portals

[note #8]

Friends,

Here’s another possible beginning [see note #3] to the book I’m working on:

On the aft deck I keep a bucket—a rope tied to its handle, a long brush beside it. I toss the bucket over the side and haul it back up, full of water. Then I climb up on the roof and dip the brush into the bucket and scrub the seagull shit off, until a whitened stream flows along the gunnels and back into the harbor where it clouds around the hull before fading.

What I like about this as a (possible) beginning is that it’s grounded (if that’s the right word for a scene that takes place on a boat). By grounded I mean it contains the stuff of this world—buckets and water and brushes and shit. It might be a good way to start a book that, so far, often drifts into the lyric. Much of what I’ve written so far seems about how memory shifts and fades (much like that white cloud of seagull shit, or the way a dandelion turns to a globe of fluff after it flowers). But the book I’m working on is centered on my years living on a boat, so the boat needs to be central. It is the central location from which the rest of the book emanates.

The flip side of a grounded image is an abstraction (we persist in believing in these drowned worlds) or a direct statement of emotion (we loved each other as best we could). “Belief” and “love” are not grounded—we cannot hold them in our hands, or take a photograph of them. But there is likely a scene connected to each abstraction, to each emotional state—I think of each as a possible portal into something important for your project, a threshold you have yet to cross…