The Coarse Grind: Part 13: The Burning Creed

March 3, 2019March 9, 2019

The past is the past and it’s here to stay . . .
—Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Christmas Eve 1995 I slept in Cromwell Park. It was cold but I had a sleeping bag. It was what it was. The 2-3 months that followed though, in the winter of my twentieth year, were touch and go man. The roots of a deep-seated trauma I wouldn’t live down for over twenty years. Until yesterday. I was out, doing my corporate lunch gig when I got a text for a bartending position. We went back and forth and eventually the offer was rescinded. That’s when I realized. Asking for $15 an hour isn’t a life or death situation, man. Everything’s gonna be alright. I’ve heard it said. I’ve seen it believed. I got it then, from my head to my gut, and it was a game-changer. I made my last delivery and headed home, fortified with this revelation. You could even say I relaxed. It changed everything and put me at ease. It ended a twenty-three year long panic attack that was my employment history. Employment, getting by and surviving had me scrapping and feral and anyway devoting precious bandwidth to work that didn’t even pay a living wage. I was working for the money and to support my Art but I was working so I wouldn’t end up outdoors. This isn’t to say I’m free now or that I won’t hate putting wherever I’m at with this column down, and heading back out on the road with 2 hot bags and an iPhone this morning. It’s just that I’m relaxed now, imagine that, and I loosened my grip the tiniest bit, cleared some space in my brain and am better devoting it to the real work–which is getting words to page.

You’ve got to keep working. Working and writing and publishing—and getting words to page. Write bad. Write good. Rhyme couplets for goddesses or detail your failing libido in blog form. But get words to page. Amass a body of work. Get words to page, rip it out the reel and throw it on the pile. Make that pile heavy, a stack of paper with words on the page so heavy it tips the scales and catapults you into the wild thin air of a creative life. This body of work is also a living thing inside you at all times. It sits square in your brain when you’re sitting in a brown office and haggling with the company over dollars per hour. It’s a world and a refuge you’ll want to head back to, once you leave Babylon behind, get off the highway and pull in, take off your workshirt and get the world off your neck. It’s that important, and more—it’s your why of life and that why will sear through any motherfucking how. Ask Father Friedrich or Philip Levine. Fyodor or Rollins, Fran Lebowitz or Patti Smith. Invest yourself in the life and these luminaries will be in your company. You’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants and it’s not just that your heart will roar so great and loud it’ll strike the world to reckoning with you and the peculiar fecund of your love but that your heart will be the world. This has been it, for me Good Reader, the burning credo I’ve culled from the spells of witchy women who took me into their thrall and sway, from poets who yelled down the centuries at me while they delivered the U.S. mail or steered a city bus, from writers who stripped calf torsos for dollars and cents in the American Century—artists all who stood in front of their work so the firing squad would only take them out and leave their truth, bare and standing there, in the light of day and for the world to see.

You’ve got to keep publishing. Self-publishing or on their dime but you know where I stand. Cut the pages by hand and glue the spine. Be like Justin Arnold and by hook or by crook manifest your work in book form. Give it mass. Give it weight. Give it a shape you can hold in your hand. A book is indisputable proof that you have fulfilled your destiny. The 5 collections I’ve published are hard proof. Every poem in each collection is a record and a document of me, sitting in front of my machine, doing the work, being the writer I always wanted to be—and getting words to page. Those 5 collections are my why manifest. They’re not just the why of my life, they are why I’m a writer. Why when people ask what I do I tell them I write. I get words to page. I write the truth, mine, and no one else’s. But I don’t tell them that. I tell them I’m a writer. I’m a born poet and a punkrocker, a romantic with a bad attitude and a heart many sizes too big but I don’t say that . . . I just say I’m a writer. I get words to page but when they ask me I tell them I’m a writer. Unless they’re paying $15 an hour then I’ll be whoever they want me to be.

VOX POPULI VOX DEI.

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Jim Trainer’s The Coarse Grind, a column on the creative life, has been published monthly at Into the Void. Jim was curator of Going For The Throat—a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance—and publishes one collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, per year through Yellow Lark Press. “KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM” is his 7th.

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