“Today I saw a grove of fruit trees in a field of yellow flowers, and I relived, for a split second, the strange sublime scene along the road to Cuenca in Spain—where the trees were giant burls with shoots that exploded in yellow leaves like sparklers, backlit as they were by the sun; where the shadows were, for that once in my life, violet; and the grass, beckoning me like soft fingers, was pale and spider-spun. When I suddenly flashed on this memory, I broke out in goosebumps and somewhere I hurt. I got home and lay down and found myself smiling at something that got sweeter and sweeter…but later I couldn’t remember what it was.”

REHEARSAL

“I dreamed a child in my class came to see me and told me that he had seen poison oak up in a woody region where the children often played. I followed him under trees and up the hill to investigate. We came to the edge of a cliff. There the world dropped away to a green wilderness so far below I might have been seeing it from the window of a plane. Suddenly the ground beneath me gave way and I pitched down the slope. I had a fleeting hope for salvation—two plastic bags, a story in height, full of white gravel, were directly in front of me. But on impact, they jarred loose and tumbled down into that picture postcard abyss, with me free-falling after them. With unqualified belief, I knew that oblivion was at hand. I felt a first heave of fear against a door in my mind, but I threw my will against it, so that I could meet the end in full self-possession. In dazed waking astonishment, I experienced a transcendent sense of spiritual poise and power.”

“I went swimming early this morning. The air was cool, the water warm. Sunlight on the wavelets cast a pattern on the aqua floor of the pool—a shimmering undulating net, like meshed lightning. With a child’s absorption in her toes, I trod that enchanted trap.

                                                                              …

“The chilliness impelled me toward the pool gate with a clumsy, frantic patter. Barefoot, tanless, goose-fleshed, I hoped no one noticed me. It was late afternoon on a day of grayness and rain. Along the surface of the pool, a cloud of steam drifted, and became blindingly radiant when the sun glanced out. I dived into it, as into a snowdrift, and hung suspended upside-down in the water. Then, with a forward thrust, I propelled myself heels-over-head-over-heels, tumbling like an astronaut in deep space. When I surfaced, everything was quiet, except for the crickets, and the quake of my own laughter.”

“I could say that Karl and I have junked our old classroom schedule, to our mutual relief. I could say that my voice teacher and I are confiding like conspirators of long-standing. I could talk at length about the evening I spent playing charades with Kay and company, and how I enacted the courting of two moose—mooses? But I don’t want to write a diary, although right now it seems all I’m up to. I feel like there’s some leap of faith I’m not making—a leap off the literal structure of my life into the airier realm of art.”

BEER BELLY

“The last few days have been novel. Instead of tucking in all sorts of questionable feelings, like an unsightly beer belly, I’ve been letting them all hang out. Karl laughed uproariously when he realized I was worried about sounding like a bitch. He kissed me on the cheek, saying, ‘We’ll make it.’ And afterward he looked as bashfully stricken as a Walt Disney dwarf. Even Lu and I gave each other a clumsy unpremeditated hug. So I’ve things to ponder with chagrin and relief. I wonder if this red-faced effort will make a difference. Sometimes I think that my being neither a singer, nor artist, nor writer, nothing can.

“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.”

“Last night I had this dream:

“It was evening in a room of my imagination. I discovered that with a bird-like stroke of arms, I could rise into the air and float above the floor. I called in passersby for a demonstration and found, to my mortification, that I couldn’t repeat the trick. I flapped about ineffectually for a time, feeling absurd, until the moment of giving up. It was then I beheld my feet, not planted on, but dangling inches above the floor. I dropped my arms with relief and floated to the ceiling, as gracefully as a helium balloon.

“I rose and descended many times more, embracing each of my audience in turn and lifting them up with me. It was as though we stood on an invisible pedestal that bore us up and down. When all had had a turn, I flew to the top of the wall to a row of small horizontal windows. I pressed through one of these and was momentarily out in a luminous night. There was another wall, another set of windows. Then at last I was free.

“A sumptuous landscape, more beautiful than life, rolled out before me. There were mountains just beyond touch whose shadows were every shade of violet. As I flew forth, there loomed up a haze of black winter branches that reached hundreds of feet into the air. They were hung with myriad icicles that sparkled in the starlight. I gasped with wonder at this celestial chandelier, and, as though one icicle had broken free and lodged magically in my heart, I felt pierced with joy, like the child I was beyond memory who first saw the rainbow iridescence of snow in the glow of an old street lamp. I began to sing as I flew. I saw a lighted arena and prancing horses that were animated drawings—not real. And I heard music that seemed to come from inside me as I dipped and turned on the wing.”