The Ruinous Writing Life

I love this article so much. The pictures, for one thing, are lovely–indeed, are exactly the point–and the writing is, well, let me just say how jealous I am. Very Jealous.

I mean, that’s the problem. The life that you have going on in your head doesn’t ever usually match the life that you have going on right in front of you, and therefore you, by which I mean me, are always at mental crossways, at emotional sixes and sevens.

I will be this kind of homeschool person. I will be this kind of house keeper. I will be this kind of writer. I will look like this and feel like this while I float diaphanously through my day and week and year.

I mean, it hadn’t occurred to me to picture myself in a mirrored cafe scrawling out deathless prose by hand–although, now that she pointed it out I can see how right she is–but I have always thought of myself actually sitting at my desk, tapping away on one of those new “old fashioned” keyboards that hooks onto an iPad so that you have the illusion of being faint and gorgeous, when, in fact, you are just as entrenched in technology as everybody else. The fantasy, for me, includes the desk being cleared of the piles of little plastic health cards that keep coming to me in the mail, and the other bits of paper and bills that apparently I can never be rid of but will never have anywhere to put, and the ugliness of computer chords and little apple squares. Next to the desk I have an old milk crate full of detritus that I similarly am not permitted to get rid of, but must always look at from every angle no matter where I am in time and space. And this is all in my bedroom.

I lie in my bed in the morning and “write,” or whatever it is this blog can be called, and look at the desk and imagine myself sitting there, tapping out something real like a Novel. Because if you haven’t written a novel, a Best Selling Novel, you are not really a writer.

And the bed itself is crowded by two dogs and the “baby” who will be seven in a week. There aren’t elegant plush chairs draped in shimmery sorts of wraps or gowns and a seven hundred dollar pair of shoes that I kicked off last night in a desultory and exhausted way because of the burden of my imaginary life. Instead there’s a large fan to keep the noise of the college students, who rove up and down on warmer nights, at bay. And there are useful and inelegant articles scattered around that make life easier, or so everyone explains to me, but do not make the place of writing romantic at all.

It is a tragedy, life. A tragedy punctuated by small comedies. The chief tragedy being not getting to embody and enflesh and incarnate one’s dreams. Of always having to face things as they really are–people in their real true complicated selves, circumstances in all their actual and sometimes terrifying horror, emotions in their boundless and untanglable depths, sin in all it’s ugliness and ruin. Or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t want to do this.

On the other hand, what happens when you don’t look at the real state of yourself and your life? Don’t try to live it as it really is? Don’t see the clutter and ruin and admit that you a person who lives where you really are? That’s the worst tragedy, because then, I would wager, the writing is terrible.