What’s the point of it, this writing?
What’s the point of sitting bare and naked against your thoughts and making something of them, especially if no one but yourself and a close cohort of others reads it? What is this insatiable human need to create, and why me?
How many questions can I ask myself and how much guilt can I pile onto my heavy-laden shoulders when another day goes by and I have not created, only consumed, and I feel the black-hole-vacuum-pull of meaning leaching from me? How more poetically can I ask myself why I am the way I am and why was this world not made for the likes of you and art and me?
I work because I must pay my bills. I work at a library which is, though often a chaotic and convoluted and even violent place, as close as I can get to the dissemination of art while still making enough money to keep the lights on.
But in some perfect world I would do nothing but write; I would sit at the desk and watch the world in its frenzy go by and give the dog a pet and spit out reams of words until I was too exhausted to string a cohesive thought. But that is not the way of the world and maybe that is not an ideal world at all – a writer must be in the world to write of the world. And then, the thought, what good is this at all?
At the library, I am confronted daily with a) those who read and crave knowledge and b) those in crisis. Find me on a good day and perhaps I can solve the majority of the issues I am confronted with or at least point people in the direction of a solution and so go to bed knowing that I did something good or useful or, here’s that dreaded word, productive.
If, the next day, I don’t work and so spend some hours writing, I have something close to a sense of accomplishment, but I do have something dragging me, too, like a kelp-entwined anchor scratching at the sand. What was the point of that? And what good did it do anyone? And there’s the idea that it did no good to me, even, because there’s every chance that the next day I’ll go through with a red pen and strike it all out. I’ve restarted my current novel(s) at least five times (each) and I plan to start one over again, if not from scratch, from something close.
Productivity, then, is what I view and have viewed as success, and it is in putting that into words that I pause and become afraid of that thought. Why do I write if I don’t think it is productive? What is the point? What is the what for?
There must be something intrinsically necessary about creating art in a world dominated by the need to make money, expand, grow. There must be some reason that I continue to strive for perfection in my novels (otherwise, I would have cranked out about a dozen manuscripts, I expect. Seems like many fast-fashion writers are doing that and getting rich by it). But there is something glimmering and deeper than the need to have a finished product, and though I have made no money by my writing, I am still working hard toward some opaque goal. Take this blog, for example. I have had hundreds of viewers (of which I am grateful) but I will not and do not want to make money by it. Then why do it?
And why, simultaneously, do I feel that I have not had a productive day if all I do is churn out words that no one will read?
Holding two things at once: a dream and a reality.
We have all been bred to view creativity as non-productive because it does not serve the greater machine. Most art will never be circulated. It is an entirely selfish act, no matter how much artists create work that is political or oriented toward justice. It is entirely selfish because it demands the artist be with only themselves for a set amount of time, writing their opinions on the opinions of others and not answering calls or texts or the blips of social media that cry out for attention.
Which brings me here: art, at one time, in some distant place, was once cherished, surely. I’m not trying to set some Golden-Age standard, but I do think that art has cheapened. Not the artists themselves, no. Fast-fashion art has always been around, and much of it has actually stood the test of time and found itself canonized. No, I think art – writing – has become cheapened in the sense that we live in a society based on the idea of consumption and so art has become another spoke in a great wheel that is running away from us down a mountain with no brakes. Art is deemed extraneous and something to be gorged upon. When we are done, we rate it, we move on, we look for the next thing to take us from out of ourselves and out of a dreary world.
But when you stop and remember how beautiful this world is, art, inevitably, becomes necessary again.
I like to say that our little ape brains have not caught up with this economic system that has divorced us from the need to be really productive, that is, the need to make things, specifically with our hands and imaginations. This is one reason we are so anxious and depressed. Nothing is demanded of us anymore that speaks to who we are.
What I’m saying is that I have been trained to view my writing as extraneous. As non-productive. As frivolous.
As the moon turned into my thirtieth birthday, I decided that I would escape this. I have not, but I have made progress (funny word to use here). I at least recognize now, and perhaps this is only thanks to the rise of AI, that writing – and creativity in general – is an act of rebellion. It is a completely selfish act, it is the complete submission into reality, it is the fulcrum that forces you confront the frightening and delicious notion that you are wholly alive and a part of something greater.
Creation is the employment of those whose souls are still intact.
I’m giving myself and creatives a very high opinion, but I am doing so to make myself feel better on this day when I sat down to my novel and found that I could not write five words without feeling that overwhelming dread of why.
This is, I suppose, a little love letter to myself. And a response to a very old poem of mine that I had long forgotten about. It was a poem written around Christmas, I remember. A poem written when I was missing my grandparents fiercely, and I imagined what it was they would say to me if their ghosts came riding the flames of our Christmas hearth. I imagine I was reading Dickens’ Christmas stories at the time to think of such a thing.
I had this notion that my grandmother would tell me to live a bit more, to quit pining over myself and the meaning of it all. To keep writing, of course, but to see its connection to the greater good, to the ever-growing rout of writers who defied it all and did what they wanted and were poorer for it but happy.
Here’s a poem, then. Be joyous.
The Visit
Frances, don’t look at me like that.
I know the floor has its dust
I know the pot boils
I know every inch of my potential
that has fizzled out on long nights
of fear. I know the energy
it must take you
to come back at the Christmas hearth
and ask what I’m doing with this one life.What of yours, Frances?
The war and the farm and the road unpaved.
I know no pacifists. We’re all and about all
depraved. But that white hand holds
up says no, I mean what are you doing
here, now, with all these pages.
(You can’t reject our sacrifices,
they’re done.)What are you here, ripping
this life into lines?
Have you lived, has the sun ever come up your door,
have you felt it on the face we gave you
the culmination of our all–
Are we, to you, just a dream?
It’s too late for sleep,
grandaddy rides the next flame.
