Something Interesting I've Learned

It's interesting to me, anyway.

See, for years I had this idea about myself that I knew how to write about the one aesthetic phenomenon that's mattered to me above all others, namely Cinema (as those who've looked at this blog from time to time might have surmised). And then I started to suspect I couldn't, then . . . well, it's gone back and forth so much that I've never had a firm grip on whether I can really write about anything, in the end.

I do now. And I'm not really surprised by the conclusion I've come to as much as I'm surprised by how . . . yes . . . happy it makes me. Before you say, "What's the big deal?", I should tell you that this is a big deal to me. The biggest there is.

Starting from when I was 15, I used to write about Cinema all the time and I was in love with it; just as much as I was in love with watching it and reading about it. I truly enjoyed the act of writing. Whenever I had a spare moment . . . and if I didn't, I'd sure as hell try to carve one out . . . I'd hie myself away to my school's library or, if I was home, plop down on my bed with a notebook and a ball point pen and start . . . writing about film; with absolutely no intent other than to write what I was thinking; whatever thoughts happened to be crossing my mind on that particular day. It could have concerned whatever I'd seen on television the night before; or later, the two or sometimes three films I'd seen when I cut school from my itinerary (as I became wont to do when I was 16-17); it might have been what I thought was a rare and illuminating insight I'd had into the work of a particular director. Sometimes these jottings would focus on some cute girl I'd seen in an audience . . . "She was so HOT!!" (Oh, I could get quite poetic in those accounts) . . . or some 'interesting' species of human animal who happened to occupy the same cinema as I one some occasion; though hopefully not in a seat to close to mine. It didn't matter what it was; not at all. If it had the merest connection to the filmgoing experience it made its way into my notebooks eventually; all I had to do was think of it and start scribbling and there it was before me and I could read it and smile or laugh or whatever the experience had wrought when it was fresh in my mind. Anyway, all that writing back then was good practice for me, I now realize, and not because some of it got me a job as a film critic when I was 17, but because it engaged me with film and with the actual process of writing in a much deeper sense than I ever understood.

And when I say "ever understood", I don't mean that this was something I failed to comprehend until I'd reached my 20s or even my 30s. I mean, I didn't figure this out until two days ago.

Let me tell you, I got very very mixed up over the last couple of weeks; to the point where I was no longer certain of anything about myself. It was bad. I'd never felt like it before, and I can't really go into the details now in a forum easily accessible by some people; not without getting into three or four different varieties of hassle that I don't need right now . . . though mark my words, I will one day relate the whole strange saga . . . but suffice to say certain events unfolded that caused me to question who I was at the most fundamental levels; and just what it was I'd really been doing with my life all these years. What I was experiencing in that short period seemed to be an endless cycle of humiliating revelations about my true worth both as a writer and, consequently. as a person; since that was so central to who I thought I was. And I literally had never felt more lost . . . this was for two weeks straight . . . in my life.

Now, just as suddently as it came, it's gone.

The trajectory of my Writing Career (Irony Alert!!) was not unlike the fabled Magic Bullet of Kennedy Assasination lore. As I say, I got a job as a film critic at 17; pretty much stopped all that writing I'd been doing just for myself; held onto the position for about a year; loved it; lost it when the paper went bust; started a journal of my own with three friends of mine (you know, to keep my 'work' in public profile); wrote 10-12 full length reviews for it over the course of three issues; loved it; then felt the sting of abject, hideous betrayal when my so-called friends (who, as Renoir put it, had their reasons) decided to abandon ship all together; all at once.

Then I did something which even I knew would be pivotal: I decided I would stop writing about film entirely; not for myself; not for anybody.

Just 19, I resolved to lead a normal life and start getting interested in other things; things more appropriate for a young man assuming his majority. Also . . . I threw just about everything I'd ever written; all them notebooks; about 14 of them; right into the garbage.

I didn't write about anything for 15 years until I got a computer. The Internet, as we all know now, thanks to the Blogosphere, is just too tempting, too convenient a forum. In a matter of weeks I was making baby steps toward writing about film again: Bulletin boards; talkback forums, Usenet newsgroups; always carrying within me an image of the promise I once had that I was now picking up again ever so gingerly. That image is in fact what governed everything I now wrote; from the moment I started again, till literally just the other day. I pushed myself to live up to what I imagined I once was: this embryonic Voice who would have set film writing afire had he not walked away from it. Oh, in the back of my mind I saw the vast talent was still there, waiting to reemerge fully formed and ready to shake the bony hand of destiny.

Well, I kept straining and straining when I wrote now. And I wasn't experiencing the same kind of . . . well, joy . . . that I'd known doing it when I was younger. It had about it more the aspect of a chore now. I chalked that up . . . wrongly, I now know . . . to being older. More than ever, I regretted turning away from writing for all those year. Though I actually got a few semi-decent pieces out of it that I posted on Usenet newsgroups: a few reviews; something about the old New American Cinema; part of an essay on Busby Berkeley; the beginning sections of a Social History of the French New Wave. My writing on those occasions was no better or worse than what I'd been doing since I'd started up again. In fact, now that I'm looking at this differently, truly differently than I have before, what I think really held those pieces aloft for however long they stayed aloft wasn't the quality of my syntax or my rhetoric (which was still . . . straining for the glory which rested on the other side of effort); if anything it was (dare I even say it?) my sense of humor and my absolute aversion to getting facts wrong if I could at all help it. I think that's what won me the few compliments that sustained me in my effort till recently. The people who made them were sincere. I think they were just willing to overlook the deficiencies and emphasize the positives in my work, thats all: to keep me from giving up. Nothing sinister; as I sometimes entertained in dark moments; thinking some subtle form of derision was afoot in their encouraging sentiments.

But I persisted in pushing that car uphill with a rope; I kept strrraaaiiinnniiinnnggg harder and harder; and I judged my writing by how much head-banging effort I invested in it, not even really how good or clear it was. I wrote less and less, and was not-so-secretly shamed by my absence of productivity. I started to think that whatever I had in them good old days was sure as hell gone now; never to return.

As I say, certain events in the last couple of weeks have caused me to reflect on much of what I'd kept buried in my mind for one reason or another, and I believe I've now figured out where I went wrong.

It wasn't that I'd stopped writing when I was 19, as I suspected; it was that I'd stopped writing for myself after I got that critic gig two years before. My attitude thereafter was that writing is something you do for an audience; a readership no matter how tiny. I understand now that I'd been performing ever since then, not writing. I haven't really written since I was 17, so the question of whether I'm any good or any bad now is somewhat moot.

And so we have, one week into the New Year, my resolutions: To start writing again the way I did before. To write and write and write; not stopping until my thoughts do. To reconnect with my younger self and not run away from him or be embarassed by him as I've been till now.

He was, after all, a kid overflowing with enthusiasm. And he loved what he was doing.

Which is more than I can say for myself over the last 4 years