L’art’ Pour L’art–It’s Child’s Play

I spent this past weekend visiting with an old friend. I’ve known this friend for almost ten years, although at least four of those years lapsed in absentia as we made our way from college into the “real world.” While my friend moved to New York City, forging a career in publishing, I drifted about the country working odd jobs (most of them serving food).

My friend and I took great pleasure in each other’s present. We described for each other our current situations and our attitudes towards them. She enjoyed meeting my family while I enjoyed hearing her wax rhetoric about life in the city, life with her husband, life working big business publishing.

While my friend enjoys her life in New York, she finds herself at a crossroads: She and her husband are leaving their comfortable city lives for an adventure in Taiwan, where my friend will teach English and her husband will work on his book.

My friends and I have always been dreamers and this recent visit precipitated much reflection on this dreaming, its fruition, continuance and its occasional abandonment.

As children we are encouraged to dream.  We tell our children they can be whatever they set their minds to.  We tell them that all they have to do is wish upon a star (makes no difference who they are) and their dreams will come true–They’ll not only achieve their goals but get everything they want, to boot.

My dreams started out, as I imagine most American children’s, pretty extravagantly. In my life, I’ve dreamed of becoming:

• A Mermaid
• A Fox
• A Lighthouse Keeper
  

  No matter how hard I wished on a star, I would not sprout a fin.

• A Pirate Princess
• A Broadway Actress
• She-rah’s Assistant
• A Basketball Star
• A Jungle Explorer
• A Writer

Our culture, in particular, puts a lot of emphasis on dreams and dreaming.  Our country would not be our country sans the illustrious American Dream–that rise to the top, that successful life that is open and possible for “everybody”.

I bet little Suddam Husain was encouraged to follow his dreams.

Achieve your dreams!

Go for your dreams!

Your dreams!

Your dreams!

Your dreams!

With so much emphasis on dreams, it is easy to get carried away.  Our dreams get greedy.

We want to be things like presidents, supermodels, famous football players, hip hop stars.  Very few kindergartners express a desire to mop floors for a living; And yet, those floors must get mopped.

So, I went from being a kid who loved to write–I wrote to play, I wrote to pass the time, I wrote to indulge my over-active imagination–to a young adult with a set “goal” (i.e. dream) to be a writer.

The writer dream stuck.  Really, I admit now, with my skill assets, it was the most practical of my dream-options.

Now–every time I wished upon that star, I had one dream in mind.  I wanted to be a famous writer (because, when it comes to writing, Fame=Success, no?)  Over and over, I put in my work, wishing and wishing for my dream to come true.

I would be interested to see our world fifteen years from now if every child achieved his or her dream.

By the time I’d met my visiting friend, we were in our first year of college.  I’d given up star-wishing, but had not replaced it with anything else.  I still wrote largely for pleasure, but had begun to enjoy the occasional compliment from others as well.

Four-years-of-college later, I was almost more interested in “being a writer” than writing itself.  With the pressure on (it was dream time!) the dream-identity sort of took over the dream-action.  I was largely interested in the writer-image and took great pains to cultivate it.   I chain smoked and wore exotic things to parties, like kimonos (my friend and I laugh at this, now).  I swore off children, husbands, and any other indicative behaviors that would allude to my “settling down”.

At the same time, there were dreams I did not talk about, so much–like the goal of being wickedly famous (not Hollywood style, more Virginia Woolf style), of being studied in schools and immortalized in text books and important anthologies.  Despite my mellow dramatic claims that all I needed in life was to write–deep down I felt that if I did not achieve a wide spread (and admiring) audience, I would have failed–my life would be a failure.

This dream was nearly as starry-eyed as the dream to become a pirate princess.

Things are different now.  Everything is different now.  Both my friend and I can see this.  As I sat with my friend, holding my baby beside my husband, I began to wonder what was left of my dreams and if I had begun my descent into a failed life.

We all have dreams, or rather ideas and projections of what our lives will be.  My life today looks nothing like anything  I ever dreamed–from childhood through romantichood.

I have yet to publish one book.  I do not live in Pairs or sit up late at night drinking wine and arguing philosophy with my gang of fellow poets. In fact, these days I’ve been retiring quite early and if i do happen to drink wine, I must be sure to take out that ludicrous machine and pump my breasts flat.

Does all this mean I am a failure?  What of my dreams?

Every time I’ve said to my husband, “I want to be a writer,” he looks at me bewildered.

“But you are a writer,” he says.

Breast Pumps are not very glamerous.

“You know what I mean,” I say, but really, to be honest, I don’t know what I mean.  I think I’ve lost what I mean.

As a child, my spontaneous writing, my lack of self-consciousness (i.e. lack of egoism) negated the need for a dream that was practical.  I was already doing the things that made me happy–dreams were reserved for surreal and lofty impossibilities like waking up one morning to discover I’d transformed into a fox.

To write was more of an action–a verb–than the noun: writing, and the image “writer”.

As I grew up, I became increasingly aware of myself as an individual and how people perceived me as an individual.

The modern writer says, “I am a writer.”

The child writer says, “I write.”

But what of my dreams, now?

As a mother, I’ve had to face reality.  I can no longer indulge in the escapist retreats I so often preferred.  As a mother, I’ve found myself distracted from myself.  Distracted enough to stop taking myself so seriously (how can you when you smell of spit up and have absorbent pads in your bra?) Not taking myself seriously has assuaged that hyper aware paralysis that has often kept me from writing one word.

Theophile Gautier's slogan was "Art for art's sake" but I think he may have wanted money, too.

I use to read about Kafka, who, at his death, beseeched his dear friend Max Brod to destroy his life’s work, unread.  Kafka awed me.  I considered his relationship with writing to be the ultimate.  He disregarded the need for an audience, altogether.  If only I could be so unconcerned with others.

Gertrude Stein wrote:  “An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.”

I consider this the purest way to create–and strangely enough, as a mother, I personally am better able to do so.

Recently, I’ve felt free–free from my self-absorbment and the desire to maintain some serious artist image.  As a mother, I am able to once again write like a child.  For the joy of it.  For the verb of it–and it is a tremendous relief.

My dream has dissolved into my life and I once again imagine how cool it would be to save the world along side She-ra.