In Real Time (5)

playing a long game

[Image: “Photo of a Resurrection Fern,” SunshinestateOfMind, Creative Commons 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The small plants growing along the top of the bough here are resurrection ferns, which get their name because they appear dead in seasons of drought but revive completely with a single rainfall. There’s an analogy lurking in there somewhere for you, no doubt.]

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We talk all the time—but especially in this sacred season—about entering into sacred time. What is just as true is that sacred time enters into us. Once there it floods whatever we would have been doing anyway with its peculiar quality of light or darkness. It produces motion in place of stillness, stillness in place of motion. We are not the ones who decide when or where it shines.

So in light and in darkness, I’m working on some longer projects—the next issue of Dappled Things; a couple of essays, which I hope will matter; most of all, my thesis, which will form the core of a book of short stories due out from Wiseblood in the fall. (Wiseblood also publishes my novel; you can pick up a copy here.)

The purpose of my saying so, though, is not to advertise any of those works—though any conversation about our own work tends also to have that subtle background effect, and therefore to seem like a sales pitch, in a way that makes me feel itchy. (Perhaps it shouldn’t. That’s a separate conversation.) Instead I want to normalize the kind of slow and steady creative labor, in and through flood and drought, whose product is irreducible to the sparks we are tempted to throw off to try to make the process look more scintillating than it is. And I want to curb my own temptation to throw off sparks—which in turn is a temptation to distract you, and if possible also myself, from thinking about the unglamorous mess that goes on behind the curtain.

Facing that mess is the only way to complete new work. Exposing the mess is its own kind of work, which I don’t choose to do in public, though I also don’t critique others who find that that practice helps their process. Yet honesty demands I acknowledge the mess is there.

Some say that it’s not good to talk too much about work in progress, including about its process: that the talking drains away the charge that should go into the work itself. I agree with that for myself, though I’ve often benefited from other artists’ willingness to talk about their processes (case in point).

At some stage, though, we have to unteach ourselves the expectation that we will not only do all the things but, also, publicly perform our doing of them. I figured out a long time ago that I could either do the work or perform the doing—and that, given the choice, I’d prefer lasting work to ephemeral performance.

The trick is to make something worth preserving in itself. And that takes time.

On that note, a question for you: What work of art (your own or someone else’s) is occupying your mind now, even as you go about the rounds of daily life? What value is it holding for you?

If you are an artist or writer: How do you balance taking the time to talk about your work with finding the time to do it? How do you find it possible to pay both kinds of attention—at once, or in alternation?