I seem to have yanked some muscle in my lower back, which is why I am awake at 5 a.m. on a Saturday and creaking around the house like an old lady. However, the house is warm and the coffee is hot, and sitting upright already feels better than lying in bed, so I have hopes of ironing out the kink soon.

Yesterday I did a passel of housework (floors and bathrooms, towels and sheets), finished another batch of Christmas cards, went for a walk along the cove with my neighbor, solved a major revision problem in a poem draft (form and line break irregularities were damaging the narrative), and made Julia Child's soupe a l'oignon (just as good as I remembered: luscious slow-cooked sweet onions, toast melting into homemade broth teased with cognac, gratineed gruyere . . . and pardon the lack of French accents, but this blog platform is ruthlessly American). It was a productive and restful day, filled with homey busyness, yet I could feel my writing mind beginning to percolate. This is always when the poems take real shape: during long slow stretches of unstructured time, when my body is bumbling through tasks and my mind is floating among stories.

I started rereading John Fowles's The Magus, which is not a great novel, in many ways a deeply irritating one, but which captures, for me, the magnetism of landscape and desire, myth and danger. It is set on a Greek island in the 1950s; the protagonist is a wretched young man who does everything wrong, especially as regards women; the world he is sucked into is false and manipulative; yet the book, as a whole, is a breath of sharp wind. Pay attention, it tells me, to the terrible cruel beauties of the world, of history, of oneself. It is an English novel that tries to inhabit an ancient state of mind. And it almost does this, and when I read it, I almost do too.

I'm drawn to The Magus at moments when I'm trying to write, and I always give into the lure to take it off the shelf again. It is, despite its flaws, a book that feeds imaginative honesty. My guess is that most other people would hate it, and might be right to do so. The male-female/colonial-empire relationships can be excruciating. But the book lives in the raw light of Greece, both as setting and as state of existence. And that light dazzles and burns.