The Fool

Today is the first day on earth. Tomorrow is the first day on earth. One thousand years from now it will still be today. Let’s consider some recent yesterdays. About two weeks ago now, I finished the first draft of a novel. Wish I could talk about it but it’s still a pearl to me. I’m holding it close, tasting it and testing the weight but no one else gets to see it quite yet. Still in the phase where someone asks me what it’s about and I get shy and nervous like the book is hovering over my shoulder listening with a smirk to see how I misinterpret it. As if it’s not even mine, it has nothing to do with me, it was by complete accident that this particular story fell on my particular head and concussed me well enough that I could not go one waking moment without wandering the world of the novel in my head, talking to the characters, making them talk to each other like dolls so I could come to understand who they are and what they want from one another. All of that, pure coincidence. I’ve been held hostage by this book, I want to tell people. This book has a gun and it presses the barrel to the inside of my forehead, to the matter of my brain, and it says to me Look closer. Closer. Closer–Too close, you’re lost in it now, I’m going to put you down, it’s the only way. That’s all that the book is about to me right now. How it pressed my cheek to the page and made me write it. How I liked the lack of control, how I was still in control anyway. I’m coming to understand why so many authors say the act of writing a novel is a solitary affair–not just because it necessarily requires so much time spent by yourself but because it is largely an internal experience, a constant negotiation with the ego, toeing the fine line of pain and pleasure, poking the boundaries of your discomfort, and then removing yourself from the equation entirely. That internal experience is something I can never quite explain, it stays necessarily inside of me, leaving the book itself as the only entity that could possibly understand it. What a strange relationship.

I linger now in the phase of the writing process where I don’t touch the draft for a few weeks so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. It’s like an itch you must stubbornly refuse to scratch, knowing it won’t truly sate anything, it will subside in its own time. I don’t know if there’s something here. Part of me fears there isn’t and the other part fears there is but it might take me the rest of my life to carve out. Mostly I’m afraid of my hope that it’s good. Of course I want it to be good, how boring. Even worse, I want it to be Great. I want to be Great myself. It’s a new feeling to me. As a kid, I could never imagine managing an ego this large. What a fool I am to put such belief into myself and into something I can’t yet even see clearly. What a fool to try and explain it.

The specter of my 18 year old self has been haunting me lately. Last month, my best friend married one of my other best friends and in addition to being her best maid of honor I also gave a speech during the reception, one that was nearly 12 years in the making. Because the two of us met just shy of turning 18 and so much of our bond was cemented in those waning teen years, writing this speech required me to go back to that place, the people we were and the way we presented ourselves to the world, how to reckon all of that with who we are now and what a miracle it is that our friendship survived the worst parts. It was never quite apparent to me back then how precarious everything was. How many times it all could have gone so wrong. For most of my teen years I couldn’t imagine myself living past 18 so every day after seemed to come to me as a shock, cold water on my face, you’re still here, people are still expecting you to stand up straight and meet the world where it is, go on living like everyone else. I’ve only recently, in the last two years or so, managed to lay down that expectation for my own self. To wake up each day and say, right, I know what I’m doing this time, I know what it takes to keep myself alive, whether it’s true or not (sometimes, bewilderingly, it is).

But that 18 year old self is always waiting nearby, stone-faced and malnourished in his jester hat telling me, gravely serious, that the void yawns large and any direction I take leads straight into its mouth regardless so why put in so much effort, why not make nonsense of yourself, why not laugh first to avoid being laughed at. If you remove all purpose from yourself then they cannot pity you when you don’t meet your purpose and wrangle it the way you must in order to feel fulfilled by this one and only life. If you believe your life is moot, it is your prerogative to make nothing of it. That is your directive. He’s a real tough guy, that teen James, he thought that not figuring anything out was the same thing as having it all figured out (he’s both right and wrong). I have a lot of empathy for him. Whenever I hear his voice crop up and ask derisively what I do all this for—writing, making a life of writing, striving for great writing—when much or all of it will only get swallowed by the great void which is death and the memory taken with it, I tell him I do it for you, buddy, for this expanding entity called Me. This is how we live. This is how being alive works for us and how we make sense of it and how we offer sense to others. We must show people how great it is to march into the darkness like you’ve got any idea where you’re going and to say loudly, I don’t fear what might be waiting for me because I will be myself when I get there and that is the only way to be.

Taking on a purpose is a great responsibility and, much as I mourn those depressed teenage years and the alcoholic early twenties, I thank myself every day that I was fundamentally unable to write then. If I’d tried, if I said let me stab the stars with my toothpick arms, I would have failed and I would have totally castrated from myself the desire to write before I managed to get a grasp on it. What I had to say and think and feel did not matter to me then, or it mattered so much I couldn’t see past the self-obsession to understand what to do with it, how could I have made it matter to anyone else?

An unnamable Something shifted for me in delivering this wedding speech. I felt, in a moment, what it means to really hold the attention in a room. Not just having it cast my way and hoping it slides right off me but to see it—someone else’s finite time—as an absolutely precious offering and to stand firmly in it and speak from my chest like I am worthy of that time. To finish my college degree, I had to deliver my nearly half hour capstone presentation on the effect of wildfires on caribou in the Canadian taiga and I remember every single second wishing for it to be over though I was confident in what I was saying and knew the facts and figures like the shape of my teeth. As much as I loved and adored studying environmental science I always knew there was little passion behind it. I’ll be an environmentalist and a naturalist until the day I die but it has never been my purpose to quantify the natural world and distill its wonder into usefulness (God bless the people who do). Its secrets I was supposed to keep secret and instead wonder about what they do to my heart, wonder at how the heart requires it. I don’t record the world around me, I distill it into glass, I fashion it into a mirror and twirl it round and round. You only get a glimpse. There is no bigger picture.

Though I received wonderful compliments on the speech from many people afterwards, I looked only at my two wonderful friends while delivering it. If I’d turned to face anyone else it would have become far too obvious to me how vulnerable I was being, how nakedly honest, how disgustingly earnest. I wrote it for those two and for no one else and so I spoke it to them and no one else. It was love on my tongue and it mattered only that I delivered that love with purpose and with the total unwavering belief that I have stayed alive in order to love them loudly and so I should be as honest as I am capable of, I should be no bigger or smaller than the words I am sharing. I should be the whole of what I mean. I should be my entire heart.

This is what writing continues to teach me: Believe, foolishly, that there is something that needs to be said and you are the only person who can speak it as it needs to be spoken. Belief does not always translate to truth, and that’s the risk. It’s the space I’m sitting in now, with a largely incoherent first draft for a novel that I want, terribly, to be very good and to say something so loudly it cannot be turned away from. I could give up on that belief now, I could turn to face the yawning void and remember no matter how important I think my work to be it cannot possibly stand up to something as infinite and inevitable as time, it cannot last forever and so maybe I should leave it be. And then I remember the looks on the faces of my best friends in the world when I said to them, under the shimmering stars of their matrimony, that I would always love them and I would always tell them of this love and I would never shy away from it, not again, because my love was something I once cast off into the void out of fear but I decided instead to put my full weight behind it and believe that nothing mattered more in the entire world than sharing it. It was just a moment and it’s already long gone but it showed me everything. I am here and I have chosen to be here so I am going to do what I can to make my one life a little brighter, a bit more rosy-hued, a little less self-serving and more like an offering. What can I do for the people around me? What can we show one another? This is what novel writing is, for me. Just a fumbling about and hoping to find you there, fumbling right back. I write the novel for me. I make it great for you.

So, the novel is resting and when I come back to it, it will be with the unshakable belief that there is greatness within it and only I can squeeze it out. I will stand before it, dressed the fool, and we will make each other into something we cannot see yet. That is faith, I think, the work that we do to one another. It’s an awfully silly thing to have faith before the imminent and infinite void but the other option is to be one long noiseless fart and get swallowed anyway. I’d rather swing for the very crown of the sky than never once lift my arms out of fear that my call to purpose is true. I have my purpose and I love it dearly: you’re looking at it. Hello, will you let me move you? I’m on my way—

Thank you for reading. I have a book that you can already read and you can buy it here and I will say thank you if you do. Love you, mean it. jw.