William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

On continuing

Two very close acquaintances of mine were recently debating, not without evident despair, whether, in the world of art, it was not more aptly said that the greatest problem the artist faces is that of beginning – as the one had it – or finishing – as the other did. I wonder that they were not both mistaken, and sorely, and that it is, in point of fact, continuing that is most difficult, and more difficult now than ever. Consider their cases. We all know someone, and all fancy ourselves not to be someone, who dreams, as they say, big, but can’t make good and convert some of those dreams into thoughts the rest of us can share. Such is the one who claims, in a work by Constantius, to be unable to write at the pace of his thoughts, only when we offer to write them for him, would he just dictate, finds he really has nothing to say. This is the one who struggles to begin. Call him B. B thinks highly of himself, and for a time others complemented this thought by thinking him a man of promise with his best days ahead of him. But, perhaps affected by this expectation or perhaps effecting it, every start stops B, and the sentences that wake him up to begin put him down to finish. That is to say, B, who can’t get started, is also one who can’t get done with it. We say he struggles with beginning, but we mean he fails to make a beginning that’s worth finishing, or – we on the side more readily see than he – to let a beginning really begin, which is to see it to the finish. The writer F, who, seemingly to the contrary, reports herself good at beginnings but can’t find an end for her works, is having the same problem: F’s beginning, having not an end, is not really yet a beginning, and where she, thwarted, leaves off and puts down her pen, she is right to report, is no real end in the desired sense. We are approaching the thought that starting writing can hardly be called beginning any more than stopping can be called finishing. We can all start and stop, but the work demands more, and who among us today can begin and finish? So what do both of these sad creatures lack? Continuity, in a word; the ability to go on in the same effort, in a mouthful. Everyone, we sometimes forget, has thoughts, and, as I live and breathe, can write them down as they come. What we want from artists – or I do; you do what you want – is a little, or much, as if it could be measured, more: we want what we lack, which is the ability to have a good thought and see it through. But this fixation on beginnings and ends, lamenting that one or the other is the real, great, struggle, strikes me as quite typical of an age which, if you consult any song, sees the act of art, like the act of love, to be the thing of one or another moment, with no sense of extended effort – “even if it takes all night or a hundred years” about sums up this lack of any sense of time within one’s life: tonight you will outlive; a hundred years you won’t. What is really described in these lyrics is the fact that if it doesn’t come about tonight we’ll happily bear the mark of failure and longing for the remainder of our lives. And I wonder if this isn’t how many self-styled artists actually reason: if it comes together today, I’m a genius, and if not, then at least I have an incapacity to be sad at. Can we hope for a love or a labor of it that doesn’t give up after the first day? Again, waking up and starting a novel anyone can do; and the contrasting case is not finishing a novel, which is to jump to a time we can’t imagine, but continuing what’s been started. Writing a novel does not take one, and – need I add? – does not take two days, one of beginning and one of finishing. And this is not owing to page count: if this is true of a novel it is true of a poem or painting. Don’t, I pray you, bore me or excuse yourself with the examples, existent, of extempore masterpieces – these are, rather than the lessons in preparation they could be, today but so much propaganda to take up and give up as quickly, which is the imperative, never uttered – needn’t be because heard in every incoherence – which carries, and disperses, the moment. And here, in continuing, is a word for the real work against the powers that conspire against the day. I once had a young person, naming this conspiracy, tell me consumer capitalism had made continuity impossible, and I dare say he was right. But this, if it needs to be said, let me say, is an empirical fact – nothing more. It is what you’ll conclude if you conduct a survey: all fall. But the reason we need the artist is because she conducts no survey to find out whether she can do what she finds it in herself to set about doing, and sees it through. Sufficient unto the day is the art thereof. If you too are discouraged by the impossibility of continuity, then give up and pray for the advent of one who isn’t, else take courage from the fact that you are, in this fact, alone, and precisely as you should be, an impossibility, and get on with it.