Ambition 4/19/12

When I began to think I was a writer I thought I would someday simply make the leap into the writing of essays, novels, poetry, any form really, as I didn’t know then what I needed to write. I still don’t. Or maybe I do. I only know that I have the need and this is what I need to be doing. There is inside of me a person steaming to get out, steaming to find a way to express himself. But what I also know to be true is that this person is locked away behind layer upon layer of self reproach, self doubt, self analysis and self denial. All of this amounts to self-abuse, the kind that creates a sense of loss or anxiety that I am not producing anything of lasting value. 

Even though I know my family is already it’s own thriving unit that speaks to the future more than anything I can do personally, I still cling to the idea that this creative wildman inside my being is capable of enormous accomplishments. How do I know it? I notice in my halfsleep the ideas and notions I know belong in poems and stories rising into the nebulous bodies I call story clouds, a mass of ethereal fragments constantly seeking a unifying idea. I search in these moments this idea, this thread that will guide me into a story. It is what keeps me grounded, this search. I have trusted my instinct in the past to follow the idea as it evolves into the mysterious form it will eventually take.

And yet, lately, the idea has been amorphous, detached from the bigger picture I have come to expect. I feel at sea with no wind, no oars, the strakes of my hull leaking. I am vulnerable now. My guard is down, and I feel that I may never write again or I may turn around and spin out 30 pages. I feel that anything can happen, right now. But the rising sense of urgency to produce something is undeniable. There is too much left undone, too much to do, too much I haven't begun. The wildman inside me howls at me, pounds his walls as I limp through my days wandering from job to home to job, never quite completing anything, never finding the peace that comes with closure.

Oh, I do struggle with that word. There is no closure. Not in this world, anyway. I guess I am plagued with the thought that whatever I begin on a particular day is subject to endless revision; whatever the idea I pursue, the further out of reach it becomes. Will I finish anything, I ask. Will there ever be anything I produce which will be brought to the finishing line. Even now, I watch my son come downstairs, getting ready for school, and I wonder how much of this neurosis will become his, how much has he already adopted simply by observing me.

And yet, I still know there is a way. I will write. It will be a daily routine. The wildman inside my being will be freed and he will know that he is free and he will run in gray of the early morning joyously without restraint. He will be me and I shall be him. We will be united, my wildness and me.

This gets closer to what I would like to explore in Lancaster. Perhaps I should start calling him Christopher, Chris, maybe. I need to see where this man’s wildness lives. How is it that he came to be an early symbol of pragmatic conservatism? What drives this man to create these bridges, this road? How is his own wildman released? These are questions I need to explore because these are the questions I am after in myself. How did he go about completing projects and was his own sense of the world stabilized in the process? 

I think I have a need to see this man through the lens of his worldview. He comes from a n evangelical Christian background. I know something of this outlook. Out of this, there is a deep conviction that he is in some way building God’s road for the people, an acute sense of providence and manifest destiny. Just four years after SCL dies Woody Guthrie pens:

As I went walking that ribbon of highway

I saw above me that endless skyway

I saw below me that golden valley

This land was made for you and me.

I wonder what Guthrie thought of SCL’s evangelic zeal to bring the glory of the Gorge to the consciousness of the people. Worth looking into, especially in light of the building of Bonneville Dam at about the same time as the Grand Coulee, to which Guthrie is ever linked.