Is pizza the world's most perfect food?

Writing's slow. When I was in grad school, one of my professors - and this is a full-fledged novelist, mind you - told my class that, if he pumps out 2 pages of text in one day, then it's a good day. A little daunting when you're looking at a final product somewhere in the 250-500 page range. We're talking a year just to get a rough draft together. And that's assuming that you're writing every day. And that's assuming that every day is a good day. (Every day most certainly will not be a good day.) And then there are all those revisions. Reams and reams of revisions. It's slow.

I've been having bad days for the past couple of weeks. It's been slow. I blame my job. Specifically, I blame a student with whom I've been "working" at my job. I say "working" because what I really mean is "getting yelled at, insulted, and threatened by for doing nothing more than trying my very hardest to help her in what are increasingly complicated and frustrating situations." I've come to dislike this woman, as I'm sure she has come to dislike me, and it's made me have to struggle for the first time in my life to not yell very loud and scathing words at a person with whom I'm conversing. But what's worse is that this has affected my writing.

I was on a hot streak for a while. Getting back into the novel, churning through rewrites, pumping out the pages and digging back into the material. I'd gotten through 45-odd pages as of the beginning of last week. And now I'm at 52. That's a marked decrease in production, for those keeping score at home. What happened was this woman. I remember distinctly, last week: I was muddling through the last half-hour of the business day, waiting for the clock to wind down to 5 so I could shut my office door and open my laptop for a couple hours, when the phone rang. Half an hour later, I was ready to kick a hole through a tree, and my mind was buzzing with fury and self-doubt. I was racked with guilt and righteous indignation. I haven't been able to dispel these emotions. They've continued to invade my thoughts whenever I've had a quiet moment to think. They've even invaded my dreams in strange ways. This woman really pushed my buttons. I think she has a Koz user's manual somewhere. It's too bad she's been using it for evil.

There are artists who can use these strong, chaotic emotions and create great things from them in the moment. There are some artists who need these emotions, who can use them like a paintbrush or a keyboard. And I say, bully for them, but it's not for me. I need peace, quiet, pleasant calmitude if I'm going to produce anything. But it stretches farther than that. I've had this conversation with my mother before: "Do you produce better work in bleak times or happy times?" "Happy times," we both say, and we scratch our heads at the genius of Van Gogh. "It's just so much easier to work when you're happy," we say. "It just feels so much more rewarding."

As I write this, it leads me to think of duende, and to wonder about its place in my writing. Because I think that soul, that duende, does have a place in art in general, and even in my writing. I've experienced it before, an outpouring of deep and almost frighteningly powerful emotion. And I know that it's vital in every respect of the word. So what does it mean that I crave peace and quiet? Am I too immature and inexperienced to be attempting the things I'm attempting? Am I unable to properly or effectively sublimate emotion into art? Am I not up to the task of being an artist?

I don't know for sure, but I think it's something a little different. There are moments when we all become trapped by emotion. It ensnares us and we become helpless. It infantalizes us, sands us down to the unvarnished id. And that's just life, it's just one of those things. Id happens. And like so many other aspects of life, it's what you do with it next that's important.

Like a lot of the rest of the world, I've been watching the Olympics over the last couple weeks. (Interstice - I LOVE the summer Olympics, and not only because it's the one time every quadrennium that I get to see rowing on TV.) I think they can provide an interesting and illustrative example in this case. Picture a gymnast about to do a routine, picture the pressure of having a gold medal on the line, in front of your parents, in front of your teammates, in front of the whole damn world. Add to that the memory of a hard fall taken on that very routine just a few days earlier in qualification or an hour earlier in practice. Picture the swarm of those emotions, and picture the gymnast taking a deep breath, inhaling those negative feelings, tasting them, and then releasing them, letting them go, pushing them away with her breath and stepping slowly up onto the stage.

It's the same thing with writing, really. You need to be centered somewhere - or I need to be centered somewhere - if you're going to be in the right mindset to write anything coherent. But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is when, from that centered place of calm, you choose to dive back into the chaos, when you choose to do battle with your duende. From that centered place, you look out and see the dark angel with his rusty wings and flaming sword and you step forward and throw open your arms and throw back your head and wait for him to strike. The interesting part is that it often is not until you have the choice to face those emotions, and you make the choice to face those emotions, that it becomes possible to turn them into an expression of truth.

There's an old Arthurian legend about a woman named Dame Ragnelle. The moral of the story rings true for men as well as women. We just want the right to choose our own fates rather than have them enacted upon us. Without that choice, that power, we can become trapped and buried - devoured. But with that power, with that choice, we're capable of making the basest horror sing with beauty.