July 13: Momentum is Motivation

 

 

Meditate, if you will, on the words of Roger Whittaker, whose 1971 song New World in the Morning contained these words:

Everybody talks about a new world in the morning. 

A new world in the morning so they say.
I, myself don't talk about a new world in the morning. 

A new world in the morning, that's today.

I met a man who had a dream he had since he was twenty. 

I met that man when he was eighty-one. 

He said too many people just stand and wait up til the mornin', 

Don't they know tomorrow never comes?

 

As time goes on, I feel more and more like the guy Roger Whittaker is talking about. If you know me, you know that there's a big massive novel in me that I've been trying to write since high school. I NEVER talk about it with anyone because I'm embarrassed that I haven't finished it yet. I would like to have finished it in my twenties but that would have been a mistake. I hadn't lived enough, I hadn't been hurt enough, to write it then. It needs to be written by someone who has been wounded by life but not by an old man who has been poisoned by the cynicism of unfulfilled dreams.

All this reminds me of another poem by A.E. Housman, which I recently quoted to my goddaughter and niece, Sasha, upon learning of her imminent high school graduation:

 

  When first my way to fair I took
    Few pence in purse had I,
    And long I used to stand and look
    At things I could not buy.

    Now times are altered:    if I care
    To buy a thing, I can;
    The pence are here and here’'s the fair,
    But where'’s the lost young man?

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If anyone is foolish enough to invite me to do the commencement address for a class of graduating students, I will centre my speech around Housman's poem. I will say there is no shame in wanting to do some things while you're young. When I was 31, I realized a lifelong dream and visited Ireland. My tour guide sized me up and asked if I wanted to go on a specialized tour, like a Contiki one. 

"That's a tour where they get you drunk and laid," he said, and I declined because I don't like getting drunk.*

 

The point is that if I were to go to Ireland now, the tour guide would not ask me if I wanted to go on a Contiki tour. Instead, he'd ask if I wanted to go on the Golf Courses of Scotland Tour, or a Whiskey Tasing Tour, or perhaps join the Middle-Aged People Who Wear Sweater Vests and Feign Interest in Irish History Tour. But drunk and laid? Perish the thought. I'm not in Motley Crue.

 

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Can't wait for inspiration to hit you, dude. You'll be waiting an awful long time.** You have to be sitting in front of that blank page or that blank canvas and doing what you've got to do. Stephen King once said that sometimes it feels like you're just shovelling shit from a sitting position, and that's probably true, but that's necessary if you're going to create something beautiful.

Almost everything I have ever written in note-a-day is just shovelling shit from a sitting position. I'm fine with that. I am hopeful that, in the eight or so years that I've involved myself in this off-and-on project, that I've unearthed a few gems. But I'm also aware that I'm mostly tossing up road apples. The very nature of note-a-day is conducive to this. They are all first drafts, mostly written hastily as I juggle it with a packed schedule of work demands, parenthood, and magic shows. 

It's a cliché but it's true: genius is only 10 per cent inspiration. The rest is perspiration. The Mona Lisa may be history's most famous painting but you've got to wonder how many mistakes Da Vinci must have covered up while creating it.

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I think I will frame the lyrics to New World in the Morning and hang them above the computer in my writing room. Roger Whittaker*** would be happy about that.

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* YOU'RE A BUTTHEAD!!!

 

** This isn't entirely true. For some strange reason, I get my best ideas while in grocery stores. If only the people at Your Independent Grocers would allow me to set up an office in the cereal aisle. Maybe I'd have pounded out a couple best sellers by now.

*** My parents love Roger Whittaker so much that they named my brother after him. Sometimes, when I tell people this, they ask me what my brother's name is. I look at them coolly for a second and then I say that his name is Dwight. (There is a family rumor that my brother was actually named after a baseball player named Roger Maris but THIS IS NOT TRUE!!! Also, I was named after a character in a soap opera and my sister was named after a church in Jamaica.)