The Lighthouse

“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next person or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment—the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away.” – Louise Glück

***

This is why I cannot be married: I am always more in love with my next project than I am with the one to which I am committed. I may have longed to write what I’m writing now, and while I love it love it love it (mostly), the romance fades pretty quickly once the work begins.

Nothing beats the airbrushed imagining of a story in the mist. An incandescent dream takes shape on the horizon: distant voices whisper of intrigue, shadowy figures become new characters—lovers, rivals, blood brothers and blood relatives. I get glimpses of a time or a place: a cobbled street, a four-poster bed, a fragrant forest redolent of sap in a sharp wintry frost. Every glimmer is enticing because it lacks context. Who is it? What is it? Where, when, why? Sometimes an errant detail will derail me, like a sunbeam blazing in the rearview mirror. I make notes in desperate moments, and return to the work at hand.

Eventually, I complete my ponderous project, the very same project that I longed to begin while in the throes of birthing its predecessor. I spend a few days recovering in the trough between the waves. It feels so good to finish.

It feels better to start something new.

I start toward the lighthouse, drawn by the beacon and full of good intention. Halfway there, I am struggling. It seems no closer despite my best effort.

I look behind … and there is the lighthouse that came before it. I was so relieved to be done with that story that I forgot how passionately I had wanted to write it. Now that it’s over—and almost exactly the same distance away as the one ahead of me—it looks different. Perhaps it did not end up the way I had anticipated in the initial dreaming, but it exists for all to see where it once resided only in my imagination. It’s a different colour and a different design, but it still bears the mark of its creator:

Me.

I go forward.