Monday 22 April 2024
During our recent video conference call, King Arthur and I were discussing my manuscript revision plan and calendar. I still have several weeks left to teach and must wait for the semester to end so that I can begin the serious revision work for the Katyn manuscript. “I’m chomping at the bit. Ideas are percolating in my mind, and I’m ready to rewrite. Now!” I informed my manuscript editor. “The semester is nearing the end; it will happen soon enough. Take notes,” he countered.
I replied, “This time, last year, I was resurrecting the manuscript, summoning it back to life. I was determined. I, too, was overzealous to get started during the latter weeks of the spring semester. I was writing here and there. During my train commute. I had no consistency. No steady, repeatable routine. Everything I had was in fragments. Reviewing notes, collating every scrap of a chapter, turning those odds and ends into a ‘shitty first draft’ (Lamott, Bird by Bird), meditating, and praying to the Muses, I subdued my writer’s block. The process of bringing the Katyn manuscript back to life involved constant, strenuous, and absolute allegiance to the deed of finishing it. I even lunched with two former teachers of mine to harness creative energy. I found my writerly inspiration; however, regaining it felt like starting up an old, rusty lawnmower. Pulling and pulling on that starter cord! Will it ever start? It did, but the stinking dark smoke… I gave that engine a fine-tuning, and it beautifully ran all through last spring and summer. This time, right now, I don’t want to tire myself out by starting up the writing engine. Thank God for those blogs I’m writing… they keep the pen moving across the page. That engine needs to be running before moving forward with the revisions. I need to be ready.”
“WD-40; just spray some WD-40,” King Arthur joked. Still laughing, I said, “Once I’m finished with grading final exams, I probably need to go on a writer’s retreat. Not one of those fancy retreats where you apply—like a competition—hoping to get in and paying fees and stuff. I want to go on my own retreat. Totally private, unconnected to any organization or anything. Even if I don’t write anything, I just need to clear my head. Not for too long.”
“Go to Montauk,” King Arthur immediately suggested.
“I like the idea of Montauk. Jackson Pollock’s former studio is in the Hamptons. A visit there could spark some creativity. When I wrote my Melville dissertation, I visited Arrowhead, his home in Massachusetts. He wrote Moby-Dick there. I stood in the same room where he wrote. I should go somewhere else, though. I was thinking about—even planning for—Boston. It’s not the semi-quiet beach refuge that I might need, but I think I need to go to Boston for the revision. Even if by going there and no writing happens, I need to realize something, to know about beforehand the eventual revisions start. And what that something is, I honestly don’t know,” I murmured, as if hitting upon some hidden, elusive knowledge.
I paused for a moment. A mood was possessing me. It wasn’t one of those old, familiar devils of writer’s block ready to hinder me. Instead, a spirit I met many times before… maybe the same dream symbol-figure who coaxed me to enter that dream room I wrote about in the 25 December 2023 “The Dream” blog… maybe now it was trying to unearth some revelation for me to decipher into how I should finish the manuscript. My mind bobbing in a semi-conscious trance, I thought I heard King Arthur’s voice. Was it his voice… or were those spoken words the spirit’s? What’s there? I thought I heard. The repeated sound of King Arthur’s voice broke the spell I had fallen into.
“What’s there?” He queried, curious what America’s old-world, New England city could possibly reveal, even teach me about Katyn.
“Two World War II monuments: The New England Holocaust Memorial, designed by Stanley Saitowitz and The Partisans, created by the Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pitynski. I saw them ages ago… long before we went on our Katyn Massacres study abroad course with the cadets…but my unconscious is telling me I need to revisit them. I keep thinking about these two memorials. An inner voice is insistent that I go. I wrote about these memorials briefly in the Katyn manuscript, but, again, something is telling me to go see both memorials again. So, I need to experience them again. I’ve looked at my old photos, and maybe know why? … but to be sure, I need to go to Boston.”
“Go to Boston,” King Arthur instructed.
Exciting times!