Letter to a Young Poet

One of the things I do (when I choose to do anything at all) is tutor or mentor or guide or coach young writers and poets, both in the classroom (my day job) and outside the classroom (my avocation). 

Recently one of my charges became so frustrated with events transpiring in her life that she asked the fundamental questions of existence that drive many writers to their craft--or from it. I could not answer in that moment with any suitable response but I did return later and typed out something approaching an answer. As I sat back, my fingers still sizzling with the electricity of creation, I was suddenly reminded of another such Q&A between Rainier Maria Rilke and a young poet who asked for his advice.

Not to put myself into that class, I nevertheless thought perhaps this Q&A might be of interest to others who write or mentor writers or those having an interest in existence and identity. (I must confess, I explored notions of identity in quite some seriousness while researching and writing a dissertation which remains hidden in a trunk in the basement.)

After polite small talk and responding to earlier issues related to an opportunity to go to what I cautioned her was a dangerous place now, she asks the following: 

You know what I'm thinking about? It seems that I cannot find myself. What I live for? Where is my place in this world? I cannot find peace...

You ask big questions that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. And me, too. What do we do now that we are here on Earth? Religious ideology has answers and many people follow those suggestions. Non-religious philosophies offer other suggestions. Most seem to come down to helping other people, creating things that will outlast you, or dreaming of a better world and working to make it change to that dream.

I think young people especially wonder about this question. We have school as our focal point for so many years that when we are free of school we have nothing to do. Most get jobs, meet someone and form a family. After that, life demands that they do many things at regular intervals in their lives. They watch their children grow up, they serve their boss at the job, they take vacations, and so on.

Others reject that traditional path and seek something more serious, more meaningful, more profound. That doubles back to the religious questions: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What should I do with my life? Nobody will have the same answers as you or me.

For me, I started as a music student because I loved music so much. However, I found it to be more difficult once I studied it in college. I got my degree and planned to be a music teacher but I never got that job. So I returned to college and studied Communications (TV, radio, film), which led to a job at a TV station in my city. That job was soon eliminated by staff reduction, so I got the first job I could find--which had nothing to do with my education or interests. Eventually I got the opportunity to travel, and live and work in foreign lands. Besides paying well, I learned a lot about myself, what I wanted to do--what interests me and what makes me happy when I'm doing it--and what I am good at doing.

So once again I returned to college and prepared to be an English teacher instead of a Music teacher. I've been on this path for many years now, of course. It is not perfect but it seems the best life I can find. It gives me something to do which makes me feel useful and helpful. It gives me time to do other things that interest me, such as writing novels. Most importantly, perhaps, it gives me an identity: I like being the person I am when I'm doing my job. I am a professor. I like being "a professor" in the eyes of society--even though I usually call myself a "teacher" when asked.

I think identity is very important in selecting a path or purpose in life. Who you want to be is as important as What you want to be or What you want to do. How do you want to see yourself in five years? How do you want people to think of you in five years? Then consider what your best skills are. How can you use those skills in a reasonable, realistic, helpful way? It is not an easy or quick process answering such questions. But careful consideration will result in a choice which enriches you and provides direction in your life, as well as give you a platform for helping others and changing the world in ways you think best.

Along the way, however, you must still stop and take time to be silly, frivolous, immature, unhelpful, and self-centered--at least briefly but at regular intervals. We all need to take a break from a path of purpose, I think. While hiking up to the mountaintop, it's good to pause and take a look around, see the valley below, see the trail you've made, and set your eyes again on that mountain peak.

Good luck! I'll always be here to advise you, for what it may be worth, and you are free to dismiss my advise. You are your own person and only you can walk the path you set yourself on.

Perhaps it is easy to ask questions. Thankfully asking the right question helps us get to the right answer, if it exists. I'm not usually a spiritual person but I have my moments. On that day, I did. Tomorrow I might have fumbled around and said nothing. The muses are forever fickle.

Enjoy your day. Enjoy your life. Help somebody if you have the time and inclination. Nobody is keeping count but it makes the world go round a little happier.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

What We Gain From Loss

Life makes you take turns, wait your turn, and often turn around so much you get dizzy. Instead of rushing on into the heady world of publishing thrill, I've been forced to pause and consider everything in the world around me. Oh, the new novel is fine, waiting its turn. Summer vacation is full of the usual indolence. The day job is waiting like a closed oyster. And the laundry is done. But something is missing. There is a strange emptiness here.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once famously said that all we have to fear is fear itself. The point was that worrying about something can be as crippling as the effect of the something actually happening. In the same way, fearing loss can be as debilitating as experiencing the loss itself. But loss is its own strange animal. 

Perhaps what a person fears most is loss of him/herself: loss of identity, loss of agency. When you are no longer who you are, who you have always believed yourself to be--when you lose that facade or mask you relied on for so long and people see you for who you really are, a kind of psychological nakedness--that kind of loss can be as real and as painful as death. Loss of agency, your ability to make a mark in the world, to make your own way, to act for your own benefit--can also be as devastating as a physical injury or paralysis yet it can come in psychological forms just as a loss of identity can.

Loss is the principal issue in many of my novels, it seems. It is easy to see in hindsight. Perhaps I chose that theme unconsciously or perhaps there was something intriguing about loss that drove me to explore it and its pain. After all, having a character lose something important and struggle to regain it is always a great way to introduce tension and advance the plot.

Of course there is the obvious loss of the significant other in a character's life. In AFTER ILIUM, Alex Parris loses Elena, the woman he has been having an affair with, and that loss drives him to take all kinds of risks to get her back. Along the way, he is threatened with the loss of his identity--how he sees himself, the kind of man he has been taught to be--and with loss of agency (his inability to act for himself, first by being in a jail, then by peer pressure to act differently than for his own interests, then by violence).

In THE DREAM LAND Trilogy, Sebastian is initially hurt by the loss of his love interest, Gina, but as he grows into his role as interdimensional voyager and accepts all that role entails, he becomes caught up with a life full of threats to his identity. He gets a little schizophrenic (mere IRS clerk or warrior on another world?) and from that wound also paranoid as he sees that others do not see him as he sees himself. Through the trilogy he is constantly losing and fighting to regain many things. It never gets easy. In Book III, Gina faces the loss of her daughter, who she gives up in order to save her.

Eric, the male protagonist in the campus anti-romance A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and his female counterpart, Iris, have each suffered loss in their lives. When they find each other one winter night, they think the losses will cease. They think they have plugged the gaps--only to find they become each other's worst enemy. Each has a plan for the other but they do not accept such plans because they represent loss of identity.

Now, in my new novel, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, our hero, Stefan, faces the greatest loss of all: his own bodily integrity. As he fights against nature--and God--he fights against the loss of himself. He does not want to transform, against his will, into a hideous and grotesque creature of the night. Moreover, it is that transformation that will cause him to lose Penny, the love of his life, who he refuses to let see him as he becomes uglier. He sees himself condemned to a painful, miserable, lonely existence: complete loss of identity, agency, and love.

People lose lots of things. Some things are given away, purposefully or haphazardly, with or without regret. Others are taken away. Car keys, card games, a race to a traffic light, the city's sports team's championship. People lose first grandparents, then parents, sometimes siblings, sometimes children. Fathers lose wives, mothers lose babies, babies lose fights with nature. People lose jobs. People lose weight. They lose pets. They lose homes. They lose their sense of well-being. They lose their safety. They lose their peace. They lose a pair of shoes they somehow misplaced. But misplacement means the shoes still exist, only they are in another realm. And loss itself can be when something you have is destroyed, whether deliberately or accidentally. You no longer have it. When the tornado comes, people cry out that all is lost--and it often is.

Or loss can be when you hope or expect or anticipate having something and then it doesn't arrive. It's rather like a child's Christmas wish. You have sat on Santa's lap begging for that special toy and the big guy assures you that you'll get it. Parents confirm you'll get it. So you wait anxiously through the days, even counting them off, looking forward to that wonderful day. But instead of that gift you have desired, there is nothing. Not a lump of coal, not even a stocking hung with care. Nothing. It's as though Christmas has been canceled and all the trappings have been taken down. It's as though the holiday never existed and your hopes and dreams never were hoped, never were dreamed. And everything is as it was before. You are returned to the heat of summer and Christmas seems years away again. That is what real loss is: never having that one precious thing.

So grab hold of all you have and be glad for it. Take pictures and stencil id numbers on everything. Lock them away. Then stare into the nearest mirror and make sure you are who you want to be. And always love your bunnies.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2014 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.