rub up against it til i break the skin

Last night I was imagining what my life would feel like if I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. If the majority of my days were spent writing, if I was reading out, if I was going on book tours, what would that feel like? At first I thought it would feel like a kind of peace, and happiness-- I think that's why I chose this career, because I thought it would make me happy. But I don't think so. I think if I were doing exactly what I want to be doing all the time, I would feel vulnerable and raw. Probably scared.

But I also think I would-- will-- feel wildly alive. Raw and wildly alive: this is what I am shooting for.

I'm listening to Ani DiFranco, because her song "Shameless" is in my head, now. And I am thinking of Rainer Maria Rilke, because I am re-reading Letters on Cezanne. Rilke wrote his letters about Cezanne to his wife, Clara, who seems to have understood him so deeply that he was able to express all of the singular weird minutia of his extraordinary mind. I was thinking how incredible to have that kind of muse relationship, where you are drawn out perfectly because someone else listens so correctly. Maybe this is why grad school gets better and better. Maybe it's not so much that our writing skills got so much better, but that we increasingly trusted the ability of our muses to grasp us. I am a terrible muse to myself. My mind is actually made of rows of tiny sharp teeth. I am a hypocrite about creative risks; I celebrate them in other people, but nibble myself to death. I am like that with fat, too. I adore plumpness in other women, and I actually get pissed off when Charity starts getting too skinny, I think she looks like a sleek muscular seal when she's got a little meat on her bones, and she's so powerful. I have trouble loving my own plumpness, though. I don't know if that's because I'm a chicken, and both plumpness and creativity require risk... or perhaps that's just being called up into museness. And maybe when you're a good muse, you love the other more than yourself, at least for a moment.

"One lives so badly," Rilke tells me, "because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted. I cannot think back on any time in my life without such reproaches and worse." Apparently he was a perfectionist, too. (Rilke said that!) Thank god for Clara-- he didn't publish the letters on Cezanne, he just wrote them to her. The world maybe, for sensitive people, is made up of rows of sharp teeth. It is hard to feed tender ideas into its maw, easier just to hand them to someone who will cradle them and smile at you.

Ok. I am a chicken. My two public attempts at taking my writing into the world since grad school have scared me pretty badly. But I am also willing to be scared. So this is something kind of in-between. I'm really writing to you, muses, but I'm also tossing my thoughts to the teeth of the world.