"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to"

Ancient Romans often began their poems with the famous invocation of a lyric muse, most commonly Venus.  It was a grateful tipping of hats to whichever celestial entity inspired them, rendering them capable of producing such classic masterpieces. Greeks too believed creativity was not something you were born with or learned, but something graciously lent to you by one of the gods, who as your muse, inspired you with the means for artistic invention. In Rome, said being would have been called your “genius.” These beings always conjure images for me of a fairy-like Yoda floating slightly above you, zapping the right words into your head and out through your fingertips before you have time to realize they were never yours in the first place. A verse to fair Juno, a few finger snaps, and you’re en route to the Iliad.

Unfortunately for me, my thought process while writing is a lot sloppier. I think my muse is probably less of a goddess and more of a goutly drunkard suffering from seasickness and one too many bar fights. He waddles through my mental hallways, knocking things over and sloshing excess hooch all over my words. Or perhaps my muse is a she, a prickly trollop whose altogether scrappiness is too evident in wrinkles and improper language. She’s truculent and bossy and makes more demands than allowances, godloveher. Sometimes I want to throw the laptop right through her rouge-ridden face, but then I realize she’d probably leave and I’d be back to the drunkard for my creative musings. Homer had it so easy.

            I’ve always wondered, what is the correct creative process for the rest of us wannabe Prometheans without the musical Venuses and the fairy Yodas? Is there a correct process? I can only assume most people start with a general topic or a point they want to make. Why else would they say, “when inspiration strikes.” Like what, lightning? If only creativity were so quick, clear, and precise as all that. Creativity is not a whole human experience wrapped up and reasoned with in a single moment of clarity. It’s an idea that starts in the most infinite of places until it unwinds and widens into something fully formed and vaguely finished.  It takes a beating again and again, but somewhere between them the moments of tender, loving attention paid to it pay off and it will, at last, unveil itself. It’s the weeks when you’ve not a fingernail to your name and you probably lost as much sleep as you got. That’s the Venus. Those are the ugly fairy Yodas. Hold on to those moments; use them. Tread them into something that makes the rest of that season a little bit easier to bear, then turn around and give your own trollopy muse a high five for being such a kickass creative guru. You’ll be left with a lot more than baggy eyelids and bloodied cuticles and the conviction that sometimes you have to scratch everything out and start again on the same story.

© 2013 Rachel Elizabeth Diehm

"Many shapes that shadows were, in crimson colours came."

 

    I once had the privilege of spending Christmas with a World War II veteran and his family. I had just finished my last semester in college studying abroad in a French exchange program that included a weekend trip to Normandy and Brittany. Knowing while I was still in France that I was going to spend the holiday with this stranger who so graciously invited me into his home, I was faced with the imposing question of what to give him and his family for Christmas. I had never met most of them before and the image of wrapping a Yankee candle in tacky green paper seemed a poor exchange for the kind invitation I had received at their hands.

    {As a side note, the rhyme and reason to my spending Christmas with this family is simply not my story to tell and so I will leave those details unmentioned. I have however received permission to share this one, intimate memory simply because it stands alone as a small testimonial and therefore has meant a great deal to me.}

    It seemed that just about the only thing I had in common with this kind stranger was the Normandy beach I was standing on.  It was indistinguishable from most beaches I had seen save a few crumbling battlements half-hidden by barbed wire and the weeds that wound and wrapped around them. I remember thinking how haunting that something so terrible could happen there and leave little more than a scarred coastline and a stifling air of sobriety. I thought of the coming Christmas and realized there was nothing I could purchase that wouldn’t be completely contrived. With the only idea I had, I walked to a gift shop across the street, bought a glass bottle for one euro fifty, shook the contents into the trash can, and went back to the beach. I scooped up what dry, unrocky sand I could find and re-corked the bottle before putting it in my pocket. This would simply have to do.

    Come Christmas day ornaments and sweatshirts were exchanged, lip gloss emptied from stockings, and soon enough my little parcel was plucked from under the tree and placed in his hands. I sat against the coffee table and watched his wrinkled, precious fingers as they unwrapped the tiny glass vile. Having pulled it from the paper, he said “Oh, how nice” with charming courtesy and yet unmaskable confusion as to the reason that this strange girl, god knows why, would give him a jar of dirt from god knows where.

“From South Carolina?” he said. (I have family that lives there.)

“No.” I said. “Normandy. From one of the D-Day beaches.”

    He held it silently for a few moments, turning the glass over in his hand before choking on the quietest and sweetest thank you I have never deserved to hear. I saw tears begin to well up in those eyes, leaving me humbled and embarrassed and wondering what right had I to put them there. This man, with exquisite grace, then began to share stories from his time in the war, what it was like on the continent during the German Occupation, and being present during the Liberation of Paris. He was one of those extraordinary characters you come across once or twice in a lifetime that can make you laugh with cheer one minute then suck the breath out of the room the next. If you have ever met one you know exactly the kind of person I mean.

    I don’t know why but the image of him cradling that bottle of sand has stayed with me since. It had nothing to do with Christmas or family or even gift giving in general. Perhaps it was because it impressed upon me forever the importance of story telling and of memories, and how eternally lucky you are if someone shares theirs with you.



 

© 2013 Rachel Elizabeth Diehm

"Presume not that I am the thing I was."

     I’m reminded of a line from the tv series Girls in which Hannah’s parents, vexed by her immaturity and irresponsibility, tell their daughter they will no longer financially support her. Conceding at last that they would rather have a lake house than the unnecessary expenditure of supporting their flighty daughter’s artsy-fartsy lifestyle, they pull the rug out once and for all and meet her protests with a swift “Get a job and start a blog.” It’s sound advice, if anyone was wondering.

     The last time I wrote on this blog was when I started it, announcing that more articles were forthcoming, but in a year I haven’t put a single moment’s thought into where it should take me. The problem was I didn’t know what to write about specifically. If I think something I say it out loud and if I have an idea I jot it down, so it seemed of medial importance to actually polish my own little commentary and put it where others could see it. Rarely (just kidding, NEVER) have I committed the creative energy to actually finishing something I’ve started. My “writing” has been more like a collection of miscellaneous memoranda that some nutty hoarder stashed underneath a Kilimanjaro-sized pile of old Vogue magazines and six years of dust. I have since realized the important thing isn’t so much what you’re writing, but that you are. I mistakenly operated under the assumption that you are only “a writer” if others will like what you’ve written. Can you imagine living the rest of life that way, doing only what you think the critics will applaud and hiding the rest? Eff that.

      The truth is something happened in the last year that I suspect is not too foreign from what others have experienced before. Oblivious that life was suddenly about to change while simultaneously being afraid that it never would, I panicked at the thought that how life had begun to look was how it would remain. I feared that happy events would follow sad ones and not far behind them both a dull sense of contentment would settle in. If so, I would never know or be able to explore my capacity to feel everything and nothing at all, and the rhythm of life would always reside within what I could picture, plan for, and subsequently bear. It wasn’t grief or regret I was afraid of, it was monotony, that there would be no extreme ups or downs, and like a failing heartbeat I would cease to feel them both.

     In retrospect I see how foolish it was to envy experiences for the mere sake of having had them. Like a child tracing the outlines of someone's scar and thinking how "cool" battle wounds are without the faintest notion of what it meant for the person who had to bear them. Heartbreak is romanticized only by those who haven’t had to feel the sickening ache inertly fade to a dull throb at the back of your chest. Perhaps that’s why poets are seen as such a pinnacle of emotional and creative achievement, because they’ve reasoned with otherwise paralyzing angst by channeling it into something constructive. Not that I envy depressive, poetic types; I’d rather not die of consumption in a crumbling attic with soot-ridden windows and flaky wallpaper. But of course things always seem more enchanting when you’re not in the throws of them; chucking yourself off a parapet and thinking you can fly is a relatively romantic notion if it weren’t for the mess at the bottom. Maybe it is healthier to put everything down on the page after all.
 

     This blog will be my soliloquy, the heartache, fear, and ugly mistakes that left me with no other choice than to start writing these things down lest they bounce around inside my skull for another torturous season before exploding into a fit of steam and really poor haiku. Not that anyone will read, let alone like, what I’ve written; the point isn’t the reception, it’s the voice, and you have to use yours. Like Diane Keaton’s character in “Something’s Gotta Give” when she gets over her breakup with Jack Nicholson by turning their story into a play that audiences will adore despite the fact that she kills him by the end of it. Hey, all’s fair…

     So there you have it, my pièce de résistance. I’ve been that girl in shambles on the bathroom tile, tears searing the sides of her cheeks and staring into the desolate past like a broken, bitter child, wordless and whiplashed and left in the dark. I wish I’d had my own future-self audibly present like Julia Roberts did, Eat Pray Love style, whispering back to me across the uncertain future to pick my ragged self off the floor and go back to bed because it all gets better. Alas, I am not Elizabeth Gilbert, but I’m hopeful it will not take three countries, ceaseless yoga, and another man in life to just get on with it. Of course I can’t claim to understand what Elizabeth went through; I’m not a thirty-something divorcée with a book deal and some really good fettuccini on the horizon. I can only speak for myself, and that self is a twenty-two year old emotional wreck of a mess that has no one to blame but herself. And that is how I wake to the world-shattering realization that I am a walking cliché. I am that girl. The girl who is trying to figure out what the hell life is supposed to be about, working on turning her dreams into a graspable future, and navigating this dizzyingly uncertain time alone because the only healthy and happy relationship she ever had imploded like Julia Child’s first soufflé at the Cordon Bleu.

     So I have to ask myself, is this really what it took for me to show something I wrote to someone? To finally admit, I’m a writer dammit and I don’t even care if I’m decent because a previously white page is now littered with something tangible, if only for me. The unfortunate answer is staring me in the face as I’m surrounded by little gemlike books on my desk like an old quotationary and "How to Write Like Chekhov" - - yes, Rachel, yes. You are that gal who is so freaking prideful and self-involved that it took life knocking you to your knees to admit it was worth writing about. Touché, life, touché.

Now, where’s my pen… 


 © 2013 Rachel Elizabeth Diehm

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