Entering a big-box hardware store, I knew exactly what I wanted: a Kohler Elliston Rev 360 EB White Elongated Bowl with AquaPiston POWER Behind the Flush, Slow-close Seat Included.
After a half-mile walk, I saw underneath “Bath” and “Plumbing” banners a man wearing a vest and name tag. Thinking I’d save time finding my desired product, I told Bob, “I’m looking for the toilets.”
He looked at me with a curious expression. “The men’s room is right over there.”
“No, I want the TOILETS,” I explained.
Exasperated, Bob spoke as if addressing a 3-year-old. “Right. See the sign for the restrooms? They are under it.”
“No! Where are your toilets?!”
Bob, now foaming at the mouth, yelled something into his walkie-talkie and soon reinforcements arrived, but I was finished with this hardware store version of “Who’s on First?” so I said, “I Don’t Know’s on third” and headed off to find the toilets myself.
The interaction may not have happened exactly that way, but I finally found my toilet, and, given how much Bob had sacrificed in time and sanity, I ordered not one, but two Kohlers.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m really suited to be a writer when finding it so difficult to make myself understood. I mean, it’s what I love to do; every morning I either write in my journal or throw down a few fictional sentences or poetic lines and tell myself, “Good job, Rick!” as if I’d just renovated Versailles or touched up the Mona Lisa’s smile.
On reflection, the most important aspect of my life that keeps me writing may be my personality. I’m rather a cynic, or, perhaps more accurate, a pessimist, which means, in my mind, a realist. Whether writing stories, essays or poetry, the essential ingredient to getting it written, then read, is stirring in a couple of potent – yet nontoxic – teaspoons of conflict.
Which creates tension.
Which writers need to live – or, at least, recognize or intuit – to have their words be believed and read when writing about emotions. Like getting frustrated when hunting down toilets.
Poet John Keats called this “negative capability,” the ability of artists to fully imagine a wide range of feelings and attitudes without necessarily having personally experienced them. Shakespeare, indubitably, mastered this better than any other author, imagining fully rounded characters from male to female, rich to impoverished, witty to witless.
Do I have an ounce of what Shakespeare had a pound of? Surely one needs to be part voyeur of human nature and part participant. The artist lives both inside and outside the norm, observing and indulging.
But doesn’t everyone at some time believe, or at least entertain the thought, that they are living a singular life and everything else is a dream – or nonexistent?
No? Hmm.
Reading Will Dowd’s marvelous book of essays, “Areas of Fog,” I loved his recounting of getting drunk with a James Joyce scholar who, hearing Dowd was an aspiring writer, asked, “Sure you’re neurotic enough?”
Creativity scholar Dean Simonton reminds us Plato believed “the sane mind knocks in vain at the door of poetry” and Aristotle [claimed] “no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.” (Cambridge.org, May 19, 2017).
From Dictionary.com, Neurosis: a mental condition … involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior) but not a radical loss of touch with reality.
Good to know that as depressed, anxious and/or obsessive artists may be, they’re still tethered to reality.
You are out there, aren’t you reader?
• Rick Holinger has taught English and creative writing on several academic levels. His writing appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, The Southern Review and elsewhere. His books of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and essays, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores, Amazon, or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.