Art Found Wanting
5 :30 on a Sunday morning and I am not sure what I am so desperate for that I am impelled out of bed, not sure what wanting there is that I can write about that won’t sound like an indictment. But it’s myself found wanting. And the unbearable prickliness I feel, the fleeing that I cannot be what anyone else wants me to be right now. And to the child who wakes before 7 and thinks that this is a lovely time for some one-on-on bonding, I owe some apology. But I hide in my headphones, and almost cry with the sweetness of the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. I think Beethoven is the patron composer of those of us who have a hard time brooking the divide between the insides of our heads and the outside, our surliness and difficulty getting along belying tenderness and awe that we struggle to unlock.
There are words I bite back, unable to figure out which facts are truth and which are propaganda, but unwilling to remain silent because that doesn’t work for me, I try to focus mostly on where I am found wanting. I tend to flop between extremes of unhappiness, the one where everything that is wrong is all my fault and the one where I am so completely powerless a victim of all the circumstances, including my own clumsiness in expressing what I am wanting. And I remind myself that becoming reconciled to my own shortcomings is not the same as becoming resigned to them.
Reading the New Yorker profile of Madeleine L’Engle yesterday I found myself mostly terrified that having a beautiful understanding of how people work does not imply any real self knowledge. And terrified that a writing habit will hurt the people I love. I try not to get sucked into either/or, but sacrifice is a reality. Even writers who create worlds with magic have to create the equivalent of laws of conservation of matter and energy because the world’s most boring novel would be “He waved his wand and everything was better, the end.” And it’s not that I think that conflict is inevitable so much as I think that it’s where meaning is found.
So I continue with the finding wanting, pursuing truth over neatness, even if it’s a truth that makes me cringe and duck and want to hide.
13 Comments
Submit a Comment
My Photos
Subscribe to Comments
- Comment on Open Letters by Brandilyn
- Comment on Enduring Discomfort by Kaylee
- Comment on Jane Kenyon Under My Bed by JSA Lowe
- Comment on Stories for Self-help by Dana
- Comment on Eating the Whale by sarah gilbert
- Comment on Eating the Whale by gwalter
- Comment on In Praise of Lying Fallow by Lynn Hanson
- Comment on Three Metaphors for the Postpartum Experience by Honney
- Comment on Co-Written by Lynda
- Comment on Psychology of Punctuation by Delphia
I have loved Madeleine L’Engle since 4th grade. I have read everything she has written and went to a writers workshop she taught in Minnesota. She got me through my childhood. And that was a hateful hateful article about her.
Shhh…put it down. You are not her. I am sure that a large family is a trial sometimes for every introvert. Lay down the burden of your heart. You are a gift.
Beethoven… 3… 7… 9… Constant companions.
And pursuing neatness over truth was, au fond, what led L’Engle astray in work as well as life—I suspect.
Patron composers…I love this. Je voudrais Chopin! Ou peut-être Bach, since they’re two sides of the coin.
Which moves me to send another song for you, if Wadpress will permit—perhaps why hiding in headphones is not always best described as “hiding”? A little Björk/Tricky to testify:
http://theunreliablenarrator.net/music/march/headphones.mp3
PS PS PS—did you see ancient socks?!
http://donshare.blogspot.com/2009/02/ode-to-your-socks.html
Mara, I am way out of touch with U.S. culture, being 12 years in Japan and all those relevant and irrelevant excuses, and know you love Ted Talks, and am assuming you have seen it, but….I watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk a few nights ago, and just kept thinking about you, and wondering…what would happen if the muse, or daemon, or genius, or whatever it is we may wish to call it, were allowed to exist outside of ourselves as Gilbert describes?? If the writer’s work were not entirely her responsibility, but a shared experience, made possible by a being outside ourselves?
Anyway, if you haven’t seen it, it may make you cry with writerly compassion–not only writers, but all artists are welcome in the theory she presents, that our Renaissance-initiated ego-centric way of thinking has made artists into crazy people entirely responsible for their art, rather than mouthpieces or carriers or collaborators in the work of the divine. Waiting to catch the tail, and drag back that inspiration, asking it to wait until pen and paper are at hand, or to show up for work and do its fair share—what do you think?
If this talk has already been discussed to death, I sincerely apologize. As I said, out of the culture loop….
@Dana — I had fallen off with the TED Talks and I am so grateful to you for bringing the Elizabeth Gilbert to my attention because it was exactly what I need, that in writing as in the rest of my life I get to show up and do my part and not get too tormented about what lies outside myself, what is outside my power. That seems to be the deal with marriage and parenthood and faith and friendship as well, and the whole theme of this winter of “It’s none of your business what anyone else thinks of you.” It feels a little cold and odd at first and then it’s so liberating. Also, it makes you rely on building good habits to carry you when the feedback you’re getting is all cracky.
CRACKY hahahahaha sigh.
Yay for daemons! Elizabeth Gilbert linky for the lazy?
Not sure about enabling laziness, but since I was too lazy to do better than appropriating “cracky” I guess I should say you can watch the Elizabeth Gilbert here.
Hey, I got an apparently shredded elbow tendon/pinched cervical nerve ovah heah, I need all the linky enabling I can get—
Okay, so what does it say about me that I started full-bore BAWLING around minute 14 and the Tom Waits anecdote, and continued heartily until the end? I guess it says that four years ago or so I was sprawled drunkenly on a mountainside in the snow yelling at the moon. Either that or it’s the diazepam.
Thank you.
(And crap, how did she give that talk?! Was it all off the teleprompter?!)
Curious, now days later is you put “having a beautiful understanding of how people work does not imply any real self knowledge.” to bed, and if so, what came of it…
Whew–just checked back for the first time since posting. Did not expect such a reception to the suggestion of that talk. Thanks to everyone who checked it out. I totally agree–it touched, it tore, it got me thinkin’ some more (sounds like good country lyrics, good thing I am from Nashville). The separation from our ego is a necessary thing, but the most difficult–we can know that separation, that distance, is necessary, but it is also the ego that protects us and asks us NOT TO THROW IT AWAY! Our intelligence, no matter how exacting, will bow to that forceful ego and say, “Perhaps it is OK to keep cute little ego just a little longer??” (We are all children inside, no matter how many years we log here on earth.) Stepping aside and looking at the forces that make us what we are–that is good work! Looking at the habits that the ego provides to “protect” us, and periodically re-arranging (or renegotiating them) keeps us fresh and sustained, able to change. Keep observing, Mara! This is your practice!
Oh, yes–thanks for posting the link to the talk–boy was I lazy! Sorry, unreliable narrator!