Poets and Kings
Spending a life on the murky waters of the Port of New York, among transient sailors, distant dialects and unknown diseases, collecting tariff payments and balancing the associated ledgers, may not have been the most inspirational of careers for an aspiring author. But there was no arguing it was a necessary one. Especially in the mid-1800's. Those payments, exacted from captains of foreign tallships carrying all manner of cargo, were responsible for over 90 percent of federal revenues at the time. Essentially, the economy of the young United States didn't simply depend on those tariffs: The economy was the tariffs.
To Herman Melville, it was a job - like most any other job - that paid the bills. It was one he held for the better part of thirty years, including the eighteen months during which he penned a book: Moby-Dick. Melville's most famous work has sold millions of copies. It is what many have called the greatest novel ever written. Even if you haven't so much as held a copy, it's likely you have noticed the continued effects of it on our culture, some one hundred-and-sixty years later, by way of a coffee chain named after one of the important characters in the story: Starbucks.
It begs the question, then: Was Herman Melville a writer, or a customs agent?
Moby-Dick was published when Melville was thirty-two. He lived another forty years. And though he had written what would ultimately be one of the most acclaimed books in all of history, it sold less than four thousand copies in his lifetime. Today, in our society, which has a powerful need to label and assign meaning based on occupation, he would likely never have earned the term "author" while he lived. Not publicly.
Our culture has told us that's how it works, hasn't it? Better to find a single tag and wear it, than to be seen as ambiguous. To 'be', to 'do', to 'practice', to 'work'; all have been casually combined into one convenient meaning. People want to know what we do to earn a living. And from that, they can apply their own assumptions and learned implications, to quickly categorize us into an easily-understood compartment. We are taught early: Find a box that fits, as soon as you possibly can, and crawl into it for life.
When we're young, we are being asked - and asking ourselves - what we want to be. A little older, and the question demands to know for what we are going to school. Older still, and every government document, every elevator conversation, every business card asks us to define ourselves by a single title: Homemaker. Accountant. Plumber.
Without question, we all have to make a decision at some point, and stick with it - for at least a little while - in order to put meals on the table, and satisfy the demands of daily life. And sometimes current circumstances dictate that even if we made the decision years ago, and always wished we hadn't; even if, like most people, we work at a job we began based solely on availability; even if we've changed, so the things we once enjoyed to do, a couple of decades on, have become a crushing grind...we need to stay with it awhile longer.
And that's when the title given to us by our jobs becomes a burden. I'm not advocating complacency. If you are truly miserable with your current station, maybe you have an idea of something else you'd like to do. If the opportunity arises, by all means, chase it with everything you have.
But I believe our true discontentment in life lies much deeper. When you suppress, day after day, the things you were truly placed here to do, they resurface as a dull bitterness. As an unnamed resentment. As a faceless anger. We can't reconcile the feeling with the source. We feel powerless to change anything, because we have taken the title given to us by occupation; of that person we wanted to be when we were young, and we have, whether we realize it or not, become prisoner to it.
We tell ourselves we can't do that, because we are the kind of people who do this. We can't speak, because we are the reserved type, who trips on our words. We can't be artists, because we normally spend our time in the realm of numbers. We can't build furniture, because we are salesmen. We can't be poets, because we are fishermen.
And that is the travesty of the 'title'. We are not simple beings. Our existence cannot be summarized in twenty characters. We were not created to be self-aware for the sake of our own frustration. We should not confine ourselves to one side of an imaginary line, including everything within, at the exclusion of everything without. And neither should our lives be confined that way.
Perhaps pursuing the things you know you love, will lead to a change in career someday. But perhaps, in the meantime, we should view things much differently than we have been lead.
The great paintings and sculptures of Europe; of Michelangelo and Da Vinci; the brilliant drawings and equations of Galileo; were funded by somebody else. Paintings and carvings and mathematical equations still being examined today, financed by fantastically-wealthy patrons. Commissioned as gifts from royalty to royalty. Though the artists, true to their talents, did the work, they did not create alone. They did not choose their giftedness. But they acted on it at the behest of kings.
What if it were not only your responsibility, but also the potential source of the truest joy, to produce something priceless with your life? I don't need to tell you it's true: Your own restlessness and longing have already proven it to you, with a gravity I couldn't convey. And what if it were also true, that a patron is required to produce those works? And perhaps you are your own patron.
Maybe your job, in its current form, is the agent which enables you to create. One that pays your expenses, so that you might pursue the 'art' for which you were born. So that you can explore and encourage and pursue that which others will see as brilliance. As a gift, appearing for them at a moment and place uncanny in its timeliness.
But which you will immediately know as simply the result of your commission from a King.