My Ambition: Part 2

I always know the root state of my mind and soul by how I feel, what runs through my head, that first moment when I wake in the morning. (It has to be the first moment, not the second, not the third... because by that time, the active mind has already taken over, has overridden what lingers in the unconscious.) Lately, I've been waking with a sense of lethargy, mixed with mid-grade anxiety about productivity, and time passing too quickly. The feeling is deceptively benign, could be easily interpreted as a simple, industrious "to-do" mechanism, a daily resolve to counter entropy - like a chipper ‘50’s housewife, exclaiming, "My goodness! So much to do, so little time!"

But that anxiety takes hold at a deeper level for me. I know this, because on the drive out here to the country, it nearly felled me, manifesting in the oh-so-unoriginal phenomenon of road rage. I was a madwoman - literally, fuming mad - and a near-menace (honking, zig-zagging, flashing high-beams, hollering... Why is everyone driving so f&%@#ing slow today?!!! It was not pretty). Poor pup, huddled in the back seat, didn't know what possessed his mom. Luckily, there was someone on the road even madder than me, going 85 instead of 79, and the cop pulled that guy over right in front of me.

The positive spin on my rage is that I just needed to get here, because this is my place of work. In the city, I do what I need to do to earn my keep; this is not, to me, real work, and often feels like busy-work. There are a multitude of distractions - blessings, too, like friends and good entertainment - but things which suck away energy and time for work. Here in the country, I work. I make things with words, I access and exercise my best (hardest-to-access) intelligence and creative focus; things stir all week long, and when I am not able to get in there, into the work, to churn and externalize, get the words on the page... Time in the city can be very constipating in that sense. And so, sometimes, that two-hour drive is like holding it (indulge me in the scatological analogies), near to bursting. I am reminded of one time when I was actually holding it, sitting in the car, stuck in gridlock traffic, no businesses or gas stations in sight, and I've never had to go so badly in my life (probably contends with yesterday for most intense road rage episode; maybe worse, because of the physical pain).

Which brings me to the negative spin: I am a wailing infant, throwing a tantrum, frustrated by my own discomfort and making things worse with my undisciplined anger. Essentially shitting all over the place, and myself, to make a point.

Ahem. Anyway. There is also physical work to be done out here in the country, which nags at me as well, when I am absent from it. I know the lawn needs mowing, the plants need either watering or putting to bed. Things are dying down now, and the mess of deadness calls for my kindness and attention. The furnace needs servicing, time to stock up the fire wood. The leaves and pine needles have begun falling in earnest, so out with the rake. And we need a good plan to keep the pipes from freezing this year, to avoid a bursting situation (C. recommends heated tape).

What else? Oh, yes. That nagging ambition for making beauty here - physical beauty, that is. Since August, I've been dreaming about a legion of non-vegetable plantings. Two lilacs - one tree form, one bush form (maybe one purple and one white), bulbs for early spring (tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth), hostas and bleeding hearts in the back where it's shady. Yes, indeed: I will make a home, a place of loveliness and living growth; I will do this all by myself.

I am in the midst of reading and digesting (and writing my own response to) an essay by Donald Hall, called "Poetry & Ambition," sent to me by L., who reads OITB regularly. DH has much to say about today's so-called ambition ("petty ambition"), about the state of contemporary poetry (the "McPoem”) and the circus-like pursuit of fame and publication. As the question of ambition, "My Ambition," swims around in my muddied head; and as I begin to unwind from all that angst, the back-up of work, the baby-artist's tantrum; I recognize that ambition, true ambition, which DH describes (quoting the sculptor Henry Moore) as pursuit of the unattainable, an objective which is unreachable, is of course ultimately a good, and a privilege. The opportunity to set one's own goals, and to set them further out than what is easy, what gratifies instantly - this is a gift, something unearned, to be cherished and stewarded and cultivated. "If our goal remains unattainable, then failure must be standard," DH writes. And, "We fail, we all fail, we fail all our lives" (from an earlier essay called "Ballad of the Republic").

There is work to do, and if we are "properly ambitious," the work is impossible. "To pursue the unattainable for eighty-five years, like Henry Moore, may imply a certain temperament," DH admits. More often than I'd prefer, I feel my temperament does not quite suit; despair (along with road-rage-inciting frustration) hovers and looms.

But I suspect despair is not a result of “proper” ambition, but rather ambition which is fatally mis-directed. The goal is not publication, the goal is The Writing Life, i.e. giving oneself fully to the work of crafting, as DH would say, words that last. And for me, right now, pursuing publication is a kind of necessary evil (the pursuit seems to me evil, less so than publication itself) towards achieving a more supported, consistent writing life - central, not peripheral, and significantly less shared with the busy-work.

Publication is also, for better or worse, today's entrée into the proverbial community of writers, the world body of literary voices. For this - this active participation, this platform for ideas and sharing of one's developing and hard-earned vision - I do have ambition. To a degree, I feel this as deeply and truly as - dare I say it - a calling, a vocation. And to the degree that you all who read OITB have encouraged me in pursuit of this vocation, I thank you sincerely; because this work, this Life Work (referring to DH's wonderful book here, of course) is damn impossible.

Now back to the moment of waking: I woke this morning thinking clearly and distinctly about writing this post. I woke in gratitude for the work ahead and the time & space to do it. I woke ready to work, and to make everything I can out of my day. I woke happy about the color of the paint on my walls (a bold red-orange which I inherited and is now growing on me). I woke with some measure of ambition, untormented. I guess you could say it took about 18 hours, but I've cleared out my backed-up system - not completely, of course, but just enough. On arrival yesterday, I went straight for the physical work: the lawn is raked and mowed (and is slowing its growth, nature's grace); the porch plants watered, trimmed back, composted; four loads of laundry done (this is what I mean by backup); bags of cow manure unloaded from the truck and ready for the lilac planting, when it happens. You get into the work, you just dig in (literally, in this case), and the priorities begin to untangle themselves, make themselves clear - what you will do today, what you will do tomorrow, what is likely impossible in both the long and short runs, but will remain, as ever, in your sights. The lilacs and the bulbs can wait until later in the month; the shade plantings until the spring. The appointment for the furnace service has been made, we'll chop and stack firewood next week; today, I wear layers to keep warm.

Onward, then. The hours are before me, the impossible awaits.