Bloodletting

“If your Nerve deny you, go above your Nerve.” – Emily Dickinson 

No way to write but to sit down in the chair and…. write. But that is where my Nerve has failed me. I finished the first draft of my book on May 20th, 2018. Dear lord, that’s almost three years ago now. Since then, my book has felt like a moving target and I am the frustrated hunter. The book is much like a deer – a doe, most certainly – and I see her slender legs move gracefully through the underbrush. I can smell her velvety coat. I can hear the soft displacement of leaves beneath her hooves. On a good day, I can see her long neck and tender muzzle as they extend gently, cautiously, toward the tree bark.  She’s right there! A mere twenty feet away from me.

I am crouched in the underbrush, dressed in my fatigues. My knees are stiff from such prolonged squatting and I have a damn tickle in the back of my throat. I swallow it down – force it back to its itchy corner. Reaching for the quiver, I silently pull out an arrow, nock it, set the arrow on the rest and take aim. The deer is right in my sights - unaware of my presence, nibbling contentedly.  She rolls out her tongue, licks the birch bark, pulls off a papery sheaf through clenched teeth. My arm begins to tremble and I realize that I had better shoot soon or my aim will falter. I brace myself and my left foot, propped on a small rock, slips. Alerted, the deer raises her head in alarm and then bolts into the trees, her retreating tail a flash of bobbing white. Damn it! I mutter, picking myself up from where I toppled over on the forest floor. She was so close! I had the perfect shot!

That has been my experience in rewriting my book for the last two and a half years – I have the bloody thing right in my sights, I’m holding it in my goddamned hand – sometimes I even press it to my nose and give it a good, long sniff. As if to determine if the words are still fresh. Or perhaps I’m worried that they have curdled, gone sour. Is there an expiration date on this thing? No smell. A bit dusty though.

But this book! She keeps eluding me like the deer bounding away through the forest. I pull her off the shelf,  turn her over in my hands. Sometimes I just stand there leafing through the pages, not even reading them - as if seeing the blur of print flash through my fingers will rewrite the book for me. An act akin to Gandalf thrusting forth his staff, or Hermione waving her wand. The words will most certainly have rearranged themselves into cohesive order when I stop the fluttering of pages. The work will be done for me – no suffering necessary.

But that is never, ever, ever the case. The words never simply reshuffle themselves. There is no wizard nor enchantress who will do the hard work for me with the snap of her fingers or by reciting a magical incantation. Simply put, I will have to suffer. I will have to sit in my chair (if the gods are merciful, they will at least provide me with a freshly poured cup of coffee.) As sure as a lemon is tart, I will have to sweat and agonize, copy and paste, delete entire pages – chapters even! – and rewrite new passages. I will have to put what is in the middle at the end and what was once at the end at the beginning and what was at the beginning somewhere between chapters seven and twelve. And through it all – amidst all the stacking of blocks and the construction and deconstruction – I will have to track logic and cohesion and sequence and narrative. I will have to maintain a constantly evolving roadmap in the back of my mind and not lose sight of the fact that not only did I remove exit 41 from Highway 33 but I reinstated it two states away on Interstate 49, and I redesigned Interstate 49 so that it now runs north as opposed to west!

There will most certainly be blood, and probably lots of it.

Isn’t that the case with anything in life that is worth tremendous effort? Writers are certainly not alone in having to withstand pain  - we’re in very good company. An athlete must tolerate untold hours of endurance training before she can qualify for the Olympics; a teacher must carry a student through endless ups and downs before that same student walks across the graduation stage; a scientist likely sees months, sometimes years of research flushed down the toilet and an untold number of lab experiences tossed out the window before she is able to finally prove her hypothesis; and before a hunter can store meat in the freezer, she must first field dress her prey, cut up the meat into transportable pieces and then hike it back out of the woods. And a mother giving birth? I’ve had three babies – all home-delivered, all posterior in presentation – and I sweat and cried and shat myself and prayed to god to please, please, please let me just walk away from this now…. like RIGHT NOW!

But I didn’t get to simply walk away. Well, I suppose a writer or a hunter or a teacher could walk  – but certainly not a mother who is 10 centimeters dilated and in the pushing stage. Too late for an epidural then. But we’re not going to walk away – what would be the point? At least, those with resolve will not walk away, not when they understand and fundamentally believe that oftentimes the bloodletting is well worth the effort.

And if the rewritten book never sees the light of day? Or the meat is somehow tainted? The athlete stumbles points away from the gold, the scientist is denied funding after delivering what might as well be called a cure or, God, please no, the baby is stillborn. What then?!

How do we reconcile a devastating loss after so much agonizing effort and sweet, sweet anticipation?

Oh, the anticipation…that’s the killer. And the beauty. The sweet nectar buried deep inside the flesh of so much strain that you want to keep tasting but dare not indulge in too much lest you get out too far in front of your skies.  And when those conjoined twins of effort and anticipation are bluntly taken away from you, wrested from your hands after you had laid each paving stone so carefully, so deliberately? Well, I suppose that that is when your suffering is renewed. But that loss does not, nor should not, equate the loss of gain. We’re standing in a different spot, are we not? We’ve gone a little further up the trail, glimpsed a longer perspective, taken something that was once one-dimensional and turned into two, even three dimensions, demonstrated our stamina, perhaps even loved a bit more ardently along the way. That’s the prize – knowing that we are worth the time and the effort, despite the outcome.

So I pick up my bow and I nock the arrow. I pull out my chair and I sit the hell down. Time to get to work.