To Strive or Not to Strive: Narcissus' Question

In sitting down to revise a story I have been working on, I thought of an experience in class on which I think The Other and Narcissus would certainly have comments.

I submitted a story entitled Alchemy for a fiction class with a certain surly, Richard Ford, James Dean wannabe, and he decided to discuss it in class. Initially, this man was excited to hear my story, having conceived of it with me in his office before class. He sensed that I knew where I was going. Yet, in class, I discovered that I had failed to meet his expectations, and apparently, ignited some sense of ire in him.

While I had apparently achieved fine writing and imagery, the execution of the story reflected my inability to plot out the story well enough. I had left too many mysteries for the reader, and thus, left them utterly untethered to the story, lost in my words. The more that he spoke, the more he came to the conclusion that I had written a character that was too close to the author, hence. He made veiled references to moodiness, a troubled pysche, and confusion in this character, then expanding this character as an example of how authors fails when they write too close to themselves, because they can't differentiate themselves from the writing. And so they have characters who can't make sense to a reader, because they can't make sense to the author.

At first, I completely understood his point. Then, my own ire was ignited. How dare this man presume that this character, who is going through things I have never gone through, acting in ways I never have, be me? He knows very little of me. Then I started to think about the core of this character - this moodiness and confusion. And well, maybe he was onto something. Or just being snarky without intending to be so. But I am going to say that he was onto something.

I left class not upset - he actually helped me to see many things about the story that had been frustrating me. But he also left me wondering about these questions of identity and the construction of it. For once, I thought I was constructing an other, but was I?

Narcissus expected that I would violently protest his claims about our modern inability to find a home where our identity is clear. That the very home for which we strive is in the striving. And yet, oddly enough, I think I agree with him. I know - the ground is shaking under me as I write this. But the other day, I was thinking about the dualism of Romantic philosophies and that infinite longing. I recently read a passage from Ovid in which he said: It is not enough to want something. If you truly want it, you must long for it. For if it is not longing that pushes us towards our goals, our pursuits, the fulfillment of relationships, then what is it? What do we find in complacency?

Last year, while sitting on a smelly carpet that reeked of tea and honey, we all wanted a sense of complacency to counteract our angst, our desire to leave and figure things out. And always, I looked around us and saw many people for whom these desires seemed not to exist. Sitting in this fiction class, I often see students who seem to not be plagued with these questions. And yet, I, for whom apparently the expectations were high, had failed whereas everyone else was onto something.

These notions of identity and home, striving and clarity that I had apparently not sorted out with my character were suddenly thrown back on me. In the middle of a stuffy English classroom on a rainy day in which my fellow comrades wanted to debate the "hotness" of my character, I was put on the spot: without saying it or intending to do this to me, this man asked if I had in fact figured these things out. My character leaves her daughter in a foreign land and returns home. He asked why she would do that, since the story did not in any way indicate why someone would do that. I replied that my former reasons - illness - were dropped in order so that I could explore other reasons of breaking a string with a family member, particularly a daughter. I then said that I wasn't quite sure why she would do this. Apparently that answer was akin to saying that I had never read as a child because it prompted his verbal attack.

So here I am - back at the striving. I took a few days merely to think about my ideas, my characters, and to read examples of writers who are succeeding where I am not. I have new ideas, and I must now pen them. I have often been told that I must be the best defense attorney for my characters - that they must be so well-crafted that they are hard to judge, as it is hard to judge people that we know intimately. So is there an authentic self that I find either in myself or in my characters? How do you create a character, who should reflect reality, (if one is writing in the realist style that is the order of the day) if there is no authentic self and if the author isn't an authentic self?

I used to think as The Other did that the construction of a self was who one was when no one else was around. Still, I hold onto aspects of that while realizing that the others that we encounter forcibly change us. So I wonder - will I change back once a particular other is gone? I don't think this is quite possible and I haven't since the absence of certain people from my life.

So yes, my dear historian and dear philosopher, I think we just have to keep striving. As we're all seeing, those plans that Narcissus wrote for us did not necessarily come true and they don't have to. But the striving helped forge us into a self that could get through days with which we didn't want to struggle. So, we strive.

I am going to strive my way onto a page right now.

Maura Takes a Moment to be Narcissistic

Today while I was sitting in the newly renovated café underneath Elliot Bay Bookstore, listening to some tunes that are a new addition to my electronic musical library, a man came up to me. He was probably about 30 years old, or close to it, and had a leather jacket and glasses. He pardoned himself for interrupting and said that he sometimes has the habit of saying things to people if only to say something nice to another. He was very humble and polite about all this. He paused, put his two fingers together in the air, and said, “You are a complete….vision. You look like you stepped out of a Rosetti painting. It’s probably the red hair, but I just wanted to say that.” He smiled and then walked off with a jaunty step.

It was a very nice surprise and actually the second time that I had heard something similar today. The other was from a young homeless man, selling copies of Real Change. While I would have loved it even more if the young man in the café had asked what I was working on, seemed interested, if only by appearances, and then offered the name of a publishing company to read my material, well, then I might have been ecstatic, but well, how much can I ask for.

I tell this story not merely as an egotistical anecdote, or because it honestly touched me as one of the few utterly selfless things that someone has done for me lately for absolutely no reason (no connection to me, nothing to gain—the man walked off and this is not a regular enough place for me these days for him to see me again), but because it led me to think about how people sometimes literally run into one another. How relationships even form. How random they can be—romantic relationships, friendships and casual acquaintances. While walking down here, I was plotting a way to find a third roommate to live with another friend and off in a townhouse off campus. Aside from the few people who already go to our university and who are returning from their studies abroad, I could only think of one other person to live with me. It was a random thought—a girl who I have not seen in maybe over a year, who I have known since kindergarten. We were not always the closest of friends, but I know that she has had a bit of a hard college experience. She hasn’t liked her classes, hasn’t been able to pick a major, hasn’t found good friends or any sense of home in the city in which she lives. It would be utterly random and spontaneous for us to come here and move in with me, maybe even a bit of a Coyote Ugly transformation for one of us (minus the dancing on bar tops, though maybe we can still ensure that). And God only knows where that would take us—she and I living together and reforming a friendship would in itself be an effort for which I had not planned. But it’s an interesting what-if.

I have been quite fortunate to have found such close friends while in university, friends whose absence makes little things a lot more difficult than I thought they would be. While most people might take this opportunity to fall in with a new and exciting crowd that’s utterly different than their old one, on free afternoons such as this one—in which I just need to read for class and plan to write and fun for leisure—I instead always find myself alone, wandering around town. Running into homeless men, leather-clad men with spectacles, the nice man who got me a Coke and smiled. Yes, even I notice that there are few women in these lists. Why? I’m not sure—it would be refreshing and I think a little comforting to have a new female friend to confide in just a bit, at least with which to have fun, drink a bit, watch some television, talk about books. Is it merely my nature that leads me to this solitary life? It’s funny, because I distinctly remember many a day freshman year, before I was writing as much for the university newspaper, before I had as many friends or a boyfriend to see in between classes and work, when I would come down here. And sit precisely where I now sit. How have things changed? Clearly the appearances of things have—the café looks younger, fresher and I look older. And still I sit, and watch.

Sometimes I consider myself to be an outward person—someone who needs to talk to people to sort certain things out. Someone who doesn’t wish to live entirely on her own. But I also develop a certain static, a white noise in my head when I have been around too many people and haven’t had enough time for myself to merely think or daydream or just wonder. I’ve heard that at this point in a study abroad program, a student learning another language usually starts getting this static because of the amount of information that they are learning to process. That would probably be the case for my friends who sit miles across the ocean from me, reading this more confessional (Augustine, be proud) entry, yet I am, for all intensive purposes, home. And yet it somehow feels like a study abroad experience for me.

Oddly enough, I think that I’d feel more at home, more likely to go out and make new friends, if I really were in a certain land right now. I think I know what it’s like to feel almost utterly un-tethered. There were times after a long day at work this summer when I felt it. There are many times these days when I feel it. And I know I will feel it even more acutely once this undergraduate experience is over, something I am not that hesitant to experience so soon.

The other day, I was listening to a song called, The Strings that Tie You, and I started wondering about the strings that tie us. There are some that we don’t pick—our families; some that we do—lovers, friends. Things like work that maybe capitalism picks for us. (Ha). What do you do when certain strings haven’t been cut but others have been stretched for so long that they are in danger of snapping? I’ve always put a lot of importance on “feeling at home” in a place. I’ve heard from The Other that she transitioned more easily to her current city than we did to the one where I still reside. I understand that—it’s still taking me some time to adjust to being here. That question of where home is for the moment (since we’re young and very mobile people, let’s presume that a home isn’t a permanent thing) seems to give people a sense of relief if only because there are certain questions that don’t need to be asked. Perhaps for myself and for The Other, one of those questions is a question of identity. While she has been around certain new friends that pose questions to her of her interactions with the opposite sex, ones that seem a bit obvious, I might presume to say that she might not have the same concerns about who she is that arose in this city in which I muse.

This summer was perhaps one of my quietest summers of my life, spent in a lot of solitude in which I thought, wrote and read quite a bit. At times, surrounded by people who presumably knew me, I no longer felt the need to explain why I might get quiet. Why I might lose my temper at things. Why I felt the need to leave places frequently. Why I wanted the things that I did. Maybe it was because there was a pattern for some of these tendencies in the family I was with. Maybe it was because they were merely not pushy people. But having no need for explanations—is that merely what it is to be “at home”? I feel like Michael Buble is going to burst into a painful, sugary sweet serenade at any moment to complement the potentially ridiculous nature, so I will move on.

I turn to the subject of writing because it’s one that The Other and I have talked about lately, and it’s one that always concerns me. Being in a city setting that reminds me of the alterity of a given “other”, looking for a new place in the city to live, I’ve held on more tightly to writing as a means of grounding myself. And lately, I’ve encountered many people, written sources, and ideas that ask me why I want to write: in some way, yes, I write, in order to make more sense of the world. This mildly solipsistic entry is given proof of that. But I will never lose sight of the sense that I write in order to affect others the way that I have been affected by writing. It’s bringing separate strings together in order to create something that holds someone up. As I walked down here, I really wanted a certain old scarf from home to keep my neck warm. The green one that I have here has several strings coming loose. So I guess the question that I ask for the others reading this, is do we just let them fall a bit loose? Maybe we do. Couldn’t hurt, could it?

I am now laughing because the singer that I am listening to just said, “No one gives a fuck about us.”

What else is true, really? If The Other and I have accepted this vow of being post-Catholics, this singer has a point. “We’re living off somebody’s trust.” Or maybe just our own.