Go forward, don't go back

The other night I was driving home from work, sort of on auto-pilot, because I had intended to turn left into the CB and head up to the Mall, but forgot and ended up not in the turn lane but going straight ahead, toward the 41 in the way I usually drive home. I took the next left, into the road that leads into the KimCentral Credit Union parking lot, and was trying to figure out if that road connected with the CB up to the left so I could cut the corner and get headed where I wanted to go.

And looking ahead, it looked like maybe in fact it didn't connect, but swept around to the right into the houses there, and that there maybe was a culvert or draining ditch between KimCentral and where I wanted to be headed. So I did a U-turn around the median strip, went back out that little road onto Winchester, to the light, and turned on the CB the standard way.

But my instinct was really to press on and see where that road went, instead, and try to keep my bearings and figure it out up ahead.

This instinct has got me lost many times, in many different cities, and I was thinking of how it is a feature of my character. I guess I don't like going back and doing anything over, I like to press ahead. Turning back, going back over old ground and trying the same thing a different way, seems to my gut like a desperate waste of time. Even inspires a low-level panic, like, "But life is so SHORT! I can't just get stuck here! There's other things up ahead to do! I might miss them, or not get them done!"

I bet I'm like this in all sorts of ways - I don't take things back to the store, I have trouble throwing out baking failures and starting again. And the very biggest, most striking example is that I can't revise written things. Just can't do it. The revising seems like ruining. My writing pours out of me as it happens, as it occurs to me and that word-generating machine part of my brain concocts it, in the moment and in reaction to whatever circumstance.

My honors thesis supervisor in college had the opposite technique - the way he wrote philosophy was by revising each sentence over and over until it was perfect, and then moving on to the next one. I wrote from 30,000 feet - had to have the outline of the whole piece structured so I could hold it in my head all at once, then start filling in intros and transitions, then filling in the stuffing so that the actual sentences were the last step. I almost didn't finish my thesis because he was advising me in his way, but after a pep talk from a good friend in the library one late night, I decided to crash on and do it my way, and in the end he was amazed that it all came together.

In the end, though, this feature of my character was probably exactly, deeply instrumental in me not making it as an academic. You have to send papers out and get them published, to keep your job. I had to papers that I submitted that were accepted pending revisions. The reviewers had read them really, really carefully and had pages and pages of comments and questions that they wanted addressed and suggestions for how to refine and refigure the argument. Could not even start. Couldn't, if I recall, even read the comments and take them in - today I have no clue whatsoever what they might have said. Just complete revision block. The papers had come out of me when I was thinking of those things, they were expressions of my thoughts that were what they were, and this was six months down the track at least, maybe longer, and revising was not something I could do, at all, even under threat of not keeping my job. So you know what? I quit my job.

And poetry - at the poetry group I read blog entries, not poems. Everyone else reads poems. I was in a class in Sydney, toward the end there, where I tried to write poems, and each week we read each others' work carefully and made comments for revisions, but I hate that kind of thing. Crafting an object and honing it and adjusting, adjusting. Sometimes classmates would bring in the revisions and often they were worse than the original, I thought. Poetry, like academic writing, is not the right medium for me.

Blogging, it turns out, is perfect!