Keeping our Heads Above Water, or
No Buoys Allowed

A Novel of Mid-life Crisis

by Frances French

I'm often asked what it's like to be a woman physicist. The question used to please me....Until one day, when the kayak tipped over...
Draft One

Notes Toward "The Novel," by Anne, Liz (and Lucy??)
Title: "Entanglement"

Epigraph: "The world is not as real as we think."

First line: "I couldn't tell whether the cat was alive or dead."

Paragraph to mull over and work from next:

"'...the discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the 20th century'...reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable... a concept...called 'it from bit'....one bit...is not enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one quality remainds unknown, irreducibly random. As the result of the finiteness of information..the universe is fundamentally unpredictable...'this randomness of the individual events is the strongest indication we have of a reality'out there' existing independently of us...'"

What's the plot?
Modern-day lit crit/physicist?
making sense?
gender and science?

Draft Two

"Lucy Darlington shut the door. She wanted to be alone.
Lucy Darlington opened her mirror. She wanted company.
The company she got was sprouting hairs on her chin, crowsfeet around her eyes, and a decided crease over the bridge of her nose, which made her look older than she felt.
What she felt, on the inside, was a lightness of heart-- because she was finally alone."

(n.b."Lucy Darlington" is the PERFECT name for our heroine.)

Draft Three

When Lucy D. shut the door, the world opened before her.
She spread out her mesa...

(or)
It wasn't until Lucy finally shut the door that...

God opened a window? (This would be a bad joke. To be followed by "God! Why did you have to give EVERYBODY free will? Why couldn't you have just given ME free will, and made the rest of them my automatons?")

i think there is a novel to be written about a woman scientist who is aging (and reflecting on what it means to be aging, in a closed universe which operates under the 2nd law of thermodynamics....--i.e.: EVERYTHING's running down...) she's learning to be alone, accepting that this means she is free to move. or--free w/in certain (physical and psychic?) laws.

perhaps--instead of "Twoness"?--
we call it "The Two Body Problem."
Or "Chaos Unbound."
Or "Centering on the Edge"

Here are our epigraphs:

"It all started w/ the moon. If only the earth could have gone round the sun by itself, unperturbed by the complications in its orbit which the moon's gravitational field introduced, Newton's equations of motion would have worked fine. But when the moon entered the picture, the situation became too complex for simple dynamics to handle. The moon attracted the earth, causing perturbations in the earth's orbit which changed the earth's distance from the sun, which in turn altered the moon's orbit around the earth, which meant that the original basis for the calculation had changed and one had to start over from the beginning. The problem was sufficiently complex and interesting to merit a name and a prize of its own. It became know as the three-body problem...." (Katherine Hayles, "Chaos Bound")

"There used to be an odd, popular, and erroneous idea that the sun revolved around the earth. This has been replaced by an even odder, equally popular, and equally erroneous idea that the earth goes around the sun.
In fact, the moon and the earth revolve around a common center, and this commonly-centered pair revolves w/ the sun around another common center, except that you must figure in all the solar planets here, so things get complicated. Then there is the motion of the solar system w/ regard to a great many other objects, e.g., the galaxy, and if at this point you ask what does the motion of the earth really look like from the center of the entire universe, say... the only answer is:
that is doesn't,
Because there isn't." (Joanna Russ, "Aesthetics")

Draft Four: On Aging
(Mar says "why did you name your heroine Lucy Darlington?
Lucy Darlington is 9 years old, and has pigtails.")

This morning, I went to Masterman high school, to observe a student teacher.

She'd asked all her 9th grade students to "share a poem they loved,"
and a red-headed girl named Lucy (!!), whose mother has cancer (!!!)
came up and read this poem, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Perhaps this Lucy is our heroine. She's young. Her cat has died.
And she is thinking and feeling.
Boy: is she thinking and feeling! Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripˇd bag,
or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
--mothers and fathers don't die.

And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always
be kissing a person?" Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window
with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and
shake them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house. Draft Five

The inspiration for this draft also comes from Mar, who rides her bike w/out a helmet. When I remonstrated w/ her last week (after a ride along a particularly risky stretch), She said, "Well, if I crashed and died, I'd still be alive in an alternative universe. So, Mom, it really wouldn't matter...."

Ta dah.

When our heroine Lucy D is 9, her cat dies. She has no trouble, keeping her alive, though, in the world of her active imagination.

(My favorite passage from Robinson's Housekeeping: "need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when...do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?...to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it....whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again...." Then Lucy's mother dies of (ovarian?) cancer. Not wanting to leave the "kingdom of childhood," she enters fully into an alternative universe, "where nobody dies" (this is somehow related to quantum physics; Lizzy, give us a hand!). Her living simultaneously in two universes (one physical, one mental) understandably creates complexities/problems/issues as she ages....



Draft Six
Draft Two said (in part),
Lucy Darlington opened her mirror. She wanted company.
The company she got...

I woke this morning to the memory that we already have this scene, and the company she gets is her own younger self! Whoopee.

As a reminder to those in the audience whose brains are more sieve-like than mine: this l'il piece written by the original Lucy Darlington, who looked in the mirror The Week After the Election: struck by the eyes of fear, a little girl's recognition...
She holds the embers of my creativity. If she goes into hiding I am bound for the greyness of life without fire...
Rather than hiding in fear, how about opening your heart even wider than before and let yourself be surprised. Not bad, not bad @ all.
(From http://serendipstudio.org/forum/2nov04/darlington.html)

While scrolling Serendip in search of whatever traces might have been left by the original Lucy D, I found also some lovely passages @ Writing Descartes. Liz, add these to your assignments: what's the physics here??? ...like dipping into a three dimensional madras plaid, each point of entry harboring a unique confluence of sensory and non-sensory data, no two points being the same, each point an opportunity to experience the whole of the present moment in it's unique configuration of qualities. Thinking, the thing that we do after we to get out, towel off and think about configuring the numerous aspects of any given experience. In this part of the process we create the next story....

A fine description of life lived as a full-bodied wine....: "one acts, [hopefully] observes the consequences ... "

"..I can change who I am"...Isn't quite an absolute....you can think, you can change medication, you can do cognitive re-patterning and sometimes you still can't count on change happening....the process of setting aside thinking, leaping into experience, being in the excitement of the moment, then coming out on the other side and reorganizing experience with thought.... My final addition, this morning, to the rich material we're accumulating as sources for "the novel," is Body/Mind, Unconscious/Conscious, Treeness/Thinking A Five Minute Story. I do believe it works--and this brings us up to Chapter 5. (Revel in the whole thing @ http://serendipstudio.org/sci_cult/lesswrong/descartes/darlingtonstory.html.)
Amazingly, we also seem to have, already, some literary commentary on it, in the form of a query about non-assailable writing, and the author's response, regarding whether her work was assailable or not. See both http://serendipstudio.org/forum/viewforum.php?forum_id=267#11002 and http://serendipstudio.org/forum/viewforum.php?forum_id=267#11028. Feeling the hot cup of coffee warming her hands, sitting on a bench at the old main line rail station, smelling the dark pungent oil wafting off the wooden ties that secure the iron rails, Scout finds herself sighing. "Life requires padding," she muses. Unlike her Quaker ancestors and her Irish catholic forefathers, she believes that sweets and treats and sunny days are necessary to soften the harder edges of getting up each morning when, despite our most earnest efforts, the struggles of yesterday still lie on our doorstep like an incontinent dog that refuses to die and make room for the fearless puppy of our dreams.

This is what crosses her mind as she waits for the train that is going to take her into town for another day of clients. The next thought she has is to wonder why so many of her analogies refer to some bodily activity that includes orifices. As these thoughts mingle with the anticipation of the clients she will be seeing today she lets her eyes focus on the other passengers on the platform.

She smiles at the girl across the tracks, field hockey stick in hand, headed in the direction of her old high school. She notices the way the youngish woman in front of her can't help but reach out and touch her man every few seconds. Though he shows no sign of receiving the affection even if he wanted to reciprocate in kind, it would be difficult since both his hands are full with coffee, newspaper, and umbrella. She checks out the grey haired man with the leather soled, tassel toed, brightly polished Italian shoes, looking intently down the tracks, seeming to will the crotchety old maiden train to be on time this day. She can feel her annoyance growing as she watches him in his solitary activity.

She knows she has been seeing this same man, different hairline, different last name, but same arrogance, her whole life, and today she can feel her blood getting into a roil. When she was 14, on this same train line only a few stops west, when the hem of her red-plaid uniform skirt, field hockey and Timmie Fullam were foremost on her mind, she would find herself making room for these august older men who treated the world as if it were their kingdom and she was just part of the litter on the landscape.

Uh-oh, she thinks, here I go, as she watches her storytelling mind begin to fan the spark of annoyance into a flame. Fuck, not today. I am not making up stories about men today, older men in particular, and god damn-it I am not letting myself react to whatever is getting triggered by my neural-associations.

This is how she thinks these days, neural-associations. Another trick she has found to prevent her self from walking the familiar fateful plank that leads her to falling head first into the swamp of yesterday. "It is not happening today" she says to herself again noticing, with rising panic, that her left shoulder has already begun to knot, like a vise, causing her to wince at the pain as it squeezes the nerve in her neck. No, no, no. Breathe. Breathe. Focus on the breath. Remember, thoughts are not real, they are just stories to which I have given meaning, back in the day when I believed in meaning.

She watches as the ever-active filing system in her brain begins to serve up some of the associations she has to the word meaning. Like daydreams for instance. She used to believe that they had much more meaning than the reality she could see in front of her. They were the firewall she used to protect herself from the red hot poker of reality called home. These thoughts co-mingle with the emotional flame that has been activated by her limbic system in response to the Man thing and the familiar smells of fall, so long associated with new beginnings, hope, excitement, loss. Like three plumes of smoke braiding themselves together, her thoughts, the meaning she gives them and her emotional/physical responses threaten to become a rope from which she could hang herself if she doesn't put a stop to this lickity split.

She acknowledges to herself that she doesn't participate in the sport of daydreaming anymore, partly because she has created a life in which she has more than her share of fulfillment, partly because the list of unmet dreams is already long enough, and to go there risks the noose that could choke the breath out of this life that she, for better or worse, has created. Girl, she admonishes herself, get your sweet ass self back here. Yoo hoo, this is Now time. Hear? Don't you go scaring yourself to death by going down that tired old path, you know the one I'm talking about. Today you are doing just fine. You have work you love. You have good loyal friends. You have healthy grown children that are realizing their dreams. You have physical and mental health, which make all sorts of things possible. You are doing okay my lady.

The familiar sound of the rails humming their vibrational song breaks into her reverie, cutting her thoughts off in mid-stream. Suddenly, body overrides mind, as her heartbeat rises and the physiologic response, more ancient then humankind itself, to the sight and sound of a large, loud object barreling towards her creates a tightening of the leg and shoulder muscles, a focusing of the eyes. In a finger snap the beast of biology has transported her from a state of musing into a state of action.

Settling into the rough vinyl orange seat of the train, having survived being consumed from the inside and the outside, the woman smiles. As always, when she is in a conscious mode of living, she is amused and bemused by the drama possible to every living moment. With all of that having happened in five brief minutes, she wonders, what will the rest of this day be like.

I have a question for the author of A Five-Minute Story. When Paul announced the addition of your tale to the Descartes forum, he described it as a "new media": "non-assailable writing". I'm wondering what you think of that description? I have a particular reason for asking, and will try not to be (too) laborious in my explanation of "why."

The same morning that your story appeared on Serendip, we'd heard an overview, in the Emergent Systems group, of "The Emergence of 'Emergence' in the History of Psychology." Rob Wozniak ended that presentation with a "clarifying" example "from Mars" (yeah, only in this group....): if a Martian were wired up to your head, and could read all your brain states, it could learn to identify those which signaled your "feeling the hot cup of coffee warming your hands," but could never "know" what it FELT like to you to hold that cup. Rob described the gap between the report of a brain state and the experience of having it as "surplus meaning": what it FEELS like will always exceed the reductionist account of what's going on in your neural network: the Martian would know THAT you held the cup, but not WHAT your perception of doing so was like.

This example was of particular interest to me because I am a literary scholar, and we talk a lot in my field about the ways in which our theoretical accounts (or "reductions") of stories never encompass the whole, which always exceeds the grasp of any "interpretation." We do acknowledge the limits of our interpretations; but we also (contra Paul, above) think of all literary texts (like yours) as "assailable," as "interpretable."

So-- what's it feel like (alternatively: what's the brain state) over there, where the writing is done? Did you just give us a piece of "non-assailable" writing (which I've--perhaps--just "assailed")?

____________

I am not really clear what unassailable, in the context of the 5 minute story, means. My "brain state" while writing was to follow my train of thought, so to speak, and the tributaries leading both in and out, that contributed to it.

About the martians; the experience that was being reported was certainly only one aspect of the whole. It was my conscious awareness of the physical, mental and emotional. I figure, by the time the martians get here and hook us up they will have devised a method of monitoring all activity, brain and otherwise and using my dna they will be able to morph themselves into me and tell the story more fully than I.

I've never been a fan of interpretation, probably because I am not very good at it. It used to infuriate me as a child, when my mother would read me poetry because I couldn't understand what was being said. I would complain that it would be a lot easier if people just said what they want me to know in a way that got the message across so that I wouldn't have to spend my time trying to guess. All that said, I am curious how one goes about interpreting something that is describing an event. Draft Seven: on disengaging the brain
Just returned from my weekend up in Goshen New York learning and experiencing, as much as one possibly can, the death rites of the Quero. Your question, what is a medicine wheel, is a good one. One I will try to answer but not at the moment as I am in my Sunday night mind. The Sunday night mind is much like the final immersion in the lake before one gets out to dry off in the cool wind on a cloudy day. I disconnect from as much thinking as possible allowing myself to float to the place where there is no sound, hoping it will encourage me to get to bed early so that I might wake to a clear and active psyche....Tomorrow I will engage the brain.

Draft Eight (written early Sunday morning, 5/7/06)

From Ian McEwan's Saturday (into which I'm now hooked:)
"A simple anthropic principle is involved. The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance....

...he remembers the famous thought experiment he learned about long ago in a physics course. A cat, Schrodinger's cat, hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real. At the point at which the lid is lifted from the box and the cat is examined, a quantum wave of probability collapses. None of this has ever made any sense to him at all. No human sense. Surely another example of a problem of reference. He's heard that even the physicists are abandoning it. To Henry it seems beyond the requirement of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting his discovery. What then collapses will be his own ignorance. Whatever the score, it is already chalked up.... (16-18)

Jeff says, "So, how will your novel be different from his??" I say, my new idea (from the novel he (!)'s planning to write w/ his brother, about "Growing Up in the Movies," the story of his grandfather and his brother, told from a grandson's point of view) is that we focus this on the question of what difference the observer makes. What difference it makes to have an observer. How different the story is, if there are two observers, who (of course!) see things differently? Can we give our story "binocular vision" story, following Kaye's description: Each of our eyes provides a slightly different view of the same scene and together they give us stereoscopic depth perception, enable us better to see three dimensions. Receiving the perspectives of two disciplines, like processing signals from both a right and a left eye, result not in shallow vision but in seeing more deeply. (From Teaching to Learn/Learning to Teach, p. 101)?

Maybe the idea should be less about the "entanglement" of the twins, Liz and Lucy, than on the different perceptions of two people on the life of another...what difference does point of view make? Or (more deeply) what difference does it make to HAVE someone as the observer of one's life?

What I'm thinking here is what difference it makes to have a mom (say) watching. (What my mother did not do for me--what I missed--why I probably am so needy, still, for affirmation. What I thought I did right for my kids: just made sure they knew there was always a loving eye on them. What I probably also did wrong for them: they knew there was always a loving eye on them. They wanted more space, more freedom, more Huckleberry Finn moments, away from their mother's loving watching.)

So what if our heroine was both watched and not watched? This might be a way of "doing" gender. I'm thinking now of how women have always been the subject of the male gaze, of John Berger's saying, in Ways of Seeing (1972), that "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at". So what happens when the woman looks back? What happens if there's a bystander, gazing @ the gazing scene? For more possibilities/playing w/ various "forms of gaze," check on Notes on "The Gaze"!

Anyhow, I'm thinking of how different my obsession (for instance!) w/ being looked @ from (say, since he's to hand) the way a common friend of ours has of being in the world--who has taught himself (he says) not to waste much time attending to what others see-or-say about him. He does what gives him pleasure, holds himself accountable for his motives only to himself. Whereas women (generally? certainly stereotypically) strive more toward relationships, worry more about how (and how much) they are seen. And themselves pay more attention to others? Might we want to play w/ observers of different genders? What difference does it make to our twins, to be attended by a man and/or a woman? By women or men?

Title of this version might be "Attentiveness." Or: "Attention"??

Upcoming: promised report on twin research!!

Draft Nine (which arose during early-morning swim, 5/9/06)

From Saturday (lovely book! wish we had written it!): Henry as just been in a car accident, and is steeling himself for the confrontation w/ the guy who hit him--

He feels he's been left behind. And he seems to see it: receding obliviously down a side street is the other, most likely version of himself, like a vanishing rich uncle, introspective and happy, motoring carefree through his Saturday, leaving him alone and wretched, in his new, improbable, inescapable fate. So...now I'm thinking that our novel could be about the many selves that each of us might have been, but--each time we made a choice/encountered an unexpected "swerve"--did not become. Since thinking of the complex system that is one character hasn't yet given us a plot, maybe pitching the book @ a different level--in terms of the complex system that is our emerging friendship--will produce one. I'm thinking that, rather than a single central consciousness, or even two, what we need is three women whose lives started out the same (are they triplets??) but turned out very differently...

So: Lucy and Liz have now been joined by a third (sister?), El. I'm actually thinking humanist, scientist, social scientist, though I admit that this is totally cheesy, and also acknowledge that my inspiration for the social scientist, "El"--the woman who signs herself "L" on her Serendip postings--is on record as impatient with the "simplistic disciplinary 'tags' used to label people, as not getting close to the deeper, more personal reasons people have for making sense of their experiences.

Nonetheless, in the world of this newly-complex novel, Lucy, Liz and El are being watched by Laine. Laine's important because she's the observer (I guess this means she's the therapist). And the question I was continuing to worry, this morning in the pool, was the one about what difference the observer makes. In the passage from Saturday I sent you on Sunday, Henry thought that the death of Schrodinger's cat is "just" about the end of his ignorance--and now I think so, too. Liz, does this sound right? The quantum universe is deterministic (think the physicists) and not-observable (think the rest of us). The non-quantum world is neither deterministic nor observable. My question now (apologies, Lucy, I realize this is getting decidedly non-novelistic) is whether there is a cause-and-effect between the fact that it is non-deterministic and the fact that it is observable; i.e.: does the act of observing interrupt what happens/make a difference in what happens? No?

Last week, when I recited the opening line of our novel --"Lucy didn't know if her cat was alive or dead"--to (the real-life) Lizzie, she responded w/ the second line: "And she didn't want to know." Now, I always (& I do mean ALWAYS/ALWAYS/ALWAYS) "want to know." Doesn't matter if knowing will break my heart, is more than I can bear, will kill me--I want to know what's going on. Part of this is about survival: a conviction that to know is to be safer, more mobile, if also much sadder (ref. here to 5/7/06 NYTimes Book Review of "Stumbling on Happiness:

the clinically depressed seem less susceptible to basic cognitive errors. Healthy people can be deluded into greater happiness when granted the mere illusion of control over their environment; the clinically depressed recognize the illusion for what it is...yet more evidence that unhappy people have the more accurate view of reality. So, ladies: I want to be the unhappy, fully-seeing Laine.
Anybody want to sign up for any of the other roles??

Whether any of you is listening or not: thanks for the occasion to imagine alternative possibilites/alternative lives/alternative possibilities for my life.

(Inspired by Lucy's 5/10/06 e-mail)
Revised First Line of "Entanglement"

...when my boys would sleep in, and this was true for many years, perhaps I would be in the kitchen when I would realize that they were probably dead. But there was no way I wanted to find out for sure because I knew that once that reality was confirmed life as I knew it would be over and I would never be able to put it back together again. So instead of running to their room to make sure they were okay or so I could call the doctor I would stay in the kitchen until I couldn't bear the weight of "knowing" they were dead.

Lucy didn't know whether her children were alive or dead.
And she didn't want to know.

Draft Ten (Sunday night, 5/14/06)

So: Saturday night represented a real advancement in the novel-writing arena. I told Liz about the advice I'd gotten from Elizabeth Catanese (an 18-year-old? we're taking writing instructions from an 18-year-old?? well, yeah; see Evolving Images and Once Upon a Time is Now. This young woman knows things.) And she says: Don't worry about not having a plot. Write scenes. Start w/ an image. Write it up. Fill it out. Go from the outside in.

So: we have our opening scene. Lucy Darlington (the character, not our friend) is in her kitchen. It's a Sunday morning. (Very different from Saturday, a day which--for McEwan's Henry--is usually "thoughtlessly content"). There's lots of light coming in. I think the kitchen is yellow. That Lucy is she sitting @ the table, drinking coffee. reading the Times. What article in the newspaper first triggers her anxiety about who's alive/who's dead in the bedroom? Is there another bedroom, another bed, with a husband in it--or is he out of the picture? (Is this why she imagines that her children are dead? Because she's on her own, and can't imagine how she, alone, can keep them safe...?)

Liz and I agree that the point of our novel is to portray the life (the interior life, really realized) of a woman in America @ the beginning of the 21st century. She's generally anxious, oft times sad, sometimes joyful....we want to paint how her life feels like on the inside. We also think that she has a sister, somewhere else on the continent. That they've been out of touch, and that the novel will trace their coming back together again.

I think (these are thoughts since Liz left) that



So: Lucy's in Philadelphia, Sunday morning, in her yellow kitchen, imagining that her sons are dead, not wanting to know for sure. Laine's in...California, pre-dawn hours, in the dark, getting the news that her brother is dead, and wanting to know more. To pin down the story.

And Laine is going (somehow) to become the betrayer, the demon, the doppelganger who appears (somehow) in her sister's yellow kitchen across the country, and disrupts everything. And that disruption (thank you, Liz) will be an "event." And after the event happens, and is seen to have happened, there will be no turning back. What is broken cannot be fixed. (This from my husband, after my daughter's abortion: he so wanted to fix what he couldn't.)

Mercy, but aren't our lives rich resources for this novel????

(Shall we warn the other old women that they may also prove to be resources/find their lives represented, in fractured form, in our fiction??)

Addendum, 5/15/06
Putting together,

I told Lizzie abt. a news items that caught my attention a few weeks ago: @ a toast @ the 21st birthday party of a disabled child (who was not expected to live so long), mother said to her two healthy kids, "This is not the life I would have wished for you." I didn't tell her about Lily's life-long grievance @ being born second: "I'll never catch up! Lena had you to herself for 2 1/2 years!" (hear the wail??)

And now I will go do some unemotional work (yeah, right: I'm grading the portfolios for "The Emotional Landscape of 19th c. American Literature").

5/22/06
so...i have spent a lot of time recently w/ lucy darlington (the fiction)
in her yellow kitchen (also fictional, but minutely realized in my mind).
and this saturday morning i woke w/ a memory of my own best&worst
dead-child-memory, now re-titled

Draft 11 (4 vignettes and an attachment):
June, 26 2005 (e-mail to family and friends;
we are expecting Lily's return from Senegal,
where she's been studying for a year):

Lena, Sam, Jeff and I drove up to NYC yesterday afternoon; had a pleasant
time wandering around the Cloisters, went to dinner @ a nice restaurant on
upper Broadway, walked around a while looking @ jazz clubs (but it was too
early for any action). Drove out to the Ramada @ JFK, checked in....

and then got a call from Lily @ 11:30 p.m. She was still in Dakar. Had been
bumped from her flight (by the Prime Minister, so I guess it makes a good story!)
There's only one flight a day, so...

she's now scheduled to come in TOMORROW morning @ 7 a.m.

Not wanting to spend the day in the hotel, or another day in the city, we
came on home.

@ least some of us will drive back up **early** tomorrow morning, meet
Lily, and go w/ her to her friend Molly's house in Brooklyn for breakfast.

I woke this morning and thought of the flowers, welcome home signs, gifts,
etc. all set out @ home and thought: this is like going to the hospital to
have a baby. The baby dies, and you go home to a house all decorated for
her arrival.

Yep, pretty melodramatic--but that is what I felt!
Stay tuned for tomorrow's developments--

June 27, 2005
My friend Lois comments that" it would be more appropriate that ... you go to the hospital
and it's false labor and then you come home. Because you're going back today to get her!"

June 28, 2005
Andrew (my therapist) points out that Lois's version is sugar coating:
"Why did you kill that child? Because you were furious w/ her,
and couldn't tell her so!")

(Back to) May 22, 2006
Now, this puts a whole new spin upon
the first line of our novel--
"Lucy Darlington didn't know whether her child was alive or dead,"
yes??

Walking this morning, Jody Cohen volunteered a whole 'nother chapter/riff for our project:
about the spin that cellphones have added to maternal fantasies about
the deaths of our children. You call, expecting to get them.
You don't get them. And the dark imagining begins....

back to (more? productive?) work.
hope you are both...
doing fine.
& keeping those imaginings in line.
a.

P.S. A copy of the graduation speech on "attentiveness" which i found so resonant for our project: By Michael Jay McClure

In the 1940s, the exacting poet and Bryn Mawr alumna Marianne Moore penned a letter in response to a gift of tropical leaves given to her by the equally astute poet Elizabeth Bishop. Here's what she wrote. The leaves are beyond anything we have experienced, Elizabeth, as tropical wonders. The cranberry-pink on the alligator-pear green, and the vein-systems [...] amaze and amaze us. Strange, too, the underside contrast,--as of a double faced ribbon,--the definite-pattern of cerise and green, then underneath, a cut-leaf maple flush all over [...] I could not have imagined such zebra-brilliance of piercing colors. This kind of language is typical of Moore. Instead of red the leaf is described as cerise, the pink is cranberry, the green is, specifically, of the alligator pear variety, and the brown is a spreading maple flush. And, so. what might have been described as a red and green leaf with a brown underside is instead described in terms that speak both to the very specific charms of these tropical leaves and to the author's bedazzlement when she observed them.

This makes sense--namely because this letter responds to a gift. As such, it is Marianne Moore's impulse not just to thank Bishop for the gift, but to thank her by describing that which she has been given, to hold it in her regard, to lave it with her attention. To my mind, this speaks not only to Moore's particular talents of observation, but to her training here, at this institution.

Indeed, what has always struck me about Bryn Mawr is the level of engagement among its students and faculty. I don't know whether it's because with 1,200 people all inhabiting the mock-Snow-White-castle campus that you're bound to notice everyone, everything, or every blade of grass at least once, but no matter. What I respect is Bryn Mawr's culture of regard for the surrounding world of things, the world of the senses, and the world of ideas. There seems to be a belief something may be augmented and made fuller or riper with our attention. It is the idea that to engage with something is to deeply respect it. On a day like this, in fact, it seems some minor crime not to notice the incredible surroundings here, the way the light plays on the trees, the flowers and the leaves, even if they're not so tropical.

But, further, I should acknowledge that the world isn't just made up of ideas, or of things, but of people as well. And in as much as Marianne Moore's language is about looking at the leaves she's been given, it's also language that is designed to be seen by Elizabeth Bishop. In other words, Marianne Moore is an intense observer who knows she is being intensely observed. And it is the care with which these two people regard not only the things of the world but each other that seems especially profound.

Because in the end, too, I suspect that each of us here owes a substantial debt to those who have noticed us, who have paid attention to our character, complexities, and zebra-brilliance. In fact, I'm guessing the reason why we're here, and I know the reason why I'm here, isn't just the fact that we're nimble observers, but that someone chose to see us. Teachers, family, friends, and the different permutations thereof. In fact what has always made Moore's letter especially poignant to me is that it was written in the year my parents were born. (You notice that I kept the year vague.) And I know it is because they were regarded, and it is certainly because of their sustaining regard, that I am able to see what Marianne Moore was able to see when she was given a simple gift of tropical leaves.

So today I hope to suggest that when we celebrate the accomplishment of the graduates that we are also celebrating the elaborate, erratic, and shimmering communities that produced us. And I further hope that to graduate means to be given the opportunity to expand our community beyond the especially beautiful confines of Bryn Mawr. Finally, I hope that to graduate is to understand the challenge of noticing how we are beheld and what we choose to behold--as we all grow to understand something the great haiku writer Basho once said, namely that "The wind is blowing/We are alive and can see each other/You and I."

5/26/06
Eliz. Catanese
Collaborative Contribution
Spending Time Dead: A Mystery of the Unconscious

Chapter 1: Dead Children

Lucy Darlington did not know whether her children were alive or dead. She poured herself a cup of coffee, took it to the kitchen table, and sat down, looking out the window. The sky out the window was an alarming blue, the clouds pure fluff. She was startled that nothing was dull; even her coffee seemed bright brown, electrified by the florescent kitchen lights. Turning on the lights was pure habit; it didn't matter that it was early afternoon and sunshine-bright. There was so much urgency in her body's lack of physical motion, in the slow redirection of her gaze from window to coffee cup to her long thin fingers resting on the table. Such was the pulse of her unspeakable, enclosed in the yellow walls of the kitchen, in the coffee, behind her fingernails. Of course, she had killed her children.

Today she was sure of it more than she'd ever been before. She'd been engaged in the process of transferring the slow-acting poison to her children, the poison generated in her bloodstream the moment she began to see her children not as others but as herself when she had been a child, the self long ago poisoned by her own mother, the self which had come back in two teasing apparitions: Adam and Evelyn. Twins none-the-less. She blamed her ex-husband for the genes that caused the unnecessary doubling and blamed him for the name issue too. It was uncanny, really. It had been her job to pick out the boy name and her ex-husband's job to pick out the girl name. (No changes, exceptions or consultations after the fact.) Suddenly, her house had been cursed into the Garden of Eden in more ways than one. The name that she'd picked out had been completely legitimate: it had been her father's name. But Evelyn? There was no precedent, no need.

Lucy was startled to see her hands picking up the cup of coffee. She was even more startled that she had let her mind wander back to her anger over her children's names. It had been 14 years since all of that and besides, they were dead. D-E-A-D. Gonegonegonegonegonegone. Why was her body relaxing? Why was she sipping coffee? Why wasn't she running to their rooms to check on them? Because she was terrified about what she had done and about the inevitability of it. Was it not an act of love to help bring one's children out of childhood and to adulthood--to help ones children to die in this sense? Wasn't it every parent's duty to kill his or her children in this way? It was a great comfort to turn to the metaphysical. Perhaps this was all that her endless struggle had been about all these years? Maybe, but...

These thoughts didn't change the fact that her senses were tormented by the image that she had of Evelyn as a pale ghost lying with her black sheets pulled up to her neck. The black sheets were a phase to be outgrown, Lucy hoped, but death would not be. Lucy pictured her hand on her daughter's forehead, testing to see if she had a fever and feeling the clammy coolness instead, shaking her without response and the instant realization--no, the confirmation of deep knowing, that the same would be true for her son. He would be resting sideways, one hand dangling off of the bed, a hard body sunken in his deep blue sheets, quilt, and calendar of practically naked women opened beside him.

There it was: the sound of water running upstairs, Adam emerging into water, then the slow awakening of Evelyn. Lucy directed her eyes to the clock. It was just before noon. Adolescent sleep was so much longer than childish sleep. They are teenagers now, thought Lucy. My children are teenagers slowly waking up and dying. They are not dead yet.

6/1/06
From Judie McCoyd:
Hi Corey & ANne,
I don't know if you two had seen this story- Colleen, the mom of Whitney (the one now found to be alive) was an old girlfriend of Pat's and we have been friendly at alumni things and do the Xmas card thing. Can you imagine all the emotions (and the economic issues- Colleen paid for the funeral, etc. and the other family's insurance has been covering the hospital/ rehab!). Thought you'd find it interesting, Judie
----- Original Message -----
Subject: Colleen's Whitney
This is not to be believed... wonderful news for Colleen! Please read this article...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-31-indiana-mistaken-identity_x.htm

From Anne:

what a roller-coaster.

had i told you that liz mccormack and i are playing w/ writing a novel this summer? it's called "entanglement," is a human-level version of "shrodinger's cat," and the current opening paragraphs read this-a-way (E--cc'ing to you, so you can see the cutting I did to your version. Now I guess I have to make our Lucy get up and go see the kids? And/or wait til they find their way--in their own good time--down to the kitchen? She just can't seem to m-o-v-e...)
A.

Spending Time Dead: A Mystery of the Unconscious
Chapter 1: Dead Children

Lucy Darlington did not know whether her children were alive or dead. She poured herself a cup of coffee, took it to the kitchen table, and sat down, looking out the window. The sky out the window was an alarming blue, the clouds pure fluff. She was startled that nothing was dull; even her coffee seemed bright brown, electrified by the florescent kitchen lights. Turning on the lights was pure habit; it didn't matter that it was early afternoon and sunshine-bright. There was so much urgency in her body's lack of physical motion, in the slow redirection of her gaze from window to coffee cup to her long thin fingers resting on the table. Such was the pulse of her unspeakable, enclosed in the yellow walls of the kitchen, in the coffee, behind her fingernails.

Of course, she had killed her children. Today she was sure of it more than she'd ever been before. Lucy was startled to see her hands picking up the cup of coffee. She was startled that she had let her mind wander...they were dead. D-E-A-D. Gonegonegonegonegonegone. Why was her body relaxing? Why was she sipping coffee? Why wasn't she running to their rooms to check on them? Because she was terrified by the inevitability of it.

Was it not an act of love to help bring one's children out of childhood and to adulthood--to help childhood die? Wasn't it all parents' duty to kill their children in this way? It was a great comfort to turn to the metaphysical. Perhaps this was all that her endless struggle had been about all these years? Maybe, but...

Thinking didn't change anything. Her senses were tormented by the image of Evelyn as a pale ghost lying with her black sheets pulled up to her neck. The black sheets were a phase to be outgrown, Lucy hoped, but death would not be. Lucy pictured her hand on her daughter's forehead, testing to see if she had a fever and feeling the clammy coolness instead, shaking her without response and the instant realization--no, the confirmation of deep knowing, that the same would be true for Adam. He would be resting sideways, one hand dangling off of the bed, a hard body sunken in his deep blue sheets, quilt, and calendar of practically naked women opened beside him.

There it was: the sound of water running upstairs, Adam emerging into water, then the slow awakening of Evelyn. Lucy directed her eyes to the clock. It was just before noon. Adolescent sleep was so much longer than childish sleep. They are teenagers now, thought Lucy. My children are teenagers slowly waking up and dying.

They are not dead yet.

June 12, 2006

So, @ Liz's suggestion, I tried my hand, this weekend, @ two more scenes of "entanglement," two more moments when our heroine imagines the death of those she loves. Neither, however, is imagined; both actually happened.

How to explore them more fully, fictionalize and expand them?

(Maybe writing from the actual limits this process??)
(These are both already up on the "novel" page, just slightly revised to fit "Lucy." But getting INTO her head...wierd...can't seem to. And it's my own head!!)

Scene I
On the night before Easter, 1981--late, too late--Lucy gets a phone call. Her twin brother has been in a car accident. He is not conscious.

The next call comes early Easter morning. He is not responsive. She calls again. The nurse, who knows her from childhood, says, "Lucy, I don't think he's going to make it."

Lucy goes to her husband, who is caring for their daughter. Standing beside her changing table, looking out the window--this is a West Philadelphia row house, they can not look far out--looking at her, not looking at him, Lucy whispers, "I'm afraid he's going to die." Her husband says, "He can't die. He won't die." He says this with certainty, and she takes comfort from his assurance.

So when she gets the next call, she can't understand what she is hearing. She asks, dumbly, "is he DEAD?" Her mother, dully: "Oh, yes. He is dead."

This is a story in which death--which actually occurred--could NOT be imagined.

In the next one, the death is not real; it is an imagined one.

Scene II

Lucy drives up to New York with her children. They have a pleasant time wandering around the Clisters, go to dinner at a nice restaurant on upper Broadway, walk around a while looking at jazz clubs (but it's too early for any action.). They drive out to the Ramada at JFK, check in...

...and then, at 11:30, they get a call from Evelyn. She is still in Dakar. She had arrived late at the airport, and been bumped from her flight (by the entourage of the Prime Minister, so it's a good story. But...)

She's now scheduled to come home a day later....

Lucy assures her daughter that this is alright. That she loves her, and will be waiting for her at the airport the day after. But the next morning, when she wakes in the hotel, her mind goes immediately to the flowers and the welcome home signs all set out at home. She thinks, "This is like going to the hospital to have a baby. The baby dies, and you go home, empty-handed, to a house all decorated for her arrival."

Why does she (imaginately) kill her child? (Days later, her therapist makes this clear.) Because she is furious with her, for her thoughtlessness, for her inconveniencing them all--

and she can't tell her so.