More Swimming Lessons
For me there was no business of sighing and saying, “Oh, but I wish I could write. Oh, but I’d love to be a writer… La. La.” There was only this… If I had not written, I would have drowned. I have a lot of friends and many of them are fools all the time. All of them are fools some of the time. And at their most foolish, because they haven’t given up all to be artists, they say to me and my artists friends, “when you go into the real world….” Or “I live in the real world…”
Meaning we do not.
Here is what I say to those fools: When I turned to writing it was because I would have drowned in the so called real world. I couldn’t stand to be submerged in a world someone else had made. So I had to make my own. There was no other choice.
I will say what I did not do when I began writing. I did not tell my family, and after a while I knew better than to tell most of my friends. People can’t help being what they call practical. Practical means, to most people, doing what you know can be done, that which is a sure thing. Practical means that if you don’t aim very high you won’t miss very much and people already have an idea of what it means to aim as an artist.
If you say you’re going to be a secretary, no one asks you, “And makes lots of money,” or “and get awards for it,” but if you start out to be an artist then the idea is you haven’t succeeded unless you are doing both. No one says a psychiatrist is a failure if she isn’t a millionaire, but, automatically, if you are an artist then it is assumed you want to be, you have to be a millionaire, turning out “bestsellers”—a very mercantile word. So, you see, in America artists are already being set up. It is all or nothing. Your friends cannot help but bring up money or utter phrases like, “And if you become really famous one day…” It is hard for the people around you to understand the phrase, “I don’t do it for the money…” because, you see, they do.
It is funny… Well, no, it is sad, really, the harried people who have asked, in the past, and in moderate disgust, “What do you do for money.” Why, I do remember there was a professor, a Cornell graduate who had landed himself into working in the juco I once attended who said, “what an interesting life you have. I just wonder,” he frowned and said, “When you’ll get your feet on the ground.”
You have to understand, I’m talking to all of your writers out there, but also you other artists, the codes people use. “Get your feet on the ground,” “move into the real world.” They are short phrases with definite meanings. They all mean, “When you learn to sacrifice your happiness as I have done and become sour as I have become. When your life has come to mean as little as mine.”
If you are serious about writing then you have to realize that most people aren’t really serious about anything. They’re distracted, poor things. And tired. And very often resentful. I think as an artist and entertainer it’s really a writer’s job to relieve the wearied and put on track the distracted. And it’s really your responsibility to yourself, to your soul, to avoid the fools who try to take your gift from you.
Because there is so much joylessness it is often hard to remember how much joy there is. Our struggle might at times seem desperate. But we do not side with desperation. Rather, we work out of joy. From immense joy comes all creation, and back to joy it dances.
<< Home