The Total Expression
Ambition through the lens of 4 personal essays
I recently picked up The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present selected by Phillip Lopate. In the table of contents, they offered several ways to break up the essays: chronological, by theme, or by form. I was most interested in grouping by theme and started with their first collection: four essays on the topic of ambition. The four essays are as listed below.
Of Greatness - Abraham Cowley
The Crack-Up - F. Scott Fitzgerald
For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business — Seymour Krim (Pg. 577)
Some Blind Alleys: A Letter - E.M. Cioran
Today I plan to consolidate my thoughts on these four essays and their overarching theme of ambition.
“I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the above line, punctures the armor of a certain creative ilk. Those people that constantly frustrate themselves by the mismatch of their desires and their reality. Those who work tirelessly to push toward something undefinable and unreachable and, though they know it to be a futile effort, nevertheless torture themselves for their failure to reach that hazy, imaginary finish line.
Seymour Krim describes this type of person succinctly:
“Those of us who have never really nailed it down, who have charged through life from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, from new project to new project, even from personality-revolution to personality-revolution, have a secret… Our secret is that we still have an epic longing to be more than what we are, to multiply ourselves, to integrate all the identities and action-fantasies we have experienced, above all to to keep experimenting with our lives all the way to Forest Lawn.1”
The lives of these people are characterized by one word: searching. They wander around looking for themselves but can never find anything consistently satisfactory. They never, as Krim puts it, “hold a finished [person] in [their] fist and say here you are, congratulations.”
This search for the “true” self is an endless procession of disappointments. It’s like grasping at clouds – not only are they out of reach, but even if you managed to rise to that height, the mist would disappear between your fingers. You’d be left floating in the open sky with empty hands and a long way to fall.
E.M. Corian, in his essay, admonishes us about the foolishness this habit with a self-mocking tone:
“The Truth? An adolescent fad or a symptom of senility. Yet out of some trace of nostalgia or some craving for slavery, I still seek it, unconsciously, stupidly.”
I can reveal at this point what is likely not a surprise to anyone who knows me: I am this type of person. My elusive, fully formed self is somewhere in the distance, a path lays out in front of me that leads to him, but I know I’ll never reach its end. The path seems to shift under my feet. Sometimes, it rushes backward, dragging me with it further from who I think I should be. The idea of setting a steady pace and walking without worry along the path never crosses my mind. Sprinting or laying on the ground in despair are the only options. Part of the problem, I tell myself, is that I know at the end of the path sits the Emerald City. Sparkling and perfect in the distance, but darker and more sinister upon closer inspection. The idealized self, grand and impressive in my imagination, is actually just another me – uncertain and flawed.
Krim, grappling with these issues, concedes to his reality:
“When do you stop making a personality? When do you stop fantasizing an endless you and try to make it with what you’ve got? The answer is never, really. You keep adding and subtracting from that creation which is yourself until the last moment.”
If the path is ever shifting, if the destination is nothing but a pleasing mirage, if people with the mental hardware that resembles mine are doomed to constantly be tinkering with their innermost gears, how do we not – to put it plainly – go nuts?
Fitzgerald offers a few words:
“I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’”
This is the antsy creative’s great challenge. As Fitzgerald says:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Beyond the search for a fully realized self, this set of essays picks at the seams of greatness, examining the word for its contents, dissecting it to discover the heart inside – the thing that keeps greatness alive.
What they discover is comparison.
Abraham Cowley wrote lucidly about the lifeblood flowing through the idea of greatness:
“No greatness can be satisfied or contented with itself: still, if it could mount up a little higher, it would be happy; if it could gain but that point, it would obtain all its desires; but yet at last, when it is got up to the very top of the Peak of Teneriffe, it is in every great danger of breaking its neck downwards, but in no possibility of ascending upwards into the seat of tranquility above the moon.”
Why can’t greatness exist in a vacuum? Because it demands comparison. If greatness is satisfied with itself and ignores all else, it ceases to be greatness because there is nothing to be great in comparison to. In order to draw defining lines around great things, we cast about for things to set it beside, and through the resulting contrast we get a clear view of their greatness. When no such thing can be found, we, in desperation and yet almost without thought, reach into an imagined future and grab hold of phantoms – no more concrete than the morning mist – and use them to provide artificial contrast.
With this toolkit ready at hand, we are able to easily compare our current lives with a potential future life and, of course, see our future greatness dwarfing our present mediocrity. This feeling is entirely self-manufactured. We adjust the lenses we see the world through, and the ways we adjust the focus determine our view of our lives. Greatness is not determined by anything concrete, but by subtle shifts of perspective. Cowley writes:
“Greatest has no reality in nature, but is a creature of the fancy, a notion that consists only in relation and comparison: it is indeed an idol… everything is little, and everything is great, according as it is diversely compared.”
Comparison is the power that creates greatness, but the framing of that comparison is a privilege provided to each of us. Fitzgerald writes:
“The world only exists in your eyes – your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to.”
Given this power, we, of course, abuse it. For as many of us that masochistically shove ourselves into comparisons with impossibly grand theoretical achievements, people, or futures, there are just as many that tower over the whole world – or at least their carefully framed view of it – distorting their lens to squeeze out every bit of greatness they could half-way plausibly credit themselves.
We can count on Cioran to, once again, provide a biting analysis of the situation:
“The confessional will soon be installed on our street corners…everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul.”
There’s a certain group of people – and I’ll once again raise my hand to admit my membership – that thrusts themselves in front of as many people they can force to listen, and pours themselves out onto the floor, begging to be seen, to be understood, and to, more sinisterly, test their mettle and discover where within them, if anywhere, greatness lies. We must expose ourselves to the public eye to evaluate our place in their midst. We have a thing within ourselves – ideas, creative expression, uncontainable emotion – that forces its way out of our pores, and we wait with baited breath to see if it’s worth anything. We hold ourselves up to the world and see what the contrast reveals. We pray we find evidence of worthiness, or — if we’re luckky — greatness.
Krim explains, with one of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read, the feeling inside these people:
“What unites us is that we never knew except in bits and pieces how to find a total expression, appreciated by our peers, in which we could deliver ourselves of all the huge and contradictory desires we felt within.”
There are things that are simply out of reach of our understanding, comprehension, or language. They are clouds in the sky, but they are also tiny flashes of feeling deep within our souls. These things are desperate – I believe – to be understood, and yet their very nature makes them incomprehensible. These things take many forms. Moments of pure love. States of creative flow. Uncontrollable laughter. Intellectual epiphanies. Sobbing confessions. Spiritual experiences. Unimaginable sorrow. These things, “huge and contradictory,” will never find “total expression.” In maybe the perfect example of their untouchability, I can only say that they are beyond words.
The search for greatness, the digging for a true, idealized self, the striving for perfection while understanding the inevitably of failure – all these things represent our refusal to accept the things in our life we cannot describe, cannot touch, cannot understand. As Fitzgerald wrote, we have a conviction, impractical though it is, to succeed in this endless quest. I have always believed the pursuit of the impossible to be a worthy cause. I have strived for a life full of adding and subtracting, and I’ve joined each day with the search party that’s out to find the final me. I have read and written with the explicit purpose of acquiring the tools needed to put into the words the “total expression” and find, at least briefly, a way to describe Truth.
E.M. Corian, to close us out, offers us an alternative:
“Silence is unbearable: what strength it takes to settle into the concision of the Inexpressible!”
I don’t plan to lay down on the path – at least not for too long. I don’t plan to sit idle or give up on reaching toward the Inexpressible, but I will – I’ll admit, reluctantly – search within myself for the strength to allow the Inexpressible to remain unexpressed and to instead notice it, whenever I am blessed with a glimpse, and then let it fade back into the ether and patiently wait for it to return, without scratching anxiously at its door.
Forest Lawn is a grave yard. I did not know this.