I'm Nobody (Michelle)

Ernest Hemingway's friend Evan Shipman was known to say, during the years when they were both expatriate writers in Paris, that what culture lacked was the truly anonymous and unambitious poet. At least, that's what Hemingway claims in A Moveable Feast, a lovely if not entirely reliable memoir.

I admire the sentiment, but I can't admit to such profound detachment that I don't actually desire to be published sometime. (And Hemingway couldn't either, as you might notice!) I still think, though, that it's important to remember that we don't (or shouldn't) write for the sole purpose of becoming known. Writing for me is a contemplative act, and one that grows in privacy. Ideally I should have the attitude of medieval craftsmen, putting elaborate carvings high up on the cornices and ceilings where no one but God could see them. I say ideally, because I am nowhere near such heights of serenity at the moment.

My sister and I have been discussing anonymity, having spent a rough 24 hours dealing with some opinionated folk who very stridently make their views heard. (I'm not opinionated, of course. If I were opinionated, I'd do something like start a blog where I could air my opinions...oh wait...) Anyway, it makes us want to curl up inside a shell a bit, and do things just for the sake of doing them. Emily Dickinson puts it so alluringly:

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there 's a pair of us -- don't tell!

They 'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

She does make the rat race seem very small and petty, doesn't she? Perhaps it is far better and more fruitful to have your art be a wonderful secret that you share with the other nobodies. And its true, I think, that fame would be a very tedious experience. It's odd, because while I don't have any desire for fame, I do wish sometimes to be part of the communities of the respected - you know, to be in a position to chat with Russell T Davies about his creative choices and whatnot.

But is the price of that to become a "public frog?" I suppose it's mostly a matter of luck, whether to find (conventionally defined) success you have to croak your own name so loud that your throat gets raspy and you forget what it was all for to begin with. I want to croak other people's names: my characters', my artistic heroes', my friends' and my enemies' and God's.

I have a feeling that Emily Dickinson is going to become much more important to me in the coming months. And she was the truly, enthusiastically anonymous poet --- and look at how she's still touching hearts.