On the path not taken
but what is a path to a woodpecker? There is only the forest
When the adrenaline rush of something new starts to wear off and the hard work is all that’s left to keep me going, I usually hear the negative voices of doubt a little bit louder in my head.
It’s Wednesday morning at 7am and I’m sitting in the living room with my coffee watching the pileated woodpecker. I hear it all the time in our back woods, the trilling sound reminiscent of the cartoon I grew up watching, but not really the same. Today is the first time in all the years I’ve been filling bird feeders that it has actually hung out for a while on a tree in the yard. I’ve often wondered what was stripping the bark from those broken branches, every so often a new one would appear against the blue sky— just a smooth white arm jutting out from the trunk, snapped off bluntly at the wrist.
“Look, there’s the pileated woodpecker finally,” I say to my spouse Janyce, handing her the binoculars that I have in my lap when she enters the room.
“Whoa,” she says. “Look at him, he’s beautiful.”
We both stand silently at the window, straining to look deep into the woods past the crooked feeder that is now teeming with tiny song birds.
I take a picture with my iPhone but I have to blow it up well past blurry to get a silhouette. Even in this subpar photo, I can still make out its grand size, way out there, but still visible. I continue to sit here quietly, wanting only to watch it hammer away all morning, but also aware of the long list of things on my mind.
I recently enrolled in another graduate program. I’m back in school at this age. At first, I felt so much angst deciding whether or not to actually do it. Then I felt the glee of dipping into new textbooks and the excitement of the first class. Still, when the adrenaline rush of something new starts to wear off and the hard work is all that’s left to keep me going, I usually hear the negative voices of doubt a little bit louder in my head. I think this happens to everyone. I read an article in The New Yorker recently that debunked this idea of an actual “imposter syndrome.” The author Leslie Jamison writes in “Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It”
Maya Angelou once said, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.” Neil Gaiman, in a commencement address that went viral, described his fear of being busted by the “fraud police,” whom he imagined showing up at his door with a clipboard to tell him he had no right to live the life he was living.
I read this part of the article and for one second it made me feel better. But only for a second. Even Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States tweeted this recently: “Note to self: stop transforming all good news immediately into fear.”
This reminds me of a movie we watched the other day. We were intrigued when we heard that Cate Blanchett delivers the performance of a lifetime as a powerful lesbian maestro in Tár. Janyce fell asleep beside me on the couch while we were watching it because we started it so late. But I watched it rapt and wide awake. It’s a heady art film, sometimes bordering on the absurd even with its depictions of a fictional female maestro who engages in intellectual linguistic gymnastics. “What are they even talking about?” said Janyce to me before dozing off. Early in the film you get a good sense of Lydia Tár —how driven she is, how exacting, how perfect, how versed in the language of elitism and the white male musical canon.
The film is gorgeous in a gray and gold palette, with stark, stripped-down images of the cavernous interiors, the overhead drones-eye views of the geometric symphonic halls, the blank concrete walls of her home in Berlin with giant windows and seemingly miles of bookcases. And of course, Blanchett’s striking angular beauty as Lydia wearing only the finest tailored menswear suits. A recent review in The Guardian quotes Blanchett who calls it, “a very human film because at the centre you have someone in a state of existential crisis.” Indeed, Lydia Tár’s downfall is not surprising to me, her need for power and greatness isn’t either. She has been so focused on the path, on what the classical music culture defines as success, that she has totally embodied that vision. She’s also narrowed the path to such a singular and focused degree that she often flirts with how much more she can attain, how much more she can push, and it does her in.
There’s a lot in this film, I’m only touching on a part of it, but it’s the part that is on my mind the most lately. At this age, I often regret my missed opportunities. This is a crazy useless endeavor, really, but it is also a human one. At 56, I don’t have a well-developed byline. I didn’t get a coveted creative writing MFA, or go to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I stopped myself on a solid journalism track in my early thirties. I never created a literary magazine. I didn’t make films and join an artist collective. I never finished a chapbook. This isn’t to say that I can’t do a few of these things still. I’m not all that old. But it’s humbling to be a student again and to realize, in the presence of other extremely accomplished adults, that you’re not on that path. You didn’t take it. And the writing you have been doing on the side for years doesn’t quite fit into any of the forms you are studying right now either.
Still, a well-developed voice is a good thing. I do have that. I’ll figure out where my words belong in the world. Sometimes I think that as much as I’m interested in narratives and in painting pictures with words, I might love the absence, the negative, the spaces between the words even more. Maybe I’m more of a poet in this way than a non-fiction writer. Maybe it’s just too soon to tell.
One thing I’d like to believe is that the presence of the pileated woodpecker in the yard this week is no mere coincidence. All over the internet this bird is touted as a spiritual symbol of hard work and staying the course. Is this true? No reputable birding guide would dare venture into this spiritual territory. But this is the beauty of a poetic seeing. I want to imagine my lifelong progress as a creative person as something akin to the illusive pileated woodpecker as it swoops in erratically to land vertical on the side of a tree, drumming it’s red-crested head into the branch— bark pieces flying out on either side— all the while not stopping to question anything, not stopping until it’s finished, simply staying in place on the tree for as long as it takes.
And then, with a twist of it’s crow-sized body, it flaps its broad striped wings in a confident display of majesty…and off it goes to get working on the next branch.
