The Power of Always Falling Short

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? 

- Robert Browning

I doubt I've ever written anything that I was completely happy with. This is also the same for me at work where I do developmental and copy editing for multi-author books, and other purposes too. There are some chapters I have edited that are nearly perfect and unimpeachable, both in terms of content and prose, but generally speaking, I have always wanted more. More great ideas. More sentences that sing. As for my own writing, the same thing is true. Christ, I can already feel it now, as I attempt this essay. I know there is more to be said than is apparent to me, and moreover that it could be said better. I especially feel this way about my work when I encounter great prose stylists, someone on the level of, say, Christopher Hitchens; it can be humbling. So what I do when writing to ensure at least little bit of worth is to try to make sure there are at least a few clearly expressed ideas that point beyond themselves, that carry resonances or overtones that might generate thought in the reader and also add dimensionality and texture to the essay itself. To make sure it doesn't just sit there, inert.

I do go back and read some pieces. It's interesting to return and see what's there from a more detached perspective. To try to read it as if I didn't write it. And I've got to say, more often than not when I go back like that not I'm pleasantly surprised, including about ones that I felt in my gut were lacking. It could even be that these now come across as the best ones of all. My ambition or vision for a piece was so high that even when falling short it still exceeds the level of other pieces that had felt more satisfactory at the time. I know this is true for many accomplished artists and musicians. I read a lot of interviews and I'll often hear that a certain recording was a disappointment for them, and I'm like, Wait, that's your best record! I also frequently learn that certain recordings or books actually make the artist cringe when they think about it, though it is highly rated and respected. Could be they simply had something else in mind, but the something that did happen is nevertheless pretty damn good. But somewhere in there for the creator there was a deal breaker. Maybe it was just the drum sound. Or a sub-character that wasn't fleshed out enough or believable. And that's enough for them to say, I don't wanna hear it, I don't wanna read it. Hell, I don't even want to think about it.

Some musicians actually don't ever even listen to their record once it's "in the can." I think that Dylan is like that. I don't get that, or maybe I do get it but I'm not that way. I like having an object to contemplate. If I've written something I like, sometimes when I'm laying in bed I'll run whole passages or paragraphs through my head, getting a sense for what is right about it, how one sentence leads to the rest, how there is a certain inevitability that is being tapped into. But you don't want to do too much of that, because the only thing that really matters is the next thing. If not, you're dead. You don't ever want to be content if you want your art, or your life for that matter, to go anywhere fresh -- somewhere invoked by the eternal Beginner's Mind. Now, understand, discontent does not mean unhappy. It actually means happy, because it means you believe that there are things worth doing that are yours alone to contribute. And even if you fall short in your mind, your contribution will still add to the discourse of consciousness that constitutes life as we know it.

Ultimately, the sense of, or notion of, falling short is both real and unreal. It is real to the extent that it reflects your honest feeling that there was a place you wanted to get to -- that place where even tension is filled with grace, where opposites are reconciled, where there is no longer any compulsion to defend yourself and your ideas. But it is also unreal because, as we have discussed, who's to say whether an attempt at expression has actually fallen short or not? I'm currently organizing a selection of my poems for publication in book form. When I showed my draft document to a friend to get her impression of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the poems, it was intriguing to learn that some of her favorites, some of the ones that she felt were strongest, included a few that I actually was entertaining doubts about. And isn't this always the way? My friend is an artist and she said it happens all the time that people single out works of hers for praise that she herself was lukewarm on. And here's one more way that's falling short can be unreal. How many times does it happen that someone goes in to make a work of creative expression better -- correcting those perceived shortcomings -- and just end up making things worse? This is why many self-aware musicians will prefer a first or early take even when there are mistakes. They know that there is an ineffable power in the "flawed" version that can never be captured again.

So, to wrap up: Maybe we can agree that time will tell. Think of Emily Dickinson. AI tells me that only seven of her 1,800 poems were published in her lifetime. This may be in part because her style was so idiosyncratic, what with all the em dashes and odd spacings. Or it may be that people just weren't ready. Or maybe there never was any reason for it at all. Her contemporary Henry David Thoreau, himself one of the finest prose stylists in all of American literature, barely sold any books in his lifetime and was not really "discovered" until decades after his death. So I think now of T. S. Eliot's line from the "East Coker" section of Four Quartets: "For us there is only the trying, the rest is not our business." And now that I consider the matter more, maybe not even time will sort things out for us. Maybe that late recognition will never come at all, or a verdict of any kind at all. All that matters is that reaching after heaven. And what's more, maybe that heaven we were seeking never did reside in some other place at all. Maybe it always has always been located in the act of reaching itself. And in this act, falling short is a concept that simply doesn't apply.