I have been meditating (in a sort of rapid-fire yet casual way) on the notion of transmuting one's memories or experiences into FICTION. And all of the notebooking and drafts and elaborate processes that one goes through until one reaches the final fictional world, and then one forgets- sometimes it is lost - what a line or a phrase or a scene or even a character was originally based on. Today is Ash Wednesday, as a suburban gothy-morbid Catholic schoolgirl I loved receiving the rites on this day - having dead people's smoke bleared all over my pale peaked forehead by a sweaty man-thumb. It is suitably somber today in North Carolina. And I have been dealing with the banality and mundanity of my body - I am beginning to realize perhaps it's not stress, that my body is actually starting to strangely sabotage itself when I am doing well! The digestive problems are terrible again, started yesterday afternoon, this quick sick, this wicked cycle, I am now back to all blandness and bread and blah - nothing spicy or boozy or chocolatey to ease the tedium. And so I am not working as well - it lasted, what, a day! I have been going to acupuncture regularly for the insomnia issues (cured) and these regular and perennial and really quite boring problems with my reproductive/digestive system that flares up consistently when I don't need it to and began appearing either a)when I moved to Akron or b)when I became an "author," dealing with stresses and different pressures of publicity, which were more or less at the same time.
But I digress (but do not digest). A line flickered through my head that I reread in one of the journals I was rereading yesterday: My life has become my own permanent Lent. A line I scribbled down when I began to have these problems, oh, years ago, when we moved back to London (do the regional disurbances cause these systemic disturbances or am I projecting a narrative onto a plotless thing?) And as Helen was sliding needles into the tops of my knees or top of head or abdomen or any of these rivers or bridges on the map of my body, I remembered that the line appears in O Fallen Angel, transmuted onto my disturbed gothy druggy college grad:
Maggie has become her own permanent Lent:
no more sucking
no more breathing
no more sleeping
no more desiring
no more wanting
no more puking
no more drinking
no more going home with strange boys
no more waking up in strange beds
no more walks of shame
no more guilt no more shame
no more no more
Also reading through these early Scratches notebooks I wrote about
yesterday, when I first started trying to TRANSMUTE my past experiences and memories into fiction, I was working on notes on this character named Magdalena, who was based on a former me but really based on a roommate I once had who basically lived the life of a Jean Rhys novel. And realizing as I write this - Maggie's original name is Magdalena. It all becomes so buried, so complex. This alchemy of writing.
