parables and prodigies

Last week during my usual International Herald Tribune binge-consumption spree, I came across an article by David Brooks. I find him incredibly refreshing. (This is mostly because the ways in which I disagree with him are so subtle and novel that they end up providing far more nourishment than the saccharine snark of Maureen Dowd, the bookishly nutritious girl-crush I’m nursing on Gail Collins, and often even the toothsome socioeconomic truths Paul Krugman and his brand new Nobel have been laying down of late.) This particular Brooks piece was on the Sidney awards, examining the best of the year’s journalism. I read on.

Writing is a funny thing for me. The extent to which I’ve always known how to do it is matched only by the extent to which I’ve derided it as a viable goal and denied it most of the pleasure it’s brought to my life. Reading is another story; I couldn’t hide my passion for other people’s writing if I tried. I carry a book with me everywhere I go, especially in Boston (nothing is worse than a long and empty commute without at least one source of entertainment). Flânerie be damned; there are times when the most interesting, insightful and fulfilling thing to do in a city is escape from it, if only for a moment on a train.

But somehow, when it comes from making the leap from producer to consumer, admitting in the process the extent to which I roll my thoughts around my lips and brain in polished knots of word-stone, worn smooth by time, I get shy. Writing becomes the equivalent of using an unfamiliar public bathroom: just as unpredictable – and endlessly postponed. I save it up and wait until I’m nearly bursting before pouring all my thoughts out in a hot torrent, then rapidly leaving the scene.

I’d been thinking in vain about how to transform the act of writing, and – more daringly – the act of being a Writer, into something more like the use of that comfortable porcelain throne of my home turf: resplendently mundane, as regular as sleeping (if, happily, marginally more frequent). And I’d been getting nowhere, which is why I was spending my Saturday afternoon 1) comparing writing to taking a piss, 2) reading about other people’s literary triumphs, and 3) avoiding contemplating the conspicuous lack of my own.

In the Brooks piece, I came across a word I didn’t recognize. Even better, it was in Italian! It’s obscenely exciting to me to learn new words; the etymological labyrinths you can spin from one naggingly familiar root are, embarrassingly, some of the most soothing narcotics my battered brain knows how to produce. Neither WordReference nor Dictionary.com seemed to have any clue on my new friend, which is how I found myself gazing intrepidly at the Wikipedia entry for sprezzatura.

I could see almost immediately why WordReference, which attempts to keep its translations to three words or less, had let this one slide; it was as hard to pin down as it was epically satisfying to pronounce. Sprezzatura, as far as I can make out, was an idea that came to favor with aspiring Italian nobles at the beginning of the 1500s, and is essentially the courtly art of faking it till you make it. The art “created a self-fulfilling culture of suspicion,” one byproduct of which was that “the achievement of sprezzatura may require [one] to deny or disparage [one’s own] nature.”

For the exceptionally perceptive observant among you, it may come as no surprise to learn that most of my life has involved faking it till I make it. For the other 99.5%, an explanation.

I don’t feel particularly confident about my skill or prowess in one or another arena. If pressed, it would be difficult for me to tell you, with any certitude, that I was outstanding at anything I’ve tried so far in my life. There are a lot of ways in which my adult existence has felt like a sometimes diverting, if rudderless, exercise in mediocrity.

I was raised to be one of those super-children who were going to take over the world. The reason I was the youngest in my class all through school was because I skipped from kindergarten to first grade when I was five. The plan was that I would then, in the second grade, progress to an obscene ninth grade classroom level (to be fair, this was the educational system of exurban Ohio), presumably graduate high school at age twelve, and pause only to ratchet up degrees in medicine, law, and business from all the best schools before marching into my rightful place on the international, if not the galactic, stage.

The plan was derailed in second grade: my mother got cold feet. It was a poignant first illustration of all the ways in which the first would, indeed, find themselves last. From being the one to move ahead, I became the one who lagged behind: in puberty, in licensed driving, and certainly in all the doors the two in concert can open for the wily adolescent. (I’m still not entirely certain I’ve caught up.)

By the time I limped out of college, having perambulated through three schools and six majors before finally settling on the cryptic Liberal Arts, my fifth year senior status had erased all traces of the future that had been so bright as to cause my five year old self to wear shades. I graduated with little more than a bad taste in my mouth and a toilet paper degree: Liberal Arts (or General Studies, to be strictly precise) is an admission that you have panned the rushing waters of academia and come up with only fool’s gold. I did not apply to graduate school. I did not inherit the earth.

And all this disillusioned hype was in the scholastic field, where many had high hopes for me (only to be dashed in terse progress reports, less a referendum on my capabilities than on my crushing boredom: “Does not live up to full potential.”) In the athletic, the physical, the social, and the emotional realms – let’s just say I was no one’s outside pick to win the Kentucky Derby. In my life, I had a great deal of intensity and equally intensely shifting focus. I had interests, but no shining beacon of clarity and direction that would tell me What To Do With Myself. I still don’t. So – I faked it.

In many cases (remember the illustrious careers in veterinary medicine or visual anthropology? Do you remember?), the passion was there, but the actuality of one choice or another left too much lacking, too many waiting holes unfilled. Then there are the things I am still passionate about, but have never really studied and have no authority on: clothing and industrial and interior design, gourmet cooking, photography, dance, the opposite sex. The only way I ever got up the courage to decide on anything was to channel a competence I didn’t really feel, fake it till I made it, and hope like hell no one noticed while I groped and fumbled (occasionally all too literally) along the treacherous path from fake to made.

I’ve only recently realized that faking it until one makes it is damaging, destabilizing, and overall an entire crock of shit.

The problem with my method is that it ignored the fundamental problem with me: confidence, or lack thereof. That’s not something you can fake – and all these years of trying has left me with absolutely no clue as to how it gets made. It means I don’t know how to let myself be seen as unsure (unless I blanket it in a heavy coating of cerebral doublespeak, which is something I am trying manfully not to do, even as I type this.) (I couldn’t resist the word manfully, though. It’s such a good one! And I figured that any decision so impulsively taken and so emotionally clung to is probably a step in a positive direction in the long run.)

I was thinking idly about love, or maybe lovability, last week (like ya do), staring off into space during another one of those interminable commutes and wondering what it was that made some people the sorts of individuals who you followed with your eyes as they walked by; you couldn’t help yourself. You have to be open, floated through my head. And to do that, you have to let yourself be vulnerable. Record scratch!

Vulnerability is not something I do well. I have a fear that is longstanding (and, for the record, well-founded) of trusting people with my best self. It seems fragile, something that only invites disaster when not protected and wrapped up tight in a highly engineered package of hardness and softness, like a liver or a soft-shelled crab. Diaphanous, defenseless, these are not bodies that thrive on exposure. They are susceptible to rents, tears, the indignity of being devoured whole by ill-clad tourists on Coney Island. What’s a girl to do? The answer has always been, hide.

Recently, on a referral from somewhere or another, I read Waiter Rant. I expected it to be raucously funny, wickedly precise, deliciously familiar from my very brief stint as front of house staff (talk about faking it till you make it! The restaurant business lives on the back of those six words). It was all of that. What I didn’t expect was the subtle poetry or the unexpected grace.

In a lot of ways, the Waiter is someone like me. Our biggest difference is in the fact that I don’t think I’m wasting my life (I haven’t really lived long enough to have gotten there yet) - but I’m not avidly chasing my passion and wrestling it to the floor with both hands, either. And maybe that’s the great failure of me, the reason I’m far more likely to come in second place on Jeopardy! than to try to change the world.

Anyway. The Waiter was in the seminary a couple of lifetimes ago, and as someone with neither biblical training nor interest in acquiring same, I really appreciated the reasonably deft touch he used in weaving parables into the narrative of his vignettes. In speaking of how he’s scared to seize his own dreams, think of himself as a writer, and throw himself into anything that matters if there’s a chance of failure, he invokes the Parable of Talents.

Sure, my critical, over-processed (and possibly under-educated) Liberal Arts brain is urging me to point out that the subsequent lines drawn to underscore the idea of talent-as-currency, talent-as-wealth, talent-as-talent, and talent, ultimately, as potential lost, are a bit belabored. But from a visceral level, it got me right behind in the sternum. Part of believing you’re wasting talent is believing you have talent to waste, and I’m still not sure that that is the case for me, and may not be for a long time, or ever. But another way to look at the same thing is that life is too short to keep from throwing yourself with all your marrow into the things you love enough to fear that they could be taken away.

I have a bit of anxiety over dismantling some of the ironic distance I put up between myself and what I care about, part of which evolved as a survival mechanism at my last and most brutal college (where nothing was more unimportant – to say nothing of gauche - than being earnest). I can’t blame it all on New College, though; that particular iteration of my protective shell was an adaptation of something that was ready for use well before I ever got swindled by that glossy, glossy promotional brochure.

And under the anxiety of being seen to really try is the deeper, more ancient fear of being seen to fail. I don’t know how to shake that fear. Maybe none of us ever do. Perhaps I’ll need to channel the image of those Italian courtiers as a cautionary tale, rocking out in their tights and slimline shoes. The original skinny-jean clad hipsters, they avidly undertook the art of seeming without ever fully grasping one small but essential detail – and it means everything. In avoiding being seen to fail, they were always, constantly and possibly without redemption, committing the biggest failure of all: the failure, in the end, to try.