Thomas Sullivan: KIDNAPPED BY MAGIC, WRITING LIQUID GOLD, AND HOW I ESCAPED THE OLYMPICS
It’s happening again. I am suffering from postpartum depression in the wake of an Olympics. Call this one Vancouver games detox or 50K skinny ski hangover. It is very similar to what I feel after penning the last word to a novel (been there, done that, as they like to say on Death Row). In both cases you are caught up in something sublime if not surreal. You’ve stumbled onto a yellow brick road, fallen down a rabbit hole, passed through a mirror. Magic has kidnapped you, and life ceases to be a series of pedestrian events — washing clothes, cooking meals, getting the kids off to school — that are an end in themselves. Suddenly there is adventurous content in your life and unknowns and the potential for…
PERFECTION.
That’s what the Olympics and writing have in common. That redeeming pursuit of excellence. Doesn’t matter that the athletes run out of condoms, piss their names in the snow, or play air guitar from the podium during their national anthem. Doesn’t matter that the author falls into a bottle for breakfast, or lives a life of quiet desperation whenever he/she is cut off from their secret passion. The cracks and the flaws do not contaminate the liquid gold of the dream. What matters is the pursuit of excellence. What matters is the courage to put yourself in gear for that far horizon, even if you travel only a few steps during stolen moments every day. The waste and the shame come not with failing to get there but only in failing to set out. To allow fear of failure or the vanity of guilt to direct your one and only life is the same as hunkering down in the middle of the herd as if you never lived at all. That is the crime of a cowardly soul and an affront to whatever created you.
So I love people who dare reach for perfection. Dreamers. Risk-takers. Love them all the more when they fail. Love them still more when they fail and it doesn’t defeat them. A writer who keeps faith with his/her pure dream despite unrelenting rejection is still in-process to succeed. Failing is never failing until you give up, and a journey doesn’t end until you stop moving. Most of all, I love those who never give up and never stop moving.
You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there. Been made to feel foolish or childish for dreaming. There is always pressure to conform to the majority who do give up and do stop moving. Being different is dangerous. After all, “who do you think you are?” So, when we get hammered enough by disappointment, most of us resign ourselves, compromise, “mature.” Thus, the athlete who seeks only medals and hears only applause quits staying fit when the medals and the applause are out of reach; the wannabe author tucks away their mss and demotes themselves to lesser expectations; the life of quiet desperation anesthetizes itself with spectatorship and stupor. They have reached their destination. RIP. But the dreamer, the romantic idealist, the Peter Pan immature oddball keeps trying, and that makes it a lifestyle (at least a closet lifestyle). Which is how they win at last: by remaining a participant in the Olympics of the Heart, Mind and Soul…
BECAUSE NOW THE EXCITEMENT, HOPE AND VITALITY OF THE ONGOING JOURNEY WILL LAST FOREVER!
Impractical? Don’t tell that to the part of yourself that secretly dreams, that wants to stay hopeful. Idealism is realism of the soul. In the territory of the heart, surrender and resignation should never be called being realistic. That is an inversion of the latter term. The needs of the inner soul (not to be confused with innersole) should not play second fiddle 24/7 to appearances demanded by society. If fulfilling practical obligations means canceling out who you are, you have morphed into a zombie. There should be nothing unrealistic about self-honesty trumping conformity especially if you don’t fit your circumstances. That may be inconvenient, but so is personal extinction. As Gerard Houarner, psychiatrist and one of our esteemed writers here at Storytellersunplugged, mentioned in his last column, being realistic is often considered anti-social.
But not for Olympians. At least not during those precious few days every four years when it’s all about performance and society focuses in vicariously. Those of us audacious enough to try and capture the world’s attention with our writing know the excitement and stress well. Stories are like single events and novels are like decathlons. You may be judged by pace and style or beauty and daring. The rules and execution tricks of language carry their own rewards and penalties for success or failure. You can lose or win appreciation points from the reader or be totally disqualified if you wander off course. And as you race ever faster through the baffles and turns of your plot, each chapter becomes another gate in a grand slalom that must be negotiated before the next chapter can be aligned. A cast of characters is inevitably the source of conflict, competing head-to-head for something or staggered in their interplay or as conspiratorial as a relay, and as these vie and collide they will produce heroes and villains in skeins of interwoven dramas. Those conflicts may be pulse-pounding with raw physical action or as lyrical as a ballet on ice, but always there will be a countdown to the resolution. A clock may actually be ticking. Certain things go hand-in-hand in the tableaux that the writer presents, as in the focused events of an Olympics: risk and reward, heart and mind, body and soul, substance and style. You are, for all the preparation and execution of your endeavor, presenting the world made simple. Life through a reduction valve. Whether that comes out in a series of fictional scenes or the symbolic goals and performance of an Olympic event, it is editing. But don’t wait for society to give you a gold medal after the fact. If your dreams are threatening to others, find a secret venue to perform them every day and write on with liquid gold…
The doctored photo of the Flying Tomato at the head of this article is from folk singer Mark Manrique (Doc Foto), whose novelty pix are a regular feature with which readers of my monthly newsletter are familiar. The newsletter is mostly inspirational stories and a rave about nature w/photos that has hundreds of subscribers globally. I’ll be happy to put you on the mailing list for free if you email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are at this author’s website under News & Articles (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/News.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.
May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter? It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact. The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow. Or you can simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan . Samples of my recent Tweets: Skis ran slow in the soft snow today. Like the woman in the bikini, I should have waxed. And … I have a 1-word solution for the killer whale: SUSHI And … Valentine’s Day: I shall visit a place where a woman once married me in her heart, mind & soul, and loved me with her body. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
