Exigencies

... a good word for the dominating force in most lives. If you are a writer you grapple with exigencies not only to pick them up and deal with them but to put them down with freer mind, so that you may take a few moments to put pencil to paper.

If you are an unwise writer then you force more exigencies upon yourself than you really need -- say, by buying a house, digging a garden, becoming interested in some matter of endlessly opening possibility such as literary history or antiques or winemaking ... or by taking on a day job that requires some mental and physical commitment.

Any one of these takings-on of exigency might do in, dowse or drown the creative spirit. On the other hand, it seems that the taking on of exigency is not to be distinguished from engagement with the world.

This leads to a conundrum. To be a writer you must disengage yourself from the world with which you must be engaged: for your mind must be free, to write.

In essence, you, whose life is writing, must disengage yourself from whatever it is that is your life.

Is it possible to balance the two? -- the engagement with the disengagement?

Of course not. You lack the strength. Your world weighs more than you do.

Since you are part of it, your world includes your full weight. You, on the other hand, include within you only a tiny part of your world, and so command only a fraction of its weight.

Exigencies are the weight of your world.

You might see yourself as an Atlas, bearing up the globe and by so doing being a fixed part of that world. On occasion you feel moved to try balancing that vast burden upon just one hand -- even if only for a moment ... just long enough to seize a pencil with your briefly free hand, to scrawl your name somewhere, anywhere ...

Cheers ...

Writing Without Payment

As a human being you house within you the potential to do an infinite amount of work for no payment. As a writer, you tend to realize the potential.

The poetry I mentioned, last posting, provides a nice example. The strange aspect of the matter is that we who felt the urge toward poetry, in earlier Age of Masses decades, put out cash in order to even have the whisper of a chance of publication. Back in that strange time, absolute requisites for the poet included the purchase of paper, envelopes, and, above all, a great many stamps.

Stamps! I feel the great philatelic treasure trove of the Modern Century well might be all the self-addressed, stamped envelopes of the greats, the not-so-greats, and the not-great-at-alls, among the poets and other writers of the generations before mine. Those envelopes would have been postmarked in towns and cities where all the presses, small and large, pursued their own struggling lives; and they would have borne the writers' own names and addresses, typed there by their own fingers. As I did in the 1980s, those writers must have thrown all such ephemera away. The latent philatelist in me would love to hold the envelopes that returned rejections to the late greats. What immense histories would be contained within those slender, emptied confines.

Who knew to what a degree matters would change? The stamped, self-addressed envelope still exists -- but in a time when so many small presses and even professional presses accept electronic submissions, their existence must be under threat.

In recent years I have been in the situation of still writing poetry but not, by and large, sending it out. One element playing into this is the rise of electronic submission. I find it hard to bring myself to commit that act. A part of my soul cries out, "What, no postage costs? Where is the expression of commitment? Where is the demonstration of determination? No wonder the world has gone to the wolves!"

Cheers ...

Untaxed

Earning in the negative amounts seems ridiculous; yet on paper that is what I managed to do last year -- by great amounts (with "great" referring more to my scale of living than yours; I doubt it would seem great to you). The goal of the free lance writer is to earn enough in a year to need to pay taxes -- and, with any luck, to earn enough in the following year to pay those taxes.

If you have grown up on stories of writers who make two dollars their first year of writing, two hundred in their second, and then two zillion in every year afterward, it may seem a bit ridiculous, too, that a writer may still, later in life, be falling well short of the simple goal of earning enough to pay taxes -- i.e., to live on.

The story of free lance writers has been more of the struggle-to-ge-along nature than otherwise. That the ones earning living wages win not only the money but attention, too, is natural. What the public fails to hear about is the quietness of the news of all those years for all those writers when the wells are a bit dry.

Not speaking of the creative wells, of course.

And the irony is that those years are taxing that go Federally untaxed.

Cheers ...