In my editing work I'm often helping my clients to clarify—their story or a chapter or a paragraph.  

But what if we can't?

The mythologist Martin Shaw talks about the authenticity of incompleteness, how this is part of what it means to be human, and I feel the truth of this deep down.

Honestly, this is a friendly debate I've been having with myself for years. Sometimes I revel in accepting the incompleteness of being human (and its bedfellow bewilderment) and other times I am passionately seeking coherence and clarity...a version of completeness. 

I think it's a spectrum I move along depending on how confusing life is feeling. 

And I am in awe of writers like Fanny Howe, who fully embrace the bewilderment. Here's the opening line in her collection of essays Meditations on a Wedding Dress: “What I’ve been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and a politics.”

Ms. Howe goes on to write: “There is a Muslim prayer that says, ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment,’ and this prayer belongs both to me and to the strange Whoever who goes under the name of ‘I’ in my poems—and under multiple names in my fiction—where error, errancy, and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story.”

I read these words from Fanny Howe some years ago when life was feeling especially confusing, and her idea of bewilderment as a way of living and writing actually rattled/perplexed me so much that I wrote to her (I did a deep-dive search on the internet and found an old email address). What about the importance of coherence? I asked. She kindly wrote me back, but, fittingly, she didn't answer my question. Ha!

Anyway, today, I'm thinking about what it means to let go of clarifying, to let go even of clarifying this internal debate. This is the next step for my bewildered, incomplete, looking-for-clarity self.

With care,
Brianna 

p.s. And an essay on Fanny Howe's poetry of bewilderment.