Multiple
Personalities
“A work
in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state
overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day
fasten a halter, but which now you cannot catch...”
Annie
Dillard (The Writing Life)
Annie Dillard describes
the writing life as “a lion you cage in your study.” You give it
daily due diligence out of respect for its individual life—a life
that inhabits your body space, but does not lay down its autonomy to
anyone. I'm not a published writer beyond this blog, but truly, it
owns me. It shakes me from sleep saying, “Get up, we have work to
do, pressing matters that must be fit into this time slot.” Then it
finds what it wants to write about and off we go, with me merely
punching the keys because I'm the one with the hands.
Sometimes, I go back at
the end of the day and read what I wrote that morning, and
think—really! You said that! When I worked on a novel, the
characters regularly took left turns that were completely unplanned
and unexpected. When I attempted to wrestle them back in line with my
thinking, they became Helen Keller at the family dinner table in The
Miracle Worker. They threw food at me and pitched fits. Annie Dillard
says you must enter your study with a chair and a whip, yelling
“Simba!” to reassert your authority over the lion—I just never
had the courage to do that.
I guess all of us, and
not just writers, have multiple personalities. We are one person with
our families, and another in our workplace, another in our spiritual
life. Like paper dolls, we slip on different outfits as we go through
our day, becoming more or less formal depending on who we're with.
I've been reading Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and in them her
characters speak in dialect to one another, some do not know Italian,
and some use Italian only in certain circles. We, too, adopt
different ways of speaking ourselves in the course of a day. Our
innermost thoughts and our outermost words often come from different aspects
ourselves, and say absolutely opposite things.
All of this is not to say
that we are intentionally duplicitous creatures—only that we are
not a singularity. We are far more than meets the eye. It's well to
be aware of all the various personalities that reside within your
particular framework—the good and the bad, the kind and the
corrupt, the lamb and the lion. The problem is not that you have
them, since we all do; it's just that when you are blind to some of
them, they become dangerous. Like the lion in your study, they will
bite you. And they'll bite others, too.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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