Two Dollar Self-Psychosis { 2004 }
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was twelve and hopelessly entranced with the development of a plot I had been given in a dream; twelve and concerned only with my careful, halting work on chapter seven and that it stayed safe and untouched on the hard drive; twelve and shy, half curled into a book and half caught at my parents' keyboard, sputtering immature narrative. My mother would say to me, “Amelia, why don't you take a break? Why don't you do something real for a while?” My face would turn to my mother in the doorway briefly, incredulously. I would say nothing and look, determined and distracted by one of many stories I could not, would not explain to her, back to the bright idea-filled interface between my brain and my hands and the white computer screen.
The ideas had begun their ceaseless onslaught early one summer morning while I was mowing the lawn. With only the continuous gr of the motor in my ears and nothing much more to concern my eyes than the faint line dividing the cut grass from the uncut grass, all the thoughts in my head had space to dance to the weird melody of inspiration, patterning the blank, rhythm-less bass of the mower's engine with voices and colors.
A few of the patterns spawned during those summer hours would grow gradually into very simple plots. I was young and naive; my characters had no names and fell into all the predictable stereotypes—melodramatic hero, flawlessly romantic princess, and evil, gothic sorceress, all wrapped up in a story of interwoven love and pain, neither of which experiences my eleven-year-old self knew very much about. But my inexperience didn't matter. Under the warm blue sky nothing much mattered other than the plain fact that I was mowing the lawn for two dollars from my dad, and my mind was taking that opportunity to explore itself.
I still have that first story living in the dark of my head. I have now recognized its grand simplicity for the cliché that it is both in plot and in character, but the eager passion with which my young self imagined it still exists deep in the shadowy, stained memories of an unreal yet brilliantly tragic panoramic love and an equally unreal yet brilliantly tragic universal pain. It is one story I have never tried to write down, and I think I never will. Its thin unreality clings tight to the dark where it does not have to depend on printed words. The story is not real; the characters are still nameless. It's all inside my head, mine, untold.
I have always greatly preferred my writing to the things my mother referred to when she used the word 'real.' Chores, homework, siblings, dinner, school, church; all of that was second place. There was so much else more interesting to me. Endless imaginary worlds and people and adventures that needed to be created—needed to seep through my mind and fingers into black type on a plain page where they could be, speak and breathe and play. My mother, sometimes, would poke her head into the study and watch me after school at the desk, typing, revising, deleting, rephrasing. She would be curious, and she would ask always, in such an annoying, motherly way, “Is it uplifting?” I would nod and sigh and for the most part ignore her, never asking myself if my writing really would fit my mother's definition of uplifting or not. I didn't care.
Perhaps my mother was worried about her shy eldest daughter, so secluded and quiet. I can't be certain. Neither can I really know whether or not she would think my fiction uplifting, since I never allowed her to touch any of it. And perhaps my protectiveness is just as well. Hugh Macleod, a cartoon artist, once wrote, “You are responsible for your own experience. Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is.” It is hard to remember if I felt very alone about my chosen art when I was just twelve, or if that sense of loneliness is a more recent accompaniment to my work, but I do believe that I have been somehow compelled toward writing. Perhaps where I stand now is only the beginning of the solitary road. But however lonely it turns out to be, however lacking in realness or sharable meaning, there is something within my heart intimately connected to the description and narration of things, whether they be real things or unreal. I do not think I could escape the beautiful web of metaphor even if I intended to leave it, broken, torn and dying behind me.
My mother would not even want to understand such an idea, much less appreciate it, but I believe that life is a metaphor to all of us in ways we don't always notice. We all look at the world with different purposes, and no one is to tell me or you that one way is more meaningful than any other. Purpose is something we must find for ourselves. Beauty cannot be touched or shaped, merely captured by the lucky. Significance is something we each look back and give to our experiences, not the other way around.
