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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Erotics of Revision11/03/2007 12:11:51On virtually every project I am working on at the moment, I am now in the thick of a thorny revision process. My master's thesis is in its fourth rewrite. A conference paper due to be delivered in two weeks still lacks a summarizing point. 2/3 of a novel is repulsing its previewers. And a pile of awkward folk songs are still waiting on arrangement. A depressing moment! Precisely because: revision can only come after the moment of disappointment, of discovering strings of problems in one's thinking and work. The ideal reviser, perhaps, simply plows through them one at a time until they disappear. The real me is different, letting every disappointment be a fine opportunity for cascading despair, for which there appears but one possibility of respite: stop trying. As a writing tutor in college I gingerly taught dozens of people the normalcy of revising in process-writing. "Do what I say, not what I do," for I never learned the habit well myself and always avoided it at all cost. It is the logic of predestination at work: if I were a truly good writer, I wouldn't ever need to. At the bottom of this spiral of despair, it is clear that more is needed than normalcy: an Erotics of Revision. Erotics, close to deification: make it the pride and joy of working. (Echo Susan Sontag's "we need an erotics of art.") The old semper reformanda of the Reformation rings a bell: reformed and always reforming. Both an erotics and a state of nature. A joyful opportunity that can be the climax of creative work, the moment when the real idea strikes. The problem, I think, is in our narratives, which too much emphasize inspiration. In the biopics of geniuses, it takes far less screen time to dramatize the flash of light, the drop of the apple, than the laborious working-out in which the true creation unravels. Fiat lux! Rather, we need stories about revision, and they will create in us a new consciousness. Walt Whitman, self-styled as such, will be our prophet and his lifelong revision of Leaves of Grass our holy library. The obscure "process theologians" will finally have a flock. From there the church of revision will send forth its scribes and scholars to all the corners of the world, from New Guinean tribes to European parliaments to the beginning of cosmic history. Their task, never finished of course, will be to write the definitive history of unfolding process. Finally we will know the drafting process of The City of God and of the physical universe as well. Once it is apparent that beauty can never be product more than it is process, art galleries will be studios, and those who can never finish will have patrons. And maybe, discreetly, in the middle of all the hubbub and hardly noticing because of it, I will finally find it in me to finish what I've started. |
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