Monday, February 27, 2012

Sylvia Plath

Last week I finished The Journals of Sylvia Plath (the edited version). Three things struck me:

 1) How familiar are her struggles about how to see herself—"Am I a writer or not? Am I a poet or can I be a novelist, too?" I've struggled with the same thing, trying to move from poetry to prose. Do all poets long to be novelists? Also familiar was the way she struggled with unstructured time. Once she was out of school and had days ahead of her in which to write, she had a hard time figuring how to make herself work, deciding on goals, trying to feel that she was really working while also needing to fill her tank with reading, etc. And how tempting it is to just dribble the day away with "stuff." It's this struggle that makes me want to get back into school. I need the deadlines, the structure.

2) How much more desperately she wanted to be great than I do. She was so much more determined and work so much harder than I do. She made herself (and I like to think it was more enjoyable for her than it is for me) do writing exercises, describing scenery, real people, etc. All the things a great writer should do, the warmup and flexibility exercises. I hate them. She did them, hard and often and well. She was hungrier than I.

3) Once again, why is it that so many great poets were/are mentally imbalanced? What does the self-interest, the self-examination that goes along with being a poet have in common with mental illness? Does one lead to the other? Can I use my mental health and overall contentment with my life as an excuse for not being all that great as a poet? Can I? Because I am. Content with my life. Pretty well-balanced. Able to abandon my work at the drop of a pin and wander off to enjoy something else, possibly indefinitely.

(It's a nice reframing of my basic laziness.)


Some favorite quotes:

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost . . . but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me. (33)


Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? . . . Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"? Or will I stick to the damn stuff and practice? (33)


So I am led to one or two choices! Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I’m any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMATINATIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTHWHILE? (35)


Perhaps my desire to write could be simplified to a basic fear of nonadmiration and nonesteem. (37)


If all my writing (once, I think, an outlet for an unfulfilled sensitivity—a reaction against unpopularity) is this ephemeral, what a frightening thing it is! (37)


The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete: that came to me last night as I despaired about writing poems on the concept of the seven deadly sins and told myself to get rid of the killing idea: this must be a great work of philosophy. Start with the mat-green fungus in the pine woods yesterday: words about it, describing it, and a poem will come. Daily, simply, and then it won't lower in the distance, an untouchable object. Write about the cow, Mrs. Spaulding's heavy eyelids, the smell fo vanilla flavoring in a brown bottle. That's where the magic mountains begin. (170)

I began realizing poetry was an excuse and escape from writing prose . . . Where was life? It dissipated, vanished into thin air, and my life stood weighed and found wanting because it had no ready-made novel plot, because I couldn't simply sit down at the typewriter and by sheer genius and willpower begin a novel dense and fascinating today and finish next month. Where, how, with what and for what to begin? No incident in my life seemed ready to stand up for even a 20-page story. I sat paralyzed, feeling no person in the world to speak to. Cut off totally from humanity in a self-i9nduced vacuum. I felt sicker and sicker. I couldn't happily be anything but a writer and I couldn't be a writer.  (249)


I feel I could crack open mines of life—in my daily writing sketches, in my reading and planning: if only I could get rid of my absolutist panic. I have, continually, the sense that this time is invaluable, and the opposite sense that I am paralyzed to use it: or will use it wastefully and blindly.


My worst habit is my fear and my destructive rationalizing. Suddenly my life, which had always clearly defined immediate and long-range objectives—a Smith scholarship, a Smith degree, a won poetry or story contest, a Fulbright, a Europe trip, a lover, a husband—has or appears to have none. I dimly would like to write (or is it to have written?) a novel, short stories, a book of poems. (251)


I felt if I didn't write nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing and love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.


Well, I imagine you can tell a lot about my own struggles by reading the quotes which stood out to me . . .

Friday, February 24, 2012

My Work in Progress


I'm having a hard time deciding how to move forward on my novel, so I've gotten quite good at ignoring it.

In November, I challenged a friend to do NaNoWriMo because she is fantastically imaginative and had been spinning her wheels. When she took me up on the challenge, I felt obligated to join her. (I wrote a little about it here .) I finished the month with a horribly messy draft of a story I could really, really love. I haven't picked it up since then, until this month, because there are some really important questions I have to think through before I can make progress on it. These questions have to do with the fact that I am Mormon. You see, my book is about some orthodox Christian girls from a commune who are allowed to attend public high school in the city, and the cultural clashes they (and their fellow classmates) experience as a result. Since I didn't want to write about any particular sect or organization, I just made one up. But the problem is that I am worried—handicapped, even—about what people will try to read into my words about my feelings about religion. If I make the men in this little commune have more authority than women, will it look as if I'm commenting on the Priesthood in my own religious culture? If I make men and women share authority, will it look like I am criticizing how things are done in the LDS church?

I'm having a really hard time with this. The thing is, I don't want to comment on the LDS church at all—but I do want to help people experience what it's like to be inside a culture that looks oppressive on the outside but that can feel very beautiful on the inside. I want both the people in the community AND the people outside it, who are puzzled about it, to be sympathetic characters. I want to show how both insiders and outsiders have good points, and a place where they can come together in mutual respect. I think I can do all of this, but I am afraid of people who might look for greater ulterior motives.

I've got to make a decision and move forward. Because this is a story I could care about, I can't leave it half-baked like this. But it's like dragging my feet through mud:  I . . . just . . . can't . . . seem . . . to . . . make . . . myself . . . commit . . .

And there are so many good books to read! And fun things to do! And naps to take!

I need a writing retreat.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Liberating Form

This month I finished Liberating Form by Marden Clark. I had been sampling it a little at a time—it was that good, and that challenging. My friend Harlow Clark gave me a copy of this book, which was written by his father. The fact that Marden Clark is the father of Harlow and Dennis Clark, two of the most interesting and intelligent literary people I know, explains a lot.


I wanted to retain the gist of each essay, but it's hard to hold them all in my head at once, especially since I began the book six months ago. The subtitle is "Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature," and that is accurate, although it doesn't do justice to what these essays make, all together. They are a blueprint for intellectual inquiry, rigor and honesty. I especially enjoyed the references to Mormon culture (particularly BYU culture); they were spot-on, and very brave. (For example, he speaks of being in shock that a BYU student would take out a no-interest student loan and invest it for profit with no regard for the government he was defrauding, and that a BYU professor would advise the student to do so.)


The title refers to the way that a defined form (such as a formal poetic form like a sonnet) can liberate the ideas contained within it. Through the essays (and, especially, the title essay) he also extends the metaphor to the church itself, a form which liberates, and even our earth-life experience.


On liberating form:


All this may be the only sermon I preach. Perhaps it is the only sermon any of us preaches, though in many variations. But it may be enough of a sermon: that we live by and bear the burden of Christ, that His Church is the form that liberates us and the energy we generate, that it provides us with the vision of form within which we find instructions to explore and express our love, that it provides the form to lead us toward our vision of heaven and our rejection of hell.


            -from the title essay. This quote reminds me of England's "Why the Church is as True of the Gospel."


On engaging with difficult ideas instead of sheltering ourselves from what might be challenging:

But surely a testimony, like education and freedom and creativity, is self-creative, is inwardly dynamic and alive, is something to be invested like talents. No hot-house plant, it needs exposure to wind and rain and cold to give it toughness, resilience, endurance. It too responds to opposition in all things.


            -from "On the Mormon Commitment to Education"


On why we should expose ourselves to great art (in particular, for me, fiction):

We may submit ourselves to the Inferno, to the heart of darkness, for the sake of experience itself or for the sake of the artistry that creates it. but we also submit for the purpose of deepening our capacity for experience and awareness and compassion and love. We submit because our experience in the depths maybe the best way—perhaps even the only way—to know and experience the ultimate heights.  If we really believe that there must needs be opposition in all things, we submit ourselves to the ultimate literary validation of the meaning of opposition. In more strictly Mormon terms, we submit ourselves to the trials of earth life—which can be enough of an Inferno—for the sake of a higher existence, for the ability to live a celestial life. As with literature, we have no assurance that we will survive the ordeal. Hell yawns, in Dante's version, for those who do not. But if we do, we should be much the stronger spirituality and in most other ways for having made the journey. we add the literary equivalent of a physical body which makes possible the literary equivalent of celestial experiences.


            -from "Science, Religion and the Humanities"


On the importance of art in building Zion:

What we need along with [Jesus] is whatever will nourish our spiritual lives. . . . But some kinds of knowledge will surely minister better to our spirits than others. And here is where I see a high destiny for the arts in our Zion.


            from "Zion and the Arts: What Will Really Matter?"


On the importance of honesty, and complexity, in Mormon art (and life):

Implicit in what I have been saying has been the sense that one of our most significant failures as a people has been the failure to really face such possible and actual tragedy inherent in our beliefs and practices.


            from "Paradox and Tragedy in Mormonism"


Well, you can see why I loved this book. I think we could have each chapter presented as a paper at an AML conference and have beautiful, stimulating discussions in every session. I wish every aspiring LDS artist and scholar could read it.