Is writing about writing only interesting to writers? Is bad writing about writing only interesting to the person who writes it? How many writers have written about how difficult it is to write when all they really need is to chill the f*ck out? Here’s some self-important prose on writing:
They say write what you know, right? Or alternatively, “Write about yourself until you get bored. Then write about something else.” Or, when someone really has nothing to say, “Show, don’t tell.” But what happens when the only things you can think of—the only things that seem to constitute any kind of actual self-awareness—fit neatly into observations of scenes or objects? Damp bath towels, the sound of someone washing dishes, the way the sunrise looks over the mountains in Utah, how an Amtrak train smells at four o’clock in the morning in a coach seat on an overnight train. Pile on the descriptions—the things you know, the things that make up (and here’s the frustrating truth about it) the database of yourself and your memories—and they can seem to amount to so little. Should writers try to provide news about the world, or just say things that everyone feels, but no one notices, because not a lot of people have time to sit awake at their computer at four in the morning and listen in the silence for something that does more than just verge on meaning. Something that actually connects. Searching for rightness, can the writer settle for the only-slightly-off? Precision, Deborah wrote me once. Precision and finishing things. Great. The two things that prove the most difficult. But listen, if I could just make one thing clear. The feeling of the doorknob, or the taste of salt-air, or the rocking of the Metro, or the sound of your own voice echoing luminously off canyon walls. Would any of us be happy to articulate, over an evening, a career of some indescribable kind, a lifetime of words and failed attempts at words, just one of these things? Not just to say them, but rather to inhabit them, to expend the emotional intensity of a billion instances of experience, and pour it into the task of description of footprints, traces? The warm teakettle index of your roommate, your partner, whomever you fuck, who made tea before they left the house, before you woke up. If language fails to describe, and we try anyway, is that love? Is it madness or sentimentality or surrender to desperate futility? Shall we take the shotguns from our heads and breathe? Should we point them at each other? Shall we change the channel, now? Verging always, at the moment of transmission, of connection, of shared presence in a moment constructed by and inhabited by language, voice, syllabic utterances, gurgles. Till we collapse in our exhaustion and then immediately reach for one another again, groping around in the darkness and silence that words force us toward then hurling and hurtling at one another in collisions and parries and glancing blows of encounter between here I am and here you begin and end and I know what it means to feel the same thing that you feel now can feel it in your presence alone your borders merging merging with mine in incomplete algorithms of limbs and—
