It’s been a minute, but I’m back. Potentially for good, but who can say anything with certainty these days.
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Dear Norma,
It’s been some time since I’ve written. I don’t suppose anyone has been rocking in the corner waiting with bated breath for my next little act of self-immolation. Still, I thought it worth my time to offer you (and your friends here at The Examine) a bit of an explanation.
I’ll start with a story, which I’ve told before, so feel free to skip this paragraph if it’s redundant. In the fifth (or sixth) grade, I wrote a short story about the biblical resurrection of the dead. In the story, all the prophets, priests, and prognosticators had misinterpreted the Revelation, because it wasn’t the dead humans that rose to meet the sweet Lord Jesus in the air. Instead, it was the frogs. Only the frogs. Millions and billions of tree frogs and bullfrogs and those tiny blue poisonous dart frogs in South America and even some giant dinosaur frogs that could swallow a rhinoceros whole. When the angelic trumpet croaked on the faithful day, the brown-haired, blue-eyed Savior clad in gleaming white announced his return from the clouds, and all that frog ash and bone reassembled. Given new life, the amphibious hoards made their way to the Great Eternal Swamp.
Even in the fifth (or sixth) grade I knew this story was somewhat sacrilegious and moderately naughty, particularly in the Catholic school my parents paid tuition to and the Baptist church they were members of. If I’d have been Methodist or Lutheran, it’d have been okay—God bless the Methodists and Lutherans—but I was neither, so I felt this story was avant-garde and moderately sexy and something approximating high art. I shared the story with Jenna—a friend from the playground—and she liked it. She offered me a quarter for it. I agreed. That was the first money I made as a writer, and I made it by spinning sacrilege.
For these and all my sins, I am truly sorry.
Anyhow, selling that first story on the playground was a sort of drug. I wanted more. Since that moment, I’ve nursed a quiet hope that people would pay me for my words. The audacity of that hope is matched only by its insanity. A little older, a little wiser, I can see that spinning words is about as lucrative as spinning pizza dough. I’ve done both for pay, and the hourly return might be better on the pizza line.
This is all to say, it’s not about the money. Never has been. So, what is this obsession with selling the written word?
Good gosh, I wish you wouldn’t have asked that question. Buy since you did, I’ll approximate an honest answer.
In the beginning, God created time. The scriptures don’t so much say this directly, but it’s implied in the text. Consider: In Genesis 0, there was nothing but a blank page and by Genesis 1:3 there is light and darkness, and the light was called “day” and the darkness was called “night”, and “day” and “night” comprised time, and time comprised the human experience. Vocabulary, it seems, isn’t incidental to the passage of time; it is foundational.
God could have left us with day and night, and I suppose it would have been sufficient if he’d have divinely ordained it so. But why stop when you’re on a roll—am I right? (I heard a Lutheran say this once.) So, God spoke more things into existence. He spoke the “sun” to govern the “day” and the “moon” to govern the night. Vocabulary wasn’t just used to mark the concepts of time, but the very objects of time itself. See how vocabulary is both phantasmic and fantastical?
God then made Man and wo-man (who was supposed to slow man’s enormous appetite for idiocy), and man and wo-man had a pretty good time till they ate the apple or the pomegranate or whatever. When their eyes were opened, though, they decided that it wasn’t enough to have the day and the night and the sun and the moon. They’d do their damndest to become the sun and moon. They would breed like little jackrabbits and use vocabulary to organize whole societies of jackrabbits. Those societies would use vocabulary to anoint one jackrabbit as the most important of the jackrabbits. They would call the jackrabbit “King” or “Queen” or “Pharaoh” (and later “Mr. President”). The chief jackrabbit would be an approximation of God in most cultures (including our own), but in Egypt, he’d be worshiped as the son of the Sun-god, Ra. I suppose it all comes back to the sun.
In my beginning, my chief jackrabbits were the storytellers—Seuss, Lewis, Tolkien, George Lucas. And when I was twelve, I learned just how much power a great author could appropriate. On my twelfth birthday in 1989, my uncle, Lee, gave me a copy of The Old Man and the Sea, a book that had been published thirty-two years earlier by a man who’d died twenty-eight years earlier. I read that book in two sittings (a real accomplishment for a twelve-year-old), and then, I kept reading. Over the years, I devoured Hemingway's short stories, micro-shorts, and novels, culminating with an all-night reading of The Sun Also Rises, which became my favorite novel for over a decade. I loved Hemingway, perhaps too much because he was an unlovable piece of jackrabbit dung—so say the historians. In any event, Hemingway was one of those famous jackrabbits who’d earned more than a modicum of fame and notoriety because he’d convinced all the other jackrabbits in the power of his stories. He convinced me.
Then there was Vonnegut and Bradbury and Eliot and Sandburg and Berry and a few modern novelists—Garth Risk Hallberg, Jesse Ball, Anthony Doerr, David Mitchell. They’d also carved out little niches in the Cathedral of Blessed Writing with their novels and poems. Maybe they weren’t as powerful as the Pharaoh, but they were powerful to me. And this made me wonder if I could appropriate some of their sameness.
For these and all my sins, I am truly sorry.
So, I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I enjoyed a modicum of success, which I will not recount here because—as mom would say—It’s tacky. But then, something happened. I turned 47.
In your late forties, life breaks one of two ways.
Way One: You realize the fleeting nature of ambition, the tender tenuousness of life, and you grow out of childish things—like the need to become the next Hemingway.
Way Two: You double down on being a jackrabbit.
Many of my favorite authors’ later-in-life works (see the above list, excluding Hemingway), leaned hard into Way One. They used their craft as vehicles for teaching transcendence. Yes, there will always be jackrabbits, but their stories showed that we don’t all have to succumb to our animal natures. We can break free. And I suppose this little pause in my writing is a contemplation of that very transition.
My writing exists on a platform (Substack) that’s eaten up with conversations about monetization and amassing audiences and stupid little vocabulary words like “discoverability.” These conversations once intrigued me. Now, though, I see them for what they are: The vocabulary of people trying to amass sun status. I suppose that’s fine for some people, and I’m happy with those who are happy with their own ambitions. I hope their sun status (or the pursuit of it) leads them to genuine happiness and solidifies their self-worth and cures their daddy issues and solves all their math problems. But I’m convinced it won’t really do any of those things because the billions of little jackrabbits who’ve populated this earth throughout history have proven a singular truth: Every sun burns out; every moon is forgotten.
As Vonnegut wrote, “so it goes.”
So, I’m recalibrating my writing life. In part because the illusion of achieving sun status is increasingly apparent to me. In part, too, because the madman (the false sun) that governs the current world order has disrupted the economy such that I’m pursuing higher returns on investment (i.e., work), even if those investments don’t raise my literary status. (That is a topic for another day.) But all this is to say, I’m quietly charting a course for my little writing life, a life that will certainly not create a niche for me in the Cathedral of Blessed Writing. But I’m quietly working on it nonetheless because I believe one true thing: Not all writing will be well-received or widely read or critically acclaimed or handsomely compensated; some writing will go unnoticed. Some writing—good writing—will be pecked out by day-blind people gazing at the sun, the moon, the times, and giving vocabulary to them. Some writing is simply about channeling the language of God to name the silent numinous without wanting any return from it.
I’m learning to become comfortable with that.
Warmly Yours,
Seth
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Glad to see you back! Words have power, even if they don’t make you the next Hemingway. Maybe, sometimes, even more powerful if they aren’t words meant to be sold.
Like a hummingbird in the rain. Well done, old friend.