obsessed!!

After completing my recent rewatch of all the Missions: Impossible in order, I still could not answer Christian’s reasonable question — “Why have you done this?”

Hear me out. Tom Cruise’s obsession with doing stunts is a meta-psychodrama on par with Black Swan. Okay? Hear me out! His hyperfocus on upping the ante of seemingly impossible stunts with each installment of a franchise he could have left behind years ago reveals an obsessive extreme that cannot be explained without some respect for Mystery. Why wasn’t it enough that he dangled from a cliff without a harness? Why did he need to climb the Burj Khalifa? Or hold onto the side of a real plane as it took off? Or break his actual ankle jumping off a building? For what purpose?? To what end? 

The Mystery of such an obsession is intriguing to me. (She said, desperately trying to justify creating a ten-page document establishing a hierarchy of Mission: Impossible movies). I think that when an inexplicable obsession emerges, it is extremely important to follow it to its conclusion. For art reasons!

Annie Dillard has a chapter about this in The Writing Life. “A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all,” she says —

“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

(“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment,” I muttered as I sat on my couch for the fourth Mission: Impossible movie in as many nights, typing notes furiously on my laptop.)

I’ve had my seasons of doubt about my writerly discipline, my talent, and my capacity to hold novel-sized complexity in my scattered brain. But I have never doubted my obsessions. They are my north star. They wax and wane as predictably as the seasons. They arrive on the horizon just in time, every time. No matter what, if I still have obsessions, that tells me the brain is still churning in ways I can’t explain. And that might mean I can still write something worthwhile.

Of course, I can’t count on my obsessions to be particularly literary, or even to make sense. That’s not a part of the deal. You take them all, or you don’t take them at all. (If you can’t handle me at my Jelly Belly flavor memorization, you don’t deserve me at my The Departed monologues!) Will the fact that for about a year, for no reason, I visited to the National Zoo so much I could’ve drawn you a map from memory with three different routes to the buffalo ever serve a purpose in my writing? I doubt it. What about how much I know about Jeremy Renner’s app disaster? These are merely the price of admission, the dark side of the parts of my personality that have also led my read everything written by or about Shirley Jackson (an unquestionable benefit to my art), or sent me down a rabbithole of researching freediving, Freud, and Marx for the past year (they are related and will result in something deep, I swear! I think! Time will tell!)

In other words, no matter how stupid the obsession, I tell myself this is what Annie Dillard was talking about. This is your fascination with something no one else understands! It is where creativity begins! Fail to follow it at your peril.

Earlier this month I found a paperback of Flaubert’s Parrot in a 1-quid cart outside a bookstore. I had no idea what the book was about, but I recognized its title right away, because when I was in high school, one of my teachers included a quote from it at the top of an assignment — a quote I’d loved it so much I copied it by hand onto a notecard and kept it propped on my desk for years. I’d read it probably hundreds of times, all without knowing much about where it came from. When I found the passage on page 33, I could practically recite it:

I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I’ll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them.

Re-reading it there on the sidewalk as an adult, I was sort of embarrassed and stunned by the fact that these words had spoken so urgently to my seventeen-year-old self. They seem so self-serious (which I was), but also eerily prescient, a description of my adult sensibilities that I find it hard to believe Teenage MC could have intuited or wanted. Did I really find that compelling back then — the idea that I could spend my life diving for things nobody else wanted? That I might come up from the deep with empty hands?

I took Flaubert’s Parrot home and read it. I learned two things — first, the passage above is not “from” Flaubert’s Parrot, but rather a direct quote by Gustave Flaubert that appears in Flaubert’s Parrot. Second, the book is not, as it first seems, a nonfiction account of Gustave Flaubert’s life and times. It’s a 1985 novel by Julian Barnes, narrated by a fictional British doctor who is obsessed with Gustave Flaubert, for reasons we come to learn more about but never entirely understand. In fact, the whole book forms this gorgeous echo chamber of obsession — the narrator’s obsession with Flaubert, Flaubert’s numerous inexplicable obsessions, seen through the distance of time and an imperfect historical record. The narrator’s actual personality and circumstances are only ever revealed to us indirectly, in flashes, and yet what more do you really need to know about a person, if you know about their obsessions?

I do believe, despite a sometimes distressing lack of evidence, that the things we feel compelled to return to again and again hold something for us, even if we can’t yet understand them. I do love following mystery threads, waiting to see where they lead me, if they might connect me to things I can’t predict. One of life’s greatest pleasures, tbh! Even if all you end up with is confirmation that Mission: Impossible III is, indeed, the best Mission: Impossible. Even if all you come up with is a blue face and empty hands.