On love and error.

The novel that I intend to work on is an old idea of mine. In fact, I started working on it last November, but I was so bogged down with work, anxiety, child-rearing (not to compare my child to a bog), etc. that I just couldn't stick to it. (Hopefully, this year I'm a little more with it, despite the fact that I have even more bogs to contend with.) I actually began toying with the idea years ago, but I never could make much of it.

I'm beginning to think that the reason that I couldn't make heads or tails of it was because I wasn't mature enough to understand the characters. I wasn't (ok, this is going to sound puerile, but here goes) vulnerable enough to be able to understand their humanity.

For instance, I had always imagined Dempsy to be wickedness with a Doris Day veneer. However, my beliefs stemmed from a deep-rooted distaste for women who remind me of Doris Day. (Oddly, I'm quite fond of old Doris Day films. Go figure.) The idea of women who fix their hair, dim the lights, and start the music when their darlings arrive home from work somehow worked on me like a red flag on a bull. Now, though, I can sympathize with her somewhat. Wouldn't a little innocent love, fidelity, sweetness be a nice thing to have? Is trying to create a soft cushion for addled, old love really that bad?

Augustine, on the other hand, I had always sympathized with because she was a ball-buster and she wouldn't be reined in. However, I've begun to see that even Augustine was a little envious of Dempsy all along. She'd been hurt, and she'd developed a veneer of her own, suits and snide remarks and sarcasm. I liked Augustine because she was self-sufficient, a quality that I was unable to perceive in Dempsy; however, I wonder now if Augustine has ever really been happy being self-sufficient. Maybe she's only just not unhappy, which isn't a great place to be.

And, then again, between the two of them, I realize that I was imagining them as one-dimensional, maybe two-dimensional, characters, having a limited number of possible outcomes and values and emotions. But characters, like real people, are nearly infinite in their possiblities, their neuroses, their potential for error and redemption. Dempsy isn't lacking in self-reliance, but she is aware of a deep-seated need for companionship and community. Augustine, despite her protests, isn't entirely self-sufficient, nor should she want to be, though she does want it very badly.

The question that I most want to consider now is: After all of the errors and miscalculations, can a person have redemption just because she wants it?