Where salvage sits beside prized…
I had just re-read Robert Hass’ poem “Cuttings” and vaguely remembered something about it being a collection of lines and poems that didn’t make it into his finished poems – like film on the cutting room floor. Or perhaps it was flowers gathered together to make a bouquet… Or perhaps I’m all wrong about both of those things. I googled his name and the word cuttings. The preview text from an article in The New Yorker had the phrase “where salvage sits beside prized…” Seeing the word salvage, my mind immediately, and incorrectly, went to a place my pappy called “the dump” – a dumping ground in the woods on the left side of the fairway of the 12the tee at the golf course surrounding my grandparent’s house. It was a dump, not a salvage yard.
But then I thought about that word salvage a bit more. I admit, I have a jealous hang up when it comes to writers (I initially wrote other writers, but I’m feeling “less than” this morning and don’t count myself among them). I’m jealous that they produce so much that they have ample cuttings to pull from. I often read books of poetry and count the pages and numbers of poems, and think “I have a long way to go.” Their cuttings are better than my best lines… Then again, they are prize-winning writers for a reason.
But that wasn’t exactly where my mind was with Hass’ cuttings and the word salvage. I was thinking about the act of creating and how it relates to moving forward and looking back. I began to divide the world into two types of people. Those who start fresh and those who salvage. Setting aside the very real probability that it’s not so black and white, I began to think that creators move forward and don’t worry about picking through the scraps. If I struggle as an artist, this feels like it’s one of my primary limitations. I tend to look back a lot, I try to reconfigure, pick apart, repurpose. I pause at every act of creation. Such a practice makes me feel small and unimaginative – as though I have such a limited scope and vision that I have to constantly recycle. In performance (and art is certainly a type of performance), they say you have to have a short memory. The athlete who gets stuck on a bad play tends to choke on the next play. The actor is trained to move on when he or she flubs a line or drops a prop.
I see this tendency towards salvage in other areas of my life too. I am, in some ways, a conservationist. I hold on to things that might still have some use. I used to compost, I try to recycle, I keep things until I can donate or sell them. While not a hoarder, I am also not the Marie Kondo type. And it’s not just physical objects. I review my past a lot – places I’ve been, people I’ve met, hard lessons I’ve learned. As much as I like to believe in an abundance mindset, I recognize that this “revisit, recycle, reuse” approach might come from a scarcity mindset: hold on to things (objects, memories, experiences) to extract every last lesson or piece of usefulness out of them.
It’s a big big world and there are an infinite number of things and experiences to take in. Perhaps too many to spend time retreading old ones. When asked about his revision process, the poet Billy Collins said to the small group of us gathered around for drinks, “who has time to revise.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I do suspect that there are those of us who are more inclined towards revisiting and revision and there are those of us more inclined to run full-steam into whatever comes next. It might be the difference between caution and daring. I suspect for the salvager, creation (and by extension change) is hard and that swimming in the unfamiliar is uncomfortable.
Yesterday I wrote about being uninspired and in rut – which both makes sense and feels ridiculous. The conservationist withholds effort until it has to be expended (I don’t write or paint until I have something worth saying or painting) . The creator just sits down and does it – to some degree, they’ve grown accustom to failure. I suspect they worry about the outcome as much as anyone else, but they don’t let that prevent them from getting started. Their cutting-room floors are littered with effort… it’s precisely where the salvage sits beside prized….