my struggle, and Birthday Week

The house in Carlton is doing that thing to me which all Melbourne terrace houses do so unpleasantly well. I feel like I know it back to front, and at the same time like I'm not sure if I've ever been in it before. It's unheimlich. The doctor said that changing to this new room would be unsettling, and it is, and as she also noted, the absence of a reception person and all the secondary paraphernalia of a healthcare setting only clarifies what the purpose of the meeting really is. And the disturbance thus created in me has muddied the water and lifted material up out of the sediment. Great chunks of it. No wonder that the thought of drinking the liquid out of that jug on the table in the waiting area is so unappealing. Other than the contents of the jug the house seems inhospitably dry to me. I don't think there is a toilet, handbasin or tap in any place inside it that I am allowed to visit.

In the month of not writing I had days when I wanted so much to write that I became unable to write. I also had runs of days when I knew I should not write because I wanted to write about things that it would be most unwise to write about. Remembrance Day was pretty bad in that way. Stewing on it, you know; too much war, too much public and civic failure to be honest about war, too much mindless loudmouthed bandwagonning that could not be avoided, and also, too much work for me and long hours of it. But mostly I just had days when the hour or so between the last of the household chores and the time when I had to go to sleep didn't seem hardy enough to carry the thinking that goes into writing.

Well, something changed, don't quite know what and it doesn't matter anyhow, and I think I can write again. The wish, not ever burning but usually very warm and sometimes hot, to write something of substance and lasting value is always present but I am blowed if I know what I can do to make that happen. The things I have to say fit into the language and format that I am using right now. It is all the more frustrating to me because almost all of the acclaimed new fiction, and quite a bit of the nonfiction, which I've read this year has operated in the broad domain of life writing in ways that I deeply recognise and understand. If other people, some of them for example Nordic types with beards and three-word names, can write whole novels that work the same way that what I can write works, then why can't I write a novel too? One answer is that I want to not be a destroyer of anyone else's peace and equilibrium, which seems to be the inevitable sequel to publishing a novel that opens up and articulates the truth of your life. Another answer might be that I don't understand my own motives enough to find them compelling. When I'm writing well, when I'm limbered up, the pleasures of cracking myself up with the sentences as they flow onto the screen are so very readily available to me, and they are such complete pleasures, that I don't need any other satisfaction from what I've made.

I have a few days off of work now and I hope the weather will be nice, because I want spend some of that time going for a long walk somewhere green. It's Birthday Week and I'm about to become forty-six, which is not terribly pleasant but it will pass soon enough.