“To feel the pleasant cool spot of my own finger poised against my cheek, to savor everything a little, laugh when the crazy pampas grass stalk in my car lurched softly into my face, to pull my wool cap down to my eyebrows and rejoice that I’d found it on the seat of my car, to whistle Elton John’s ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and actually hit the high notes, to recall Ellen’s and Laurie’s joy at having me back at school, their almost forgetting to greet me with the usual, ‘Hi, Mrs. Coconut Ketchup Sandwich.’

“Slowing at the stop sign at Clayton Road on the way to the restaurant and wondering if I would be able to write tonight, feeling scared, like everything was hanging out, scared of my arrogance in assuming I would be able to write just because I’d made up my mind to, knowing that’s folly, that moods of confidence pass and I can’t honor the commitments I make in those moods.

“Ah, what can I say? I feel like I could write a novel—that the words are links in a chain extending from this page back into the most obscure recesses of my mind, and that by pulling hand over hand, I could eventually bring to light something astonishing.

“And how everything gives me pleasure—the gesture with which I pull open the prongs of a binder and slide out a new page, the sight of my own body as I curl in a hot tub. Today, I’m not embarrassed by excesses—my imperfect animality delights me. I feel pulses of power, a half-awaited something coming true.”

“This is the strangest day of illness of all. I am unaccountably fitful. One minute I spring up with an apparent surfeit of energy and pace about, restlessly reviewing plans and projects in my mind, the next I fall suddenly into a sleep, like a swoon, for five minutes or twenty, my mouth wetting the pillow like a child’s.

                                                                                …

“Another day, and I wake again to a sense of altered consciousness. I feel a savage restlessness, as though there weren’t space enough for me in this existence. In and out of moments I experience pangs, like hunger—feelings red and raw, like things new-born. I feel desperate or on the verge of tears, and at the same time, the quality of perception is so dear that I can’t believe I will be allowed to keep it. Surely it will be snatched away from me, and I will be as I was before.”

SACRILEGE

“I feel scared—like I’ve committed a sacrilege in opening my journal and reading the contents prematurely. I’d said I would wait, and I did, but not long enough. I had only enough distance to evaluate a little of it, and now I feel all the misgivings—the apprehension—of having unlatched a Pandora’s box.

“A short while ago, I felt so electric—an image occurred to me. I felt like I had been a scrap of cord severed from the main line, I’d blocked off so many memories of my past, and that at last, because the break had been mysteriously mended, I was feeling a power surge throughout my contemporary being. But now I fear reprisal, a fall from grace. Perhaps I’ve done it—destroyed the clarity. Sometimes I think I was better off before, for now there is a new dimension to anxiety. That all this may desert me. That’s what reading my journal has done—planted some queasy seed that is burgeoning in my garden.

“’Go to the typewriter and write to save yourself, if you can,’ I tell myself. And why do the images relate before I consciously see that they do? And what in me is writing? Now the tears are coming.”

Following my dream “Aerial,” I woke up in an altered state of consciousness—one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life—that I chronicled in a series of vignettes:

“Literally overnight, a startling change has come over me. I have incomprehensibly achieved a vivid sense of my life’s continuity. I am discovering the logic behind what I have done or tried to do that I didn’t perceive at the time, and I remember the bolder person that I was. She turns on like a light within me, illuminating my past. What I cried out was not, is today—my past is real.”

SPLINTER

“Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed. I awoke with my throat so swollen it felt like a golf ball had lodged there. And speaking of lodged, I had the thought, as I lay there enjoying my new condition, that it was as though something had been dislodged in my brain, a great psychic splinter that had pained and aggrieved. The truth is, much of this time I don’t feel so different. But I keep passing before some door in my mind that stands slightly ajar and strikes me with an edge of light from within—the reality of my past, the coherence of my personality. I have been incredulous for years, like a pitiful, dumbfounded animal, over my total and unaccountable loss of vitality—capacity for intellectual assertion, effective will, rational control over my feelings. How could I have had these things and lost them? How could I have been loved and not experience a trace of the feeling that I had been? How could I have achieved, yet come to feel so small and drab? How could I, after attaining a measure of self-possession, have become stuttering, intimidated, and withdrawn? How is it possible that I could have worked through so many problems, only to find, years later, that the sum of my unhappiness was the same?”

And here, I feel obliged to observe in hindsight, “But I hadn’t been loved; I’d only imagined I was, after Britte’s declaration before I sailed off to Spain.”