Morning Becomes Ambiguous

A Digression into Writing Practices and (why not?) Time.

God bless, my new café has Wifi.

Harmony. It’s called Harmony. I am going to have to start ordering meals here to show my appreciation. Beyond that: the girls who work here speak some English. The Café Americano is small but potent – not at all bitter – and it comes on an oval, wooden tray with a small glass of water. I am happy. Well, not exactly happy. I woke up knowing that today I must take on two bureaucracies – my Romanian bank, which has yet to issue me a credit card, and the Romanian government, from which I need a “Residence Permit” to stay longer than 90 days – to stay, to be precise, 102 days. Both of these are formidable opponents providing onerous tasks that must be undertaken somewhere near now. I know that “now” is not a place but “somewhere” speaks to the vague sense of hopelessness that surrounds these potential obstacles. It seems like a place, though not Iasi with its poetry parks and abundance of statuary.

Get over it, Patty. Do the difficult things first. Well, writing is difficult, isn’t it? Sitting in this lovely café, with a good coffee, is difficult? I don’t know. I don’t feel like answering. I know I needed to get out of the apartment. After I’m here for a little while and do some communication “housekeeping,” I’ll return my laptop to my apartment (across the street) and walk down to the bank. It’s about a half-hour walk, but the day is pleasant and cool. I would call but I feel like I’ll get nowhere (somewhere, nowhere) on the phone with a Romanian bank clerk, as nice as they have been to me. I need someone to see what happened to my bank card.

Wait, my coffee girl is serving someone what looks like an individual French press? Or is that tea? Did I see apple strudel tea on the menu? Can’t do tea right now. I am going to need another Americano. I am going to get a reputation here.

I’ve told a couple of writer-friends how much time I have to write. They are envious. There is only one time in my life that I have had this much writing time: when my friend Lorene and I rented an apartment in Ojai for a week and fashioned our own “writing retreat.” We were beasts. (We were also both eating Paleo at the time, so our ferocity was supported by lean protein and organic produce.) If you are going to embark on a personal writing retreat with a friend, go with someone who can cook. That would be Lorene. Or Connie. Find writing friends who can cook and more than that, take pleasure in cooking. Anyway, we stayed at a place called the Green Lantern, or the Green Chameleon – okay, I found the name, it’s the Blue Iguana Inn. Its logo, at the front of the property, was a mosaic in mostly greens and blues, with a sufficient kitsch level. There was a small, curvy, outdoor pool. Our apartment was spacious, though somewhat lacking in light – unusual in Southern California, although Ojai approaches central coast. It’s the light here that gets you to pay the ridiculous rents. I mean, the weather, too, but the light is part of that. My friend and teacher Adam Zagajewski said that the light in Clairmont reminded him of the south of France. Adam could say that in his measured voice with a lovely Polish accent and it did not sound pretentious at all. Because it wasn’t. (I can still hear him saying, “Patty, is this a poem?” about something that probably was not.)

During that week, Lorene and I got up earlyish (7 a.m.), made coffee and breakfast and each retreated to different corners of the apartment to write. We wrote. We wrote and wrote. At some point, we would decide to go to the local high school track (I think we were both running, then) and a couple of evenings, we went out to dinner. One night we went to the bar at the Ojai Valley Inn and had a wine-flight (what a term!) which was lovely. But mostly, we wrote. As the kids say – we got a stupid amount of work done. I wrote much of a draft of what would become “Honi, the Circle-Maker,” a novela-length series of prose poems about an ancient Jewish mystic who could supposedly make rain; it was eventually published in The Tampa Review. We would make our Paleo dinner (spaghetti squash with turkey bolognese! Chicken and roasted vegetables!) and write some more after dinner. It was nuts. It was great.

The only aspect of the formal writers’ retreat that is lacked was the networking – I mean, the “bonding” with other writers. Not that I don’t think that has value. Even in my little world, connections count. Paying too much attention to that, however, affects the work. The writing. I’m sorry if that sounds California “woo woo” but that is how I feel. I recall poet Jorie Graham speaking years ago critically about “the commodification of poetry.” That has grown a great deal in the three-plus decades of my writing life. It’s not that I want us to be hermits (Salinger) or die of consumption (Keats), but I do think that paying too much attention to one’s public persona, and equating writing poems with significant financial gain, steals psychic energy from putting words together – as my buddy Coleridge said, “best words in best order.” I grant this is a Romantic notion of the writing life and sure, maybe it would be nice if every company had an in-house poet, and poets had corner offices. Maybe. I’m thinking not.

Time, by the way, for those who don’t write, is everything. Talent, desire, gripping the pen or tapping the keyboard – none of it matters without time. Of course, there’s the issue of making the time. Creating the time. How funny we talk about “carving out the time,” as though the day needs to be butchered. To carve means “to make objects, patterns, etc., by cutting away material from a piece of wood or stone, or another hard material” (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary). You might use chisels or gouges or hammers, of various sorts. We all want to have been Michelangelo’s chisel, but the job was taken.

As for carving, the closest most of us get in a literal fashion involves a turkey. I used to buy mine at our local family butcher, Celestino’s, which closed a few years ago. Father and son – you don’t get too many more generations in California, not like the riddlers in Reims – they rotate each bottle of champagne 1/8^th of a turn each time – who pass down their jobs from generation to generation. That is a phrase in Judaism, as well, “l’dor vador,” though it has more spiritual trappings. Then again, what is more spiritual than the feeling one has after two glasses of champagne? A temporary and admittedly illusory sense of well-being.

I think I will pick up eggs at the Mega Image on my way home. (Day starting to take shape.) Then the bank. Don’t worry: I’m going to the bank. The Mega Image is not very Mega. Wait – there’s a second floor. Who knew? (Everyone but me.) The Carrefours – that French grocer – like Big Ralph’s on 17^th Street in Costa Mesa.

Randomly: today’s title is a mental fidget. I saw the play, Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill at some point in college. It’s a modern, adapted version of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, though the Oresteia was a trilogy. As one might suspect: it’s a tragedy. There is nothing tragic about my morning, but the play’s title popped up while my brain was floating possibilities about the pending day. Theater companies don’t perform much O’Neill anymore. It’s too bad. Fortunately, my morning is becoming less ambiguous; the day takes on intentions and goals. When do you have time, this is important, though I just read an article about how we should all stop trying to accomplish so much. I wish the experts would make up their minds.

I want to close by thanking Romania for providing me with appropriately named hang-outs. My coffee shop: Harmony. Restaurant/bars, one five minutes up Boulevardul Carol I (my street, my king): “Muse” to the right, “Time-Out” to the left. Harmony, Muse, and Time-Out. (At home, MoonGoat and Avila’s.) I also want to thank a recent Bolt driver who recently moved back to Iasi after 15 years in Italy. He said that he wasn’t a very good person when he was younger, and he needed to move to Italy – I think he worked in Formula One – to figure that out. He came back, met his wife, and has two baby girls, named Eva Maria and Aria Maria. Aren’t those beautiful names?