As I read the comments about Torrents of Spring posted out on GoodReads, I was struck by the thought that hindsight is 20/20, and that, "Sometimes life as you're living it has you by the throat, or is making you feel like you can truly fly; and the act of a life lived in full immersion doesn't necessarily promote the art of 20/20 introspection."
I am going to share with you something that a leader of mine once shared. He was talking about his wife and how sometimes he felt challenged to be a helping partner in fostering a thriving marriage environment. He shared that, simply, "Sometimes you just have to love them."
Ernest, when I read Torrents of Spring (and I now know that you wrote it in order to get out of a contract you didn't want to be in and away from a life you didn't want) my heart breaks for you as you set into motion, without the benefit of hindsight, a pattern of behavior that will spin tighter and tighter throughout your life until it culminates in your death.
Let's talk about the contract and your wish to get out of it. What led you to the path you chose? You, who have the capacity to bend and break hearts and minds with your words; you, a virtuoso in writing stories that echo the music of the human condition - you cut, and slashed, and mutilated your art in Torrents of Spring. What was left was a Quasimodo work of literature, that dragged it's deformed sentences, and mishappened framework over the shards of glass and razor wire of broken thought processes and flawed reasoning to arrive at a naked conclusion of insanely diminished outcomes. It had to have been painful to write.
What prompted such potentially self destructive behavior? You were 27 years old. Your literary career was just getting started. To have taken such an, "in your face" stance was risky.
Yes, you were back from a war that forever changed you. You had just lost a love that you, like your character in Torrents of Spring, may have anguished over how to hold onto, "She had felt lately that she couldn’t hold him. In the nights, now, when she touched Scripps he rolled away, not toward her. It was a little sign, but life was made up of little signs. She felt she couldn’t hold him." You too must have felt that you couldn't hold the love you lost.
In your effort to escape a reality that you didn't want, your choice of behavior was to insult your mentor and deride his school of writing while mocking it's established membership and following. Your choice of behavior was to write a piece of work that like the Durian Fruit stunk so badly, and prickled so sharply, that only those who were truly accepting of all of its nastiness could ever get past those barriers to be able to appreciate what you created.
Ernest, you yourself pointed out that, "life was made up of little signs." At 27, when you have experienced so much, and been hurt so badly, it's easy to be reactive. Striking out, hurting others, leaving those who fail to meet your expectations, that's instinctual knee-jerk behavior; that's the base behavior of a wounded animal. In all honesty, I've been there myself, I've behaved that way myself. However, it is the times where you have the capacity to step back and think about your choices, to deduce more constructive behaviors and to make other choices going forward that are different, that have the capacity to put you on an other than self destructive course.
That being said, there are those of us who never seem to be able to escape the black hole that the vortex of repeatedly destructive behaviors can draw us into. Sometimes, as my leader said, "Sometimes you just have to love them."
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