The Blackbird Letters #4: Writing as Discontent

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at thirteen aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. This is the fourth dispatch.

Dear friend,

I’m glad you wrote about observation last time because I feel like I’ve been too busy noticing to even think about writing about it. I’m going to try to not let our yard become a trope, but it’s May 5th in upstate New York and our blank slate of a yard is filling in. Spring has sprung and everywhere around us it’s springing still. All the perennials are popping up and I’ve thrown an annual or two around, hoping they take. The weather app says it’s clear sailing from here on out, but the Farmer’s Almanac says wait until Mother’s Day or May 15th. I may be tempting fate a bit to dig a few holes and plant a few plants, but I like to live life on the edge.

Just kidding. I like to do the very opposite of living life on the edge.

I think of observation as a virtue, the art of seeing, noticing, paying attention, as you wrote. But observation is also, I think, a form of discontent. Or rather, the fruit of a kind of discontent. The sort that says, “I am not all there is in the world and I know there must be more.”

You and I have talked about imposter syndrome before, the sense that we’re faking it until we make it all the while knowing that there is no single solitary island of being made to be found. It is the Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, it is Atlantis, it is the Bermuda Triangle, is the fruit that promises being like God. It’s all an illusion born out of a sense of “This can’t be it. There must be more.”

Observation is what we do when what we see is no longer enough. Discontent is what powers it.

So, writing as a form of discontent? What were we thinking when we suggested this one? I think it was you, which wouldn’t surprise me, since it’s a constant theme in your writing. You have clearly done more thinking about it than I have. Discontent turns me inward, but you have learned to turn it outward. When I am discontent, I hide, become invisible, small and small-minded.

I think I used to write more from a sense of discontent, back when I was braver, more courageous, when life hadn’t battered me about, and when vulnerability didn’t bite me in the backside as often as it does now. I wrote about dreams I had, hopes and plans, wishes and thoughts about the future. I wrote about what I wanted instead of what just was. I wrote about the ideal and now I feel like I mostly just write about what happens when the ideal doesn’t happen.

What I mean to say is that when we’re young, discontent leads us to think there is more, and as we grow older, discontent becomes almost dangerous. We watch too many of our peers fail in their marriages, in their ministries, in their vocations and parenthood, because of discontent. We have seen the myriad of empty ways our own discontent has led to downfall, brokenness, division. If not immediately, then one, two, three steps removed. Almost everything I have done that was born out of discontent has led nowhere good.

But (and this is why I think we may have chosen this one) there have been a few things in life, very few mind you, that borne as they were in discontent, still turned out okay—even good. Writing was one of them for me and perhaps for you too.

As much as imposter syndrome has plagued me every step of the way (Is it my thorn? My personality?), I have still sat down in the chair, placed my fingers on the keyboard, and let them dance. They know the steps by heart, their chemistry is undeniable, these fingers belong on keys. My discontent in life has turned, for better or worse, into my vocation, my livelihood.

Now it occurs to me that almost everything good we do may actually be borne of discontent, a sense that something isn’t just right as it is, even if is. It’s the painting we never quite finish, the piece we never quite leave alone, the yard I’ll never stop planting in. We keep coming back to make and remake and remake again, because, in some ways, our discontent is holy isn’t it? It’s what we were put on earth to do, care for and cultivate what is there, plant and supplant what is not, bear fruit in multiples. It’s never, never, never enough.

This is why we write but it’s also why we keep writing. Why we’re writing these letters to one another, even. Because no matter how much has been said, perhaps we still need to keep on saying.

In discontent,

Lore