“There are cancers that are able to speak their own mind.”
It dawned on me today that, I used to starve myself as a teenager just so I could spend my lunch money on books. And I wondered, why would I do that?
All writers have shared their own burdens. What they unravel in their inner and written worlds are baring studies of the human mind and its condition. When I read a lot, I spent a lot more time in the worlds of characters, (or people) that didn’t exist. I read the works of people who have long since passed, people who were older than me, and people who had lived entirely experiences.
A lot of this came from my own internal loneliness, and dissatisfaction with the world. What I wanted was not out there but in here and the solace of my room and a story provided comfort from a hostile and indifferent reality. I realise that this has become somewhat of a cliché that more or less defines the bookworm stereotype. But even clichés have their own mechanisms.
As I discovered, novels take decades to write. The absorption of years of wisdom into the minds of the young writer is distilling the essence of that writer into the present, and as such you acquire life experience that ironically, you could never get through living.
And so I lived a very theoretical existence, not daring to actuate, not having the audacity to bring my choices in the world. No, the poetics of possibility were ultimately much more seductive in their plural lure.
Artists spend a great deal of time looking at other artists and wondering not only what constitutes a work of art, but how an artist should conduct themselves and live also. And as I pored over those pages and began to really understand how these writers were paying attention, I learnt that the complacency I was enjoying was actually hurting my own potential to become an artist also.
I learnt that literary criticism, philosophy or critical theory while admirable and an art in its own right, keeps a tight distance between the text and the person who experiences that text. The meta-language that is constructed from academic discourse sits on dust collecting devices, or bookshelves, that are neglected by people too far busy entertaining themselves on the endless buffet of the internet.
Books keep you safe because their immanence is kept within the spines of the book. The concepts of the book migrate and fertilise the mind, blossoming it into many other growths that will one day bear their own fruit. Once you shut the book, you have reopened the door to reality. There is a clear distinction in your hidden mind that the characters on a page are only animated by the virtue of having being printed on dead trees.
The internet on the hand, follows you, wherever you go. It is not a work of fiction. While pixels might be dead, the ghosts that they infer have agency. As Joyce says, we weave and unweave our images, but this time we do it on a screen. The book does not answer back. It does not alter your image. It does not alter your perception of reality.
As the internet started to take over my life, I felt that I was part of something whole, and it was truly something like the worlds I had encountered in my books yet different.
The first burden of the writer is to acknowledge that they are bookworms. And bookworms, as the metaphor implies, stick to the earth. They stick to what they know. If you spend too much time absorbing knowledge, you become one with the knowledge itself. This means that your existence, (which Sartre taught us, is very real) becomes completely centred around the theoretical. Rather than doing you think about the doing, you look up things around you, you start to know more than you do.
I really thought, perhaps in my youthful hubris, that if I acquired enough theoretical knowledge, I could write a really great book just like the people I admired. I took a writing class in university to discover that my characters, just like my life, were utterly lifeless. They could tell you a lot about dreams, consciousness and art, but they were pretty doll figures that were a symptom of my own narcissism rather than anything remotely human.
The second burden of the writer is knowing that your writing is subservient to your living.
What I had missed all those years ago, in my admiration of glittering words and poetic narratives, was the undeniable beauty of the everyday. As a writer, as an artist, you must have the powers of observation. You have to see things people do not see.
I came to this realisation after taking a break from reading, prompted by finishing Ulysses by James Joyce which had left me with such awe and fatigue that my mind was demanding a period of silence. I was also drained by spending too much time in my own world, and finding that it too, has a fence that you cannot simply climb over. Finally overcoming my own shell, I ventured out into the real world.
I cannot describe it any way other than this phrase : The poetics of the everyday.
We think of poetry, art or metaphysics as something as lofty and abstract. But watching a great deal of film shows you the poetry in the mundane. Take the following example:
Imagine an overly worked single, working class mother with four children. She has bags under her eyes from the lack of sleep yet there is nothing else she would live for. She tells herself in the morning when she wakes up that she cannot do it all over again but snoozing the alarm can only go so far. She sees the faces of her children in their soft sleep and realises it is her duty to deliver this beauty to the world. She wakes them with harsh shouting, yet takes extra care to butter their bread, slowly and methodically so that each child receives a fair share. She either skips breakfast or takes one bite and then leaves. She used to do her makeup before she went out but, now that she no longer has a partner, she no longer cares. She holds and hugs the children, feeling their hair with love and looking into their eyes, imagining what future they have ahead of themselves as they go to school, a future that she has no possibility of attaining. As she is alone in her car, she wonders if she could ever be driven somewhere instead of always driving herself, and her thoughts wander to her partner, then of other men that she had admired, and wonders to herself if it’s ever too late. Her sister keeps telling her to take care of herself better, but before she has a chance to wander down that avenue of thought, her fingers, without her permission, automatically turn the keys of the car and the purring of the engine drowns out her sorrows, and her dreams.
This is the kind of insight that I gain from watching a normal mother drop off her kids at school. It is of course, coloured by my own perspective of the world, and is quite fictional, but when you observe the smaller details of reality, you start to see the space behind or forwards in which a story, or character can be created. I could not have done this by endlessly reading novels. It only happened through talking, and observing people.
This leads me on to the third, last and perhaps biggest burden of the writer. And that is the burden of knowledge. Overtime you begin to develop a hypersensitivity to the auras of people, of small mannerisms or habits that they do, of any irrational or compulsive behaviour that individually defines them. You begin to intimately know details about their behaviour, and how they would function as characters. This immediately sounds dangerous because it requires some inventiveness on the writer’s part to essentially dream up false details and, subsequently judge people based on their behaviour.
I concede that this large margin of error is self contained in the burden of knowledge, since knowledge is often acquired through mistakes. If anything, the mere reflex of having to invent a curious fiction behind every single act that someone might do is mentally exhausting. However, the role of fiction is to tell the truth through the act of telling a lie. While my fictions might incorrectly interpret the fine details of what a person’s life actually is, they nevertheless create an impression, or a canvas of what that person’s aura exudes. This endless empathy creates situations where, you may have an insight to share, but you end up being merciful in not sharing it.
I believe every writer, in the act of writing, is loosening the noose of knowledge. We equally share our vision of how we think things are and how we want them to be. We share them in pages because, no one would want to talk to us for ten hours straight about it. We write because we have nowhere else to go. We write because only the pages will have ears for us.
The Center Space 