When I Fight Myself, One of Us Always Loses
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Spending time with Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation and coming to understand a thing or two. Thing One. I'm Not a NovelistI've always wanted to write novels. I've tried. I really have, but then there I was, reading Palmer: Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about --- quite apart from what I would like it to be about -- or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest. So much in the advice-o-sphere on the writer's life is about determination and powering through and keeping the pen or cursor moving rightward. Most of what we write down is a string of failed attempts to grab hold of something, an impulse or insight or image, to bring some part of it onto the page, imperfectly, sometimes quite tragically so. But we find gold in the pan and keep sifting, refining, separating, adding together. I'm typically pretty miserable when I'm writing, and I start thinking along the lines of: Vocation at its deepest level is not, "Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing." But then isn't that, in a nutshell is what it is to write? You're always in a strange place, you almost never understand what you're doing, but you can't not do it, at least not at a huge psychic cost. There's a Palmer for that, too: Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling." So Which Is It?It's taken a while to sink in that all along, while I've been banging my head against unfinished -- or unsatisfying -- novel/la/lettes, I've been plugging into something better, deeper, more nourishing in poetry, flash fiction, essay. Getting a poem, "The Inner World of the Cabbage," nominated for an award was a huge breakthrough. A piece of flash fiction I wrote just for fun will be coming out later this year. Success speaks, and I should be listening. There's an aliveness when I'm paying close attention to language and imagery, feeling and form. It's something I can do all day every day and rarely get tired. It's all about listening to the signals. I spent about a four-week stretch back in December working on a long-form fiction project and finding that while I could line-edit all day, when I tried to focus in on plot and character, tension and crisis, I was running so hot emotionally that I ended up a wreck by the end of the day. Distracted and distractible, moody, quick-tempered. There's a Palmer quote for that, too True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth. Further, he writes: This is what the poet knows and what every wisdom tradition teaches there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective amasks and self-serving fictions, and my true self. How's that for clarity? Stay tuned for Thing Two. |