Back for More

Guess who’s back?

Technically, I never left.

But many of you now reading this post haven’t received anything from me in four months.

I can explain.

My goal has always been to offer something rare on the internet. A free service that doesn’t bake your cookies or track your keystrokes or locate your exact position on this broad-girdled earth. But bringing you truly free posts has its cost: my negligence. 

Over the course of this year, the technology I use to bring you The Miracle of the Mundane has gone through auto-updates that disrupted the delivery of the monthly blog. I noticed something was off months ago when I logged in and my Jetpack service wasn’t displaying stats anymore. But I took that as a blessing: who wants to care about things like that? I want to care about life and life only, the vast and immeasurable aspects of existence.

What I didn’t realize was that not having Jetpack connected also halted all deliveries of the blog to email subscribers. It likely did other delivery damage I am not aware of. The result was that my posts were only sent out on social media — where my presence dwindles in my refusal to use it. 

I solved the problem and then, as is usual in the modern technological interface, the simple became complicated. My rote update allowed users to register on the site. My inbox was flooded with users signing up to be a part of the blog. Utterly confused, I let it ride for a while, not wanting to devote more time than I already had that month to complete the most basic web function of writing words and posting them to the public. 

I’m not sure if I’ve successfully vetted all the privacy settings, but I deleted all those users and no longer allow random people to register on the site. The Miracle of the Mundane has not gone public, and does not plan to any time soon.

It’s difficult, in this world as we know it, to live unadulterated. Technology making our lives easier is a farce perpetuated by those who profit from the time we spend trying to figure it all out. The caveats are mounting. When was the last time you unlocked your phone and did only the task you thought to do? When was the last time you checked your phone for the time of day without doing anything else? How often are you the arbiter of bitter disputes between competing technologies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft. 

Managing technology itself — let alone our use of it — is a part time job. And that work is increasingly more difficult to avoid. 

Is it worth the one-click buying, video-streaming and geo-exacting services? It may be. I don’t know. What I do know is that my happiness is inversely proportioned to the time I managing technology. Not everyone may share this experience, mind you. What’s right for one is not right for all. But the pressures of viral culture refute that truism. The individual must only declare what is acceptable by all or else face ostracism. And living our real lives knowing that the weight of the world is one swipe away becomes increasingly daunting.

After a two-year hiatus, I dusted off the novel and got cracking on a fresh revision. It’s been great to once more engage the creative side of my mental illness. And it’s been refreshing to allow such a long distance to come between me and the work. I have this blissful detachment at my behest. It is far easier to imagine this way — easier to know what the character thinks, not what I think. 

What’s more, the fact that I am completely rejuvenated in this 5-year old project punctuates the answer to the question: why am I doing this? A gnawing fear of mine (one that I imagine is shared with all artists to some degree) is that I am doing this for the wrong reasons. I want to prove my college professor wrong about the C he gave me (true story) or I am only doing this for external validation or what I really want is the status of being a writer. 

My son is enjoying The Hobbit. Here goes Gollum’s ultimate riddle: 

“This thing all things devours: 

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays kings, ruins town;

And beats high mountains down.”

Bilbo is flummoxed and asks for more time, unwittingly answering correct: time. Time can beat down the highest mountain. I remember musing about this as I sat on a rock in Bryce Canyon as part of an extended solo cross country tour. The most beautiful statues I’ve ever seen are in that canyon. And time was the sculptor. 

My point is that if time can grind stone to meal, it can also, very easily, wash away all those petty fears about what is motivating me to write this novel. I want to write the best novel I possibly can. That’s it and that’s all. 

What has allowed this desire to endure was the completion of it in the first place. I doubt I will ever experience greater creative satisfaction than writing the last chapter of the first draft. There is some work in life that you are so glad to be done because it allows you to get on with other things — the great American retirement falsehood: begrudge what you do until you no longer have to do it. It is truly special when you come to the end of a long journey only wishing you could continue on it. Writing the last chapter of the novel made me wish I could keep writing it forever. No doubt my heaven will be some safe creative space where the muse whispers unendingly into my ear: my own enactment of Yeat’s Innisfree.

But I had to stop. And that was the beauty of it. I knew exactly how much I had to write. I knew what each character had to say. I knew how the weather had to be and where each character had to go. There was no question about it. Whereas the start of the project saw nothing but questions — the end had none. I had reached a place where necessity drove each word. This was an indication to me — at least it felt this way — that I had written something true. 

And that, truth-finding, is the point of art, I think: to conquer yourself so convincingly that a single truth can emerge from what you create.