Some Words About Words

Not every day is churlish, but this one is, sort of.

The second someone dies, I can read them with an open heart. A friend says this is envy and that is partly true but it is also not true. Because I am a writer and because I spent much of every day writing, I go through those days propelled by an element of competitiveness. I want the things I do to be better than the things I encounter that are done by others. That want is in fact split into two affiliated phenomena. One of them is defensible, which is that I want to do a good job. The flip side of that is that sometimes it feels to me that I do not want other people to do a good job. That feeling feels bad until I split that up too. My calculation along these lines usually has to do with similarity and difference. The more similar to me a person is, the more I feel a sense of competition. If I encountered a guy who looked like me and grew up in circumstances more or less like me and he had a huge book, I would be reluctant to give it its due. This has happened! In part it would be because markets are mercantile and I’d worry about the zero-sum aspect to it. Oh, you already picked the guy who is Like Me? Well, then I guess there’s less room for me. But it would also produce a sense of discomfort and displacement. Why did that guy, using the same ingredients, bake that strange cake? It would be more difficult for me to appreciate it. It might feel foul to cut a slice and foul to take a bite. The flip side of this whole process is that I have a better time of it when people are different. I do not share their experiences or their opportunities or their struggles, and so I am both less competitive with the cakes once baked and also more of the belief that I can learn from them. Of course, even those other authors who are not like me are still like me in the sense that they are writing, revising, publishing or not publishing, and then grappling with the reticulations of their terrible human ego. Even an author who has no overlap in experience or beliefs still engages in the process of reaction to writing flowing to a living mind, and that strikes me as immensely painful, and consequently worth avoiding. Which is how I have come to conclude that the small amounts of comfort that are created reading across a line of difference are greatest, of course, in the presence of the greatest difference, and that is between someone who is alive and someone who is dead. An author no longer with us, an author in decease, is the most different kind of author, and consequently I can read that author with an open heart. (I do not feel this way every day.)

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MISUNDERSTOOD

He said he was a ranch hand and told her that it was a promotion from the year before, when he was just a ranch foot, and she knew it was just a joke, but it toppled the way she listened to him. It turned it from bad to worse. He said he was a nomad and she thought that he said “no ma’am,” or maybe that he was never mad. He said that he much appreciated her generosity and she heard something about a preacher. He proposed marriage to her and she trilled a little laugh and said “Well, thank you, it’s an heirloom” and then he held out both hands, flats of palms facing her, and said that maybe they’d better leave off for a while and pick up later when she was in a better frame of mind. At that, she took out a sheet of paper and printed her name in big letters. “This is who I am,” she started shouting. “This is who I am!”