It’s been a long month and I, as always, am the King of Understatement.
So much has come into my mind and so little has gone out that mighty river of imagination has all but grown stagnant and still.
I have discovered things both beautiful and catastrophic. I have read thousands of pages from every spectrum: Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Vonnegut (Armageddon in Retrospect), James (The Turn of the Screw). Not everything was so heavy. There was a guilty pleasure: Moody (Hater) and even a little Chick Lit: Brown (All We Ever Wanted Was Everything).
I’ve watched dozens of movies, both commercial and independent (and of the latter, most notably was the Zeitgeist series). I’ve studied civilized structures, both monetary and shared resource. I’ve learned how our money structure works and I’ve discovered who really runs our planet, nations aside. I’ve even, finally, read our United States Constitution and all it’s subsequent amendments. Things are never what they seem. Imagine my surprise to discover that the original Constitution was created and signed WITHOUT any Bill of Rights. To my further surprise (and subsequent disappointment) I discovered that it wasn’t, in fact Thomas Jefferson who tarried on about the need for civil rights attached to our documents of freedom but rather the “Forgotten Father” George Mason. From right here in Virginia Mason wrote the Virginia Bill of Rights, which Jefferson later “borrowed” from heavily; actually word for word in some cases.
As our minds grow we absorb more of the evident truths of our history and of our possible futures. It’s inevitable. It’s also enough, at times, to make you want to drop upon your knees and scream out the futility of all pioneer desires. And if that isn’t a sign that one’s head is too full, I don’t know what is.
Why don’t I just turn on the spigot and release some of this pressure? Right now, I find that I can’t. My Name Is Joe is still deeply within it’s editing work and it’s exhausting. Only trickles of new experience get released, just a little at a time, and I can feel the dam walls weakening as they staunch the flow of what remains.
It’s a mantra of mine that the first draft is always written with the heart and the second with the head and in the future, I’ve taken steps to ensure that this overwhelming editing phase will be better parsed out to relief the pressures of the heart, so to speak. For now though, I press through, a section at a time, attempting to combine both head and heart into a draft of words that hold true to the original construct of this story, but that are beautiful and profound as well. This is NOT an easy endeavor and the time it takes to achieve is close to maddening. I lie awake at night, dreaming with my eyes open, of the time that I can once more sit down and pour forth the “new stuff”. The words aching for release. To let the rivers of imagination splash like rapids across the country of the heart.
I’ve been tempted of course, to take “some time”, as Holly put it, to let Joe go for a bit and get into something more creative. I can’t seem to do that. It will put “Joe” off for longer and upon each return I will be a different writer and a different man and that I’m afraid will create a Frankenstein’s Monster of a story. Much like my first novel “Juggler”, which is a testament to writing a single tale over too long a period of time.
That’s the philosophical or high art reason for not putting aside this novella for a bit. A more truthful reason is likely that I’m incapable of working on a new thing until the old has been completed. I’m too fucking linear. (And too compulsive to attempt to think otherwise.)
So for now, I’ll keep pushing ahead. Perhaps writing with the heart (the first draft) is more akin to making love, to making the baby. This makes sense to me, as writing with the head (the second draft) is often painful and hobbling and likely more like the true labor, the true birth.
In the end, I hope to hold the baby child in my hands and smile down upon it with love and pride–just as many of my friends these days are doing the same with their new babies.
While mine will never (in all likeliness anyway) go off to college, I can still look at them upon my shelf and swell with pride as I recall their conceiving and subsequent painful deliveries.
For now, the bound heart must seek patience as I do what must be done. In the end, once more it will be free to pontificate love, philosophy, anger, lust, hope and redemption, all the wonders of a new life. Then, once more resign itself to irons as the head labors and rears the newborn. This is the cycle of life, both for humans and, it seems, for literature.
