Read Time: 02:23
There are two reasons I write.
First: a dream I don’t remember now, but one I did write down. The record of this dream is a torn, half-scrap of paper in the box labeled “Most Important.” It reads: “I cut myself to write with blood I had no ink. Who is a philosopher has gold in his bones.”
Second: also from the “Most Important” box, a newspaper clip from the New York Times, June 17, 2018, with the title, “What Kept Me from Killing Myself.” The article is written by a recovering alcoholic and Iraq veteran, and the first sentence is, “Books saved my life.” The author is unnamed.
***
Five years ago, I wrote a real nice, blowhardy essay about ‘Why I Write.’ Most every writer—especially if you have an ISBN number and a black and white photo with your dog on the back sleeve of your book—feels the need to make such a statement of purpose.
Time has a way of eroding things and changing us, and sometimes we better understand what is simple, smooth, essential and good only after some time has passed. This is to say that reading ‘why I write’ from five years ago was annoying—annoying like the black and white author/dog pictures. (Use the word armchair, here. It fits, and is super annoying.)
The honest-to-goodness care with which I wrote the piece feels juvenile. It is a delightful piece in many ways, but perhaps too hopeful. The perfect title for it, if I could re-choose, is already in use by another author, Durga Chew-Bose: Too Much and Not the Mood.
(Cf. Why I Write: 1. Because if I don’t write it, other people will)
I do not have a ISBN number and I have never had a dog, and yet at one point I answered ‘why I write’ with alarming alacrity. I was finally able to tell you, reader. I was excited for you to know. I was finally able to elucidate each ‘why’ and I numbered them one through seven. I wrote this in 2014, and it is in many ways a love letter to you, reader. A love letter I never delivered. I never published it anywhere at all.
Of course there’s a whole different world of ‘why’ behind that failing, and the ‘why’ of failure and love is especially hard to name for uncountably many reasons. When we touch things like failure and love with precise language, it makes the experience decidedly real, completely palpable and totally true. The starkness of language which names and talks openly about love and failure is at first humiliating and then, much later, if we don’t die of that humiliation, healing.
***
Five years ago, I made a definite statement regarding ‘Why I Write,’ using seven illustrated points with reasons and references (move the armchair over here).
Now I have only two reasons, and though they are immutable derivations of the original ‘why’, they are also far less exact, the movement of a cloud formation you once knew the name of.
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