Public Like a Frog

Sacchi Green

Emily Dickinson, 1830 – 1886

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Does anyone, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, really feel successful for long? Some people certainly deserve to feel successful, at least from the viewpoint of those of us who aren’t, but there do seem to be many who can’t enjoy their own success, or, for some, even believe in it. There’s a potential downside to success.

I’m not approaching this topic in a sour-grapes sort of way. At least I hope I’m not. I’ve realized for some time that as far as my writing goes I’m a small frog in a bog so small that I occasionally get to feel middle-sized. I chose the bog to live in, the niche-within-a-niche that is lesbian erotica, and left behind the somewhat larger pond of science fiction and fantasy where I was a mere tadpole but beginning to make a few ripples. At least I took the plunge, so late in life that it didn’t feel like I had time to do novel-length work so I focused on short fiction, another case of a niche that almost never leads to much in the way of success. The closest I’ve come to success is as an editor of that niche-within-a-niche, and that doesn’t really feel like personal success, since so much depends on the writers who trust me with their work. That may all be in the past, anyway; anthologies are fading fast as readers go for single stories self-published on Amazon for $.99 rather than books with twenty stories for $9.99.

I didn’t mean to say so much about myself, but at least it fits in with what I really mean to write about. Would I be incapable of feeling successful if I did have something worth calling success? I don’t think so, but it’s definitely true that many people suffer from “imposter syndrome,” never able to accept and enjoy their success, always thinking that they must be deceiving people, or succeeding by accident, and afraid they’ll eventually be found out. Maybe they’ve internalized certain cultural memes of “don’t be stuck up,” “don’t think you’re better than anybody else,” “who do you think you are?” so deeply that they’d be ashamed of feeling successful.

Then there’s the matter, for writers, of stress over whether success can be repeated. Can you make the next book as good as the one(s) that succeeded? Yeah, I know, we should all have such problems. But it’s real source of anxiety associated with success. And there’s another related problem with success that I hadn’t thought of until I recently saw a link to an article about Jack Kerouac: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/the-picture-that-captures-why-jack-kerouac-will-last-forever/ The article is subtitled, “His ambition, his hunger, what was lost when they were sated – it’s all there in a single frame.” (The photo in question is of Kerouac crouching next to a radio, listening to a recording of himself.) The main point the article tries to make is that Kerouac fought so hard for so long to get On the Road published, certain in spite of rejection after rejection that his book would eventually be recognized as a great and revolutionary work, that once the battle was won he lost the energy that had driven him. I don’t agree with the writer of the article that Kerouac could never write anything as good after that—I think Dharma Bums comes close, and Big Sur has its virtues—but the point that success can sometimes destroy creativity is a valid one.

Still—when I was a kid I wanted to be a successful writer, in part as an “I’ll show them!” statement from a geeky girl when being a geeky girl was even more of a heavy burden to bear than it is today, and in part as a hope to make my name immortal. That was then. I got over it. I had to get over it. Still, I do, in a way, envy Kerouac his success.

I envy many writers, but more because of their skill when I know they’re better than I could ever be, than because of their success. Some of the ones I most admire and envy aren’t very successful at all, by most measures. I’m not jealous; jealousy implies resentment or even malice, while envy just means you wish you had what they have.

Okay, I admit it. Talking about the downside of success must be sour grapes after all, at least to some extent. I’d like to have “an admiring bog” like Emily Dickinson’s frog. But I wouldn’t want to change my life for hers, even for posthumous “success.”

Forever – is composed of Nows

Sacchi Green

Forever – is composed of Nows –
‘Tis not a different time –
Except for Infiniteness –
And Latitude of Home –

Emily Dickinson is, as always, right. Each moment of Now is a component of Forever. Forever is built of Nows, each affecting the next, each happening in just one of all the potential ways. In cases of things like chemical reactions resulting in explosions or physical effects of gravity there may not actually be much in the way of alternatives on a moment to moment basis, but in the case of humans, we tend to think that choices come into play, however conscious or subconscious they may be. I’m inclined to broaden the concept and assume that all living things make choices, however random. In another mood I might argue that even the choices of living things are determined by chemistry and physics on levels we may never understand, but in general I figure that we might as well believe in free will, because we have to behave as though it exists in order to function at all.

So, onward to the choices we make, the major ones, involving clear alternatives, metaphorical “forks in the road.” More precisely, however much I’ve been procrastinating, the choices that I’ve made. Anybody who’s lived as long as I have must have made a whole lot of crucial, life-changing choices, right?

Right, but…as I look back, trying to remember, it’s hard to find times when there really seemed to be a choice. In petty, everyday ways, noodling around on Facebook, etc. instead of doing anything constructive like writing, sure. I make bad choices like that many times a day. But at the the times in the past when a different choice might have made for a better outcome, it wasn’t clear, and often didn’t even seem possible. I came to dread choices when it came to dealing with the difficulties of my younger son (who has since, many years later, been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and a few extras) because I was being pressured on many sides but no options seemed right or even possible.

Those Nows are Thens, though, all components of Forever, but no longer requiring decisions in the same way. What’s done, or not done, is, well, done. Lately, when I’ve been spending time in places that have long been familiar—the home where I grew up, the college I went to, the place I love to retreat to in the mountains of NH, the house I’ve lived in now for almost forty years—I’ve been imagining that I see ghosts of myself at different ages, and remembering how life felt when the future seemed more extensive than the past. I envy those ghosts, just a bit, but I don’t second-guess their choices, and don’t think of times when I wish they’d done things differently, except on the few occasions when I might have been kinder or more helpful. There’s always the regret that I didn’t get started writing much sooner than I did, but that doesn’t feel as much like a wrong choice as just the way things worked out.

When it comes to forks in the road, I’d rather think about roads taken than those unexplored. I’ve just come back from a short trip to Cape Cod, where I’m always reminded that my parents got engaged on Nauset Beach, at the beginning of WWII. They knew that my father would soon be drafted into military service, and knew that it might be wiser to wait until after the war, but the British movie Mrs. Miniver tipped the scales and persuaded them (and many other couples, I’m sure) to go for all the joy they could, while they could. Without that choice, I would not exist. I’ve always been grateful to Mrs. Miniver and Nauset Beach.

I don’t like to speculate on what would have happened if my parents had made a different choice, but I do feel a certain fascination with choices made under the pressure of dramatic events like WWII. Which leads, wouldn’t you know, to excerpts from a story, or rather a couple of stories, that I’ve mentioned here before all too often. That’s the way it goes with fascination. In the first story an American army nurse stationed in England and an American pilot ferrying war planes for the RAF have a brief, intense fling, and then have to part, the nurse being transferred to the Pacific and the pilot returning to the US to fly with the women’s air corps there who have been promised official military status soon (a promise that isn’t kept.) The pilot can’t afford the scandal of a lesbian relationship, but she wavers in her intention.
____

     I thought, when I could think anything again, that she had fallen asleep, she was so still. Gently, gently I touched my lips to the nearly-healed tattoo above her breast. Tiny wings matching mine. Something to remember her by.
     Without opening her eyes she said, in a lost, small voice, "What are we going to do, Kay?"
     I knew what she was going to do. "You're going to claim the sky, to make history. And anyway," I said, falling back on dark humor since I had no comfort to offer, "a cozy menage in Paris seems out of the question with the Nazis in control." 
     Then, because I knew if I touched her again we would both cry, and hate ourselves for it, I stood, put my clothes in as much order as I could, and walked away.
_____

Thirty-five years later they meet again, in Alaska. Kay has married a soldier whose life she saved in the Pacific war, raised a family, become a physical therapist, and recently discovered how to contact Cleo, the pilot. Cleo has made a career in flying and has a partner, Yelena, who had flown bombers in Russia during the war, one of what the Germans called “Night Witches.” Later, after her husband and child had died as the result of a Siberian earthquake that Stalin refused to acknowledge with medical help, she defected to the US, crashed on an Alaskan ice shelf, and was rescued by Cleo. Yelena is wise, and big-hearted, and welcoming, and understands that she and Kay are, in a sense, living each other’s alternate lives. Near the end, she urges them to spend some time alone together.
_____

At last we lay peacefully, cocooned in blankets, Cleo's head on my breast, my mind drifting. Surely we had been like this always, through the lingering violet twilight of summer, and the long, white nights of winter.
"Kay," she said suddenly, "I did try to find you. But it was too late."
"Yes," I said, stroking her vibrant silver hair. "And if it hadn't been too late..." What of Jack, I thought, and my children? But all I said was, "Yelena would have been alone on the ice."
"Yes," Cleo said. We clung together a little longer, in perfect understanding of how much, after all, we had.
_____

Now, when I think in terms of “what-would-have-happened-if,” I think of it as a “Yelena on the ice” situation—which is also, incidentally, a story I intend to write one of these days. Or years.

Enough of speculation on forks in the road. Today, and often lately, I’ve been concentrating on the Nows of these lovely autumn days. I’ve stood in the yellow (and orange and scarlet and green) woods of Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken and not worried about which of two diverging paths to take, but just absorbed the beauty, the glory, the infinite gift of being there, in the moment, in the Now.