Up in the Tree

I'm a writer which is like saying you're a house painter. Everybody is a writer. Your uncle Dortmunder is working on a memoir; aunt Kitty is writing a variorum history of the fall of Rome with recipes. Sometimes I wonder if violinists have this problem? Of course they don't. If the famous violinist says: I'm a first chair violinist for the Uppity Orchestra" the person next to her on the aeroplane doesn't say "Me too!"

That it takes hard work to become a writer is scarcely credited by the happy many and lately I've begun to see that this is a good thing. (I used to think otherwise, snarl a bit with the kind of exceptionalism usually reserved for brain surgeons and rocket scientists.)

If everyone believes she or he is a writer then they still believe in tribal meaning, still want to make signs, share something around the fire...

Black Elk speaks. Then the amateur Black Elks spoke. Everybody got to speak.

You don't have to be Ernst Cassirer to like that picture.

And the dogs get up, circle three times, then lie back down.

May you have a good story today.

 

S.K.   

Comments

[Ken Smith]

I took someone to see a plastic surgeon once. The doctor had a huge collection of diplomas and awards in his hallway, and I saw that his M.D. degree was from the University of Iowa. He was there at the same time I was doing my own graduate work. Breaking the ice, I mentioned that we had been in Iowa City at the same time. I mentioned what I studied, and he said that he had been on the other side of the river, performing surgeries. A slight chill swept through the room, brought on by his tone of voice as he compared what I had been doing with his own lofty work.

Not in the mood to offend the doctor who was about to take care of someone who mattered to me, I let it pass, but I remembered meeting the surgeon/writer Richard Selzer back in Iowa City, and chatting with him in the hallway of the English-Philosophy Building, near the offices of the Writers' Workshop, and getting the unmistakable impression that writing had deepened his life as a doctor in ways that he found very satisfying and that made him proud. He felt no need to pull rank-- we were people who liked to write in order to make sense of our lives, having a conversation about it. Very nice of him, I thought. We had this common ground.

There is exceptionalism, as you say, and then there is tribal meaning. According to the one story, I failed to become the next great American poet and no dissertations will be written about my balanced compositions. According to the other story, I am almost always happy when I have been writing, and some of what I write reaches people.

As Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

[Valerie]

No, as a professional classical pianist, people just asked me how many instruments I played, and when I said "Only one,", they took obvious pride in telling me how their niece played six.

Or they asked what orchestra I was in, and when I said that piano was not an orchestral instrument and that , therefore I was not in an orchestra, they just looked at me as if I were lying.

[Dissertation Writing]

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