Moira, so different today

​I.
     A little over 10 years ago, I started this blog. I had just started calling myself a writer, a step up from “trying to be a writer.” However, I still feared putting my writing out into the world. Before putting it out, I wanted to know that it would be loved. Of course that meant that my writing lived mostly in a stultifying cycle of self-indulgence, self-pity, hubris, and shame. The blog was my decision to go “loud and proud” as a writer and thinker. It was hard to “publish” and leave those first pieces out there. What would those people think? Of course, most of those people didn’t read my blog. 
     Why don’t you submit your work for publication, I was asked. I did, with distressing lack of success and often felt that what I wrote and the way I wrote didn’t fit most publications. And I didn’t want to write what fit; when I tried to write what fit it felt as if I plastered my face and gave you the cast to kiss rather than my cheek. (Admittedly, you may not want to kiss my cheek! And I may not want you to do that.)
     So in the first place I pushed out the blog as a kind of “exposure therapy.” More significantly it became a place where I could write what I want to write, in my way, rigorously. I shared my blog posts with family and friends and posted the links on Facebook and Twitter.* Always, I engaged with something outside me from deeply within myself. I wrote about art, politics, the Covid-19 pandemic, grief, and other things in very personal, but also analytical and critical, ways. 
     About a year or two ago, even as I was starting my fourth work of long fiction, I publicly named, for the first time, my blog as a body of work. I hesitated because it has only a small readership, and has never had any official imprimatur by an editor or publisher. However, over the last year, I have become confident and proud of this corpus. My public journal, now ten years old, is a record of an extraordinary time as witnessed and lived with mind and heart, and aging body. 
     My first post was “Moira.” The name of today’s blog post comes from it.

II.
     A little before my 65th birthday, I spent the evening at The Point’s “What is violence for?” celebration at the KGB Bar in NYC. See below for my IRL not-so-spying.

III.
     Why did I come to this? Packed room. Average age, maybe 45? Hard to tell in the dark. Maybe three other people closer to my age. Maybe four other people who are not of predominantly European origin. Why are these demographics important? Because Moirae come from all parts of the world. Moirae grow older, younger, older. Stories change.
     Here the story looks the same as it might have in the 1980s, the 1950s, or longer-ago perhaps. Thoughtful, eager Americans, yes mostly of European origin, yes mostly young, intellectually inclined, very well educated in the high-cultural European-American sense, and, yes, did I already say eager?
     Luckily the young ones clustered around the door so I found a place at the far end of the bar and started writing this, in my mind’s eye remarkably like an old witch spinning. 
     There is great pleasure in this practice of sitting in an eagle corner: watching, curious about this place and these people, ignored for the most part — thank god! A constant VERY LOUD beat keeps us nodding, and I’m relieved I don’t have to chat with anyone. I wouldn’t be able to hear them.
     But what does all this have to do with Moirae?

IV.
     It’s a settling into a past, eyes popping out, it’s not the past. They are trying to do something different, still in the past, but different, definitely intelligent, meaning not simply frivolous, definitely urgent, so earnest. By the way, this is almost a perfect place to write. Each jab of my pen synchronizes with the beat.
     They stand in the middle, between my colonized past and my colonized present. They tread that middle ground between head-head-head, did I already say head, and heart. Intelligently limited, knowledgeably blinkered, broadly blinkered, is there such a thing?
     The bartender is good. That may not go into this blog post. Too unserious. But the Moirae spin. They spin towards, away from, towards, away from, the real, meaning the truth, meaning the lived.
​

​​     It took me this long to realize I’m at the KGB Bar. Of course, I knew I was here, I had looked up the directions on my Google Maps. Why settling again on “KGB?” Well, because my morning began with Tarkovsky. And KGB is a false friend. Tarkovsky, KGB, red, movie-old high ceiling, man on poster with Russian (or maybe Ukrainian?) writing. No doubt the man was Russian (or maybe Ukrainian? maybe just say Cyrillic letters; he could be anyone European-ish; he could be Uruguayan, random plausible pick). The bartender doesn’t know, Google doesn’t know, someone knows, does it matter? The story spins off, a jumbled fantasy.
     I am pinned down here. I think the founder (a co-founder?) stands blocking my corner with his back. I will leave soon. The beat is more frenetic now. I am too short. I won’t be able to hear what they say. I feel like one of Tarkovsky’s inept characters, meaning foolish, irrational. Ha, this is what somewhat-mystical looks like on the inside. Short and foolish. In my case, also aging, shrinking, losing my hearing, spinning.
      It’s a young person’s thing. I do not begrudge them this, oh, I don’t. I did it too, as squawkingly different then as I am now, but I tried harder then.
     I see someone like me, like me when I was young, but much more beautiful than I was. She is trying to hear what the man is saying, leaning in, trying to hear what the other women are saying in response; she’s trying to hear the man who has no problem talking and showing his teeth. She’s trying to join. So far not successful. Not different.
     I’ll leave this lower red room now. There’s a different world out there, a different world from this one in here. Everyone here knows that. Let them have this respite. And thanks to my corner, sheltered by the big back, I had my witchy respite too.
      Can I get out without explaining myself?

V.
     The storytelling goes on, sometimes spinning backwards, sometimes spinning off disconnected, inconclusive. Always it is present. 
​
The Moirae spin the present, over and over.

Post-script: a verse for our times and for this post

Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
​
(from Robert Penn Warren’s “Tell Me a Story”)

* Several years ago I left Twitter and stopped being active on Facebook.