Looking south, toward Bellaire. Our lake is 7 miles long, but our cottage is on the narrowest part.
I’ve been at our lake for a few days, watching the water and listening to the fiercely insistent spring birds. This was Jerry’s idea. We look out for each other. I didn’t think I needed this, but sure enough, after a long, hard winter, I’m energized by just being here. This lake, this cottage, humble as it is, is my ground zero. I’ve finished reading Secular Buddhism, Stephen Batchelor’s new book, am pretty far along in a translation of Van Gogh’s letters, and have almost slogged the whole way through the very worst of the six wonderful novels I’ve read by Tana French. And caught up on magazines.
The going is a little unsteady. My spine is in a slightly different position. I have to watch my step around the roots, especially. And I get tired much more easily. Still, I’m walking about a mile and a half every day, sometimes preceded or followed by Tylenol.
Van Gogh ‘s letters to his far more sane brother, Theo—I understand Vincent’s floundering: first his passionate piety, then art. That’s kind of like the history of my own floundering. Many of us flounder. It’s not a moral failure. Maria Popova, this week in The Marginalian, says, “Changing — your mind, your life — is …painfully difficult because it is a form of renunciation. . .it requires giving something up — a way of seeing, a way of being — in order for something new to come abloom along the vector of the endless unfolding that is a life fully lived.”
There are actually three signets. One is riding under the mother’s wing feathers.
When you change your mind, when you change your partner, when you change your place of living, it’s a terrible wrench. I’ve written a diary (look for it next year, I hope) about our move to a senior residential community. The move pushed all those words out of me. There is a growing tip, like on a flower, that moves on, that would wither otherwise. “We give things up,” says the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “when we believe we can no longer go on as we are.”
No good poem is written without floundering. That’s the growing tip.
Vincent sold one painting (out of 900) in his life. I have a friend—more than one, actually— who has a barn full of paintings. Why would you keep on, with all those unsold paintings? Why would you keep on, with all those unpublished poems/novels/stories? What courage it takes, to follow what comes out of you, believe in yourself this way! You can repeat to yourself all you want that art is not about selling, but we all look to others for validation, I think, even if we’re the most independent of humans. Here’s to all the poets (especially) who keep floundering and writing and sending out with no positive feedback and the general public’s disinterest, for at least the pleasure of trying to write a good poem.
Maybe failure to be rewarded for our work can work for us. It is dangerously easy to think that when our work is celebrated, that means we’re good at it. Maybe, maybe not. In the absence of immediate reward, either we get all caught up in our narcissism and decide for ourselves we’re great, or we look to the great poets of the past and the really good ones writing now. We try not to get mired in jealousy. We study their work to see how we can improve our own. Vincent lists dozens and dozens of painters he admires. He studies them minutely.
Every line of a poem, every stroke of a brush, is fraught. Is strange and new, if it’s any good.
I remember when this was a huge, two-trunk birch tree. And now the moss has almost eaten it up.
By good, I mean true to the impulse. God knows I’ve floundered in my life and my work. I have the privilege of being able to look back over a lot of lifetime. As I see it now, the awful (full of awe) stumbles, the long walks along long sidewalks agonizing over a radical change, the tears, the fears, all followed a trajectory I couldn’t see. It was always a trajectory toward life rather than the death of being stuck. It was always an unfolding. And that hasn’t stopped. Sometimes I think I’m done writing, for example. Then something else occurs to me.
Of course life is more than the art. The unfolding keeps happening. I am not the same person as I was yesterday, much less a few years ago. I don’t have to be, which feels to me like a great freedom. Life shapes us; we shape it.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) says old Walt.