Marya Hornbacher

Reposted from Marya Hornbacher's blog visit here.

When, exactly, cities sleep...


At approx. 4 a.m.

That is what I have determined this fall. In a mad dash through an insane number of cities these last few months, I’ve decided that cities fall asleep—kind of suddenly—at 4 a.m.

I’m an early riser—a cross between a night owl and a morning person—and I generally get up between 2 and 3, when most of my night owl friends are abandoning their desks or late-night walks or easels or what have you, and head for bed. That’s when I’m making coffee and sitting down to work. So I’m a counter of stars, a student of degrees of dark, and a connoisseur of sunrise details.

So it is that I happen to be awake to determine when cities sleep. And, almost across the board, it’s 4.

Sitting on a fire escape above West 4th and 6th last week, bundled in a sweatshirt and freezing my bare feet, I watched the last-gaspers stagger home from bars around 3:30. The cabs came fewer and farther between. The Papaya King on the corner stayed neon-lit, of course, in case anyone should want a hot dog for an early breakfast. The all-night shouting lost energy and eventually quieted down. And at 4, New York, the city that does not sleep, slept.

Columbus, Indianapolis, Calgary, Seattle, and various other cities fall mostly asleep earlier. But there are always those who feel it necessary to shout down hotel hallways till all hours, always a few cars running red lights on streets below, presumably in a hurry to make their 4 a.m. bedtime. And then those cities, too, go dark.

Tonight Minneapolis has just fallen heavily asleep. The lingerers in Loring Park—who were particularly raucous tonight—have headed home. The people coming and going and coming and going from various old brick buildings have disappeared, and are no longer shouting on the street outside or banging on windows and doors.

All is quiet on the northern front. And the sun won’t rise anytime soon. Winter is pressing at the edges of the city. The trees are almost all stripped bare, the last color drained from the color-mad trees of a few weeks ago. Those leaves, dry now, skitter up and down the sidewalks and swirl around your feet as you walk. The lakes are silver, the sky shifting from that same silver to an impossible blue, a blue so rich and saturated you’d think it was painted onto the inner arch of whatever arches over and around this tiny planet where we spin.

It’s November. And soon the snow will “come shawling down,” as Dylan Thomas wrote in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and cover everything as far as the eye can see.


*

The new book I’ve written for Hazelden Publishers, Waiting: A Non-Believer’s Higher Power, is finished. Turned in almost exactly on time, now in copyediting, and lurking in that pre-publication world where it goes through whatever mysterious machinations books go through before they hit the shelves. As I’ve told you, it was the singularly weirdest writing experience I’ve ever had. One feels one’s way along through any book, but with this one I felt like I had no earthly idea what I was going to write until it was there, staring back at me from the page. But it came together, like books do, and completed itself, and will come out this spring.

Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the Twelve Steps is on the shelves as well, and I want to thank all of you who’ve written to tell me how the book has affected you. It means the world to me to hear from readers at any time, but hearing that people are able to put into practice some of the ideas Sane suggests is an enormous gift, and I’m awfully grateful to you.

So on November 1, I sat down with my notebook and returned full-force to the novel. Which, of course, immediately morphed all over the place, cut vast swaths of pages from itself, in fact decided it was two novels, put one of itself in a drawer, and left me with what is actually a clear and writeable story. Despite my irritation at its willfulness, I am elated that it has decided to emerge from the murk and tell me what the hell it wants to be. The notes and new pages are piling up, the research is being done, the voices of the characters are making themselves noisy, and I can finally sit down to it every day without wanting to scream and tear out my teeth with a pliers. In fact, I’m having a very good time.

Meanwhile, I’m preparing the class I’ll teach this winter—taking a machete to the reading list I’d like to assign, dithering about which craft point to focus on when, etc, and generally behaving as I always do when I’m about to teach. I. Cannot. Wait.

Poems, as usual, come and go. I have a friend who writes something like a poem a day. I want to hit her with a pan. I take comfort in the fact that Louise Gluck goes on wild sprees of writing periodically, and then stops altogether for periods of time. Surely this is a valid way of doing a thing.

NB: Someone recently read me Jorie Graham’s work. Prior to this, I hadn’t much liked Graham. Upon hearing her read aloud, though, I fell madly in love, and am telling anyone who will listen to read her poems. Sit in a coffee shop and read them aloud. Everyone will think you odd, but you will get to revel in her marvelous way of putting together images and words.

*

It’s now 4:20 a.m. The city is well and truly asleep. The light won’t begin to come up for hours, and even then will come up slow. People will lie in bed, half-waking, burrowing deeper into their blankets, in no mood to throw them off and dash out into the freezing world. And it isn’t even that cold yet. Our blood slowly thickens to take on the falling temperatures. Today it is only 32 degrees. Soon the mercury will drop and drop and drop, and we’ll bustle out the door in heavy coats, 22, 12, 2 degrees, -2, -10…

Winter has barely begun.


Peace,

M