os180127 Ten reasons why I write my autobiography  

Seven-hundred pages into my autobiography I feel I’ve hit a hollow spot, a slightly dead feeling and I’m having a time getting into the first two and the last one of the eight book I planned. The words of T. S. Eliot come back to me, “We shall never cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.”

This is from Eliot’s Four Quartets. Another excerpt is:

“Do not let me hear, Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

I am an old man, and wise. But, as the poet said: “Do not let me hear.” And so, after a year of writing an accumulation of facts and my fancies about my life, I come to the beginning—1941—and dwell on the question, “Should I write about the bombing of Pearl Harbor 17 days before my mother gave me my birthday?” Shall I dwell on the triggering event that I found recommended on a website about writing good fiction?

Following that advice for a triggering event I employed a fiction about all my life’s work in a dumpster so that our little showroom can be cleaned out and rented or sold—no longer of any use to me, a dead man, after all is said and done.

But there would remain the story of my life so if anyone cared to read it, they would see what was lost. As if anyone would care enough to read a 700-page autobiography of an obscure artist and failed art professor in Seattle.

Get real.

Maybe I was good enough to read about. After all, no artist nor art professor that I know of from around here wrote his or her autobiography—that alone is a unique thing, original and authentic. But is originality and authenticity of any value today?

Today I will try to write ten good reasons to write my autobiography—maybe this will help me out of this dead spot.

Here are ten reasons.

1. Know thyself – to know the place and times better, a self-revelation which can be shared as if a teacher.

2. Family enrichment – by reading my autobiography, my family members might be entertained and enlightened in ways similar to what mom achieved.

3. Friends enrichment – the people whose name are in my autobiography might be interested to see their names in print and in the context of my life story.

4. Valuation – the worth of my legacy, be it academic, the physical artworks, or reputation might be developed in this first step toward making stock certificates out of the physical works in our family collection.

5. Gratitude – a way of acknowledging the people whose lives intersected mine in positive ways, often for reasons they didn’t know about.

6. Reinstatement – there were things a few people did, unknowingly I suppose, which harmed me and my family in subtle ways. Perhaps it was also my fault for letting those things happen but I may claim had it not been for their ulterior motives my family and I would be happier today knowing I should not have been treated that way. By presenting my point-of-view I may reinstate my self-worth as a step toward establishing the worth of my legacy.

7. Create another element to Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life, a game of keeping on top of new developments in printmaking, i.e., the new technologies of information creation, storage, retrieval and distribution.

8. Killing time – if this is not a serious project, then it is play, a way of giving myself a reason to get up in the morning and going to the gallery. By sending a draft to be printed by the Lulu service, I then have a reason to look forward to the mail.

9. Answering old questions – Why resign a perfect job? Why withdraw from the art world? Why leave Triangle Studios? All these can be woven with kindness to the dead into the autobiography with no sense of vengeance or getting even.

10. Money. If the book is online on Lulu, I could get $4 for each version sold for $20. If it were to be better, bigger and got good reviews, it might get $25 each for a $95 book in color.