To Write #52essays2017 no. 4

Writing by Gari Melchers, circa 1905-1909 from the LACMA.
To write I need an opening line. Preferably I need an excellent opening line, one that gets me in the middle of something, ties me up in knots I have to untangle my way out of, or lays out a road so open and wide I have to follow it, like a two lane highway on a summer’s day.

Rarely do I get such a line, but even the lesser lines are ones I get attached to, as if they are talismans. It’s very hard for me to throw an opening line away.

I didn’t have any opening line when I sat down to write today. I had nothing but dread and loathing, neither of which is a place that produces great writing, or any writing, at least not for me. But my friend Pooja people to take part in this write in today, and I had to try.

A year or so ago I decided to give up on the pretense that I would ever write about anything other than my dead father. I even say to people now, “Oh, I have another dead father essay if you’d be willing to read it.” I thought that perhaps by surrendering I might somehow open the way for new material, but that has not happened. I keep coming back, circling around. I’m not sure if I’m digging a hole to somewhere or if I’m mired in muck like one of the circles of hell (the suicides, I think, appropriately enough). But it’s the hole or the muck I’m stuck in, like it or not.

I wrote last week about how my father would likely have voted for Trump. There’s an outside chance he’d have sat out the election, but there’s no chance in hell he would have voted for Hillary Clinton. Trying to write about your father while trying not to think too much about his presidential picks is a neat trick. The only way I avoid it is by sticking to the parts of my father’s life that overlapped with my own. He died when I was five and a half, at which point politics hadn’t yet entered my world view.

The only way I can deal with the current political reality is sort of the opposite—by taking a very, very long view, one long enough that the next four years (or even eight) are just a blip in history, the wink of an eye or the toss of a hand. I think of the Trump administration in terms of how much space it would take up in my AP European History textbook. I had the seventh edition of the book my mother had used the second edition of when she was in college—Palmer & Colton’s A Short History of the Modern World. She used to say you couldn’t underline the important parts of that book because you’d be underlining everything, which I found to be true. I imagine a short paragraph about Trump in a subsection called Authoritarianism in the 21st Century, and then I feel a little better.

But not much. We don’t live in the lines of a history textbook. There are more of us than fit there, and our lives are too big, and many of them aren’t even deemed worthy by the authors. But we keep slogging along, even on the days when we have no inspiration. We keep showing up and doing the work.

2 Replies to “To Write #52essays2017 no. 4”

  1. Natalie Goldberg talks about how we should keep returning to the well of our obsession for our writing, regardless of what other people think. I agree that this is good advice. If you need to write 52 essays about your father, write 52 essays about your father. I will probably read them all. 🙂

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