Mercenary

I descended the stairs from my bedroom this morning and the light was on in the little boys’ room so I peered in, and there they were each in their own bed, and though it was Saturday, so they had permission to get up and use the electronica and screens of their choosing, they were each lying in bed READING and quiet and we had gotten to sleep in, as had the older brothers, old enough now that they choose to sleep in and it was significant and ordinary and I wished I could send a snapshot to a tired self any where from four to fourteen years ago when it seemed like I would never feel rested again. Of course I commented on it and they bounced out of bed. But Rainer wanted to go up and use the computer, and when I came in from the studio and morning pages forty five minutes later to refill my coffee cup, Rainer told me he had written two pages of the story he is writing. I think I said something about how cool it is that rather than relying on the worlds video game designers have created for him he has found joy in creating a world for himself. Of course, he looked me like I’m slightly obtuse and more than a little simple, “No, Mom, I’m writing because I want to get paid!”

I’ve thought about this all day. It was cute, but also, maybe it’s okay to want to get paid for writing. Now that his oldest brother has started getting paid for cello ensemble performances at receptions and weddings (and turns around to spend the money on amps for his guitar, wanting to turn the band he plays with into one that gets gigs and, yes, one day money) I have to think about money and art, professionalism and amateurism. I love this quote from Yehudi Menuhin where he says “I would hate to think that I am not an amateur. An amateur is one who loves what he or she is doing.” But I also know that we pay for the things we value, and that I am uncomfortable valuing the things I do, that I remember babysitting and enjoying the work except for the part where I had to ask to be paid, to set a price on my work. And I am haunted by romantic notions of not compromising one’s vision trying to chase an audience or market, but also wondering if I would do this whole writing thing differently if I were suddenly confronted with an urgent need to put food on my children’s plates because all of the sudden Raven couldn’t. Would I be a better writer, or more driven, if I were hungrier? Or would this become a private sustenance while I took up night stocking at Wal-Mart?

Anyway.

I finished reading Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being today, continuing the reading in memoir that Sarah and I have been doing in our Kitchen Table MFA and am continuing to consider the congruencies among journal scrawlings and blog entries and memoirs. Mostly, I suppose it’s the preoccupation with me, me, me. She puts it, in prefacing her piece “Am I a Snob?” written to be read aloud to the Memoir Club that was Bloomsbury:

Am I speaking for myself only when I say that though nothing worth calling an adventure has befallen me since I last occupied this thorny and prominent chair I still seem to myself a subject of inexhaustible and fascinating anxiety? — a volcano in perpetual eruption? Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, “Good God! Here I am again!” — not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes with a spasm of acute disgust — but always, always with interest?”

Exactly.

And it occurred to me that just as I learned to put a red pen through most of the prefatory statements that self-consciously set out to explain what I am about, the remnants of bad high school English trainings in five paragraph essays and introductory statements, the circumlocutory attempts at establishing what my my reasons for writing are best excised for it is either apparent or I have failed and no tacked-on justifications will serve. Most people relate to discomfort and awkwardness, but too much self-consciousness is embarrassing rather than ingratiating. But this doesn’t mean that I am excused ever from being aware of why I am writing, and for whom.

What bothers me, in talking about how my journals are private is that I am haunted by a much nicer version of myself who would never think, much less whisper, and heavens forfend, commit to physical form words that could hurt anyone. Wasn’t that the lesson of Harriet the Spy? Actually, I haven’t read that since i was of an age where friends were passing around mash notebooks, where we could anonymously write cruel criticisms of each other (this was what cyber-bullying looked like before the internet!). But yes, I remain acutely aware of the power of words to hurt.

And I maintain that the journal thing is where I have to write without fear of hurting anyone else. Every spoken word carries awareness of how it could affect those who hear it, I speak so carefully that sometimes I don’t know what I think and have to write for that knowledge, have to write to feel and ultimately to let go of feelings, that it’s a form of exorcism. And that that remains distinct from the blog or any writing intended for anyone else to read.

And I think these are two fears that linger round my studio doors, unintentional affliction of pain to anyone with anything I write and writing to please rather than writing to get to the truth, that these spectres are more alarming than straight-out rejection of my writing or criticism of it (also delighted in Woolf’s treatment of a critic “He was a kind man; he took his own reviews seriously…” and when he stammers an apology for “slanging” i Orlando, “I blurted out, quite sincerely, ‘If I choose to publish books, that’s my own look out. I must take the consequences.’”) One of our oldest son’s most entertaining rants is on the litanous “That band was so great before they sold out” — that any commercial success is selling out. As irritating as that trope is, it does suggest that success has a multitude of forms.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a friend’s blogging about recent reports on women and publishing, thinking about access and confidence and permission. I’ve been watching Sarah be relentless in writing and submitting and writing some more, in taking a class, networking, and being just generally fearless and stretching herself and, without getting competitive or comparative, I am paying attention and trying to learn from how she’s doing it because I still feel like I am hanging back, and am trying to be honest, to not make excuses, to look the fears I feel in the eye before gently dismissing them. And is this what I want, and how much do I want it?

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