on purpose

Nothing in a movie by Wes Anderson ever appears to be accidental. Each scene looks like a page in a children’s storybook and is as highly choreographed as a Broadway musical. I can’t decide whether or not I like his movies; I find their artifice suspect.

In The French Dispatch, Anderson’s latest film, the central character, Arthur Howitzer, Jr., a magazine editor played by the ever-wearier Bill Murray, advises his writers, “Just make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” The feedback sounds like a put-down, or perhaps it is what Howitzer says because he is too weary to edit anything properly anymore. But I like to think that it offers a way to embrace what is accidental, partial, overblown, or incorrect.

How aware must I be of my purposes to say that anything I did was done on purpose? The notion that a slip of the tongue reveals a hidden meaning has always irritated me, though I am irritated mainly at the possibility that I could betray myself through my own wayward words. Meanwhile, my waywardness on the page pleases me. I like to surprise myself, much in the way that my dreams surprise me.

My purpose right now is simply to write something complete enough that I can call it finished. My commitment this spring is to learn to share my writing regularly. Otherwise, my purpose in writing what I’m writing now is hidden from me. As a writer, as an aging woman, as a person on this planet, these days I feel like I’m at sea in a very small boat. The boat is like something in a children’s book—little more than a bucket, allowing me hardly any room, let alone room for anyone else. I have to hug my knees against my chest to sit in it, like a cosmonaut in a Vostok space capsule.

I think about the cosmonauts often, hurtling beyond our atmosphere in a little tin can. How could anyone bear to go where it is so cold and there is nothing to breathe? And what was it like to be ejected from the spacecraft and fall with a nothing but a parachute seven kilometers through the troposphere back to Earth?

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