Day 7, and I'm having more fun than usual....

Yup...haven't had any alcohol for seven days....that's a whole week, right? So many things about my physical body are feeling better it's hard to keep track. My right foot, for example, doesn't hurt when I step out of bed in the a.m. as it has for about a month. I realized that I was eating cheese along with belting down the wine, and milk makes my feet hurt. Why my left foot hasn't hurt, I don't know. Go figure. It started out cool today, but it got hot and muggy by suppertime. Tomorrow it's supposed to be in the high 90s, which usually means it'll crack 100 before the sun goes down. I am loving my new bed now that it's not trying to break my bones. Can't wait to get into it and read. I dug out Margaret Atwood's "Negotiating with the Dead" two days ago. That's her book on writing. I decided to start with the last chapter, which also has that for a title. Why? The subtitle says "Who makes the trip to the Underworld and why?" It has some lovely quotations to begin the chapter:

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion. And die the death, the long and painful death that lies between the old self and the new... Oh build your ship of death, your little ark and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.

--D.H. Lawrence, "The Ship of Death"

A winter hanging over the dark well, My back turned to the sky, To see if in that blackness something stirs, Or glints, or winks an eye: Or, from the bottom looking up, I see Sky's white, my pupil head-- Lying with all that's lost, with all that shines-- My winter with the dead: A well of truth, of images, of words. Low where Orion lies I watch the solstice pit become a stair, The constellations rise.

-- Jay Macpherson, "The Well"

What moves and lives occupying the same space what touches what touched them owes them... Standing knee-deep in the joined earth of their weightless bones, in the archaeological sunlight... Standing waist-deep in the criss-cross rivers of shadows, in the village of nightfall, the hunters silent and women bending over their fires, I hear their broken consonants...

--Al Purdy, "Remains of an Indian Village" and the last one, my favorite:

Take for joy from the palms of my hands fragments of honey and sunlight, as the bees of Persephone commanded us.

--Osip Mandelstam, "Take for joy from the palms of my hands"

 Cathy says that's in the bible, too--the part about drinking honey from someone's hands (Esau??) I regret I do not know that. Cathy knows more about books than anyone else I know, and she can recite a lot of it by heart. She recited that part of the bible, too. Of course, I had never heard it, never heard of it. Here I am, an old woman and ignorant. C'est la vie. Anyway, Atwood gets around to explaining all the morbid imagery on the second page of chapter 6 (p. 156). She says

 The title of this chapter is "Negotiating with the Dead, and its hypothesis is that not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality--by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead. You may find the subject a little peculiar. It is a little peculiar. Writing itself is a little peculiar.

I love it when I find things like this in books that just spear me right in the gut. I'll have to keep reading to find out what she's talking about.