Obbsession

By Rob Kunzig

What will I do now, with my hands?

Thus Carl Phillips ends “As From a Quiver of Arrows,” a swooning elegy for a dead lover. It’s been haunting me for weeks, turning over and under my tongue like a pearl. Why? I have no dead lovers, no loss so traumatic as to leave me staring at my empty hands. I passed it off as the cabin fever-dream—until that was me, staring at my hands with a stone in my stomach, the last sentence of my thesis in size 12 Times New Roman behind the blinking cursor.

It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that something happened three years ago, is the subject of my honors thesis, and has reminded me of the pyrrhic necessity of obsession in writing.

The word “obsession” carries a stigma, associated with fanaticism, zealotry or over-enthusiastic significant others. It implies unhealthy excess, a dependence on the object of fixation. Addiction doesn’t seem too far off. Of course it’s the writer’s best friend.

In the typical tools-of-the-trade interview, where writers are plumbed for their work habits, including music, gastronomic and sleep patterns, most talk about writing the way a priest talks about devotional meditation: a small, uncluttered room; a window, maybe not; above all, silence, uninterrupted hours of silence. Complete immersion.

I started writing in September, prancing around the periphery of my subject with simple five to ten-page meditations. I worked in my carrel, a cubicle with a lockable door issued to double majors and those naive enough to undertake honors. By the time I moved onto writing about the interviews I had stopped reading for class, instead spending hours hunched over transcripts, listening to the tinny voices through headphones. By January I was spending six to seven hours a day in my carrel, shuffling to the bar afterwards with a friend to have a beer and talk about—what else?—our papers.

While my grades were stable—ironically, the best they’d ever been—I slowly retreated from the walking, talking world. While I could argue that the walking, talking world doesn’t actually exist in Gambier, Ohio (imagine a hamster home with two bars, a cafe and a foot of snow), drinking and racquetball took the place of normative socializing. While still capable of holding a conversation, I felt like my mind was crawling into the grave with LCpl Richard C Clifton, USMC. I knew his words better than anyone’s. I was the Boswell to a dead Marine, following him backwards through time, from the mortar that killed him to his high school graduation to the first time he saw Full Metal Jacket and thought, I want that.

Finishing the rough draft was an ear-popping surfacing. I’m noticing small things again, remembering to hold the door open for people behind me, attending the litany of thanks,-you-too,-have-a-good-day while getting coffee or buying a paper. But the real work, the editing, is only ahead of me, and I can’t shake the sinking sensation that the prospect of red-penning my way through 250 pages is the only thing keeping me glued together. When it’s done, what’s left? Graduate, with some phony “Honors” tag appended to my diploma? Without the narcotic pull of obsession, I couldn’t have done it; but what about the withdrawal? What will I do then, with my hands?