Love's Labours Lost

One evening, this past June, I was sitting in a tent in The Pumphouse theatre in Aldeburgh watching a live poetry reading. It’s a small venue in a disused church and inside in the dark were a half dozen rows of folding seats. The floor under mine was squeaky beneath my Crocs from spilled Adnams. Only seven of the seats were occupied. I think I was the only person there who wasn’t a friend, spouse, boyfriend or parent of one of the poets. And I was there by accident—having got my festival performance schedule mixed up. I was expecting a stand-up comedy act and it took me a few minutes to work out that the earnestly declaimed lines, read aloud from a slender chapbook collection, weren’t a sketch. But I soon found myself moved—less by the poems themselves, though I enjoyed them (the poets were Martin Figura and Helen Ivory) but by the care that had gone into the composition of these tiny linguistic miniatures, flowers blushing unseen and wasting their sweetness on half a baker’s dozen human listeners and a yawning Labrador.

Poets are troubadours born too late, living anachronisms. The power laws that govern commercial success in creative writing are mercilessly extreme. Few prose writers are read by more than a handful of people and fewer still make a profit from their work. I’m not sure that any poets do (apart from Amanda Gorman and a few in academe). My friend, the poet Hannah Louise Poston once distinguished between her paid work and her real work (“the thing I’ve been put on Earth to do”). Writing poetry is the epitome of a labour of love.

No wonder I write poetry.

There’s often a gap between the things that people say they value—perhaps think they value—and the things for which they are prepared to pay in time, attention, pounds and pence. Revealed preferences are often dispiriting. With the odd fortunate exception—and there are just enough of these to make the artist feel that if only her work were good enough it would surely count among them—quick, convenient, cheap, easy and thoughtless things monopolise most people’s attention and their cash. The well crafted essay languishes unread, while the video of lipstick swatches gets a million views. The viewership for Hannah’s own make-up videos (her main paid work) probably dwarfs the readership of her poems many times over. As I often do with friends, I make a small regular donation to the Patreon for her make up channel myself: I love Hannah and everything she does. But the contrast is suggestive to me. What we creators most value and what audiences are primarily drawn to are often completely at odds.

I’ve always been irresistibly attracted to activities that offer very little earning potential. I’ve always chosen pleasure over duty—though it’s not pleasure in the sense of pure hedonism that I am after, but a pleasure in art. That’s why I chose to study English Literature; why I did a PhD—knowing the odds of an academic job at the end of it were low; why I traipsed around from one temporary academic position to another for a decade; why I upended my life to study, teach and write about Argentine tango for another decade; why I went to live in India; why I edit a small, independent magazine—which I hope will attract more funding soon, which I feel should have more funding, deserves more funding but which, in itself, is, by its very nature, not a profit-making enterprise. I’ve always asked myself, first and foremost, What do I love? and not, What are people willing to pay good money for? I’ve always gone down the path less travelled—and discovered that people avoid it for good reason. The path of true love is narrow, rocky and lined with stinging nettles and its labours are rarely remunerated.

I often hear the advice that you only regret the things you didn’t do: a phrase misattributed, in various forms, to everyone from Mark Twain to Lewis Carroll. It’s a surprisingly popular cliché, for a statement that is so obviously untrue. (People do things they deeply regret all the time.) And it holds out the false promise that you can have it all: you can lead a life of excitement and adventure and still end up at least financially secure, if not affluent. The odds are against this. If you’re in your twenties, I recommend choosing the year hiking through Bhutan over starting university or a job right away. But if you are thinking of making that a life choice, be wary.

I’ve led a kaleidoscopic life. With every country and occupation I’ve chosen, new colours and patterns have revealed themselves and each time I have been mesmerised by their psychedelics for a long while, until finally twisting the tube to let the beads fall into a new pattern, to let the mirrors reflect them from a new angle.

For three years, I taught at a small liberal arts college in the US. In the winter semester of my second year, there was an opportunity to go to Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka, to study local art, archaeology, ecology and literature. The dean gently warned me that I could go, but if I did I would miss a three-day faculty development training seminar that I would be well advised to attend if I wanted to increase my chances of passing my third-year review. Friends, I didn’t hesitate.

In Sri Lanka, winter 1999–2000

It was one of the richest experiences I’ve had. But, thanks to this and other choices, I am not currently tenured at one of the highest paying and most renowned colleges in the States. This was just one of many, many times that I have opted for life-enriching experiences in the moment over the tedious but necessary sustained work that it takes to build an economically stable life for oneself. This is probably why, at 53, I own no property, I have almost no savings, I have no private pension.

Back in 2017, at nearly fifty years old, I was eating biryani at one of those old-fashioned Bombay members’ clubs—all raffia chairs and striped awnings—that recall the no-dogs-or-Indians establishments of the Raj, with an Indian man of my own age, when he asked me a question that has haunted me ever since. “You are so talented at both dancing and writing,” he said. But then, as I squirmed with pleasure and prepared a self-deprecatory response, he added, “and yet you have not made a success of your life. There must be something deeply wrong with you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this remark as cruelty or condescension or to try to yass Queen my way out of it, by loudly proclaiming that I am actually very happy and successful on my own terms, thank you very much. But that would be mere bravado. In fact, this man—who was a kind and generous friend—pinpointed something important.

Again and again, I’ve chosen love’s labours and hoped somehow to persuade people to pay me for them. But things that are deeply rewarding in themselves generally do not also generate revenue. When you spend hours, day after day, perfecting the smooth corkscrew turn of a tango enrosque, trying to strike the perfect balance between control and ease, to allow the momentum of the movement to assist but not overwhelm you, to hit that sweet spot between forcing and falling, your reward is the beautiful consciousness of harmonious movement. When you compose a sonnet, your reward is the joy in capturing a thought in a beautifully succinct and historically resonant form. And when you travel your reward is a life that can be double dipped, a catalogue of places and experiences that can be revisited in memory. And you must be clear sighted about the fact that these will probably be your only rewards.

My choices have caused me a lot of anxiety. Sometimes, I have felt as if I were tightrope walking across a chasm of regret, eyes fixed straight ahead at the mountain views, or as if I were free-soloing like Alex Honnold, trying not to think about the vertiginous drop into poverty that threatens if my grip slips, just enjoying the wind at my back, deciphering the crevassed braille of the rock and looking forward to the sight of Yosemite from the summit. Has it been worth it so far? Yes and no. It’s been polychromatic. And it has come at a cost. Only a fool lives like this. As Samuel Johnson quipped, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”—or painted or danced or travelled. But with our tendency to rush in, we fools get to explore some terrain that angels will never discover.