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For every good writing day, I have 20 bad ones. A good writing day is one in which I feel inspired to make progress on a piece. But that doesn’t ensure that I will be able to finish it or feel satisfied if I do. It doesn’t mean that I will think I did a good piece of work or that I will be able to trust that judgment over time. All I know after a good day is that I felt good. All I know on those other days is that I felt frustrated, uninspired, and aggrieved whether or not I produced pages, whether or not I think (or will think) that those pages are worthwhile.
Optimal conditions rarely exist for creative work. There is always something getting in the way, some defect of body, mind, or circumstances that conspires to obstruct progress and generate despair and self-doubt. The only answer is to keep writing, to admit that I can and will generate unsatisfying work, to avoid wondering about my talent, and to just get on with things. As my trombonist friend, Mike Hickey, once said about being a musician: just keep playing.
Just keep writing.
No one feels they have talent all the time. In fact, most people feel the way I do: it’s hit and miss, always a struggle, always an emotional upheaval. If literary geniuses really do exist outside the marketing generated by a hypocritical and terrified publishing industry, they would, by definition, be critical of themselves. History confirms that creative work is hard, even for the most famous and memorable writers. And it can’t be genius to believe it’s always easy or that your talent will confer all the pleasures and none of the agonies.
Just keep writing.
I tell myself to forget the people who have advised me not to give up my day job; they don’t know and can’t judge. Forget the family members and acquaintances who wanted me to reflect their own lack of talent and resented me for trying to develop my own; they can only see disappointing reflections of themselves. Forget the graduate school competitors, the half-starved adjunct professors, the depressed self-diagnosed creative failures, the cynical postmodernists declaring everything already over; they’re all too emotional. They’re like sick dogs. And sick dogs don’t typically write fiction. Don’t be a romantic. Be methodical. Cultivate a classical mind. Stay dedicated to the work and just keep writing because all these feelings and emotional people will disappear.
The only thing left will be the words I’ve written down. Whether there are many words or just a few is irrelevant. The point will be that I wrote them and kept writing them. In the end, that’s all I will have because the books will get put away on a shelf or recycled or lost. The computer files will get forgotten or deleted. What I wrote will be no better than a half-remembered dream. Just as what I intend to write is nothing more than a flimsy possibility. A trombonist is nothing without his trombone in his hand. If he keeps playing, he’s a trombonist.
Nothing exists except for this moment and what I do in it. So if I call myself a writer, I have one job.
Don’t buy into the romantic assumption that being a creative artist is easy for those who are truly talented and meant to do it. This is a materialistic commercial lie. Something I believe: art is part of being human and must therefore be available to everyone. And those who do it right never find it easy; though, the publishing industry, for example, may find it easier to sell certain books if readers believe that the writers being published are like idiot savants.
Everyone has an aptitude for some kind of creative process. Finding out what it is means finding out more of what it means to be human and alive. Not investigating this firsthand means voluntarily accepting an impersonal, commercially interested assumption about one’s creative potential—some external story about you imagined and written by someone who doesn’t even know you. It’s an affront to everything unique and valuable in the individual self.
Moreover, it elevates money over art, which is fundamentally disconnected from the reasons we make art in the first place. This is essentially stupid. Therefore, we need to appreciate art. We should create it and consume it, but we should not assume that it is something mysterious, selective, elite, or random. It is better to think of artistic ability as an attainment, a product of self-cultivation that uses materials we already have. And our job is to understand it, interact with it, develop it, and teach this praxis to others. Our job is not to worship those being held up to us as a select, anointed group. Our job is to understand how commerce reacts with art and then to set all that aside so we can do our own work.
Thoughts after spending 5 hours in the National Portrait Gallery, looking into the faces of Americans from the 18th century to the present day.
If I’ve acquired any broadening of perspective from all the hours I’ve spent in the Washington D.C. Smithsonian galleries, it’s this: every life is valid. Everyone has a story. Everyone is “okay.” Although human experience is varied, everything we do, everything we are, has been done, has been experienced before by someone. This is cause for joy. It means that we can’t get it wrong.
There is no way to err or truly screw up. All error comes from cultural viewpoints; it’s all a point of view; it’s all relative. And looking back across history in these incredible museums imparts the realization that there are no true successes or failures, no right or wrong in any kind of ultimate, transcendent sense. Everything that could be done has been done (and even so-called new things like space walks on Mars and other technologically aided novelties have existential roots in early voyages of discovery from history).
Because everything has already been done and there have been so many personality types recurring again and again and so many in each
generation striving in the same ways, the “general” of history validates the “particular” of the individual. We lead lives that are different in their particularity (being unique to time, place, culture), but that have been lived before in a general sense. The faint smile of Alexander Hamilton can been seen on people passing on the street outside the National Portrait Gallery. George Washington’s armchair is something we might find in a living room (certainly in any number of attics). FDR’s gaze in a national photo has the same depth and resonance as that of Arthur Rubenstein in his famous portrait. The potential comparisons are endless.
There have been artists and explorers and statesmen who were considered successes or failures in their time, but all of them have passed into history. And they were all valid. Death really is the great equalizer and this is a deep relief for someone like me, who has been told he needs to prove his worthiness his whole life. We deify our national heroes, but they were (and are) just talented people. And there is talent everywhere; though, it is not uniformly recognized or rewarded.
Essentially, these realizations amount to one basic truth: we are completely free to do whatever we wish because we have the power to define those particularities and the grace of knowing that we are also part of history. How widely we are known and if we are remembered is hardly up to us. Our only responsibility is to remember that we are okay, that we can’t get it wrong, that we are worthy by default.
There are no standards of quality that are universal and transcendent. The brilliant short story of yesterday will be disregarded and dismissed today in favor of something else. And those works that “survive the test of time” are great because we can still see their greatness. Our attitudes are what make them great. Otherwise, they are works of art like any others–each with their unique expressions and depths.
Say to yourself, “I only need to do my own thing. I don’t need to make any decisions out of desperation because desperation comes from the need to appease some external force or reach some external standard. Beyond satisfying basic needs, I am completely free.” The trouble is that the attitude of having to prove oneself to family and society is pervasive. As soon as we shake it off, we find ourselves unconsciously interpolated back into that dynamic. So our self-work must now be all about living for ourselves, as our authentic selves.
Authorship of one’s life is an inwardly focused prospect. It begins first and foremost as a choice of perspective and culminates as an outward way of living. We are all inwardly, which means perfectly, free.
It’s an old story. Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Kids. One of them dies, is imprisoned, is atomized in a steel box, gets deported, is spontaneously liquefied while buying a hot dog, is eaten by bears, runs off with a radio preacher, or goes out for a pack of smokes for 30 years. Everyone is sad. Remaining parent remarries. Kids remain sad. What about mom / dad? they ask. Was all that love stuff just an act? To which the universal response is always: suck it up, junior. It’s my life. Someday you’ll understand.
Meanwhile, the new replacement spouse initiates a scorched earth campaign to eradicate any lingering trace of the dearly departed, which includes the kids. They’re packed off to boarding school, to their pedophiliac uncle, or to social services. And, you know, fuck them for being so inconvenient. Suddenly, all is quiet. But Replacement Spouse is bitter: this isn’t what I wanted. You want me to be HER and quit asking me to wear her dresses! The surviving parent is bitter: this isn’t want I wanted. You’re obsessed with yourself and your meatloaf tastes like warm manure! Everyone is sad again.
Alcohol is purchased in significant amounts. Books speculating on the possibility of finding happiness in second and third marriages are read while the aforesaid alcohol is consumed. She criticizes his sexual inadequacies to her friends. He blogs about her obsession with Elizabeth Gilbert novels. Misery. Radioactive fallout (It was manure, you imbecile). The kids grow up swearing not to be like their parents. They fail.
There are many variations on this theme, but such is the through line. The idea of “through line” comes from Stanislavski and is closely associated with his concept of the “superobjective”:
When objectives were strung together in a logical and coherent form, a through line of action was mapped out for the character. This was important in order to create a sense of the whole. Stanislavski developed the concept of the superobjective that would carry this “through line of action.” The superobjective could then be looked at as the “spine” with the objectives as “vertebrae” . . . . These objectives, when strung together, revealed the superobjective, the logical, coherent through line of action. Stanislavski called this superobjective the “final goal of every performance.” (Sawoski 6)
With this in mind, our superobjective, the final goal of our performance, is not the happiness of the boy, the girl, the Replacement Spouse, or the kids. It can’t be. The vertebrae are all wrong. They’re fractured. Our characters are in psychological traction. They’re emotional quadriplegics. And instead of a functioning spine, the “logical, coherent through line” points to an abundance of potential suffering, right to it, like the Devil’s lodestone.
And like the lodestone—an ancient magical item “held in high regard as a Powerful Amulet and all-around Good Luck Charm because its Magnetic Influences are supposed to attract Power, Favors, Love, Money, and Gifts” (Yronwode)—the through line of our story functions as a Bad Luck Charm, attracting Injuries, Hate, Penury, and Loss, a cursed item of power. Or maybe it’s like Tolkien’s One Ring, leading our poor love hobbits straight to Mount Doom instead of a cozy faux-Ireland with ergonomic sunken houses and lots of comfort food.
Old stories are the most powerful. And this is one of the oldest, older than Macbeth, older than the short stories about crocodiles and honey jars found in the pyramids, perhaps older than writing itself: look for a Replacement Spouse and you never, ever get the Shire. You get displacement, disrecognition, self-alienation. But the saddest thing about this story, maybe the reason it has always been classifiable as a tragedy, is that it proceeds from a faulty assumption: people can be optimized like things.
My significant other got liquefied and all I got is this lousy T-shirt. And the bit of her I was able to pour into this jar. I think it might be her elbow. And it’s depressing to have to look at that on mantelpiece every day. The brilliant short story writer, Sam Lipsyte goes so far as to have his protagonist in “Cremains” take down his mother’s ashes and mainline them like heroin. So if you’ve read his Venus Drive, maybe that appeals to you as an option. But think about it. If you line up three or four shots of Old Elbow tonight, what’s left for tomorrow? That’s real loss—not just losing dearest but getting faded on her liquefied remains and having to live with the knowledge that you could have just picked up some Midori on the way home.
People are not things. Replacements cannot be found. Loved ones will go the way of all flesh. And we must then either make amends to our memory of them or ask hell to let us in. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud writes that “By abandoning a part of our psychic capacity as unexplainable through purposive ideas, we ignore the realms of determinism in our mental life. Here, as in still other spheres, determinism reaches farther than we suppose” (278). How far it reaches on our through line, how far it determines our final cause, depends on the extent to which we are willing to cower like mindless puling beasts that know neither reason nor truth. To what extent are we willing to sacrifice what we have, which is to say, what we remember, in our attempts to avoid pain—our best and only teacher?
“We are only what we remember of ourselves.” – Trevor Goodchild in Aeon Flux
Countdown to Africa continues. The next battery of inoculations takes place tomorrow, after which I will tutor my nephews and collapse on the floor twitching and mumbling. At the same time, I’m doing additional paperwork for Japan. This crazy life I’m leading is at least keeping me awake. The best case scenario will have me employed in both places as well. Worse case? Well, there are many fine parks and golf courses all over the world in which I could sleep.
The good news is that I might have a real second book manuscript ready to go soon–a collection of short stories that will precede the novel I hope to finish while abroad. I should have enough down time to finish it.
I’m betting on a lot of things coming through for me in the next few months. Let’s hope the dice stay toasty . . .
You know I once was a gambler, boy, but I lost my money soon.
Yes, I once was a gambler, boy, but I lost my money soon.
Yes, I lost all of my money some other, some other gambler can have my room.
– “Gambler’s Blues,” Otis Rush