Tag: success

Two swimmers

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Two swimmers wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun,
When one turned smiling to the land.
O God, the other one!

The stray ships passing spied a face Upon the waters borne,
With eyes in death still begging raised,
And hands beseeching thrown.

~Emily Dickinson

Maybe I’ve been watching too much BBC lately, but this sounds like a murder to me. I haven’t found any reference to this yet, but the image of the swimmers wrestling on the spar, with one succeeding and surviving, the other drowning, is suggestive.

It’s also curious the way the speaker inserts herself as observer. The broken exclamation, “O God, the other one!” sounds as if she is somehow watching the drama unfold, if only in her very vivid imagination.

The poem also reads like a riddle. Who or what do the two swimmers represent? What do you think?

To meme or not to meme?

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We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.


The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits warp
For fear to be a king.

~Emily Dickinson

A cursory internet search suggests that this may be one of the most often-memed Emily Dickinson poems. This bemuses me because I’m not sure the poem is really so meme-able–it strikes me on first reading as one that sounds like an easy aphorism but holds much more than it appears to, like the enchanted tent the Weasleys use at the Quidditch World Cup.

The first stanza is the straightforward one. We never know what heights we can achieve until we are asked or forced to attain them–we can’t know our true potential until we achieve it, and in that moment, if all goes well, we are nearly limitless. We can achieve great things. So far, extremely meme-able.

But the second stanza complicates things. The general sense of it seems to be that we get in our own ways, that it’s our fear of success that prevents us from succeeding. But what is “the heroism we recite”? Is she talking about the heroic deeds of others that we recount, thinking we will never achieve such greatness? Is she saying that we talk big but don’t deliver? I’m not sure how to read this line.

And what are the cubits about? She’s reverting to old Biblical measurements–but why? For the meter alone? Or as a sly allusion to the heroes of the past, who will always seem higher than ourselves? We “warp” the cubits because we are afraid “to be a king.” Are we afraid of greatness itself? Of power? Of the responsibility success brings?

There’s so much packed into this tiny poem–so many interpretive possibilities. It may look like an easy meme about success on the surface–Don’t get in your own way! Do the thing! You are awesome!–but there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.

Can we meme poetry? What does this do to it, to our experience of it? To transmogrify a poem into a meme is to encapsulate it, to package it for quick consumption, to suggest that what it contains is easily digestible in one quick gulp. But that feels to me like the exact opposite of what poetry is, what it is meant to do. What do you think?

“Those who ne’er succeed”

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Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.


Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory


As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

~Emily Dickinson

Far more astute people than I have said a hundred million things about this poem, as it’s one of Dickinson’s best-known pieces, one of the infinitely anthologized. I chose this one today because of a conversation I had yesterday with my brother. (Hi, Will!) I’m not going to try to get academic with it, but instead tease out some thoughts and connections it’s raising for me.

I often feel like a member of some eclectic diaspora, constantly searching for my people. I have been fortunate to find a few of them over the past decades. I’m especially fortunate to have some of them in my actual biological family. My siblings are both makers, creators, one an artist/writer/crafter, the other a writer/artist/actor. We all dabble in various creative endeavors while committing the bulk of our time to one. My sister is an artist, my brother and I are writers. As another one of my people, my writer-friend and colleague Kelsey has said, “We are made of making.”

There is, of course, infinite joy inherent in the creative process. We all love what we do. We seek to carve out time for creative pursuits amidst the busyness of life as partners, parents, employees, activists, friends, family members, students, volunteers, and generally productive members of society. But I wonder how many of us there are who dream of making our creative pursuits our careers, our true life’s work.

It’s hard, and this was the gist of my conversation yesterday with Will. It often kind of sucks. Recently I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic, and while I loved what she says, I have a LOT of questions about the position from which she says it. Gilbert argues that we should create for the sheer joy of creating, that we shouldn’t care about success or acclaim or income or any of that. Which is all good stuff. BUT.

It seems to me that it is very, very easy to say these things from a position of privilege–the privilege that comes with economic security, with acclaim, with a TED talk, with a following of millions of adoring fans ready to validate your every word. Yes, there are haters (always, always, and it seems to me that these are definitely not my diaspora people–these are the people who consume and criticize without making), but overall, to be a bestselling author seems like a pretty okay gig. I mean, I’m guessing that Gilbert isn’t stressing about how she’s going to budget for daycare when the transmission just died. She’s not wondering if she’s ever going to have the rare and beautiful privilege of making a living doing what she loves. She’s definitely not wondering if anyone other than her mom is ever going to read her stuff.

In recent months I’ve read a number of Twitter threads by published writers warning the rest of us in great detail that being published isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that it’s hard, that it’s harder than not being published, and that the rest of us should all beware. Implicit in many of these cautionary tales is the notion that unpublished writers are completely naive and think that life will suddenly become perfect with publication, and that we should stop complaining already and realize that our lives are so much better than those of the published.

This, it seems to me, is bunk. Doubtless many people are laboring under the impression that publication is a magic pill. However, I maintain that there are many of us who have been around long enough to realize that life is not perfect, that nothing is, but that achieving our major professional goal would actually not be a totally horrible thing.

It’s so easy, from the privileged position of the successful, to tell others what they should do, want, even think. I am reminded of Tolkien’s elves, how they occasionally seem just a tiny bit wistful when they look at humans and ponder the beauty of our brave fragility in the face of certain death. There are things the immortal will never understand. The rest of us labor on, looking up toward that rarefied atmosphere and dreaming.

So I believe that Dickinson is right. Those of us who have not achieved a certain measure of worldly success have a completely different perspective from those who have. And I think that once you achieve that success, you may be able to look back and recall what it was like before, but you cannot truly feel what it is like to have never succeeded. Once you cross that bridge, there is no crossing back. You can’t un-succeed. Sure, you can stop trying and fade into obscurity, but you can’t undo the fact of having achieved what you have. You can remember how you felt, but you cannot know what it is like to have never succeeded.

So here’s my ask. (If you’ve read this far, I am hopeful that you are one of my diaspora peeps.) Should I “make it,” should I publish books and make a career as a writer, and then wax rhapsodic about how much harder my life is than that of the unsuccessful, and tell you that you have no idea, and inform you how much better off you are than I, please kick me in the shins. Thanks.

To fail with land in sight

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It might be easier

To fail with land in sight,

Than gain my blue peninsula

To perish of delight. ~Emily Dickinson


Brenna here–this one’s going to be more of a personal reaction, because I have failure and blue peninsulas on the brain.

As a writer who’s been querying various novels for a decade now, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to success. I’ve gone from rejections that critique my plotting to rejections that essentially say, “It’s not you, it’s me”–my craft is solid, but a particular agent just isn’t in love with my book enough to take it on, or that agent already has something similar, or the YA market is flooded. I feel like I’m getting closer–but you can infinitely halve the distance between two points and never truly have them meet. So I don’t know if I’m close enough.

Failure terrifies me. I am afraid of pouring myself into stories that no one will ever read, afraid that the time I’m writing (and thus not doing anything else) will not pay off in the writing career I dream of. I hit a low point this past November after a three-rejection week–a novel rejection, a short story rejection, and a grant rejection. The dark night of the soul got so dark that it ceased to be a night and was more like a fortnight. It took me a while to dig my way out of the pit.

It was such a rotten time, in fact, that it prompted me to allow myself one day of despair per month. That way I can keep the angst contained. So far, so good. When I get a rejection, I tell myself that I can get bent out of shape about it and rail against fate as soon as despair-day comes, and not a moment sooner. I have tricked myself pretty effectively, I think.

But every once in a great while, I imagine the seemingly impossible happening. What if I don’t fail? What if I (gasp) succeed?

This possibility can be just as terrifying. After all, success is counted sweetest, as the poet says, by those who never attain it. To succeed means to have made it, to have attained the rarefied stratosphere of the great and successful and brilliant and amazing–but the thing we get may not be quite as sweet as we imagined it to be, and at least half the fun of anything is in the anticipation.

But Dickinson here isn’t talking about sweetness–she’s talking about  ease. It’s easier to fail.

Well, she and I might have to have it out about that one at a later date–but I see what she’s getting at. Giving up is the only way to truly fail–as long as you haven’t given up, you’re trying, not failing. And giving up is wildly easier than persevering.

With this poem, though, I get a bit hung up on the qualifier–failing “with land in sight.” That doesn’t seem easy. That seems horrible. You’re within sight of the promised land and you give up then? Who does that?? Someone who’s afraid of succeeding. And a lot of us, I think, are conditioned to think that we don’t deserve success. As a woman, wife, and mother, I feel a bit like a carnivorous unicorn when I start talking about ambition–are moms supposed to even have ambitions? Maybe to take over the PTA, but certainly not pretensions to literary greatness or anything highfalutin’ like that. Fortunately, one of the gorgeous things about hitting your 40s is that you suddenly cease to care whether people are looking at you as if you are a meat-eating unicorn, and you just bare your teeth and flash your horn and smile. Still, being over 40 does not make failing easier. If anything, it makes it harder. Some days it feels like time is loudly ticking.

I keep reminding myself that every time I hear of a writer “making it,” becoming “an overnight success,” that writer has worked for years to become an overnight success.

Nights can be very, very long.

~Brenna