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I was sharing with a few online friends that I have made this space, and thinking again about all the previous spaces I have made and why I quit writing in them. I said some, in my first entry, but it is usually a type of dissatisfaction with what I have written, a feeling that having begun in such-and-such a style & voice that I must forever continue in it or...
Or what? I am sure some of it is leftover from childhood, trying to hide our many-ness from others; consistency was key to not being seen for whom we were. And some of it is my aesthetic sense, my favourite works of art have a unified style and it does trouble me some when I realise that I am 'breaking' my own voice. But that is, in fact, the thing I am determined to outgrow -- the belief that I in myself must have only one voice, the belief that my best self is not a messy sprawling contradictory emotional person but is instead a stripped-down, refined, spare line. I am not in fact a Raymond Carver short story (and even his short stories were not before an editor got to them) -- if I am a work of art I would like to be something like Elif Batuman's delightful novel The Idiot which certainly has a voice but is full of trivia and details and humour and insight and emotions and confusion and, yes, idiocy.
And really, of course, the core of it is that I am not a work of art, however much I spent the most of my life until a few years ago trying to be; I am a person and (deep breath, say it with conviction) there is really nothing wrong with that. I love personhood in other people; I can learn to love it in myself.
Or what? I am sure some of it is leftover from childhood, trying to hide our many-ness from others; consistency was key to not being seen for whom we were. And some of it is my aesthetic sense, my favourite works of art have a unified style and it does trouble me some when I realise that I am 'breaking' my own voice. But that is, in fact, the thing I am determined to outgrow -- the belief that I in myself must have only one voice, the belief that my best self is not a messy sprawling contradictory emotional person but is instead a stripped-down, refined, spare line. I am not in fact a Raymond Carver short story (and even his short stories were not before an editor got to them) -- if I am a work of art I would like to be something like Elif Batuman's delightful novel The Idiot which certainly has a voice but is full of trivia and details and humour and insight and emotions and confusion and, yes, idiocy.
And really, of course, the core of it is that I am not a work of art, however much I spent the most of my life until a few years ago trying to be; I am a person and (deep breath, say it with conviction) there is really nothing wrong with that. I love personhood in other people; I can learn to love it in myself.
