nest

"Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How-ever spacious it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long in "finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him.""

I write a lot from bed, and always have. I think Colette did this, perhaps only at the end, when confined to her bed that was pushed alternately to and from the open window, depending on the French season. I find comfort in it.

I keep thinking about Annie Dillard needing to shut the blinds in her studio every day, even though they look out onto beautiful forest land. My blinds are closed, but I think I may need to stop the click-shuttering of memory slides in the back of my head, the colors blur together, I hear them turn over one by one, like my Dad's early first "digital" clock that he dismembered so you could see the numbers turn over on themselves, just the innards of the clock, working away in regular whirring increments, numbers on a spool.

With tests looming, I am trying to calm myself down. I am trying to remember landscapes that opened up around me in my past, places that responded to the immensity of space within me. I am calling up that feeling of response, the first time I drove around the curve of canyon into Taos, NM.

The basin opens up before you as an immeasurable plain, and a kind of vertigo sets in, like being underwater and feeling the shelf of sand drop off darkly and without warning. I am remembering the highway that seemed to have no end, when I first started college, first drive to school in Santa Fe, and I remember thinking "How will this landscape change me"? What will I become here?" Its strange, even at that young age I prioritized the power of a landscape to effect serious change, to warp, to expand from the center of the mind, to accrete. My choice of that particular high desert site for a home was most painstakingly made.

Inviting that much space into my life at such a malleable age has turned out to have a reverberative and long half-life, shelf-life, pantry-life. I was watching old movies last night, and some of the Civil War footage, and thought "I want lace curtains one day." You know, the kind that you see as you drive by old farmhouses, the kind you see at the onset of dark on the prairie, the ones wavering just so as you drive by and think about the concept of home. I miss this feeling. I still feel homeless in New York most of the time, and fight it.

I am trying to make myself strong, trying to not feel the alien terror of anonymous places like airports with dirty carpets, subway tunnels with sulphur smell rising from the grates, giant warehouse stores brimming with flourescent lights, constant change of place to place. I am excited for a time when I can have a house again. When I visited my sister last month, my favorite part of her house was the old 1930's wooden back porch, old screens still latched strangely, set up for summer cross-breezes and set above the backyard with a view of the neighbor's houses curving upward.

I thought that this was a place that felt like home. This is where I would have spent my entire adolescence, with a stack of Virginia Woolf books strewn across the dirty floor, notebooks of scribbled ideas, packets of seeds, bizarre almanacs and books on how to make your own herbal elixirs, homemade jam. What we agreed on, was that it felt like "home", to both of us. It had those qualities that we remembered growing up, tactile wooden smell, creaking screen doors, privacy, space to dream, access to inside/outside, free but still safe.

As a teenager I used to sneak out onto the roof outside my bedroom window and smoke cigarettes. My father would get furious b/c the roof itself was not in the best shape and me sending the entire front porch to the ground would have been kind of a bummer. But I couldn't help myself, and mostly just sat there while the cigarette dwindled away unsmoked. I was looking at the huge elm and maple trees outside, moving silently overhead. I was thinking about something C.S. Lewis had written, on learning of his wife's terminal disease, that there was nothing more beautiful than the image of bare branches against a night sky.

I am still trying to find my right place in the world, but just recently it has dawned on me, I am ready for a Home.

april 8, 2011 elg