To Alice

I miss having someone to write to. In a way, the e-mails we exchanged are the prototypes for my current blog entries. I've tried to be funnier, more light-hearted in this more public form of writing. Whatever. The mere act of writing itself is doing me good. In writing to a greater crowd about personal thoughts, I am facing the problem that the usual public writer of current events and opinions does not have -- I am not writing to convince you of anything. I am writing to paint a picture, to show you my world. But there is no one you. I am lacking a muse.

The idea of a muse has been bothering me. I started public writing, inspired, among the other events that happened, by Calvin Trillin and his devotion to Alice. He was always impressing Alice.

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When I wrote in the dedication of a book "For Alice," I meant it literally. In that sense, the headline on her obituary in the Times was literally true, as well as in the correct order: it described her as "Educator, Author and Muse." When Alice died, I was going over the galleys of a novel about parking in New York -- a subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a publisher if she hadn't, somewhat to her surprise, liked it. When the novel was published, the dedication said, "I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice." ~Calvin Trillin, "Alice, Off the Page", The New Yorker, March 27, 2006
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There was a period of time in my life that I kept a collection of quotations. I still write a few lines down every so often if I remember to. Amy said that I keep the most banal quotations. She didn't actually use the word "banal", but I don't remember exactly what she said. I remember what she meant though. My criteria for keeping a quotation is simple. If it moves me, speaks to me, it goes into the book. There are things that stay in my mind that I don't write down coz I can't. For instance, I was at a performance of Orpheus X and there was this line that went "Only the dead and poets can see with indifference." There are things that stay in my mind that I don't write down, because there is no need to. Like the Fox. The line that I really want to refer to, that seems most relevant tonight, is this incomplete thing that I took down from the book that I copied the most lines from, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

"Love begins with a metaphor...love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."

Why did I like this line? I liked the idea of a poetic memory. I hate to say this, but there are just some people who enter our poetic memories. You can't think of them in the same way you think of the other people. They just seem special, worthy of being a muse. I understand that we all have different criteria for appointing our muses, so I won't get upset if I'm not yours.

It's not only people. It can be a place, the weather, a building. Histories, the breaths of the dead and the past color the world. Some nights, the dampness and the fog of the past seep into the living. Like tonight.

Here's to Alice, a person I never knew. I suspect that you may at best be amused, but not surprised, that I am dedicating entries to people I don't know, most inappropriately. I know someone who wrote about the internal pattern. But I won't quote her tonight.