REINVENTING YOURSELF

Richard Diebenkorn, Coffee, 1959

Never think you’ve seen the last of anything. (Eudora Welty)

Lately I have been thinking about reinvention. A few acquaintances have used the word in describing my recent life transition (that transition being, in case you haven’t read my previous blog posts, leaving my full-time job to write).

What does reinvention mean really? And what does it mean for someone like me—or you perhaps—making a change when you are no longer young?

If you google reinvention you will find all kinds of good advice, mostly about developing better habits. Get up earlier. Work at your dream at least an hour a day. Meditate. Exercise. Eat better. Ditch negative friends. Write down goals and tasks.

Check check check. These are good things that we all can benefit from.

But do they constitute reinvention?

I have been trying to name artists (of any genre) who have reinvented themselves. And I can’t think of any obvious examples (if you can, though, I’d love to hear). Looking at the whole body of work of artists like Richard Diebenkorn for instance (who moved between figurative and abstract, shifts that some critics called reinventions) illustrates to me how he was honing his singular vision, experimenting too, but not reinventing himself.

Though I see various stages in Diebenkorn and other artists I’ve pondered, I still see their work as a whole. I see the same colours, themes, and patterns, hear the same essential voice. I see a continuum, an evolution, a gradual discovery of a true voice or aesthetic or obsession.

I believe we form our basic aesthetic at about age 4, and we continue to riff on that aesthetic all our lives.

When critics say an artist has reinvented him or herself, I believe they are really referring to style or content, not real reinvention. Or they are referring perhaps to a dramatic event that provoked a shift. But still not what I would call a true reinvention of self and voice.

Dramatic events, in fact, just seem to make us more ourselves than ever. A few famous examples of this (from an almost infinite number that could be given): Gaugin’s travel to French Polynesia; Monet’s cataracts; the Stalin years’ effect on Anna Akhmatava; the civil rights movement’s effect on Gwendolyn Brooks; how Iceland’s economy and technology affected Bjork’s music).

The good news to me about all this is that we, as artists of all kinds, as people of all kinds, have everything we need to create… within us. Being older makes it all the easier, in fact, because we have lots of stories to tell. Younger people, just from childhood and the intent observation of adults that most children make, have scads of material too.

We don’t have to reach anywhere else, or try to scour something new out of someone or somewhere else. Look within. We don’t have to pretend to be better or different than we are. Consider Eudora Welty’s comment seriously: All serious daring starts from within.

Our job is to describe what’s in us, around us, what we know or imagine, and reach the best of what we are capable of creating. (Welty again: Write about what you don’t know about what you know.)

I think we can surprise people by exposing a part of ourselves that we haven’t exposed before. Or we can work a muscle that we’ve never worked before, but we don’t really develop new muscles.

Google reports that “invent” means to “create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.”

Google also reports that “reinvent” means to “change (something) so much that it appears to be entirely new.”

Appears to be entirely new? Thank you Google for supporting my thesis. We are not reinventing, we are simply mining parts of ourselves that have been there all along.

You may be thinking, this is all semantics. Or that the idea that there is no real reinvention is scary (i.e. that you are stuck with what you’ve got). But working with what you’ve got is the work of an artist, or any human being on any quest or endeavor. A better way to look at it is “go crazy with what you’ve got.” It’s all there is, yes, but your experience is vast, and both your strengths and your limitations act as architects for your creativity. Maya Angelou puts it this way:

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot—it’s all there.

We just have to find and scoop up what is right there in us. Each spring when I was a kid, smelt used to run thick in the river that curled through our town. So many smelt that you only had to thrust a fish net into the water and pull it out full.

It’s always spring, even now at my age.

Here’s how this rumination on reinvention has played out in my writing decisions recently:

Years ago, I wrote a story (fiction) about a young woman who worked at the National Zoo in Washington DC (at the time, I was living across the street from the zoo, and loved walking there). This fictional character took care of the seals and sea lions and owned a wonderful dog. The story was 1^st person in her voice, and it was one of the easiest things I’ve ever written.

I took the story into a workshop at the time. People liked it, and advised me to turn it into a novel. That seemed like good advice to me; I loved the character too. Some years after, at a writing residency at Hedgebrook, I wrote a whole bunch more about her, until it was about half to two-thirds of a novel length. A writer who I shared work with at Hedgebrook mentioned my work to her agent, and then her agent urged me to send her the first five chapters of it.

I didn’t want to send them; the book wasn’t finished; it was a first draft, for heaven’s sake. And I’m a perfectionist, for heaven’s sake!

But was I not going to send it to an agent who was interested in seeing it? Had an agent ever been interested in seeing my work? (Was I stupid? Of course I sent it.)

She sent me a nice letter back, telling me what she liked about it, what she didn’t, and ultimately said she wasn’t going to take it on. This should have been encouraging. I should have wrote the hell out of it, and sent it back to her. But I didn’t. The whole event interrupted the dream world I was in as I wrote. I was not strong enough to compartmentalize the interruption, and also, by the time I got her response, I was back in my 9-to-5+ job, with a young child too and not much time on my hands. As the years went by, I wrote stories and essays and poems in the time I had available (and so so many reports and proposals) but I never wrote any more of the novel.

Now and then over the years, I’ve gone back to the original story (I’ve just started shopping the story around to literary journals, after all this time). I’ve always been surprised that each time I peep into it, the characters and the world they occupy are still vivid and alive to me.

Which brings this thought to mind, from Margaret Atwood:

When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

(Yes they do come back, ex-husbands, high-school friends, your own strengths and weaknesses! And I find I still love them all… but I transgress…)

Over the past few months, I continued to resist the idea of going back to finish this novel. I felt the need to reinvent myself, let go of my past writing and plunge into something new. I began dreaming of a different, new novel.

In my self-conscious writer’s mind, some voice told me that if I was still glommed onto something I’d started ages ago, I might be delusional or pathetic in some way. Or cheating somehow, stealing from my younger self. Self-plagiarizing, perhaps?!

“Yes exactly,” said another kinder voice (thankfully). “You get to self-plagiarize. And to cultivate whatever has been brewing inside you all your life. To mine it. To drill right down into your obsessions. You own those obsessions, after all!”

It doesn’t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination …

… That’s confirmation, again, from the ever-wise Eudora Welty.

This fictional young woman of mine working at the National Zoo is directly keyed into my obsessions. And really, who cares when I started it? I am the same strange blend of earnestness and wise-assedness as I was at age 4 or 24 or 44, and it has been easy for me to jump back into this novel.

So… perhaps this roundabout conversation I have been having with myself, about invention and reinvention, helped me realize that I am still who I have always been, and who I will always be.

And that is enough for me, and I passionately believe, for you or anyone… we have those multitudes. We are all we need.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

                                                           – Walt Whitman (from “Song of Myself”)

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #40, 1971

With love,

Tricia