I've been moving. Which means I've been sorting through box after box of things like this: crushed fragments of my babyteeth loose in a redwood box, love letters in my teenage hand to boys I can't even remember (thank god I never sent them), pants that are too big, too small, and rocks. I never set out to collect rocks. But when I moved to California I discovered that I did. As I was opening the boxes I kept finding bundle after bundle of bubblewrapped rocks. Why? Why had I kept so many? Why had I bubble wrapped them so carefully? But upon closer examination none of them could be discarded. They were all, once I looked at them carefully, very intriguing. Which is why, I suppose, I picked them up in the first place.
I realized that I do a lot of things involuntarily. I don't mean breathing and sleeping and farting, not those things. I have other involuntary hobbies. The two major ones are: writing fiction and falling in love.
I was supposed to make a YouTube video for my friend, and was under the mistaken assumption that it never went out onto the internet. Well, it's out there. You can look it up. It is one minute of me trying to explain why I write fiction. My eyes are very puffy so I must have been crying or drinking the night before, and I just said what came into my head. Which is that I wrote to see what would come out. I used to joke with my friend Matt Ducker, who also went to the MFA program at UVA that being a writer was like owning a house with a secret, bottomless hole in the basement. And everyday you went down there and lowered a rope and a hook down into the hole and then you just hoisted out whatever you found. We were studying under a brilliant man who was always asking us about our intentions when we were writing. Matt and I both felt a little sheepish. The stories we brought in were things we had fished out of the basement. Whether it was supposed to be a vase or an urn, the strange ceramic thing that had come out snagged on the end of the line, we didn't know. When our professor would ask us why we made certain artistic decisions we would just shrug. We hadn't made any. All we had done was concentrate on not dropping or breaking the thing as we fished it out.
Artistry, as far as I could tell, was really of an archaeological nature: get the thing out of you without breaking any bits off it. When things are wrong with my stories, I often have the feeling not that I haven't "planned well," but that there was supposed to be a piece there and it got knocked off in the process of excavation. Now, I, in a scientific manner, try to recreate what might have naturally been there and jimmy-rig the structural integrity as well as I can. For this reason rewriting feels entirely different than first draft writing. The two activities are night and day.
But I have to say: I feel quite a bit about my stories as I do about my rocks. I never set out to collect so many! I certainly don't know why I was so intrigued by these rocks that I picked them up, brought them home, then carted them 3,000 miles with me when I moved. But I did. The stories are the same way. They aren't necessarily about the things I would choose to write about. If I had any choice in the matter, I would really much rather write mystery novels because the chance of being paid and being read and bringing pleasure to people is really a lot higher. But, somehow, much as I would want to write mysteries, I am not intrigued by them. If all the stories that are possible to tell are out there floating in the ether, and I have access to them via the hole in my metaphorical basement, then the hook I use, which is really a part of myself, is wrong. I never catch mystery stories. Or romance stories for that matter. Just like I never pick up quartz even though I see it everywhere because I just don't find it intriguing. Probably other people would like my rock collection more if it was all pretty, shimmering quartz. But quartz doesn't draw me to it. It doesn't say: pick me up! Take me home! Hold me in your hand for hours because I am a rock that can never be figured out!
Because that, when you come down to it, is what I like about rocks. You can't figure them out. That isn't what you are supposed to do with them at all. In fact, they aren't really for anything. You can make things out of them, you can build houses out of them, but no one in their right mind would say that was what rocks were for.
Which brings me to my third involuntary hobby, by far the most dangerous of the three: falling in love.
Not that I am terribly wise, but the one thing I know about falling in love is that very rarely do you fall in love with someone because they are suited to you or would make you happy. You fall in love with them because they intrigue you. They are a land to be discovered, a new language to learn. Whatever could it be that is inside of them? Why do they say the things they say? What is it like being in that skin of theirs? And it isn't always the beauty of another person that is intriguing and makes you fall in love: sometimes it is the ugliness, or the woundedness. Sometimes it is the power or the differentness. Sometimes you really don't want to be falling in love with someone but you do anyway. And then you have to keep them and move them around with you everywhere you go wrapped up in bubble wrap because they, they of all people, are the one you fished up from the basement.
But of course if I say the rocks I have collected and the stories I have written and the men that I have loved are not what I have chosen, it would be a lie. They are more than what I would have chosen: they are what I have chosen.
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