[Dean's World] Celia Farber: For Esmay With Love and Squalor

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Posted by Celia Farber:
For Esmay With Love and Squalor
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1151564711.shtml


   The freedom is paralyzing and I don't like it much. Dean handed me the
   secret code to the control room and dared me to write one single
   paragraph about anything at all. I think it was weeks or maybe months
   ago. I keep stalling. He knows I am frozen solid from 20 years of
   magazine journalism, which has given me a rich and properly traumatic
   life, but also made me spectacularly uptight about whether what I
   write possibly has whiskers that need clipping. You never know what
   people might say, not to mention women.

   Magazine journalism is not to be dismissed but it is safe to say that
   the form teaches us to bind our true selves as tightly as Chinese
   maiden feet. (The Censor is frowning: "I'm not entirely clear what you
   mean by Chinese maiden feet.")

   (Etc.)

   It was the rythms that started to drive me crazy, in the end--the
   rythms of the journalistic prose that were identical to all the rythms
   that had come before. They seemed to correspond to core grooves that
   existed in our minds, that had not and would not be perturbed, that
   somehow say: "I am the voice of reason. I am the voice of reason."
   Terribly ungenerous.

   So.

   Dean Esmay has been--for about a year-- inviting me to understand what
   blogging is, and to try it, and I have reacted like somebody who is
   asked to run naked down Broadway. Tonight he pressed me a bit harder,
   and actually made a case for the idea that if I write what I am really
   thinking and feeling it will not be a disaster.

   But where is the EDITOR? Where is the HOOK? Where is the STORY?

   And what if it isn't "working?"

   Dean says not to worry. I can be myself.

   Why?

   You mean I can say anything I want?

   Ok then. I'll tell you some things. The war I won't name (you
   denialist scumbags at Dean's World know what I mean) is raging all
   around, all sides being driven to screaming hysteria, lawsuits,
   e-rage, fire and brimstone accusations. I breathe shallowly and watch
   from a ditch, and dream of home.

   Home is Sweden, where I grew up. I got a letter today from one of my
   closest friends, who's known me, as he likes to remind me, since I
   wrote my views straight onto my ripped jeans with a black Sharpie pen.

   I swore I'd get home by midsummer (June 23) but I didn't make it. He
   said the gang was awaiting me expectantly and had plans to sink my
   laptop and cell phone into the Baltic sea under the dock on day one.

   Then we would do as we always did; Start a fire, get the guitars, pour
   some schnapps, go pick wildflowers for the table (my job.) I kept
   writing cramped emails explaining that I was trapped in some kind of
   psychic warfare that made it impossible for me to do anything other
   than defend and survive--hammer out unending emails to an unyeilding
   universe. Gain one yard, get beaten back, advance again. A political
   existence, barren either way.

   Our summer island is called Runmaro, and it is the gem of Stockholm's
   archipelago. Everybody was there, I hear, including Erik, who is never
   without his butterfly net, and who babysat our favorite poet Tomas
   Transtromer's butterfly collection on the island one summer. (This
   story has a subplot I won't reveal just yet but if you stay with me in
   my new incarnation as late night blogger, all will be revealed...)

   So there I was, stiff with worry, sick with worry, over the war, the
   pogrom, the gangrenous infinity of it all.

   And my friend wrote: "Erik told me that the Apollo butterfly has just
   been seen on Runmaro again!"

   That is the famous butterfly that Mr. Transtromer wrote an ode to:
   "How I love that butterfly. As if it was a fluttering corner of Truth
   itself."

   That's the story: The Apollo Butterfly Has Just Been Seen On Runmaro
   Again.

   I was going to start posting hundreds of pages of data about who is
   Right and who is Wrong, but my soul went with that butterfly, and I
   decided he or she is a much better story.