Love those moments when a deft phrase turns a long-held conviction on its head and forces you to look back on it with new eyes. Had one of those moments the other night, figured I’d share it in the hopes that you can take a look into your own repositories of experience and see if there’s anything in there that needs shaking out.
When I was a kid in high-school, Jill Krementz came and spoke to the school. She is a photographer and an author, but what had me paying what little attention I paid was the simple fact that she is the wife of Kurt Vonnegut. Let me first state that I don’t trust my recollections of the speech she gave, the photos she showed, or the majority of what she talked about, and that is because she pissed me off with one comment.
Finally she gets to talking about her husband, and I remember sitting up a little straighter and paying closer attention in the hopes of some illuminating anecdote about a hero of mine. What I remember her saying was something to the effect of-
‘…basically all my husband does is lounge around the house, smoking cigarettes and dreaming up worlds, and I doubt there is anyone in this auditorium who could do what he does…’
Oh the livid tantrums of an insulted ego. How dare she drop such a condescending line across the multitudes assembled? She had no idea who she was addressing.
I remember running on a good head of steam for a number of days from that one simple remark. The next brilliant voice in literature could be found anywhere, and half the time I operated under the conviction that it could well be me. How dare she cast aside such potential genius? I remember feeling sorry for Vonnegut, thinking that it must be miserable to be married to this ice-queen.
At any rate, I’ve harbored this grudge ever since. Then I happened to tell the story to talking plant.
His response -
“And how did that affect your desire to write?”
Damn… stopped me dead in my tracks.
It’s true. We all need something to rage against. What better motivation can there be than to prove somebody else wrong? Sad perhaps, but certainly an actual facet of this human experience.
I’m not prepared to state that it was something she did on purpose, pissing off the creative element who might be present in her presentations in hopes of providing that impetus, but I do have to admit that this little grudge is pretty stupid. That was years ago, and I’m still writing, she certainly didn’t make me quit. If I have a day to myself I smoke too many cigarettes and try to invent worlds. Still haven’t made the jump to the point where I’m getting paid for it, but that’s something I’ve made a certain amount of peace with for now.
The moral here is that if you read this looking for a moral, you’re a bigger fool than me, and I call myself finite jester. It was just one of those moments where your own personal motivations are dragged from the dark corners where they’ve been hiding and subjected to the kind of scrutiny that we usually don’t like to subject them too.
That kind of scrutiny is important though. Seems I couldn’t resist moralizing a little bit after all, so drag a couple of your motivations out and see what they are made of, if it hurts, well then you’ll probably learn something.
January 26th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
I gained a similar impetus in high school. There was a teacher there that I grew to despise. It wasn’t that she was a bad teacher, although she was extremely average at best. What made me hate her so much was that she thought that she had me figured out.
You see I was a fuck up in school. I was one of those kids who didn’t find much that interested me in the state mandated curriculum endlessly dolled out by uncreative and underpaid teachers. So if you couldn’t hold my interested I didn’t bother to pay you any attention. To hell with what grade you gave me, I didn’t care. Letters are not the measure of a soul
One thing that I thoroughly enjoyed at the time (and still do) was writing. So when I wrote I applied myself.
I remember the straw that broke the proverbial camels back. I handed in a essay that she had assigned. It was supposed to be modeled after a sarcastic piece that we had been reading. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.
The next day at the beginning of the class she dragged me out into the hall with a desk, making a big scene of it in the classroom. She slapped down a list of words on a piece of paper and told me I had to define each of them.
The words were all from the paper I had written. You now, fancy words that the average ninth grader was stretching to have a grasp of. Words like dung and extrapolate.
She didn’t believe that I had written the paper. I found out later from another english teacher at the school that she had told everyone in the teachers lounge that I was a plagiariser and had my parents write most of my stuff.
She said this even after I correctly defined each and every word on the list.
Now it made me angry that a teacher would make such horrible accusations. And it hurt especially bad to know that she was dragging my reputation through the mud where other teachers were concerned. But that didn’t bother me much because I knew in my heart that basically she was a small person.
What really pissed me off was that I had begged and pleaded with my parents to write that particular paper for me.
And of course they had refused.
So I promised myself that the first book I would have published would be dedicated to her.