Leveling. Here’s the thing. It’s hard to do this un-self consciously. There are considerations. I think about generosity, about selfishness. About the necessity, even, some would say, responsibility, to write for others. How to jive with the imperative to write, first and foremost, for oneself. How to think of oneself as both writing in a vacuum, without audience, and at the same time giving of oneself for the benefit of the other lonely bodies out there.
Picture, for a moment, yourself. Sitting, hitting refresh, cycling through the several pages that you frequent every day. Now, think of the writer. The someone out there who thinks, perhaps, his or her words have some sort of impact. We’re scared, we who attempt. And yet, even as we fear, we fear the fear because it gestures toward a possibility that seems too difficult to realize: that we might land a blow. That, somehow by flailing around in the dark like blind aunties with canes, we might stumble upon something that connects us to the reader.
What then? Downplay. That’s what. If words land their blows—if, at any rate, they can be considered weapons in the first place—then what are we to do? Sit back and enjoy our glasses of sauvignon blanc? Share our successes with whomever believed in us in the first place?
Here’s the deal. When I first started writing these things in November, it was for others. Now, as I poke through some sort of thick soupy darkness toward the clarity of writing again, I am stuck. Stuck at the justification to do it in the first place.
How do you write for yourself while being generous? How does a writer indulge in the narcissistic project of self presentation on the page while still being able to genuinely ask the questions: “Why do we hurt?”
Listen: I’m not into therapy. If my words ever make you feel better, reader, it’s an accident. Because there is no better. There is only the momentary contact with another. There is only an instant of remediation against the cold blankness of your consciousness. Or at least, that’s what some of the writers that I love most would have us believe. The trouble is perhaps that, as I sit here sweating at my desk in the un-air-conditioned apartment: I don’t know if I believe it. What if loneliness actually can be remediated at some deeper level? Maybe that’s what happens when writers get too caught up in the desolate mechanics of linguistic signification.
Like, what if, when we embrace, it’s really an embrace? What if, when we stick our tongues down each other’s various orifices, we’re really doing, like, something that means, I dunno, something?
Alternatively, and I mean to ask this only in a limited sense: what if, when we read the words of others, we feel momentarily as though we are (not BETTER, God forbid) connected to something someone some thought some someness that feels in some way familiar?
One time, I was in love and didn’t know it. One time, I got high with a maniac who kept knives in his closet. One time, I woke up on a stranger’s couch and the police were called. One time, I laid out in the sun and thought of beating my scoutmaster at chess. One time, when I got drunk to celebrate the departure of a friend, I thought to myself about the relationships that span time and place and distance. I thought of temporality and of love and of the finite nature of our intense moments of contact. I thought of drapes swaying in the spring breeze and about the inevitability of winter. I thought of you. I thought of us. I thought of the possibilities that never were, and of the unknown someones out there that I have yet to meet. I thought of the warm summer night and of the crickets and the inevitable morning. I thought of what comes next, and of how, in the infinitude of my inadequacies, someone might imagine how to write about all of it in some degree of specificity.
