TITLE: Making Something That Is Part Of Who You Are
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 27, 2019 10:23 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 The narrator in Rachel Cusk's "Transit" relates a story told to
 her by Pavel, the Polish builder who is helping to renovate her
 flat.  Pavel left Poland for London to make money after falling
 out with his father, a builder for whom he worked.  The event
 that prompted his departure was a reaction to a reaction.  Pavel
 had designed and built a home for his family.  After finishing,
 he showed it to his father.  His father didn't like it, and said
 so.  Pavel chose to leave at that moment.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 'All my life,' he said, 'he criticise.  He criticise my work,
 my idea, he say he don't like the way I talk -- even he
 criticise my wife and my children.  But when he criticise my
 house' -- Pavel pursed his lips in a smile -- 'then I think,
 okay, is enough.'
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 I generally try to separate myself from the code and prose I
 write.  Such distance is good for the soul, which does not need
 to be buffeted by criticism, whether external or internal, of
 the things I've created.  It is also good for the work itself,
 which is free to be changed without being anchored to my identity.

 Fortunately, I came out of home and school with a decent sense
 that I could be proud of the things I create without conflating
 the work with who I am.  Participating in
<A HREF="https://hillside.net/conferences/usefuldocuments/65-conferences/how-to-run-plop/235-how-to-hold-a-writers-workshop">
   writers' workshops</A>
 at
<A HREF="https://hillside.net/conferences/plop">
   PLoP conferences</A>
 early in my career taught me some new tools for hearing feedback
 objectively and focusing on the work.  Those same tools help me to
 give feedback better.  I use them in an effort to help my students
 develop as people, writers and programmers independent of the code
 and prose they write.

 Sometimes, though, we make things that are expressions of ourselves.
 They carry part of us in their words, in what they say to the world
 and how they say it.  Pavel's house is such a creation.  He made
 everything: the floors, the doors, and the roof; even the beds his
 children slept in.  His father had criticized his work, his ideas,
 his family before.  But criticizing the house he had dreamed and
 built -- that was enough.  Cusk doesn't give the reader a sense
 that this criticism was a last straw; it was, in a very real way,
 the only straw that mattered.

 I think there are people in this world who would like just once in
 their lives to make something that is so much a part of who they
 are that they feel about it as Pavel does his house.  They wish to
 do so despite, or perhaps because of, the sharp line it would draw
 through the center of life.
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