Learning to Love the Weeds

by Susan Grieger

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life

I've always thought of writing as a discipline. Writing is hard work. Practise, practise, I'd repeat to myself as I relentlessly rolled another sheet into the typewriter or, later, as I called up another untitled document on my Macintosh. When discipline failed and writer's block set in, I thought of writing as a campaign, a marshalling of inner resources. In blocked times, I'd think of a poem by John Berryman:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
—from Dream Song #14

This poem was strangely comforting. If a depressed alcoholic like Berryman could make art bloom from his inner desert, perhaps I could, too.

If the healthy creative imagination can be compared to a garden, then writer's block is scorched earth. Diligent watering, fertilizing, and weeding are every gardener's humdrum tasks, but luckily, there's a whole quasi-military-industrial complex out there to help. From the corner hardware store come poisons to quell weeds, while more upscale garden centres offer chrome-plated cultivators, available with a long handle that lets us delve without breaking our backs. There are compost bins and bags of deodorized sheep manure, all waiting to help us transform bare earth into gardens.

For blocked writers, there is now a burgeoning writer's block industry to help us deal with our dearth of mental vegetation. My introduction to this industry came in March 1994, when, along with the spring nursery catalogues, the new crop of brochures on summer writing courses began to sprout in my mailbox.

Like the lawn-care professionals who regularly tantalize me with visions of a lawn so healthy and weedless that I can play croquet barefoot in it, the creative-imagination-care professionals promised to cultivate the strength and vigor of my ideas. In the winter of my block, I pictured myself galumphing barefoot through my newly humming neuro-networks, whacking along at the keyboard with the abandon of a six-year-old.

I had heard about Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, had leafed through it casually, and had discussed its efficacy with one or two writer friends. At a retreat I attended with members of my writing group, some folks rose at dawn to perform the daily devotions that Cameron recommends—the Morning Pages. Cameron swears by the Morning Pages—a daily three pages of longhand writing on any topic, done first thing in the morning. She believes that this exercise, done consistently for twelve weeks, encourages the blocked writer to dream, muse, bitch, moan, and otherwise free-associate without guilt, and to get back in touch with her Inner Artist. Another of Cameron's favorite exercises is the Artist's Date, a weekly couple of hours of solitary indulgence in activities she might otherwise deny herself—going to a museum, finger painting, playing the kazoo, or whatever excites her creativity. I don't mean to imply that Artist's Dates have to be silly or childish, but I gather that it helps if they are. Cameron wants us to recover our ability to play. She wants us to get back in touch with the Inner Artist, who frankly sounds a lot like the Inner Child of current pop psychology.

For someone who thinks of writing as a discipline, as I am prone to do, here was a refreshing paradox—that by indulging myself in a series of playful activities, I might find discipline. Here was news I wished I could time-warp back to John Berryman: You don't lack inner resources, Johnny. You're simply out of touch with your Inner Artist. At last I obtained a copy of The Artist's Way and set to—I almost set to work, but thinking better of it, I set to running barefoot through my inner resources.

Cameron says it's okay if you hate the Morning Pages, and hate them I certainly did. I didn't hate the writing of them so much as I hated getting up. I hated leaving the warm bed, leaving the habitual morning cuddling with my partner. After a week, though, I had to admit that I had at least found a certain satisfaction in sticking to the discipline. Artist's Dates were more fun. The first one I spent wandering through a hardware store, examining all the power tools. When I was growing up, girls didn't use power tools. I sketched out the beginning of a short story about a young woman who teaches herself to use her husband's circular saw, but before I could finish it, it was time for my second Artist's Date. I fixed up the basement toilet space, using odds and ends of paint and fabric and a light fixture that might have been salvaged from the McCarthy era. At last—light enough not just to meditate on the john, but actually to read! Finally, I had a place to write my Morning Pages while my partner was upstairs shaving.

As time went on, however, my writing exercises under the spotlight's pitiless glare took on the aspect of a self-interrogation. Discipline, again!

I took the Fifth Amendment.

Undeterred, if slightly strained about the eyelids, I pushed on to Cameron's suggestion that I list things that block creativity. When you are truly blocked, finding a cat hair on the computer sceen can be reason enough to clean the entire house. I cut to the main points: lack of time, lack of money, running out of caffeinated coffee, running into too much strong liquor, and putting things in drawers. (Personally, I have little use for putting things in drawers; it's something I do to placate my partner.) While my list of blockers is dispiritingly commonplace, completing it did make me feel better. If these time-honored distractions were all that were keeping me from writing, then perhaps my problem was smaller than I thought.

Somewhat encouraged, I listed my heroes of creativity. I thought first of my junior high teacher, Eugene Schnick, who admired my water-color painting and consistently met the onslaught of hormone-charged adolescents with humor. One day when the class had been rowdier than usual, Mr. Schnick walked to the blackboard and drew two circles on it. One he labelled "Panic" and the other he labelled "Picnic." Below the two circles, he printed, "Press One."

I had a hopeless crush on Mr. Schnick.

After two or three weeks, I began to notice a theme running through the activities that my Inner Artist chose and the memories she dwelled on. I had a little talk with my Inner Artist.

ME: Do you resent my relationship with my partner?

INNER ARTIST: What?

ME: I feel as though you resent my being in love with my spouse.

INNER ARTIST: No. What's your point?

ME: Well, whenever I do something out of love for him, like keeping my office halfway tidy and confining the stacks of paper to the desk, rather than the couch or the floor, you tell me I'm stifling your creativity. You stamp your foot and sulk, exactly like a spoiled brat.

INNER ARTIST: Brat, shmat. Didn't someone say that writer's block is a spiritual malaise? I'm suffering from a spiritual malaise and you want to do housekeeping. What a dork.

ME: Living with someone you love is a matter of compromise. If you loved anyone but yourself, you'd know that.

INNER ARTIST: Of course I love myself. Who else is going to love me, if I don't put myself first? You should try it sometime.

ME: Not if it makes me act like a spoiled brat.

INNER ARTIST: Well, you do, too. If you're not spoiled, why haven't you asked what I believe in, rather than making me go through all this dorky stuff about heroes of creativitiy and power saws? Who cares?

ME: Okay! All right! So, Inner Artist, what do you believe in?

INNER ARTIST: I believe in irony. You remember what Milan Kundera said about irony? No. You've forgotten about irony, all you're interested in lately is this self-actualization bullshit. Kundera said, "The novel is, by definition, the ironic art: its 'truth' is concealed, undeclared, undeclarable." I remember that he quoted another good writer, Joseph Conrad: "women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action." So by refusing to play your silly games, I'm actually expressing my aspirations.

ME: There you go again—putting down women. I just can't get any respect.

INNER ARTIST: That's irony for you.

ME: Virginia Woolf once said, "The little voice in your mind that asks, 'Who are you to think little you could write anything?' That voice must be killed, now, without mercy. If you don't kill it, you are finished."

INNER ARTIST: . . . [silence]

You see my problem. Having come to the conclusion that my Inner Artist was putting me down, I could only return the favor.

Now, those who've studied psychology may object. Perhaps I was deluded. Perhaps I had mistaken my Inner Artist for another psychic entity altogether—the Inner Censor. But whatever you call it—or her—I guess that my Inner Artist doesn't give a damn about this wanton splintering of mental processes. She thinks that the mind is like Shiva, creator and destroyer. Her glass is half full and half empty. Creativity is a cosmic joke, picnic and panic.

Perhaps I've misunderstood Julia Cameron, but I've discovered something. I was trying to pursue my block consciously, with a program. I was like a gardener obsessed with the perfect lawn, digging out the burgeoning clumps of crab grass, dribbling herbicide on the upstart quack grass. Rooting out the blocks had become a point of honor, entirely independent of whether or not I had in mind something else to plant in their place. And here, all the time, was the answer. My unruly, irrepressible Inner Artist may not be pretty. She may be selfish and determined to crowd out all our other, more socially acceptable denizens of the garden.

What if I accepted the weeds—what if I welcomed them? My Inner Artist is like crab grass—virtually impossible to root out. Her voice is not the dignified, mellifuous one I thought I wanted. She prickles and sulks and puts me down for being too much of a dork, too much like somebody's mom. What a voice to write from!

My mental garden is full of crab grass. I call it roses. Life is sweet.

Susan Grieger is a Minneapolis-based freelancer specializing in books, arts, and women's issues. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Minnesota Women's Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Skyway News, and The Villager and Grand Gazette (St. Paul community newspapers). Her fiction has appeared in the Lake Street Review and Z Miscellaneous.

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