SOMETIMES DREAMS ARE NOT ENOUGH
On the Creative and Critical-Self (Simplicities 2 and 3)
Quick recap: after my last book combusted I had a lot of feelings, most of them berserkerish. As a consequence of bookfail, I stopped writing for a year but what I really should have done was launch right into the next project. What was it Admiral Nelson said? “Never mind maneuvers, always go at them.” Nelson wasn’t wrong. But for whatever reason I didn’t or couldn’t go at them. Instead I drifted, lost in the no-writing doldrums.
Please understand: I wanted to write, desperately. Shoot, I’d been wanting to write desperately since middle school. Writing was about the only dream I had growing up and my writing as lame as it was helped keep me together through all those years when I had to share two pairs of pants with my older brother and nothing seemed to go right, ever. In those earlier days, I had what Octavia Butler called furor scribendi; I wrote like mad, like a person possessed because, I suspect, writing was about the one thing that kept me sane. (This was before therapy, before I started dealing with the holes that my childhood had blown clean through me.)
From the age of 13 writing was what I did – writing was what I was and also why I was, if that makes sense. For those reasons and others, there was always a lot of pain involved with not writing. More than I care to caliper here. That year after bookfail, the year I drifted, I had a lot of vivid tormented dreams about the days that I used to write – in college, in the pre-game hours before we hit the Roxy or Melody; in that apartment in Ithaca where the snow-wind would rattle my windows like a burglar; in all those various cribs across NYC typing typing typing furor scribendi until I could no longer think straight in either Spanish or English.
And yet no matter how intensely real the dream, how awesome it felt to be my writing self again, when I woke up the vitality would flee, the bullshit would sweep in, and nothing I tried could recall that energy, that lambent connection. I could not, for the life of me, return to the page.
Sometimes dreams are not enough.