The Writing Bed

One day when I was in the depths of my recent shingles attack, I set up the double bed that spends most of its life folded inside a convertible sofa in the downstairs guest room.  I

I put on a blue fitted bottom sheet, stacked some pillows against the back, and folded a crocheted afghan across the bottom.  Then I lay down, exhausted, and closed my eyes.  Bisou came streaking into the room, took a flying leap and landed beside me, and gave a big sigh.  I sighed too, a sigh not of pain or discomfort or boredom, but of contentment.  I had solved the bed-and-Bisou problem.

Knowing the limits of a spouse's tolerance helps to keep a marriage going, and in the case of my particular spouse Bisou's body on the conjugal bed is beyond those limits.  In normal times, Wolfie and Bisou sleep on their own bed at night, on the floor next to my side of things.  During the day, I do my reading or writing or napping or mindless staring into space on various sofas and chairs where Bisou and I can be in close bodily contact.

But when the shingles hit, I was too sick to sit on a chair or even recline on a sofa.  I needed to be in bed, but I also needed my comfort spaniel.  Hence the recourse to the guest bed during the day.

I'm feeling better now--today I even did the laundry--but I'm still spending a lot of time on the guest room bed.  I have the phone nearby, and a cup of lemon balm tea from the lemon balm jungle at the back door.  A good lamp on either side of the bed, and a view of the trees turning russet along the driveway.  Also my Kindle, for when I get tired of writing.  And when I get tired of reading I can close my eyes and subside against the pillows, one hand on Bisou's silky back.

Compared to this, the living room, the sun porch, and my study, have come to seem pretty spartan.  In those rooms you cannot flow seamlessly from snoozing to reading to writing and back again.  You have to make an executive decision about what you're going to do and where you're going to do it, and then you have to get up and implement it.  It's a vertical kind of existence, and I am really getting fond of the horizontal.

The tradition of writing in bed is a long and honorable one.  Before central heating, lots of writers wrote in bed, for practical reasons.  But even in the twentieth century, when houses became more comfortable, Proust, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, George Orwell and Truman Capote all took to bed in order to write.

Why is that?  It's possible that the bed evokes a less formal and therefore less intimidating feeling than the hard, flat, cold surface of a desk.  In bed, you can just scribble and jot, whereas at a desk, you have to WRITE.

And perhaps the bed, with its softness and warmth, its invitation to recline and even to close the eyes, offers a physical conduit to that dreamy state in which the internal critic retreats and the poor neglected subconscious comes out to play.

Just curious:  how many of you like to write in bed?

What Mozart Saw

"Though ... [Mozart] lived through the French Revolution you search his letters in vain for anything other than the most oblique references to this continental cataclysm.  He had no feeling for nature and no interest in the visual arts.   In his letters home during his wide-ranging travels he describes everything he heard and nothing he saw."

I found this quote by Anthony Tomassini here--one more confirmation of my belief that we each perceive the world in radically different terms.

Years ago we lived next door to the retired director of the National Arboretum.  He was an affable gentleman who asked my permission to prune our tree--the sight of our unkempt ornamental pear was distressing to him.  One day I was in the car with him, and he kept a running commentary on all the sidewalk trees we passed.  For me, at that time, a tree was an indistinct mass of green atop a brown pole, but on that drive I realized that when our neighbor looked at the world, he saw trees.

A gardener friend looks at the world and sees bushes (which for me are an indistinct mass, etc.).  She doesn't just keep track of her own bushes, but of those in neighboring villages as well.  We'll drive past some stranger's yard and she'll say "That lilac suffered a lot last winter.  But it seems to be recovering nicely now."

My zoology professor saw birds everywhere.  He'd be driving us to a field trip and out of the corner of his eye point out little brown fluttering forms that I could barely see, much less identify.

My husband perceives the world in terms of fulcrums and levers, forces and currents.

I drive down the road and see dogs, and here in Vermont--lucky me--also chickens and cows and horses and goats.  

And I notice sounds (so like Mozart, no?), which is both a blessing and a curse.  The sound of birds is the essence of spring for me, and their silence in the fall depresses me as much or more as the fading light.
I am acutely attuned to people's voices, their volume and pitch, the rhythms of their speech.  When certain announcers come on the radio, I have to turn it off, or leave the room.  I know several people with the habit of letting out a sudden explosive laugh, and when I talk with them I find myself flinching in anticipation.  I cannot read if there is music playing.  I can barely make myself enter a store during the Xmas season.

Not only do we all perceive different worlds, we are different worlds.  And this reminds me of a magnificent quote by Proust about the function of art:

"...style for the writer, just as color for the painter, is a matter not of technique  but of vision.  It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct and conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the way in which the world appears to us.  This difference, if it weren't for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us.  Only through art can we come out of ourselves and know what another sees of that universe which is not the same as ours, and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those of the moon.  Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we watch it multiply, and we have as many worlds at our disposal as there are original artists."  (My translation.)

Highly Sensitive Global Nomads

I cannot listen to music while I write. I cannot listen to music while I read. Too much beauty does me in: after two hours in a museum I have to go sit in a darkened room. If I have just seen a play or heard a concert, the car radio must be off on the way home. After being with people I like for a while, I have to go sit in that darkened room. Too much of any good thing usually does me in.

I am distressed by chaos and tumult; I wince at laugh tracks and screams on TV. I am affected by other people's moods. Folded-over rug corners, open drawers and messy eyebrows drive me crazy. I am easily bored, but too much stimulation exhausts me.

For years I thought that there was something wrong with me, that I was different from other people, who would laugh if they knew this about me. I felt like Marcel Proust--who could only write in his cork-lined bedroom and drove his family crazy from earliest childhood--without the talent.

But not at all. Rummaging through a bookstore a while ago, I opened a book, took a "test," and found out that I am one of millions. I am a Highly Sensitive Person, and I need not be afraid. That first book (The Highly Sensitive Person) spawned some more specific offspring (The Highly Sensitive Person At Work, The Highly Sensitive Person In Love, The Highly Sensitive Child--not sure I have the titles right). There are websites, newsletters, workbooks and support groups for us HSPs--we even have our own acronym.

I wonder if poor Proust would have been consoled knowing what a huge club he belonged to?

But that is not all that used to bother me about myself. Wherever I find myself, I feel that I am "from away." In America I feel European; in Europe I feel American. Asked where I'm from, I launch into a long explanation, which embarrasses me and bores the listener.

For a long time, "home" seemed to be a future concept for me--something I was looking for--rather than something in my present or past. During a certain period in my adult life, I instigated house moves every three-to-four years, much to the discomfiture of those who lived under my ever-changing roof.

I handle trivial separations, as in short business trips, badly, but I can let go of people, places, houses, jobs in the blink of an eye. I have trouble embracing the things most people embrace: a national identity, a political creed, a religious faith--I am mostly on the outside, looking in, comparing, contrasting. For a long time, I felt strange and sad about this.

But now, thanks to the internet, I find that, again, I am not alone! There are hordes out there like me! We are Global Nomads-- people who, before age eighteen, resided in at least one country other than their "passport" country. As far as I can tell from the websites, newsletters and support groups available, we GNs have a lot in common, down to the urge to move house all the time. Maybe that's one group I could feel comfortable joining?

Probably not. I'm too accustomed to feeling different. Besides, it might be too exciting, and then I'd have to go sit in a darkened room.