THE MANIFOLD THINGS

Have you ever experienced profound self-doubt? I am going to assume – since you are presumably human – that you have. Well, there are many things of which I am afraid – which comes as no surprise to those of you who know me. I am afraid of spiders and bats, sticky seats and crowds, Wal-Mart and occasionally butterflies, but of the manifold things I fear, there is none so much as obsolescence.

The wife pointed out a Milton sonnet to me this afternoon after I had been pondering my own possible creative demise:

When I consider how my light is spent
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd?’
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

Today I am drawn to this poem. It speaks for me far better than I could put it at the moment. I am feeling a mixed doubt, doubt tinged with enormous confidence, confidence tainted with an uncertainty as to whether I shall ever fulfill what I believe I can do. Milton was 43 [-ish] and half blind – if not all the way so – when he wrote this, and I feel a certain kindred at the moment.

While I am not yet blind, nor am I particularly old, I am starting to feel the age of my career upon me. I know I am still quite young by artistic standards, but the drive to the youthful genius pushes forth around me. I am more cautious than I used to be, more scholarly perhaps; my passions seem to be more circumspect, less prone to creating a furor – or a court case for that matter. When I too “consider how my light is spent” I wonder if what “Talent” I was given – here note the double implication of money and ability, hmm… I should read more Milton – is “Lodg’d with me useless.” Am I simply grinding away for no greater purpose, whit no hope of climbing higher? Today it feels that way; today I wonder if I have already made my best work as an artist.

Yet, I am still confident. I know I have not thought my finest thought, have not even toughed the fore-edge of ideas lodged within me – please pardon the use of typically modernist interiority motifs; I am suffering doubt. I don’t know what form they may be in: written, performed, viewed, or touched seem all within possibility. Perhaps I will work in forms yet to be conceived. Yet I know I have more; I find hints and suggestions as I continue to work, but never seem to grasp the elusive idea whole. Still, I remain confident.

Then doubt returns. Doubt’s harshest words simply remind me that I have committed myself to art – not simply as a career, but as something I believe in deeply, at least in theory. The confidence I feel tells me that it doesn’t matter what I make, how I speak, that good work will inevitably win, that the past forty years of art have made simple distinctions irrelevant. But doubt – perhaps proving that I am all too human – need only prod me, gently nudge and prick me to take control of my thoughts. Yes John, I understand that:

Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

I have a long career in front of me – a long life full of successes and failures – but that still leaves me with today and the sense that I too am a forty-three year-old blind man.