A Tyranny of Technique

So I pushed aside the stack of books I am planning to read to start Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers on the strong recommendation from the unreliable editor, which is definitely a mark of esteem since I was as sworn off books on writing as I was on books on parenting. And it felt like it was written for me, which is hard to admit, because it means I am confronting my inner ambivalent writer and admitting that I am just like a million other aspiring writers in this country with little to show for it. I guess it’s like when I read Catcher in the Rye in the eleventh grade, a book that had been a source of a lot of identification a few years earlier, only now I had to listen to several other students that I was sure were, in Holden’s words, phonies, identify strongly with it and, oh how uncomfortable that was! Somehow, it seemed, I ought to be special, have a short cut, an exemption, from whatever it means that being the ambivalent writer is. Being a writer, or a phony, ought to be clear and obvious and not this subjective thing.

Lerner strongly advocates figuring out why you write, which has been fuel for lots of journal entries the last week, until the self-absorption and reflexiveness of it makes me queasy. Because if I admit I do it, I want it, there is some responsibility there. It’s so much more comfortable acting casual, diffident, only my life doesn’t work without writing in some form — cue the Brokeback music, “God, I wish I knew how to quit you!” It gets in the way of other things: the Suzuki teacher asks me to assist her in teaching an early childhood music class, with a plan in her mind of my getting trained up and starting my own classes, and what’s in my head but “I never wanted to be a music teacher, I am a writer (but not out loud)!” But the writing thing is deeply ambivalent. I want, have always wanted, more than money or fame or sex or food, connection. Not just squealing “Me too, right?” when somebody else likes the same tv show or song or whatever (which is still validating and lovely) but ideas evolving, morphing in front of me, so that I don’t know what’s mine and what’s yours, metaphors blossoming and turning toward the sun, casting light on the nature of the things being compared. And more than four years now of three pages every morning has resulted in 1) I am a little clearer about what I want, what I need, what I think, which helps a little in being a good wife, a good mother, and not horrible friend 2) lots of lists of things I need to get done in a day 3) faith that it is possible to add a habit to your life from nowhere even without understanding the motivation and 4) occasional insights and connections and ideas metamorphosizing all by themselves. So morning pages by themselves would probably suffice, but, lately, the blog addiction. And the tantalizing prospect of connection, outweighing the terror of having my thoughts out there being judged.

So: I started writing this a week ago just as I was finishing the Lerner, and was trying to sanitize the fallacies out of my thinking — surely there’s a fortune cookie/horoscope fallacy when she describes the great writers who were notorious, ballsy self-promoters versus the dysphoric and retiring Dickinsons, two opposite extremes on a spectrum — so it’s easy to find yourself there, “Yes, me too!” In fact, in her catalogue of neuroses, addictions, and self-sabotaging behaviors of writers, I am doing the Psych 101 thing and self-diagnosing all over the place, which is surely enough to convince me I am a great writer.

Only. Some completely forgettable magazine article I was probably reading in the dentist’s office and am thus excused from citing had one line that jumped out with some probably completely bogus definition of expertise as taking ten years to acquire. Which means little, except, I realize, I have been a mother ten years! And I started musing on what that means and what has changed. Aside from tricks to keep things flowing smoothly, persuade small people to do what I think needs to be done, organizational tips, and a few routines worked up to entertain them at various ages, and the patience that comes with realizing how much of it all passes, I think most of how I do this has stayed the same. A basic spirit of empathy has been with me from the get-go, an assumption that we are all working towards if not the same, then generally compatible goals, except I tend to have the longer point of view. I started out confident and have remained confident, but the big change is in the quality of the confidence, moving from arrogant confidence (“I am good with children, and mine will be exceptional”) to a more humble (and complicated) confidence (“this is damn hard, and I make mistakes and learn from them, stand up and brush myself off, apologize when needed, and my children belie a grace in that they are better than my parenting. still I can do this, am doing this…”) In some of the conversations my sister the cellist and I get into late at night about Art and Music and all, it’s come up this paradox that arrogance is often a mask for insecurity, that those who are truly great are often great in a humble way. That creating something good does require a backseat ego so you can get into a Buberesque “Thou” mode, which is a humble thing. So, so much of what Lerner describes in the pathology of writers comes from insecurity, and while they may be correlatives of the writing life, they are not a necessary condition of it. Keep a list at the back of the journal of poets who didn’t kill themselves, right?

I do cringe at the spectre of the relative merits of writers and artists, the great and the not-great and the not-yet-great, when it is the connection I crave. One more music related attempt to understand this was the discussion my sister and I had about kids starting music lessons at different ages and learning at different rates and how it was possible that you might not tell the 12 year old who’d been studying since he was four from the 12 year old studying since he was seven by technique alone, but that there was a value to not having a memory of life without daily practice and I lay this gem proudly at the foot of the Suzuki music teacher, who exclaimed “But you most certainly can tell the child who has been playing since he was four, he should be almost a virtuoso!” This stung, like, “Ack, by not starting our older children until they were seven and eight, we’ve hamstrung them, held them back, kept them from meeting their true potential!” and it took a little to recover my equilibrium. There is a schizophrenia in the focus on progress and absolute, comparable ability on the one hand and on encouraging a child where they are at because the music, the time practicing itself is a gift. This is slowly mapping for me into the strange breakdown of every art in our culture into “that which can be taught” vs. “that which wants to be expressed,” which I sort of shorthand as techniqe and connection. I think that they want to balance each other, that a deficit on either side is going to be frustrating.

Oh, but it’s late and this is a landscape pitted with false analogies and romantic notions, not to mention convenient excuses. My husband is turning out his light and spreading out the comforter, so I will close not like it’s a piece of formal writing and I have any sort conclusion…