In a ridiculous attempt to understand why I am drawing swans, I start to visit the town library and read up on the swan, hoping for a clue as to why this particular animal has chosen me to represent it continuously on sheets and sheets of newsprint.
I find nothing all that interesting about the swan. They are irritable beasts, can wrestle one another to the death over territory, holding an adversary’s head under water until they are drowned. They are not faithful unless they choose to be. The most interesting of all the information is the fact that a swan can fly faster than a horse can run.
I read Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,” then a book about his poetry where I discover that he wrote many different drafts of that poem. I obsessively seek them out and read them all. Then I make a new poem using reject lines from the various versions.
Night after night I go
Among the grey lanes, the trees.
In the half dark I go
And they are gone again.
When I first saw them I was young.
They have fled when I awake.
Have crossed the skies and climbed the river.
Floating among the stones.
My friends start to worry about my mental health. I have long conversations, walking up and down the dirt road in front of my cabin. The snow falling and falling, sticking in my hair, stitching white epaulets onto the shoulders of my jacket.
“It’s really a kind of cult, where you are,” one of them says.
The arts colony is an odd mix of excess and deprivation. Too much unstructured time. Too much isolation. No agency, except in the creative realm. All our meals are made for us. Lunch is delivered in a basket to the studio. Our bedding is changed once a week; soap and towels are replaced when needed. There is nothing for us to do except our work, and if this is not going well it is an almost unbearable torture.
Some mornings, I go to town and just sit on a bench outside the post office, watch people who belong to that world go about the business of living. All the simple mechanisms of daily human life seem fascinating and so removed from me. I watch people with a kind of wry curiosity. How odd to go to the bank or buy groceries. How odd to use money or drive a car.
Because we are separated from our real lives, and from the people who inhabit those lives, the residents at the colony bond with a fierce intensity that is unnatural and alarming. Everything is accelerated. Love affairs blossom and die within the space of a week. Passionate friendships, like the ones we had when we were children, spring up, sometimes in a matter of hours. We swear our undying affection for one another, our affinity, over and over again. Because we’re not doing anything except exercising our imaginations, our extrasensory abilities are heightened to the point of madness. People are avoided because they feel evil. We work ourselves up into a froth of supernatural feeling, start predicting who will die soon, and of what, or who among us will rise to glory and who will plummet to obscurity. One manic evening, a group of us walk through the dark woods of the estate and announce which parts of the grounds feel as though bad things have happened there. Nameless bad things — death and violence and misery.
At this point, I give up trying to write my novel and just let what happens happen. It all feels very Zen, which I have decided is just another word for futile.
Spring never comes. The snow continues to fall. Deer come out of the heavy snow in the woods to walk on the main road and are hit regularly by the cars that travel the slick winter distance between our town and the next. The crazy swan drawing stops, and I am grateful when nothing rushes in to take its place.
For a while, I stop going to dinner in the main house, because the other artists are spooked that I’ve given up writing my novel. They are afraid it’s catching, that they, too, will suddenly feel the urge to stop what they’re doing. I hoard the lunch food, and for a number of days dine only on fruit and cookies and carrot sticks.
