I have been writing, “working” on short stories, works of fiction that buzz through my head, full of really cool characters and great back stories. I know these guys intimately. They live in my dreams, haunt my days, talk to me like schizophrenic voices in my head, and manage to stay ever so slightly out of reach as I try to put on paper their very nature, as if taunting me to define them. Defining is the problem. There is a small part of me that doesn’t want them defined. What would happen if I managed to capture their essence in words, and let it flow across the paper in beautifully structured sentences that reach the muses’ ears with delight ? What if with that , the characters had voices and bodies and realities of their own to live, defying the logic of fiction at all? Becoming real for everyone, and not just for me.
So instead, I have been tackling the stair right in from of me, ignoring the voices, letting them stew in their own reluctance to show themselves, and just moving forward with what I can.
Always moving forward. Tiny little steps at a time.
My son has me worried, because he is an amazingly bright kid who is simply shutting down when it comes to language arts and social studies. It is not because he can’t do it; he is still testing way above level in all the things they test you on. He just doesn’t care. I can’t even find fault in his logic behind the not caring, because, in a weird way, I totally agree with him. He says that understanding what happened in the past hasn’t really helped the present much. We keep making the same mistakes, even though we know the outcome of having made the mistakes before. He thinks if we never learned that lesson from our forefathers, maybe would should just stop listening to them. And writing about them? Um. Why? The history doesn’t change, and in his world, the present is hard enough to deal with without having to pay for other people’s crap that they got wrong. He should not have to have someone else decide what is important to him. This is a constant theme, about if things already aren’t fair in life, why bother caring about a bunch of dead people and how they were an influence. In his head, the entire history of California fits in one 370-page book, and, if he were to count actual individuals, there are only maybe 100 listed. One hundred. That’s it. One hundred important people in a 1000 years of history. What the hell chance does a ten year old who can’t even get his dad’s attention have of making any difference? So, he avoids it, and does math instead. Math doesn’t change. Math is a constant. Math solves problems. Math makes no judgments. Math explains the Universe. And his universe is spinning, math is his stationary point to focus on.
This confounds me, and saddens me at the same time. Here I am trying to eliminate absolutes and think in terms of freedom and creativity, and all my son wants is structure and routine. Something tangible and real. That ever elusive quality of something just outside of your grasp. We want what we want to be real. We want what we want when we want it. We want our worlds to show up solidly and keep us from floating away. We want the same thing. Just to tackle the stair in front of us, move forward with what we can.
So I am stepping back and trying to understand my own personal history, and history in general, and trying to understand why the recording of it on paper is important. I am also slowing down enough to help my son understand that stability does not mean things never change. That learning how to be in the world does not mean you never move forward, but that it might just mean you choose a different path. And moving forward means the step right in front of us. Me, maybe it means letting the characters just be there for a while until they tell me their stories. Him, maybe it means telling his own story while still knowing he has a rock that is stationary. Maybe it means I write his story and let us both enjoy that facets of creativity that may bring. Maybe it means I need to embrace his never-changing chaos so he can understand my fluid stability. Both are overwhelming if you feel like you are spinning all alone.
The stair right in front of me. It’s not that big if I only look right here. And it has some really amazing characters already willing to talk.
