Futility & Futurity
Welcome back. When I started this particularly blog in December of 2020, I posted about how I had stopped and started blogging four or five times previous, and I felt this touch-and-go relationship would likely continue. I posted semi-regularly for about five months, and then stopped after April 2021. And now I’m back.
I have a checklist I use to track the status of various writing projects. It’s an artifact of the way in which I tend to plan constantly but execute little. Planning is more fun than actually doing – a theme I will return to. In that checklist, I marked this blog post as having been outlined, but in truth, I really don’t have a structure, and now that I’ve begun writing I feel the old anxiety – the sense that I really should stop and think about the organization of ideas, in tension with fact that I feel too lazy to do that. So instead, I’m acknowledging this part of the process here. This is something that some folks really praise in writers, a sort of meta-candor, but others find it insufferably pretentious. In my case, I think it may just be an excuse, throwing the aspect of intent over what is really just pure intellectual sloth.
But that tangent I just went on is in truth quite relevant to the rest of this post, because it provides a clear example of exactly the way in which I feel I am a barrier to myself ever accomplishing anything, both in the sense that I lack the discipline to push through, and also in the sense that I second-guess anything I do. And that’s what I want to talk about today: what my writing is and isn’t, and the relationship between what it has been, and what it will be.
I have never been very consistent. I show up to work and to church, to be sure, and I certainly never miss a meal, but when it comes to the creative projects I claim to hold as my dear priorities, my actions belie my words. In my defense, my life has not been terribly stable. After I stopped posting in April, I became busy grading final papers, and then I went through several part-time jobs in quick succession, moved back to Washington, spent several months looking for work, and then spent several more getting used to my new work schedule and learning the ropes at my current job. Now I’m at a place where I feel I have enough regularity in my schedule to get back on a schedule of posting. But I’m not very confident in that, because the truth is that I’ve always had plenty of time for this if I had made it a priority – I just seem slow about any project. At any rate, I suppose I should come to the point of this post.
I’ve been thinking a lot about futility recently. If I look at my life, I have made so many plans and so many beginnings, and most of them quickly trail off to nothing. There is a very real sense of futility haunting any creative effort, not because the work is too difficult, but simply because I have no faith in my future self to carry it to completion. This is based on long experience with my past. In some ways, I feel I have never really been a serious person in this respect.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about futurity, and where I want to go. When I was younger, I had a clear picture of what I wanted to do. Now, that seems much less clear, and the futures that seem realistic based on past experience don’t seem satisfying. There is, of course, probably quite a bit of both nostalgia and unrealistic expectations playing into this, and I know that it’s not a healthy habit of mind. Perhaps I will successfully unlearn this mental diptych of future desire and futile planning, but I’m not there yet. At the same time, actually posting here is at least a step toward writing more regularly, which is a healthy practice.
I do have other doubts. I feel that perhaps what I am doing is a selfish waste of time, both because I am spending time talking about myself, or about things that don’t really matter, rather than spending my time helping others or serving God, and because it seems unlikely that many people will read this, or that it will serve any useful purpose (I include beauty as a useful purpose, because beauty is an end to itself as well as a means of praise – but I don’t edit my blogging nearly enough for me to think it will be particularly great art). I’m also concerned that people will rightly point out that I am not saying anything original, which is true.
Originality, however, is not my goal. What I chiefly want to do is to satisfy the desire that led me into teaching in the first place – the desire to point people toward beautiful things that I enjoy and love. So, if I post about a movie I’ve only just seen for the first time, but which came out years ago and which people have discussed to death, I’m not even trying to be clever or original. I’m simply trying to set down my felt response to it, and to use that as a signpost to point others toward it. Frankly, and I know this will sound like an excuse, but originality is a very modern concept. Our ancient and medieval ancestors worried little about whether or not what they wrote had already been said before, and they by and large contented themselves with joining the long echoing hallway of human speech. So too with me.
I also worry that paragraphs like the preceding one are a symptom of pretentious narcissism, of spending too much digital ink and time talking about myself as if my perspective were particularly interesting or important. By the same measure, I am often driven to write about subjects I find compelling, but I am haunted by the sense that I have little to say about them. Some of these posts may end up very short. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the longest posts are those like this one, dealing simply with myself, and the shortest are about actual substantive things.
At any rate, I actually do have things I want to say, if I ever successfully make time to write about them. But I wanted to begin here, by acknowledging the sense of futility I feel about the future. But I wouldn’t spend time writing this, if I wasn’t looking forward to some kind of turn into hope. 2021’s two best films, The Worst Person in the World and Drive My Car, both left me with the same feeling – that despite whatever life we have lived, it is important to come to the realization that, in the end, all shall be well. When I think about my writing and my career, I feel a little like Julie, the protagonist of the former film, who had constantly changed life paths, drifting between different beginnings without seeming to progress further. But we do progress, whether we see it or not, and regardless of narrative fit, the story moves forward. So, I am trying to begin again, again. And as a start, I am announcing that I will finally write a book. This is me throwing my hat over the wall. We shall see how I follow after.
