I find it hard not to work. It’s a Sunday afternoon, Norma and I did brunch at Zuni with Karen, then hung out at Green Arcade Books, enjoying the poetry and the cool local books and talking with Dave about labor history and how the minute there’s a museum about your movement you know you’re in trouble (“Fossilized Bongos in the Haight!”) and about the business of artists and trying to be both artists and employees and businesspeople and doing good in the world and being true to ourselves and keeping from becoming assholes or letting the assholes of the world run our lives and then home sitting in the front room of the house with the New York Times and the sun streaming in and Norma napping until the poodle barks her into submission and makes her take her to the pet food store for treats.
I find it hard not to work. I drink green tea and try to read the New York Times and I’ve got my feet up and I find it hard not to work. There is the Web site to continue fine-tuning, there is financial information to gather for tax time, there is the novel. There are all the unfinished poems and stories. There are travel plans. There are Salon things to catch up on.
I think I’m supposed to rest.
But I find it hard not to work.
Maybe I have one of those “isms” people in recovery talk about — workaholism. But on the other hand, what is life if not an engaged struggle to bring into being what we imagine, and how are we to do that except by concerted, intense and prolonged labor? How are we supposed to live engaged lives if not by patient, focused struggle? The Web site will not fix itself. People will not wander into our workshops by accident. We must keep speaking, keep saying what we have discovered. We must keep talking about the inspiring beauty of it.
There is something I want to say but I don’t know how to say it. I think it is that after four and a half years leading these workshops I feel I finally have a handle on it. I finally have some opinions, based on experience. When I started I was just a guy doing something because it was novel and it might help me be less of an asshole about my writing. I thought it might help me be less anxious and more generous to myself and other creative people. I thought it might bring me some relief from the incessant chattering of ambition and perfectionism and failure all mixed together in my head.
I think that if you attend these workshops for two years things will really start to happen. I think it takes that long. I think you need to do this for about two years. I think after two years amazing things happen. I have noticed that the people who stick with it for a year and a half or two years suddenly seem to shift into high gear. This excites me a great deal, because what I want to see is people come through this workshop and then take on the world. I want to see their work go out into the world. I want to see my own work go out into the world as well — my own fiction and poetry, that is. I complain often that the daily Salon column take so much of my strength, and I live in the fear that I will never achieve competence as a poet and fiction writer. I write all the time! I dabble! I am still working on the novel! I woke up this morning with another image for it, another thing to put into it, to make the theme of dissolution and crumbling of reality work: the corner of a desk crumbling. This may not mean much to you but it was a victory for me. And I ran across a quote from Paul Éluard in a Gregory Orr essay in the Feb. 2012 Poetry magazine that well sums up what is happening in the novel: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” So this journey, this interminable journey fraught with fear of incompletion and fear of my own inability to render the novel successfully, and some anger at myself for picking a hard problem rather than an easy one (I think I could write certain comic novels with ease, but they are not what come) … this journey has an end. I do see my way to publication, to making the novel work structurally, aesthetically and commercially. I can see how this will work. And the workshops, the constant sharing of magical and unforeseen images and ideas, the constant gathering with others, this thing keeps me healthy creatively.
Karen tells me I’m an artist not a businessman and I shouldn’t be worrying about all these business things but all I do is think about the nuts and bolts of business because that seems to be the medium of social interaction and artistic survival. She says, Artists need patrons. I say, Line me up! Where is my patron?
Certain people have expressed interest in investing in the business, both to help us give scholarships to deserving young writers and also just to generally further our efforts. And I am again — this time more carefully — putting together a plan whereby we can invite volunteers to give of their time and talents in exchange for entrepreneurial opportunities as well as valuable experience. But it seems to me that other people do this much better than I do. Still, it is important to just reach out to the world, to market, to proselytize, to sell, to bring others such as interns and volunteers into the circle.
I am at heart an extrovert.
It is the combining of this deep, inward-searching activity with the world of practical activity and struggle that is most perilous for me. I am most vulnerable in the revealing of my true loves and true ambitions: It is here that I am most likely to want to control things and hide myself, not to let you see me.
Sometimes it seems it would be so much easier to just have a job and participate in the alienated and anonymous process of selling one’s labor! My work at Salon is a perfect balance: I reveal my soul but I do not have to do the accounting.
There is one thing about me: I am dogged. I am persistent. I keep going. I repeat myself. I keep chipping away at it.
In recovery we learn to just ask for help. In matters of recovery I have found that possible. But in matters of business, it’s so different!
This is just where I’m at right now. Norma has come back with the dog. The dog is lying on the floor at my feet.
Last night we got pizza and watched My Week With Marilyn on Direct TV.I know this is all going somewhere. I’m trying to learn not to edit myself too much in these efforts, to speak here as though I were speaking to myself, and not to be too controlling about what the responses or the outcomes might be.
I do know that it’s time for anyone interested in the workshops to sign up.
I do know I would like to get more people for the upcoming sessions. I am available to talk about it by email or phone. I’ve been toying with the idea of making a phone project — of actually phoning everyone I can find who has taken a workshop or attended a getaway up till now, just to say hello, what are you doing, how is it going, would you like to come back to the workshops?
I have this feeling that we get very intense with these workshops; we reveal parts of ourselves; we leave parts of ourselves on the floor here. And then we go off, back to life, and I wonder what happens, what processes continue, what ones abate. This is like my dad used to do. He’d float ideas out there. We’d be wondering: What do you mean, Daddy? Are we really moving to England? Are you really building a sailboat?
He was just dreaming aloud. Me too. Just dreaming aloud. But that’s the trick, I guess. Like John Gardner said, you want to create something like a vivid and sustained waking dream. I got the quote wrong, I think, but you get the idea. We’re dreaming aloud.
