Archeology

I'm a writer. I say that despite that fact that I rarely write anymore. To be fair, I wasn't particularly prolific at my high water mark either, but it was more than what I manage today.

To say that I'm my harshest critic is perhaps too excoriating a condemnation of criticism and critics. I am my meanest bully. And though I consider myself a person bound to the need to create, my creative impulses bear the worst burden of that bullying.

Through the years I've explored a number of creative outlets. And I've enjoyed all of them intensely. A variety of visual media: from pencil drawings to charcoal and paint, computer graphics and design, 3d animation, architectural drafting and modeling. Dance. Writing. Photography. Music. Most of these outlets have been closed, atrophied in disuse, shut down out of a hopeless inability to live up to my own expectations. And I assure you, my expectations far outreach yours.

I do not say as much out of pride. Why bother hoping to write the Great American Novel, when you can hope to write the work that defines the next two thousand years of intellectual discourse? How's that for overweening? And while it begs the question, "Where does something like that even come from?" and while I've come to a few answers on that count, it begs a far more important question: "How do I go about dismantling such an enormous, detrimental construction?" I'm finding such demolition work is perhaps the effort of a lifetime.

I can still write some, before I'm shut down, and I continue to press on in dance, despite how many minefields I've laid out there too. I've found a bit of a work around in dance--I switched dances, where I could cultivate beginner's mind again without as much self-recrimination. It's not as easy in writing, but it occurs to me that the important aspect of the work in overcoming the self-bullying is not the success, but in the continued focus and determined intent. So I will keep writing, but it will probably continue to be less than I could produce. But then, so what? How much less is it bullying, telling myself I'm not writing enough?

Anyway, what brought this on is the fact that in unpacking all my books yesterday, I found two literary zines a friend published 13 years ago. They'd been sitting in a box in my closet for the last seven years. Two of my poems got into them. They're pretty much the only two things I wrote that wasn't ad copy in my entire post-college 20s. I'll be posting them here in the blog entries that follow.