Y is for yearning

In 2008, I want to explore my deepest yearnings.

Life is yearning meeting obstacle. Perhaps, as Randy Pausch told us, “brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." Brick walls are, in fact, the stuff of life. They make the story move forward, just as Little Red Riding Hood depends on the Big Bad Wolf to be a story. And all stories—yours and mine included—depend on yearning. We want something and something keeps us from getting it.

“We yearn,” says writer Robert Olen Butler. “We are the yearning creatures of this planet. There are superficial yearnings, and there are truly deep ones always pulsing beneath, but every second we yearn for something.”

Life itself is yearning. That is the story of life—yearning hitting up against obstacles. So often, we play the victim, blaming others (other people, other circumstances, other choices) for the obstacles. What if the obstacles are the point, the measure against which we can find the depth of the yearning itself?

Learning about fiction is learning about life, isn’t it?  Fiction, Butler says, is the art form of human yearning. But yearning is often missing from what we are reading (and possibly from what we are living?):

"You may admire, maybe you have a kind of ‘smart’ reaction—but nothing resonates in the marrow of your bones, and the reason is that the character’s yearning is not manifest.”

“The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level,” Butler says. “Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire’s heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other.” At what level am I yearning? You? Am I living an entertainment fiction or a literary fiction?

"Fiction is about human beings and human emotions," Butler said in a recent interview. “Fiction is not about ideas. Students are writing from their heads, and that’s the problem. Art does not come from the mind; it does not come from ideas. It comes from the place where you dream. Because they are writing from their heads, they are abstracting and generalizing, and interpreting and analyzing people’s feelings, characters’ feelings. They aren’t expressing feeling. They lose track of yearning.” Is this also true not only of students writing, but of people living?

He continues: “Any Buddhist will tell you—this is one of the great truths of their religion—that as a human being with feelings, you cannot exist for even thirty seconds on Planet Earth without desiring something. That’s their word. I prefer yearning; it suggests the deepest level of desire. The manuscripts I get from my students have characters with problems, much elaborated problems, and attitudes and opinions, and sensibility, and a voice, and a point of view, and ideas, maybe a vividly evoked milieu. But these things do not inevitably or automatically add up to the dynamics of desire. And it’s the dynamics of desire that make stories go.”

Desire is what drives plot. At what level are we yearning? On the level of I want an iPhone, or on the level of I want to speak my truth; I want to live my truth; I want to find out who I am, not who you think I am?

The dynamic behind our life’s story is plot, which Butler defines (brilliantly, I believe) as "the attempt to fulfill the yearning and the world’s attempt to thwart that."

“When you write a story you need to make sure that something is at stake. It doesn’t need to be an external thing; it must have inner magnitude, though. Your character’s yearning is deep and important; you need to treat it with respect.” Maybe when we live our story we also need to make sure that something is at stake, something with inner magnitude.

What is my epiphany of yearning, where “the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth”? Am I moving so quickly that I won’t recognize that moment when it arrives, but only brush past it?

Intentions: Sense my most fundamental yearnings by writing about them. Really writing about them. Not the writing you do at the surface, once in a while, when it’s convenient, no. The kind where you do it daily, to get to that unconscious place where lines connect as if by magic, and things unfold. That  unfolding is something I must wait for, work for. Yearn deeper to get to. I want to appreciate that the story only moves forward because my yearnings meet obstacles, and to embrace the brick walls as integral to the story itself, acknowledging that the plot of my life is the meeting of deep yearning bumping up against obstacles, a world set on thwarting it. In 2008, I want to rejoice in the sparks when those things collide. Own them, don’t blame them. Allow myself (yourself?) to yearn.

[Note: read Robert Olen Butler’s essay, “Yearning,” in From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction]

Note to Artists UPDATED: To carry on the artists’ challenge, let’s illustrate this alphabet. If holiday preparations (and recovery) aren’t too unwieldy, artists are invited to submit their illustrations (any kind of art–photographs, collage, digital, crochet, sculpture, you name it) for each letter by January 15th. Please use the letter in your illustration. All entries will be catalogued and considered for use in a future publication or 37days calendar – and may also be featured on 37days. Shall we play?

From the last alphabet challenge: Y is for yes, yardstick, young