May 20, 2013 · 9:20 am

Monday’s with Madeleine: V.10

20130422-100403.jpg

 

Serving the Gift: Artists and Their Art
No Work is Too Small

If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, “Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
          To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. Servant is another unpopular word, a word we have decided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you’re not fit for anything better or higher.
          I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn’t matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully.

****

I am not a good servant. As someone who is selfish by nature, I have to rigorously remind myself to not be, well, myself when I go to work, where my entire job is constantly helping customers. God did not equip me with the skills of good customer service, and the only thing I can say to my fate of actually working in customer service right now is that He is either doing it out of spite or wants me to learn something important about properly serving something or someone other than myself.

When it comes to writing–like a lot of writers, I’m sure–my focus and motivation is much stronger when struck with inspiration rather than sitting down by way of duty and obligation. My idea of “life is about doing the work” is still something I’m coming to terms with and grasping in all its ferocious, hard reality. I’ve been researching life during the Great Depression for a story I’m working on, and the research is going slowly, the writing of the story much slower than that. I sometimes get discouraged by the idea of the trickle, because what little ego I have wants to be a thick veiny river gushing wildly into the lake, while my actual workload is about as thick as cockroach antennae.

I am discovering the difficulty of getting myself in a frame of mind that will allow me to sit down, focus, and plow through my work. This was not so much of a problem in college as it is now, because then my GPA was on the line, whereas now the only thing on the line is my repertoire, which if I were a bonafide member of literary society that would be much more important to me than my GPA ever did. There are days when I am thankful to still be so young and still “learning” how to structure my life, but I know that there will come a point when I won’t have my youth as an excuse anymore, and honestly, I hope that I have my shit together by then. But when I look at the progress I’m making in my creative life now, which is very little, I know that I am on the wrong track to getting anything accomplished. I have sent two short stories off to be considered for three different literary journals, but other than that I have not done much in the way of writing.

It has always mystified me the effort I will put into avoiding my writing rather than just sitting down and doing it. I have several stories I want to record in my journal from the last two weeks that I have yet to sit down and write, and on top of that are research for my book, actually writing my book, and brewing up more short stories. I have never known myself to avoid my writing so ardently as I do now, and the only thing I can say as to why I have had a nasty habit of doing that in the last year is because I’ve had a lot of time for self-evaluation, and I haven’t liked what I’ve seen. If I were to sit down and actually focus on my writing, I’d be forced to acknowledge and externalize some vicious internalizations.

But that is what must be done in order to properly serve your work. I have read that it is impossible to be completely honest with ourselves in our journaling, but I think in order to reach that place that opens us up to this way of living is to remap our course and surge as hard as we can toward that lonely island of denial. Forgive me this horrendous pirate metaphor, but there is a metaphorical treasure to be found when we are able to be 100% honest with ourselves. It exposes us to ourselves in a way that nothing else can, and if we can read back to ourselves why we feel a certain way about something or why we reacted a certain way to an experience, then we have a power in our hands that we’ve never had before–the power to change and develop as human beings into someone infinitely more aware of the world around us.

Madeleine says that the range of an artist’s talent doesn’t matter. If there is a story that presents itself to a writer or an image a painter or a song a musician, then they are responsible for creating it and it will turn out the way it is meant to turn out. Despite Madeleine’s religion, I don’t think this is a necessarily unfair statement and has very little to do with her beliefs, actually, but more so with her experience as a writer and creator. What I am constantly reminding myself is that, in spite of my sluggish writing process and lack of exposure in areas I wish I had much more knowledge of, I will gain this knowledge in conjunction with my progress at the opportune moments, and the stories will finally be written when they are meant to be written, as they are meant to be written.

I think that is what she means be “trickle.” Today, I am a lazy creek dribbling into other lazy creeks that eventually find themselves dipping into thick, veiny rivers surging toward the lake. And maybe one day I will be the one surging through those veins of water and pouring myself into oceans. But I am still young and I still have lessons to learn, experiences to be had and mistakes to be made. I am confident, though, there will come a day when I know what it means to throw myself into something, to serve a work as fully as I know how.

2 Comments

Filed under Monday's with Madeleine

Tagged as , , , ,

May 17, 2013 · 1:44 pm

An Arrangement of Light

Last night I laid in bed thinking of a story: Nicole Krauss’s An Arrangement of Light. I’d read it the day before and hadn’t thought much of it since. I’d like to say I was letting the words soak into my brain, so I could later deduce some kind of meaning from it, but that wasn’t my initial intention. In fact, I didn’t know what to think of the story after I closed my Kindle app and went on to check Twitter or my email or chat with a coworker or help a customer. I was fine brushing it off without another thought, ignoring the unsettled feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t do anything with what I’d just read.

“I totally got this,” a Goodreads reviewer wrote of the story, but I didn’t understand what I got until I fell against my pillow the next day and started to think. Krauss wrote, “A garden is an arrangement of light.” It was something the secondary character, a famous landscape architect, said often, a phrase I turned over in my mind trying to divine what it meant. I studied the lightbulb exposed on my fan. A few weeks ago, I was pulling on the chain, fighting between it and the light switch trying to turn it on, when the shade fell and hit me on the head. Something about that memory made me think about the generals who came to the architect’s garden to lay bodies under the ground.

That’s when I thought of the light as a prism, magnifying the gardens into something we use to manipulate what we see in front of us–a kaleidoscopic vision allowing us to change the way we perceive things out of convenience or an effort to avoid pain. I remembered how the architect told the main character, his personal secretary, not to be fooled by the beauty of nature. “The weak are killed,” he told him, “first tormented and then killed, and the strong are nourished by the rot and decay.” And I realized that the architect drew a parallel to himself and his relationship with his work, how he could allow the men to come and dig up his creations, dump in the bodies, and flourish from their forced fertilization.

I wondered if the arrangement of light, the way he interpreted its reflection on the gardens, provoked a self-imposed expectation. We thrive on illumination, on food, on growth–those of us who can’t settle. We give ourselves expectations of greatness, and when these expectations come to light it is both hard to meet them and easy to let them fall. But now I have to wonder if the architect meant himself as the weak one. It is easy to undermine ourselves when we believe that we are weak. It is how we allow people to bury their waste in our land and feed off our vulnerabilities. So then the way the light arranges itself on the garden each day is how we are forced to see the things we try to hide underneath, because no matter how deeply they are buried, the light eventually arranges itself to reveal the truth.

There was almost a Gatsby-esque feeling to this story. A young man records his observations of a troubled older gentlemen who appears a lesser version of himself on the surface, but who also bleeds his anxieties in the sweat on his brow, so that you know he is aware of all his misgivings but manages to deny them as well. Only Gatsby did a much better job of denial, whereas the architect wore a sense of acceptance, or at least a suppressed awareness, about his shoulders like a scarf. It is his defense mechanism, his way of acknowledging his faults without really acknowledging them. In some ways, looking at the architect through the narrator’s eyes was like looking at myself through a friend’s eyes. I saw how desperate I looked, how defeated I let myself become, how disappointing and pathetic I could be when there were people out there hoping better of me, but sadly expecting much less.

In this way, I think an Arrangement of Light was less about the light in the garden and more about the way we arrange ourselves; at the very least it served as a parallel to the ways we manage and mismanage our demeanors, our words, our ideas and perceptions. With each light that is shed on someone or something else, we arrange the way we see that person or that thing until we get the best sense of them that we can and know what we can and cannot handle, what we can and cannot expect. In the end, what the story gives us is perspective.

2 Comments

Filed under Books

Tagged as , , ,

May 15, 2013 · 2:03 pm

Give yourself a fighting chance.

Now that I’ve decided not to attend grad school for at least the next year, I’ve been brainstorming ways I can still keep up with my interests in literature and critical writing without the benefits of learning in the classroom. When I first graduated college, I was excited about the prospect of setting my own syllabus. I’d always wanted the freedom to finally study what I wanted at my own pace, but now that I’ve been out of school for a year, I’ve felt, for the first time, helpless without the guidance of professors. Even though college is a place that is supposed to help you obtain a certain level of independence and intellectual stability, I’ve been paranoid that, in the year since graduation, my mind has atrophied.

Two of my favorite professors during college were bright women who went on for their Master’s, Ph.D.’s, and MFA’s. They called me “brilliant” and said I was “the real deal,” and I’m trying to come to terms with these estimations of my writing and myself when I have no clear goals ahead of me. I guess now my mind is really settling into the reality of me putting off grad school and whether or not that makes me a lesser writer and person. The thing that I really miss about academia is how it forces you to work your mind in ways you may not have before, and I sometimes worry that my mind will never strengthen without those influences forcing me to think in different ways, and then translating those thoughts and ideas into plausible writing.

Mostly, though, I wonder if I put too much weight on the idea that higher education can make me into the person I want or am destined to become. I still have a desire to teach in a university in the future, and so far as I know, unless I write soul-changing, earth-shattering literature within the next ten years and am asked by universities across the country to lecture to their English departments, the only way to get there is through grad school and doctorate programs.

Regardless, my focus now is on writing and reading. I want to read more diversely, especially, and force myself to write, even when I don’t feel like it. I want to write about everything–my thoughts, my ideas, things that happen, how they make me feel and how I reacted to them, and what that means about me as a person and the world I inhabit. I’ve realized that, while grad school could still be on the horizon for me, in the last year the idea of it has been somewhat of a security blanket. As long as I planned to continue my education, I could count on myself to grow smarter. Now, however, I am in a position where my intellect relies solely on what I decide to do with it, and that feels like a far more heady feat, like a young Indiana Jones going on his first escapade, an amateur adventurer, literally learning the ropes as he went.

I have understood, recently, just how full I am of misconceptions and the ways these thoughts have influenced my beliefs. It is interesting to realize you’ve been thinking a certain way that may be hindering any progress you might have made and taking away any chance you had at coming into your own, but still resentful of changing the processes of your mind out of fear or stubbornness. Sometimes I think of what my life might be like if I never end up going back to school, and have allowed myself to believe that it will make me lesser, even though I know that it is not a fair hypothesis. Because already I am undermining my abilities, not giving myself a fighting chance.

2 Comments

Filed under Life

Tagged as , , ,

May 13, 2013 · 9:04 am

When you turn down your own expectations.

I avoided my computer last week. I was faced with a decision with an inevitable outcome, and I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write the email. I came home from work, changed into my pajamas, grabbed an unhealthy snack en lieu of dinner, and gorged on episodes of Sex and the City. The one time I actually did boot up my computer, I discovered something in it had gone awry and it underwent days of tune-ups headed by Em before I could use it again. While I was frustrated that yet another PC I’d bought was crapping out on me, I reveled in the fact that I couldn’t use it for a while. You see, not only was I not wanting to send this email, but I also wasn’t feeling at all inspired or drawn to blog. In fact, it was Tuesday before I even realized I hadn’t written anything and the oddest feeling hit me: I didn’t seem to care. I needed this week to get my head together before coming back here, and this is why:

I turned down the assistantship for grad school. For a number of reasons. Some of them logical. Some of them not. I found out about it on Wednesday. Someone from the school called me during work, so I excused myself to the bathroom to check the message. I knew I had gotten it when the lady on the phone said she had good news to deliver. I should’ve known then when I didn’t geek out by the toilet that I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready to be told that I’d achieved this job I thought I’d wanted for the past year. A chance to go back to school and prove my academic chops to myself and to everyone else who questioned why I majored in English. A chance to work in a writing center and help people hone a skill that changed my life as an undergrad. I wanted that, and as I took the next week to think about it, I understood that it was something I still wanted. Just not at Winthrop.

I applied to Winthrop last summer, because I was desperate. I hadn’t put any real thought into continuing my education and when USC rejected my MFA application, I freaked out. Well, first I worried myself with preparing for graduation, and then I freaked out. I felt working at the bank for the unforeseeable future to be an impossible task, and when Winthrop was the only school I came across that accepted applications into June, I knew it was my last chance to secure my place in academia. But, of course, I didn’t go. Most of the funding was gone by the time I was accepted, and with the government waiting for me to pay back thousands of dollars in student loans come December, borrowing even more money wasn’t at all ideal or desirous. I’m sure the ladies who interviewed me are confused as to why I turned down the opportunity, but the only thing I can say is this: it just didn’t feel right.

The most important thing that came to light when making this decision was that I needed to learn not to do to myself what others had been doing to me for years: creating expectations that couldn’t be met. I expected myself to go to Winthrop and do great things. I had this idea that I could turn into a Hermione Granger and kick academia’s ass, but I’m not Hermione Granger. While her focus and astuteness are admirable, I cannot make myself be someone or something I’m not, and I realized in making this decision that I wasn’t willing to change who I am to do something I’d pressured myself to do because of the pressures of others’ words. I’d felt ashamed of being an English major, even though I’d loved what I’d studied. It’s always perplexed me how others think it’s their business or their right to tell you what you decided to study in school was wrong, but I let myself be affected by their words, thus forcing expectations on myself that couldn’t be met. If I’m going to go back to school, it needs to be for a reason beyond a shame I shouldn’t even be allowing myself to feel.

Aside from that, the stipend for the assistantship wasn’t enough. And I don’t say that to be ungrateful, because I know a lot of schools don’t even offer them, but the situation just wasn’t right. Some people can work a full-time job, a part-time job, an assistantship, attend classes, and still find time to study and write papers and eat and sleep and bathe. I’m not a person who can do that, and I realized that is something I would have to do in order to afford to move to Rock Hill and take this on. I always tried to give myself the best possible financial scenario when I sat down and tried to figure out how I could make going back to school work, but the fact of the matter was that there were too many variables that would be left up in the air, and I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I moved myself an hour and a half away from home only to realize I couldn’t afford it with my change in income. What if I couldn’t find a roommate or a cheaper apartment or a job that paid and gave me enough hours? Or what if I ended up working so much that I struggled to pass my classes?

But what it really came down to was the fact that I wasn’t at all interested in moving to Rock Hill and the school I thought I wanted to continue my studies at a year ago really was just me trying to settle for anything but what would inevitably happen. The bank hasn’t killed me, and working there hasn’t been an impossible task. I don’t want to be there for very much longer, but I have witnessed in myself some important changes and learned valuable lessons there in the past year. What I came to realize in turning down the assistantship was that, for now, I want to try to make a life for myself here in Columbia. As I stewed over whether or not to take the assistantship at Winthrop, I beat myself up about chickening out and not trusting God to take care of things and once again emotionally resenting something that represented change in a life that has been nothing if not static for the last few years. I realized, though, that by turning down the assistantship, I would need even more faith and trust in God to bring about the kind of change I’m looking for—good change. And now that I’ve decided not to go, I realize it was the decision I was supposed to make all along.

This is all to say, I have no idea where I’m going next—I’m applying for jobs and praying and hoping and sending desperate vibes to potential employers across the city every day—but, I honestly can’t wait to see what will happen. This is of course assuming that whatever will happen will be awesome. I have no way of knowing if it will be, but I’m hopeful.

8 Comments

Filed under College, Life

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

May 2, 2013 · 9:43 am

This is your fear talking.

Last Wednesday I had my assistantship interview for a graduate program. The next several days were spent immersed in turmoil. I had thought the feelings of confusion and uncertainty had only come following an interview for a job I knew I didn’t want nor would be offered, always thinking these fits of discomfort were due to an ethereal knowledge that I would be going back to school in August, but then I have my interview for an assistantship that would allow me to go back to school fully funded and those same feelings bubbled up like indigestion, gnawing at the base of my throat. I walked through a tour of the building with the heads of the department and writing center trying to unearth a feeling of rightness, but all I felt was another layer of uncertainty across my conscience.

Fast forward to Saturday night/Sunday morning and you could find me sitting in my bed coaxing myself into an innocent conversation with God about what I should do only to watch me unravel faster than Carrie’s resolve around Mr. Big. I explained to God that I couldn’t figure out if the reason I wanted to attend grad school so badly was because I was trying to prove something to myself or if I was using it to strap a label to my chest so people could start seeing me as a viable adult and human being or if it was because I genuinely had an interest for deepening my knowledge of language and literature, or if it was possible that I wanted to attend grad school for all of these reasons, which made it feel so much more intense and unmanageable than if it had just been one or the other. I’d somehow harbored the misconception that if I didn’t go to grad school, I’d be limiting myself; that I wouldn’t get any smarter and couldn’t possibly write the books I wanted to write, because I wouldn’t have been exposed to new culture and literature and art and music and philosophy.

Of course, I knew that had been a pretentious thought the moment it passed through my mind, which left me even more confused than before. It was obvious I was pressuring myself to go back to school and also to want to go back to school, but the why and the authenticity behind it were still uncertain. Before I knew it, I was confessing to God that what I really felt was pressure from Him, pressure to be a perfect little human because I had hardly done anything to royally screw up in my life before. And one not-so-drunken make-out session with a marine I’d known for about five minutes didn’t seem to count. But as soon as I thought those words, I knew the pressure was really coming from myself. I was scared to live, not so much because I was afraid of disappointing God, but because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to extend forgiveness if I disappointed myself.

That’s when the horrible feelings began to sink in—the worry that nobody was listening to me, and that forgiveness was moot because there was no one there from which to receive it. I heard— well, more-like, felt—the question that was really sitting at the foot of my worries nudge me. What is it that you’re really afraid of? I inhaled a sharp gust of air, tasting the salt from my tears ring around my mouth. “I’m afraid you’ll leave me.” I squeezed my eyes hard, lowering myself toward the bed, clutching fistfuls of tissues and trying hard not to wake Em, even though I was desperate to scream. I was sure that all the crying I’d done in the year since graduating college would worry my psychiatrist if I’d had the money to spend on seeing one, but at least I knew what was literally eating away at my soul, the reason why I stared out the window at work lost in daydreams rather than reading or busying myself, the reason why I came home sometimes and curled up on my bed instead of writing or cleaning.

“Please be there, please be there, please be there,” I begged Him, as though I were clutching a phone to my ear and God were a boy who’d just broken my heart. I could feel the doubt rolling in, the possibilities of His nonexistence tempting my ears, but those thoughts only made me cry harder, more desperate. I knew there were people out there who could logically talk themselves into believing God didn’t exist, but I couldn’t be one of them, and I knew that they would say it was because there was something inside me, psychologically, that needed something bigger than myself to believe in, and I could let them think that if they wanted, but I was not wired to think that way. I did need someone bigger than myself to believe in, and the thought of that bigness not existing terrified me in ways that no slasher film or horror flick could. I even thought of all those horrendous movies—Freddie Kreuger, Leather Face, Mike Myers, Jigsaw. I recalled specific scenes, and none of them phased me. None of them made me fear the fact that I was sitting up in my bed, alone and vulnerable, caked in darkness and dried tears the way that God’s nonexistence scared me. And that’s when I knew:

This is your fear talking. I looked up, wiped the water from my eyes. So, this was it—the aforementioned unnameable creature haunting my dreams and following me around waiting to strike at my weakest moment. Was this rock bottom? I wasn’t sure, but it felt like it. I could not think of a point in my life that was lower than this one, lower than questioning God’s existence. But, I told myself to look it in the eyes, lift my gaze as though it were a nasty, snarling beast standing right in front of me, waiting for me to flinch so that it could rip me to bloody shreds. “This is your fear talking.” I repeated it to myself again and again and again, looking straight ahead the whole time. “This is your fear talking. This is your fear talking. This is your fear talking.” I said it so many times I exhausted myself, surrendered, resolved. The beast either faded or tucked its tail between its legs, backing into its cave. I wondered if I had come the figurative face-to-face with the devil. I had let him into my mind by voicing my concerns. He knew the secret passageways into my troubles and pilfered all the loot he could get his hands on, but not before I shined the spotlight on him and called him on his treachery.

The next night, I had too much to drink at Em’s sister and brother-in-law’s house for her birthday dinner. They fixed me a Mai Thai, two strawberry daiquiris with rum, and some drink mixed with tequila. They thought I would be a funny drunk. I snorted with laughter, regaled them with work stories a little too loudly, and promised them I would come back again so they could see me even looser. On the drive home, I said to Em, “They only like me when I’m drunk,” the back of my hand resting over my eyes. “No,” she said, “they just like you better when you’re drunk.” This was not just the case with her sister and brother-in-law. Most people we’d gone out with liked to see me at least tipsy, because I said ridiculous things and talked in a British accent and laughed a lot more. I once said to Em, “I feel like I’m much more open and carefree when I’ve been drinking.” “You don’t have to drink to be that way, though,” she said. Only when I was sober I couldn’t find it in me to free my demons enough so that I could enjoy myself without having to worry I looked awkward or stupid.

“I think I had a nervous breakdown last night,” I told her. “How so?” “It started off with me thinking about school and that led to me thinking about God and whether or not He was there or listening to me and I was afraid He had gone and I just don’t want to limit myself but I don’t want to do something for the wrong reason. Wait, did that make any sense?” “No, not really,” she said. I tried again, slower this time. “I just… I was afraid that He’d left me.” “Were you afraid that He wasn’t there at all or that He just wasn’t listening?” “Both.” “Well, usually when you feel alone and like God isn’t listening, He’s trying to get you to reach for Him.” “I know, I know,” I said, “That’s what I was thinking. But I still felt so helpless. I was thinking about school, and that if I don’t go back I’ll be limiting myself. But then, even though I’d been applying to jobs in New York at one point, when it came down to me possibly leaving soon, I realized I didn’t want to. You know, I feel like I just got here, and I don’t want to leave the people I love like you and my parents and the girls.” “How do you know you won’t be limiting yourself to people you might love in the future by staying here with people you already love?”

It was a good, albeit even more confusing question, but at the moment I felt too drunk to give it the serious contemplation it deserved. “I just feel that going off to make something of myself isn’t as important as being with the people I care the most about,” I said. “Well,” she said, “it sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.” I knew it sounded like it, but the next day I still felt unsure of everything. I knew that I needed to let it go until I knew whether or not I got the assistantship and would have the funding to go back to school. In past experiences, it was easy being rejected. No, that was my answer, you cannot come to work for us. It was decisive, it was final, it wasn’t meant to be. It might take me a day or two to get over it, but “no” was a word I could deal with, because it meant that all those uncertain feelings were trying to tell me something, and that I would know the right path to take when it came along. But, then I began to wonder, with the seemingly perfect opportunity to go back to school unfolding before me, if there wasn’t a deeper issue at hand. Was it possible that I was afraid of change? Had I gotten so comfortable in my current job that the thought of leaving for something bigger terrified me?

But, no, that wasn’t it. It was something else. It was the fear of making the wrong decision and ending up unhappy. A few nights ago, Em and I had gone out to dinner for Italian and I’d asked her if she felt as indecisive and uncertain of her future in her twenties as I felt. She hooked me with a pointed look. “What am I doing with my life right now?” she asked. “Going to school,” I said. “That should answer your question.” “I’m just so afraid of making the wrong decision and ending up miserable with my life.” She took a bite of her food and sipped her wine. “You just have to make a decision you think you can live with and agree with yourself to accept the consequences of that decision, good and bad.” Her advice made too much sense. The fact that it made so much sense was the very reason why it didn’t seem to help me at all. I could imagine going to grad school and being miserable because I hadn’t decided to try harder in the real world. I could imagine getting a new job and being miserable because I decided not to go to grad school.

I went to my family’s house that night for my Nana’s birthday and drove a majority of the way home listening to Jack Johnson’s “Adrift” on repeat. I kept turning the song back on my iPod, determined that the answer to my problems were in those lyrics. Your voice is adrift, I can’t expect it to sing to me as if I was the only one… I’ll follow you, the leaf that’s following the sun… Your voice is your own, I can’t protect it. You’ll have to sing, a verse no one has ever known… Don’t be afraid, ’cause no one ever sings alone… Your weight will never be too much for me. Your ideas have always been your own… This moment keeps on moving, we were never meant to hold on… I knew the answer was in letting go, but in letting go of what? My fears? My misconceptions? Both?

6 Comments

Filed under College, Life

Tagged as , , , ,