless love will mount in my soul, and I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy though the countryside — — as happy as if I were with a woman.” Arthur Rimbaud! And the blinkers fell away!
The people closest to me kept saying in baffled, hurt tones, “You’ve changed,” and though I wanted to weep in front of them, I found myself unable to.
Not long after, I discovered my favorite restaurant in Paris, La Dante, in the Latin Quarter, where Rue Saint Severn meets Rue Du Fouarre. It is a place whose existence is of continual amazement to me, as it is where I once sat with Leonard, a whole way of life I had a chance to be but never realized. In that restaurant on that corner, Leonard, in his best reading voice, made Philip Larkin real, “Higher than the handsomest hotel/ The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see, / All round it close ribbed streets rise and fall/ Like a great sigh out of the last century.” *
And that’s the restaurant to which I always go back. Alone, to sit by a cobbled street, lost in thought, wondering how I made it without Leonard.
Today, when asked what I do, I tell them I write.
- ‘The Building.’ Philip Larkin
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D. Denise Dianaty, Editor and Graphic Designer for the WE PAW Bloggers E-Zine. Administrator for the writers forum “WE PAW Bloggers” group and its sister group “Pandora’s Box of Horrors” on Facebook. In addition to being a self-published author and poet, artist, art-photographer, and administrator of the group, “WE PAW Bloggers,” Denise is a graphic designer with 25+ years experience, predominately in print media.
