Reasons
This week, a participant in a writing group asked me why I write so much. I answered with something not untrue–something like, “Because I’m really fucked up and trying to survive.” But that wasn’t the whole truth. It was like a sliver of the truth, or a version of the truth. Because while, yes, I believe that I’m fucked up and trying to survive, I also believe that everyone else is too. That my fucked-upness isn’t extraordinary. That nearly nobody’s is. The below is excerpted from my thesis (the above is what I look like when I’m working on my thesis), and it’s a more complete answer.
We must do the work ourselves. No one else can do it for us. Socrates, Baldwin, Jamison, Rich, Rukeyser all write: an unexamined life is not worth living. Whether they quote verbatim or paraphrase, it is no less of a revelation each time. Never does it become cliche; each of the lives they examine are singular. No one else’s examination will do. Even if the conclusions drawn are essentially the same ones that have been drawn by thoughtful people for centuries. Even if we ourselves have drawn these conclusions before, in a different skin. In my well-worn copy of This I Believe, the 1952 anthology of personal belief systems edited by Edward R. Murrow, I found a folded stack of notes scribbled in my own hand. No date (I am always reminding people to date their work; add hypocrite to my list of titles). The note lists the ways I have suffered. Large and small. Two weeks prior, I had begun to write the section of this book that deals with suffering. I am always learning and forgetting and relearning not to discount my own experience. I suppose the self-assurance of the artist is evident in the fact that we believe that our particular examination may be interesting or beautiful enough for others to derive pleasure from viewing our art, reading our words, listening to our music. When I discovered Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, I wrote to my friend Shomriel: this is the book I wanted to write, but better. I’m like sixty years too late. I give up. Shomriel wrote back: I am trying to keep from copying the book I’m reading word for word into my thesis. We dropped our heads, returned to writing, although the thoughts have already been had, have already been written.
In the four years after leaving the institution of marriage, I discovered more about myself–good and bad–than I could ever have imagined. I was in the early stages of my writing, limping forward in spite of my attachment to the comforts of that life, toward a self-questioning that would ultimately leave me excavated beneath the crust of myself, blasted open like a mine inside a mountain. James Baldwin writes, in the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, “The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.” The essays in this collection are from Baldwin’s time in Europe. Having left America in an effort to cast off his identity, he thought he would discover something. And he did. He discovered the America in himself. For all I have said and have yet to say about the complexities of that marriage–our youth, my temper, his temper, his overwhelming and consuming love for me, my great but lesser love for him, our mutual devotion to our children–the fact most difficult to face is my inability to be truly pleased or satisfied by anything that marriage was capable of giving me. In our joint quest for normalcy, it was I who was least willing to sacrifice self, to conform to a standard for the task. How well we discover what we are when we are no longer railing against what we are not. He may have been mean or aggressive, controlling and unyielding. But I am selfish, restless, lustful. By which I mean: I am an artist, a writer. By which I mean: becoming is my life’s work.
The suffering I have experienced has awakened me. I do not wish to fall back into a slumber. Nor do I believe I can. I can never again be who I was. I look forward to who I’m becoming. This doesn’t feel like a retreat into myself so much as it feels like a foray into some wild place. I am happiest here, when the pieces connect, when the words are correct. Even when I’ve read the thing I think I ought to have written, I am happiest to be writing it again, happiest to be walking ever forward into an unknown self. But much work remains after the writing is done.
So here’s a starting phrase as your prompt, from the incredible James Baldwin: “The questions one asks oneself begin…” Set a timer.
Send me your writing if you like. Know that when it lands in front of me, it will be received with a great quantity of gratitude.
