::sigh::
/I came across this title the other day on someone else’s blog: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, by John Koenig.
Koenig has created an entire book of neologisms, new words, cobbled together from old words from every language imaginable in order to define those indefinable emotional states we all experience in our lives.
The word that jumped out at me in the other blog post, the word that made me order this book?
zielschmerz
n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could. (from German Ziel, goal, + Schmerz, pain)
Excuse me?
I get the feeling that reading through this book is going to be like picking at a scab.
Yes, here I am, finally pushing to get William Blake’s Inn to its world premiere next year, with absolutely no guarantee that it’s going to get any further than the few handshakes I already have with potential collaborators/supporters. It’s ABANDONMENT in its worst form, putting one’s work out there for the universe to embrace — or reject.
That’s the whole point of MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT, though, isn’t it? Create the thing, then release it — share it— give it to its AUDIENCE. As I say in the book:
Think of these two artists: Emily Dickinson and Vincent van Gogh. Neither was well known in their lifetimes. Emily wrote mostly in secret and in fact left instructions to burn her work after her death. Vincent sold almost none of his canvases before he died.
In both cases, a sibling rescued the work and then made it their business to make sure that the world — the AUDIENCE — saw it. Without that AUDIENCE, Emily Dickinson’s poetry would be a pile of ashes; Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night would be landfill. Don’t leave the work to your siblings. Share your work with your AUDIENCE now. Let us in. (p. 99)
Risk it.
NOTE: I will be traveling out of the country for the next two weeks, so there will be a hiatus in blogging here until I get back. See you in May!
