Blotter, 1993Every afternoon, when I walk the mile from my studio to the main house for dinner, the snow in the woods bordering the road is deeper, the calligraphy of the deer moving through the trees more finely etched.
Sometimes in the afternoons, instead of working, we take the small plastic sleds from the basement of the main house and struggle through the thigh-deep snow of the woods to the hill that overlooks the town. We plunge wordlessly down, labour slowly back up. The trees on the hillside are straight and thin, look like strings, and when the sun is out it plays them as a chord of light.
I don’t like tobogganing. The journey down is too fast, the return slog too slow. I don’t like the spray and sting, or the grinding of my boots against the snow. I worry about rocks and my back, about crashing into the distant fence bordering the ball diamond. But the headlong rush down the hill matches my despair at not writing, seems mildly self-destructive, and this is why I keep doing it.
After half a dozen runs, we struggle back through the snow to the road, our wet clothes freezing on our skin, stiffening the hinges of our bodies shut. At this point, it seems madness to have come, and we scuttle off to our respective studios, guilty for the work we’ve avoided, the work we’ve missed by hurling ourselves repeatedly downhill all afternoon.
In the centre of the woods, halfway between the top of the hill and the road, stands a small clutch of graves. Soldiers from the Civil War, inexplicably killed and buried here, miles from the proper cemetery. The small white graves are clustered together under the shadow of a dark, mossy boulder. A glacial erratic, left at the top of the hill by a moving wall of ice, thousands of years before these young men were born, or fought, or died.
I have read the worn inscriptions on the stones, know that the soldiers died from war, and yet, each time I push past the graves through the deepening snow, a plastic sled banging painfully against my numbing, wet legs, it seems as though the men must have died, not from war, but from tobogganing.
I am here to finish a novel, and yet each word I have already written seems entirely fraudulent, and each word I can think of to write seems entirely wrong.
All around me, in all the other cabins spread out over the two hundred acres of the arts colony, the other artists are happily industrious. At dinner, people are abuzz with their own genius and productivity. There are endless stories of endless brilliant ideas, and I am sick of all of them.
I don’t work on what I’m here to do, but I am seized by a sort of rogue creativity, the spirit of the place, perhaps, where artists have been coming to paint and sculpt and compose for 150 years. I don’t write, but I start to play the piano in my studio, even though I haven’t played piano since I was six years old. I make up short, mournful songs and call my friends on my cellphone when I know they won’t be home, so I can record the songs on their answering machines. I don’t think about my characters, but every day I sketch the stone wall outside my studio, noting the slightest changes from the weight and shape of the new-fallen snow.
I become obsessed with the old stone walls that are scattered like broken, human music across the estate, and spend hours following their weave through the snowy woods. They were made from clearing the fields, used to demarcate boundaries. They were built using large rocks, often glacial till, for the base. The size of the stones gets progressively smaller as the wall gets higher. All the walls are thigh height because this is as high as a man can lift a stone without strain, without having to raise his hands above his heart.
I think of the walls as language. They are like fine tracery with the light behind them, like lace, and they are no different from these words — each one lifted slowly into place and balanced on this page.
I sketch the walls. I play the piano. For a week, for no reason that I can fathom, I draw nothing but black swans. Hunched over the paper on the floor of the studio, the charcoal — once wood, once fire — softening to dust on the page beneath me. Light, a steady breath against the window.
What I wanted was for an idea to seize me, to arrive as expected. I wanted the simple pleasure of loving my work again. But the words for my novel can’t or don’t want to come. I’m not sure how to make my book happen, don’t know how to get my desire to finish it back. But I do come to know the black swan. I know the long snake flex of its neck, know that the shape of the body is a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. Every afternoon, I fasten these images to paper, call them swan. And every evening, I rise, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walk through woods feathered with shadow — darkness lifting me home.
It is all so strange, the piano playing, the drawing, and I feel almost ill with the confusion of it. The impulse to do these things feels so strong, and yet I have no idea what it means to do them, what they mean.
