Where to Write

We often wax wasted writing what to write, how to write, why write at all. A refreshing sidebar might discuss where to write. We could compose while walking, a kind of no place to write, or allplace, which Wallace Stevens did, composing lines, poems, in his head as he walked from his rather palatial home through local paths through the park to his desk at the Hartford in New Haven where he transfigured from poet Wallace Stevens to Wally, Claims Manager. He wouldn’t forget his words from his morning walk commute. Hemingway said he could write anywhere, though maybe we are not as good writing in some places as others. In Cuba, Papa wrote standing up at a typewriter placed atop a casement or podium. During the war, Jacques Prévert wrote at sidewalk cafe tables in Paris, the leaves falling, one imagines, weather also being a kind of place, or, as Hemingway points out, place being a kind of weather. In any case, we sit down now to write this post in new writing digs. We have three choices of where to write in our current quarantined predicament, apart from the ubiquitous pocket notebook which with pen goes everywhere, for unlike Wally, we are poor at remembering our words, and must write them down or they disappear like birds out of the corner of the eye: the basement, the main floor, the upstairs. Since we write using an electric, we need to be near an outlet, and since the basement in winter is often damp, our choices where to plug-in quickly diminish to two. The living room is comfortable, with couch, no television, much light from windows, with a limited view of the sidewalk and street through the twisted branches of a giant rhododendron Cynthia. The kitchen is nearby, coffee refills within easy reach, and Susan will not have come down yet, and we sometimes gas up imagining what she might be dreaming, fuel for priming the writing carburetor. But we’ve moved to the upstairs back bedroom, now sitting at an old oak desk, three drawers on the right, a wide thin drawer across the sitting space, a pull out board on which in the old days someone might have set a manual typewriter. This desk is quite heavy, solid panelled sides and front, such that it must have been intended to sit in an open space, not against a wall, and it’s difficult to move around. It creaks complaints in various seams when jostled, and probably won’t withstand any more moves down the stairs. We’ve had it, at one time and another, in the basement and in different rooms on the main floor and upstairs. It presently sits at an angle off center toward the middle of the room, affording a view out a wide window facing east-northeast, over roofs and growing trees in the foreground, buildings nestled in trees and streets, lit at night, and, farther out, the opening of the Gorge, the Washington hills tapering down from the north, the Oregon Cascades steeping sharply down from the south. In the distant sky, airplanes can be seen coming in for landings at PDX. Down in the yards, closer in, birds are seen fittering, frittering, flittering, fluttering about: crows in the tops of the firs, flickers and jays lower down, hummingbirds, all sorts of bushtits and the like, flocks of them. The occasional racoon or possum at dawn or dusk, coming or going, though one must get up from the desk and go to the window to see those. This view is a distraction. This is not a good place to write. Back to the living room. One can’t get any writing done upstairs with a such a view that all one wants to do is to go out and fitter with the birds, not sit in and write.