September 28, 2005

Rejection, Rebellion, and Death
by Lorraine Berry

I cannot forgive contemporary political society: it is a mechanism for driving men to despair.

Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

I spent four years writing a novel. I finished it this summer and sent it off to an agent whom I had met a couple of years ago. She had expressed an interest in seeing the finished product. Monday, she sent me a polite letter--polite, but firm--with a number of reasons why she felt she couldn't represent the book. As polite as the letter was, it still felt as if I'd been punched in the gut. Grief is like that. You feel that shift inside, as if someone is poking your viscera with a stick, and then, if you're like me, you feel the surge of nausea that signifies that there's a tidal wave of sickening emotion that desperately needs an outlet.

I consider it a triumph of will over my past-bulimic self that I didn't wind up hunched over a toilet bowl. Instead, I cried. Fellow addicts will know that tears signify progress.

Vague nausea has been my companion the past several weeks. I can't pinpoint the moment that I first felt it, but it has built over the summer and into the fall as I've become aware that the surge of hope I felt last spring--that as people woke up to the political nightmare of the current administration, the Democrats would mobilize into a real opposition party--that surge of hope has been battered by the events of late summer. In the spring, I felt charged with the energy of Sisyphus, ready to put my shoulder to the rock and, with the help of "my" party, take back the country from the robber-baron frat pack.

But, somewhere between the Roberts nomination and Hurricane Katrina, my anima lost its animation, and I feel a bit like some wan Yorkshire ghost, wandering the moors, and waiting for Heathcliff to open the damn window. He's warm, dry, fat and happy, and I feel like shit.

That's the whine part of what I have to say. Here's where I try to put together something hopeful, to make it worth your while to read this and worth my while to pick my ass up off the floor and try again.

Nothing is given to men, and the little they can conquer is paid for with unjust deaths. But man's greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself. Camus, R,R,D

Here's the domino sequence that went through my head when I got my rejection letter:
My book sucks; therefore, I suck as a writer; therefore, writing is a waste of time and I should give up; therefore, I should just stick to my day job and give up all aspirations of writing; therefore, my sense of myself as a person is all fucked-up; therefore, my life has no meaning and maybe death will come quickly.

When I got to the logical nadir of this sequence, that is, that a book rejection meant I should kill myself, I knew I'd either have to start laughing at my solipsism or go stand out on in the middle of Rte. 13 and wait to get hit by a truck. I'm still here, so I guess I've decided to laugh at myself. And start again.

The first decision that had to get made, and I admit, I made this decision with the help of friends who love me and wanted to offer positive alternatives, was to decide whether the opinion of one person--admittedly, someone who knows what she's talking about--was enough to budge me away from the idea that I had written the best possible novel I was capable of and that it was a piece of work I should stand behind. One of the possible responses would simply be to scrap the novel and start over again. But I decided that I need to believe in my vision. I made choices when writing the novel, and it's not going to be to everyone's liking. In other words, I'm going to have to stand firm, nay even fight, for my piece of work. Easier said than done, but I'm trying to gird my loins as I venture back out into the world of rejection and criticism with my not-all-that-firm sense that I've written a fine piece of work.

I'm sort of like the Democrats on this one, and believe it or not, this experience this week has made me the slightest bit more empathetic to the party that keeps failing to do the right thing. The Democrats need to find a way to stop reacting to the brawling world of politics like sensitive artists watching their work getting trashed, and more like those folks who sang "we shall not be moved" while they were getting the crap kicked out of them.

I need to stop being a sensitive artist in the marketplace, and realize that the world in which I create my novels is not the world where I try to sell my novels. And my party needs to realize that the same qualities that make us the party of compassion--the party that feels other people's pain--are the qualities that lead us to getting our feelings hurt by the bullies who mock our agenda and make us deny our core principles. Somehow, and I'm not sure how you do this, the party needs to develop the ability to remain a party of compassion on the inside, and a tough, brawling, force out in the world of politics that will fight back, defend its good works, and not respond to criticism by offering to change in order to make the bullies happy.

Posted by in Activism, Books, Creative Class, Creativity, Democracy, Democrats, Epiphany, Hurricane Katrina, John Roberts, Life, Literature, Publishing, Testimonial, Writing
Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) | Technorati Cosmos

Trackbacks

Trackback for this post:
http://www.culturekitchen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/3338

The following blogs make reference to this post :

Say it loud, say it proud!