The Odd, Enduring Ache to Make Something New
The work of staying alive is staying in love with life
I am still ambitious.
It’s ridiculous, unseemly. I should act my age (73)! Old people donning youthful outfits repel like milk gone sour. One’s seventies are a time to savor, recall, reflect, bequeath, if one’s lucky enough to reach them. Let the kids take charge – now middle-aged themselves, no longer kids.
I agree with such thinking, preach it. But my insides refuse to heed. I wake brimming with desire. This will be the day! Before lunch, Jane can barely talk to me I’m so intent on my screen. Bumptious Henry must shift for himself till I’m spent. Can’t you see I’m busy! Busy at what, you ask? Busy making. Making what? Who knows what – something different, better than before!
It is not career glory I pant for: that I no longer believe in. I climb no ladder, aspire to no eminence. Even the most famous end up dust. There is no there there, as the rich are forever rediscovering.
I do not want things. Or even, to my surprise, acclaim. I love gladdening loved ones, but your approval is not my goal. Tallying “followers,” in Web-speak, makes me squirm. Yes, one’s numbers matter in a material sense – the more readers, the more chance for my words to find their way. I check my stats, curious. Data’s as yummy as potato chips (Lay’s original – no faux flavoring). I can’t quit munching – then feel grouchy with bloat.
My ambition hankers for effect, not result. I yearn to express myself. Though unsure what that familiar phrase means, I’m convinced it means something. I want you to know me – as nearly as another person can. I connive to snag and retain your attention – and never to abuse your trust. Words are my instrument: how to arrange and derange them to pause you in your busy day; how to make them amiable but not predictable, fresh but not weird, provocative but not offensive, so you’re inclined to spend time, your most precious resource, at least for a paragraph. I want – this sounds ghoulish – to inhabit your brain but not inhibit it. For being together with people we care about is the only good reason to live.
Confessing this ambition may be odd but not the fact of it. Appealing to others is what most of us do most of the time. Some do it by their appearance, others by cooking, others with kindness, others by entertaining, others with gifts. To each their schtick. Who of us deep down isn’t a toddler pressing our posy on a grown-up? (“You picked these? Why, how wonderful!”) Who, even the surliest, doesn’t long to be loved?
How to make words work such magic is a trick and a half. Yesterday’s words won’t suffice any more than yesterday’s flowers. I must guess your taste without knowing who – or when – you are. Any worthwhile word must be true, of course, but what should it be about? How should it sound? What tone befits our unprecedented moment? The miracle-workers in art somehow anticipate me in my specificity. Shakespeare detects my inmost secrets: how on earth!
This ambition is preposterous, I confess. But which ambition isn’t? Only humans strive to be more than we are. We envision glories and gods welcoming us home. Dog Henry thinks we’re daft. But isn’t that dream a hoot? “What is man but his passion?” asked Robert Penn Warren in a great poem. What, we might wonder, is man without passion? “An aged man,” wrote Yeats,
is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing.
To have written thus!