The next few days will be devoted to the greasing of elbows, the grinding of noses, and the proving of pudding. I might need to pick up some Formula 409 and paper towels on the way into work.
Though I’m trying hard to shrug off the yoke of Promethean preoccupation, keeping my mind in the near term is a moment-by-moment challenge. The trick, I find, is not adopting the resolve necessary to make sweeping long-term changes but making those myriad minor yet pivotal decisions as they rise up before me. It’s something like a diet of desire: all the firmness of purpose that keeps me on course for the length of a day can be undone by one lapse, one simple concession. Rather than a constant current of time-released willpower I need well-timed infusions, ones that can stead and sustain me when lapses are likely.
Tomorrow, for example, I’m slated to plunk down a sizeable chunk of change to pay off credit card debt, funds I set aside over the past year as a down payment for a house. Now is a fine time to buy, of course, but holding on to that cash keeps my mind’s eye trained on the distant future–on tenure and promotion, on long-term financial plans, on contingent decisions that hinge on events that have not and may not come to pass. I have far better odds of realizing the futures I seek if I can keep my thoughts fixed on the near term, on the things within my reach, and spending that money will close a door that I’m really not ready to open. Even now, however, I know my pen will hesitate as I write that check tomorrow (a payday, when my financial outlook will be clearest, hence the delay); I’ll need some extra gumption to keep me from hedging, from fudging the numbers in such a way that the door remains ajar. All the clarity I might muster today won’t mean much if pull up short when it’s time to jump.
The same holds true for my writing, and I’m trying to mind the footing before me instead of the horizon. Rejection notices have been pouring in (editors trying to beat the change in the postal rate so they won’t need to add one-cent stamps to SASEs?), and the jury’s still out on my new verse. As a result, part of me wants to start fretting and fine-tuning, revisiting those manuscripts and trying to discern What Went Wrong. At bottom, however, I know that’s an essentially fruitless pursuit: I already know there are a few lines I’d like to have back, and I’ll revise them all in time, but any work I could do now would be overwritten by the work I’ll do when I prepare to send them out again. Besides, in all likelihood nothing really “went wrong” in the first place–those manuscripts simply wound up in the hands of editors seeking something different. Like most writers I have to learn to trust my judgment, and I know the work I sent out in January and March was as good as I could make it at the time. A mountain of rejection slips can’t change that, and when it comes time to revise I’m going to need to lean on my judgment again. Nevertheless, I could kill a lot of time refining those files with the eyes of ethereal editors upon me, looking forward to the promise of an abundant autumn harvest no matter how chancy the planting looks to me right now. When my cursor hovers over my poetry folders nowadays I need a little more gumption to drag it away. The fact of the matter is that I’m always inclined to revise; I take real pleasure in it. Revision right now, however, would only be a knee-jerk response to an ill-defined anxiety. My knees deserve better.
Accordingly, my struggle today is to fix my attention on objects at hand: the Wollstonecraft I’m teaching, the Wordsworth I’m reading, the story I’m writing. The future will come as it must, and when it arrives I hope not to be looking too far beyond it.
