I can't help but feel writing about life detaches me from living it

Return from the Market (Adrien Moreau, 1883)

1.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that a writer, or any artist really, is professionally detached from life.

When John Steinbeck was writing his masterpiece, East of Eden, he was at his desk before 8am, Monday to Friday. With the same blue-lined notebook and a long, sharp pencil, he began at the top of a fresh page on the left side, only the left, writing a letter to his friend and editor Pat Covici as a kind of warm-up before getting into the more serious work of the novel. He wrote a letter a day until the first draft was finished, 276 days later.

One of the reasons I like reading old letters and diaries is that people censor themselves less than if they were writing to an audience. They are not trying to sound impressive or worrying whether their thoughts are interesting, but rather writing clear and hard about what they want to say. Using plain language to put their mind, as it is, on the page. In a strange way, this often makes for good writing. The lack of rhythm becomes its own kind of rhythm, the casualness creating a sense of comfort.

Steinbeck talks about normal human things. Not sleeping well the night before, worrying about his writing being bad, getting sick, trying to lose a couple pounds for the summer, fretting over his sons. One part that stuck in my mind, even months later, is when Steinbeck talks about the strain that writing puts on his marriage and home life. "I help with what I can but I am very thoughtless—very. My mind goes mooning away. I never get very far from my book. And this must get pretty tiresome. I'm sure it does. I guess a writer is only half a man as far as a woman is concerned."

That last line especially: A writer is only half a man as far as a woman is concerned.

It may sound like Steinbeck is being dramatic but I don't think that is the case. To create great art, it requires all of you. A certain primitive absorption that can come off as distant or disinterested, but can only be properly understood as intense.

Maybe I need to explain.

2.

The story I really wanted to tell in this essay is about a summer I spent with a girl from Germany while I was traveling. I would come by her cabin in the mornings and she would make coffee and I would read parts of poems and listen to her stories about back home, how she was hurt and didn't know if she would heal. It was never romantic, but it was domestic. We argued sometimes, but we loved each other, I think, the way humans are supposed to love each other.

Anyway, after we had spent about a month together, I remember she found my writing. I must've told her about it. I remember she was quiet for a few days. And I remember when it all came out, one bright morning, as I sat on the floor of her cabin in my usual spot—back against the wall, book and pen in hand, eyes soft, lost in the pattern in the rug—how upset she was that I had this whole other side to me that she couldn't see and how she felt like she barely knew me, unable to reconcile the writer who seems to drink life down to the dregs with the man who was often somewhere far away.

I remember feeling guilty and bad. Like a fraud. Alarmed at the impossibility of ignoring this discontinuity, this compartmentalization of self, I didn't know if I could ever resolve.

3.

Henry James once said that to be an artist is to be someone upon whom nothing is lost.

Writing, like any art form, is crafted patterns of information. Less about the words, more about what happens to your mind, how your consciousness temporarily reshapes or permanently restructures, when you attend to the words. To read well is to let the world dawn on you.

Writers, to cultivate the kind of observational awareness that sees patterns where others see chaos, must inhabit a strange adjacency to experience. Removed from the action, two feet securely on the sidelines, wistful from being left out, but mesmerized from looking in. As if they feel life, the burn of being, most when watching.

One must have devotion to be an artist and there is no way of side-stepping the cost.

The thing is, on this road it's not hard to begin to see life as a distraction from art. Engaging in an experience that demands to be left unanalyzed or cannot be compressed into a sensible string of words seems frivolous, even threatening.

For most of my adult life, I worried I would become the kind of man "who would leave his wife and child because / they made noise in his study"¹. That maybe I could write these simple and quiet words and touch people's lives, being a means to peace that I myself do not feel, but every morning old anxieties would return and I'd be as volatile and paralyzed as ever. Lost in a kind of isolation that only enables the intensity. Blooming in loneliness.

There is nothing more difficult to escape than a neurosis that has become useful to us.

If the human condition is one of solitary confinement, like Simone Weil once said, a writer is one who can't stop staring at the walls of their cell. They savour, in a cruel, self-sacrificial kind of way, standing numb and apart from others. Unsure what is more real, the world or their words. Unsure which is worth their attention and, therefore, their devotion. Both deeply seized by existence and deeply alienated from it.

But this kind of emotional reserve is a reservoir, a way to go deep inside, to pour color and feeling onto the page. Their art becomes a silhouette of all they fail to feel in normal human experience, as vacancy turns to pain, and pain turns to power. I think it was Annie Dillard who said a writer's life is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation.

The paradox is that art can compromise the well of experience it draws from. This is why artists, like the religious, can try to manufacture intensity, create and claim distance. To burn themselves awake. To feel something beyond the mildness with which they drift through their days, the monotonous hum of daily existence.

4.

People always tell me that I am a deep thinker. I never know what to say because I don't think my thinking is deep, it's just how I think. I can't climb into someone else’s consciousness to compare and contrast the texture of our thoughts. But the cost of this depth, perhaps, is that the ideas I communicate in conversation are often a fraction of the meaning and nuance I experience in my mind. (I am also a slow thinker and tend to replay conversations afterward for all the dumb stuff I said and all the cool stuff I should have said instead). That is why I write. To unravel. To sketch the fleeting and firing neurons in my brain. But writing feels into and feeds that depth, my tendency to “intellectualize stuff,” and the space between us grows.

There are these inescapable tensions: between writing and the people I love, between writing and my responsibility to serve others, between writing and a life that is creased and close and well-lived. Writing itself is a weird tension. One between obligation and joy. It is somehow both.

There is a safety in intellectualism. A naivety, almost. I can gesture toward grief, muse about how to have a good marriage, even describe how I will face death, but it is all safely remote from me, still abstract and impersonal, lacking in any sharp edges. I imagine all the young poets who valorized death felt quite different when they were staring into its cold, gray eyes.

Not to mention, there is the whole problem of intellectual pride. The ego getting involved, which it unavoidably does. Pride is the life of the art, but the death of the artist.

It's not hard to get wrapped up in wanting people to like me and admire me and think I'm a good writer. To care about how many likes my essays get, not as a means of happiness but as a shield from despair. If I'm not careful, my writing becomes basically about showing off, trying to get people to think I'm good. Trying to present myself in a way that I imagine will be interesting and impressive and maximally likeable. But the thing is, this kind of attempted seduction is exhausting, in the way all inauthentic things are, and it submerges me in the extreme unpleasantness of my own vanity.

Maybe I'm scared of what parts of me writing indulges. Maybe they are not all good parts. I have grown less interested in the self, feeding the parts of me that want to feel unique or smart or whatever.

5.

"Art, like religious devotion, either adds life or steals it. It is never neutral. Either it impels one back toward life or it is merely one more means of keeping life at arm's length".

— Christian Wiman

And so I wonder to what extent writing removes me from life. I've always had the feeling that art is sacrifice, in every sense of the word. I've always known it ends up consuming its creator, in both senses of the saying.

I've begun to believe that anything that abstracts us from the physical world is evil and anything that sends us deeper into the current reality we inhabit is good. These aren't categories alone, like art is evil and walking is good, but filters within categories. Whether it's art or religion or relationships, the unifying measure of goodness is whether it calls you to more fully inhabit, and therefore affirm, reality.

Perhaps true art, like true religious experience, propels you back toward the world and communion with others, not more deeply within yourself. It points you outward, in a sweet sort of agony, toward the nearness of the distant. Of the presence colliding with the absence.

And do not be fooled. It is not easy to love reality.

6.

These days, it seems I have lost the ability to write. The connection I had once experienced between the word and the world has grown faint. Estranged. I feel like I have little to say, or worth saying. Even many of the things I read nowadays feel circular, pointless.

There are things more important than self-knowledge.

And so I feel like I'm watching something I loved die in my arms and staring blankly. I find myself in this liminal space where something old is dying and something new is being born, but neck deep in the stark, sullen reality that both death and birth are disorienting. And intensely painful.

What I hope is happening in this confusing transition is that it's my vanity being crucified. My dependence on writing to make me feel significant and redeemed.

7.

A friend emailed the other day asking what makes me want to keep writing. I thought about it all morning and my honest answer was: I don't know.

Earlier this year, I tried to only write on weekends. But a month later, before I realized what had happened, there I was: 5:30am, six days a week, at my desk, writing.

When I wasn't writing, a mysterious ache began to mount inside my brain and devour my days. Ideas pressured through the seams of me, until they began to spill out into words and sentences I had to scrawl down. It's as if I am always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of my life that grows intensely unpleasant when I ignore it, because it demands the attention I am giving to other things.

I often return to Rilke's advice to a young poet: the only good reason to write is necessity. As in, the need to create has spread its roots to the very depths of your heart that existence itself would be colorless if you were forbidden. As in, you will probably die for it but certainly die without it.

This is all to say, writing is complicated and confusing, not to mention hard. It often looms over me more than I stand above it, yet it's a love I can't and maybe won't ever be able to shake.

All I know is that when life is thriving in me, I want nothing more than to go beyond it. In rare moments of religious feeling, how much I think of myself feels like a sickness that I am appalled by; a kind of cancer that I want nothing more than to escape.

I'm sure you can tell there is no clear or coherent conclusion, no triumphal declaration to change, or even a mild decision. This is life, the messiness on the page. It's contradictory and large. Full of multitudes².

Your humble and obedient friend,

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1. These Poems, She Said by Robert Bringhurst

2. “Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

— Walt Whitman