9 - on writing
or: do or die
Brief thoughts on a time-consuming activity.
And all my love and gratitude to Isa and Kayla !!!
It’s logical to think that writing begins with something to say, but I have never really found this to be the case. Consider the school essay, one of our first introductions to writing: you need to write it - and you do - because there is a deadline to respect, not because you have any pressing thoughts about ambition in Macbeth. It’s only in the process of writing that the ideas blossom, when you find the little links between seemingly disparate points and create a new line of thinking.
This isn’t to say that writing comes easily. Like I said: it is very often forced, and forced things do not come willingly. Indeed, words tend to resist the pencil or keyboard pushing them out, out, out onto the page. I came across this passage in I margini e il dettato (or In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing), a book by Elena Ferrante (of My Brilliant Friend fame) which I am working on translating for funsies:
I hold a pencil and a piece of paper. My forehead is smooth because all efforts have flown out of my mind. My thoughts appear to be outside of me. I see them. They rise, they fall…but this is their only activity. To remind them that they are thoughts and that their task is to manifest themselves, I grab the pencil. (Svevo 1923 in Ferrante 2021, 18)
I think it’s fascinating to refer to thoughts as if they are both sentient things with duties to perform and robots to be commanded at the will of their owner. Writing is an exercise in the assertion of will, then? Partially. (Often.) But - perhaps contradictorily - I think there is something to be said for letting thoughts arrive at their own pace. It’s true that writing requires discipline, but it is also often a tool for channeling experiences and wonder.
My good buddy and very smart girl Liz wrote this in her most recent essay, and though she wasn’t talking about writing at all, the line resonated deeply with me:
A picture is starting to take shape in my head, which means a dream is coming. I hope I’m not too late. I don’t think I am. (Read the whole thing here)
She’s talking here about the reinvention of the self and if it’s ever too late to do so. But to me, I think she also captures the feeling of chasing after a wisp of an idea and scrambling to document it before it poofs into a cloud of nothing.
Or, to put it like David Lynch did:
If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there. It might just be a small fragment […] but it’s all there. And so I always say you got to write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out […] of that one flash pop. […] But if you don’t write it down, it..it could happen right that the next day…you want to blow your brains out. (Lynch for Noisey 2012, 0:05-0:53)
Writing can also act as a good purge for the mind and spirit. I never sleep so soundly as the nights where I’ve just finished knocking out a coherent, well-structured, and interesting bit of text. But even beyond the satisfaction of having tamed The Words, just the act of writing exercises the brain, assures us that we’re capable of intelligent thought, and allows us to expel everything within us that has long been pressure-cooked and overdone. There is a lightness after writing.
There is also something hazy and trance-like when the words start flowing, when your fingers turn to automatons operated by some unseen hand. That is the high to chase. That is the point of it all.
Writing, then, functions almost as a kind of seld-administered therapy. You cannot wait until the therapy is necessary: instead, you need to take your steps to address whatever problems are lurking below well before the boiling point is reached. Regular writing will do that, even if it’s writing that no one will ever see. You aren’t compelled to share anything you write with anybody else - although I love it so much when you do.
I am no good at all at poetry and I’ll admit, I don’t read a lot of it. I think that being able to use words so tactically and economically, to employ verbs and phrases with such strategic precision is daunting and nearly impossible to achieve. That said, I’m always happy when my favourite Instagram account - @poetryisnotaluxury - posts. (They’re named for the eponymous 1977 Audre Lorde essay.) I think poems - especially the nature and love verses - are essential reading because they contain some little magical spark that helps the reader to understand the world through emotion and sensation.
From Mary Oliver’s Upstream:
And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness - the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep within books - can re-dignify the worst-strung heart. (Oliver 2016, 14-15)
And I suppose that on the necessity of poetry, Leonard said it best (and pithily):
If you want people to have shiny shoes, you want to write those, kind of, very good instructions. If you want to polish other parts of yourself, you do it with poetry. (Cohen for CBC 1966, 0:55-1:06)
🥺❤️