My Ambition

Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.
- Paul Morgan, screenwriter (THE QUEEN) & playwright ("Frost/Nixon")

I'm a little bit country. I'm a little bit rock 'n' roll.
-Donny & Marie

City=ambition. Country=retreat (I'm thinking here of the verb form, as in, to withdraw, to recede...an implication of ceding defeat).

The notion of ambition as an expression of damage - wow, that's something. That would make a place like New York City a kind of vat-full of ruined souls, manifesting their pain in high achievement, in fierce competition and freakish single-mindedness.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

In her gazillion-weeks-on-the-bestseller-list memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of her experience in Bali:

Everywhere in this town, you see the same kind of character: Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life, that they've dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely....where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it... but generally all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again... This is a very high grade of people - multi-national, talented, and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally married or employed) and now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say there's a lot of drinking... When I am around this scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz: be careful, don't fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life."

Ambition. There is something about it that is driven by brokenness, and a burning need to right something. Contentment of the happy-happy variety and ambition do not often go hand-in-hand, do they. And the city feeds off of it, this ambition, this energy, this urge to ascend, perhaps transcend, whatever demons plague us; and if you do not partake, you feel the sting. Are you someone? Are you no one? What do you have to show for yourself? For what are you striving? What creds can you flash, what contacts in your rolodex? What are you selling, and who's buying? It sounds so hackneyed, so trite, a caricature. But my experience is that it's real. Everyone's got an angle, people are out for themselves, they want to be someone, go somewhere. And they will do what needs to be done.

I was telling a friend recently about my experiences in seeking a literary agent, how frustrating and demoralizing it's been, how distracting from the work (and joy) of writing. How I feel caught in the middle, between wanting to publish a novel, and wanting to "doze away the rest of my life" in quiet contentment, in the country. How miserable I am when I am in ambition mode. In ambition mode, you must contend with The Market. As an artist in The Market, you must have more than creative talent, more than serious ideas or lyric genius; you must have something to sell, something that people will buy. And you must be willing to play the game. You must be willing to cede the power to determine the worth of art to people like agents, and editors, and publishing executives - people whose primary skill is not spiritual wisdom, or aesthetic vision, or crafting language. Their skill is understanding the mass market and centering all things around the behavior, the intelligence, the cravings of that market. I'm not one to think that the market is always bad, or that popular equals shoddy. But the market is the market; the market is where people are, it is anathema to reach, or vision, or difficult pleasure.

And the market is unforgiving. You cannot be a little ambitious; in fact, ambivalence about ambition is the worst place to be. If you want it, you must to be prepared to do whatever it takes to get it. If you wobble, if you waver, if you hem and haw, you will fail. And if you're going to fail, it's better to let it go completely, rather than torment yourself with your little bit of ambition, your mousy hope in partaking in The Arena of Recognition & Success.

Of course country life, in my (limited) experience, is not dozing. There is hard work to be done, living in retreat - physical, creative, intellectual, spiritual. But you are, more or less, working for the sake of beauty, for joy, for the light of day; you are a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear, to see, to affirm. There is a kind of purity to this life, yes; and a deep loneliness. A life in full-time retreat is, I think, a kind of calling. A vocation. Perhaps even a different breed of ambition, one focused solely on the inner life. I have always been interested in, drawn to, this vocation. But you can't really be a little monastic either.

Tales from the city and country. Tales of ambition and retreat. Maybe Donny & Marie could do it - a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll - but then again, there were two of them. I wonder and worry that my promiscuity, my bigamy, will be my downfall.