Months have passed, fine readers. Moons have come and moons have gone. Moons have grown bright and dim above us, slender as a cat's whisker, full as our hearts as Autumn approaches and pulls sweaters over our wrists and kindling in our woven baskets.
Some of us have fireplaces, and some of us have fireplaces that we aren't allowed to use, as the great grumbling men in charge of our place of residence have decided to grumble away our rights to winter and fire and smoke. These things aren't fair, and they aren't right, but they are so. They are the lives we live, fire-less and dependent upon the gooseflesh of another--thick of New York accent, and small of spirit--to warrant their own warmth. But we will forgive him, as we are forgiving people. As we are bearded people. As we are people doing our best, and sometimes failing, but nonetheless, reflective and consumed by the desire to be as decent as we can, when we remember to do it. Our beards our witness, we struggle, but we try. We do try.
Woe is me. And, also, Whoa. Whoa is a word. Whoa is a word that just never looks right when you write it out. And can we--the fine bearded men living in the basement of an abandoned meat-packing plant in central South Dakota--finally be honest? See, every time we type out the word "whoa," we question ourselves. We stare at this word, over and over again, and worry we've messed up the placement of its letters.
Is it actually "Woah"? No, no, we reason. That would result in the word being pronounced Wo-AH, and that would make no sense. Would be the blathering work of idiots. Because the word is mono-syllabic, is pronounced 'WOah'. And, fact is, those last two syllables are mere stand-ins. For show, for nothing, for naught, for nil, for fancy, for
DICK FANCY.
And so we shall move on. Forward, into the beckoning moonlight which sings, but too gently to hear unless you're a loon and you sing back. We have heard these loons; we have visited their lake, in Maine. We built a fire there, in a cabin, in a real fireplace that sucked smoke up its flue and shifted it back to the black sky. And it was everything we'd hoped it would be. Flue is another word whose spelling we question. Even now, we wonder: are we making fools of ourselves? Do we look like real cads? Real dingbats?
We'd like to return to the point of forgiveness for a moment--we bearded men, sat around the series of wooden boards we call a dinner table, candlelight fading quick. The South Dakota winter is whipping past the slats of glass we call windows, barely protecting our un-bearded flesh from deep-freeze.
Let us explain our long-winded absence, long-windedly.
We have not been writing, or at least putting forth into the world concerted efforts of writing or creative work of late, because, as we've probably told you before, we are often plagued by the icy, gnawing claws of perfectionism. That tepid, yowlping beast. That furtive soul-sucker. That slutty, hooting low-dancer. There is fear in our bones that what we make contains no real value, or might not; it is a useless narcissistic cycle of inner-battlements that produces this fear, it is. So, we bat away our own efforts, and, as a result, make little, or nothing, for fear that what we make might make us puke a bit inside of our mouths. This, fair readers, is simply no way to live.
While listening to NPR this blustering, leaf-scattered morning, in our humble basement dwelling, we heard writer Ann Patchett speak of the universal nature of this struggle, and, also, of forgiveness in this regard. Despite our doubts--and our feeling that the thing inside of our heads which we really know might be beautiful (or gruesome, or terrible, or important, or dangerous, or lonely, or mad) and which we make all efforts to convey will never trick out exactly as we hope it will--we must persist. And we must forgive ourselves for this gap. This near-always gap somewhere between the story we've been holding inside every better cell of our bodies and brain-worms and the story that actually makes its way onto a page or screen or wherever it is we end up putting it. We must forgive ourselves for this and move on and then keep going, knowing we tried our best. And this trying our best, this work, is better, far better and more noble, than not trying at all for fear our try will simply not be good enough. It probably will not. But, then, maybe, eventually, it will. And our beards will grow more fine and lustrous, and the smell of old meat will disappear from inside our nostrils, and then someone we don't even know will send us a care package from Harry and David's, full of perfectly-ripe pears and shredded paper and something covered in chocolate, and we will really know we have won.
This is the goal, citizens of these lines, mayors of our hearts, strokers of our fine and lustrous beards (grown slightly dry now in the cold-ing weather). And what will happen if we fall back into familiar patterns? We will collect ourselves, dust the mites from our elbow-pads, and find a way to forgive ourselves again. And you. We will forgive you, too, for being kind. For doing right by us, and by each other. For sending us more pictures of cats, too, maybe.
Dick Fancy lives. Sometimes, he struggles to breath more deeply. But, though he plods and drags his boots now and again through the steadily-hardening mud, he exists. We exist. We are open for questions, we are open for advice, we are open for anything you want to share. Or keep to yourselves. The point is: Hello. Hi. We're grateful to have dusted off our old PC, found a sparking outlet near the old meat-grinder, and begun again.
Love,
DF
