Read Time: 16:00
Why I Write
1. Because if I don’t write it, other people will
I’ve seen them in print before: ideas that were mine, storylines mine, compositions mine. This morning wasn’t the first time it happened, but it’s fucked every time it does. The idea, the storyline, the composition, yes, they were all mine–he just wrote them down first, got them published first. Bastard.
So this guy gets printed, not to mention everybody else who seems to be able to shit out books regularly like they’re on some juice-cleanse. Over here, I’m pretty busy avoiding writing, so much so that I have stress-gas bubbling cramps in my stomach. It makes me wonder Why can’t I even shit out a piece of shit, even to just get started? Try harder. Fail harder (1). Shit it out, I tell myself. Rock back and forth and get your shit out, even if it’s one of those hard, unsatisfying pebble shits.
***
I’m upset. Today what was plagiarized was my very original, page-centered and stand-alone, blocky prose that I originally created in the 11th grade.
I’ll admit now that the invention of the layout happened by way of my irrevocably fucking up the page justification on the electric typewriter. I took what was a newly-learned term, “poetic license,” and used it to explain the block-shaped paragraphs I could not undo. When asked about the structure In English class, I manufactured an explanation about the verbal blocks: my writing was like a word sculpture, a cubist word sculpture.
I imagined a later time, in a future fancy city, where arty people would see my writing and immediately know it despite a bare glance at the words. I imagined them all recognizing my writing for the blocky turd that it is, and some would roll their eyes while others would mew, “I sort of like it,” but either way they would know who I am and that the turd was produced by me and my typewriter with its unchanging justification.
Every passing moment and every small shift of the sun is wasted on me if I am not getting my ideas out. Each day I wait (and drink coffee and feed the cats and masturbate instead of writing), there’s going to be someone else shitting out some runny, yellow, malnourished version of my ideas. And I just can’t let this go on.
2. Because we would all be better if we acted with a little more urgency
George Orwell wrote an essay called, “Why I Write,” which is what I would have called this piece of mine.
Orwell’s writing benefited from a far more compelling urgency than my gastric metaphors: actual War. In the 1930s, Orwell goes to Spain to fight the war (by way of Paris, you know, so as to dine with friend and American writer, Henry Miller, first), ends up getting shot in the throat (after being warned that at 6’4”, perhaps he should not be standing against the trench parapet), and is dispatched after loudly being labeled a fascist. Years later, he is become the canon. Orwellian artillery–thoughts, ideas and books–won the most real war of all simply by lasting.
People nowadays have no real concept of war, except maybe that they know someone in the small minority who has given up their freedom to protect ours. But kids today aren’t charging at their brothers with bayonets and frostbitten feet, anymore.
You know what I mean: war is so impersonal now, the troops aren’t even told whether they’re fighting for ideology or limited natural resources, or what’s the difference between the two. And I’m just not fortunate enough to have the bombs overhead reminding me of the fragility and urgency of it all.
I hope someday to be in combat with my laziness. Until then, I can only imagine the urgency Orwell felt with the thunder of new technology, jet aircrafts blasting overhead, not knowing if the plane is us or them, not knowing if the bundle about to be dropped means survival or death, not knowing if he had time to get himself and his manuscripts and get out of there at the sound of the “Red Warning.”
We don’t really have a war going on right now (not one that our government will tell us about, anyway), but it seems like everybody else does. Sometimes I think my writing would be helped by an actual war, the same way I think my writing would benefit by my mother’s death.
3. Because I am in love with certain writers and maybe you will fall in love, too
The first time I read the “Preface to a Life,” in James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times, it became my favorite literary garment of everything hanging in the wardrobe of my mind (1). Season after season, I return to the comfort of that perfectly-fitted, perfectly warm-when-it’s-cool, perfectly cool-when-it’s-warm prose that is unmistakably Thurber.
It doesn’t matter that such an outfit can’t be worn everyday; I try it on again and again in the company of No One simply because it flatters me. The curves of his words cut to fit the naturally ill-shaped, better than a foreign-tailored suit. He explains the temperament of a writer who “…moves about restlessly wherever he goes, ready to get the hell out at the drop of a pie-pan or the lift of a skirt. His gestures are the ludicrous reflexes of the maladjusted; his repose is the momentary inertia of the non-plussed. He pulls the blinds against the morning and creeps into smokey corners at night. He talks largely about small matters and smally about great affairs.” (2)
Oh, go on.
The simply knitted blanket of Thurber’s words warms me with delightful stitches and loops. (He is talking about me, to me, after all.) And it is warm for a while, like whiskey. And then like whiskey, it gets confusing. Because here Thurber has perfectly put together the words to make big the small, to day the night, and he beautifully buffs a writer’s ridiculous sensitivity to a patent shine.
Can an expression of the beautiful mitigate an ugly actuality? At the very least, we can agree that a perfect description of the most lowly or affected is more holy and high (and undoubtedly more powerful) than the idea unexpressed.
***
James Thurber, on a via from Benvenito Cellini, warns that “a man should be at least 40 years old before he undertakes so fine an enterprise as setting down the story of his life.” I’ve considered the amount of time I spend doing things like eating and sleeping, clipping the dry skin from my cuticles and avoiding phone calls; the amount of time I spend looking for things and being lost; the amount of time I spend feeding cats and masturbating (separate items, there); and then I consider how much time I actually spend writing.
Based on these calculations, starting to set down any story at all at 35 (as I am now) leaves (maybe barely) maybe just enough time to squeeze out time for you “…time for me, /And time yet for a hundred indecisions /And for a hundred visions and revisions/ Before the taking of a toast and tea.” (3)
What every story is–all any story can hope to be at this point, really—is a hundredth revision about a hundred indecisions. And what every life well-lived wants, I think, is love, repeated in any form, any iteration. –That, and some time for toast and tea.
4. Because I think I know something about the state of mankind, and I want you to admit it, too, so that we both feel better
Nobody tells you it’s okay to be an artist, except maybe other artists, and this they do (I suspected for a long time) to justify their own means and to feel less like a fraud. Certainly no one tells you to hurry up and be an artist, though I think there is art in all of us.
Feeling fraudulent may have something to do with why writers can’t help but indulge in creating grossly self-important prose (Reason #1 ‘Why I Write’ is a prime example). Regarding the things we bring to life, we are desperate for justification. We must make ourselves rightly understood; we must make ourselves right.
The need to alleviate feeling fraudulent might also explain why we can’t help but coddle the soft step-sibling of Self-Important Prose, Purple Prose. Creating Purple Prose, though, is even more shameful. It is an imperious child from an affair who will publicly complain that it never asked for life, but who privately believes is it special for having been born of love, however illicit.
Writers and artists wear humanity’s foibles like formals. Our scars show. We are less embarrassed about what we have or have not made of ourselves. Still, we can’t help dressing up what we mean in purple prose, and its flowery, overblown way becomes a fiction we tell ourselves, and each other, that everything is okay when everything is not necessarily okay.
If our self-important musings or purple prose ages well or at all, it grows into the the woman at the cocktail party whose plastic surgery scars, still visible in the sunlight, haven’t quite yet healed. (Still you might call her beautiful.)
I believe it is not just artists who struggle to find justification, and I believe we are all desperate not to appear or feel fraudulent. I believe we all want to be right, and we have all created fictions to prove our rightness. Artists are just the first ones to admit it.
***
Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? has a great section about the ugly art piece inside each one of us (4). She challenges her artist friends to an “Ugliest Painting Contest,” and, in the end, one artist cannot create anything truly ugly, one artist paints something so ugly that it creates an emotional burden, and one artist does not complete the task at all.
The ugly painting contest forces them to see what their ugly says. When you look at yourself closely, sometimes you will be like the one artist who created something so ugly that it is worrisome. You’re a fucking goddamn mess inside; and you look at this fact and it upsets you, and everything that comes out of you is a fucking goddamned mess, too, and it upends everything and everyone around you.
On the other hand, sometimes you’re the artist who cannot create anything ugly at all. You have a golden touch and perfect timing and all is right with the world and even your ugly is sort of beautiful.
But if neither of these things are true for you, then you might be the artist who opts not to create anything at all. If this is the case, you may have avoided the Seriousness of self-expression that making art requires, and you might be the most sane of all.
Whoever we are, there is a definite importance in finding out out sooner rather than later: Aren’t we all the same, in our confusion about how to be?
***
Sherwood Anderson, in Winesburg, Ohio, paints portraits of the town’s people as grotesque masks making up an unfortunate parade of humanity. But nowadays, what is grotesque, more than just a baroque idea?
Why, it’s you. It’s you. It’s you and it’s me.
You look in the mirror in that bad light—that fluorescent light or maybe broad daylight–and you catch a glimpse of deepening creases between your eyes on your forehead there, and that momentary inertia of being nonplussed allows you to stop and see how ugly you have become. The lines on your face make you look older than you are and a little angry, but you know your face has not always been this way. You reassure yourself you have not always been this way.
But then the asymmetry of your bottom lip (which has bothered you since childhood) is still there, and knowing that it can only be seen from the left side, you shift your head again to the right and decide that it’s just the light.
Usually you think you are a relatively decent looking human being. But there is a certain light that paints us all unflatteringly, and this you know. So you try not to look at your friends under those fluorescent lights. Sometimes you even try to avoid them in the daylight. And you walk around wondering exactly how much people can see.
5. Because I am in love with words as much as self-important people at cocktail parties are in love with themselves
I love words so much that when I was younger and used to go to a lot of cocktail parties, I would either embarrass or confuse most people for the fact that I would use as many five-dollar words as possible. I would not realize until years later that this did not give any appearance of intellectualism, but only fostered a definite conclusion that I was a great big blowhard.
I love words so much that even after I was able to control my word snobbery at cocktail parties, I would keep a silent, secret count against other people who used any particular five-dollar word more than once in an evening.
If by chance I heard someone use the same word multiple times, I would grant several imaginary (but real to me) “You’re-a-Fucking-Idiot” points, depending on how heinous the word was. (For example, saying the word saccharine more than once would earn more “You’re-a-Fucking-Idiot” points than a more banal adjective like excessive.) I would dock points for inappropriate usage of pretty much any word, and I would dock points if someone got infected by someone else’s five-dollar word (that is, if they reused it). I couldn’t stand five-dollar words being passed around a party like shitty hors d’ouevres on a plastic plate.
***
I love words so much that I once had a teacher tell me that I was a pretty good writer except that I “ought not to be so in love with my own words.” I was about 22 years old. Later, he asked me to dinner under the pretext of editing my writing, and that’s when I found out about his cheating wife and clinically depressed, transgendered son.
By dessert he had touched me inappropriately and enough times that I knew I wasn’t going back to his class. Years later, his name was on a list of judges for a local writing contest, and I was compelled to enter for the sole purpose of vindication.
I was desperate to show that I had finally synthesized my love for words into decent writing, and I was unrelenting about the fact that I would edit down to the bare minimum word count, a demonstration of a beautiful economy of words. I won an honorable mention and had my name and piece printed in a local paper, which, when I saw it, made me neither happy nor sad nor gratified. I thought only of the teacher as I saw him last: a sad, tall man with a pathetic little poke showing through his trousers.
***
If the words are the thing I love the most, how is it that every story I love to the stars I can’t even remember the name of? Why can’t I remember the last words my dad said to me?
The words are so goddamned elusive sometimes; sometimes objects don’t want to be named the things you want to call them. Sometimes people get angry because you use truthful words. And sometimes, no meaningful words get put on paper at all, even though my only constant desire is to have words like lovers: available, ready, mine.
6. Because writers have got to write otherwise we’ll forget things and have no literature
These difficult fucking words: they’re the only way we’re going to remember anything at all, which is why we’ve got to deal with them. We’ve got to create them and ingest them, regurgitate them, share them, sharpen them to precision. If we don’t, everything we have, everything we are, and everything we know will rip away violently, like what would happen if gravity gave up on earth.
Though writing is always a testament of some sort, there’s a wonderful irony in having forgetting as a central theme in much great literature. The very fact of setting down words about forgetting is sublime, contradictory.
***
Another interesting problem: some of the most perfect ideas are so simple that if you are not careful, you will forget them. Important things have got to be recorded and writers need to be left alone to write the important things. In his “Self-Interview,” Kurt Vonnegut warns that we are “…soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs to do writers, and that is waste their precious time.”
I think about the writers with ‘hack jobs,’ stuck in the circuit of magazines, advertising copy, newspapers, blogs–the never-ending race of content-creation. Some of them want to be doing what they are doing, but if they are true storytellers and soothsayers, such jobs might mean death.
One of Murakami’s characters from Dance, Dance Dance illustrates the caliber of bullshit-commercial-writing he does by calling it “shoveling cultural snow.” When I think about shoveling cultural snow, I recall this news article, a wonderful blip of exasperated humanity on the news radar about a man who was tired of having his time wasted with snow shoveling:
Fargo, ND – Local resident Todd Fox has been detained for “reckless endangerment” and “illegal use of high-powered fire-breathing weaponry” for attacking snow with his flamethrower…
… Neighbors to his immediate right and left noticed a bright orange cloud and could hear what they thought was, “Puff the Magic Dragon spewing mayhem all over hell,” which prompted one of them to notify police.
Fox stated that he was simply “…fed up with battling the elements,” and that he did not possess the willpower necessary to move “…four billion tons of white bullshit.”
Four billion tons (of bullshit) is actually a very close estimate of the amount of content published here in the US every month, which is probably how all of this got connected in my head in the first place.
7. Because I want you to find good things
You wanted a particular book so badly that you to spent extra money on the hardback version with the lousy sleeve that gets in the way but must nonetheless be kept. You buy the book and you keep it close a short while, a new and welcome companion.
When you are done reading it, you place it back on the bedside table and close your eyes to go to sleep in the simple satisfaction of having read something really good. The next morning you reach for the book again. You touch it again, inspecting it all over to see how you have bent or mistreated the pages and cover. You notice small details on the cover you never saw before. You have finished the book, but you go back and reread the last page or so just to satisfy the desire of arriving at the end again. You leave the book on the bedside table, there to glance at every once in a while, the way you glance back in time and consider the particular feel of a past lover.
***
Hemingway said Gertrude Stein gave the following advice: “One should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.” I am confident that the result of my effort here is one of those two.
–S.A. Strebel, South San Francisco, 2014
(1) Beckett, Samuel I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On teaches us a healthy sense of resignation
(2) Wolfe,Virginia. “How should One Read a Book?” The Love of Reading
(3) Thurber, James. “Preface to a Life,” My Life and Hard Times
(4) Eliot, T.S., “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
(5) Heti also commits perfect exposition on the power dynamics of giving desirable blowjobs.
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I’d love to get an anthropologist’s take on a lot of modern things, but especially the fascination with “finding one’s tribe,” the purpose of which seems to be: to reinforce one’s sense of self in terms of ‘belonging,’ to codify success, and to surround oneself with like-minded people who help manifest emotional buoyancy and resilience.
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