In football it's halftime and for novelists it's called the "Sagging Middle". Just look at those last two words; with their centered double consonants they look like letter-drawings set to prove their own words' meanings. And unlike the maneuvering of boats and airplanes, it's the middle part that gives the difficulty. With book-length fiction you can usually get your mind around the takeoff and the landing, the casting off and the docking, but the cruising portion of the journey is where the steering can get tricky.
We are just hours beyond the midway point in our vacation, to the place where you begin to do the math. Try as I might, I could never force myself to stop keeping score of the remaining days of summer when I was young. Even then I knew that though there would be vacations, gatherings, picnics, and softball games somewhere it would never get any better than that first day when you wake up at a reasonable hour knowing the entire summer lay stretched out before you. Wasn't it Basho who wrote:
"Even in Kyoto,
When the cherry blossoms bloom,
I miss Kyoto."
In the midst of a thing your mind produces a balance sheet of sorts, your debits and credits, as your honors try to keep pace with the demerits. And you scan the horizon always for the thing that chases you relentlessly--the end.
Sometimes when you're creating something you get a feel for the ending and you stand there alongside it, shifting your weight from one foot to the other, in an effort to hitch things up as they should be, in an attempt to board a fast-moving carousel. At other times you drift in your Blue Boat #3 with the clangy bell, going in slow circles, waving at your folks and their camera at every pass, looking for the ride's end.
I'm not sure which ride I'm on right now, I just know I'm enjoying every minute of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment