a subcreator's field notes, 2 - Time Enough Under the Sun
Issue 2: Focus and Constraint, Determination and Desire
It's really clicked for me this week that I don't really need more time; I need more focused effort.
The book that's had my full attention this week is called The Intellectual Life, by Fr. Antonin Sertillanges. The work I've been doing has been to unpack, understand, and assimilate all the nectar that can be drawn from this sentence:
He who knows the value of time always has enough.
Let us take this atom into our minds and try to split it open with our understanding, so as to absorb its awesome power into our hearts.
Two Relationships with Time
As I remember, I was ten years old when I was introduced to — I should say assaulted by — the concept of a to-do list. Fourth grade, given a piece of paper and a list of things to do. I remember being at home, with this piece of paper, feeling stressed out, feeling behind.
So that's one way of relating with time, and one that I can easily fall into if I'm not careful. In many ways it was for a long time my default mode. The conception): I am in a deep dark hole and I have to dig my way out, and it's impossible, I'm never going to do it. The attendant feelings: panic, despair, dread.
Can you imagine doing anything useful in such a state? As a cornered animal? Two hands of a clock pointed at you like swords, fencing you in.
There's a better way: He who knows the value of time always has enough.
I am at the beginning of a decades-long journey. I am not only learning how to learn; I am learning how to learn how to learn. There is great power in beginnings, and a great responsibility — miscalculate the direction slightly in the beginning, and you can end up very far off where you intended to be.
The temptation is to rush, to panic, to move so as to feel that you are moving, but to give into that temptation is to guarantee that you will not end up anywhere you want to be.
The art is in creating time and space for writing to emerge. The spirit of work determines the quality of the work; there's a real sense in which the spirit of the work is the quality of the work.
Origin of Turiya
It might be useful to share how I came to have the idea for Turiya. I don't mean where the idea came from. I mean how I reached the state of receptivity so that the idea could even come to me. I will try to be very exact, and lay it out sequentially:
I wrote fiction on and off for years and years and years. I don't know how many stories. Maybe a hundred, probably more. They were all bad. Eventually I gave up.
At some point, I had to commit to the path of mastery of fiction. This happened maybe a year ago, in a somewhat paradoxical way. I realized two things:
I felt that I completely sucked at writing fiction and that I maybe just didn't have what it takes to me good. That fear has been gnawing at me for years, but I faced it and I accepted it. I thought, maybe I'm just too shallow. Maybe I don't really have anything to say.
I realized I couldn't stop wanting to write great fiction. I tried to stop wanting it for years and years and years. But the desire always came back. I prayed for it to go away if it was just vanity, but it kept coming back.
The only way I could think to reconcile the two was to commit to writing fiction for the rest of my life, and to fully accept that the only thing that might happen was that I'd keep writing and never write anything worth publishing. Not much, but I started with 15 minutes of longhand fiction writing every day.
The practices changed (and keep changing), but I continued to write. I continued to have ideas, some of them subjectively good, some of them subjectively bad. I came to accept that my subjective sense of the quality of an idea meant nothing in itself. The execution was all. And I continued to feel that my execution sucked.
Somewhere in there, I had a glimpse of a vision, of a sadhu — a Hindu priest — with a prosthetic arm, wearing a dhoti (like an Eastern monk's robe) made of an impenetrable spiderweb fabric.
I opened a story I wrote a year ago, one I hope to revise and publish before long, about a Chinese-Indian fusion restaurant that exists along a continuum of forms in parallel universes. I realized I didn't hate it. I actually liked it. Parts of it made me laugh out loud.
Then I rewrote it and I liked it even more. In the process of rewriting it I felt, for the first time, that I was wrestling with something essential, that there was a there that I was trying to pin to the page. From that, I realized I can do this thing, because for the first time, I felt what it feels like to really try to do the thing.
I now know what I'm trying to do, which is a great gift, and one that I now realize has to be earned. And it is a great blessing, it's our dignity, that we have to earn this. We have to earn the right to even call ourselves beginners. I also accept that the process is interminably, impossibly slow. So be it.
What a mess! So much for being exact.
Also, somewhere in there, I made a friend who I could share my work with and discuss it and he got what I was trying to do. That's super important. I prayed for it and I received it, and I'm grateful for it, and that's all I can honestly say about it.
Turiya progress updates
I've started making a plan, or at least assembling the pieces of a plan, by writing down the books I need to read into lists. There's something like 60 books, and the list is growing all the time.
In the coming week I'm going to continue to write my way through The Intellectual Life, and I'm convinced I'll come away with what I need to map out a plan, at least for the next two or three months. So I should have more wisdom to share from that next week.
I finished the second draft of that flash fiction I mentioned last week. I think I'm ready to start submitting it, so that will be one of my goals next week. I really hope I'll be able to share a link to that published story soon.
My brain is quite tired. I'll have to figure out a process for writing this newsletter that reliably produces issues I feel good about. This is not one of them.
Oh well. Can't win them all, man. But right now it's about building consistency, getting the vehicle moving and then learning to steer it.
So: until next week. Thank you for sticking with me.
△AR