“In this corner, weighing in at 128 pounds with his glasses, wearing black trunks (of course), the Challenger: Literary Aspirant!
“He’ll be facing off against the reigning champ-een. Here he is, weighing in at a massive 300 kilonewtons, and wearing only a tan trench-coat, the indomitable Mortal Fatigue!”
The thing I’m learning about writing (and after many years struggling I thankfully am still learning) is that every day the simple act of writing begins like a fistfight with myself. I have to defeat myself, I have to beat my brain into submission, I have to tenderize, exercise, and endorphinize.
Most days pit my Heraclean Ambition vs. Lenarean Self-Doubt (my brain, I suppose, the contradictory quagmire of sulfurous intellect and poisonous emotion?). As I grow older the heads of the beast grow more plentiful, despite my struggling, as if each year I slice one off to find two growing back in it’s place.
And so the more years that pass, the more difficult the challenge of finally conquering the Hydra. The completed novel, published. The collected poems, edited, selected, all good. The finished play, revised, rewritten, readable aloud. I’d like to think it’s a struggle between age and youth, a la E. E. Cummings’s old age sticks:
old age sticks
up Keep
Off
signs)&
youth yanks them
down(old
age
cries No
Tres)&(pas)
youth laughs
(sing
old age
scolds Forbid
den Stop
Must
n't Don't
&)youth goes
right on
gr
owing old
But even if it were as simple as that, I am no Heracles, and I have no firebrand. Where is my Iolaus? And, if he were to come, shouldn’t I shun him for fear of Eurystheus’s judgement? For my part, I can only bare-fisted show them what I’m made of, and in the showing make of myself whatever can be made.
