And let's suppose for a moment we, I, do try to get free and fly off from that common morass the heart is so prone to settling in. Let's say this is more than just an exercise in literature, tarting up the corpse so it won't look quite as dead and we may admire it before closing the casket. Let's say I'm serious, let's say I'm working in the only ungoverned zone left to us; ideas as tangible agents of change. The age of philosophical and artistic manifestos is long over, and no matter how you slice it they were just another set of boundaries in novel costumes; we, the undersigned artists, exclude any vision not compatible with our own, and vow to slump into complacent old age once we've replaced our predecessors as the established brand-name of innovative thought. We have the formula, and we're locking it in the vault.
Is the entire aim of beginning to work the promise that we'll eventually reach an end? What end is there to reach when what we apply ourselves to isn't a product we can place on the market, when we step outside the arena of profit and loss, when there is no criterion against which we can measure how far we've come?
I wanted to be a writer. More specifically, I wanted to be a great writer, but I never asked myself why. Here in America we have a mania for producing, we're nothing without evidence of our usefulness to society at large, various slips of paper bearing large numbers and a string of polished bullet points. The money in the bank, the manuscript in the drawer we're sure will make us the next overnight sensation, the portfolio we rest our fate on, tidy columns reassuring us that all this will be worth it in the end; these things tell us that we exist, that there is reason and an order we can follow if we apply ourselves with a single-mindedness. I had my own work to do, a sense of purpose attached to my own slips of paper and the promise of some measure of success I believed they contained.
But I didn't know what form I expected that success to take. I was published a few times, in some small magazines, and that was pleasant. I participated in readings and workshops, I went to school briefly, I learned how to learn, I was on the right track. Sometimes I was satisfied with what I made, most times not, but as I had been told all writers feel this way I was undeterred. I had a product, I was producing myself through my writing.
This is the point in the story where I'm supposed to say that I was a colossal failure and couldn't understand why, or that I was a great success and was disheartened by the futility and emptiness behind the great machine that is the world of publishing. I was neither of those things. What I did was realize I had a desire that I had channeled into writing, but that writing couldn't possibly contain. And if writing wasn't the answer, then all of the trappings associated with it certainly weren't what I was after. I could go on to achieve my mature style, get a grasp on my subject-matter, maybe become part of a scene with like-minded people, or failing all that I could give up writing forever and get a real job. I chose neither.
There is no end to this story, and there is no end to the desires that don't tell us why they belong to us. We all have our own, and it's the lacunae in all of them--the missing text in those slips of paper that stack up to simulate a life, what is left to die outside the closed doors of the manifesto, the spaces we're left to fill in once we recognize we're not seeing the whole picture--that I'm trying to take the measure of. This might not be so productive; it's certainly maddening. William Carlos Williams wrote:
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
--and moving towards that elusive "something", out of order, without a terminus, is the work of a lifetime.
No comments:
Post a Comment