Falling Through Space (12 page)

I
KNOW
a lot of two-year-olds that have genius. They are terribly observant, absolutely curious, willing to take risks. They will pay endless attention to detail, will return over and over again to a problem until it's solved. Suddenly, they make the final move, the cap is off the bottle, the cabinet is open, the door is unlatched. My children were escape artists. They ran away to have adventures. I have chased them through the streets a million times, in my nightgown or in the rain. The oldest one was the best at it. When I found him he would be sitting in some stranger's house eating cookies. He knew how to pick his victims. They would usually be people about the age I am now. Do you remember how marvelous a stranger's house smelled when you were small? That's another mark of genius, the senses are keen and finely tuned.

How to hold on to that native genius and also learn the things we need to know to survive. How to hold on to the breadth of genius and still narrow it down enough to concentrate on one piece of work. How not to allow the narrowing to become more important than the whole. These are big problems. I'm thinking about them all the time. How not to let the world de-genius us, our children and our grandchildren and our friends.

Here's one thing I know for sure — you have to stay flexible. You have to have a lot of possible moves so no one can get you in a position where you think there's only one way to live or only one way to solve a problem. A Jungian I know used to make me so mad telling me a story over and over about a friend of his who refuses to eat in the same restaurant twice or drive the same route to work in the morning. Oh, I know, I would say when he told me that story. You've already told me that, don't tell me that again. No, he would answer, hear me, you aren't listening. Then he would tell it to me again. It was a long time before I began to see the wisdom of that story. Every time I would do something like take a different path when I walked downtown, I would say, Oh, my God, this is so silly.

It is silly. That's the point. It's divine and silly. It's the stuff that genius lives on. To constantly sample the riches and variety of life. Watch a child move from one activity to the other, moving around a house, never exhausting the possibilities of any one thing before moving on to the next one. We say of children, they are into everything. We should be into everything. We should get up one morning and take all our books and put them in a pile in the middle of the floor and start playing with them. Euripides and Aeschylus and Hemingway and Thornton Wilder and Margaret Mead. Faulkner and Edna Millay, and oh, yes,
The Conquest of Mexico
and
The Conquest of Peru
which I borrowed years ago from my ex-husband. Maybe I'll mail them back to him for his birthday.

I
AM GEARING UP
to go to New York for two weeks to oversee a professional reading of my play. It is a play that I began in New York in February of 1984. I began writing it during the first act of Sam Shepard's
Fool for Love
. I wrote all over my program and my agent's program. Then I went home through a blinding New York rainstorm and wrote all night in a hotel room. The next day I had lunch with my agent and told him I'd been up all night writing a play.

I told him the story, then I put the play away for three months. In June I had to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to teach for a few weeks so I took the notes with me and there, in a basement apartment near the campus, I hammered out three full acts in less than a week and sent it to a typist.

Since that time the play has undergone four major revisions, elaborating and extending what is there, taking stuff out of the stage directions, which at one time contained a lot of the best material, and putting it back into the play. I am, after all, a fiction writer not a playwright and had to transpose the work from one form to the other.

Now, the American Place Theatre is going to have a professional reading of the play with a fine actress playing the lead. I'm excited and scared, but the day I no longer do anything that frightens me and makes me shy I will know I am finished as a writer. And of course I'm hoping that around eleven o'clock one night they will say, “Oh, Ellen, you have to rewrite the second act,” and I'll say, “Don't worry, I'll do it tonight,” and so forth. I'll emerge from a hotel room the next morning holding a brilliant revision and everyone will cheer. I keep thinking about a passage from a book by Georges Simenon.

“Why do we read?” he asks, “why do we go to a show? Imagine an entomologist, an observer of insect life, suddenly witnessing the exodus of a quarter of the inhabitants of an anthill, at a time of day when they normally would be sleeping. They are going off to a mysterious appointment. He sees them jostling each other and converging towards a clearing where the soil rises in tiers. In order to enter that enclosure each ant must surrender part of his winter provisions to a sharp-eyed official.

“Why have they left the shelter of the anthill and undertaken this long march? What are they waiting for, motionless and quivering with their gazes turned to a small circle of earth?

“Imagine the shock to our entomologist if he saw five or ten ants, no different in any way from the others, move forward into the light and amidst an almost religious silence, begin to mime a scene from the life of the ants.”

A
FRIEND
of mine had dinner with the president of a large makeup company the other day. It's all fear, the president told him. That's our key word. Keep them afraid that no one will love them and you can sell them anything.

I have pondered this little story. Several years ago I became angry at a friend for questioning a column I wrote for
Southern Living
magazine. “Puss,” he said, “what's going on? What's happened to you?” “Nothing,” I replied, getting really mad at him. “It's just a magazine article, that's all.”

The article was about how I'd gone down to Jackson, Mississippi, to visit my mother and as soon as I got off the airplane she told me I looked like Daisy Mae. I was wearing a short denim skirt and leather sandals and a cotton shirt tied around my waist. Actually, I looked just fine. My hair was long and loose, my skin was clear and the color it turns all by itself in the sun. I looked about as good as I can look.

By week's end I was a different person. Jackson, Mississippi, had done a number on me. I had reverted to type, turned myself back into a frightened sorority girl. I had bought a lot of useless clothes and spent two hundred dollars on makeup and ruined my hair with a permanent.

The magazine article I wrote about all that left the reader with the impression that I thought it was very funny. A lipstick costs eight dollars this year. You have to do a lot of work that someone else thinks up for you to afford that kind of fear.

S
UMMER IS THE TIME
to deal with paradoxes, with questions that have no answers, problems that can only be surrounded, laid siege to. The Castle of Fat is such a problem. The Castle of Fat is surrounded by a moat of self-deception and absurdities. High walls of fantasy surround it. Evil guards of self-hate man the towers. In the square is an everlasting spring of Diet Coke from which the inhabitants draw sustenance.

Some of my friends and I have set out to besiege the castle. First of all we have to decide whether we are fat or not. I was in conference one afternoon recently with a philosopher and a retired United Airlines pilot. We had been for a long walk around the mountain. Afterwards, we were in the philosopher's kitchen and we were talking about fat.

“I don't know if I'm fat or not,” I said. “That's what plagues me. I might not even be fat. I might just think I'm fat.”

“The brain has to have glucose,” the pilot said. “That's a fact.”

“The part I hate,” the philosopher said, “the part I cannot deal with, is that a grown man would take off his underpants to weigh himself.”

“Correct,” the pilot agreed. We sank our chins deep into our hands to think it over.

“Why do you think you're fat?” the pilot asked.

“Because I can't button my skirts,” I replied.

“That sounds fat,” the philosopher said.

“You could get another skirt,” the pilot suggested.

“Stay for dinner,” the philosopher's wife put in. “We're having meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”

This issue has reached crisis stage in the United States. I know the way I'm thinking about this problem has been imposed on me from without. I can't stand to be dumb and brainwashed about the structure and size of my own body. We will be having further meetings about this matter and I will be giving you reports. One of my characters once said, “I think maybe it is my destiny to start a fad for getting fat.”

Then a good-looking carpenter goes by and she decides to wait a few more years before putting her plan into operation.

I
'VE BEEN DRIVING
along the Natchez Trace, “that old buffalo trail that stretches far into the past.” I‘m in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, near Cane Creek, moving turtles off the road and thinking about where I‘m going and where I‘ve been.