Skinny Dipping

[3.i.24.c] The Woolfs have returned to Hogarth House / Paradise Road / Richmond. I have not returned from anywhere for the simple reason that I’ve never left. I don’t do so much moving around—and certainly not from house to house. I’ve been in the same house for the last twenty-one years : this house on Fishers Way has been my space for writing in. All the books I’ve written, I’ve done in collaboration with this house. And to prepare for the next twenty-one years (or perhaps only fifteen, since that’s the average optimal lifetime for any kind of household project), we are installing new insulation throughout the house: attic, walls, and basement. So my house has been full of busy workers for the last two days. And I am displaced. My study is a work zone for a different sort of work. Still, I’m getting plenty of reading & writing done sitting here in front of the fire. And since I don’t have to write a review of Charles Cotton’s translation of the Essays of Montaigne, I will not have to cut short my other reflections which will (no doubt) fill up the rest of this page.

On New Year’s Eve, Alice & I watched Jane B. by Agnès V.  We discovered Jane Birkin (for ourselves) when we were on a trip to Belgium. We were in Toon in Bruxelles having a beer and Jane B.’s album, “Je t’aime … mon non plus” was playing. “Who is this singing?” I asked the bartender. She told us. That afternoon we went to a record store (this was a few years ago, when such places still existed) and bought a copy of the album on CD. I won’t say that Alice & I have become Jane B. fans, but she’s been part of our sonic landscape for over two decades. When Jane B. died last July, I spent a few days listening to her recordings and discovering how much I hadn’t heard yet. Then (as the months passed) I forgot she’d died. Yes, the fact of her death slipped my mind, but something led me to get up from the couch and reach for the case holding my collection of Agnès Varda films and take out Jane B. by Agnès V.  Of course, Alice remembered that Jane B. had died. Maybe some part of me did too.

The next evening, I watched the first episode of Agnès de ci de là Varda (Here & There, an arty travelogue made for TV) and because she (Varda) (when in Berlin) showed a film poster for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, I watched the first episode of that multipart film next.

I don’t watch as many films as I used to. Reading has taken over, demanding time that I can’t possibly yield to sitting on the couch eating popcorn. But I do enjoy film, so why am I denying myself? I think it might have to do with project-based thinking.

When my mania for projects started, I can’t tell you, but for at least as long as I’ve lived in this house, I’ve been working on one or more projects (usually more). The idea of starting a new project thrills me. The actual work involved in realizing the project is pleasurable, but not nearly as fun as starting something new. I don’t have an exact count on how many projects I’ve started and not completed, but I’m certain it’s more than a hundred. What I would have liked to have bitten off is more than most people could reasonably be expected to chew in a lifetime. The thing I like next best after starting a project is writing about that project : my love of the dream of the project. I delight in documenting my process, my plans, my research, my struggles. Each project becomes an adventure in writing and I am the protagonist. It’s adult form of “Let’s Pretend”. I sit at my writing desk, day after day, typing so that I can keep up the pretense of writing. It’s not so much the presence of being a writer that excites my imagination, but the mechanics of writing itself : I’m a student of the process. For whatever reason, I seem to be endlessly fascinated with writing. And not just my own writing. A great many volumes in my library are books by writers who have written about themselves writing. I think one of the reasons I enjoy reading V.W.’s diary is because she tells me about how it is for her to write. Yes, yes, Virginia, I’ve experienced that too, I know just what you are talking about. “Now how much of this is dream, & how much reality?”