Getting In On The Act

As chagrined as I am to admit this, I have come to the conclusion as of late that I have been operating under the misguided notion that I was training to be an academic; what has commanded my thinking for the last month or so about successful academics is that they are writers (or poets, musicians, painters, filmmakers, etc.). Instead of trying to better society with supposedly superior logic, I need to focus on the compelling articulation of ideas that strike me as important. Yes, this is a grandiose oversimplification on which I could be duly charged. Still, in the end my work focuses on transmitting ideas to others via the vehicle of writing.

One will note that Definer’s latest positing has to do with the idea of narrative and authorial intentions, a post I had want to chastise at first due to the somewhat false binary created between psychology and style. On second thought, however, I realized Definer is expressing a similar sentiment to my own. In particular, we all struggle with the craft of writing in hopes of offering something to our readers (however small in number they may be) that is of aid. Moreover, my hope is that what I write will surprise me, in that what emerges may be far more profound than I might normally express.

In many ways, good writing is never easy, and the fitting form often arises from many false starts. The end product, whether completed or abandoned, can be likened to a failed relationship: sure it hurt, but look what I learned, and didn’t you enjoy it too? After all, aren’t we all trying to leave behind beautiful prose? This application of effort, and those moments when we commiserate on our failings, makes the suffering such pleasure. Thus, I have surrounded myself with junkies of the literary sort, people for whom a concept, phrase, or sound represents one of the utmost pleasures in life.

Somehow, this consideration of writing has moved my thinking onto that of my body, but likely not in the manner you are expecting. Rather, in the thick heat that signals the arrival of summer here in the Midwest, I often overlook the various ways the world clings to me—those riots of pollen that stain my hair as I walk past the bushes outside my apartment, the smell of corn blooms on my hands when I walk in the tall fields, or the sharp taste of chlorine that emerges from my skin hours after leaving a swimming pool.

Like our memories, our bodies are marked by their passage through the world, not just by scars, sweat, and sunlight, but the intricate geometries of propagation and destruction. When I next return might I be the grime blurring your car windows, or a slight hummock of earth against a backdrop of pines? Whatever my fate, I ought to remember that I am less the product of intention and more the insistent pulse of movements not wholly my own. We are all driven on by forces that bespeak our making and undoing. Here at the start of summer, I try to recognize the obvious reminders of my own involvement as a mere vessel of processes too little understood or acknowledged. Yet, the need for conclusions tells me that I am far from this achievement, and thus my post ends without an ending