Dare to be great, or at least peevish
6/26/96
DARE TO BE GREAT, OR AT LEAST PEEVISH
When I sit down to write, I think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who turned the Soviet Empire upside down with his courageous books. Here was a single man, armed only with his mind and spirit, sick and freezing and worked half to death in Siberian concentration camps, who composed the great novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in his head and memorized his text because he didn't even have pen and paper to record it.
Am I inspired by the greatness of Solzhenitsyn's courage and vision? Am I encouraged by this demonstration of the primacy of the imagination and the power of the written word?
Hell no! I'm completely DIScouraged! Why should I bother to write? I don't have a great subject! I didn't survive a concentration camp. I'm not an oppressed minority. I'm a person of privilege, notorious in my own mind for my underachievement. I've been given every advantage and what have I done with them? I've been like Jack in the Beanstalk, and traded my cow, my intellectual and emotional gifts, for three beans. And what are my three beans? Why, they are my hunger to write, of course! I don't have my heart in becoming anything else because I desperately want to write. So I remain forever on the precipice of life---a writer who does not write.
I'm aware of the great and small subjects of other writers, and as far as I can tell, I have no subject of my own. When I sit down to write, I can detect nothing of value in my head. I'm a living flatliner, a human cerebral test pattern. And I am haunted by the example of greats like Solzhenitsyn, whose writing was fueled by subjects far greater than their petty lives and ambitions. I'm like a seed trying to germinate and grow under the shade of a giant redwood. I don't get enough sunlight to sprout, much less grow into a tree.
Of course, it isn't really Solzhenitsyn who is blocking the birth of my words. It's me. I talk myself out of having anything to say. Solzhenitsyn, or Steinbeck, or Melville, or Arthur Miller, or even P.G. Wodehouse, the "trained flea of English literature," are merely the instruments of my own literary suicide. They are the poison pills I administer to myself, the excuses I use not to write.
Solzhenitsyn, afflicted by the best kind of survivor's guilt, was admirably devoted to the proposition that he must do something to memorialize all those who didn't escape and survive the Gulag. In that sense, Solzenitsyn has never left the Gulag, just as Eli Weisel has never left Auschwitz. Not every writer has that kind of imperative behind his writing.
Sophocles, for example. And Shakespeare. They didn't write to memorialize or somehow redeem the victims of the Gulag or the Holocaust. And God knows Proust didn't.
Can you imagine Proust talking himself out of writing Remembrance of Things Past because he didn't write agitprop like Emile Zola? Fortunately, Proust's head was teeming with the sensuous memories of his youth and of French society. He didn't gag himself because he couldn't imagine a precedent for the kind of book he was setting out to write. In fact, he wrote because there existed nothing quite like what he wanted to read, so he had to write it himself.
A writer must first of all feel, in his gut and heart, that his own point of view is valid enough to set down on paper. If he can talk himself out of writing because he doesn't feel, for whatever reason, he has something sufficiently worthwhile to say, then he'll never be a writer. Now here's the kicker. Many writers do not KNOW what it is they have to say until they've said it!
So if they talk themselves out of writing because they do not feel like they have something worth writing, how is it that they KNOW it's not worthwhile when they don't even know what it is until they've written it?!
Hypothesis: Much good writing is born in the hunger to write, and in the pure joy of invention, not in the knowledge that the writer ALREADY has something worthwhile to say. The writer doesn't always have the SECURITY of having, in advance, something worthwhile to say!! He makes it up as he goes along. He surprises himself even more than he surprises his readers.
There are writers and writers. There are writer-journalists like John Steinbeck, who did a series of newspaper articles on the Okies and then went on to memorialize and fictionalize them in The Grapes of Wrath. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's head was full of facts, and his heart was full of rage and compassion, about the enslavement of the millions in the Gulag Archipelago. Clearly Solzhenitsyn knew he had a powerful subject, a subject he was passionate about, before he actually wrote.
But what about Lewis Carroll? Was he passionate about talking caterpillars and disappearing Cheshire cats before he wrote Alice in Wonderland? Or was he simply writing in order to seductively amuse the half-dressed nymphets he liked to photograph? Who would advocate that the only wouldbe writers who should write are the ones who know in advance what they're going to write, and who take up the cudgel for the underdog and against the oppressors' wrongdoing? Who would advocate that only writers who already know they are brilliant plot-designers, or psycho-dramatists, or wits, or poets, or describers of landscapes or battle-scenes or parlors or horse races or whaling vessels should be the ones to write? What about the wouldbe writers who don't know what they can do or what they know? What about the writers who only know how they have thus far failed, yet still hunger to succeed in some way that they cannot yet imagine and predict? The biggest mistake any wouldbe writer can make is to decide that he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, is to decide that what he has to say isn't worth taking the trouble to try to uncover, discover, and recover.
The first, and second, and millionth thing a wouldbe writer may have to do is write one, or two, or millions of words not worth saving. They may be words whose very clumsiness seems to argue against the writer actually having something worthwhile to say, and the talent and craft to say it. The writer must have the courage to throw off, or plow through, all the naysaying on his way to yaysaying, in order to express something of value. What's hard and painful and discouraging is not writing something worthwhile, something beautiful. What's really hard is writing something seemingly worthless and/or dispensable and/or unreadable on the way to writing something worthwhile. That is where the struggle takes place, that is the crucible where the writer's mettle is tested.
What the writer is struggling to do is to make something valuable out of something apparently worthless, out of the buzzing confusion and nihilism in his brain. And finally, what does the writer have to go on? A hunch. A yearning. A burning. A desire to say something worthwhile even though he doesn't really know what it is.
The writer discovers what he has to say as he writes. He may discover that much of what he has to say is not worth showing to anyone else. He may discover that what he has to say is not saleable in any market. He may discover that what he is writing has no plot, nor characters, nor clever dialogue. He may discover that what he is writing is not an action-adventure script which will make an ideal vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone. He may discover that it will not be possible to auction the movie rights to his piece for millions of dollars. He may discover that what he is writing is not even a pleasurable reading experience for himself and his closest friends, and certainly nothing that the rest of humanity will want to read.
But the writer can't know in advance that what he is going to write will be worthless. For all the writer knows, some very valuable purpose may be served simply by writing, thousands and thousands of times: All work and no play makes the writer a dull boy.
OK, so that's the route that turned the character in THE SHINING into a homicidal maniac. And it may be that the next time you try to write you'll get so frustrated that you'll jump up from your typewriter and axe-murder your family. But will that be so terrible? Will that be worse than never daring to try to write at all?
After all, before you sit down to write, all you are being is a wouldbe writer who doesn't have the courage to actually try to write. But after you axe-murder your family, you're not just a wannabe. You've axe-tualized yourself. Instead of being freefloating potential, you ARE something. You're an axe murderer. And in this country that's nothing to sniff at. Consider Lizzie Borden.
Now it may be that your failure to write what you wanted to write will enrage you but not make you murderously furious. In that case, you may jump up from your word processor and grab your axe and run down to the nearest bar and smash it to kindling. Don't be disappointed in yourself because you haven't chopped to the heights of a Lizzie Borden or a Jeffrey Daumer. Remember Carrie Nation? She, too, was probably a wouldbe writer, before she started smashing up bars. And whether you think of her as famous or infamous, you think of her. And why? Because she tried to write, that's why.
If she had just sat on her settee and continued to do needlework, she never would have enraged herself enough to chop up all those saloons. It was only when she took pen in hand and tried, really tried, and then FAILED, to write something worth a damn that she tapped into her own powers of volcanic rage. How could Carrie Nation have known IN ADVANCE that she was going to be the most savage of the mother-founders of the Temperance Movement? It was only by having the courage to try to write, and by failing abysmally, that she got in touch with her own best and worst self, transforming herself into the terrifying battleaxe we celebrate today.
So even failing can lead to grand things. But to what can wanting, but not daring to try, lead? You'll become a human bomb or a human dud. You'll walk around choking on your own bile, leaking discouragement and dashed expectations upon everyone you brush up against. You'll either explode like a pinata, or roam the Earth like Typhoid Mary, spreading the contagion of your suppressed aspirations.
By suppressing your desire to create you do more than simply crush yourself. You crush others, as well. Because what you present to others is the model of the muted self, who does not dare to express himself because he does not feel he has anything of value to express. He points to others and says that they are valuable, so valuable that he is valueless. He imagines that he is inspiring by pointing to the example of others' inspirations. But the example he is setting with his own life is far more vivid than anything he points to outside himself. And what is he? He is a person who lives by the credo that he dare not begin to create because others are greater creators than he could ever be.
--FIN--
DARE TO BE GREAT, OR AT LEAST PEEVISH
When I sit down to write, I think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who turned the Soviet Empire upside down with his courageous books. Here was a single man, armed only with his mind and spirit, sick and freezing and worked half to death in Siberian concentration camps, who composed the great novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in his head and memorized his text because he didn't even have pen and paper to record it.
Am I inspired by the greatness of Solzhenitsyn's courage and vision? Am I encouraged by this demonstration of the primacy of the imagination and the power of the written word?
Hell no! I'm completely DIScouraged! Why should I bother to write? I don't have a great subject! I didn't survive a concentration camp. I'm not an oppressed minority. I'm a person of privilege, notorious in my own mind for my underachievement. I've been given every advantage and what have I done with them? I've been like Jack in the Beanstalk, and traded my cow, my intellectual and emotional gifts, for three beans. And what are my three beans? Why, they are my hunger to write, of course! I don't have my heart in becoming anything else because I desperately want to write. So I remain forever on the precipice of life---a writer who does not write.
I'm aware of the great and small subjects of other writers, and as far as I can tell, I have no subject of my own. When I sit down to write, I can detect nothing of value in my head. I'm a living flatliner, a human cerebral test pattern. And I am haunted by the example of greats like Solzhenitsyn, whose writing was fueled by subjects far greater than their petty lives and ambitions. I'm like a seed trying to germinate and grow under the shade of a giant redwood. I don't get enough sunlight to sprout, much less grow into a tree.
Of course, it isn't really Solzhenitsyn who is blocking the birth of my words. It's me. I talk myself out of having anything to say. Solzhenitsyn, or Steinbeck, or Melville, or Arthur Miller, or even P.G. Wodehouse, the "trained flea of English literature," are merely the instruments of my own literary suicide. They are the poison pills I administer to myself, the excuses I use not to write.
Solzhenitsyn, afflicted by the best kind of survivor's guilt, was admirably devoted to the proposition that he must do something to memorialize all those who didn't escape and survive the Gulag. In that sense, Solzenitsyn has never left the Gulag, just as Eli Weisel has never left Auschwitz. Not every writer has that kind of imperative behind his writing.
Sophocles, for example. And Shakespeare. They didn't write to memorialize or somehow redeem the victims of the Gulag or the Holocaust. And God knows Proust didn't.
Can you imagine Proust talking himself out of writing Remembrance of Things Past because he didn't write agitprop like Emile Zola? Fortunately, Proust's head was teeming with the sensuous memories of his youth and of French society. He didn't gag himself because he couldn't imagine a precedent for the kind of book he was setting out to write. In fact, he wrote because there existed nothing quite like what he wanted to read, so he had to write it himself.
A writer must first of all feel, in his gut and heart, that his own point of view is valid enough to set down on paper. If he can talk himself out of writing because he doesn't feel, for whatever reason, he has something sufficiently worthwhile to say, then he'll never be a writer. Now here's the kicker. Many writers do not KNOW what it is they have to say until they've said it!
So if they talk themselves out of writing because they do not feel like they have something worth writing, how is it that they KNOW it's not worthwhile when they don't even know what it is until they've written it?!
Hypothesis: Much good writing is born in the hunger to write, and in the pure joy of invention, not in the knowledge that the writer ALREADY has something worthwhile to say. The writer doesn't always have the SECURITY of having, in advance, something worthwhile to say!! He makes it up as he goes along. He surprises himself even more than he surprises his readers.
There are writers and writers. There are writer-journalists like John Steinbeck, who did a series of newspaper articles on the Okies and then went on to memorialize and fictionalize them in The Grapes of Wrath. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's head was full of facts, and his heart was full of rage and compassion, about the enslavement of the millions in the Gulag Archipelago. Clearly Solzhenitsyn knew he had a powerful subject, a subject he was passionate about, before he actually wrote.
But what about Lewis Carroll? Was he passionate about talking caterpillars and disappearing Cheshire cats before he wrote Alice in Wonderland? Or was he simply writing in order to seductively amuse the half-dressed nymphets he liked to photograph? Who would advocate that the only wouldbe writers who should write are the ones who know in advance what they're going to write, and who take up the cudgel for the underdog and against the oppressors' wrongdoing? Who would advocate that only writers who already know they are brilliant plot-designers, or psycho-dramatists, or wits, or poets, or describers of landscapes or battle-scenes or parlors or horse races or whaling vessels should be the ones to write? What about the wouldbe writers who don't know what they can do or what they know? What about the writers who only know how they have thus far failed, yet still hunger to succeed in some way that they cannot yet imagine and predict? The biggest mistake any wouldbe writer can make is to decide that he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, is to decide that what he has to say isn't worth taking the trouble to try to uncover, discover, and recover.
The first, and second, and millionth thing a wouldbe writer may have to do is write one, or two, or millions of words not worth saving. They may be words whose very clumsiness seems to argue against the writer actually having something worthwhile to say, and the talent and craft to say it. The writer must have the courage to throw off, or plow through, all the naysaying on his way to yaysaying, in order to express something of value. What's hard and painful and discouraging is not writing something worthwhile, something beautiful. What's really hard is writing something seemingly worthless and/or dispensable and/or unreadable on the way to writing something worthwhile. That is where the struggle takes place, that is the crucible where the writer's mettle is tested.
What the writer is struggling to do is to make something valuable out of something apparently worthless, out of the buzzing confusion and nihilism in his brain. And finally, what does the writer have to go on? A hunch. A yearning. A burning. A desire to say something worthwhile even though he doesn't really know what it is.
The writer discovers what he has to say as he writes. He may discover that much of what he has to say is not worth showing to anyone else. He may discover that what he has to say is not saleable in any market. He may discover that what he is writing has no plot, nor characters, nor clever dialogue. He may discover that what he is writing is not an action-adventure script which will make an ideal vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone. He may discover that it will not be possible to auction the movie rights to his piece for millions of dollars. He may discover that what he is writing is not even a pleasurable reading experience for himself and his closest friends, and certainly nothing that the rest of humanity will want to read.
But the writer can't know in advance that what he is going to write will be worthless. For all the writer knows, some very valuable purpose may be served simply by writing, thousands and thousands of times: All work and no play makes the writer a dull boy.
OK, so that's the route that turned the character in THE SHINING into a homicidal maniac. And it may be that the next time you try to write you'll get so frustrated that you'll jump up from your typewriter and axe-murder your family. But will that be so terrible? Will that be worse than never daring to try to write at all?
After all, before you sit down to write, all you are being is a wouldbe writer who doesn't have the courage to actually try to write. But after you axe-murder your family, you're not just a wannabe. You've axe-tualized yourself. Instead of being freefloating potential, you ARE something. You're an axe murderer. And in this country that's nothing to sniff at. Consider Lizzie Borden.
Now it may be that your failure to write what you wanted to write will enrage you but not make you murderously furious. In that case, you may jump up from your word processor and grab your axe and run down to the nearest bar and smash it to kindling. Don't be disappointed in yourself because you haven't chopped to the heights of a Lizzie Borden or a Jeffrey Daumer. Remember Carrie Nation? She, too, was probably a wouldbe writer, before she started smashing up bars. And whether you think of her as famous or infamous, you think of her. And why? Because she tried to write, that's why.
If she had just sat on her settee and continued to do needlework, she never would have enraged herself enough to chop up all those saloons. It was only when she took pen in hand and tried, really tried, and then FAILED, to write something worth a damn that she tapped into her own powers of volcanic rage. How could Carrie Nation have known IN ADVANCE that she was going to be the most savage of the mother-founders of the Temperance Movement? It was only by having the courage to try to write, and by failing abysmally, that she got in touch with her own best and worst self, transforming herself into the terrifying battleaxe we celebrate today.
So even failing can lead to grand things. But to what can wanting, but not daring to try, lead? You'll become a human bomb or a human dud. You'll walk around choking on your own bile, leaking discouragement and dashed expectations upon everyone you brush up against. You'll either explode like a pinata, or roam the Earth like Typhoid Mary, spreading the contagion of your suppressed aspirations.
By suppressing your desire to create you do more than simply crush yourself. You crush others, as well. Because what you present to others is the model of the muted self, who does not dare to express himself because he does not feel he has anything of value to express. He points to others and says that they are valuable, so valuable that he is valueless. He imagines that he is inspiring by pointing to the example of others' inspirations. But the example he is setting with his own life is far more vivid than anything he points to outside himself. And what is he? He is a person who lives by the credo that he dare not begin to create because others are greater creators than he could ever be.
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:03 AM
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