vertigo

Every once in a while, during my daily life, my project, both this current book and the whole overarching series, enters my mind: its vastness, its ambition, and I gasp--yes, gasp. I have an experience like vertigo: an unpleasant dizziness, a lack of anchoring. I feel the crushing burden of unwritten pages, unwritten scenes. So many. So many creative ideas yet to have.

It's all right, I tell myself, nothing's changed. Just keep your eye on what you're doing now.

If I wake in the night (and I almost always wake in the night), it might hit me there. It did last night--that is, early this morning. I sensed the vastness of what I'm attempting, and felt a kind of crushing feeling, suffocation, like being buried alive.

It's the same with anything big, that you try to see all at once. When I was at Gampo Abbey, I had arranged to stay there a year. That meant leaving Kimmie and my comfy home-life for 12 months, four seasons. Sometimes I would look out a window at, say, the naked trees and the snow on the cocoa-colored hillside, and think, I'll have to see all the seasons go by before I go home again. It felt long, hard, and terribly lonely. I knew I must, like a prisoner, focus on the concerns of the day. To "be in present time," as Mom reminds me, passing on the advice of Caroline Myss.

When I have one of these attacks of project vertigo, I try to reassure myself that it's natural and normal to have such attacks. Only a fool would try to pretend that he had such a massive thing under control. It would be a sign that he didn't know what he was doing.

I've got little option but to accept project vertigo. Last night, in bed, I felt the dead gray sense of anxiety lurking just past the lamplight of consciousness. I rose naked to pour myself a scotch, and lay in bed again, drinking it and feeling better.

A hot sunny day. Kimmie and I went out and did a few errands, walked at Ambleside. A prose sketch:

SAT 13 AUG 2005 1:30 p.m. AMBLESIDE BEACH

Another beach: K & I on a slatted wooden bench. Strong sun, fresh wind, warm and vaguely ice-cream-scented. Crows squawk behind us. The view: horizontal vista: dull dented sand.

"Are all ships that deep?" says Kimmie, pointing across the water to a dark, hulking freighter motoring swiftly toward port, past the pleasure boats poking along offshore. I squint out at it.

"No. It's not deep. About half its height is containers stacked on its deck."

And sure enough, as it chugs by closer, sharpened out of the haze, you can make out the dark battlements of its containers, with the flat white tower of the superstructure rising in a cleared canyon among them.

Kimmie giggles at the antics of little dogs, like the frolicking spaniel, chocolate-blotched, trotting by on its leash.

"...Yes, people don't think you're being quizzical if you just say, 'How is she?'..."

Dialogue between two passing elderly women.

And now the booming honks of the freighter about to run under the bridge. Across the water: Point Gray, long flat blue form, almost featureless in the summer haze. A float-plane growls over the water, its noise fading. Sexy girls walk by, buff guys. Three dark-skinned Chinese guys, talking their own language.

More freighters ride at anchor on the gray-blue horizon, sitting at all angles. The haze looks like something in the Mediterranean: North Africa. A tropical heaviness.

Now: teatime. I plan to read From Eden to Exile and advance a little in A History of Technology, volume 1. Later: night 4 of Paul's Rom-Com Festival: Annie Hall.