Toughsledding

For some odd reason, I’ve spent my life working to emulate a social structure that no longer exists, if it ever did.
You see, although I was raised rather poor in a daylight basement in the Western Washington woods, I was weaned on writers such as Jane Austin, Leo Tolstoi, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and the romantic waltzes of Johann Strauss, on the promise of drawing rooms, dinner parties and balls designed so the sexes could meet in a planned, sanctioned environment, talk and dance with each other.
As a young woman, I read Virginia Woolf’s diaries and craved her social venue, chats “over the fire” with T. S. (Tom) Eliot and E. M. Forester, intellectual dinner parties at Garsington Manor hosted by Lady Ottoline Morrell, D. H. Lawrence and Freida lurking in the background on their way to hang out in another intellectual drawing room with Mable Dodge in Taos, New Mexico.
I also read works by and about Gertrude Stein and Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s and continue to conjure up conversations in my head with Picasso and crazy Ezra Pound, H.D., Bryher, Matisse, the Crosbys, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson (The Little Review) . . .
The world I believed I’d enter as an adult no longer exists, and didn’t exist as I read about it, and whether it existed to the extent 18th, 19th and early 20th century writers described it is probably questionable as well.
Despite my disappointment, I’ve worked hard to create my own coterie of intellectuals, artists, writers, thinkers, gardeners and artists. I even published a literary magazine for 20 years in an attempt to nurture the prospect.
And after getting a formal degree my subscribers insisted I needed to “validate” my literary passions (at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin), I returned to my beloved American West to Pocatello because of the vibrant writing community in this somewhat tired and forgotten Idaho metropolis.
That community, like the eventual life of communities in general, has disintegrated. Writers, like everybody else, leave town for better jobs or to follow lovers. Writers, artists and thinkers get sick and remove themselves from community. Some get ill and die too soon. And time covers us all up with dirt and ashes eventually anyway, so why did we bother?
Remnant personalities of my publishing years still wander about, of course, and a few new faces skirt the bounds, but my youthful vision has never been realized.
I’d like to say I found something better because living in the present is all that’s really real, but today in the wet March snow, in the middle of my spring break, melancholy has me in its grip.
I sit in my west side hovel perusing my walls of books, artifacts that threaten to soon become obsolete as the world moves from print culture to an image-driven one, a step backwards to stick figures and cave drawings some theorize, while illiterate and marginally literate youth cheer, their struggles dealing with complicated ideas a thing of the old-fashioned past. Why read a book when the movie is available?
As I write this, I caress a crystal wine glass filled with a 15-year-old cabernet sauvignon a mystery person left in my wine rack a few years ago. I’m alone. My intellectual “conversations” these days occur within my own mind and in the air in hopes a like-minded someone’s eyes tunes in out in the vastness, the emptiness of cyberspace. But how would a new friend find me? I have no sexy photos to plaster on screen. In fact, a photo (an image) at my age would only discourage discourse in this era of youth worship.
All I have to offer friends are words supported by experience, a collection of timeless ideas and very human hands that pour wine, bake bread, dig in my garden, play music and hug those I care about.
Despite the “convenience” salesmen and geeky youthful lunatics hail as Internet superiority, I miss real live bodies sitting about on chairs, sofas, floor pillows discussing books old and new, cussing out politics, reading poetry, laughing . . .
If time machines were real, I’d opt to return to an Austen, Stein or Woolf drawing room. Whether we’d even be able to communicate with our own brands of spoken English is an intriguing mystery in itself. And of course, if a genius mind like Woolf felt marginalized in her intellectually active community, I could only expect to have been cut out moreso considering my low, peasant, social status.
And as an American woman without leisure and money I’d never have even made it to Paris in the 20s.
So, who am I, and what does the new Millennium have to offer?