Blog Post

I've had this idea I've been hung up on for the longest time, and lately I've been really obsessed with it to a degree that sucks.

Every so often I'm overcome with a strange mix of disappointment, desperation and almost anger, which all kind of swirls into a mild garnish in my overall state of perpetual depression. The idea that provokes these morose feelings is the following: I want to write about a field in a way that can perfectly convey the feeling of you seeing that field, being in it, walking through it yourself. Write it so well it can almost substitute for being in a field. The field is a changeable thing-- sometimes it's a vast flat grassland (easy to write about), sometimes it is rolling hills and distant mountains flecked with green grass and broken up by trees (more difficult). I am, in the act of describing this malady to you, already describing the field, but it wouldn't be this simple. If I put it down on the page, it would be *more*. It would be *perfect*. It would be art-qua-art with all of my blood and flesh enmeshed within. You could *smell it*.

There are a lot of reasons this idea provokes negative emotions in me, and a lot more reasons that it's an ultimately dumb thing to get hung up on.

First is that, the act of reading is interpretative. Readers will not extract my perfect vision from any of my writing, they will *interact* with it. Readers will read about my perfect beautiful field and they will think about fields that they saw in life-- or they might have never been in a field and maybe don't have such strong feelings about it. Their field might have been an autumn or winter memory, it might have been battered by rain, pockmarked with artillery or laden with mines-- it might provoke melancholy, awe or fear. Some readers might become bored and skip the description of the field and feel *absolutely nothing*. There is no way, with art, to just inject into the observer the exact feelings you require them to have. Even visual art doesn't do this. You can put your intentions into your art, do the best you can, and people will still *interact* with it. The idea of conveying through perfect synesthesia *anything* in writing or in art generally is just a kind of silly maximalist self-torment for the artist. I'm sure I'm not the only sad, crazy person having this self-defeating obsession-- but that's what it is.

Second, everything that I write, my "style of writing" I guess, is very focused on restricted character perspectives with limited information. I don't like writing in first person-- I think that goes way too far for me-- but the things that I write are defined as the sight, sound and feeling of a specific character. As such, there is no perfect version of that field-- it'll be whatever character I am writing and what they are seeing that will define that field. It is what they are *doing* that will define it. They can't stay in there forever, grasping at every detail-- characters have things to do! And I'm never thinking of a character when I have this thought, am I? Characters come up when the writing is poised to become "a work of art", a labor-- when I'm just fantasizing about creating transcendental work in an age of decline and conflict, that's when I think of the field. The field is not a project. It's the purest idealism.

When I think about fields and about pastoral idyll I think of some marketing copy on a book cover like "the latest from the master of fantasy fiction!" However, when I reread "The Lord of the Rings" or something I don't really my field there either. There is a stereotype of the interminable descriptive work bound within "epic fantasy," but the field is not something you can *find*. The descriptions in all of these books are part of their context. The field is ultimately mine-- it must come from me. Perhaps only I can create it. When I'm looking for it somewhere else, I'm a reader. No-- it is something that must come out of my own self. But woe abounds-- I am not good enough for it. There is no research you can do to get nearer the field. It won't come about from infinite practice. If I could create the field I would have done so. I'm staring at Microsoft Word ultimately because I am sad, tired. I'm mentally ill and have a draining day job. Now now, don't whine though. We're all there, this is nothing special.

Perhaps most haunting of all the considerations, however-- how would I know I had done it? When would I know, when would I remove my hands from my keyboard and exclaim that I have done it, I have written my perfect field? Do I, in some dark corner of my own mind and heart, believe that the field will change anything? Will the field be what gets people to look at my work? Will the field be what unlocks the boundless creativity and curiosity of my youth, which has slowly eroded with time as all of my body inevitably does and will? Will the field get me respect? Will the field save my friends in poverty, strangers from precarity and ruin, nations from depredation and conflict? What is *transcendental* work? I used that word a little bit ago and I've been thinking about it recently and I honest to God don't know where it came from or how I would define it. So why am I obsessed with it?

What do I think I could have that I do not have now?

Ah, but there is one thing I do not have now-- *the Impossible*.

I think everyone probably has a beautiful perfect field of their own-- something that represents what their art could be if it didn't have to interact with reality.

If I wasn't tired; if I wasn't sad; if I could discipline myself, focus, overcome my obsessions, and simply create perfect art every time. If I could simply go back to writing and publishing 10,000 words a week, pulling all-nighters, sustaining myself on little more than two coffees a day, ignoring the migraines, stomachaches, back pain, neglecting my wife and ignoring my friends. "On the grind." "Sigma." Flawlessly remembering all of my plotlines without going over my notes, adroitly executing on my exact ambitions for every story beat. Recalling every word in the English language, never looking something up, editing in one swift pass because there were no errors to begin with. Publishing, marketing, distributing, repeating. Until the day I die.

I could write "a description of a field that can perfectly convey the feeling of being in it".

Yeah. Let's do it.

Come on, you and me. Let us simply be perfect and have no considerations.

It's as easy as doing it, and we'll know we've done it when the lightning strikes.

Are you ready? Let's go.

Hmm? Again.

Again.