5 March 2012 John Keats…
John Keats once remarked, “Sometimes I feel as if my whole life has been in preparation for something that is never going to happen”. Keats was one of the three great English Romantic poets of the early 19th century along with Byron and Shelley.
I first came upon that remark in a saloon called O’Rourke’s on the north side of Chicago. It was posted on a board above the bar and has haunted me for thirty-five years. The older I get the more Keats’ sentiment seems to apply to my own life. Perhaps it is a sentiment that many people have harbored. Youth sparkles with the effervescence of great expectations and yet, sadly, old age ends up in a dry-dock…a rusted and flat-bottomed hull encrusted with the barnacles of disappointment. Dreams so fervently pursued fade away “into an airy nothingness”.
There are, of course, those who maintain that as long as one genuinely tried to achieve a goal then that should provide sufficiently compensating satisfaction…the effort is what counts. I wished that worked for me but, it doesn’t. My conviction is that people stop being graded for effort when they get out of grammar school. From that point on, merit should be based upon results.
Obviously, few sought after results are achieved without effort. I’ve spent much of my life trying to become a successful writer. A great deal of effort has been devoted to developing my craft, honing what talent I may have been blessed with, establishing a unique voice and all the rest of the blah, blah, blah that another billion aspiring writers drone on tiresomely about.
I was prepared years ago for success. The thoughtful demeanor, intellectual prowess, witty repartee, a repertoire of scintillating anecdotes… that whole armory of requisite paraphernalia was meticulously developed a long time ago. The problem is that no matter how much I may be prepared for success; success doesn’t seem to have made the slightest effort to prepare itself for me.
Oh well, is there anything more tiresome than listening to a writer bemoan his lack of acclaim? In fact, it bores the hell out me listening to anybody bewailing their thwarted aspirations. Well, anybody with the possible exception of Keats. He managed to do it with a great deal more panache than most of us. And, of course, Keats eventually acquired massive acclaim and deservedly so. The pity is that he didn’t live long enough to appreciate how much his work was appreciated. It seems to be often the case that writers need to die before the general public becomes aware of them. These days, the markets are glutted with aspiring writers obsessed by promoting sales of their work. A plethora of websites are devoted to providing suggestions designed for that purpose…tags, branding, blogs, paid advertisements, pricey public-relation quacks, social networking and so on and so forth. I’ve pursued many of those avenues. There is one suggestion, however, that has never been put forward on any of the sites I’m aware of…namely, suicide.
That is definitely a promotional tool worthy of consideration. What method of killing yourself would draw the most attention? How to compose a compelling suicide note…a note that would rouse sufficient sympathy amongst a wide audience that would grieve your demise to the extent of buying a piece of your work that they didn’t think was worth a damn when you were alive. It seems only fair that any writer who truly believes his work has merit ought to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for its cause.
As I consider the option myself, the only conclusion to be drawn is that my own work simply isn’t that good. I’d rather keep on living. If what I’ve spent much of my life preparing for never happens…well, so be it. I’m no John Keats and may he rest in peace.
Excerpt from: 'An Eclectic Journal...Cambodia'
