on sharing

How to speak-- and to whom-- and of what? For me nearly all difficulty and all reward in human relation resolves to this: speech or silence. Was it always this way? Is this essential to who I am, or is it a state brought about by some sequence of experiences, or is it a phase I will grow out of? To be understood-- why is it still so important?

Maybe it is the search for an ally. Everything out there is so big, and so hostile, and so confusing, that I seek for one, just one, companion in my thoughts: one place where the battle and the search can cease, and I can rest. I have no such person-- probably no such person exists-- and even worse than the loneliness is the sense of being perpetually under attack.

And yet the impulse is to reach out, even with these thoughts, to present them to other eyes. What is it I want in response? What is the hope that these words fly on? Why do I permit myself such a ridiculous, overprecious phrase as "the hope these words fly on?"

It is at this point in writing, in my notebook with my fountain pen, whose current ink color is a bright pink, that I stopped to post those three poems. I wrote them three or four years ago, and there are lines and phrases in each that make me shudder. I want so badly to write well, to write elegantly, irreproachably, without cliche or evasion, convincingly, and beautifully. That there should be works of mine out there that betray the staggering weaknesses of those three poems is painful to me. I don't want those weaknesses aired.

Some of you will protest. Some of you will say, "But Ginny, I really liked those poems! I thought they were good." I know. In the genre they belong to, the genre of amateur poems which exist mainly to express to the author's own satisfaction some feeling or experience, they're not half bad. And in fact they do express, to my satisfaction, the things each of them were meant to. There are lines and stanzas in each of them that I will recite to myself, pleased. But it is my vanity, my aspiration, that says, Not enough! If I am to be a poet, I must be a great poet, an irreproachable poet, a poet without weaknesses and clumsy moments. And if I cannot do this, and I cannot, then my poems will be for myself only. If I must have weaknesses, they will be for my eyes only.

One of the beauties of learning to play go is that it shines a pitiless light on this vanity of mine. There is a beauty in good play that I crave, that I strive for, and that constantly eludes me. Instead I play sluggish, vulgar, fumbling moves; and if I ever tried to convince myself that it is not so, the final score would show me the lie. Worse yet, there is no end in sight. My teacher, who beats me four times out of five with a nine-stone handicap, loses as badly to people who lose as badly to still more people. This is well understood in the world of go; which does not make it any less painful to me. I hit a very bad wall early in my learning to play, where the gap between my aspirations and my abilities was so frustrating that it crippled me. I got over it-- I had to, or I would have had to stop playing-- but it still stings.

My teacher tells me that to improve I must play lots of games. This means lots of bad games, lots of weak and clumsy games which are still the best I can do. I have been making my peace with this. Now it is time to turn the same eye to writing. If I am to write, I must write a lot, and I must write much less brilliantly than I desire to (it is the only way I can write; so high is my vanity.) And I must, God help me, submit to criticism, as I submit to the review of one of my games.

One of the reasons this blogs sees so few posts is that I once designated it my "quality-controlled" blog. My other one, Chronicles of the Ephemeral, (which I do not want to delete, only because I'm so fond of the title) is where I post whatever thoughts or stories I feel like sharing, without worrying about whether they'll be of general interest or whether they're written well. Of course, once I put the expectation of quality on this blog, it was doomed to receive only rare updates. (Chronicles has been neglected, too, these last few months, but there are other reasons for that.) And of course the beauty of it is that Chronicles has many posts that are, in retrospect, much more interesting and witty and insightful than anything posted here. Bah.

So I am going to try and demolish the barrier between "quality-Ginny" and "regular-Ginny." It's an artificial distinction, and it causes harm in ways I'm only beginning to identify. There is only Ginny, foolish and weak and clumsy at times, but also, also, having her moments of quality. (This applies to much more than writing, by the way, but it is a good place to start.) After all, the world can absorb a few more bad poems without sustaining too much damage. If I hide my weaknesses, it is for my protection, not theirs. I think-- we will see-- I think I can do without that kind of protection.