I'm working on a long project. It's been rough.
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been cleaning out my office space. Before, when I tried, I would find things that would make me sad...and then abandoning the task to watch the Bonaparte's episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares for the 35th time would sound like a really great idea. But something clicked this time with the cleaning...and I have no doubt it was having something to do besides the long project.
It's made me start to think about why long projects are so difficult for me. Because I've got a big Tupperware container full of them, and none of them are complete.
I've also been reading Joan Didion's The White Album. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I have somewhat complicated feelings about Joan Didion. (See this blog's title, natch.) On one hand it's easy to think yeah, if I had most of that life I'd be a better writer. On the other, juuust often enough she'll have a passage that flips me over and dumps me on my head in a way that no one else can. In Blue Nights, which no one seems to think is as good as The Year of Magical Thinking and I'm inclined to agree, she talks about how mementos are a burden to her...and the way she does it guarantees I'm always going to have a copy of that book, no matter what. Even though it's not as good as The Year of Magical Thinking. That's just what Joan Didion does, and it makes it impossible to throw the book across the room when she's talking about lounging by the pool.
Anyway. Not long after I started The Cleanup Project From Hell, I happened across this section in The White Album, where Didion's on a plane to Hawaii, waiting on the tarmac. A man behind her yells "You are driving me to murder" at his girlfriend, and then opens the plane door and leaves. On the flight (which continues as planned, as this is the 70s), Didion can't stop thinking about that moment, and eventually she realizes why.
I disliked it because it had the aspect of a short story [...] I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do. I wanted room for flowers, and reef fish, and people who may or may not be driving one another to murder but in any case are not impelled, by the demands of narrative convention, to say so out loud on the 8:45am Pan American to Honolulu.
I am afraid of flowers and reef fish, I think. Of slower speeds, of not being impelled, of drift. But at the same time, over the past few weeks I've also caught myself thinking, more than once: Life isn't a novel. Why are you trying to make it into one?
I need to figure out a way to reconcile those things, and then maybe there'll be one less in the Tupperware container.
