What it is really like: the come-up, the coming on of a good, strong drug. “I’m starting to feel it…” “I think I can…”
Writing again, I mean, after a long silence. During which, yes, I may have have written—but with difficulty, and without joy. Not this singing in the fingers that made me love writing once, before I loved it less.
“La la la, Oh music swims back to me.” That’s Anne Sexton, from a poem about something other than writing again after a long silence that I always think of when I do. I put the version she recorded with her band on a playlist titled after my manuscript-in-progress—the name of which I won’t tell, for fear of dispersing whatever force I feel is pulling me up (up, up) “where only longing reaches.” That’s not Sexton; that’s a secret still.
Writing this way is like having an affair. Only better, because there are no men involved.
Sometimes it feels so intensely good you think you wouldn’t be able to bear it if you couldn’t get it out of your body and down somewhere.
Sigrid Nunez paraphrasing T.S. Eliot: “Human beings are capable of passions that human experience can never live up to.”
But sometimes—rarely—yours are the passions, and you do bear them.