Our home used to be owned by a gardener. When she moved out she took with her the plants that required careful upkeep, and left the rest of her cultivation: an inheritance of surprises, which have flourished so far despite our benign neglect. One week in spring, up pops a flower with snakeskin petals—then, on tall stalks, spheres composed of a thousand tiny sharp purple blossoms.
We have friends visiting, with their dog and child, and one of them (farm-raised and botanically minded) pointed to this week’s gift, long purple bell-like flowers hanging from a central stalk. “That’s digitalis—don’t let the baby eat it.” Or the dog, I imagined. The friend explained, no, we’re not so worried about the dog, though he shouldn’t eat foxglove either. It tastes too bitter for animals to eat much of it. But humans can like bitter flavors, or learn that they’re good for you. We explore them.
Babies start solid foods by eating (mostly) what they’re offered—but soon after, they begin to reject a wide range of foods, particularly bitter ones. I’ve been told this is because toddlers are far more sensitive to bitter flavors than are adults: a developing organism with low body mass approaches possible toxins with caution. Adults are bigger, our growth is complete, and we need to be less worried. As we grow, we learn to eat bitter. We do learn, because bitterness is often found with other benefits. Coffee has a bitter taste, and tea, and leafy greens.
In Chinese martial arts you’ll often hear the phrase 吃苦 chi1ku3, “eating bitter,” to refer to the kind of diligent, difficult, repetitive, painful exercise needed to develop skill. Spend four hours in deep horse stance: eating bitter. Carry water buckets up the mountain: eating bitter. Plunge your hands into hot sand repeatedly to toughen them: eating bitter. But of course it’s also possible to overtrain, to injure yourself. Breaking a bone does not improve the bone.
In writing we often talk about doing the hard work, about how, in the words of Red Smith: “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” There are injunctions to suffer for your art, implying that if you have not suffered, if you are not suffering, you’re not producing the true coriander. We romanticize the broken genius, the tormented poet. (Forgetting that, for many of these people, the most productive intervals of their life were those most buttressed by help, friendship, and simple money against the causes of their suffering.) We eat bitter. But some bitterness is simply poison—or, as with foxglove, may be useful in some quantities and concentrations, and harmful in others.
After so many years of hearing “art is suffering,” I have seen a countervailing trend to shun bitterness, to “let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves,” while leaving off the poem’s immediate next line: “tell me of despair, yours, / and I will tell you mine.” Which can lead to another cul-de-sac: if the work feels hard, it must not be good, or you must be doing something wrong. Work may, of course, be a source of solace. I think it must be, if it’s to have a place within a functioning life. But that does not mean it is painless, or entirely sweet.
I was not an athletic kid. I liked thousand page fantasy novels too much for that. I had to convince myself to move my body by doing things that felt like they belonged in thousand page fantasy novels: fencing, martial arts, hiking and camping. I didn’t run much, and when I did I felt like I was about to die. I started running in a more directed way early in the pandemic—working my way up through intervals. I began to notice the fine degrees of difference between a run that was doing the work, and a run that pushed too far. I gained some comfort walking that line. One virtue of eating bitter, I think, is that it helps you learn the taste and sensation of helpful bitterness, and how to tell it apart from the bitterness that breaks you down, or poisons you.
Humans—I don’t think this is just me—seem so drawn to framing oppositions, and settling on a single big answer or another. “If your art does not repent in sackcloth and ashes it is worthless.” “How dare you question my comfort writing!” I wonder (I’ve been around a lot of kids recently) if there’s some developmental psychology at work here: we remember crawling, a slow-moving state of more or less constant stability. And then we take our first, quite literal, steps into a uniquely human mode: the odd controlled fall that is to walk, to run. We place our weight on one side of an opposition, we lean forward until we begin to fall, we catch ourselves on the other side, and if we want to move forward fast, we keep leaning. We learn to do this about the same time we acquire an aversion to bitter tastes.
It is strange, to be forever falling. I wonder if there’s not some deep therapsid memory within us that finds it uncomfortable, that dizzies and wants out. But we see so much more from up here, and we can cover ground.
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Upcoming events: On July 23 at 3pm I’ll be at Copper Dog Books in Beverly, MA to chat with the most excellent Kevin Hearne about his new book, Curse of Krakens. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll join us.
Touché, Max. And in older age, the bitterness can be a sweet reminder of earlier times once forgotten. BTW I’m enjoying Wicked Problems. It’s the best part about recovering at home from Covid!
Excellent as always. Our yoga teacher says the same: "stretch yourself to your limit, but not beyond." Under limit, you're bored, it's easy for your mind to wander. Beyond the limit, you get injured. Goldilocks zone, over and over.
I am in a rare, blissful period, where regular writing is not a struggle. Every week or so, I run a game. The next day, or the day after, I write the next scene. I don't push myself to write beyond, but I always do write, part inspired by the previous day's game, part nervous about not having something ready for next time. Last week, I wrote the third to last chapter of the campaign, and sketched out the second to last one.
I don't know what changed, how I went from bitterness and frustration to a happy cadence; but I certainly am much happier now than either when a) I was focusing on word count, or b) not writing at all. Who knows what's next?