580 Split

On the Brink of Words

by Carolina De Robertis

She had nothing to write that day, and so she didn’t. The computer screen glowed in front of her, the only light in the room. White bare document and a blue, indifferent background behind it. Words had appeared out of the cursor, then deleted, appeared, disappeared again. She had nothing to write that had the staying power it needed to survive more than a moment on the screen. The keyboard was a loom with no wool in it. She had no wool. Nothing to say. Words that turn to chatter in the mind of their creator have no reason to stick around. She let the screen go dark, and the room with it. In the dark the walls disappeared. She listened to her own breathing. Listened to silence. In the silence, she could feel them coiling around her, swirling slowly, darkness coiling through the dark. She did not know that they were, but she knew she could not write without them. Traces of presence; traces without which she was not herself. Maybe they would tell her what she needed, what she longed for, what to say. She wanted to lean into them, but leaning too hard made them fade. They must be approached the way a feral cat is approached: slowly, not too aggressively, not too hungry for contact, approached carefully if at all.

She had tried, before, to write without them. She had dutifully pulled words from her mind, strung them together. Typed. Anyone can type. Anyone can write, too, she supposed, but still it was not the same. When writing happened it was larger than herself, larger than the cognitive functions of her mind. It had happened before, this writing. She had made a book. She had listened and let a book fall together, fall through her, sentence by sentence, in terrified exhilaration. It had taken years. And it was done. Over. Gone. No more book. It was possible she would see it in the future with a cover of someone else’s design, pages filled with its words, shelvable, holdable, flippable, burnable, but even then she would not have it in the way she did before—she wouldn’t be inside it, shaping it, letting it take shape, slowly, soft and wet like clay under her hands, a supple clay you live and move inside of, each step and breath a gesture toward form. For years she had longed to be finished. Now she was finished and she longed for the book.

It was dark. The walls were invisible, and so was the ceiling, five feet above her head. She wanted to write. She had nothing to write. She missed the people in her book. Missed listening to them, loving them, wrestling with them in their invented worlds. Missed her own repulsion and her tenderness, the rope those two emotions made together. She wondered where they’d come from, the people in the book. If they’d stepped through some kind of door, perhaps she could go knocking? If they’d risen from the water, could she dive? In public she would say, of course, the word imagination, but the public had a bizarre meaning for that word. Imagination was supposed to be a private thing, individual, the acrobatic feat of a single human mind. This was not her experience. Imagination blurred beyond the boundaries of herself, down into reservoirs she had never seen the bottom of, out into the darkness without walls. Out into the darkness full of coiling presence. Imagination was surrender, it was terror and delight in their purest forms, it was everything but private; it exposed her; it was not in her control, just as winter storms were not in her control, even though they touched her, soaked her, made her shiver, made her sing. She had no way to fabricate a storm, and even if she did—the tricks of Hollywood, clouds on demand, sprinklers with their metallic gusts of rain—it surely wouldn’t work, surely would produce writing as artificial as its source.

She did not understand the writing life. It did not have a function in the strictest sense. It was like beauty in the words of D.H. Lawrence: a mystery, that one could neither eat nor make flannel out of. Useless—yet essential. It saved no lives and paid no rent (and she needed, daily, ways to pay the rent). And yet, without her writing, her world went out of balance. She became capable of sudden rages, snapped words, bouts of television. She became a beast, or, worse, much worse, she became a machine.

So she should write. She should keep writing. She touched a key on her keyboard, and the screen lit up again. V, it said. Nothing more. An accidental letter, not enough to start a book with. Perhaps a sentence. Vicinity, she wrote, but it meant nothing to her. She deleted all the way back to the V. She wrote, Volatile. Volatile words are shaking in the air, stripped of their meaning. She moved to delete the sentence, then stopped. Deletion could be its own addiction.

In the glow of the screen, she saw her bedroom in low light. The loom of her bed, her closet doors, the hamper with its mouth stuffed full of laundry. Dirty laundry. She should have washed her clothes instead of sitting here, trying to write. Trying to write into the emptiness. There is no try, said Yoda. Only do. Clearly she was no Jedi.

So what was she? A person who longed to write. Who had finished a book—just the writing of it, not the sending-into-world—and missed it, mourned it. Who feared that there would not be anything else, no more doors, no more creatures from the deep, no more gales of imagination to half-drown in. That was the great fear: that she had nothing else to say, nothing to write that was worth writing, nothing new to rise from the vast emptiness. Was it true? Could it be true? Perhaps it could, except, of course, they were still there: the traces, coils of darkness, wisps, plumes, presence. So-subtle presence. They could lead her anywhere, forward, back, inside, shooting up through sunlight, reeling down in wells. And inside her, too, there was still something, in the emptiness. A hunger. Not a hunger for words—more than that: a hunger for the alchemy of word and vision and that greater force sweeping right through her; a hunger for that terrified delight.

And when it started, anything could rise up in this room beside her: men, women, dragons, naked couples slick with sweat, houses full of shouting, houses full of silence, beetles, races, crashing cars, the smell of baking bread, gutters where coins glitter, gutters where shit mingles with the rain, bodies dancing naked, bodies exploding under bombs, bodies strapped to gurneys, bodies leaning lazily on balconies, bodies opening their mouths or other parts, old songs sung from lying mouths, new songs sung by radios, arias, dirges, lullabies, deaths, births, afterbirths, weddings, jilted brides, drunk brides, lusty brides, brides who smell of baking bread, brides whose bodies are exploding under bombs, peaches, pineapples dripping sweetly onto hands, sticky fingers sucked by a wet mouth, ships, storms, mountains, towers, brothels, priests, monks, hot-minded monks, soldiers, boots, children, windows where geraniums grow, windows with iron bars, sun that strokes the windows, rivers, whips, laughs, screams, dreams, whispers, families huddled around tables, families pushed together, families blown apart, people moving though the dark, people wandering and crashing and slowly coming undone, people droning through the hive of daily life, secrets, longings, murders, sodomy, feasts and hungers, thefts, bridges, buildings, cages, halls, walls, nails, doors, rooms, big rooms, small rooms, cluttered rooms, empty rooms, darkened rooms, rooms a lot like this one, where she sat, wanting to write, reaching for it, teetering, on the brink of words.

Carolina De Robertis’ first novel, The Invisible Mountain, is forthcoming from Knopf in August 2009, and from publishers in ten other countries. Her writings and literary translations have appeared in Zoetrope: Allstory, The Virginia Quarterly Review, ColorLines, and elsewhere. Her translation of Bonsai, a Chilean novella by Alejandro Zambra, was named by Three Percent as one of the 10 Best Translated Books of 2008. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2007, and is currently at work on her second novel. For more information, visit her website