Not long ago, a meme started circulating (I first saw it on Instagram) that poked fun at bands who’d announce on their social media that “big things are coming!” and then disappear completely, for all intents and purposes. Well, I’ve been guilty of that very thing here on this blog: my previous post is dated almost two years ago, announcing that the blog would “soon” become active again. Well, I guess if “barely within two years” counts as “soon,” then this is soon! Of course, as things turned out, it just wasn’t a good time for me to start writing in public again. And that is okay.
But here in 2023, I’m in a different place. I’ve been through some major life-altering passages in the meantime. But today, I’d rather focus on everything that is to the good. The core of my life remains intact: I continue to enjoy a wonderful marriage, my health continues to be good, I continue to love my adopted home town of Portland, my creative life is as varied and interesting as ever, I’m somehow (at my age!) continuing to develop as a pianist, my music studio is thriving, with robust and stable enrollment; and, last but not least, in my mid-forties, I am finally — finally — secure financially. For the very first time in my entire life, I do not have to worry about this month’s bills, nor even next month’s bills, but rather about the bills I’ll have two months from now. That’s a change so profound that it more or less enables all the rest of what has been going well, by making the necessary mental and emotional space.
Which brings me to two things have recently come back into my life, which have been enriching my days.
The first thing is that I decided to start making visual art every day, something I’ve been wanting to do at least since I was 19, but I’ve never felt I could afford to spend the required time on it, owing to the demands of developing (first) a writing career, and (second) a music career after starting a decade later than everyone else. Today I bought a new easel and started learning how to paint lavender flowers in watercolor. I’ve been taking a classical drawing course too. So that’s where I’m at with that! It is a wonderfully restful part of my life.
The second thing is the French language. A long time ago I got to a level of reasonable fluency — around B1 in general, enough to function perfectly well in the country while I was living there. At some point in the past two years, though, I decided it was time to raise my fluency in French from a level of “haven’t thought about it in years” to something close to mastery. And I’m getting there rapidly, taking in French media daily, taking classes, and using the language with native speakers five days a week in conversation exchanges. According to an assessment I recently took, my reading comprehension is at C2 (the highest possible), my written expression is at C1, with my oral comprehension also at C1, and my oral expression at a high-ish B1. (I can easily say things like “I would have if I could have,” but found myself unable to remember the word for “quiet” the other day.) It’s typical for adult learners to exhibit this pattern of mastery, with reading comprehension reaching the highest level first and oral expression reaching it last, in a very messy way, and that is why I’m making time for daily French conversation right now.
But at any rate, all that is just what I’ve been up to lately, and none of it is why I have written this long and wooly blog post. The actual point, to risk looking foolish once more, is to announce that, um, well… Big things are coming.
So let me back up a little bit.
Some weeks ago I was driving from one piano lesson to the next, listening to David Runciman’s charming voice on the London Review of Books podcast. He was discussing Montaigne, the French 16th-century nobleman, scholar, and politician with a talent for remaining, shall we say, “not-assassinated” during a very dangerous era of anarchic civil war. His many interesting exploits aside, he’d be forgotten but for one thing: he invented the modern essay. He gets credit for this because he named his pieces essais or “attempts”, in a frank admission that he had no idea what he was doing with these peculiar bits of writing that, from their titles, would appear to have a clearly defined subject, like a classical treatment of a topic, but which in practice only begin with the supposed subject and quickly stray off the path, ending up somewhere else entirely. They don’t resemble the models he had at all, instead being more like a conversation. And although this conversation is necessarily one-way, it is so entertaining and engaging, and held in such an intimate tone of voice, that his works feel remarkably immediate even though they were written some five hundred years ago. Somewhere in the show Runciman remarked that you feel as though he is speaking directly to you, and this is exactly right.
It happens that Montaigne is one of my favorite authors, though in my opinion, to read him is to love him. I had long known his moving words on friendship, actually from finding the end of the following phrase quoted in a novel during my first foray into French — “if you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I” — a line which surprises me every time with its straightforward acknowledgment of the total incomprehensibility of love and friendship.
But five years ago, I began to absorb his complete works (in English), first as an audiobook which I remember listening to during long breaks between lessons on hot North Berkeley days, and then finishing up in print with the Everyman edition, which I read on the balcony of my then-new apartment during hot summer afternoons in Portland.
Thus, when I think of Montaigne, I think of a genial companion on a hot summer day.
After I listened to that podcast episode, I reflected on a thought I first had around the time I paused my writing career, over a decade ago. That thought was: maybe I should be writing essays, instead of all this other crap I’ve been failing at all these years.
At the time, I had spent about 15 years single-mindedly pursuing the path of a writer. Starting in my teens, I spent about a decade writing fiction, with only a small amount of artistic and publishing success. And then I spent another half decade pursuing arts and politics journalism, also with only a small amount of success. By my early 30s I felt that I had reached a dead end. But it was a uniquely frustrating dead end, because I was surrounded by success stories, some of them spectacular. I was on a first-name basis with many successful writers in San Francisco (still am, with a few of them). Not the true household names, though I did meet Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Cheryl Strayed once or twice (none of them would recall me). Rather, I was friendly with many widely-known inside the literary world, and not much outside it. However, even their level of success didn’t seem to be in the cards for me. And when it came to making a living with writing — actually paying my bills by stringing words together — my practical career prospects were appalling. In 2011, it mostly amounted to working for blog mills and doing junk journalism.
But worst of all: I was no longer getting any enjoyment at all out of my writing practice. So why even go on? I wasn’t a failure, not exactly, but something much harder to bear: somebody who had succeeded about as much as he was ever going to. And unfortunately, that level of success was a disappointment. So I did the sensible thing, and quit.
And proceeded to make a much less-sensible decision, and turned to music as a career — of all things! Thankfully this turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. It changed everything about my life for the better, and I owe all my subsequent success to it.
But I have never quite set writing aside completely, these past dozen years. And that brings me back to that thought I had back when I decided to stop trying. It seems that I’m not cut out for fiction, poetry, or journalism. And that’s too bad, I guess. But I have a strong feeling that I probably am cut out for the essay, and possibly memoir, because that is the kind of writing I’ve been turning to for years in the privacy of my own studio, and not publishing in any form.
It’s also the kind of reading I persist in doing. I almost never pick up a novel, unless it’s in French and I therefore have another reason to be spending time with the text. I read a little current-events nonfiction, and some history, but for the most part I choose essays, memoir, or autofiction. My favorite authors for the past dozen years fall under all these genres, and often in a way that blends all three: Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, Marcel Proust, lately Annie Ernaux — and of course, Montaigne.
So what’s next? It’s clear that I need to answer this inner call back to writing. I have spent now half an hour to an hour a day for a week, working on this blog post, which shows how out of practice I am. But I’ve decided to set myself a goal of starting to write one essay tomorrow, since the current school session is concluding this coming week, and I will be responsible for almost no lesson preparation, freeing up about an hour each day. I don’t have a subject, or plans for publication, and though I have some thoughts about both, I don’t really think those things matter at this stage. What I do have, is a vision of myself spending time at this and enjoying the practice once more, and seeing where it may lead me. And I’m very much looking forward to getting back into it after all these years away.
So yeah. Stay tuned. Big things are coming! Maybe! Probably!