LUCIFER
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writers’ musings:
“Artistic achievement is in large part a function of will; it is rarely a function of character. Ada Louise Huxtable
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I am known as the woman who cannot sit down to watch some riveting television if the dishes aren’t done. I cannot deal with e-mail before the bed is made. That is how I am, that is who I am. Blessedly by now I am quite comfortable in my ways. No point in flagellations over this stuff anymore.
When I at last had some found days, found time, finally, without further ado, I’d gotten to the long-delayed moment of going back into all my writing notebooks in order to transpose them into the computer. And I have come up stunned.
I remember writing these pieces. But I have no way of knowing how. I read them now, and I am abject before them, humbled in their presence, my own work. Did I REALLY write that? It isn’t ego or value judgment. What translates to me, and me alone, is the utter miracle of the act. The dredging of mind and memory, the calling of words, phrases, concepts, and letting my very hand make a page into a ouija board.
Writing matters. (There is a pun here.) I am beginning to see that it is not an issue of remembrance, or of importance, of witnessing or declaration, of gravitas or legerdemain. It truly is some alchemy through which some pulse comes into existence. Right this moment I am faltering in writing about writing. My one idea of the mystery of the act is stymying me even as I exult in its deep realization.
Oddly, never have I doubted my ability or impulse to write. It is something toward which I’ve had certitude, always. Never mind that I don’t write much more than I DO write. Writing is something that I deeply trust.
No question, though, that I am an underachiever. I’ve never felt I’ve squandered my ability. I have, though, squandered time. I am guilty of wandering through thickets of diversions, a lifetime of digressions from the act itself because I always knew it was there, immanent, inexhaustible. I admit I have been shamed by the arguably less-gifted but more accomplished, who DO it, when I don’t. Is it laziness? No, I don’t feel lazy, exactly. Undisciplined? Maybe: a gifted natural pianist who doesn’t bother to practice.
Then there are the ones who are gorgeous and masterful, who flatten the likes of me. I am awed and thrilled by what they’ve put out into the world. Lucifer comes and sits on my shoulder and tells me I cannot come up to that.
There are so many gatekeepers, impediments to moving forward. Just when I get myself into the saddle, find my seat, take the reins, set off at a trot into the wind, I am brought up short. Can’t go that way from all those gatekeepers, the arbiters who reject and refuse, the nay-sayers who prevent one’s riding through. So I ride around the fence to the next gate, and the next, and they don’t open, and do I have to figure that they WON’T open? I join the ranks of the unacknowledged. We are brought low.
Thus I ruminate as I sit in a chair for a haircut from a beautiful French-Moroccan woman wielding the scissors just by my ear. ‘Do you hear that?’ she says. ‘Hear what?’ “There’s a nest,’ she says. ‘It’s just there, outside.’ I hear only the sound of the blades of the scissors. She stops. And there it is. The weakest music, the universal chord of the newest emerged from the egg, from the clam shell, prima vera. It’s not hopeless. Look. Listen. There is so much to perceive.
You idiot, I say… to myself. To that newest chick in the nest. To the beautiful woman wielding the scissors just by my ear that at first obscured the tweet close by the window outside. To Lucifer, who is laughing in victory, who managed to knock me off my pins to place me in the arena with Com-pete and Com-pare, those two wretched stepsisters. Oh, well. They are real. Real witches of double-bubble, toil and trouble, who get in the way and take you down the nowhere path.
This exercise, now, of review of my own past work, of re-visiting – - brings up mortality. There is NOT tons of time. There is not tons of time LEFT. The lovers have come and left. The career ebbed and flowed. The marriage lasted and changed. The children are grown and gone. Now I am a widow. There are only a few more corners to round…
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Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid
Judith, this moved me deeply.
What I admire most is that you are not really writing about ambition or accomplishment here. You are writing about consciousness itself, about the strange, holy fact that something inside us keeps trying to make meaning out of being alive. That is the real act. The publication, the gatekeepers, the comparison game ... those are weather systems passing overhead. The deeper current is the pulse you describe so beautifully.
And I think you are too hard on yourself about “underachievement.” The world tends to measure output. But some people are gatherers of perception. You notice the fledgling outside the window while the scissors are still clicking by your ear. Most people never hear the bird at all. That attentiveness is not a lesser gift. It may in fact be the source of the writing itself.
I also loved your naming of Lucifer, Com-pete, and Com-pare. They never really leave us, do they? Even now. Especially now. But the chick in the nest wins the piece. Quietly. Without argument.
And those final lines landed hard. There are only a few more corners to round. True. Which is perhaps why work like this matters even more now because it is stripped of performance. It feels utterly lived-in. Wise, unsparing, and very tender.
You are still hearing the bird. That feels like grace to me.
I love this, Judith. No one writes better about writing badly. It's what we do, we writers -- we crawl up our own keysters and then complain about the view. But I wouldn't trade professions for all the world.
Mike