What is the social glue which keeps the fabric from tearing itself apart?
What keeps the ruck from fragmenting further? We may often ask subconsciously.
(I hope this piece does not come across as all virtuoso triviality.)
It is on failure. Literary failure. Which I have experienced. A fair bit.
Why isn’t failure seen as artistic? A mode or median? Or is it Meritocracy every time? While we see people on the meteoric rise, there is the flip side of people on the downward slide. No, not a yogic position or posturing. Do the gilded downward spiral. Embryonic. We may feel like retreating to our figurative beds to curl up in a ball and munch on biscuits from the packet, but this is tipping the scale toward an inner sadness. And guilt. And vulnerable, in a way, narcissism – the trombone-slide of hubristic of intent. The banana peel whoopsie!
We must see it for what it is: The Meritocracy is in bed with the marketeers and the salespeople. They are slaves, drones, to profit at the behest of quality. Quality does not come into it. Hype and spin do endlessly.
But they will profess they know it all. But their only definite realities are based on sales. I doubt they know Christina Rossetti’s lesser-known poems, not knowing of Goblin Market, and not reading, with its bacchanal temptations, but In the Bleak Mid-Winter? Yes, the Christmas carol. Beautiful when sung by the choir at church while the frozen flakes of winter outside begin to take shape and fleet softly and slowly down. Or have you even read Middlemarch? The Bell Jar? Not your generation’s syllabus?
No. I didn’t think so.
Dealing with these mentalities is a form of botulism – it attacks your senses and nerves. They do not capitulate because their position of power affords them, they believe, ‘to always be right.’ That’s a form of insanity right there.
You have to go it alone.
You will fail. That is part of the process. Failure. Not getting it write…right. You see?
(This is either full-blown alacrity or innate foolishness; I do not know which.)
It’s an interesting rubric—an interesting dominion – Desperation. Want. Need. In the glaring lamps of the Visual Auteurship – social media. There is a lack of human fellowship – when personal failure descends.
One is reminded here of these two lines from Bukowski’s The Genius of the Crowd:
they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world
Becoming embittered due to not being accepted and thus validated:
- Embitterment, anger and hate.
- Embitterment but adopting an ‘I’ll show them’ mentality, which is
- proactive, and, in the end, decreases the anger and hatred and becomes a positive as their work will, no doubt, improve. Due to self-editing. A learnt skill within itself.
You must not put your failures against the judgement of others you seek to impress. To validate you. You must believe in yourself. And that sometimes means being honest and saying, ‘I am being greedy here. Selfish.’ Take a step back. Evaluate. Self-reflective practice. Every time.
Or, and I have borne witness to it, you may end up pitching yourself into a big, cold, deep river because of a lack of success. And it has happened. I noticed a guy on social media who was somewhat disingenuous about a writer whose work I liked and slagged the writer’s life and literary canon off. Well, cut to a year later, that guy pitched himself into eternity because he lacked writing success. I looked at his social media and some of his work, which was online, and he came across as an angry, resentful person.
This resonated with me. I understood it. We are not immune to things not going our way as they were. We desire our output to be well received. Sometimes, this does not happen, and it can be painful if we do not grow, mature to accept it.
Dragon-scale calcite. Beat your wings. Bare your teeth. Breathe your fire. No. No good.
You will feel like a dust bowl, depression-era nomad who shunters around with their work, emailing it off only to get turned down.
There is too much emphasis on the meritocracy.
Nepotism – it exists. Magazines, etc., tend to publish the work of their friends. It happens. Sadly.
You will not hear from anybody when you are failing. You will receive your rejections, and that will be it. You have to manage the rejections. Psychologically and emotionally, they can be a dent. It depends on your ego—whether it is balanced or if you are emotionally damaged, insecure, and harbour resentments—perceived or actual—like I was. I am working on it.
Here is a massive tip: do not discuss your writing projects until you have finished working on them. I, too, have been guilty of this, and it came back and kicked me in the rump. It was embarrassing, humiliating, and all of my own making.
But you must read first. Understand literature and then write. Fail. Fail and fail again, and write and write again. The plaintive hills of writing are alive with the cries of failing writers, but you must push on past the Gauchos on their haunches and roll-ups in their cupped hands, smoke streaming from their mouths, past the mud adobes and the mining huts with their roofs caving in.
And onto the plateaus of the self, accept sanctuary there, and feel free to work unhindered by what others are doing. Saying.
When I feel like this, I go to A Peasant by R.S. Thomas; here is a man, an ‘ordinary man’, a farmer of the ‘bald Welsh hills’, and Thomas ushers in these lines,
‘Who pens a few sheep in a gap of cloud.
Docking mangels, chipping the green skin
From the yellow bones with a half-witted grin
Of satisfaction, or churning the crude earth
To a stiff sea of clods that glint in the wind—’ [1]
In the final stanza,
‘Remember him, then, for he, too, is a winner of wars,
Enduring like a tree under the curious stars.’ [2]
It’s just like The Yellow Christ by Gauguin. It has a Cloisonnism style, with muted tones, flat fields behind, and Breton women in the foreground paying their respects to the Son of Man, on the cross, who died for our sins…
It brings in a particular perspective, no?
We must endure like a tree under the curious stars. We must work the fields and be thankful for life, for life is precious. We must know that the gift of life is all, not the garrulous limelight, which is fleeting and ephemeral.
Remember, those who want power and glory will always enjoy it and do not know the pillars of strength and endurance. Labouring. Grace. They are without thanks for others but only thankful for themselves. Stay clear. As difficult as it will be to engage with them, learn not to. Do your own thing.
And while you are listening to an Aphex Twin ambient mix on YouTube, drinking down a mug of green tea, slowly munching on fig rolls in the lamplight of your small room, or working on your project, there is the present mind of just being.
Try to be mindful of that, at least. It is a crumb of comfort in an age of lyrical excess.
(I believe in the process. It is a marathon. Not a sprint.)
We should not forgo Beckett’s pithy maxim, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
N
[1] http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/r__s__thomas/poems/11303
[2] http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/r__s__thomas/poems/11303
mindmuesli 