I thought I’d take a little break from juicing the noodle today, as I’ve made happy and maddening progress over the past several days. Last Friday I decided to pay a visit to the Graveyard of Abandoned Drafts, and I found a variety of working parts tucked beneath the hoods of problematic chassis that were all the rage last spring. I wrenched them out, oiled them up, and installed them in the kind of machines I’m inclined to build nowadays. When I fired up the engines, the old parts practically purred with sonorous content.
I’m required by law to tweak every draft I’ve got compulsively until it’s time to ship them out, but in the space of five days I used bits and pieces of those old drafts to make significant strides toward the realization of my principal summer ambition. Then Wednesday happened to me.
Predictably I was feeling pretty chipper, even a little frisky. On Sunday I had laid down the framework of a poem that I was able to work up by Tuesday (as I note above, I had several moving parts to work with; my drafting process is typically terribly slow), and I was accordingly hopeful that I could jot down enough notes to give shape and scope to a new idea I’d start the following morning. Sure enough, a stray association rattled through my brain and began collecting cargo on Tuesday afternoon. By bedtime I had a point of departure, a destination, and something to say.
When I returned from the gym yesterday morning I was rarin’ to go. I fired up the computer and started slinging pixels. In about four hours I put together seven satisfying lines, ones that evoke a fairly resonant memory in terms that please my ears, eyes, and medial prefrontal cortex. And then I hit the wall.
The wall, in this case, was the consequence of a tactical turn, the price of having a fairly concrete sense of how I’d like the piece to end from the get-go. That terminal flourish, like the point of origin, strikes a chord for me, but getting from those seven lines to the anticipated end may involve more detours and digressions than I’m prepared to make. I’m disinclined to impose arbitrary order on a concept in the offing, but I’m also unwilling to stretch a simple conceit into an epic, hence my quandary.
I could attempt to build a bigger hinge to make it round the bend, which makes a certain sort of sense. One source of tension and energy in my work stems from the effort to reconcile discordant impulses, and this beginning and this ending probably qualify. Alternately, if the seven lines I’ve got point toward a different destination, I’d be a fool not to follow their lead. Were it more fully realized, the ending would warrant comparable consideration. As it stands, however, it’s nothing more than a trio of lovely lines, an anchor awaiting a ship.
And so I reckon today I’ll have to slow my roll, revise some different drafts, and come back to the matter with fresh perspective. I have an inkling of a corollary snag that might have a bearing on my current concerns; I’ll conduct a couple of cognitive experiments and get back to you.
