It might have been more useful had I been more specific, like asking: “How do you want to be a writer?” Or: “Why do you want to be a writer?” (As opposed to just writing as you go along.) Or: “Why do you want to be a writer?” (As opposed to, let’s jump, a dancer like that nimble black guy in the park, or painter or architect, for example.) Even: “Why do you want to be a writer?” Like, why me? Is there something wrong with me?
My excuse? I wanted to get some sense of you. Since we are working together.
I thought the best way of getting to know you would be through your writing. (Writing is a recognizable gesture of conscious/unconscious expression, unique to each person.) Presumably, the assignment I gave you might have been about describing a cherry or discussing Dostoevsky’s soul — he’s one of the few authors who knowingly had one, as you’ll remember, and he guessed that it was an internal excretion brought about by repression and punishment, the unhealed wound of the break-off point between animal and human, causing him endless pain and discomfort, but it was also his easel to ecstasy. Didn’t he mount his soul? And didn’t it talk to him, conveying truths in donkey-talk that he didn’t understand?
I’m reminded of a beautiful tale — it may not be apposite here, or even appropriate, but so what? It is recounted in the Talmud, if I’m not mistaken. A rabbi bought a big carp in the market and is taking it home for dinner. The fish is still alive and to keep it fresh (or warm, or hidden from concupiscent eyes) the rabbi carries it under his coat with just the tail sticking out at the top. The thrashing fish slaps the rabbi in the face with its tail. This was inadvertent, one would like to think. The townspeople are outraged by the insult to their beloved spiritual leader. So a trial is organized on the spot and the verdict is that the culprit (the fish) must be drowned for his effrontery.
Part of writing consists of this self-reflective/reflexive meditation on writing — on the interaction between you and the materials you use, on the nature and the purpose of words (they are remarkably resilient mutants), on the role of imagination (only fiction can reveal reality), etc. As it should. Wieseltier will note that Milosz showed a preference for poems that “honored the object, not the subject.” And I was reminded of something Einstein is reputed to have said, along the lines of: Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. (He also said ‘time’ only exists so that everything does not happen all at once.) This too, I wanted to hear from you. Because, however general the relationship to words and images may be, each writer approaches the tools in an individual way. No two hands fit around the haft of the hammer in exactly the same fashion. Your tools are simple words.
Nevertheless, a further part of being a writer that I might have wanted you to respond to consists of asking what a writer does in this world of shit and smoke. Anything special? If I eschew concepts like ‘task’ or ‘duty’ or even ‘function,’ when the wings are resolutely folded, then there’s still an ongoing process of interaction between pen-pusher and word-sucker. How? To what purpose or effect? Does it change either? Is there an ethical component to what one produces? Do people need writing? Do societies need writers? I noticed that your answer to this implied query purposefully kept the sights low, in a somewhat self-deprecatory way. Was this to keep the expectations realistic, or does it denote a deflation of the writer’s ambition in the community?
Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in Composing a Life: “Why do you suppose you want to write, to tell stories? For others, of course, for fun, for glory, for the game and the endlessly fascinating puzzle of it, but also always to rewrite and restage your own inner dramas. Any writer who denies that aspect of her work is lying to herself. True works of art happen, I suspect, only when inner and outer come together. That’s an important reason they’re so rare.”
This still doesn’t add up to a motivation for being-with-word-in-the-world, but it is a beginning toward constituting a mode of reaction to life. (The mode, as I suggested earlier, may well reflect an affliction: it is not easy to dissimulate a live fish under your coat.)
You will keep on asking yourself these questions as you continue, and the answers you come up with will not be the same at different stages of your trajectory. Indeed, they will be shaped by the stage, the station and the situation your life finds itself in at the time of asking. In the article which Wieseltier is going to write in three years’ time he will report on how it was said at the time of Heine’s funeral that there would appear to have been two possible answers to the questions about the writer’s ‘purpose’ or ‘sense’ — that of Goethe who was “destined to work and to live,” and that of Heine whose way was “only to laugh and to die.” Wieseltier will then extol the virtues of his deceased friend Milosz who “had come to work and to laugh and to live and to die.”
In my own lifetime, with much living and little work, my tentative answers changed (at moments they were quite adamant!); even my questions were modified several times.
I wouldn’t be dogmatic about this if I were you: cometh the moment cometh the attitude, and perhaps the conviction. By which I don’t wish to convey that one should comply and bend with the prevailing wind. Rather, my own inclination is always to arc against whatever wind may be blowing out of some hellhole of history. I don’t like to be pushed. I also often get blown over. But we all live through cycles. Outside events shatter our certainties. Who will now think of herself, and thus of her work, exactly the way she did a bare month ago when those ugly towers still stabbed at the sky? Besides, what is the use of a mind if you can’t even change it?
Writing still is the existential game of amusing ourselves and others through the magic of inventing the known and hence the surprises of seeing it new; it is still also a process of digesting our lives, transforming perceptions, drawing the boundaries of our comfort and shaping the contours of our discomfort; it is, as ever, an ageless event and need, bigger and more mysterious than any of us, through which we may be crystallized. (Or cremated.)
Ultimately, the mode of apprehension may become a way of life defined by the culture or the time you come from. In ancient China, as I pointed out elsewhere, one had to be proficient at painting, poetry and calligraphy, with a smattering of music and philosophy added, in order to be a fully aware citizen — and then you were likely to be commandeered for political and administrative service unless you ran away to the monastery or the mountain. ‘Renaissance man’ could be another example of how artistic creativity became a life discipline. In this, perhaps, lies the difference between being ‘a writer’ and only writing. This need not imply that you play unnecessary roles or go dressed in obsolete attitudes as in a long dark coat for carrying fish around, but it does suggest that you make of writing your angle to life and the spectrum through which you translate your surroundings.
‘To be a writer’ could be good and it could be bad. What it ought to lead to is greater empathy and insight, the ability to quarter the meat of existence, deeper questioning, developing the practice of doubt without reifying it to a doctrine, more objectivity, finer compassion, perhaps some understanding of what it’s all about. That is, if you do not get mummified by the paint coming with the role and the personage; if you do not choke on the bad fish meat of words. But if you can hold on to the sheer magic of being a first-timer, the footlights blinding you, even when knowledgeable and cynical, you would have won the day and earned the night. And maybe have the pleasure of seeing the cheeky fish swim away in the water of oblivion.