nancyjensen.org

Actor Liam Neeson is in the news this week after having told an interviewer that he understood and could draw on the deep, primal urge for violent revenge because he had felt this nearly forty years earlier when a close friend revealed that she had been brutally raped. Neeson also immediately told the same interviewer that within a few days of seeking an opportunity to act on his race-focused rage, he “came back to Earth,” and was horrified and deeply ashamed of what he had felt and of what he had nearly done. For the last several days, he has dealt patiently and humbly with dozens more interviewers who want to focus on the rage, rather than on his shame–and on what that shame could teach any of us who, in dormant or wakeful rage, have trained our assault sights on a people, rather than on a particular guilty person. It wasn’t until his first year out of high school, when he went to work at a defense plant in New Jersey, that Baldwin realized there were people who didn’t care how he acted, since all that mattered was that his skin was the wrong color.

His coat, so sleek it looked wet, the prominent white star at the center of his forehead, his mane and tail whipped by a wind that touched nothing else—all these details combined to express who this Black Beauty was: a proud, triumphant creature taking joy in his freedom. Reading Black Beauty, I cried real tears, many times, and when I finished, I read it again and again, finding I craved the feeling of being pulled by words through delight, heartbreak, and all the emotions in between, ultimately to a deep contentment I could carry with me, reflecting on what Black Beauty had learned: that terrible things happen sometimes, beyond our control—like a stumble in a rut—and change the course of our lives; that no matter how hard we try to hold our heads up, to be good and noble and kind, we don’t always get the treatment we deserve or deserve the treatment we get; that genuine triumph comes only after trial, and that nothing matters so much as knowing and holding onto our true selves. Though I’m sure at seven I had never heard the word literature, I know now that reading Black Beauty burst open the seed of who I am—the lover of literature and the writer—all of it the gift of a horse who never lived, but who lives always.

but I lingered anyway, wondering about the nature of the groundhog’s pleasure, what the undersides of the viola leaves smelled like, and if they tasted sweeter when mixed with the flavors of the saturated earth. and if he’d found himself a weary traveler after crossing so many treeless, close-clipped lawns, relieved and joyed to come upon a space allowed to go wild (to the dismay of the neighbors), where walls of honeysuckle cover chain link and most of the trimmed and fallen branches are thrown into stands of scrub grass as natural shelters. I envied the groundhog because he seemed whole, fully body and fully spirit, and I longed for some slow, gray, after-the-rain morning when I could heed Walt Whitman’s ( A day, perhaps, when I could swing in my hammock chair reading for a while to quiet my mind sufficiently for me simply to listen, first to the sounds of the trees, the birds, the squirrels, and maybe even to the slow rustling of the groundhog in the viola—and then to the footfalls and whispery voices of the characters who have been flitting in and out of my mind for months, wanting me to follow, listen to their stories, and start writing.

(it’s a writer thing)–I made some working notes for myself as triggers for the next scene (already fully visualized) so I can start writing again early in the morning after, I hope, a good night’s sleep. Once in awhile, I realize I’d better bring the notes into some sort of order, which usually means making one pile of notes related directly to whatever I’m working on, another for notes that are indirectly related, and another for notes that are for other ideas altogether. I’ve been a little disappointed at how few pages I’ve managed so far–pages worthy of keeping more than a day–but a conservative estimate of all my note pages tells me that for the twenty I have, I’ve written at least two hundred. So, all that time I’ve been in the worst kind of a writer’s despair, thinking I wasn’t writing, but the truth is, I’ve been writing all the time.