I Like to be Intense
On Fiction and Joy
Someone said the above title to me - I like to be intense! - while wearing velour pants that hugged their hips. Then they jumped down a set of stairs. It was perfect, filmic gold and yes, the pants were a purply maroon.
How’s everyone doing out there? I’m not gonna lie, five days at home while eating questionable rounds of food (a lot of butter was consumed) hit me hard this weekend. It snowed, which was magical but also made me not want to leave the house (see butter). When Monday hit, I was so grateful for routine, a little space to remember my name.
It also hurt that Tim and I worked through a lot of the holiday, taking turns staring into our computers or monitoring if the basement door gaped wide open while the kids played in the snow. (The door did not, in fact, gape wide open. They are growing, the church mice! We are gelling as a household! Thank goddess).
And - not gonna lie, again - it was kind of the wrong thing for me to do, I think. I told myself I needed to stay connected to a story I’m writing (actual fiction, not just the story we are all writing everyday by being alive in human bodies, taking our breaths). I needed to touch it everyday - the story, the fiction. But I think, mentally, it was all too much, to be surrounded by other bodies all day, everyday, and try to push myself to Be Good. As you know, or maybe you don’t but I’ve discovered these last few years, being good comes to me easily after I’ve exercised my pleasure. I don’t mean Exercise exercise, though I do enjoy that. But if I’ve given myself room to play, if I’ve gotten some of my wiggles out, I have so much more to give. I can sit down and focus with less resistance.
It makes sense, right? Especially as a caregiver. I have to Be Good so much for my kids: make sure they are fed, help them with their shit - physically, mentally, emotionally, and also remember to have fun with them, not just think I’m their leader or saint. It’s a lot! I am not someone who manages a lot all at once. I do a lot of different things and have a lot of different sides, but I can’t do them all at once.
I think another problem is that, sometimes, writing fiction - as ridiculous as this sounds - feels like The Real Work to me. And maybe because of that, because of how seriously I take it, ultimately, it feels really really hard. And I think that’s a problem, because then I avoid it. I’m trying to get back to the play of it, to let myself fall in love with it again. But I put so much sneaky, secret pressure on myself, I squeeze the passageway closed. Not even a mouse of pleasure can get through sometimes. It’s pre-migraine quality, though I don’t actually get migraines. (I feel like I understand how one does, but I’m sure my understanding of them is miniscule and there is a huge physiological component, too.)
Why am I telling you all this? I’m not quite sure. Writing to you helps me see myself more clearly. Part of me feels guilty about this - Save It for The Work! etc. Sometimes when I’ve been working on a piece of fiction and it’s not going well, I think of it - and call it - wrestling the alligators. I am down in the basement wrestling the alligators, thrashing in the water with those muddy, horned beasts. But also? Like alligators, themselves beasts from another time, there is something profoundly primordial about writing. It is often much much smarter than I am. It does not let me get away with *not* seeing things. I often think of nonfiction especially as a fishing line trawling the ocean. It usually catches a big fish. And I’m like, Holy Shit! How was that thing down there, living in the ocean while I was up here in all this winking sunlight?!
The power of writing sometimes terrifies me.
In some ways, I understand that writing is my duty. It feels dramatic to say it like that. My calling? I don’t know. I actually don’t like to talk about writing very much. It’s better to do it. But I think about it pretty much all the time - what I want to say, what I haven’t said yet, what I need to say and haven’t found the words for. Language babbles at me all day long. I speak passages of it aloud and then wonder where it’s coming from: my mind? some fabric of writing weaving itself across time? Something is writing me as I reach into the barrels of laundry, stringing wet clothes across the rack. How do I feel about this? It’s kind of weird. But the more I fight it - and I have, I’ve fought it pretty much my whole adult life - the sadder and more rageful I become.
(This, incidentally, feels embarrassing to write. I’m also not sure it’s the whole picture, it’s just the parts of the picture I have right now.)
So I try to surrender, to submit. And then it does become something like play. It’s a strange alchemy, I admit, one I don’t fully understand. One of the reasons I say to work on your art, give the world your art, is because I understand this - that I don’t understand. That we come into the world primed to tell these stories and sing these songs, and our cultural conditioning tries to beat it out of us. But it’s the real medicine. Often I can summon the grandiosity to think, yes, others need these songs. But let’s be honest, I need them. I need them to course through me, because they do something to the machine they pass through.
As my brother-in-law Trent Miller might point out, the songs, the words, the pictures, the stories that are trying to be born are the real healing machines. It’s sometimes vulgar to me that the world asks us to make sense of these mysteries, to monetize or become famous by our works. These works will humiliate you. They will take all but your breath from your body some days. They will expose and lift, strip and heal. And maybe your work will walk, eventually, on its own - your own little Frankenstein babies. But maybe they won’t. (Aye, the real rub.) Maybe they are student work or, like my favorite - the sketch - they will just live in your kitchen with you and look down while you fry some eggs.
I don’t always know what I’m aiming for, to be honest, and it causes me a great deal of pain. I kind of just want to be a sketch artist, but not finishing A Big Thing gnaws at me. Is this cultural? It feels, sometimes, like another summoning. So I work on A Big Things, and some days - most - it makes me really crabby. Ultimately, I feel like I have failed. Cue Joy Williams’s old chestnut that nothing the writer can do is ever enough, a reflection I used to find hilarious but have also, almost always, found to be true.
It’s not easy to feel like a failure, especially in a culture that tells you that you’ve already failed for trying to do this foolish dance instead of just putting on your hat, going to the bank, and doing your adult job. And you probably are a fool. You are trying to keep yourself light and fit and happy by wrestling corpses in the dark.
Is all this too depressing? Maybe! You see, again, where I am: thinking too hard, losing the play. But maybe there is some spiritual equation here we are missing in the way we talk about making art. To surrender to the darkness of the endeavor, the heaviness, the weight of the hubristic attempt at playing god, actually lifts your bones off the ground.
One thing that’s surprising to me is how much cooking and writing pair in my days. It is so easy for me to get down in my pages, and I mean spiritually down, to feel like a failure. Then to come upstairs and start chopping onions, heating oil and cooking vegetables? It is true grace, angels on high.
Here’s Joy saying something interesting again, from this Marginalian post about her:
Whenever the writer writes, it’s always three o’clock in the morning, it’s always three or four or five o’clock in the morning in his head. Those horrid hours are the writer’s days and nights when he is writing. The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
Thank you for hanging with me on this winding stream. I don’t want to be maudlin but I also don’t like “hiding” what I’m up to from you. My work on these other things makes my posts here a little more spread out, maybe even a little less good? I am not sure. What ends up happening, frequently, is that while I think The Real Work is unfolding in the spiral notebooks scattered around my desk, I look up and a child has sewn an adorable card. We have knitted something. I have gone outside and found joy in the trees. I need them both - the reflection, the honest accounting that writing gives me, and the abundant grace outside my human plans. The simple Christmas tree we have up, with its jumbled ornaments and lack of tinsel or fanfare, and my more ascetic attempts at listening, getting still enough to obey the fates or whatever wants to be born with my help in the world: I need them both.
I need the lights of the tree and, perhaps, need the darkness to see them.
Without the writing, my life grows brittle. I start scripting my beloveds, who are not just characters in my story but the main characters of their own. And without the joys of my “silly little life,” my work becomes boring, self-serious, obsessive. It’s a balance, yes. The physical world is balance for the tightrope walk of the arts. It is also - and this is not how it’s taught, I don’t think - essential to bring your whole body with you into your art.
Anyway, this is a whole other topic - the problem of the body in our culture (and in universities where much of our art education currently resides). I am not sure we respect or understand true creativity, its feather love and zipping heat. But it’s too far afield, this topic of the body, and I’ve already gotten too far afield.
As I like to say: sorry & you’re welcome!
I’m sending you twinkle lights and toast and hot beverages galore. I am nursing a sore throat over here, wrapping myself in bathrobes. Yesterday, I ran out to the driveway in a red robe and slippers, my hair clipped high on my head. A child had forgotten their snack and the car ferrying them to school was about to pull away. I ran into the frosty cold, careful to pick my way over the ice, and handed over a bundle of snacks, a caricature of a housewife. All I was missing was a rolling pin or shouted nagging words. I find myself curious about feminist theories - why *have* the women been shouting all their nagging words? - while also knowing that, if I am to be of any good to myself, if my strength is going to last or serve anyone at all, I have to protect my joy.
Some days, joy is the only resistance. It’s the whole plan.
XOXO
Kara
love the idea of joy being the resistance 🫡💥💪
Oh my gosh, I hear you SO HARD on the struggle with writing. Fiction feels like my Real Work™️ too and I have successfully avoided my novel for three solid years now as a result. >.< Ugh. So much pressure.
Also, rainbow tree FTW. 🙌🏼 🌈