Louis Rhead, 1900 poster for "The Sun," New York City.
We didn't quite get skating weather this weekend, but we grazed 29º and that is cold for us in Central Texas. It is February, and I am holding on to winter now, for I love autumn, winter, and spring in Texas, but not the long hot summers. When winter starts to disappear, I know that summer isn't far behind.
I went looking for ice skaters for a particular reason. Last week, I mentioned how important notebooks were to me, how I never go anywhere without one. I have written thousands of pages in notebooks, ever since I was nine, when I decided I would be a writer when I grew up. But most of these pages have been notes, sketches, ideas for stories, the stories themselves, or letters.
Not journal pages, as in personal diaries.
I didn't write a personal journal until 1994, and then I kept a journal, written in spiral notebooks, for about twelve years. But one day, a few years ago, I threw these notebooks away. Fifteen or twenty very fat, 180-page, wide-ruled, spiral notebooks.
I took them to the dumpster behind my husband's office and threw them all away.
"Les Patins d’argent (The Silver Skates)," éditeur Hetzel et Cie, 1876 or 1877
I threw them all away because I had filled them with everything that was bothering me, and I couldn't imagine ever wanting to read them again, much less ever wanting anyone else to read them. I've never kept a personal journal again, for I find I do better when I write my thoughts down in sketches, stories, or letters.
But there is one tiny scrap of those pages that got saved in the most curious way. I thought I would tell you about it today.
It came about because I had read that several hundred of Emily Dickinson's poems were recently discovered, poems never published before, because they were hidden inside her letters. Someone, and I don't remember who, had been reading her letters and realized that some of her words were actually poems if you lifted them out of the letters and put them in poem form.
January 1916 Vanity Fair cover by Ethel Caroline Rundquist
This idea of poems being hidden in letters was mulling around in my head when I suddenly looked into my own journal pages and found one little group of words and thought, "Oh, this is a poem!"
When I saw this Vanity Fair ice skater, I thought that she almost illustrated my words in a lighthearted way, although the words are really not so lighthearted. In my journal these words would have appeared all together, in mid-stream, in the middle of other words. But I lifted them out and made a poem out of them.
I have to tread so carefully to keep the ice
from breaking beneath my feet.
But, no,
I can't walk that nicely anymore.
I need a footstep that makes a sound,
that hits the ground with a roar
that can be heard for miles around.
And if my footfall cracks the ice,
I'll take up freefall
and soar.
I can't tiptoe anymore.
This poem has been saved because I put it in a folder marked "Poetry," where it has lain so quietly for years now. You'd think it would make a roar every once in a while.
I have no idea what event prompted these particular words. But I'm glad, out of all those words, that these are the ones that got saved, for it is a message from myself to myself to not be so quiet, perhaps!
To try to illustrate my words, I decided to make a paper version of the Vanity Fair ice-skater. This is a first draft. I'm not sure about the red and the violet, but I have always liked the idea of pairing "infra-red" with "ultra-violet." In a story once, I described the color of a dress as being "ultra-violet" to add a poetic dimension to the character who was wearing the dress, for she seemed to me to be the kind of person who would clothe herself in ultra-violet.
I think the hands are wrong. Can both hands be in that position, I wonder, or do I have two right hands, or two left hands? A few lessons in human anatomy might be needed here!
But back to my "poem."
I've been thinking of how this little blog has become my morning notebook now, and of how much I love to put my thoughts and memories and sketches here, and of how the sound that quiet people make is like the age-old question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is there to hear it.
I think a quiet person writing all alone in the early morning dark of her boxroom might make a sound in the darkness . . . Not a roar, perhaps, but maybe a purr.
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