A Pilgrim’s Digression

I have often written of my love for the fall and winter months, but I have rarely written about what I dislike about this time of year. Besides the frequency of colds, above all I dislike the dryness of this time of year.

My hands turn to chalky sandpaper in winter, and moisturizer rarely has more than a minimal effect lasting an hour or two. When we go to my mother-in-law’s for Christmas, staying a week in an old house heated by radiators, the dryness of my skin increases many times over.

I hate getting out of a warm shower and feeling my skin crawl, as if my body were itchily shriveling up like a desiccated snake skin.

Winter is a dry season.

My grandpa, a bird lover, used to tell me that people often overfeed birds in winter while neglecting to make sure birds have enough water to drink. Finding water in winter is often more difficult for birds than finding food, yet people put away their bird baths or let them freeze over.

The other morning, Lynn noticed birds pecking at the ice in our bird bath. I filled a pitcher of warm water from the sink, took it down to the bird bath, and poured it over the ice.

My brain, too, feels dried out, frozen over, mummified and coated in the dust of the tomb. Writers often refer to going through a ‘dry spell’ when they don’t seem to have much impetus to write. I am in a drought, lasting who knows how long. Months? Years?

It’s ironic, too, because not even two months ago I wrote what I believe to be the best short story I have ever written in my life. My best friend even said he thought it was more mature than previous stories I had written. At the time, I intended to send it out to a magazine or small journal. Now, I probably won’t ever do that. I don’t have any desire to even look at the story again. To me, a story that is a couple months old is like cold scrambled eggs. Yeah, you could eat it, but who likes to eat cold scrambled eggs?

I am not short on ideas for writing. Ideas have never been my problem. Maybe I am just lazy; I often say that about myself.

Or maybe something has changed inside or outside, in my life. I seem to have lost that crucial bit of blind self-confidence that allows a meagerly talented person to continue writing, oblivious to the vanity of the endeavor. A writer, whether he be an ordinary blogger or Thomas Pynchon, has to believe that someone wants to read what he has written. He has to believe that what he has written matters, in some way.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Maybe my defeatism and self-loathing have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and here I am contemplating how I have single-handedly wasted the granule-sized modicum of talent God gave me.

I have also begun thinking about God’s will for me. I admit to being just a little scornful of those people who attribute “God’s will” to everything from a life-threatening illness that afflicts them, to winning five dollars on a lottery scratcher.

At the risk of sounding judgmental or arrogant, there is a woman at our church who is probably morbidly obese, in strictly medical terms. Yet one day in Sunday school, she happily announced the purchase of a chocolate store. She said that she felt that God had been pushing her towards this purchase for a long time, but she had repeatedly resisted taking the path God had chosen for her. Now, she said, she was surrendering to God’s will for her.

I think that more often than not, we mistake the grumbling of our stomach for the voice of God.

So I am very keen not to attribute to God’s will that which could be construed as my will, my own base desire. Yet I look back on my life, and I see only signposts telling me that I have been headed in the wrong direction, in terms of my creative efforts. I have been following my will, not God’s will, and the result has been failure. Why have I been able to complete nothing longer than a short story? Why have I left even many short stories incomplete? Why hasn’t my overall output been greater? I’ve spilled a lot of ink, but written very little of the fiction I actually desire to write. These are a few of the signposts I speak of. I feel like God has been trying to tell me something: you’re headed the wrong way, Matt; your faith in yourself is misplaced.

For at least the past fifteen years, by trying to sustain this belief in myself and my writing, I have been like a child trying to maintain belief in Santa Claus past all reason. I just don’t believe anymore. I am 33 years old. At this point, if no evident justification for my belief has presented itself, it ain’t going to happen.

Coleridge wrote of the “suspension of disbelief” in his Biographia Literaria, a book I actually read, once. People use that phrase in all manner of contexts, few of which Coleridge intended. What he seems to have meant with the phrase was that in reading a great book, we place a kind of faith in the author that is rewarded by his transporting us out of ourselves and our time. Anyone who has read a good book, whether it be The Lord of the Rings or The Shining, knows that feeling of belief in the fantastic, that feeling of living in a purely imaginary world.

I can neither create that feeling, nor any longer fool myself that, with a little more effort, I might be able to create that feeling one day. I have ideas, good ideas, but I cannot actualize them in good fiction or poetry, or even in a blog.

To some extent, over the past month or two, I have wondered if what I really wanted, when I began writing so many years ago, was connection with others. I still remember my fifth grade class, where I began writing short stories for my classmates as part of a regular class assignment. It was the connection between myself and them, my readers and schoolmates, who otherwise were not especially pleasant or friendly to me, it was that connection that I loved and longed for.

All my writing has been a seeking of that connection with others. Strange to say, because I am generally considered anti-social and cold, and I am indeed so, in terms of face-to-face contact with people. But writing liberated me from having to directly interact with people. To some extent I have tried achieving that same connection with other by blogging, or posting in online forums, or even playing a “social” game such as World of Warcraft. It is always the Platonic connection with the other that I yearn for.

Yet, I have come to feel that it’s all a wasted effort. In the end, I have constructed these elaborate devices–avatars in games, blogs, my fiction (yet everything we create is a fiction, really)–in order to connect with others.

And yet, I feel more disconnected, alienated, and alone than ever before in my life. I communicate with dozens of people a day, from my World of Warcraft guildmates to fellow bloggers, and yet I feel oddly depressed by my lack of connection with any of them. We are mostly talking to ourselves.

This morning, walking to work in the dark, early morning hours, I dsicovered the perfect metpahor for the modern condition. I passed a man sitting in the doorway of a restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue S.E., muttering to himself. I gave the giggling, wild-eyed man a decent berth as I passed, but amidst his mutterings I heard him say, “Got to be a white man to live in the White House,” and then he cackled as if he had just told the best joke in the world. “He’s probably a blogger,” I said to myself.

What a great metaphor, not just for who I am, or for bloggers, but for the modern person in general. We’ve all got our place in the world where we can monologue for as long as we wish on the obsessions that preoccupy our addled brains. Yet in reality we are just a rather dirty, mentally ill homeless person chattering to ourselves, alone in a shadowy doorway on a garbage strewn street in the dark morning of a grey day.

How can that be? Isn’t technology supposed to make us more connected to each other? More able to understand the point of view of others? Less alone?

I just don’t know. I have no answers, and I no longer believe I can find answers through writing. I just do not posses the talent or the intellect necessary. If I did, I’d be putting this into a novel right now.

But I am not writing a novel, or anything else, and unfortunately I never will. Maybe I am reading the signposts clearly now, for the first time, and all the signs say, “You are done.”