Savannah Lee

Yeahhhh, yesterday. Between the unexpected sleeping late, the unexpected trip to Denny's, the unexpected tour of my area's antique stores and galleries, and so forth, I kinda didn't blog. Or even manage to announce that I wasn't going to blog. Sorry.

The reason I'm so totally excited is because I read this essay by Cynthia Ozick. It actually, imho, starts off kind of shaky, but then breaks into flight like an escaped falcon. Which is to say that the best part of it is its self-remembering, oh yes, this is what it feels like, this is what I am. This is what I can do.

Along about paragraph six is when the wings really start to stretch on the air. To act like they're going somewhere instead of back to the jesses. "You have never met [a writer]," Ozick declares with the chilling truth of a Stephen King. "[If you have], then you can be sure it is all a mistake."

And why have we never met a writer?

Well, it involves telling a campfire tale, but what it boils down to is: writers only exist in the dark. Where they can be "at home among the ghosts."

So those people who walk around "industriously chatting on the terrace," well, they ARE real, in the sense that you can touch them (Ozick calls them a "palpable effigy"), but nonetheless they are not...well, they're beside the point, is what Ozick is saying. They're completely beside the point.

There's something deeply and wonderfully Buddhist about that.

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In and around these beautiful words, I'm afraid you are going to encounter the particularly maddening sort of reverse narcissism which leads Ozick to boast about her low sales and her "invisibility." Just ignore that. Ignore the stuff that's about fame, an even worse subject for humans to write about than death. Tear those bones out of the metaphor; ghosts don't need 'em anyhow. Leave only the milk-light in the darkness, the kindly glow by which the writer works.

The moon by which the falcon makes its escape.