As an only child, I have always wrestled with my separateness, wanting to generate something so whole and coherent that I would not feel alone or set apart, an authentication of a valued self. This is why I had hoped to be a poet for the decade that began when I was sixteen. Writing something then (perhaps now too) offered me the confirmation of self and feelings I could not create alone; we are all self and feelings at sixteen. (Those poems would confirm that now, but they were awful remnants of another person I have longed to forget, and so they have been burned.) That intensely self-ridden, unformed person, I think, could not know an identity of his own making since there were no mirroring, mutually trusting others in his world. I was formless, floating, waiting. I read books: becoming adult meant breaking through, alone, privately. This is why I so admired writers whose tragic intensities – so admirable to me – led them to equally admirable early deaths. James Agee. Hart Crane. Dazzling and dead. Had I been a genius, my struggle to create a self-devouring self might have worked better for me, led me to good writing and an early exit, genius whose heart exploded, genius who jumped overboard. It’s a good thing to have failed at this, not being a genius, since it allowed me to become a teacher, and live. A student in poetry class sought to break through and delivered himself to great death instead, and I just thought of another who killed himself before thirty, and another who tried and failed, probably succeeded with a sharper blade. Later on, still without anyone other than my wife, whose caring rescued me (“pear wood to pear blossom” I wrote of her) I observed that an intensity of focus in artists and others working alone seems not to consume or destroy them but to cause their work to deepen, grow reflective, become multi-faceted and richer, to risk more in self-presentation. It is not that they are more confident, it is that they are more whole. Collaborations tend to reduce these intensities and the individual voice, individual insight, individual feeling. This is why most of my work has one author: who else would there be who can say these things? Writing is my privacy, also my privation. The slow work of making a difference through fabrication helps me to know what it has meant to be this person, having seen these things, having found these words. Having been. Having been without a brother or sister on this voyage into heart and age has been hard work – it is still hard – but now writing is a way to recover the energy and intensity lost in the struggle of being just one, separate, and distant. Still, this is late repair and vanishing consolation for the only child.
Only Child Notes: This is Why
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