Skinny Dipping

§74 [9.ii.24.b] Finally, now that L.W. is recovered from the flu and she doesn’t have to play nursemaid (as enjoyable as that is, no really, it’s great when someone else really needs you, although I suppose this is debatable since I recall that Bernardo Soares, in his Factless Autobiography, wrote that he would hate for anyone to have to take care of him when he was sick for the simple reason he can’t bear the thought of having to care for someone else when they are sick, there’s probably more to it than that, but I can’t be bothered to look up the precise passage at the moment given that I only have seventeen minutes left to write this note), V.W. is back working on “The Hours” which (as we know) will become her masterpiece (or one of them), Mrs Dalloway. How exciting to be sitting next to her at her writing desk as she labors in her mine, those subterranean caverns from which she’s drawing out literary gold. What do you imagine that I’ll draw out of my mine? literary radium (!) perhaps? L. Frank Baum, in writing The Patchwork Girl of Oz in 1913, described a village populated by “Horners”, round mulitcolored people with with (you guessed it : !) horns protruding from their foreheads who mine radium and use it to decorate the interiors of their houses. Clearly, this was before “we” discovered just how deadly radium is if used for ornamental purposes. Still the idea of literary radium intrigues me …

May I generalize? Could I say that we writers (poets : !!) are compulsive spelunkers? How many writers can you name who aren’t (or haven’t been) obsessed with death? — the Great Subject :: Caves (natural mines) have always been closely associated with death. Where else could the land of the dead be located except for the Underworld? Elizabeth Sewell writes about this in The Orphic Voice : connecting the story of Orpheus (the first poet) who goes down into Hades in search of his dead wife, Eurydice : caves (and by extension, mines) are “the site of a journey between the two worlds of the living and the dead.” I don’t want to make too much of V.W.’s mining for gold metaphor (too late : ?), but there’s also a danger of not making enough of it. But speaking of gold, here it is :

The great thing is never to feel bored with one’s own writing. That is the signal for a change—never mind what, so long as it brings interest. And my vein of gold lies so deep, in such bent channels. To get it I must forge ahead, stoop & grope. But it is gold of a kind I think.

What can I add to that statement? Nothing really, but being a writer (poet : !), I can’t not write something : one’s own interest in what one is writing is justification enough for writing it— “never mind what” it is that you write, as long as it really interests you, just run (naked?) with it. So what if your little fantasy novel gets streaked by nonfantasy diagonals! A zebra wouldn’t be half so interesting without its stripes.