This dream I could not complete

This entry is for Paula.

It has been a while since I've done the good, hard work of writing.  Since classes at the university have resumed, I've taken to reading more than writing.  I tell myself that by reading I'm energizing myself for the work ahead, and I am.  I know from experience that reading helps me to prepare the ground for my writing.  But it's rather like being a butterfly, flitting from this idea to the next and never making any hard choices.

I'm not in the midst of "the struggle" like Paula is right now.  "The struggle" is when you're wrestling with your ideas down in the dirt and mud.  Even at this moment, Paula sits at a retreat, working at centering herself for the hard work of writing her memoir.

You can support your friends at such a time with sweet words.  But in the end, it's the writer who must rise to the occasion, and the writer knows this.  It's the writer who must find the way. 

Sometimes it's a matter of just sitting still and waiting.  Sometimes it means you must make a hard choice, a sacrifice.  Sometimes you have to roar like a lion and tell the world to leave you alone--you can't attend to it now because now is the time for writing. 

The truth is, sometimes you don't know what you need to do to clear the debris from your roots so you can feed again and feel the connection to your center, where your deepest ideas come from. 

The answer could be right under your nose.  I've found this to be the case, sometimes.

Sometimes writing is easy, and sometimes it is a struggle.  We keep doing it because it brings us joy.  But that joy can be elusive.  In such cases, patience is the only way.

Goethe speaks to this elusiveness in a poem I found in an appendix of his early works.  The poem doesn't even have a title, and isn't well-known, but it speaks volumes:

 

      And joy like a star sound

      Floats only in a dream before us.

 

      In golden moments of the springtime sun

      This vision held me

      Spellbound; sweet

      That darkness of the senses,

      This dream I could begin

      But not complete.

 

In another source (an unusual book by John Gardner called Lies, Lies, Lies, which is Gardner's college journal begun in September of 1952 when he was a sophomore at DePauw University) is a short discussion of big thoughts.

We all want to write about big thoughts, don't we?

In his journal, Gardner writes:  "One grows tired of little thoughts, after a while, just as one grows tired of laughing."  He goes on to say that:

"You can look at things and know that they have in them a big thought--only you can't quite catch it.  Still, you can look at it and know that there is a big thought there.  There are stories--like Grapes of Wrath, that imply big answers--but you can't quite catch 'em."

This describes the search for big thoughts in art.  But it also describes that feeling you get when you try to capture a big thought in writing, when YOU try to walk in the same footsteps as, say, Steinbeck.  It describes that desire to write something important, to capture the essence of life with words, to catch the "big thought."  Only you don't know how.

And this is where the squeamish will quit.  This is the point at which I've quit scores of times.

I don't have "the" answer.  I only know the things I've talked about in this entry are the things all writers wrestle with. 

In the mud and dirt.