Its Own Cure

Today I taught in Ж_________ for two hours after school. No one threw fireworks at us and even the most vicious or painfully shy kids repeated “A is for apple.” I teach two groups, one right after another, the exact same lesson. There are four girls who study in the first group, and then stay and repeat the lesson verbatim in the second group. They don’t get bored. One of them, Iliana, told me her dream is to study at a language school and travel the world, to meet “many different people.” It sounds played-out to Americans, but Iliana lives among many people who have never been west of Shumen, and studies with children who think that England is one of the United States, and that it’s possible to travel from Bulgaria to Miami on a train. 

 

Here’s a poem by Marge Piercy. “Inspirational poem” sounds like something that would be published under a title that begins with Chicken Soup for the... “Motivational poem?” Now I’m thinking of something printed under a photograph of an eagle framed in the waiting area outside the dentist’s office. I guess I’ll go with “Light a Fire Under Your Ass poem.” Piercy’s examples all use writers (that knitting gets the brush-off makes me smirk), but she offers sound advice for anyone with a dream, whether it’s to start a business or a family, or to reform a diseased education system. Truly living your dream doesn’t mean talking about living your dream, getting paid for living your dream, or being remembered for living your dream. It’s the act of working your hardest at what you love the most.

 

For the young who want to Talent is what they say  you have after the novel  is published and favorably  reviewed. Beforehand what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting. Work is what you have done after the play is produced and the audience claps. Before that friends keep asking when you are planning to go out and get a job. Genius is what they know you had after the third volume of remarkable poems. Earlier they accuse you of withdrawing, ask why you don’t have a baby, call you a bum. The reason people want M.F.A.’s, take workshops with fancy names when all you can really  learn is a few techniques, typing instructions and some- body else’s mannerisms is that every artist lacks a license to hang on the wall like your optician, your vet proving you may be a clumsy sadist whose fillings fall into the stew but you’re certified a dentist. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved. Copyright 1980, Middlemarsh, Inc. from THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE  Alfred A. Knopf, New York