Notes On A Writing Life 26
June 14 2021
Dear All,
“How do you know when something is finished?” My son asked me on the phone recently, about a piece of writing of his own. I thought – not until it’s published, and you can’t change it. Not until you can’t go on tinkering with it anymore. But there are stages of finishedness – the moment when you decide to ship it out and press SEND is one. I said, “When you feel you can’t do any more to it, I think.”
The writers among you must know the feeling of looking at a piece of work – one day it looks finished, the next you find an enormous flaw. It’s very hard to know what you have done. You can send something out one day, to an agent or editor, and wake the next morning to see the enormous flaw staring you in the face. We have to ask others for help, and trust that other eyes on our efforts will be clairvoyant. Sometimes, with a trusted reader, this works – sometimes, not.
So, you send a book out, keeping fingers crossed, planets in alignment, work done and re-done, gods of novel-writing placated – whatever it takes. Then what? The waiting period, the doubt, is painful to writers – and we all go through it, no matter how well or often we have been published. Each attempt at a creative work is a step into the unknown.
Failure, someone said in the Apollo 13 movie, is not an option. But failure is always an option, and we know it. In our success-oriented world, where failing is at least embarrassing and at most, catastrophic, it’s a good time to have another look at the notion of failure. What exactly is it? The lack of acclaim by a single person, our peers, society at large? Is it simply about disappointing ourselves? Perhaps failure is the only way we learn, and success – that ‘siren hiss’ as the poet Anne Stevenson once put it – is the illusion.
So I’m including here a poem I wrote about it, and I’m going back to poetry for a while – poetry, in which you can say or do anything and nobody can argue with you, although they might not like or understand the poem. Poetry is private property. It doesn’t really deal with success or failure. It can be obscure, even baffling. It can live in a drawer and not scream to get out. It can live for a lifetime in a memory, a heart. It’s where flaws can hang out unchallenged, because it has no expectations, is simply not in any race. At least, that is how I see it.
Meanwhile, in summer here the mangoes drop off the trees, you can hear them rushing through the leaves to hit the ground, and the clouds of midsummer gather and promise rain yet don’t deliver - yet. Everything to its season. I’m including another bee photo, sent by my bee-keeping daughter, as bees are successful creatures as long as they are not being poisoned. They know how to do their lives, and create what only they can create.
Affectionately, Ros
FAILURE
("Last night as I lay sleeping/ I dreamed—marvelous
error—that I had a beehive here inside my heart and the
golden bees/ were making white combs and sweet honey
from my old failures. "
—Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly.)
I read you Antonio Machado,
sitting out here with my coffee,
trying not to listen to the noises of the day—
shriek of wood-saw, blurt of traffic
on wet streets—
and think about your golden bees
making white combs and sweet honey
from your old failures—
and so, presumably, mine.
Yesterday’s rejection letter came :
‘we all loved it but unfortunately. . .’
and now you remind me, sleep is
a gathering of bees,
dream is renewal, even an idle
breakfast stretching into the morning
can hold a hidden reconfiguring
of sorts;
that it’s all going on out of sight
as my neighbor invisibly mows his grass
and someone deafens the street
with a leaf-blower;
that not-doing is possibly
our purpose, while the beehive
thrums in the heart; that poets
will always be read
if we write about
failure, the topic nobody mentions,
except in whispers,
except among bees.
(from INVISIBLE HORSES, published 2019 by Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY.