blind ambition

Do you know what you want for your life?  I think I’m gaining clarity on that point, though I still wonder sometimes if it’s really possible to be all things in all moments.  I want to stop changing hats every five minutes!  As I wrote in my Book Smugglers post, I want everyone to know that first and foremost, I am a writer.  But I don’t want to have to subordinate the other aspects of my identity—I am simultaneously a writer/scholar/educator/intellectual.  I want to learn how to paint like Gustav Klimt (this image of Athena makes me think of The 100K Kingdoms!).  I want to make a film.  I want to present at an upcoming conference at Columbia on black women intellectuals.  I don’t want anyone telling me to “stop thinking so much”!  I finished reading through my novel yesterday and shed a tear or two…not sure if it was the power of the ending, or my own memory of that moment in my life—I was SO ambitious then, so determined to produce a masterpiece!  But I didn’t quite have the ability to match my ambition.  At times, the novel’s definitely overwritten, and I think I really was thinking too much–writing everything literally, it’s like a catalog of Brooklyn!  And that’s why I’m not forcing myself to work on Judah’s Tale right now—b/c I’m still doing the intellectual work, thinking through the narrative so that when I DO sit down to write, it will mostly be intuitive, not forced or false.  Neesha Meminger has a guest post at The Rejectionist in which she discusses the power of myth to shape our realities and sense of self.  There was so much I wanted to say in my first novel about black womanhood, trauma, and the paths to healing.  But most of what I knew *then* came from the scholarship I was reading in graduate school.  If I wrote that story today, there would be fewer words and more of my own earned wisdom—though I decided to keep this epigraph:

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.  But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”

 

-Audre Lorde

Ok, back to the manuscript.  I’m giving myself one more day to work on revisions.  Then I let it go…