Silences by Shelly Fisher Fishkin Page A

the hope of it, was “the air I breathed, so long as I shall breathe at all.” In that hope, there was conscious storing, snatched reading,beginnings of writing, and always “the secret rootlets of reconnaissance.”
    When the youngest of our four was in school, the beginnings struggled toward endings. This was a time, in Kafka’s words, “like a squirrel in a cage: bliss of movement, desperation about constriction, craziness of endurance.”
    Bliss of movement. A full extended family life; the world of my job (transcriber in a dairy-equipmentcompany); and the writing, which I was somehow able to carry around within me through work, through home. Time on the bus, even when I had to stand, was enough; the stolen moments at work, enough; the deep night hours for as long as I could stay awake, after the kids were in bed, after the household tasks were done, sometimes during. It is no accident that the first work I considered publishablebegan: “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”
    In such snatches of time I wrote what I did in those years, butthere came a time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of daily realities became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness of endurance. What might have been, I don’t know; but I applied for,and was given, eight months’ writing time. There was still full family life, all the household responsibilities, but I did not have to hold an eight-hour job. I had continuity, three full days, sometimes more—and it was in those months I made the mysterious turn and became a writing writer.
    Then had to return to the world of work, someone else’s work, nine hours, five days a week.
    This was thetime of festering and congestion. For a few months I was able to shield the writing with which I was so full, against the demands of jobs on which I had to be competent, through the joys and responsibilities and trials of family. For a few months. Always roused by the writing, always denied. “I could not go to write it down. It convulsed and died in me. I will pay.”
    My work died. What demandedto be written, did not. It seethed, bubbled, clamored, peopled me. At last moved into the hours meant for sleeping. I worked now full time on temporary jobs, a Kelly, a Western Agency girl (girl!), wandering from office to office, always hoping to manage two, three writing months ahead. Eventually there was time.
    I had said: always roused by the writing, always denied. Now, like a woman madefrigid, I had to learn response, to trust this possibility for fruition that had not been before. Any interruption dazed and silenced me. It took a long while of surrendering to what I was trying to write, of invoking Henry James’s “passion, piety, patience,” before I was able to re-establish work.
    When again I had to leave the writing, I lost consciousness. A time of anesthesia. There was stillan automatic noting that did not stop, but it was as if writing had never been. No fever, no congestion, no festering. I ceased being peopled, slept well and dreamlessly, took a “permanent” job. The few pieces that had been published seemed to have vanished like the not-yet-written. I wrote someone, unsent: “So long they fed each other—my life, the writing—; —the writing or hope of it, my life—;but now they begin to destroy.” I knew, but did not feel the destruction.
    A Ford grant in literature, awarded me on nomination by others,came almost too late. Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used, as the congested time of fullness would have been. Still, it was two years.
    Drowning is not so pitiful as the attempt to rise, says Emily Dickinson. I donot agree, but I know whereof she speaks. For a long time I was that emaciated survivor trembling on the beach, unable to rise and walk. Said differently, I could manage only the feeblest, shallowest growth on that devastated soil.