Strategic Withdrawal
To retreat. To disappear. To dare to be invisible for a few days, or weeks, or more. In our hyper-connected world—which has turned the cult of attention and celebrity into a click-bait driven religion—stepping away can feel like stepping out of life. Yet every artist knows when it’s time to withdraw. We feel it that when the wellspring of creativity dries up, when our own true inner voice is being drowned out by the voices of others, and when we lose our joy. That’s the point when, for the sake of our music and our souls, we muster the courage to strategically withdraw.
Strategic Withdrawal, by author David James Duncan, first appeared in his book My Story as Told by Water which was published in 2001. It spoke to me so deeply that when I chose to blog about the necessity of artistic retreat, everything I wrote read like a poor paraphrase of what he stated so eloquently. That’s not surprising—I’ve read everything Duncan has written since his book The River Why found its way into my hands decades ago, cracked open my heart, and blew my narrow fundamentalist world wide open. I respect him so much that it took me several weeks to summon the courage to approach him (through his publicist) and ask if I could post Strategic Withdrawal on No Dead Guys. I’m honored that he said yes, and I’m thrilled to share this beautiful piece with you on my blog.
strategic withdrawal:
any movement inward
— as into a chair by a window the light of which
you use simply to stare into a cup of tea
— or as in letting the eyes come to a standstill in
some space on the page of a book you've been
reading in order to stare at nothing, or at
something inside, or at something neither inside
nor out— an association-sprung scene, an entire
small world, maybe; a place so pungent you
leave the body to stand in it for a time
strategic withdrawal: any move away
from the battle
lines of your incarnation— as in the term
spiritual retreat but without that term's once-in-
a-blue-moon connotation, for inward movement
is the rightful night to outward movement's day
— any refusal to man our habitual psychological
or geopolitical trenches, for though the turf
we're defending is holy our defenses, once
they grow automatonic, are anything but
— a quiet refusal, then, to engage with that
ideologically rigid, dangerously doubt-free,
agitatedly political, compulsively-processing co-
worker, parent or (God-help-you) spouse who
refuses to grant peace till you've installed the
same clanging banging brand of editorial
machinery
strategic withdrawal: any move away
from your
ramparts, news sources, screens, political
position, sworn causes, strengths, weaknesses,
irritations, shames, philosophy, identity,
toward
formlessness;
silence;
primordiality
a journey then into ignorance, that underrated
state of being the acceptance of which precedes
every fresh influx of knowledge; a pilgrimage
back to the very Beginning (as in Tao te Ching 1,
Genesis 1, Diamond & Heart Sutra Kalevala
Ramayana Mahabharata Gita Mumonkan Monkey
Odyssey Torah Divani 1) & to our own "In the
Beginning", our origin being the source of every
original synapse, cell or molecule we ever
borrow & feign to own
strategic withdrawal: any attempt to
step from who &
what & why we are into whylessness
— as in an extemporaneous walk to a
destination so unknown that everything but
your movement through God-knows-where
becomes the God-knows-what you're doing
— or as in fishing with no desire for fish, so that
desirelessness-by-water becomes the prey you
begin to catch
— or as in strolling to a cafe two or three
neighborhoods removed from any in which
you're known, which you then enter not to
socialize, read the paper or eat the (probably
mediocre) food, but just to nurse the one drink
as you imbibe, without judgment, the riverine
flow of your forever unpredictable tongue
strategic withdrawal: any act you can
devise, any
psycho-spiritual act at all, that embodies a
willingness to wait for the world to disclose
itself to you rather than to disclose yourself,
your ideas, your skills, altruism, creativity,
energies & (let's face it) agenda, myopia,
compulsions, preconceptions, addictions &
illusions to the world
— a willingness to renounce our trajectories,
boot up with all extensions OFF, & let the world
disclose itself to an alert but fallow you whether
anything seems, even after long waiting, to be
disclosing itself or not
— an act of faith then, really, that the world
is always disclosing itself; faith that lack of
disclosure is impossible; faith that what blocks
awareness of Creation's ceaseless creativity is
our callouses & callousness, our injuries &
injuriousness, our ruling manias, divided minds,
crossed purposes, absurd speed of passage, lack
of trust, lack of faith— or surfeit of faith, as
when Merton cried: "Real prayer is possible only
when prayer is impossible!"
strategic withdrawal: to step away
from the possible &
take rest in the impossible; to stand naked in the
godgiven weather till the soul's identity begins
to appear in the body's weathering; to step off
our own laboriously cleared & maintained trails
into the pathless pristine by moving, any old
how, into the surrender Francis calls Sister
Poverty, Bodhidharma calls Absolute emptiness &
nothing holy in it!, Ikkyu calls Wonderful, no?, &
Eckhart calls Desirelessness: the virgin who eternally
gives birth to the Son
strategic withdrawal: this prayer:
When I'm lost, God help me get more lost. Help me
lose me so completely that nothing remains but the
ancient originality that keeps creating & sustaining
this blood-, tear- & love-worthy world that's never been
lost for an instant save by an insufficiently lost me
"We're all in the gutter," said Oscar Wilde in
the throes of just such a withdrawal, "but some
of us are looking at the stars"
strategic withdrawal: look at the stars
— David James Duncan
David James Duncan is a father, a renowned fly fisher, an activist, and the author of the novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collections My Story as Told by Water—a National Book Award finalist—and God Laughs & Plays. His work has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan Fellowship, a National Book Award nomination, Inclusion in Best American Essays, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Catholic Writing, five volumes of Best American Spiritual Writing, an honorary doctorate from the University of Portland, the American Library Association’s 2004 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom (with co-author Wendell Berry), and other honors. David lives in Missoula, Montana.
His newest novel, Sun House, will be released August 8, 2023. To learn more about him, visit David James Duncan.