Romance.
The morning after we were engaged, my fiancé opened the hallway closet and remarked to our perpetually overflowing hamper, "We're engaged now, can't someone come do this laundry?"
I remember this vividly because it was both earnest and funny — a joke, but also a serious plea to be excused from our domestic lives. The night before was all surprise photoshoots at the Williamsburg waterfront and rooftop sunset drinks with friends. By morning, we were back to reckoning with the day-to-day. Our status had changed overnight, but the laundry remained. How quickly the romance bubble bursts!
I mean romance here in the figurative sense — ours is fully intact, as is the state of the hamper. I use the word ‘romance’ when considering ideals, namely our ideal wishes, desires, and dreams, because being attracted to the idea of something feels much like a real world attraction. The idea, the possibility, is lovely to think about, intriguing, and compelling enough to make your palms sweat.
Everyone is a little smitten by something. My romance, for example, involves becoming a sound engineer as a means of seeing my favorite bands play every night for the rest of my life. Or, I sit down and pen the next great collection of essays, á la Thoreau (written all by hand, with my favorite pen, no revision necessary). To use a modern term, these are my ‘Instagram,’ my ‘reality’ resembles the normalcy of daily life: I can count the number of times I have worked with favorite musicians on only one hand, and my magnum opus is likely this Substack, which comes with far less ease than my romantic notion wants to believe (and is also completed 100% from behind a screen).
I first internalized the romance/reality dichotomy in college, in a creative writing class, no less. Looking back on it now, I find this interesting because I was a music major, and music school might as well be ground zero for the romance/reality clash. Nevertheless, it took a writing class for me to better understand this universal balancing act. In John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, a book I was assigned my sophomore year, and still reference to this day, Gardner talks through the elements that make a young aspiring writer a professional. His writing is matter of fact, yet somehow, he both heightens and lays bare the romance of writing with tidbits that apply to any craft. The spine of my copy of the book falls open to the book's final section "Faith", to a page that is both bracketed and check marked in the margins:
What is the writer to do? I think the answer is, given the writer's linguistic competence: Have faith. First, recognize that the art of writing is immensely more difficult than the beginning writer may at first believe but in the end can be mastered by anyone willing to do the work. Good writing involves the operation of many mental processes at once, and in the beginning one must deal with those many processes one at a time, breaking down the total job into its smallest segments…
The essence here is not exclusive to writing, which Gardner goes on to recognize:
Second, trust that what works for other human activities will work for the activity of writing. Learning to ride a bicycle, one must learn to steer, learn to keep one's balance, learn to push the pedals, learn to stop without falling — all separate processes requiring separate focuses of concentration. Eventually they become one process.
And of course, on the topic of writer's block:
Since the problem of the writer unable to concentrate on the fictive dream or respond flexibly to the impulses of language is essentially a problem of inhibition, or the mind defeating itself, all of the conventional forms of breaking inhibition can be employed to get things rolling — self-hypnosis, TM, drunkenness and smoking, or falling in love. None of them are effective in the absence of hard work and occasional successes.
I feel the romance/reality disconnect as an inhibition, a kind of frustration between what we desire and what is required of us to live and exist. It can take many forms, like feeling uninspired and beaten down by reality, or wavering directionless in a day dream of possibilities and indecision. But the sentiment here is that the inhibition can be overcome, with hard work and a little "getting out of your own way" one might say. It is a process, this contending with romance and reality. Somewhere in between the dream and the day-to-day exists our lives — this great managing of expectations becomes our life’s work.
All this to say, it has been awhile since I have last published here. For those who are more recent subscribers, welcome and thanks for following along. Life has been filled with tending to the romance and living the reality, which is to say, it is being lived.
— caro.
Listening to:
All Born Screaming, but particularly this song, which is the first song all year that shocked me awake (literally, I was dozing off on a plane). Stick around for the horn intro on "Violent Times," 🤌🏽.
And to my friend Maddie Rice's new song, which came out May 1. Shout out to her for gifting me the little green notebook you see up in the picture of this post, thanks girl! :
Reading:
Finishing Aleksandar Hemon's My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You, which has already made me cry. Sunday's Maybe Baby on routines…
…and an analysis of a poem about a sound check, which I have been dying to share since I read it weeks ago:
You can find a Bookshop.org list of recommended books from my posts here.
Watching:
The CBS Sunday Morning clip about the popularity of watching shows with captions turned on, which is too relevant for those who are music/audio/television adjacent not to share. Team no captions — put a sheet over that bird's cage and actually listen!