I have always been in a fight with my potential. I work at a tangled set of crossroads. “Commercial success!” insisted peers and mentors. “Big L Literature!” they preached from academia. Meanwhile the ghosts who haunt us from the books that build writer mythos model invention. Over it all the, by all accounts, timid tenor of of Charles Baudelaire, sneering at any hint of pandering.
The thread of it all tying the tangle together is the message, “find yourself.”
And the fight I’ve always fought is against my own originality, because I honestly didn’t know what that meant. Because all the conflicting voices haranguing me to tell my own stories might have been carrying different messages, but they did have that thread in common and an implicit second half.
Don’t be like anyone else.
Find yourself. Don’t be like anyone else. That was the mantra.
I’ve always had an instinct to fight against that, though. I couldn’t articulate why. It has always stuck in my craw, though, like a half-swallowed pill that won’t go down and keeps worriting at me.
It may be the death of me.
Or it may not.
I’ll Eat You Up, I Love You So
Among my favorite books is “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak. I could go on and on about its depths and heights, but I won’t. It’s been done. I know it has, because I just come back from an exhaustingly thorough museum exhibit on it.
The Denver Art Museum recently hosted an exhibit on the life and works of Maurice Sendak. It was very good. I hope you got a chance to see it.
I’ve always admired the book “Where the Wild Things Are”. Tonally enormous and structurally compact. A gut-punch of a book containing worlds. It’s one of the most punk rock books of all time. In ways I have trouble explaining, since I don’t want to write picture books, I want to make stories with that much magic in them, but in my way.
I was braced to discover at this exhibit that there was some disappointing truth behind Sendak that I would have to ignore to keep admiring the Wild Things. That’s what they always say, right? Don’t meet your heroes.
Maybe if I met Sendak in person—unlikely, he died in 2016—I would be disappointed.
Instead, though, the version of Sendak they brought to this exhibition illuminated an attitude about originality that has left me with a profound sense of peace.
It had to do with Sendak’s attitude towards his own inspirations.
He articulated it in an interview about “Where the Wild Things Are.” They had a snippet of the interview, showing him leafing through the book and talking about artists and art styles that he loved.
He spoke to that, saying that he could see the reflections of his inspirations in “Wild Things.” He could see the Matisse and the Durer and the bits inspired by nameless monks bent over desks in Carolingian scriptoria. He said he could see them, but he supposed they weren’t that visible unless you were looking for them.
He said that he loves to be inspired by great artists, and he hopes to continue to be inspired by them for a good long time.
The whole exhibit had that thread stringing it together. Sendak loved music, and he did a great deal of art inspired by the music he loved. He loved cartoons he watched as a child. He loved his contemporaries and figuring out the attitudes they shared.
In spite of that love of being inspired, Sendak’s work was also uncompromising in being Sendak’s work.
Best I can articulate it, the attitude goes like this: he embraced the nature of art as an evolution of what its artist invites in.
“We both draw not on the literal memory of childhood but on the emotional memory of its stress and urgency. And neither of us forgot our childhood dreams.”–Maurice Sendak
Steal My Ideas
The moral is you can’t be original on purpose. I shouldn’t have been as shocked, colliding with this idea. I’ve thought about it. It’s part of my personal ethic already. I don’t feel protective about my own ideas. I don’t think anybody needs to. Even great writers. Most of them hardly had any ideas. Jane Austen only had, like, two. After more study of James Joyce, I’m unconvinced he ever had any ideas at all. These people were skillful arrangers, rearrangers, and shaders.
I don’t care if you steal my ideas. Take them. They weren’t mine to begin with. I just found them lying around.
Original material is illusory. That’s the moral, I think. And that’s the poor interpretation of the lessons from all the voices I carry around. Find yourself, they extol me. And I’ve always fought with it, this journey for myself, because originality seemed impossible and no fun anyway.
Being original, if it’s even possible, is in perspective. It’s in interpretation, arrangement, iteration, management and strategy of thought.
That’s the lesson that I think I was supposed to learn from Sendak. We are the product of what we love, and instead of pursuing some illusion of uniqueness, we might embrace it instead. We might be glad to love what we love. As Baudelaire would put it, be drunk, “on wine, poetry or virtue as you wish. But be drunk.”
I’m the inheritor of the traditions of a lot of belligerents myself. Punks and revanchists and malcontents. No matter how much I embrace them, they’re still fighters.
We all have the friendly burden of inheriting the legacy of what has nurtured us. It ain’t so bad to embrace that.
What do you love? What are you evolved from? Whose legacy are you?