Tuesday 21 August 2018

Sevens

Every seven years, or so I've been told, the body renews itself. Of course, this is technically a myth. Your stomach lining renews itself every five days, while the lenses of your eyes and enamel of your teeth are with you from before birth. But in the main, if you dismiss the outliers, the body in which you now live, and move, and have your being is not the same one in which you lived seven years ago, not exactly.

The idea might stick around so easily because it chimes with the idea of the climacterics, the turning points in a life. The first comes in the seventh year; the rest are all multiples of seven. Unless they're multiples of nine; as with cells, not everyone agrees on the distance between turning points. Regardless of their frequency, a climacteric marks a dramatic change from one type of life, from one approach to life, to another, or so Plato and Cicero and Boethius all believed. The body you move around in is not the same body you moved around in seven years ago, and neither is the life through which that body moves.

Seven years ago I was living on the Eastern Shore, working in a wine shop and trying to write a book that would eventually become The Shore. I'd spent the previous school year in England and already knew I had to go back. We had no internet, no phone, so once a week I collected fat airmail envelopes from the post office, read the letters and responded to them in instalments. David had never written letters before. His handwriting looked a bit like you'd expect from a doctor with serial killer tendencies, or a serial killer with medical aspirations.  Some weeks they were the only human contact I had.

Some things are the same. That summer I searched the hedges for wild raspberries, lay on the dock and dipped crabs out of the creeks, paddled out into the marshes to pick mussels and picked up the potatoes left in the corners of the fields after harvest. Now I drag Dave out to scavenge blackberries from the hedgerows, hunt damsons, make wine. Back then I couldn't imagine the life I have now, the same way I can't now imagine going back to America. I miss the Shore, and I miss my family, but I don't know how I'd even begin making a life there.

That summer, I wasn't sure I'd finish my degree. Since then, I've finished two more. I wasn't sure I'd finish the book. I wasn't sure, when I'd been alone with the marsh and my own thoughts for weeks at a time, whether I would ever regain the ability to step into the human world, to speak aloud when I wanted to be spilling the words in ink, because you only get so many words in a day and why waste them on the air when you can fix them to the page?

It could be that it's the blackberries that makes me think about that time. Summer is its own universe. They link together, so that when I stand in a pool of sun in my garden in England I can close my eyes and feel the Virginia sun, be seven years old, or fourteen, or twenty-one. Writing has a similar property: when you're sunk beneath the surface of a work, slowly letting it drown you while you tinker with its moving parts, it's like every other time you've been under, like you've never left that word-sea.



Or maybe it's just the sevens: I have both a new body and a new life, both different from their previous iterations in major ways and yet possessed of a few comforting similarities. New body, new life, but doing the exact same thing I was doing seven years ago.


Of course, this all begs the question: what will I be doing seven years from now?

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