When February 2nd is January 1st

I have returned, like a pilgrim, to the MacDowell Colony. MacDowell, a name to me almost like an incantation, is an artist’s retreat in the snowy woods of southern New Hampshire that through its fellowships to writers, composers, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, puppeteers and others offers much more than shelter – secluded cabins in the wood – and food – homemade, natural meals formed for someone who spends time thinking, trying to find the new, writing, but mainly sitting at a desk. (Unusually hungry due to strainings of the mind much more than of the body (but I am not a performance artist) one could easily get both fat and lethargic from the wrong kind of food fed to the sedentary).

It’s a place for the arts, a community of artists, “the only place,” a writer said recently, somewhat tearfully and with terrifying conviction, “where I have ever felt fully that my art mattered. And was totally supported.”

To which I utter a loud, internal Yes.

I’ve come to MacDowell to begin editing a documentary film I shot with Micah in Iraq, and to write.

With every routine and all geography built around one thing - creating a place where the artist can be – MacDowell is still very much what one makes of it.

My favorite MacDowell rule, and the only one (though these things are more a code of conduct), is that you cannot go to anyone’s cabins uninvited. (A total reversal of that revered rural practice of “come on in, anytime.”) Even the lunch basket, delivered daily, is left quietly outside and without a knock, a rare respect for the narrative difficulties and syntaxic struggles going on behind that closed cabin door.

When you work at home, when you are working on something “artistic”, a strange thing happens to the otherwise well-regarded convention of the closed office door. There are phone calls, interruptions, poppings-in. Somehow, it seems, if you are not in a suit and behind a glass with your title stenciled to it, you are not really working. And that’s not the worst of it. The call of the everyday and the world at my fingertips (yes, wireless plus internet) create the best distractions for me if I’ve moved from my bed to my desk (which may be the sofa that morning) in under 20 seconds and am sitting with my computer in my still-warm-from-sleep pajamas. I interrupt myself.

No internet and no phones are in the cabin. You can’t reach anyone, they can’t reach you.

Just me, my computer, my thoughts. And me.

There is no easy avoidance.

Coming to MacDowell is, for me, the beginning, artistically, of the new year, with all of its promises, however grand, and the dogged discipline with which one faces new beginnings and second chances.




In “January First”, an Octavio Paz poem translated by Elizabeth Bishop, Paz writes

Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
Once more,
The reality of this world.

Here, it is clear. The reality of this world is not the madness I create outside – trying to do everything at once (also known as multi-tasking, once a highly regarded skill, now seen as a possible hang-up or a problem with delegating) and please all the people I want to be happy - or the difficulties I always seem to be dealing with – deadlines, bills, a rushed visit to the vet. And in greatest paradox, in life and work efforts that seem to be all about me, I find myself totally effaced, and cannot create. But here - in the silent but for the winds, the ice-cracking and the gentle lope of some searching animal, woods, where I sit, in peace, in quiet, away - in the mirror of solitude, I start to see me.

The day had invented you
But you hadn’t yet accepted
Being invented by the day.
-Nor possibly my being invented either.
You were in another day.

The real mantra for the artist, I have come to think, is not to live in a world created by others, but to create a world for others.

When you open your eyes
We’ll walk, once more,
Among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
And bear witness to time and its conjugations.

At MacDowell, I realize (and what a heady, active verb that is) that if I can create my world, I can create art. (And what a heady presumption!) At least create.

Perhaps we’ll open the day’s doors.
And then we shall enter the unknown.

To open my cabin door, not because I have to answer a knock or rush out, but open it into a day of my own making - that is what I hope to make of my time at MacDowell.

The day is unknown, but desired; desired to be known, and possibly, tenaciously, created.

Happy (artistic) New Year.

Peterborough, NH, 6 February 2007, 4 days into my fellowship