Why It's Pointless to Write
WHY IT'S POINTLESS TO WRITE (AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN)
First of all, it's pointless to write in The Age of Channelsurfing because upcoming generations no longer want to nor know how to read. They'd rather watch TV. And older generations sometimes still remember how to read, but they don't want to read anything which upsets them. So if a wouldbe writer is so pigheaded as to persist in the notion that he wants to write something that others will read, he must be careful to tell lies that will serve to soothe the savage beast that dwells in the breast of what is laughingly known as the reading public.
If a wouldbe writer wants it all, that is, if he wants to tell the terrible truth rather than soothing lies, if he wants to write beautifully and imaginatively, and if he also wants a large readership who will pay him well for his words, then he's crazy and will soon find himself out on the street unless he's lucky enough to be a trust fund baby, or get committed to an asylum, or get arrested.
In many totalitarian regimes, the better a writer is, the more likely he is to be jailed and/or assassinated. But in America, and especially in Southern California, where this wouldbe writer wouldbe writes, nobody is interested enough in words, qua words, to punish a writer with anything more violent than indifference.
I can imagine a scenario in which a great American writer writes a mindblowingly great American novel and is greeted with thundering silence, or, at best, incomprehension. And I don't have to exercise my imagination too hard, either; all I have to do is remember back to the non-reception America gave to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
The argument could be made that Moby Dick wasn't appreciated during the lifetime of its author because the book was ahead of 19th Century American frontier society. Most Americans of that time, especially the slaves, Indians, muleskinners, and whalers, just didn't have the intellectual tools they would have needed to "get" it.
So there's a damn good argument right there why it's hopeless to write: Even if you did succeed in writing a genius book, your fellow Americans wouldn't be willing or able to read it, especially if they were slaves, Indians, muleskinners, or whalers.
But this is the 20th Century. We appreciate Moby Dick now. In fact, Moby Dick is WORSHIPPED in English Departments across the country. It's worshipped, but it's not read, except in the Cliff Notes version. And there's another damn good reason why it's hopeless to write: There's no sense aspiring to write Moby Dick even if it is worshipped (but not read) because MOBY DICK HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN. And Herman Melville, justly or unjustly, has already been given credit for the piece.
You could transcribe Moby Dick in your own handwriting, stumble upon your own manuscript in your own attic, and thus offer incontrovertible proof that you indeed wrote it, but the sad and cruel fact of the matter is that Herman Melville has somehow gotten his name inextricably bound up with Moby Dick, and you'll have a devil of a time supplanting his name with yours. The only balm I can offer you is that most of Melville's recognition came after his death, so he really didn't get to enjoy it. What you could do is POSE as Melville. A few years ago, Hal Holbrook posed as Mark Twain and travelled across the nation, taking credit for the dead man's wit. There are worse ways to make a living.
Vincent Price made a career out of posing as Oscar Wilde, Robert Morse posed as Truman Capote, and Quentin Crisp posed as Quentin Crisp, so there are clearly plenty of possibilities for the literary poseurs of the world. The trick is to pose as a writer without actually doing any writing.
There are other ways to accomplish this. For example, you can become rich and famous enough to hire someone to write your books for you. This is doubly convenient if you never learned how to read or write in the first place, which is true of most rich, famous, writers. Or you can write so badly that what you are doing can't tuthfully be called writing at all. That is what Harold Robbins did for decades, and it's ever so much less painful, and more financially rewarding, than real writing.
Here in Southern California, there is an activity called screenwriting which is said to be akin to writing. Screenwriting is to real writing as military music is to music. That is, in screenwriting, words are not prized as ends in themselves, but rather are viewed as a means to an end. Military music exists to exhort the troops, to give them courage when they surge into battle. An electrifying screenplay gives producers, directors, and actors courage when they surge into production, it helps them to persuade themselves they have a reason to be where they are, spending all that money in hopes of making even more. But the screenwriters themselves are rarely allowed on the set. In the opinion of most filmmakers, the screenwriter's presence would only stifle the creativity of those in front of and behind the cameras.
So does that mean it's pointless to try to write screenplays, as well? No. Because screenplays are less painful to write than other literary forms because they aren't really literary forms---they have more spaces and fewer words, and the words they do have need not appeal to the ever-shrinking pool of literate consumers. It's better if they don't. In fact, you don't even have to be semi-literate to write screenplays. The proof of that is that 95% of the population of Los Angeles has written at least two screenplays, yet the city has a 50% illiteracy rate. Moreover, Sly Stallone himself has written many screenplays, winning an Oscar for one. It's probably a fallacy to say that screenplays are written at all. They're bizarre and magical blueprints, pulled from the nether orifices of scenarists in moments of financial, creative, and existential desperation.
Another reason it's pointless to write in the Age of Channelsurfing is the concentration span. No one has one any longer. Even those who know how to read have been so spoiled by their clickers and by their 99 (soon to be 999) cable channels that they can't concentrate on reading material that's longer than a four-panel comic strip. And those rare younger birds who have somehow learned how to read would prefer to read nothing longer than a STOP sign, and just because they read one occasionally doesn't mean they'll obey one.
Nor are wouldbe writers themselves free from ever-shortening concentration spans. Many of them can concentrate so briefly that they forget, before they actually manage to write anything, why it is they have sat down at the word processor. This is a blessing, because real writing is so painful, so problematic, that they thus deliver themselves from pointless suffering and are free to return to their TV's, their video games, and their 3-wheel offroad vehicles.
Now suppose some hopelessly deluded individual manages to write something which,in his considered opinion, would make a valuable reading experience for others. Chances are, after the writer has finished the piece, he will be whipsawed between self-congratulatory megalo-mania and despair born of an abysmal sense of failure. He will be completely unbalanced and it may take him months or years before he can again get his psyche on an even keel. Whereas, if he had never written in the first place, he wouldn't have unbalanced himself to begin with.
But suppose this individual persists in compounding his folly by taking his writing out into the world and showing it to others. First of all, because this person is a writer, he may be blinded as soon as he emerges from his writing cell into the harsh light of day. Writers are notoriously reclusive and many are ill-suited to trafficking with the rough and tumble universe outside their burrows.
Now the writer shows his piece to someone else. That reader has one of 3 reactions: Acclaim, indifference, or criticism, or a combination of all three. Chances are, no matter how the reader reacts, even if he praises the writer and his words to the skies, the writer will plunge into despair because he will realize that his words are not going to do for him what he had secretly, in his heart of unconfessed hearts, hoped they would do. That is, the words don't solve the essential problem of life, which is that it is intolerable.
The writer had set out to write in the first place because life was intolerable. He somehow got the idea that if he wrote the right thing it would turn, like a magic key, in the lock of his life, releasing him from his insufferable imprisonment. It was this hope of eventual release, of deliverance, which reconciled the writer to long hours alone, in his cell, as he labored over his words, which were to be a kind of hacksaw with which he would escape from the bars of his own private Alcatraz.
So even if the writer's words win him all the acclaim, prizes, money, wine, women, and song that he could possibly hope for, inevitably he'll feel betrayed and cast down by them, because what they have won him are the things of this world, but what he was truly yearning for was something not of this world---spiritual deliverance.
It can be argued that all of us alike: Writers and wouldbe writers, bankers and painters, soldiers and whores, actors and priests, politicians and pushers, yearn for spiritual deliverance. But how many of us are foolish enough to hope to find that deliverance in our work? That is the writer's dilemma. He somehow thinks that if he just writes well enough, if he can just find the right words, he can talk himself out of the spiritual morass we all find ourselves in, and maybe he can even temporarily lift his readers (of whom he counts himself one) out of that mire.
So, when he has completed a successful piece, he is cast down lower than those who complete nothing, because he is no longer free to delude himself with false hope about what words can and cannot do for him. Moreover, he is spent by his effort and is therefore stripped of his defenses. Harpie Despair is free to have her way with him.
Now suppose a writer has taken all the pain and joy of his life and boiled it down to a single magnificent sentence, and he has found a way to place that sentence perfectly, for maximum effect, in just the right literary setting. The argument could be made that he should withhold that sentence. Why? Because as soon as he releases it, it's gone from him. It's no longer his, it's the world's.
It's out there, away from him, where others will be free to steal it, criticize it, misinterpret it, grind it into the dust, laugh at it, weep at it, scorn it and applaud it.
It's as if the writer were a weird bird that lays a single egg in its lifetime and then dies, exhausted; or he were a jungle plant which blooms once in a century. Until that ovulation, that blossoming, the writer is all hope and potential. He is also airy nothingness. His flesh, his outer shell, may be suffering terrible blows, but his soul is young and virginal and seething with potentiality.
But once the writer dares lay his egg, once his petals split open and are laid bare under the jungle sun, then his inmost spirit, that which he has endowed with all his hope, changes from potential to real. He must face his own words. He must see himself, laid and flayed open. He knows that what he has made cannot last forever. It's just another egg, another flower. The egg may rot, or crack and hatch, the flower may wilt, it may pollinate and fructify, but it will certainly die.
By writing, the writer has committed his spirit to the endless wheel of death and life which is the world. And there is the possibility, once those words have gone out of the writer, that he will never find their equal. He may never express himself that well again. He may never express himself at all again.
It is also possible that, by speaking, by letting the precious, special, words fly out of his head and fingers, that he will have created an emptiness, a vacancy, in his head and heart. He is made an empty well. And circumstances may refill him again. And perhaps again. Perhaps as many times as he sees fit to draw from his wellspring.
He may frighten himself by the emotional intensity of the act. He may wonder how long his physical health, and his sanity, can bear up under such a feverish pitch. How can he afford to be so vulnerable? How can he afford to put the very best of his life into these words when words matter so little, are such will o' the wisps, and no one reads them any longer, and no one can concentrate that long, and everyone would prefer to watch TV instead?
How can he afford not to? He can afford not to the same way a wounded man can afford not to tear the scab off his wound. He can stand pat, watching the scab swell and heat up with the supperating, infectious, pus of unexpressed truth. He can live with his infection until it bursts outward, of its own accord, into the general atmosphere and population, or inward, into his bloodstream, his extremities, his tripes, his heart, and his brain. He can, in short, share what’s eating him with others, though they may hate him for it, or he can sit on it and spin his own shroud of it, make a flag of it, make a suicide note of it, tie it around his eyes, make a blindfold of it, face an execution squad composed of all his unexpressed selves firing, like bullets, all his unexpressed words directly at his heart and head. He can take those words, the words he never wrote because words don’t matter enough and no one understands them anymore, and roll them up in a cigarette, and stick that cigarette in his trembling lips, and have one more good smoke while he waits to be forgotten.
--FIN--
First of all, it's pointless to write in The Age of Channelsurfing because upcoming generations no longer want to nor know how to read. They'd rather watch TV. And older generations sometimes still remember how to read, but they don't want to read anything which upsets them. So if a wouldbe writer is so pigheaded as to persist in the notion that he wants to write something that others will read, he must be careful to tell lies that will serve to soothe the savage beast that dwells in the breast of what is laughingly known as the reading public.
If a wouldbe writer wants it all, that is, if he wants to tell the terrible truth rather than soothing lies, if he wants to write beautifully and imaginatively, and if he also wants a large readership who will pay him well for his words, then he's crazy and will soon find himself out on the street unless he's lucky enough to be a trust fund baby, or get committed to an asylum, or get arrested.
In many totalitarian regimes, the better a writer is, the more likely he is to be jailed and/or assassinated. But in America, and especially in Southern California, where this wouldbe writer wouldbe writes, nobody is interested enough in words, qua words, to punish a writer with anything more violent than indifference.
I can imagine a scenario in which a great American writer writes a mindblowingly great American novel and is greeted with thundering silence, or, at best, incomprehension. And I don't have to exercise my imagination too hard, either; all I have to do is remember back to the non-reception America gave to Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
The argument could be made that Moby Dick wasn't appreciated during the lifetime of its author because the book was ahead of 19th Century American frontier society. Most Americans of that time, especially the slaves, Indians, muleskinners, and whalers, just didn't have the intellectual tools they would have needed to "get" it.
So there's a damn good argument right there why it's hopeless to write: Even if you did succeed in writing a genius book, your fellow Americans wouldn't be willing or able to read it, especially if they were slaves, Indians, muleskinners, or whalers.
But this is the 20th Century. We appreciate Moby Dick now. In fact, Moby Dick is WORSHIPPED in English Departments across the country. It's worshipped, but it's not read, except in the Cliff Notes version. And there's another damn good reason why it's hopeless to write: There's no sense aspiring to write Moby Dick even if it is worshipped (but not read) because MOBY DICK HAS ALREADY BEEN WRITTEN. And Herman Melville, justly or unjustly, has already been given credit for the piece.
You could transcribe Moby Dick in your own handwriting, stumble upon your own manuscript in your own attic, and thus offer incontrovertible proof that you indeed wrote it, but the sad and cruel fact of the matter is that Herman Melville has somehow gotten his name inextricably bound up with Moby Dick, and you'll have a devil of a time supplanting his name with yours. The only balm I can offer you is that most of Melville's recognition came after his death, so he really didn't get to enjoy it. What you could do is POSE as Melville. A few years ago, Hal Holbrook posed as Mark Twain and travelled across the nation, taking credit for the dead man's wit. There are worse ways to make a living.
Vincent Price made a career out of posing as Oscar Wilde, Robert Morse posed as Truman Capote, and Quentin Crisp posed as Quentin Crisp, so there are clearly plenty of possibilities for the literary poseurs of the world. The trick is to pose as a writer without actually doing any writing.
There are other ways to accomplish this. For example, you can become rich and famous enough to hire someone to write your books for you. This is doubly convenient if you never learned how to read or write in the first place, which is true of most rich, famous, writers. Or you can write so badly that what you are doing can't tuthfully be called writing at all. That is what Harold Robbins did for decades, and it's ever so much less painful, and more financially rewarding, than real writing.
Here in Southern California, there is an activity called screenwriting which is said to be akin to writing. Screenwriting is to real writing as military music is to music. That is, in screenwriting, words are not prized as ends in themselves, but rather are viewed as a means to an end. Military music exists to exhort the troops, to give them courage when they surge into battle. An electrifying screenplay gives producers, directors, and actors courage when they surge into production, it helps them to persuade themselves they have a reason to be where they are, spending all that money in hopes of making even more. But the screenwriters themselves are rarely allowed on the set. In the opinion of most filmmakers, the screenwriter's presence would only stifle the creativity of those in front of and behind the cameras.
So does that mean it's pointless to try to write screenplays, as well? No. Because screenplays are less painful to write than other literary forms because they aren't really literary forms---they have more spaces and fewer words, and the words they do have need not appeal to the ever-shrinking pool of literate consumers. It's better if they don't. In fact, you don't even have to be semi-literate to write screenplays. The proof of that is that 95% of the population of Los Angeles has written at least two screenplays, yet the city has a 50% illiteracy rate. Moreover, Sly Stallone himself has written many screenplays, winning an Oscar for one. It's probably a fallacy to say that screenplays are written at all. They're bizarre and magical blueprints, pulled from the nether orifices of scenarists in moments of financial, creative, and existential desperation.
Another reason it's pointless to write in the Age of Channelsurfing is the concentration span. No one has one any longer. Even those who know how to read have been so spoiled by their clickers and by their 99 (soon to be 999) cable channels that they can't concentrate on reading material that's longer than a four-panel comic strip. And those rare younger birds who have somehow learned how to read would prefer to read nothing longer than a STOP sign, and just because they read one occasionally doesn't mean they'll obey one.
Nor are wouldbe writers themselves free from ever-shortening concentration spans. Many of them can concentrate so briefly that they forget, before they actually manage to write anything, why it is they have sat down at the word processor. This is a blessing, because real writing is so painful, so problematic, that they thus deliver themselves from pointless suffering and are free to return to their TV's, their video games, and their 3-wheel offroad vehicles.
Now suppose some hopelessly deluded individual manages to write something which,in his considered opinion, would make a valuable reading experience for others. Chances are, after the writer has finished the piece, he will be whipsawed between self-congratulatory megalo-mania and despair born of an abysmal sense of failure. He will be completely unbalanced and it may take him months or years before he can again get his psyche on an even keel. Whereas, if he had never written in the first place, he wouldn't have unbalanced himself to begin with.
But suppose this individual persists in compounding his folly by taking his writing out into the world and showing it to others. First of all, because this person is a writer, he may be blinded as soon as he emerges from his writing cell into the harsh light of day. Writers are notoriously reclusive and many are ill-suited to trafficking with the rough and tumble universe outside their burrows.
Now the writer shows his piece to someone else. That reader has one of 3 reactions: Acclaim, indifference, or criticism, or a combination of all three. Chances are, no matter how the reader reacts, even if he praises the writer and his words to the skies, the writer will plunge into despair because he will realize that his words are not going to do for him what he had secretly, in his heart of unconfessed hearts, hoped they would do. That is, the words don't solve the essential problem of life, which is that it is intolerable.
The writer had set out to write in the first place because life was intolerable. He somehow got the idea that if he wrote the right thing it would turn, like a magic key, in the lock of his life, releasing him from his insufferable imprisonment. It was this hope of eventual release, of deliverance, which reconciled the writer to long hours alone, in his cell, as he labored over his words, which were to be a kind of hacksaw with which he would escape from the bars of his own private Alcatraz.
So even if the writer's words win him all the acclaim, prizes, money, wine, women, and song that he could possibly hope for, inevitably he'll feel betrayed and cast down by them, because what they have won him are the things of this world, but what he was truly yearning for was something not of this world---spiritual deliverance.
It can be argued that all of us alike: Writers and wouldbe writers, bankers and painters, soldiers and whores, actors and priests, politicians and pushers, yearn for spiritual deliverance. But how many of us are foolish enough to hope to find that deliverance in our work? That is the writer's dilemma. He somehow thinks that if he just writes well enough, if he can just find the right words, he can talk himself out of the spiritual morass we all find ourselves in, and maybe he can even temporarily lift his readers (of whom he counts himself one) out of that mire.
So, when he has completed a successful piece, he is cast down lower than those who complete nothing, because he is no longer free to delude himself with false hope about what words can and cannot do for him. Moreover, he is spent by his effort and is therefore stripped of his defenses. Harpie Despair is free to have her way with him.
Now suppose a writer has taken all the pain and joy of his life and boiled it down to a single magnificent sentence, and he has found a way to place that sentence perfectly, for maximum effect, in just the right literary setting. The argument could be made that he should withhold that sentence. Why? Because as soon as he releases it, it's gone from him. It's no longer his, it's the world's.
It's out there, away from him, where others will be free to steal it, criticize it, misinterpret it, grind it into the dust, laugh at it, weep at it, scorn it and applaud it.
It's as if the writer were a weird bird that lays a single egg in its lifetime and then dies, exhausted; or he were a jungle plant which blooms once in a century. Until that ovulation, that blossoming, the writer is all hope and potential. He is also airy nothingness. His flesh, his outer shell, may be suffering terrible blows, but his soul is young and virginal and seething with potentiality.
But once the writer dares lay his egg, once his petals split open and are laid bare under the jungle sun, then his inmost spirit, that which he has endowed with all his hope, changes from potential to real. He must face his own words. He must see himself, laid and flayed open. He knows that what he has made cannot last forever. It's just another egg, another flower. The egg may rot, or crack and hatch, the flower may wilt, it may pollinate and fructify, but it will certainly die.
By writing, the writer has committed his spirit to the endless wheel of death and life which is the world. And there is the possibility, once those words have gone out of the writer, that he will never find their equal. He may never express himself that well again. He may never express himself at all again.
It is also possible that, by speaking, by letting the precious, special, words fly out of his head and fingers, that he will have created an emptiness, a vacancy, in his head and heart. He is made an empty well. And circumstances may refill him again. And perhaps again. Perhaps as many times as he sees fit to draw from his wellspring.
He may frighten himself by the emotional intensity of the act. He may wonder how long his physical health, and his sanity, can bear up under such a feverish pitch. How can he afford to be so vulnerable? How can he afford to put the very best of his life into these words when words matter so little, are such will o' the wisps, and no one reads them any longer, and no one can concentrate that long, and everyone would prefer to watch TV instead?
How can he afford not to? He can afford not to the same way a wounded man can afford not to tear the scab off his wound. He can stand pat, watching the scab swell and heat up with the supperating, infectious, pus of unexpressed truth. He can live with his infection until it bursts outward, of its own accord, into the general atmosphere and population, or inward, into his bloodstream, his extremities, his tripes, his heart, and his brain. He can, in short, share what’s eating him with others, though they may hate him for it, or he can sit on it and spin his own shroud of it, make a flag of it, make a suicide note of it, tie it around his eyes, make a blindfold of it, face an execution squad composed of all his unexpressed selves firing, like bullets, all his unexpressed words directly at his heart and head. He can take those words, the words he never wrote because words don’t matter enough and no one understands them anymore, and roll them up in a cigarette, and stick that cigarette in his trembling lips, and have one more good smoke while he waits to be forgotten.
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:34 AM
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