I named this loose collection of newsletters “Earthbound but Aspiring” mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to not give it a name and still get the site to display correctly, and a little bit because Steinbeck’s pigasus was the first sticker I saw on my coffee table that lent itself to a catchy title. I’m slowly working my way through all of Steinbeck’s books, but of everything he’s written, his personal stamp is the thing that has most stuck with me. Whenever Steinbeck signed his name to books or letters, he would draw a pig with wings, later adding the motto “ad astra per alia porci”—to the stars on the wings of a pig. (I’ve read that this isn’t actually the correct Latin, but it is what it is.) As his wife explained it, “John would never have been so vain or presumptuous as to use the winged horse as his symbol; the little pig said that man must try to attain the heavens even though his equipment be meager. Man must aspire though he be earth-bound.”
I’ve written about hope and about truth, two of what I would consider the most consistent aspirations of humanity, those things with which we try to be better than our baser instincts, and I seem to be unable to escape tying everything somehow back to writing and art, one of the primary methods we use to aspire to the stars, to shuck our skinsuits and be briefly more than what we are. It is a great and terrible mantle to consider oneself a writer or artist, to communicate en masse and in perpetuity that particular struggle with those things that fundamentally contribute to our humanity, to grapple with those things that have the potential to leave us floundering in eternity.
In Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he detailed what he considered the commission of the writer: “He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
You can see, perhaps, my perpetual struggle with booktok’s most popular novels and the internet’s assertion that in order to be a writer, the only thing one must do is write.
In another very real sense, though, stories that exist just to make us feel good hold an important place in society, if not necessarily in the literary canon. I recently read a fantasy with gaping plot holes and ridiculous worldbuilding, and I enjoyed it more than anything else I’ve been reading lately, to the point that I was sad when I finished it. I also, at the behest of my friends, started writing a fantasy in that particular style, and it’s the most excited I’ve been about a personal project of mine in years. I am, to put it mildly, conflicted. Descending to the style of the lowest common denominator is quite literally the opposite of aspiring to the stars, though I suppose the primary difference falls squarely in how I define my little porcine self.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.” And while it’s on my to-do list to find some less pretentious literary idols, it’s easy to decry popular literature (and the general public) as lowbrow and vulgar, because, well, it often is. Which, when taken to a logical conclusion, would make me, an artist™, above such tasteless things as “fun” and “enjoyment.”
Steinbeck believed in the perfectibility of man, but he also wrote about humanity with depths of compassion few others have grasped. The lifeblood of his books is the belief that most people are doing the best they can with what they have. It’s easy to blindly aspire with little regard for how earthbound we really are, as though one day it might be possible to permanently ascend out of this pigsty we’re all wallowing in. But what if perfectibility doesn’t lie in faultlessness? What if it’s not achieved through pedantic adherence to a relatively arbitrary set of rules designed to stratify humanity?
What if those stars we meagerly aspire to have nothing to do with achievements but are actually such things as hope and truth and courage and compassion and love? Even, perhaps, fun?
Even Oscar Wilde, in one of his plays, said, “I used to think ambition the great thing. It is not. Love is the great thing in the world.” And later, in De Profundis: “Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole.”
I recently edited a friend’s dissertation on the topic of sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity,” a phrase used to denote (and grapple with) that which is universally and eternally true. It’s the lens through which humanity can take a step back and attempt to see and address that ineffable more. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the connection between art and ethics, wrote, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.”
I don’t think I’ll ever stop judging subpar literature, nor do I think anyone should. I don’t think I’ll ever shake my ambition and aspirations, or rid myself fully of the feeling that my life is small and there’s something waiting for me, as Belle so eloquently put it, out there in the great wide somewhere. But instead of striving for peak piggy prestige—Napoleon is not the end goal here—I’m trying to gently aspire to greatness of heart and spirit, knowing full well I’m earthbound but stretching my wings under the aspect of eternity in the hopes that my life and my art might be in some small way worthwhile.
The stars may never be fully within reach, but every act of love and courage and compassion, every piece of art that moves us, every kindness and every joyful interaction I think brings them just a little bit closer.
Stay excellent,
Kristen
I recently went to see one of my favorite bands in concert and if you haven’t heard of them, consider this a PSA to go listen to Jukebox the Ghost. Not only is their music fantastic—here and here and here are a few of my favorite songs of theirs—but they seem like genuinely awesome people. And they shared and responded to this embroidery piece I did of their lyrics, which made my week.
Scaachi Koul is one of my favorite writers online, and she once responded to my tweet about Buzzfeed News back when I was on Twitter, so I’ll always appreciate her for that. I don’t watch Love Is Blind, but her article on the newest season made me laugh. There are spoilers, if you care about such things.
I haven’t published much recently, but here’s the latest episode of our podcast about enemies to lovers and all the subtropes people shove under it.
Featured image by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash
Earthbound, But Aspiring 