((Part 2 of the essay that began last week: Seeking the Incantatory Novel))
What follows first is a true story, put into poetry, a charm I chanted into the motherhouse I had made of words in order to name and honor where I had been. In order to help myself back out.
What follows after that is a labyrinthine walk through the grounds of my personal brain chemistry, Cretan lyra music, trauma therapy, rituals for treating PTSD in ancient Greece, rhythm as healing, and where contemporary novel writing might fit into to all of this. Pour yourself a cup of something and settle in.
First, the story:
1.
Winter came, and went. I hardly saw it. My great mane thinned. My great mane went brittle. At night I feared death. At dawn I feared it. One part of me never rose up from the bed. Another part went further and further away, beyond the bed, elsewhere. The morning star was always out of sight. The corridors in me flooded. Pieces of the old world, of my life before, floated everywhere. His boots. His flute. His wool cap. My notebook pages. The wedding certificates. The bridle, the reins, the steering wheel, the bloody knot of my larynx from the dream, the biopsy pieces of my cervix, the tarot cards. The wedding ring he wanted back. The other one he threw in the bay. My mother’s vessels. Wild irises and the shed velvet of elk antlers, old promises of what cannot die even though I felt entirely dead, famished but unable to find or feed the famishing.